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The goal of this study is to give an overview of the figure of István Bocskai, the prince of Transylvania in the public eye in three critical periods of the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in political thought. He is mentioned often during difficult times, while before and after these periods he is referenced much less frequently. The experience of the Revolution of 1848–1849 constituted an emotional basis for the formation of the Hungarian national identity, and the previous struggles of the Hungarian Estates were seen as parallels. The contemporaries saw a connection between the glorious period of the 17th century and their own times. This connection elevated Bocskai’s revolution to being seen as one of the great chapters of Hungarian history, and the prince became a member of the national pantheon. During the crisis following World War I, and later around World War II, different considerations gained importance, and the prince’s image became much more multifaceted. However, Bocskai still wasn’t a divisive personality, he was seen as a great politician and freedom fighter. Every political faction and ideology considered him an example to be followed, and found something among his values, achievements or deeds that fit their current message. It can be seen that the meaning of the past changes constantly, and different sources of remembrance paint a confusingly varied picture of Bocskai, who is constantly “repositioned” in public memory, but the role of history in politics doesn’t change: it underlines and authenticates contemporary messages.

<i>Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture</i>. Leo Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+245.

I first drafted this poem on Christmas Eve 2016 in a Zeme Naga village called Laisong in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. I was with Catriona Child, an activist and environmentalist who works in Naga areas, collecting oral histories about the Second World War and how locals memorialized the famous British female anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower, Catriona’s mother. Bower arrived for fieldwork here in 1937 and eventually worked in this region as an ethnographer, government representative, and later, a wartime intelligence and guerrilla leader after the Japanese invasion of neighboring Burma in 1942 and the push into the hills of India in 1944. The gramophone in the third stanza references her device, which Catriona told me her mother often used to entertain her friends in the village during her stay here. Catriona and I have a mutual interest in the War, but more broadly, in working together to engage and expand Bower’s family archives. By archive, we refer not only to papers and documents but a whole range of audio-visual materials and stories about Bower and how Nagas, in particular, remembered and continue to reference her. For us, this is also a project of co-interpreting an archive and exploring different world-views which met in Naga contexts in Assam and present-day Nagaland. We were in Laisong, which is in the Dima Hasao district of Assam, where Bower was based. Laisong is a Naga village inhabited by the Zeme Naga tribe. We additionally conducted documentation work in the area during celebrations of the winter festival, Hgangi. One village, in particular, was said to be the “last” of the communities to practice what was thought of as the pre-Christian “animistic” religion and its concomitant rituals and rites. It is noteworthy that only in recent decades have many Zeme rural communities converted to Christianity, while the variants of a native “Heraka” religion (increasingly becoming “Hinduized”), revived in the 1930s as part of an anti-colonial millennial movement, continue to be practiced. In this context, it is interesting that the “animist” Paupaise religion and the ritual celebration of an important seasonal event of the local calendar were perceivably layered with other religious motifs (such as Hindu ones) while reiterating the “indigenous” and “tribal” nature of the rituals. Moreover, the Naga folkloric and cosmological world has a rich tapestry replete with a parallel spiritual universe, origin myths, and numinous beings, including fluid human-animal relations professed through lore and lycanthropic forms. The poem’s narrative is inspired by these traditions, reflected in recent decades of literature produced by Naga writers in English and other languages. Often in these stories, the “real” anthropogenic world is interwoven with mythical and magical realms, and sensory boundaries are blurry. The Zeme communities claim to have been historically, geographically, and politically “excluded” from the ethno-territorial political formation of Nagaland and are spread across several states in northeastern India. The area in question is also dotted with “blank spaces” as to what constituted state and non-state (or “rebel state”) spaces and was strongly affected by the history of armed conflict. To generalize, the political dividends and collateral arising from the decades-long Naga self-determination movement and armed conflict since the end of the Second World War have been uneven, and communities here faced particular forms of exclusion, community fragmentation, and hardship. Zeme Naga-dominated areas around Laisong are particularly marginalized since they remained within Assam as a minority community in the border areas. Nagaland was created in 1963 after the territorial re-organization of Assam. Many Naga tribal communities also inhabit areas that fall outside the state in Assam, Manipur and the neighboring country of Myanmar. However, these groups do not enjoy the rights and protections that Nagas within Nagaland do. The poem reflects my interest in space, while references to cosmology are a less direct intervention of my research, but a subject of personal curiosity. Both space and cosmology are deeply interwoven into Naga folk-life and oral and material culture. The boundaries between what one might consider real, mythical, and surreal from a “rational” point of view are quite blurry and fluid. As such, my choices in framing the poem are inspired by this context and how I felt sitting under the stars on that night as I penned my thoughts. I sought to capture the layered realities and fragmentary temporalities without reifying or overly romanticizing them. In retrospect, while drafting revised versions of the poem, the methodological complexities became starker. Time, experience, and perception of space are collapsed, yet the depth of dimension is simultaneously comprehensible to the “outsider.” I use this term because it is loaded and hard to clarify even from my positionality in this context. I was an Assamese person in a Naga village within Assam, invited there by a British person pursuing her own historical and familial connections to the place and people there. One of the village elders had often introduced me as “our Assamese brother.” The insider-outsider binary is very stark in the region as a whole due to a long history of ethno-territorial conflicts that have only fuelled xenophobic discourses about “outsiders.” The contradictions of these binary discourses and territorial regimes are also more problematic as even Nagas in Assam, like our friends from Laisong require a special authorization called the Inner Line Permit to visit the state of Nagaland, which is the professed “homeland” of Nagas. To some extent, my position on that spectrum of insider-outsider also collapsed in my interactions and relationship with people in Laisong. The political histories of this village and the region as a whole are complex. The layered realities described in the poem are somewhat at odds with the ethnographic mode of perceiving, and in the end, actually undermine the narrative authority of the ethnographer precisely by confusing the assumed notions of being, boundaries of social difference, as well as myth and folklore in the area, including the history of the Second World War, which was, after all, a global, imperial war and did not mean the same thing for people here compared to European, American, Russian or Japanese empires that were fighting each other. Yet, other wars and conflicts, especially since WWII, have impinged on people’s lives in Laisong and Dima Hasao as a whole, caught in a coercive social economy between Indian armed forces and “insurgents.” The insurgent cadres also have strong kinship ties and often emerge from the local context, inviting coercive counterinsurgency measures that govern everyday lives. The reference to the army officer in the poem is inspired by an actual event during the Christmas feast in the Zeme village of Laisong in the Southeastern border zone of Assam. The presiding army Major from the adjoining Assam Rifles camp, with whom villagers here have had a troubled past, had been challenged in jest by a colleague to bite into this chili. The officer, however, diplomatically declined. I find poetic inspiration in this event, which I saw like one of those Orwellian moments like in George Orwell’s Shooting the Elephant (1950), when colonial authority was put to the test and had to be performed by pulling the trigger to kill the elephant, only to meet the expectations of the Burmese onlookers (see also Guha 1997). For me, any pretensions of an ethnographic “gaze” are blunted out, which is also a humbling experience. I did not see myself as an ethnographer there in the first place, but writing the poem pushed me to engage this question. Here I do not have the typical gaze of an anthropologist looking through a photographic lens as once may have been the case with several colonial anthropologists who worked on different Naga groups. Rather, I find myself enmeshed within the layered experiences of reality and perception that go into the continuous process of history-writing and lived history, neither of which are linear. Then there is the futility of ethnographic description, never being able to capture it in entirety, but only fleetingly, even if these realities can be visceral for the people living there. The dissolution of the body and perception of the ethnographer also signals the embeddedness and entanglement of the person to the “field,” which continuously constitutes what is imagined as a field-site. Thus, the ethnographer and field are in constant flux, much like layered histories, bodies, and changing meanings of objects across contexts and time. Depth of Field in the poem’s title refers to greater perceptual insight. Although it is a visual metaphor from photography, the depth here is a simultaneous broadening and sharpening of interpretation and access that de-centers the authority of the gaze, another optical metaphor. Field, too, carries dual meanings, both a site of investigation and the multiple sensory and temporal realms that come together.

The study deals with the differences between physical unfreedom and slavery as a spiritual category in Taras Shevchenko's poetry. We observe the transformation of the image of the Ukrainian people in the poetry of the fourth period of creativity, compared to the previous ones. Traditionally during the first three periods of Taras Shevchenko's work the image of Ukrainians is shown as an object of abuse, a victim of circumstances, a martyr of lords, colonizers – one who suffers from the unmercy of God. In the poetry of the fourth period, the Ukrainian people appear in the image of slaves – through the worship of untruth, the silent indulgence of evil – which causes the poet rejection, anger and condemnation. Life outside the truth has no value for Taras Shevchenko. In the mind of the artist, the concepts of freedom, truth and word (which have the highest value) – are inseparable, like slavery, untruth, silence. At the same time, unfreedom and slavery for the artist are not synonymous concepts, or even – antithetical. Shevchenko's images of the tsar and slaves, we are convinced, are not an oppositional pair, but as a rule are complementary: slaves need the tsar as much as he needs them, slaves show their adaptation to the tyranny of slavery. The chain tsar – slaves and multi-stage slavery can be traced in a number of works of the analyzed period. However, the most eloquent is the scene of the "general battle" of the poem "Dream (Everyone has their own destiny)". It seems that there is no middle ground 75 between a tsar and a slave. On the other hand, T.Shevchenko's oppositional pair is the tsar as the parent of slavery – fighters for freedom as unconquered, those who did not accept slavery, and slaves – fighters for freedom. External shackles enslave only physically, says the poet, the most destructive is the internal enslavement, which the author notices in his own nation, as a consequence of long conciliatory existence in Ukraine enslaved by the Russian Empire. "Falling under the yoke", deadly indifference due to its longevity are reflected on the spiritual face of the nation. In his reflections on the enslavement of Ukrainians by the empire, the poet also comes to the conclusion that, in fact, the point of the root of enslavement and development of imperial power is in "inclination" of Ukrainians, their nonresistance to Moscow oppression. Shevchenko notes that under enslavement the people are degradated. The author speaks of slavery as helplessness, acceptance of untruths and lack of human dignity. And the word is able to resist evil and untruth.

Why We (Still) Read Orwell Janine Utell Bluemel, Kristin. 2004. George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $59.95 hc. xi + 246 pp.Gleason, Abbott, Jack Goldsmith, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds. 2005. On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future. Princeton: Princeton University Press. $55.00 hc. $18.95 sc. xiv + 312 pp.The 1930s and 1940s in Britain-the peak of Orwell's career-are conceived as a period notable for the sustained intersection of politics and art, for the pursuit of political commitment through literature. A place could be made for the literary writer in the important public debates of the time because, in the recent words of Judge Richard Posner,the literary imagination is equated to the possession of a social conscience (2001, 233). George Orwell remains an avatar for the writer of such social conscience, one who seeks to reconcile literary concerns and civic engagement. continued reliance on Orwell as an exemplar for how we should think about the crucial intellectual and political issues of our day is revealed in two recently published books; both use Orwell's works and life, his causes and his conscience, as a way into debates spanning over 75 years and as a conduit through which writers and issues can meet.The first, Kristin Bluemel's excellent George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, revisits the 1930s and 1940s as a crucial period for the history of modernism and for public intellectual life. Her study calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between modernism and the years leading up to the Second World War. other publication, the valuable On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future, an anthology edited by Abbott Gleason, Jack Goldsmith, and Martha Nussbaum, revisits Orwell's classic novel in the context of a post-9/11 world. These books are important for anyone seeking to examine the relationships among politics, culture, and literature; they investigate the philosophical and social ramifications of the world we live in now as they play out in new readings of Orwell's work and his time.The writers of the interwar period have traditionally been read as eschewing formal experimentation for a literature of engagement; they called for poetry to be a vehicle for political commitment; they believed they were speaking truth to power with the voice of the people. 1930s and 1940s may be considered a key moment in modernity, a moment that saw the breakdown of the British imperialist project and the rise of the regimes that would scar the century. While later studies of the 1930s, like Valentine Cunningham's 1988 book British Writers of the Thirties, sought to move beyond defining the period simply as The Auden Generation (to note Samuel Hynes' characterization), the critical vision of the decade still bracketed it off from what came immediately before-modernism-and after-the second World War. Bluemel, with her model of intermodernism, widens the scope of the study of the period in some very smart and provocative readings of several all-too-neglected figures of interwar British literature. In doing so, she reveals how this decade is a key moment not only in modernism but in modernity.Bluemel focuses her consideration of the 1930s and 1940s on Orwell in order to show the ways in which Orwell serves as both insider and outsider; he is a key figure of the mythology of the decade and a conduit through which other important writers moved and made their own movement. He was never part of The Auden Generation, and has thus been construed as an outsider, yet this participation renders him a central player in public and literary life. He was part of the imperialist project through his time in Burma, the socialist project through his joining the struggle in Spain and through his writing, the working-class project through his study of miners, and he responded to the concerns surrounding the rise of totalitarianism in his later novels. …

Today, in Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian and even Ukrainian society, the January Uprising has become a symbol of the ‚ fight for freedom’. This article attempts to answer the question: did/do Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Jewish societies really have anything to glorify? In other words, from the perspective of nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalisms (and therefore not from an academic perspective), was the uprising in any way useful to them? Or to put it another way, did it do more good or harm? For all non-dominant ethnic groups, the uprising brought new repression and discrimination (although sometimes discrimination against one group objectively benefited another group), and with the exception of the Poles, it is difficult to see the impact of this historical event as a positive image in the process of nationalising the masses until World War One. The fact that such an image was created later is simply an‚ invented tradition’. The fact that a positive image of the uprising was ‚invented’ later in Lithuanian or Belarusian societies does not mean that it did not (or does not now) influence the mobilisation of the masses, but it is not a direct consequence of the uprising, but a narrative constructed by later generations.

In 2019 comes the 70th anniversary of the founding of LLKS – the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters (Lietuvos Laisvės Kovos Sąjūdi). This underground organization had been founded in February of 1949. It united the people, who had been fighting against the Soviet power in Lithuania. Heads of the LLKS were active partisans and they called themselves freedom fighters. In the same time, other people called partisans ‘forest men’, ‘greens’ etc. The main purpose of this article – to consider the process of unification of the forces of Lithuanian partisans under unified command and to highlight the main circumstances of this process. The article is based on the archival materials and modern research writings. So far, very few research papers about Lithuanian anti-Soviet struggle have been published outside Lithuania. That’s why one of the goals of the author – to provide the information about this episode of the modern history of Lithuania to Ukrainian readers. Perhaps, the similarity with Ukrainian national insurgent movement during the 2nd World War will be found. The final ambition of the armed struggle of Lithuanian partisans was the creation of free democratic Lithuania. Partisans considered the mistakes of Lithuanian state-building during the interwar period, such as authoritarian regime and weak social politics. Freedom fighters hoped to get help from the West countries – Great Britain of the USA – through the mediation of Lithuanian emigrants. The unification of partisans was difficult because of the activity of infiltrated Soviet security agents. The chronological framework of the article covers the period of 1946-1949, when where held the main events of the unification of partisans. Active partisan struggle against the Soviet in Lithuania power lasted to 1953.

The given article deals with the problem of comparison of literary and political works of Ivan Bahrіanyі and George Orwell, as well as with an objective to prove that these two writers make up a far from random parallel for comparison.&#x0D; On the basis of scientific works it proves that one can trace a genetic similarity in the main ideas highlighted in a number of works by these two writers. Both of them had a kind of indirect dialogue on the topics of freedom, equality and struggle against anti-humane regimes.&#x0D; The article also highlights the face that there is more to the indirect dialogue of Ivan Bahrіanyі and George Orwell than it seems. Biographical insight used for the research proves that both men faced similar struggles in their lives, their political views were really close and their interpretation of the ongoing events serves as evidence. Consequently the article brings to attention the fact that biographies of the writers might become a key for understanding their works and positions. Another fact to support the above-given idea is that both writers use their own lives and personal experience as a basis for literary interpretation; this was proved by the researches of both George Orwell and Ivan Bahrіanyі literary heritage. As a result we can research their works from the point of comparative typology in synchrony on the double grounds: the indirect dialogue about crucial human problems (mainly a solitary personal struggle against totalitarian regime) as well as usage of a similar artistic method to bring it to their audience.&#x0D; The article deals with the problem of freedom as a core problem highlighted in literary and political works of Ivan Bahrіanyі and George Orwell. It traces similarities and differences in the authors’ perception of the notion and ways it changes in various circumstances. It proves that the Ukrainian author pays more attention to the national aspect of freedom than his British counterpart does, which might be explained both by the differences in the worldviews (Ivan Bahrіanyі always defined himself as a socialistic patriot, while George Orwell often was perceived as a generalist and the citizen of the world) and by the political conditions of the nations the writers represent. In terms of personal freedom both authors claim it to be a crucial value for every person as it is closely connected with notions of dignity, self-respect, dreams realization etc. and defines the very existence of humankind.&#x0D; Generally the article emphasizes the role and place of the writers in the anti-totalitarian discourse of the XX century. It draws attention to the fact that Ivan Bahrіanyі and George Orwell devoted all their lives and literary efforts to the struggle for a free personality, who is not to be oppressed by any political regime.&#x0D; Keywords: Ivan Bahrіanyі, George Orwell, typological approach, genetic similarity, indirect dialogue, freedom, liberty, anti-totalitarian discourse, dignity, biographical approach.

16 Mary O’Rourke, ‘Remembering An Bráthair Ó Súilleabháin’, pp.189–193. Mary O’Rourke is a former TD for Longford-Westmeath and has served as Minister for Education, Minister for Health and Minister for Public Enterprise. She lives in Athlone and is a frequent media contributor. 17 Mary (Burke) McQuinn, ‘Entering first science, 1968’, pp.194–197. Mary (Burke) McQuinn, a retired teacher, lives in Tullow, Co. Carlow, with her husband, Christopher, also a Maynooth science graduate. 18 Mary Cullen talks to Vincent Comerford, ‘The 1960s see the first female lecturers’, pp. 198202 . Vincent Comerford is a Maynooth graduate and former Professor of Modern History. Dr Kevin McNamara later became Bishop of Kerry (1976–1984) and Archbishop of Dublin (1984–1987). Fr Tom Fee later used the Irish form of his name, Tomás Ó Fiaich. 19 Tom Collins, ‘The old order passeth away: Remembering Maynooth 1972–79’, p.305. 20 Evelyn Conlon, ‘Remembering what I’ve forgotten (1976)’, pp.271–274. Evelyn Conlon, a member of Aosdána, is a novelist, short story writer and essayist. 21 Lawrence Taylor, ‘An anthropologist’s memory of Maynooth’, pp.401–404. Lawrence Taylor continues to write, in a variety of genres, and divides his time between Tubac, Arizona (near the Mexican border) and Maynooth. 22 Denis Bergin, ‘Remembering Maynooth, an exercise in indulgence, acknowledgement, balance and preservation’, pp.23–31. Denis Bergin is a writer and editor. He lives in West Offaly and the eastern Algarve. 23 Thomas O’Connor, ‘From guff to chub, a seventies rite of passage’, pp.318–321. Thomas O’Connor is a Professor of History at Maynooth. 24 Tom Collins, ‘The old order passeth away: Remembering Maynooth 1972–79’, pp.301–306. Tom Collins is the former Head of Education at Ma ynooth University (2006–11), where he served as interim President from 2010–11. In recent years he has been involved in establishing the Technological Higher Education Association. Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, The Dead of the Irish Revolution (London: Yale University Press, 2020), xvii+705 pages. This book does for the revolution that culminated in the creation of the Irish Free State some hundred years ago what an earlier book by David McKittrick did for the more recent ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, detailing those killed in the conflict and the best information on how the deaths occurred. It draws on published work, including memoirs, contemporary newspaper reports and accounts of participants lodged in the Bureau of Military History or found in applications to government for pensions or compensation. The entries detail payments made from public funds to the families of those killed. This is interesting but, perhaps, not all that meaningful without a full account of the basis upon which such payments were made by the British and Irish governments. The wilderness of single instances is analysed in a masterly introduction by Trinity’sProfessorEunanO’Halpinwho,despitehisstrongfamilyconnections with the ‘freedom fighters’of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Army (IRA) of that era, has maintained an objective professionalism that has long Studies • volume 110 • number 437 110 Spring 2021: Book Reviews set his work apart from the polemical writings of some historians. This informs the treatment of individual deaths as well as his overall view. Typically, the account of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ shooting at Croke Park in November 1920 identifies it as ‘a bungled search and arrest operation by Crown forces rather than a calculated reprisal for the earlier killings of officers as is often asserted’. Professor O’Halpin does not shrink from admitting flaws in accounts given by members of his own family of events in which they were involved, nor from doubting the merits of some of their actions. ‘In seeking the truth’, he remarks somewhat sorrowfully, ‘be careful what you wish for’. Overall, the number of deaths in the Irish Revolution was not enormous – one tenth of the Irish who died in the Great War. The rebel fatalities of the 1916 rebellion – eighty-four (including those executed afterwards) – were much fewer than the soldiers and police opposing it or civilians caught in cross-fire and suchlike. What was most significant for the future were not the deaths themselves but...

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) engaged an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, to name only a few. The idealism of the cause - defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war - and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia. Paralleling the outpouring of writing and art, the war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology. So many different countries participated directly or indirectly in the war that Time magazine called it the 'Little World War'; Spain served in those years as a proving ground for the devastating technologies of World War II, and for the entire 20th century.

Desert Insurgency: Archaeology, T. E. Lawrence, and the Arab Revolt

In the 1930s more than any other decade of this century English writers exaggerated the moral, social, and realistic content of art. Among the many important observations that Samuel Hynes makes in his excellent study of the decade, The Auden Generation,1 is the fact that the major writers of the period who took up the social and political causes were from the middle class, most of them came from professional families, and were educated at Oxford and Cambridge. In spite of the fact that Rhys wrote precisely of what it was like to be down and out in both Paris and London, her fiction was not a literature of social engagement. Even by 1939 her writing seemed untouched by the devastating political and military events which had occurred and the even more horrendous ones which were on the horizon. A passing reference in Good Morning, Midnight to Franco’s Spain and the fact that it is October, 1937, are the only indications that the outside world has changed very much since Marya Zelli first came to Paris in the aftermath of World War I. Set against the 1930s writing of Graham Greene, George Orwell and nearly every other English prose writer of the period, with the exception in a very different way of Henry Green, her work continued to rest on the power of style rather than new subject matter, intuition rather than analysis, the private rather than the public self.

The given article deals with the problem of comparison of literary and political works of Ivan Bahrianyi and George Orwell, as well as with an objective to prove that these two writers make up a far from random parallel for comparison.&#x0D; On the basis of scientific works it proves that one can trace a genetic similarity in the main ideas highlighted in a number of works by these two writers. Both of them had a kind of indirect dialogue on the topics of freedom, equality and struggle against anti-humane regimes.&#x0D; The article also highlights the fact that there is more to the indirect dialogue of Ivan Bahrianyi and George Orwell than it seems. Biographical insight used for the research proves that both men faced similar struggles in their lives, their political views were really close and their interpretation of the ongoing events serves as evidence. Consequently the article brings to attention the fact that biographies of the writers might become a key for understanding their works and positions. Another fact to support the above-given idea is that both writers use their own lives and personal experience as a basis for literary interpretation; this was proved by the researches of both George Orwell and Ivan Bahrianyi literary heritage. As a result we can research their works from the point of comparative typology in synchrony on the double grounds: the indirect dialogue about crucial human problems (mainly a solitary personal struggle against totalitarian regime) as well as usage of a similar artistic method to bring it to their audience.&#x0D; The article deals with the problem of freedom as a core problem highlighted in literary and political works of Ivan Bahrianyi and George Orwell. It traces similarities and differences in the authors’ perception of the notion and ways it changes in various circumstances. It proves that the Ukrainian author pays more attention to the national aspect of freedom than his British counterpart does, which might be explained both by the differences in the worldviews (Ivan Bahranyj always defined himself as a socialistic patriot, while George Orwell often was perceived as a generalist and the citizen of the world) and by the political conditions of the nations the writers represent. In terms of personal freedom both authors claim it to be a crucial value for every person as it is closely connected with notions of dignity, self-respect, dreams realization etc. and defines the very existence of humankind.&#x0D; Generally the article emphasizes the role and place of the writers in the anti-totalitarian discourse of the XX century. It draws attention to the fact that Ivan Bahrianyi and George Orwell devoted all their lives and literary efforts to the struggle for a free personality, who is not to be oppressed by any political regime. To achieve this goal they employed completely opposite methods, using positivism and negativism consequently as their basic artistic impulses. Though their ways of describing world phenomena were different the impact of their works and recipients’ perception of their main ideas is the same.

Reviewed by: Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War by Kathleen Riley Marina Mackay (bio) IMAGINING ITHACA: NOSTOS AND NOSTALGIA SINCE THE GREAT WAR, by Kathleen Riley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiii + 331 pp. £30.00 cloth. Imagining Ithaca is not primarily a book about literary responses to the Odyssey, and thus it is not much concerned with Ulysses, the subject of a paragraph in the introduction and a few passing mentions thereafter. Rather, Kathleen Riley's declared theme is "the contemplation of Home from a distance" (21), and her book consists of readings of a wide range of films, novels, plays, poems, and memoirs that appeared between 1918 and 2017. Aside from the introduction and epilogue, the book is arranged in six parts, incorporating nineteen numbered chapters. The text's first part is about homecoming in the context of the world wars, and it consists of separate accounts of Great War novels by Rebecca West and Erich Maria Remarque,1 of William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives,2 and of David Malouf's historical novel Fly Away Peter.3 The shorter second section addresses three works that incorporate explicitly Odyssean allusions: John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, Njabulo S. Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and English writer Tamar Yellin's short story "Return to Zion."4 There follows a section on exile and nostalgia consisting of chapters on memoirs by Vladimir Nabokov and Doris Lessing and on two Alan Bennett plays. The fourth part is on ideas of spiritual displacement and discusses work by Carson McCullers, Woody Allen, and Doris Pilkington Garimara; the fifth part addresses nostalgia for childhood in works by George Orwell, John Van Druten, and John Logan. The Telemachus figures of the book's final section, "Voyages Round the Father," are Seamus Heaney, Daniel Mendelsohn, and politician-turned-television-presenter Michael Portillo, whose work on the life of his late father Luis Portillo, a poet, center-left intellectual, and Spanish Civil War refugee, is credited early in Riley's acknowledgments as among the inspirations for her book (vii). It would be difficult to make any programmatic argument from so heterogeneous a body of work—so many differences of medium, genre, and form, and of historical, cultural, and national context—and Imagining Ithaca does not attempt one. Rather, Riley's interest is in the sheer pervasiveness of yearning for real or imaginary homes, and if the book has a general orientation, as distinct from a specific argument, it is that nostalgia is more usefully understood as a feature rather than a failing of modern literature, theater, and film. She proposes that, contrary to the new set of pejorative associations that nostalgia has accrued from recent exploitation by right-wing opportunists—promising various impossibilities about the recovery of American greatness or British sovereignty—nostalgia implies no [End Page 549] particular politics. Side by side sit chapters on Speak, Memory and the then-Communist Lessing's Going Home, a reflection on expatriation almost contemporary with Nabokov's.5 Because the chapters are almost entirely self-contained, such juxtapositions go unremarked. The book's chapters range in length from just over four pages, in the case of the one on Yellin, to over thirty deeply researched and absorbing pages centered on the episode of the BBC's Great Railway Journeys that Portillo wrote and presented about a journey from Granada to his father's beloved Salamanca. The book's usual allowance is approximately ten or eleven pages per chapter, and much space is necessarily given to the exposition of plot and situation for the benefit of new or forgetful audiences of each work. The range of material surveyed is compelling in its own way, but the short chapters mean that the local analysis, which is invariably astute and well informed, sometimes feels squeezed by the need to contextualize and summarize the text under consideration. For example, the section titled "John Van Druten's The Widening Circle (1957)" spends much more space on the nineteenth-century transformation of West Hampstead from a literally Keatsian rural idyll into a bourgeois NW6 suburb than on Van Druten's actual book, a volume of autobiography...

One of the advantages of writing about futuristic scenarios, is that an elderly author has little chance of facing criticism. The Indian born author, George Orwell knew this fact well, when he published his famous novel of life and times 1984 in the summer of 1949. He painted a rather dark, sombre picture of life in 1984 keeping in mind the dark clouds of intrigue and conspiracy that hung over the post WWII world at the time. 1984 came and went and was not as eventful as George Orwell had imagined and most of his predictions went unnoticed. Encouraged by this, I venture to see 2050 as a very crowded planet (with well over 9 billion inhabitants) competing for resources, conscious of the need to preserve and conserve the earth for future generations, sentiments that were not a priority in 1950 when we were rebuilding after 2 world wars. The factor that would dominate all activity is the restriction of the amount of carbon emissions by human actions. The Paris agreement of 2015 points to limiting temperature increase on our planet to below 2o C from start of industrial revolution. Reliance on fossil fuels will be reduced; rise of renewable energy and lower carbon economy will take shape. By 2050, we will have a very electrified world with more electric vehicles replacing internal combustion engines and hydrogen replacing natural gas. These issues will dominate on how and on what topics we will do our research and what challenges need to be tackled. The changes will help mankind towards sustainability, alleviating climate hazards and improving quality of life on our planet. But will that be enough to reverse the course of the planet?