Yallah Bye or the Dream of a Farewell to War

Yallah Bye, an album published by Lombard (2015), illustrates two wars marking the contemporary history of Lebanon: the civil war (1975-1990) and the war between Israel and Hezbollah (August 2006). There is an intersection between two visions: that of a Lebanese screenwriter who tells a universal autobiographical story and that of a Korean illustrator who is committed to create an authentic figurative narration. The aim of the article is to show how this medium constitutes a documentary source within the framework of a cultural and social history. By exposing the repercussions of the 2006 war, images and text reveal, via humour and denial, a dream of peace despite the current turmoil and the obsession with a past that keeps repeating itself.

“There is a new drug in the schedule”: The Criminalization of Cannabis in Canada

Canada has recently concluded its prohibition on the recreational use of cannabis, which lasted for nearly a century. However, when cannabis was first criminalized in 1923, there was effectively no use of it in Canada at that time, and scholars have struggled to identify the specific reasons for which cannabis was added to the schedule of prohibited drugs. When situated within the drug discourse of the time, the lack of an explanation for criminalization becomes less surprising; the contemporary links between addiction, drug use, and racism likely transformed any prohibitive drug control measures into the kind of policy that did not require debate or analysis on the part of Parliament. Drugs and racial minorities were presented as connected threats to the integrity of the white Canadian population and to moral order, and moral reformers capitalized on this connection to support the criminalization of drugs. While the documentary source of the criminalization of cannabis remains unknown, these discursive conditions are of far greater import in understanding why cannabis was criminalized.

Documentary Evidence about the Year of Birth of Vasil Levski

Bulgarian historiography did not find to date a documentary source based evidence that firmly establishes 6 July 1837 as the birth date of Vasil Levski. Therefore, other hypotheses placing the birth of Levski in 1846 or 1843 have lately been put forward. The present article examines data from the population registers of Karlovo, kept in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, and argues that 1840 is Vasil Levski’s most probable birth date.

Folk Costumes in the Photographs by Julije Kempf and Atelier Wollner at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Photographs from the first two decades of the 20th century, taken by Julije Kempf, the founder of City museum Požega and the photography atelier named Atelier Wollner in Požega, proved a useful documentary source for the studies of traditional dress in rural Požega area from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. A large number of their photographs is preserved in the Collection of Photographs and Negatives in City museum Požega. These photographs provide a historical overview of men’s and women’s folk costumes from the end of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th century, showing the appearance, the changes and fashion influences in traditional folk costumes in the villages near Požega.

Autonom autobiografisch: Zu Thomas Manns Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus

In its peritext, Thomas Mann’s Entstehung des Doktor Faustus is described as a “Roman eines Romans”. The essay reasons that this description of its genre as well as structural aspects of its composition mark it as an autobiographical text. Instead of following most studies on the Doktor Faustus, which regard the Entstehung simply as a documentary source for exposing autobiographical intricacies of Mann’s novel, textual evidence for the Entstehung’s autonomy is given. The analysis focuses first on the structural frame of the Entstehung in order to show Mann’s central techniques of autobiographical self-stylization. In this context auto-fictional elements can also be identified. Exemplary passages from two longer sections are taken into account based on these findings. While the Doktor Faustus is a recurrent topic in these passages, it is not, by any means, the only one. Combined with varying autobiographical writing techniques, the Entstehung is thus displaying continuous independence from the Faustus. Based on these insights, future Mann studies on both works may reevaluate the role of the Entstehung for the reception of the Faustus and the status of autobiographical literature in the works of Thomas Mann.

The weather diary of Felipe de Zúñiga (1775-1786): A key documentary source to understand the hunger year in Mexico

<p>The weather diary of Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros (FZO) (Oaxtepec, 1717–Mexico City, 1793) provides daily meteorological information for rain frequency, temperature, frost, hail, thunderstorms, and windy days, from January 1775 to December 1786. It is the earliest obser­vational data collection with daily resolution retrieved in the region so far and it has higher time resolution than any other climate proxy available for this period. Some of the meteorological information provided by FZO could be compared with current meteorological records i.e. frequency of rain, hail, and thunderstorm. The seasonal distribution of these variables corresponds well during the FZO period and the present climate. 1781 was the warmest year in the FZO record while 1785 and 1778 were the coldest. FZO also identified a wet period (1782/1783) and two dry periods (1780/1781 and 1785/1786). The later coincides with the hunger year. It is considered the worst famine in Mexico during the colonial period (1521–1821).  A combination of adverse climate, lack of food, and an outbreak of typhus epidemic killed around 300,000 people. During these years a drought event extended over almost all the Mexican territory and was particularly severe over the central and northeastern regions. During the period 1785/86 FZO only recorded 188 rainy days. A similar record of low rainy days only occurred two times in the instrumental period: i) 1909/10 (188 days) and ii) 2010/11 (189 days). Both episodes with harmful consequences to the country e.g. water shortages, important loses in agriculture, farming, and forest fires. However, the climate during the hunger year was worse than during the instrumental droughts due to the high frequency of early killing frost. During 1785, frost events happened on April, August and September. FZO describes the impact of the frost and the attempt of the government to alleviate the famine “<em>the frosts since August 28th have been so general that the fruits have been lost throughout the Kingdom, with the excep­tion of the warm lands; the government has asked them to sow corn, beans and other seeds in the irri­gated lands immediately so that they can be harvested by March 1786 and partially remedy the hunger that threatens</em>”. Nevertheless, this decision was no useful because 1786 was driest than the 1785 impeding the growing of any crop. The annual summary of FZO for 1786 was, “<em>It has been an unfortunate year due to scarcity of rain, supplies and everything needed for life, also in misfortune and public diseases</em>”. The FZO´s diary is a good example of a documentary source that allows understanding the climate situation and the socio-economic response in detail during an extreme event.</p>

Alban Berg – Sieben frühe Lieder. Performance perspectives

The study presents several interpretative suggestions made from the perspective of the accompanying pianist that played Alban Bergʼs Sieben frühe Lieder. Why this topic? Because in the Romanian music literature, there is nothing written about the song cycle Sieben frühe Lieder by Alban Berg, which is a representative work in the history of the art song. The theme, addressed in the literature written abroad, is treated mostly from a musicological standpoint. That is why we considered it useful to make some observations of an interpretative nature. They will become relevant if read in parallel with the PhD thesis entitled Alban Bergʼs “Sieben frühe Lieder”: An Analysis of Musical Structures and Selected Performances, written by Lisa A. Lynch (the only documentary source that proposes in-depth syntactic analyses of the work, associated with valuable interpretative suggestions made from a vocal perspective). We also considered useful, during the study, the comparison between the two variants of the work: the chamber/voice-piano version and the orchestral version. The analysis of the symphonic text was carried out intending the observation of significant details useful for realizing an expressive duo performance. Of course, our interpretative suggestions are a variant between many others. However, irrespective of dynamic, agogic, timbral, and articulation elements highlighted by the various performances, the reference point of any interpretative view remains the musical text, whose syntactic wealth opens up a generous semantic area.

Mikhail Bulgakov and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin. Textology of a Theater Album

Personal collections of documents related to the performances of SukhovoKobylin’s and Bulgakov’s own plays have never been compared. Bulgakov practically never mentions Sukhovo-Kobylin in his texts. However, the “meeting” of the two playwrights took place in the space of the theatrical album. Unlike the literary album that has been studied many times, there are no special studies about the typology of the theatrical album and its cultural semantics. The textological study of album “autocollections” as drama companions contributes to the acquisition of semantic “keys” not only to certain texts, but also to those meta-links that they form as well as to the compilation of mobile text transcriptions. The album laboratories of the two playwrights make this similarity clear. The theatrical albums by Sukhovo-Kobylin (a blue blotter with envelopes of versions of plays that are part of the “Pictures of the Past” trilogy, held in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts) and Bulgakov (eight albums in the Handwritten Section of the IRLI) reveal two layers. One is an “encyclopedia” of theatrical history of plays, posters, reviews, accompanied by the author’s notes, and a detailed “dossier of censorship ordeals”. The other layer is newspaper clippings with author’s marginalities, marks that simulate a vocabulary universe and the library of plots reflecting newspaper reality and later turned into works. Thus, it is known that Sukhovo-Kobylin was one of the characters in V. Chernoyarov’s feuilleton “The National Team”, published in the magazine “Novyy Zritel” in 1926 and pasted into Bulgakov’s album related to the play The Days of the Turbins at the Moscow Art Theater in 1926. The specified album is an auto-documentary source of Theatrical Novel. The metamorphoses of the texts in the album, accompanied by the author’s notes, marginalities, typologically bring together the theatrical albums of Sukhovo-Kobylin and Bulgakov. They are related semiotically and visually to the scenario of a conventional play, the director’s staged copy, or the exhibition plan of the exposition. The playwrights quite obviously collect the dossier, the “data bank”, fixing the junctions, the path from the manuscript to the publication and the scene (especially in Bulgakov’s case), as if they were making up a biography of their own text. Bulgakov appreciates the author’s recipes and technical guidelines for making an author, formulated in feuilletons of the 1920s. By coincidence, Sukhovo-Kobylin got into this feuilleton environment.

P. KULISH IN CREATIVE THINKING M. KHVILOVY AND M. ZEROV

In the literary and artistic discourse of the 20–30’s of the XX century. Interest in P. Kulish is growing among literary scholars. It was in the 1920s that the archive of P. Kulish was transferred to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which became a serious documentary, source base for the study of works, literary-critical views, and outlook of this writer. P. Kulish is considered to be one of the first Europeanists of Ukrainian culture to lay the foundation for the modern modern culture of the 1920s. For example, G. Grabovych called P. Kulish a driving force and the founder of the newest Ukrainian intellectual, critical thought and those dimensions of national consciousness that underlie it, and a key figure in the formation of modern Ukrainian culture. He quite rightly noted about P. Kulish M. Dragomanov: “… one of the Ukrainophiles hits the point of world, human culture, which will lift our people”.

African Union Institutional Reform: Rationales, Challenges and Prospects

This paper aimed at investigating the rationalities, Challenges and prospects of Africa Union institutional reforms agendas. The paper has been analysed by using the documentary source of data. The institutional reforms of the African Union (AU) have gained significant prominence in recent years within the framework of promoting regional integration and strengthening the African collective action. Africa has witnessed significant changes over the past two decades on several fronts, which has made reforming the AU more urgent than ever before. The main attention of the institutional reform is its focus on key priorities with continental scope, realign AU institutions to deliver against those priorities, manage the AU efficiently at both political and operational levels and finance the AU ourselves and sustainably. However, having these focus areas with prospects, challenges facing the institutional reform agenda are prevailed and needs homogenous intervention amongst member State for real implementation of the AU reform.