Introduction to Section III: Cultural Affiliations and Society

ZusammenfassungIn his diary entry of 6 January 1520, the papal master of ceremonies Paride de Grassi mentions an event that has caused quite a sensation in Rome: the christening of an emissary of the king of Fez being held in papal captivity at the time. According to the diarist, during his one-year confinement the ambassador requested permission to become a Christian and then received comprehensive instruction in Christianity. He soon renounced the “Mauritanian faith” and, when questioned, recognized all the articles of the Christian.

Introduction

On 27 August 1944, Robert Grosche, a 56-year old parish priest in Cologne, preached to his congregation on Revelation, verses 22: 6–10, concerning the imminence of Christ’s return to pass judgement on the living and the dead. This service did not mark a departure from his usual pastoral practice—Grosche had begun to take Revelation as the basis of his sermons two years earlier, in August 1942. In his diary entry of 27 August 1944, he noted that, ‘The coming of the Lord always means downfall … therefore the Book of Revelation is a book of downfalls.’...

Talk

This transcript of a talk given by Ali Smith at the National Portrait Gallery in London on 23 October 2014 is published here for the first time. A recording of the talk may be heard at https://soundcloud.com/npglondon/getting-virginia-woolfs-goat-a-lecture-by-ali-smith ‘Well it is five minutes to ten: but where am I, writing with pen & ink? Not in my studio.’ No, unusually, in this diary entry from May 1932, Woolf is miles from home and miles from England, a foreigner on holiday in Greece, sitting in a dip of land ‘at Delphi, under an olive tree […] on dry earth covered with white daisies’. Leonard is next to her. His holiday reading is a Greek grammar. She sees a butterfly go past. ‘I think, a swallow tail.’ It’s all part of the desire to catalogue where we are. She describes simply for her diary what’s around her: the bushes and rocks and trees, the ‘huge bald gray & black mountain’, the earth, the flies, the flowers, the sound of goat bells....

The March of Headlines

Virginia Woolf's “curious props”—including her diary and others’ diaries—ably support her across 1931. She shows, in fact, such sure life command that she mocks the outer political scene in September of 1931. Meanwhile, she continues to add newspaper headlines to her 1930–1931 diary, and her inner wars persist. This chapter shows how Woolf used her 1930–1931 diary as a practice field for The Waves. Other diaries also aid her. In December 1930, she makes double use of The Journal of a Somerset Rector, with its tale of a country suicide. First, she summarizes John Skinner's Journal in her diary to test her ability to write and then she revises the diary entry for her Second Common Reader essay “The Rev. John Skinner” (1932). She finds James Woodforde's Diary of a Country Parson further proof of life deathless in a diary and pairs him with John Skinner in the Second Common Reader. In May 1931, The Private Diaries of Princess Daisy of Pless—Vita Sackville-West's distant relative—offers Woolf rich matter for future works: for Flush, The Years, and Three Guineas.

‘A Petty Form of Suffering’

‘Itching is a petty form of suffering,’ wrote André Gide in 1931. Itching may be occasional or obsessive; it positions a person inside a body that exists in familial and social contexts; it can be evoked in debates about righteousness and justice. This article begins with discussion of the work of Didier Anzieu, psychoanalyst author of The Skin-ego: among the nine ‘functions’ of the skin-ego that Anzieu describes, the last is ‘toxicity’, the skin turned against itself in a gesture of self-destruction. In my discussion of three other texts, I connect Gide’s diary entry to his sexuality; Lorette Nobécourt’s novel to the social world; the book of Job to the metaphysics of virtue; and to these I append two semi-comic moments from Jean-Paul Sartre and Sarah Winman, and discussions of ‘leprosy’ and psoriasis, two versions of feeling (in both senses) that one has a skin.

“A WRITER — A NERVE CELL OF THE NATION”: SPECIFICITY OF THE AUTHOR’S NATIONAL SELF-IDENTITY IN THE “DIARIES” OF OLES GONCHAR

The article is devoted to researching of “Diaries” written by Oles Gonchar through the prism of the author’s national self-identity. The first diary entry is dated June, 1943 and the last entry dated July, 1995. The Ukrainian national features are found out to be revealing in a diary prose of Oles Gonchar both at the content and the form levels through the system of interrelated dominants; the signs of these specific dominants can be traced in the reflection of its characteristics in the writer’s chronological notes. The author of the paper has conducted an analysis of the main motives revealed in the diary entries being realized in the image palette, archetypes, place names — all these are combined with ethnic specificity. The author summarizes the writer’s ideological viewsthat identifiedthe genesis of popular perception of reality incorporating sincere apologetics of socialism in prewar time, romantic passion (enthusiasm) for European revolutionary ideas throughout losses, tragedies, frustrations and failures of war, gradual awareness of the essence of the Soviet power, Stalin’s bloody crimes against his own peopleas well as the genuine admiration for a short “Khrushchev Thaw” elimination of which in Brezhnev “stagnation period” convinced Gonchar in the necessity of democratization of society. The results of the conducted research determinesome factorssuch as: the Chernobyl disaster, degeneration of national spirituality, displacement of the Ukrainian language on the margins of being — all these key factorsmade Gonchar a leader of spiritual revival of Ukraine.