scholarly journals Apocalyptics of revolution and self-sacrifice in the poem “Lieutenant Schmidt” by B. L. Pasternak

Author(s):  
Oksana A. Maltseva

The paper investigates the structure and significance of a mythopoetic component in the poem “Lieutenant Schmidt” (1926–1927) by B. Pasternak, revealing that mythopoetics contributes to the expression of the author’s Christian views on the events of the Russian revolution of 1905–1907. It depicts the Sevastopol Uprising as a kind of repetition of the tragic history of capture of Kyiv by Mongols-Tatars in the 13th century, as well as the represents bloody realities of the Great French Revolution of the late 18th century, since these events resulted from the fact that society neglected the spiritual and moral foundations of its existence. According to the author the images, arising in the subtext, the images of the Church of the Tithes destroyed in 1240, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and the October Manifesto (1905), not implemented in time, are the embodiments of such foundations. At the same time, the study emphasizes the significance of a philistine appearance of the “sleeping” fortress-city of Sevastopol. The author draws attention to the fact that the leitmotif of representing the spiritual sleep, lying and violence is the image of the rampant demonic force which eventually engulfed both warring parties. As she argues, there is, however, an antagonistic spiritual origin of this element in the poem — it is exactly in the image of Lieutenant Schmidt who embodies the idea of evangelical self-sacrifice in the era of violence and lack of spirituality. The paper analyzes the nature of internal conflict experienced by the hero, as well as the dynamics of the plot lines connected with him and highlights the role of biblical, historical and literary allusions. The author concludes that the work under study reveals characteristic features of a historical and mythological poem.

Author(s):  
Norman Etherington

Christianity came very early to Africa, as attested by the Gospels. The agencies by which it spread across North Africa and into the Kingdom of Aksum remain largely unknown. Even after the rise of Islam cut communications between sub-Saharan Africa and the churches of Rome and Constantinople, it survived in the eastern Sudan kingdom of Nubia until the 15th century and never died in Ethiopia. The documentary history of organized missions begins with the Roman Catholic monastic orders founded in the 13th century. Their evangelical work in Africa was closely bound up with Portuguese colonialism, which both helped and hindered their operations. Organized European Protestant missions date from the 18th-century evangelical awakening and were much less creatures of states. Africa was a particular object of attention for Evangelicals opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Paradoxically this gave an impetus to colonizing ventures aimed at undercutting the moral and economic foundations of slavery in Africa. Disease proved to be a deadly obstacle to European- and American-born missionaries in tropical Africa, thus spurring projects for enrolling local agents who had acquired childhood immunity. Southern Africa below the Zambezi River attracted missionaries from many parts of Europe and North America because of the absence of the most fearsome diseases. However the turbulent politics of the region complicated their work by restricting their access to organized African kingdoms and chieftaincies. The prevalent mission model until the late 19th century was a station under the direction of a single European family whose religious and educational endeavors were directed at a small number of African residents. Catholic missions acquired new energy following the French Revolution, the old Portuguese system of partnership with the state was displaced by enthusiasm for independent operations under the authority of the Pope in Rome. Several new missionary orders were founded with a particular focus on Africa. Mission publications of the 19th and 20th centuries can convey a misleading impression that the key agents in the spread of African Christianity were foreign-born white males. Not only does this neglect the work of women as wives and teachers, but it diverts attention from the Africans who were everywhere the dominant force in the spread of modern Christianity. By the turn of the 20th century, evangelism had escaped the bounds of mission stations driven by African initiative and the appearance of so-called “faith missions” based on a model of itinerant preaching. African prophets and independent evangelists developed new forms of Christianity. Once dismissed as heretical or syncretic, they gradually came to be recognized as legitimate variants of the sort that have always accompanied the acculturation of religion in new environments. Decolonization caught most foreign mission operations unawares and required major changes, most notably in the recruitment of African clergy to the upper echelons of church hierarchies. By the late 20th century Africans emerged as an independent force in Christian missions, sending agents to other continents.


Author(s):  
Joel Colón-Ríos

Although the origins of the theory of constituent power are generally placed in the French Revolution, the different legal and institutional implications associated with it in late 18th-century France are seldom explored. This chapter engages in such an exploration by focusing on two institutions that were rejected by Sieyès: the imperative mandate and (decision-making) primary assemblies. Part I focuses on Sieyès’ proposals about constitution-making and constitutional reform after 1789. Part II of the chapter examines the role of citizen instructions in late 18th-century France. Sieyès saw citizen instructions as radically inconsistent with the very idea of representation; they were abolished very early in the Revolution. In so doing, it will be shown, French revolutionaries altered in fundamental ways not only the relationship between electors and representatives, but the very nature of what counts as an exercise of constituent power. Part III focuses on the role of primary assemblies during the more radical stages of the French Revolution (namely, 1792–1793). The approach to primary assemblies found in both in the Constitution of 1793, as well as in the Girondin Draft Constitution, reflected in important ways Rousseau’s conception of those entities as a key mechanism of democratic constitutional change. This approach to constitutional change will be contrasted with that of Sieyès, who saw primary assemblies as the site for the exercise of the much more modest ‘commissioning power’, the power to elect those seen as capable of identifying the nation’s constituent will.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-122
Author(s):  
Björn Moll

Abstract This article focusses on the discourse surrounding ›projectors‹, autoentrepeneurs, who made plans for innovations of any kind and tried to have potential financiers promote them, from the Baroque to German Romanticism. While the role of projectors in the history of science has been the object of historical study, there is a lack of research regarding the concept’s trajectory and its semantic variation. In the early modern period, the necessity of innovation was emphasized, but also the contingency of project proposals. During the Enlightenment, the tradition of the approval of project-making continued, but projects became detached from projectors. In the late 18th century, the idea of speculation and the fantastic transformed within the area of creativity, due to the primacy of imagination and genius. What happened to the talk about projectors and their ways of self-fashioning after the disappearance of the social figure? What enabled authors to refer to projectors and how was their role historically discussed? Projectors served as a topos of insanity or deception or a sign of unprofessionalism (as shown in examples by Goethe and Schiller). Romanticism carried with it the positive connotations of the project, but also reinterpreted its negative aspects, such as the value of incompletion, insanity and alternative ways of work.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-328
Author(s):  
Salahudeen Yusuf

The history of Islam in part of what is known today as Nigeria datesto about the loth Century. Christianity dates to the late 18th Century. Bythe middle of the 19th Century, when Nigerian newspapers began to appearon the streets of Nigeria, both religions had won so many followers and extendedto so many places in Nigeria that very few areas were untouched bytheir influence. The impact of both religions on their adherents not only determinedtheir spiritual life, but influenced their social and political lives aswell. It therefore became inevitable that both religions receive coverage frommost of the newspapers of the time. How the newspapers as media of informationand communication reported issues about the two religions is thetheme of this paper.Rationale for the StudyThe purpose of this study is to highlight the context in which such earlynewspapers operated and the factors that dictated their performance. Thisis because it is assumed that when a society faces external threat to its territory,culture, and independence, all hands (the press inclusive) ought tobe on deck to resist the threat with all might. Were newspapers used as verbalartillery and how did they present each religion? It is also assumed thatin a multireligious society a true press should be objective and serve as avanguard in the promotion of the interest of the people in general and notcreate or foster an atmosphere of religious conflict. The study also aims atfinding out whether the papers promoted intellectual honesty and fosteredthe spirit of unity particularly when the society was faced with the encroachmentof the British who posed a threat to their freedom, culture, economy ...


1985 ◽  
Vol 20 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 182-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shabtai Rosenne

En s'efforçant, au lendemain de la guerre [1914 – 1918], de poser les bases d'une société de peuples régie par le droit, les fondateurs de cette communauté internationale nouvelle se rendaient pleinement compte qu'il ne saurait y avoir une société organisée sans un pouvoir judiciaire chargé de veiller, en dehors de toute préoccupation de politique et de force, à la stricte observation du droit. C'est dans cette conviction qu'ils ont prévu, dès l'origine, la création de la Cour permanente de Justice internationale.Feinberg in 1931Reviewing the history of the Permanent Court of International Justice and of the International Court of Justice from 1922—the World Court, a convenient but possibly misleading expression which embraces both the Permanent Court from 1922 to 1945 and the present International Court of Justice established as an integral part of the United Nations since—four clearly separated periods can be discerned. They run from 1922 to 1931, 1932 to 1940, 1946 to 1966, and from 1967 onwards.The establishment of the League of Nations and the Permanent Court after a cataclysmic war in Europe and the awe-inspiring Russian Revolution released a wave of euphoria upon the exhausted and war-weary peoples of what is now known as Western Europe, and they placed great hopes in the new League and Court.


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Radenovic

One of the main goals of the book ?The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions ? by William Reddy (Reddy, 2001) is to provide an explanation of the events that led to the French Revolution and the political regimes that followed the First Republic. What makes Reddy?s approach unique is that, unlike standard political, social, economic and similar approaches, it emphasizes the role that emotions and emotional suffering have in the change of political regimes. For this purpose Reddy introduces the concept of emotives. According to him, we use emotives to express and change the emotions we feel. By expressing and changing emotions, we reconsider the values we endorse, and in the times of crisis, we sometimes embrace new ones. In this way, emotives play important role not only in the emotional regulation but also in the formation of our identity. Reddy argues that in the strict emotional regimes in which the use of emotives is restricted individuals experience emotional suffering. Such suffering is not relative to culture and can be objectively measured. Thus, for Reddy some political regimes are better than others. Within this theoretical framework Reddy describes the emotional regime of the French society that preceded the revolution as strict. According to him, emotional suffering that was caused by such regime played substantial role in bringing about the revolution. In this paper I will argue that the emotional regime of the 18th century France was not as strict as Reddy argues. What was strict were the rules for how to behave not for the emotional expressions, i.e. for the use of emotives. Thus, his analysis of the emotional pre-revolutionary regime is not without weakness. I will conclude with some problems that Reddy?s analysis of the acute emotional suffering characteristic of the revolutionary period faces.


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihály Balázs

Although in recent years there has been an upsurge in the research of the history of early modern spirituality, this research has paid hardly any attention to the Unitarian denomination. The reasons for this lie beyond the scope of the present study: between the late 16th century and the late 18th century the denomination had to refrain from the use of printing, and thus, the manuscript versions of prayer texts were threatened by loss and destruction. It is a unique paradox, however, that the first edited protestant Hungarian prayer book of considerable length was published precisely by this denomination in 1570/1571. The first part of the paper explores the concept of the prayer book based on Johann Habermann’s famous Gebetbüchlein, and compares it to the greatest achievements of the same sort within this period, the Catholic Péter Pázmány’s and the Calvinist Albert Szenci Molnár’s works. This section is followed by a survey of the vivid reception of Heltai’s work, with particular focus on the way the Unitarian author’s work was used in the Lutheran community of Lőcse. The concluding part argues that building on the foundations of this tradition, as well as on the heritage of Calvinist prayer culture, an unparalleled Unitarian prayer literature developed in the 17th-18th centuries, which deserves the attention of comparative research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-127
Author(s):  
Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky

This article discusses the biographies and economic and public activities of the Ḥatim family in Istanbul in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. Most of the attention is focused on R. Shlomo Ḥatim and his son Yitsḥak, who were members of the Jewish elite in Istanbul and settled in Jerusalem at the ends of their lives. R. Shlomo, who is said to have served the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul, settled in Jerusalem more than ten years before the leaders of the Jewish economic elite in Istanbul were executed in the 1820s. His son, surviving this purge, followed much later, immigrating to Israel in 1846, but died immediately thereafter. This article provides insights into the business activities of the Ḥatim family, as well as the activities of Yitsḥak Ḥatim as an Ottoman official in Istanbul. I also discuss two more generations of this family, considered an elite, privileged one, and that was highly esteemed among well-known rabbis in the Ottoman Empire. I also discuss the ties that developed between the communities of Istanbul and Jerusalem in the first half of the 19th century as a result of initiatives of officials in Istanbul and of immigration from Istanbul to Jerusalem.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Jan Pezda ◽  

The study historicizes the phenomenon of tourism as a purely modern variety of the mobility of which inner morphology began taking form at the turn of the 19th centuries. First, the study draws on the innovative approach of Hasso Spode, historian of mentality, who has a profound influence over contemporary research of the history of tourism in German historiography. Using his theoretical framing, the study discloses how travel that, from the late 18th century, had been a diverse set of motives, experiences, ideas and practices, started to be cemented by a psychomental foundation: the tourist gaze. Then, the study interprets tourism as the product of spatialization of time and temporalization of space. Finally, the article, using Zygmunt Bauman´s theoretical conception of “retrotopia”, clips today's form of tourism together with its primordial form and leads to a conclusion that the tourism as a controversial phenomenon of modern times is endowed with human nostalgia, romance, a never-ending desire for authenticity as well as an eternal obsession with the idea of “progress” encompassing also utopian notions.


Author(s):  
Belinda Jack

The Industrial Revolution from the late 18th century on brought changes to reading. Printing processes developed further, in particular typesetting. The development of the steam-powered press, the rotary press, and cheaper paper-making accounted for the birth and rapid rise of the daily newspaper. ‘Modern reading’ also explains how the Industrial Revolution resulted in the expansion of towns and cities, which then became the privileged places for reading. The ever-growing audience of readers were reading newspapers and journals, sermons and manuals, but above all novels. The history of the novel is considered along with how reading affected people’s ideas, in terms of how they then wanted to live.


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