Biography Research Articles

„Szanowny Panie Kolego”. Listy Jana Adamusa do Jana Kamińskiego z lat 1929–1932

Przedmiot badań: Listy polskiego historyka prawa dra Jana Adamusa wysyłane ze Lwowa do dra Jana Kamińskiego w latach 1929–1932.
 Cel badawczy: Przedstawienie mniej nieznanych epizodów z „lwowskiego” okresu życia Jana Adamusa.
 Metoda badawcza: Poszczególne listy przepisano, skomentowano oraz opatrzono przypisami.
 Wyniki: 1. Prywatna korespondencja Jana Adamusa w istotny sposób uzupełnia jego oficjalne biogramy. 2. Jan Adamus porzucił służbę wojskową, gdyż przeszkadzała mu ona w rozwoju naukowym i uniemożliwiała karierę akademicką. 3. Można mówić o fenomenie „szkoły Dąbkowskiego” działającej na Uniwersytecie Jana Kazimierza we Lwowie przed rokiem 1939.

Józef Zmitrowicz – wybitny działacz społeczny w Białymstoku w latach 1916–1921

The main point of this publication is to present the activity of Józef Zmitrowicz in Białystok in the years 1916–1921. The author has decided to deal with this subject beceause the figure of Józef Zmitrowicz is little known among the inhabitants of Białystok. It is also worth highlighting, that the activity of Józef Zmitrowicz in this city is also forgotten in his official biographies. Józef Zmitrowicz (1879–1980) was a famous lawyer, educator, parliamentarian and pro-independence activist. He studied at St. Petersbourg and Kharkov. In the inter war period, he was a solicitor in Vilnus and then, after the second world war, in Olsztyn. He came from Vilnus to Białystok in November 1916. He became a teacher and director in Polish Real Gymnasium beceause his predecessor – priest Stanisław Hałko – was arrested by the Germans. Józef Zmitrowicz also managed a scouts group in Białystok and participated in many community initiatives. In 1919 he became a parlamentarian in the Legislative Assembly. Józef Zmitrowicz was a great patriot and a very religious person as mentioned by his protégé Michał Sopoćko – currently a blessed of the Catholic Church. I have used the publications by J. Dworakowski, M. Goławski, M. Kietliński, J. Dziemian and others while working on the biography of Józef Zmitrowicz. The parliamentary and senate transcripts as well as press articles, contained mainly in „Dziennik Białostocki”, were very helpful. While writing about the activity of Józef Zmitrowicz in Białystok, I have also used the collection of archives of the Sixth King Sigismund Augustus High School in Białystok – inheritor of the traditon of the Polish Real Gymnasium in Bialystok.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer Soon after news broke of the scandal of blake bailey, philip roth's official biographer, we were inundated with many versions of the same question: Will Philip Roth be "canceled"? The question seemed to be motivated by a concern that Bailey's scandals with women—grooming and sexual assault, to name a few—would be connected to the scandals of Roth himself. It is, if not ironic, then at least telling, that Roth famously wrote about "cancel culture" before it entered our lexicon. His 2000 novel, The Human Stain, for example, features a protagonist, Coleman Silk, who is canceled (to use the language of the twenty-first century) for misusing the word "spooks" when describing three prodigal students he never met. Twenty years later, readers, academics, journalists, and fans started to wonder whether the same was true for Philip Roth regarding his poor choice in biographer that, some said, reflected his attitudes toward women. This fallout occurred shortly after the Newark Public Library launched its unparalleled Philip Roth Personal Library—featuring volumes from Roth's home libraries—and leaders in the city of Newark began planning a Philip Roth Festival to commemorate what would have been Roth's ninetieth birthday. In response to these questions about the future of Roth's legacy, we gave a resounding answer: No. Of course, Roth will not be "canceled." There was no way we could imagine one of the most important writers of his generation going away any time soon, and surely not in response to scandalous books, or scandals surrounding books. Then again, of course we can never be sure. History, and literary legacy, are equal measures fickle and unpredictable. But we think it is safe to say, at least by the printing of this issue, that Roth remains more relevant than ever. As a powerful indication of how Roth has not lost value in the academy, in 2020, the Philip Roth Society decided to present the Siegel/McDaniel Award for graduate research to two candidates because of the high quality of the papers in the competition. Both Siegel/McDaniel winners printed in this issue submitted outstanding essays concerned with how Roth's work is in conversation with a younger generation of writers and important new fields in cultural studies, such as food and affect. A close reading of all of the essays in this issue not only shows that Roth is not canceled, but also why and how that must be so. The essays, while not comprising a special issue or planned to take such a unifying approach, all address versions of the same themes: Roth's perpetual questioning of the status quo, his infamous bristling at rules and conventions, his keen awareness of the link between thought and [End Page 1] embodiment, his celebration of critical thinking, and his worries about the effects of accepting bad policy and misreadings of our founding documents as truth. These themes, of course, made Roth famous in the 1960s, when the US and the world were on the verge of social and political upheavals. A generation later, we seem on the precipice of another significant turning point, when we still need thinkers and activists to take to the streets and the page. Roth knew this better than anyone. In the wake of scandals all over the world, not least of which have been televised in the United States as the country attempts to grapple with the 2021 coup at the Capitol and the conservative backlash at the Supreme Court, the scholars published in the pages of this journal continue to find value in Roth's uncanny ability to showcase the best of us, even when writing about the worst. We hope you take heart in reading the essays in this issue, essays that at once recognize the significance of the written word and the literary language of revolt. In this way, we will have done our own small part to help reposition Roth as an indispensable voice, not only in 1959 or in 1969 or in 1995 or in 2010, but right here, today, when we once again seem to be on the verge of transformational change...

С.Л. Франк в Швейцарии: контуры творческого пути

Based on the analysis of foreign archival materials, correspondence, and periodicals of the 1920s–1930s, the author of the article carries out the historical and philosophical reconstruction of the Swiss episode of Semyon Ludwigovich Frank's philosophical biography. The author thoroughly reconstructs the history of his lecture visits to Basel, Kreuzlingen, Rüschlikon and Zürich, which were organized by his Swiss colleagues Ludwig Binswanger, Fritz Lieb and Elsa Mahler. The role of the Swiss Frank's lectures of 1929, 1935 and 1938 in his creative development is stressed, and their significance in the history of contacts between the Russian philosopher and the Swiss intellectuals is determined. Particular attention in the article is paid to examining  the little-known publications of the Russian philosopher in the Swiss newspaper Neue Züricher Zeitung, in particular his reviews of Rene Le Senne's work "Obstacle and Value" and Eugene Minkowski's work "Towards Cosmology. Philosophical Fragments", published by the philosopher in 1935 ("Changes in French Thinking" ("Wandlungen des französischen Denkens")) and 1938 ("Soul and World" ("Seele und Welt")) with the assistance of L. Binswanger and the editor of the Swiss newspaper Hans Barth. It is concluded that the Swiss episode in the biography of Frank, in spite of its not being a major one, was nevertheless of great importance for the philosopher; therefore, a detailed study of this period will make it possible for researchers to recreate the most complete picture of the thinker's creative biography – the history of his philosophical views development, his travels around Western Europe and meetings with European intellectuals and philosophers – during the complex and controversial era of the 1920s–1930s.

"Тамыр" русского переселенца, но "бодан белого царя": антропологические особенности романа "сказ столетнего Степняка"

Fiction, being one of the forms of reflection of public consciousness, shows the value orientations of historical epochs. The study analyzes the novel “A hungred years on the steppe” from an anthropological point of view, it was published in 2018. The author of the novel is Bayangali Tokanovich Alimzhanov - Kazakh poet, playwright, writer, director. Born on October 16, 1954 in Stepnyak, Kokchetav region, Kazakh SSR. He is the author of more than 30 books written in Kazakh and Russian. “A hungred years on the steppe” is a story about the Kazakh aksakal Asanbai, who tells his grandchildren about the key events of the XX century, being on the threshold of the “new time of independence of the steppe”. The work is based on the life experience of the older generation - the ancestors and fellow countrymen of the author. The text of the book is considered by means of Memory Studies technologies. The novel under study is a symbol of the collective memory of the peoples of Northern Kazakhstan, created in certain socio-political conditions. During the research, an interview was conducted with the author of the novel. The interview included questions related to the author's biography, the process of creating a novel, the interweaving of artistic images with real stories. The novel “A hungred years on the steppe” is of interest as a source for studying the anthropological aspects of historical processes in the post-Soviet space, and is also a form of broadcasting ethnocultural information.

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

In the Space of Socialist Science: a Discussion of the Czechoslovak History Textbook (1953)

This article focuses on the problem of expertise as a form of scientific communication between Soviet and Czechoslovak historians. At the end of 1953, a discussion of the first volume of the textbook “History of Czechoslovakia” (“Dějiny ČSR”) took place at the Institute of Slavic Studies. The textbook was prepared by a group of authors headed by the director of the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences J. Macek and sent to the Soviet Union for peer review. Expertise is considered in several contexts: 1) the situation in Czechoslovak historical science through the prism of the biographies of the textbook authors; 2) the specifics of the development of Soviet historiography and Bohemian studies in the early 1950s; 3) the formation of a communicative field among historians of the socialist countries.

The “Women’s Question” in the Biographies of Scientists and Philosophers by E. F. Litvinova (1890s)

In the 1890s, Elizaveta Fedorovna Litvinova (1845–1919), a mathematician, philosopher, educator and writer, published ten biographical essays on prominent scientists and philosophers, including the first Russian biography of a renowned mathematician S. V. Kovalevskaya (also spelled Kovalevsky). This article gives particular attention to the “zhenskii vopros” (women’s question), as reflected in these biographies of the scientists and philosophers. Apart from the biography of Kovalevskaya, the women’s issue is considered in the biographies of F. Bacon, J. Locke, J. le Rond d’Alembert, J.-A.-N. de Condorcet, P.-S. Laplace, and L. Euler, as well as in the book “Rulers and Thinkers”. The biography of Kovalevskaya describes the difficulties encountered by the woman mathematician in her professional self-realization. In the biography of Bacon, Litvinova writes about his mother and her four sisters being learned as well as the women of the English royal family. In John Locke’s biography, a chapter is devoted to the philosopher’s friend Lady Damaris Masham, her upbringing and education, and the women’s position in society in the late 17th-century England is criticized. In d’Alembert’s biography, special attention is given to his discussion with Jean-Jacques Rousseau about women’s education. In her book about Laplace, Litvinova writes about the scientist’s spouse and her role in the preservation of his scientific heritage. In Euler’s biography, Litvinova reviews his “Letters to a German Princess”, written in a form of lessons in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, intended for an educated woman. Finally, in her biography of de Condorcet the author refers to him as the most committed and strenuous advocate of women’s rights, who promoted the women’s right to education and active involvement in the life of society.

Карьерная динамика губернаторов Российской империи 1906–1911 гг.

The relevance of the study lies in the quantitative analysis of the official biographies of the governors of the era of P.A. Stolypin, which was not previously noted in historiography. A quantitative analysis of the official biographies of clerks involved in the governor’s corps under P.A. Stolypin in 1906–1911 is conducted. The list of educational institutions that the future governors graduated from is examined. Governors’ careers are typified in relation to previous service experience in terms of the nature of the activities in the positions held and geographic dynamics. The main stages of the promotion in rank, the age of appointment to the post of governor and the number of years of service in this capacity are analized. The data of the quantitative study are compared with the official biographies of governors I.F. Koshko, D.N. Lyubimov and N.P. Muratov in order to determine the degree of typicality for the governors of the studied period. The relevance of the research topic is associated with the need for a clearer understanding of the models of career dynamics of bureaucracy in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. It is concluded that the official biographies of I.F. Koshko, D.N. Lyubimov and N.P. Muratov correspond to the most common types of careers in the governor’s corps of this period.

The Unwritten Official Biography of William Stevens Fielding

The Unwritten Official Biography of William Stevens Fielding

Rural memoirs of Southern Ukraine of the 20th century : prosopographic approach

The aim : to consider the application of prosopographic approaches in the study of biographies of authors of peasant memoirs in order to identify common features that laid the conditions for the emergence of memoir practices among the peasants of the Southern Ukraine in the 20th century; to analyze the potential of prosopography for researching general processes. The article considers the application of the prosopographic method to the study of biographies of authors of peasant memoirs in order to identify common features that created conditions for the emergence of memoir practices among the peasants of southern Ukraine in the twentieth century. Modern historical science suggests that individuals having their own little life stories are present behind all processes and events. New directions and principles of historical research are becoming increasingly important. The prosopographic method is one of them. Under prosopography we understand the scientific method of studying individual biographies of authors of historical sources in order to create a “collective biography” of a certain social group on their basis. Methods: analytical, historical, comparative, system-structural. The article author uses methods of specific scientific activity, empirical research and general logic. Practical meaning: recommended for use by scholars for historical research; provides opportunities for the use of this issue in theoretical and methodological and source studies. Originality: research, in particular on the choice of research source base and methodology of its analysis. Scientific novelty: creation of a collective portrait of a peasant author of a memoir source. Conclusions: on the basis of the analysis with the involvement of prosopographic research methods we have the opportunity to create a conditional collective portrait of a peasant of the Southern Ukraine of the twentieth century, the author of the memoir. When creating a “biography” of a peasant author, the following features are distinguished: common social origin, primary education, teaching and educational skills, psychological characteristics, propensity for creative activity, external influences. The materials collected by the researchers from the Zaporizhzhia branch of the NASU Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies named after M. S. Hrushevsky and the History Faculty of the Zaporizhzhia National University and published as a part of collections titled “Sources on the History of the Southern Ukraine”, “Antiquities of the Southern Ukraine” and “Ascension Antiquities”, are used as sources in the analysis. The purpose of the current investigation is to identify the causes and conditions that prompted particular peasants of the Southern Ukraine to create their own historical narrative – memoirs. Another goal is to create a “collective portrait” of an average author using prosopographic methods. The article investigates through the analysis of biographies the background of peasant authors, which singled them out from the general mass of peasants. It also highlights an “average author” as a “historical figure” and analyzes his attribution to a particular era, place, social group and culture. The use of prosopographic methods in the study of biographies of Southern Ukrainian peasants, who distinguished themselves by creating their own memoirs, allows to determine those aspects of the era and the position of the little man who chose to create their own historical excursions contrary to general trends and understanding the risks of totalitarian system. The creation of prosopographical (collective biographies) portraits of peasant authors is a very important component of the reproduction of general processes that created the conditions for the emergence of peasant narrative sources. The author tries to highlight the modern era in all its aspects through the prism of individual biographies and works of peasant authors. Type of article: scientific and theoretical.

An Algorithmic Socialism in Defense of the Lived Without Life: A Political Proposal through Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals by Katerina Kolozova

Author(s): Oscar Pichardo Isaak Title (English): An Algorithmic Socialism in Defense of the Lived Without Life: A Political Proposal through Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals by Katerina Kolozova Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 18, No. 1-2 (2021). Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 100-104 Page Count: 5 Citation (English): Oscar Pichardo Isaak, “An Algorithmic Socialism in Defense of the Lived Without Life: A Political Proposal through Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals by Katerina Kolozova,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 18, No. 1-2 (2021): 100-104. Author Biography Oscar Pichardo Isaak, Independent researcher Oscar Pichardo Isaak is a writer, musician, filmmaker and self-taught philosopher from Mexico. His first full feature film, Aimee, has been shown at several international film festivals and is inspired in lacanian psychoanalysis and its discourse about psychosis. His current research is situated in the crossroad of non-standard philosophy, science, and political economy.

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Author Biographies

Author Biographies

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND (LITERARY) LAG FORM

In the article we are trying to propose a new way of linking (explaining overdetermination) autobiography (biography) and literary text. We contrast the concept Death of the Author and the formal methods of analysis of the literary text (when the author's biography and autobiography are taken out of the brackets) to the lag form introduced by us. The lag form is considered as a universal form of conjugation of biography (autobiography) and (literary) text. The article is based on examples of the analysis of Dostoevsky's underground consciousness and the film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder «In a Year of 13 Moons».

Russian Reception by James Hogg (Mid-19<sup>th</sup> — Early 20<sup>th</sup> Centuries)

The article continues a series of works devoted to the Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), a famous interpreter of folk ballads and author of “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (1824). The facts and materials related to the perception of J. Hogg in Russia in the middle of the XIX — early XX century are collected and summarized. It is noted that during the period under review, no new translations of J. Hogg's poetry and prose into Russian were created, however, in the articles of leading literary critics (N. G. Chernyshevsky, M. L. Mikhailov, A. V. Druzhinin) when analyzing the works of N. V. Gogol, T. Goode, the translation activity of I. S. Turgenev expressed opinions on certain aspects of the biography and work of the Scottish author. It has been established that the main source of information about J. Hogge and his work was for the Russian reader of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries translated publications on the history of English literature and culture, other books by Western European researchers published in Russia. The manifestations of interest of Russian researchers and popularizers of English literature in the work of J. Hogg are comprehended, with special attention paid to the article by N. A. Solovyov-Nesmelov “James Hogg”, which was a literary sketch about the childhood of the writer, and the essay by K. F. Tiander the novel of the first quarter of the 19th century, which offers a different assessment from the predecessors of the Scottish author’s activities as a continuer of the traditions of M. Edgeworth.

Juarez and Maximilian. Stories and interpretations in film and literature

This paper approaches the relations between history and fiction through analysis of two works: the Franz Werfel drama’s Juarez und Maximilian (1924), and the Miguel Contreras Torres movie’s, Juárez y Maximiliano (1934). Both works intend to tell us the happened during the Second Mexican Empire, Werfel with the Austrian gaze and Contreras with the Mexican gaze. We go inside to biography and context of authors, as well as the reception of the drama and movie in the local press, to understanding the political implications of the representations of the past. Finally, we analyze the philosophy of history implied in both Werfel and Contreras, and your relations with creation’s context.

Encounters on the Holy Mountain: Stories from Mount Athos

<i>Encounters on the Holy Mountain: Stories from Mount Athos</i>

Author Biographies

Author Biographies

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology ed. by Karina Vernon

Reviewed by: The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology ed. by Karina Vernon Ludwig Deringer Vernon, Karina, ed. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2020. Pp. xv + 576 pp index. CDN$44.99 paper-back; CDN$26.99 ebook. It is in the earliest exploration reports of Canada and the United States that the presence of Black people in the North and on the Plains is attested. Thus, an African slave by the name of York contributed to the success of the first transcontinental exploration of the United States, the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–06). A Black- Indigenous man, Pierre Bonga, served as a member of the first expedition to the Arctic Ocean, led by Samuel Hearne (1771) (see Vernon 374–78). Individual attestations such as these are paradigmatic of the picture at large, even to this day: a lack of awareness of Black culture in the North and on the Plains in general, and of its beginnings as early as the eighteenth century in particular. One of Karina Vernon’s main aims in The Black Prairie Archives is to familiarize readers on a wide scale with the rich body of literature by Black authors from the Canadian prairie region, what today are the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Some texts are published in the Anthology for the first time. In her comprehensive introduction (1–35), the editor succinctly addresses the key issues in nuce. Vernon conceptualizes this archive as dynamic and processual, comprising both historical and future works and reflecting their authors’ intellectual, ethnic, linguistic, literary, and cultural networks. To her, in this archive converge “the geographies black prairie writers are connected with, including other parts of Canada, the US, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa” (3). By the same logic, it incorporates the authors’ interrelations “with Indigenous peoples, and South Asian, Chinese, and European diasporas” (8). The role of the pertinent languages is preeminent: they include “Arabic, Bantu, Ebonics, Creole, Portuguese, Swahili, and many more” (3). Vernon, a native of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, prefers “the term ‘black’ over ‘African Canadian’ because it suggests that the nation does not function as the dominant point of reference in determining black identities” (11). Each author represented in the Anthology is introduced with essential biographical-critical material, often containing fresh information from the editor’s first-hand correspondence. The human, linguistic, and artistic complexities of one immigrant’s situation are captured in the following sample, a poem in Portuguese, “Na Corrente do rio” (2012), by the bilingual Angolan Albertan author Francisco Alexander Fwallah (born ca. 1980), translated as “In the River Flow” by poet Erin Mouré, with the two texts set in parallel columns: Sou I’m Teu Your Irmão Brother Refugiei-me I took refuge Na In Poesia Poetry (460, lines 12–17) [End Page 422] Vernon divides the historical development into four periods of migration and subsequent literary production as follows: ca. 1790–1900, covering the fur trade and early settlement; 1905–1912, the years of Black Americans’ migration from Oklahoma to Canada; 1960s to early 1970s, the era of international immigration; and 2012 to the present, reflecting “neo-liberal immigration and asylum” (11). This division, however, is not replicated in the volume’s outward arrangement; instead, the authors appear in chronological order by birth date. Vernon’s selections widely vary by author biography, theme, genre, and author intention, featuring historical records, novels (in excerpts), short stories, drama, poetry, creative nonfiction, and expository prose. The most recent pieces in the Archives date from 2017–18. For the first and the second period of Black migration to the prairies, relevant collections of document sources are housed in the North West Company Archives, the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, the three Provincial Archives, and in municipal repositories such as Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and Archives. Significantly, as Vernon points out, the writing of this time span intersects with the literature of the colonial Black Atlantic. In the early periods, “non-textual practices” (16), i.e. oral and gestural ones, predominate over written text types such as the aforementioned fur trade company records, oral histories of individual settlers, pioneer diaries, or the local...