From the Other Shore: Russian Comment on Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley J. Rabinowitz

Among the many and varied critical responses to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, two Russian voices have not been heard in the West – Akim Volynskii's (on the right) and Anatolii Lunacharskii's (on the left). The former, Petersburg-based ballet critic from 1911 to 1925, followed the Russian Seasons with anxious dismay as so many stars of the Mariinskii Theatre departed for Paris; the latter, Soviet Russia's Commissar for Enlightenment between 1917 and 1929, witnessed Diaghilev's enterprise first-hand – both before World War I and after – and wrote about it with a mixture of admiration and class-conscious disapproval. These critics’ observations are offered in English translation for the first time.

1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jarzombek

Joseph Goebbels' famous claim about the connection between politics and art in his letter to Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1933 epitomizes Nazi theories concerning the cultural benefits of art. In it he attempts both to legitimize and cunningly obscure an underlying reactionary agenda: We who are giving form to modern German politics, see ourselves as artists to whom has been assigned the great responsibility of forming, from out of the brute mass, the solid and full image of the people. Though there are many studies of post-World War I cultural aesthetics, especially in the context of Hitler's final solution, little has been done to trace that concept back to its nonreactionary, Wilhelmine roots. This paper, which looks at the discourse on cultural aesthetics as it emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century, also challenges some received notions about the Werkbund, an organization of artists, architects, and industrialists founded in 1907. With the Werkbund, the utopian potential of cultural aesthetics that emerged in the context of liberal bourgeois theory long before it was co-opted by the right wing revealed itself for the first time as a powerful instrument of cultural definition. This paper will also discuss some of the early formulators of Wilhelmine cultural aesthetics in various disciplines, Karl Scheffler (art critic), Heinrich Waentig (economist), Hermann Muthesius (architect), and Georg Fuchs (playwright), among others.


1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willard A. Beling

The World Federation of Trade Unions (W.F.T.U.) was one of the most hopeful ventures of all the Communist front organisations. Unlike some of the other fronts the Russians did not create it. They captured the W.F.T.U. after it was established, and had a good start. Once captured, however, the W.F.T.U. represented merely an extension of the pattern of the earlier Red International which had been created by the Comintern following World War I as a vehicle to reach the working masses of the world and rally them to Moscow. But like its predecessor—dissolved in 1937—the W.F.T.U. has also failed to make significant inroads among the workers in western countries and win control over them. While it has affiliates in the west, the French Confédération Générale du Travail (C.G.T.) and the Italian Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (C.G.I.L.) being the most outstanding examples, the W.F.T.U. does not at all dominate these movements. Rather, control for the most part is exercised through the local Communist parties, some of which, while still very much an integral part of an international apparatus, have won some measure of autonomy from Moscow.1


2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 895-925
Author(s):  
Leor Halevi

AbstractIn 1922, one of the most famous Muslim scholars of modern times, the Syrian-Egyptian reformer Rashīd Riḍā, published in his journal a detailed fatwa in defense of alcohol. He did so in reaction to an obscure Indian jurist's fatwa that had warned Muslims not to use alcoholic products. On the surface, the authors of the fatwas appeared to be principally concerned with the right way to interpret sacred laws of purity and pollution. However, this article reveals that their disagreement had much to do with differing approaches to the politics of independence. Their divergence is intriguing because the cities where they lived, Cairo and Bombay, had just experienced the convulsions of anti-British consumer boycotts. And it emerged at a time when anti-imperial Muslim activists from the Middle East and South Asia were rallying together for a pan-Islamic cause—to prevent the final collapse of the caliphate. These movements swayed both Riḍā and his rival, who may well be described as Muslim nationalists. Yet they embraced radically different strategies for independence. One aimed for national purity, the other for national power. This discrepancy led to the battle of fatwas—a forgotten battle that is worth remembering because it suggests some of the difficulties that Muslim jurists of Arab or Indian ancestry faced during the interwar period when they tried to turn Islamic law into an effective nationalist discourse.


2016 ◽  
pp. 147-168
Author(s):  
I. Datskiv

The article investigates the events that took place after World War I, and directly affect the fate of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Particular attention is paid to foreign factors profound rethinking of the liberation struggle in 1918-1921. ZUNR diplomatic action in defense of statehood at the Paris Peace Conference is analyzed. The activities of Ukrainian diplomats at the conference, their attempts to protect the right to self-determination of the Galician Ukrainian are considered in details. It was the first outing ZUNR diplomacy on the international scene and the active participation of the Ukrainian delegation at the conference, along with the leading states of the world. It is noticed that in Paris the victorious powers regarded Ukrainian problem in the anti-Bolshevik aspect, relying mainly on Poland, Romania and Russia white than ZUNR.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-103
Author(s):  
Aliaksandr Bystryk

Abstract This paper deals with the topic of conservative West-Russianist ideology and propaganda during World War I. The author analyzes the most prominent newspaper of the movement at the time – Severo-Zapadnaia Zhizn (The North-Western Life). The discourse of the newspaper is analyzed from the perspective of Belarusian nation-building, as well as from the perspective of Russian nationalism in the borderlands. The author explores the ways in which the creators of the periodical tried to use the rise of the Russian patriotic feelings to their advantage. Appealing to the heightened sense of national solidarity which took over parts of Russian society, the periodical tried to attack, delegitimize and discredit its ideological and political opponents. Besides the obvious external enemy – Germans, Severo-Zapadnaia Zhizn condemned socialists, pacifists, Jews, borderland Poles, Belarusian and Ukrainian national activists, Russian progressives and others, accusing them of disloyalty, lack of patriotism and sometimes even treason. Using nationalist loyalist rhetoric, the West-Russianist newspaper urged the imperial government to act more decisively in its campaign to end ‘alien domination’ in Russian Empire, and specifically to create conditions for domination of ‘native Russian element’ – meaning Belarusian peasantry, in the Belarusian provinces of the empire.


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (08) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Джамиля Яшар гызы Рустамова ◽  

The article is dedicated to the matter of Turkish prisoners on the Nargin Island in the Caspian Sea during the First World War. According to approximate computations, there were about 50-60 thousand people of Turkish captives in Russia. Some of them were sent to Baku because of the close location to the Caucasus Front and from there they were sent to the Nargin Island in the Caspian Sea. As time showed it was not the right choise. The Island had no decent conditions for living and turned the life of prisoners into the hell camp. Hastily built barracks contravene meet elementary standards, were poorly heated and by the end of the war they were not heated at all, water supply was unsatisfactory, sometimes water was not brought to the prisoner's several days. Bread was given in 100 grams per person per day, and then this rate redused by half. Knowing the plight of the prisoners, many citizens of Baku as well as the Baku Muslim Charitable Society and other charitable societies provided moral and material support to prisoners, they often went to the camp, brought food, clothes, medicines Key words: World War I, prisoners of war, Nargin Island, refugees, incarceration conditions, starvation, charity


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (22_suppl) ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
Gerard Hastings

We have discovered the elixir of life. For the first time in human existence we now know how we can avoid disease, make our lives healthier and more fulfilled, and even fend off the grim reaper himself (at least for a while). We may not have joined the immortals – many traps and snares continue to prey on us – but we are beginning to learn some of their secrets. Why then are we failing to grasp these heady opportunities? WHO data show that nine out of ten of we Europeans are dying of lifestyle diseases; that is diseases caused by our own choices – self-inflicted diseases. Despite the all too familiar consequences for our bodies, we continue to smoke the tobacco, swallow the junk food and binge on the alcohol that is killing us. Yes, there are systemic drivers at work – commercial marketing, corporate power, inequalities, addiction – but we don’t have to collaborate. No one holds a gun to our heads and commands us to eat burgers or get drunk and incapable. This paper argues that public health progress – and human progress more widely – depends on us solving the conundrum of this self-inflicted harm. The urgency of this task increases when we consider our irresponsible consumption behaviour more widely, and that it is not just harming our own health but everyone else’s too. Most egregiously anthropomorphic climate change is being caused by the free choices we in the wealthy global north make to drive SUVs, go on intercontinental holidays and accumulate a foolish excess of stuff. It need not be so. Historical experience and two millennia of thinking show we are capable of better. We have moral agency and we can make the right choice even when it is the difficult one. Indeed, it is this capacity and desire ‘ to follow after wisdom and virtue’, to rebel against injustice and malignancy, that makes us human and cements our collective identity. In the last century this realisation was focused by the terrible events of the Second World War and resulted in the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Importantly these rights do not just protect us from oppression but enshrine in international law our entitlement to be an active participant in the process of progressive social change.


Al-MAJAALIS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-179
Author(s):  
Ali Musri Semjan Putra

Among the proofs of the greatness of God's power in the millennium is the emergence of various kinds of information media that are very helpful for ease in various matters. The convenience covers various fields of affairs, not just in the form of sharing information but has penetrated into the fields of business, education, da'wah and so on.Besides the many positive sides of social media, on the other hand social media is also a vehicle for various negative actions, such as hoaxes, fighting, sex trafficking, drug sales and so on. So this study tries to examine the nabawi hadiths relating to things that must be heeded in social media, specifically those related to hoaxes, with the induction approach using qualitative analysis. The purpose of the research is to provide insight to the community in using social media so that there is no violation of religious teachings or legislation when integrating on social media. As well as being a wrong solution in tackling and minimizing various forms of irregularities and violations that occur in the community in social media, both offenders in the form of crimes of intimidation, provocation, fraud, counterfeiting and so on, are spurred from hoax news.The conclusion of this study is that making or spreading hoaxes is an act that is strictly prohibited and prohibited in the nabawi hadiths which are the second source of law in Islamic law after the noble Qur'an. The culprit has the right to be punished in the world in a criminal manner or get a severe punishment in the hereafter, according to the effects and headlines of the lies he did.


Author(s):  
Etsuko Takushi Crissey

In September, 1945, with most Okinawans still in refugee camps, the U.S. military ordered elections for civilian leaders in which women were granted the right to vote for the first time, seven months earlier than in mainland Japan. Yet they were far more concerned about the many rapes committed by American soldiers. Women and girls were abducted from fields while searching for food, dragged away from their homes, and assaulted in front of their families. After months of inaction, the U.S. military decided to set up “special amusement areas” for prostitution in certain towns. Some Okinawans favoured this policy as a “breakwater” to protect women and children of “good” families, while others opposed it as exploitation of women. In 1967, at the peak of the Vietnam War, an estimated 10,000 women engaged in prostitution. In 1948 the U.S. military rescinded a ban on marriages between U.S. soldiers and Okinawan women that failed to prevent couples from having intimate relations and living together. Still, commanding officers pressured soldiers not to marry, threatening disciplinary transfers. By 1967, among thousands of biracial children in Okinawa, about half were raised by mothers or their relatives with little or no financial support from fathers.


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