A War Poet in Absentia: the Year 1918 in Jaroslav Hašek’s Literary Output

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1 (464)) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Jean Boutan

This article purports to give an outline of the major evolutions in Hašek’s literary output around the year 1918, a year that saw not only the end of the world war, but also, for the writer himself, the start of the Russian civil war. The Russian Revolution meant for Hašek, as he wrote in 1918, the transition from a “war between States” – or “war between Empires” – to a “war of the proletariat against capitalism”. The lack of safe information about Hašek’s biography during this short, yet crucial, period of his life does not still prevent us from retracing the repercussions of the great events of 1918 on the east front – the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the founding myth of the Czechoslovakian Legion and the beginnings of the Soviet Union – in the literary works of an author who has been taxed for being a renegade to each of the three aforementioned causes. The particular issue of Švejk’s maturation during the war may help us to put the year 1918 into a perspective with the end (though, only to some extent) of the conflicts and the beginning (however protracted) of the post-war period. Whereas the novel was about the Good Soldier’s bursting into the conflict, this article observes Hašek himself, walking out of the world war.

Author(s):  
Gerard L. Weinberg

The ‘Conclusion’ shows how the world was changed forever by World War II, during which around sixty million people had been killed, the majority of them civilians. There were huge losses in the Soviet Union and China, but the country most damaged was Poland. Massive destruction and economic dislocation characterized much of Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and portions of North Africa. The war and its ending also brought about enormous population movements. Countries faced massive reconstruction, the defeated had reparations to pay, and war criminals had to be dealt with. The war also provided new developments in technology and medicine, which transformed post-war life.


Author(s):  
Elena V. Baranova ◽  
Vitaliy N. Maslov

The relevance of the research is determined by the necessity for study of the set of documents related to the migration of the rural population in the Soviet country after the World War II. The movement of the Soviet peasantry was an important part of the resettlement process on a national scale. An array of primary data from the echelon lists of migrants stored in a number of regional archives has not yet been introduced into scientific circulation. It is in them that informa-tion is concentrated on the composition of the migrant’s families, their nationality, education, pro-fession, labor activity, property and places of exit, up to village councils. We analyze the content of acts on the arrival of migrants to the Kaliningrad Region. Its agricultural workforce was formed primarily through migration organized by the authorities. The materials of the acts reflect impor-tant aspects of the organization and conditions of the controlled movement of the peasantry across the Soviet Union. Acts on the acceptance of resettlement echelons, along with statistical sources, memoirs and administrative and managerial documentation, allow you to reconstruct an objective picture of the Soviet resettlement campaign in the post-war period.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Jakub Majkowski

This essay will firstly address the extent of Stalin’s achievements in leading the course for domestic policy of the Soviet Union and its contribution towards maintaining the country’s supremacy in the world, for example the rapid post-war recovery of industry and agriculture, and secondly, the foreign policy including ambiguous relations with Communist governments of countries forming the Eastern Bloc, upkeeping frail alliances and growing antagonism towards western powers, especially the United States of America.   The actions and influence of Stalin’s closest associates in the Communist Party and the effect of Soviet propaganda on the society are also reviewed. This investigation will cover the period from 1945 to 1953. Additionally, other factors such as the impact of post-war worldwide economic situation and attitude of the society of Soviet Union will be discussed.    


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
Magdalena Ruta

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.


1970 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 256-276
Author(s):  
Dariusz Miszewski

During the Second World War, the national camp preached the idea of imperialism in Central Europe. Built peacefully, the Polish empire was supposed to protect the independence and security of countries in Central Europe against Germany and the Soviet Union, and thus went by the name of “the Great Poland”. As part of the empire, nation-states were retained. The national camp was opposed to the idea of the federation as promoted by the government-in-exile. The “national camp” saw the idea of federation on the regional, European and global level as obsolete. Post-war international cooperation was based on nation states and their alliances.


2020 ◽  
pp. 209-230

This chapter discusses the novel “The Quiet Don” and the controversy over its authorship. It briefly recounts some of the relevant events of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. The chapter focuses on Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov who was awarded by the Nobel Committee in 1945 for the literature prize on his magnum opus, the four-volume The Quiet Don. It also looks into the initial claim that Sholokhov stole the book manuscript for The Quiet Don in a map case that belonged to a White Guard who had been killed in battle. It talks about an anonymous author known as Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaia, who wrote several historical studies and claimed that Sholokhov had plagiarized an unpublished manuscript of Fedor Dmitrievich Kriukov.


Author(s):  
Kal Raustiala

The single most important feature of American history after 1945 was the United States’s assumption of hegemonic leadership. Europeans had noted America’s enormous potential since at least the nineteenth century. After the Civil War the United States had one of the largest economies in the world, but, as noted earlier in this book, in geopolitical terms it remained a surprisingly minor player. By 1900 the United States was playing a more significant political role. But it was only after 1945 that the nation’s potential on the world stage was fully realized. Victory in the Second World War left the United States in an enviable position. Unlike the Soviet Union, which endured devastating fighting on its territory and lost tens of millions of citizens, the United States had experienced only one major attack on its soil. Thanks to its actions in the war America had great influence in Europe. And the national economy emerged surprisingly vibrant from the years of conflagration, easily dominant over any conceivable rival or set of rivals. When the First World War ended the United States ultimately chose to return to its hemispheric perch. It declined to join the new League of Nations, and rather than maintaining engagement with the great powers of the day, America generally turned inward. The years following the Second World War were quite different. In addition to championing—and hosting—the new United Nations, the United States quickly established a panoply of important institutions aimed at maintaining and organizing international cooperation in both economic and security affairs. Rising tensions with the Soviet Union, apparent to many shortly after the war’s end, led the United States to remain militarily active in both Europe and Asia. The intensifying Cold War cemented this unprecedented approach to world politics. The prolonged occupations of Germany and Japan were straightforward examples of this newly active global role. In both cases the United States refashioned a conquered enemy into a democratic, free-market ally—a significant feat. The United States did not, however, seek a formal empire in the wake of its victory.


2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.


Worldview ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
Donald Brandon

For a generation now, America has played a significant role in world affairs. Until Pearl Harbor a reluctant belligerent in World War II, this country was also slow to respond to the challenge of the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of that gigantic conflict. But for almost twenty-five years American Presidents have been more or less guided by the policy of “containment.” Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all introduced variations on the multiple themes of the policy adopted by Harry Truman. Yet each concluded that the world situation allowed no reasonable alternative to an activist American foreign policy in most areas of the globe.


Experiment ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-60
Author(s):  
Musya Glants

Abstract When Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, for me, a child, the world turned upside down to become an alien condition of cruelty and death, hunger and fear. Evacuated, our family faced the War far away from Riga, our hometown, in Uzbekistan—with its strange and unfamiliar landscapes, exotic people, and very different lifestyle. Normal life ended long before the outbreak of World War II.


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