scholarly journals Miłosz Wobec Conrada w Traktacie Moralnym / Miłosz and Conrad in the Treatise on Morality

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 489-512
Author(s):  
Jolanta Dudek
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
World War ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Post War ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
Second World

Summary It would appear that Czesław Miłosz’s Treatise on Morality - one of whose aims was to “stave off despair” - was largely inspired by the writings of Joseph Conrad. That Miłosz had no wish to draw his readers’ attention to this is perfectly understandable, given Conrad’s particularly low standing in the eyes of communist State censors. This long poem, which extols human freedom and pours scorn on socialist realism (together with its ideological premises), is one of Miłosz’s best known works in his native Poland, where it was published in 1948. The Treatise on Morality may well have been inspired by three of Conrad’s essays that were banned in communist Poland: ‘Autocracy and War’ (1905), ‘A Note on the Polish Problem’ (1916) and ‘The Crime of Partition’ (1919). After the Second World War, translations of these three essays were not available to the general Polish reader until … 1996! Conrad’s writings helped Miłosz to diagnose Poland’s political predicament from a historical perspective and to look for a way out of it without losing all hope. An analysis of the Treatise on Morality shows that only by reconstructing the Conradian atmosphere and context - alluded to in the text - can we fully grasp all the levels of the poet’s irony, which culminates in a final “punchline”. Apart from allusions to The Heart of Darkness and the brutal colonization of the Congo, the fate of post-war Poland is also seen through the optic of those of Conrad’s novels that deal with the subject of depraved revolutionaries: Nostromo (1904), TheSecret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). Conrad’s ideas for ways to fight against bad fortune and despair are suggested not only by his stories Youth (1902) and Typhoon (1903) - and by his novels The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Lord Jim - but also and above all by his volume of memoirs entitled A Personal Record (1912), in which he relates his yearning for freedom as the young, tragic victim of a foreign empire. In an article entitled ‘Joseph Conrad in Polish Eyes’ and published in 1957 - on the hundredth anniversary of Conrad’s birth - Miłosz writes that, through his writings, Conrad fulfilled the hopes of his father (who gave him the name “Konrad”) and that although “the son did not want to assume a burden that had crushed his father, he had nevertheless become the defender of freedom against the blights of autocracy”

scholarly journals Inne spojrzenia na Zagładę w polskiej fantastyce. Paweł Paliński i Cezary Zbierzchowski

2020 ◽  
pp. 307-324
Author(s):  
Mirosław Gołuński
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
Second World

The author of the article carries out an analysis of texts by two writers who present the Shoah from different perspectives. At the onset he points out two layers of looking at theHolocaust in fantasy writing. The first one results from the said theme filtering through into the genre directly, the second is an intermediary one, namely, through the popular after the Second World War post-apocalyptic narratives where the Shoah is thematised as, for instance, the annihilation of the human race resulting from nuclear conflict or the spread of a deadly virus. The article analyses both mentioned layers using particular examples. Polaroidy z Zagłady [The Shoah/Annihilation Polaroids] by Paweł Paliński is a tale of an individual Shoah. What constitutes the analytical framework here are the titular pictures, which translate into a genre, nowadays rarely practised, called the literary picture. In the course of reading one recognises the triangle of attitudes: victim – witness – torturer. Even if the said triangle has been criticized by historians, it nonetheless decisively appears in the text owing to its layout. Requiem dla lalek [Requiem for Dolls] and Holocaust F written by Cezary Zbierzchowski are, respectively, a short-story collection and a novel, set in the fictitious world of Ramm. It is known from the very beginning that the world is doomed to be annihilated, the harbinger of which is God’s departure. In the short stories other signs of extinction are, among other things, euthanasia, the problem of immigration etc. The plains of annihilation recognized in the course of interpretation: metaphysical, social, and personal, compose a part of philosophical reflection on consequences of catastrophes being one of the spheres of the analysis undertaken. What also arrests our attention, and thereby is reflected upon, is the highly intertextual background of Zbierzchowski’s oeuvre. A prominent place is given to the analysis of the novel’s final chapter entitled Heart of Darkness, both referring to the famous novella written by Joseph Conrad and more than sufficiently justified by the text composition itself. The article’s conclusions both position the texts in relation to other works of Polish fantasy genre and indicate their role as examples of various absorption by popular culture (here fantasy) of the Shoah-related issues.

Ian Dalrymple McFarlane, 1915–2002

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Cave
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
World War ◽  
Career Training ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

Ian Mcfarlane belonged to the generation of scholars whose early careers were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Drawing on the sense of a new start and a radical break with past habits and prejudices that characterised the post-1945 era, that generation brought about a major renewal of modern languages as a university discipline, ensuring that it would henceforth be regarded as equal in status to other arts subjects. The importance of this task in post-war Europe can hardly be over-estimated, and Ian was certainly conscious of its magnitude. He spent the thirty-eight years of his academic career training the modern linguists of the next generation, many of whom are now themselves leaders in the subject, and he set an example of meticulously thorough yet enlightened scholarship in each of the several distinct areas in which he worked.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.

Western Ethnic Borderlands in the Influence of Russian-Soviet Propagangda Before and in the Years of the Second World War

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (46) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Russian Identity

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics

“Product Not Available in Pre-War Quantities – but Quality Remains the Same”: Remarks on Advertisements as Historical Sources

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Press ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The article focuses on advertisements as visual and historical sources. The material comes from the German press that appeared immediately after the end of the Second World War. During this time, all kinds of products were scarce. In comparison to this, colorful advertisements of luxury products are more than noteworthy. What do these images tell us about the early post-war years in Germany? The author argues that advertisements are a medium that shapes social norms. Rather than reflecting the historical realities, advertisements construct them. From an aesthetical and cultural point of view, advertisements gave thus a sense of continuity between the pre- and post-war years. The author suggests, therefore, that the advertisements should not be treated as a source for economic history. They are, however, important for studying social developments that occurred in the past.

Hendrik Draye, tegenstander van de uitvoering van de doodstraf

2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-152
Author(s):  
Luc Vandeweyer
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Catholic University ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World ◽  
Young Professor

Hendrik Draye, opponent of the carrying out of the death penaltyIn this annotated and extensively contextualised source edition, Luc Vandeweyer deals with the period of repression after the Second World War. In June 1948, after the execution of two hundred collaboration-suspects in Belgium, the relatively young linguistics professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, Hendrik Draye, proposed, on humanitarian grounds, a Manifesto against the carrying out of the death penalty. Some colleagues, as well as some influential personalities outside the university, reacted positively; some colleagues were rather hesitant; most of them rejected the text. In the end, the initiative foundered because of the emphatic dissuasion by the head of university, who wanted to protect his university and, arguably, the young professor Draeye. The general public’s demand for revenge had not yet abated by then; moreover, the unstable government at that time planned a reorientation of the penal policy, which made a polarization undesirable. Nevertheless, Luc Vandeweyer concludes, "the opportunity for an important debate on the subject had been missed".

scholarly journals Per Ravenna trecentesca: nuove proposte per l’assetto architettonico di Santa Maria in Porto Fuori

2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-31
Author(s):  
Fabio Massaccesi
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First Time ◽  
Santa Maria ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Church

Abstract This contribution intends to draw attention to one of the most significant monuments of medieval Ravenna: the church of Santa Maria in Porto Fuori, which was destroyed during the Second World War. Until now, scholars have focused on the pictorial cycle known through photographs and attributed to the painter Pietro da Rimini. However, the architecture of the building has not been the subject of systematic studies. For the first time, this essay reconstructs the fourteenth-century architectural structure of the church, the apse of which was rebuilt by 1314. The data that led to the virtual restitution of the choir and the related rood screen are the basis for new reflections on the accesses to the apse area, on the pilgrimage flows, and on the view of the frescoes.

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