David Avidan’s Message from the Future. Nuclear fantasies of the galactic poet

David Avidan’s Message from the Future (1981) is one of few Israeli science fiction films ever made. This ambitious project of the well-known avant-garde poet has been forgotten for many years, as a result of a financial and artistic failure of the movie. The paper shows Avidan’s doomed film as an interesting cultural text that can be read as the director’s commentary on the Israeli reality of his time. Contrary to the artist’s claims about the global ambitions of the picture, Message from the Future is immersed in the local, exploring it under the guise of narrative structures borrowed from Hollywood. The text analyzes a precise deconstruction of the plot patterns characteristic for the classic American SF films from the 1950s, which Avidan adjusted to the Israeli sociopolitical landscape at the turn of the seventies and eighties.

„Na Ukrainie za owych dobrych czasów” – „Przed laty. Powieść ukraińska” Paulina Święcickiego

The forgotten work and life of Paulin Święcicki (1841–1876), a writer from Kiev region and active in Galicia, represents a rare, authentic example of Polish‑Ukrainian cultural border. His debut work entitled 'Przed laty. Powieść ukraińska' (1865), despite being an artistic failure, is an interesting link between the heritage of the Romantic 'Ukrainian School' and the historical vision of Polish Borderlands in With fire and sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz. The creation of the 17th‑century reality of Ukrainian grasslands (noble, rural and Cossack existence), battle scenes (fights against the Tatars), romantic‑melodramatic plot – these are all adapted to a unique Ukrainian (not Polish‑centred) perspective. Święcicki’s ‘ukrainism’ is a portrait of Cossack heroism, a picture of enslaving the Ukrainian nation, and a picturesque description of local stories. The eclectic character of the work, which is nostalgically contemplative and in romantic style, as well as journalistically engaged, has an impact on its incoherence, but also makes it original against the background of the Sarmatian‑borderland fiction of those days.

Prokofiev and the Soviet Symphony

The contrasting fates of Prokofiev’s last three symphonies vividly illustrate the problematic status of the symphony during the Stalinist period, because of its inherent difficulty in satisfying a key tenet of Socialist Realist aesthetics: that all art should communicate ideological engagement. While t Fifth Symphony (1944) was immediately acclaimed as a major contribution to Soviet symphonism, the Sixth (1945–47) was roundly condemned during the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign of 1948; and although the Seventh (1951–52) won official approval, it was widely regarded as an artistic failure resulting from enforced compromise. That music critics tended to focus primarily on the putative ideological content of abstract instrumental works, and to downplay suggestions of foreign influence, often led them to advance highly questionable interpretations of the music’s import. This chapter draws on a range of contemporary music criticism and archival materials, which have clouded objective perception of both the Soviet symphony and Prokofiev’s later instrumental works.

Deceptive Art, Bad Education, and the Letter to Michetti: Classical Intertexts and Artistic Failure in D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere (Pleasure) feints at being a bildungsroman. Even as it incorporates the genre’s defining tropes, it repeatedly undermines them, staging an educational process that is continually frustrated and problematized. Il Piacere can therefore be read as the story of a bad education, as it foregrounds an educational model that is upended before it even starts. More specifically, due to his faulty education, the novel’s protagonist sputters through the stages of his formation, failing to mature or develop appropriately. He founders in a crisis of representation as the fullness of creative, artistic, and amorous satisfaction continues to elude him. The objective of the bildungsroman thus stands as the elusive and problematic ideal to which Il Piacere’s protagonist should strive and remains a constant, tortured concern throughout the novel. D’Annunzio prefigures this impasse in his overlooked dedicatory letter, which recalls and subverts traditional models of formation. The letter uses a Catullan intertext to emphasize and model the importance of instruction and guidance to growth and artistic maturation. By understanding the portrayal of education in the dedicatory letter and the novel, readers learn that the structures that might have upheld the bildungsroman’s implicit promise are in short supply. The same dynamic is reiterated through classical topoi like the stories of Pygmalion and Zeuxis. These artistically grounded intertexts anticipate the major concerns of Il Piacere’s protagonist: how to engage with beauty and art to obtain pleasure, and how to overcome an improper orientation to reach amorous, artistic, and authorial objectives.

Sexuality, Trauma, and Dissociated Expression

The trauma experienced by queer children and adolescents resulting from the societal stigmatizing of their sexuality may produce the post-traumatic conditions of avoidance, numbing, and dissociation. These conditions in turn may enable rich forms of musical expressiveness. The music of the pop duo, Pet Shop Boys, sometimes comes close to bringing a post-traumatic numbness into music itself. It is as though, in their case, the magic of dissociated musical expression has failed to offer its lifeline to the traumatized subject. This may sound like an artistic failure. But it can also be heard as a demystification, a refusal of the socially accepted queer expressiveness that succeeds only by avoiding the material that most needs expression.

Hits and misses: crafting a pop single for the top-40 market in the 1960s

The art of crafting successful pop singles can be a hit and miss affair, and this essay addresses the notion of hits and misses through a consideration of ‘(They Long to Be) Close to You’ by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. In September 1963, Bacharach produced the first version of the song with Richard Chamberlain, but the recording was, and still is, considered an artistic failure, as was the version Bacharach produced with Dionne Warwick a year later. It was not until Richard and Karen Carpenter recorded the song in 1970, without input from Bacharach, that the full potential of ‘Close to You’ was realised. But what made the two Bacharach versions miss the mark, while the Carpenters, to use Bacharach's words, ‘nailed it’? If one identifies the elements of a recording's sonic surface that contribute to its success, the deficiencies of Bacharach's misses become as readily apparent as the strategies The Carpenters employed to score a hit. Specifically, this essay considers how groove, instrumentation, melodic style, tempo, manner of performance (both vocal and instrumental), and the disposition of the song's sections (verses and bridge) generate an expressive flow that either enhances (The Carpenters) or diminishes (Bacharach) the emotional impact of the story told in the lyrics.