scholarly journals Formation and Modification of Notions ‘Revolution’ and ‘War’: Bulgarian Case

Author(s):  
Nikolay Aretov ◽  
Nadiia Boiko

Related notions of war and revolution are not something primordial and constant. They are constructed and constantly changing. The paper traces some aspects of these processes in the mentality of the 19th and early 20th century Bulgarians, with attention to their Balkan context. The lack of the own state for a long period of time (1396–1878) determined the initial negative image of the war. For the Bulgarians of the late 18th and early 19th centuries a war was something definitely negative, as it brings death, troubles, and disasters; it was also something alien or external as only few of them were recruited in the Ottoman army. The wars between Russia and Ottoman Empire generated some hopes for independence among certain elite groups of society (although not so much among common people). The Greek War for Independence (started in 1821) and other uprisings in European dominions of Turkey had their impact on Bulgarians. The idea of revolution grew in the 1860s and 1870s within the group of radicals, mainly the alumni of Russian Universities and high schools. Literature played a serious role in this process, and April uprising (1876), not without some debates, was represented as ‘revolution’ in the last decades of the 19th century. The two notions were mixed after the Russian-Turkish Liberation War (1877–78), especially in later interpretations. The newly established Principality of Bulgaria lived in constant threat (real or imagined) of Ottoman invasion and soon got drawn into the war with Serbia (1885) which contributed to creating the fully positive image of a patriotic war. This image persisted during the First (1912–1913) and Second (1913) Balkan wars, called in Bulgaria ‘inter-allied’. The defeat motivated to shift the image of war from something patriotic to something making the ordinary people suffer. This was a gradual change catalyzed by the World War I (1914–18) that made the previous image problematic. The notion of revolution that was previously associated only with the past (1876, 1878) also shifted and became associated in some leftist minds with the future as well. First and still shy anti-war humanitarian ideas appeared; the last poems of Dimcho Debelianov (1887–1916), who died in the war, were the most representative examples of this trend.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-4) ◽  
pp. 196-205
Author(s):  
Vadim Mikhailov ◽  
Konstantin Losev

The article is devoted to the issue of Church policy in relation to the Rusyn population of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. In the second half of the 19th century, the policy of the Austro-Hungarian administration towards the Rusyn Uniate population of the Empire underwent changes. Russia’s victories in the wars of 1849 and 1877-1878 aroused the desire of the educated part of the Rusyns to return to the bosom of the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, even during the World War I, when the Russian army captured part of the territories inhabited by Rusyns, the military and officials of the Russian Empire were too cautious about the issue of converting Uniates to Orthodoxy, which had obvious negative consequences both for the Rusyns, who were forced to choose a Ukrainophile orientation to protect their national and cultural identity, and for the future of Russia as the leader of the Slavic and Orthodox world.


2020 ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
E. N. Tsimbaeva

The article analyzes physical and physiological problems caused by fashionable clothing in the mid-18th to early 20th cc. that shaped people’s appearances and lifestyles in the past. Affecting the skeletal system and the functioning of internal organs and brain in particular and causing various illnesses, these problems went largely unrecognized by contemporaries, including writers, but would inevitably surface in literary works as part and parcel of everyday life. Without understanding their role, one may struggle to comprehend not only plot twists and characters’ motivations but also the mentality of the bygone era as portrayed in fiction. Chronologically, the research covers the period from the mid-18th c. to World War I. The author only focuses on so-called respectable society (a very tentative term that covers members of the aristocracy and other classes with comparable lifestyles), since it was this group which drew the most attention from fiction writers of the period. The scholar chose to concentrate on the kind of daily realia of ‘noble society’ that permeate works by Russian, English, French and, to some extent, German authors, considered most prominent in Europe at the time.


1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”


2011 ◽  
pp. 37-61
Author(s):  
Stefano Santoro

The Rumanian nationalism of Transylvania, which developed during the 19th century to defend the rights of the Rumanian population from the Magyarization policies implemented by Budapest's government, suddenly found itself in a completely different situation at the end of World War I: from non-dominant it had become dominant. As in other areas of postwar Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s,, this transition involved a reversal of the paradigms of reference of the Rumanian nationalists that changed from inclusive and democratic values into an exclusive and fundamentally totalitarian ideology.


Author(s):  
Terence Young

This concluding chapter offers a review of the key notions developed in the earlier chapters and draws upon this enhanced understanding to offer an explanation for why camping's popularity has begun to waver. Despite camping's strong and pervasive popularity today, the zenith of its national appeal occurred in the past. It is impossible to precisely quantify such trends, but camping's cultural significance appears to have peaked with the explosion of auto campers who hit the motor-camping trail during the decade following World War I. This heightened and widespread popularity should be understood as a reflection of the continuing and rapid urbanization that was sweeping through America, transforming it from a largely rural country in 1910 to a distinctly urban one by 1930.


Author(s):  
Thomas Steinfatt ◽  
Dana Janbek

This chapter focuses on the use of propaganda during times of war, prejudice, and political unrest. Part one distinguishes between persuasion and one of its forms, propaganda. The meaning-in-use of the term ‘propaganda' is essential to understanding its use over time. Part two presents relevant examples of propaganda from the past several centuries in the United States and Europe. These examples include episodes from World War I and II, among others. Propaganda is not a new tool of persuasion, and learning about its use in the past provides a comparison that helps in understanding its use in the present and future. Part three looks at recent examples of how propaganda occurs in actual use in online terrorist mediums by Al-Qaeda and by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).


2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
Emily Greble

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and World War I shattered the social fabric of Ottoman Europe and led to a radical revision of the region’s political boundaries. How did experiences of successive traumas—expulsions, famine, disease, massacres, and new occupation regimes—shape Muslims’ understandings of the European project and their experiences within it? This chapter analyzes this catastrophic era from diverse Muslim perspectives. It reveals how many Muslims found legal promises of political equality and rights ambiguous and intangible, and instead sought to define their own terms of political belonging. They wanted autonomy, confessional sovereignty, and the protection of Islamic institutions and property.


2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1771-1781
Author(s):  
Santanu Das

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.


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