Common-law Wife Research Articles

«Чайка» А. П. Чехова в свете гендерной психологии и психоанализа. Отцы и дети

The paper discusses the character system of “The Seagull” in terms of “human fullness”. Chekhov’s concepts of “living life” and “living people” are regarded as the author’s response to the socio-moral typification principle and “mise-en-scene sensation” of contemporary theater. Medical knowledge and artistic intuition allowed creating plot situations with social characteristics playing a secondary role. Subconscious factors come to the fore, becoming decisive in the structure of an individual and his relations with others. The hidden motives of the relationship between mother and son (Arkadina – Treplev), lovers (Arkadina – Trigorin, Polina Andreevna – Dorn), wife and husband (Medvedenko – Masha), common-law wife and common-law husband (Nina – Trigorin) are analyzed. One of Treplev’s character traits is nervousness. Most remarks concerning his image reveal his emotional state, a classic neurotic. “The Oedipus complex” can be seen not only in the Treplev-Arkadina storyline. As Freud claims, Nina Zarechnaya needs a father as a man model, a protector and A helper. However, she considers him a “traitor,” for he married another woman after her mother’s death. Thus, in psychology of love, she transfers her unsatisfied love for her father (Philia love) into love for Trigorin (Eros Love). In terms of gender psychology, Trigorin belongs to a certain psychotype preferring to marry women of older age for they require a mother-wife to dominate and solve their problems. Polina Andreevna’s husband mostly conforms to gender stereotypes, dominating the family, being sometimes aggressive towards other people, rude in relationships with women. Dorn is often seen as Don Juan, but this is a different psychotype – a bachelor. Don-Juan has no affection and will not interact with a woman seduced twenty years ago. A snuffbox, wine, black dresses are Masha’s challenge to the world when playing the role of a “bad girl” to draw attention to herself. In terms of psychoanalysis, her personality is dominated by the Child, with no strength or desire to become an Adult. To sum up, “living life”, children and parents in the aspect of psychoanalysis, male and female in the characters make “The Seagull” always modern.

Echoes across the iron curtain: the letters of Münevver Andaç to Nâzım Hikmet

Nâzım Hikmet is perhaps Turkey’s best-known literary figure from the twentieth century, due at least in part to his dramatic life story and flight from Turkey to the Soviet Union in 1951. During the course of the ten years which followed, Nâzım's common-law wife Münevver Andaç sent him more than 750 letters, only a handful of which have ever been cited in biographical works relating to Nâzım’s life. Drawing upon over 400 letters housed in Moscow’s restricted RGALI archive – to which no Nâzım Hikmet biographer has previously gained access – and another 100 located at the Aziz Nesin Vakfı outside Istanbul, this article constitutes the first time that any of these letters have been analyzed in a systematic manner. The letters, combined with other archival and published materials, are employed in this article as a means of gaining insights into Nâzım’s Soviet years, a notoriously understudied period of his life, as well as Münevver’s life in Istanbul and their shared relationship across the Iron Curtain.

Procedure of translation, transliteration and transcription

It is the process of transferring an SL word to a TL text. It includes transliteration named "transcription". The process of transferring from the original language to the target language. Including transliteration called "transcription". It adapts the SL word first to the normal pronunciation, then to the normal morphology of the TL. Adaptation of the first word of the source language with normal pronunciation into the normal morphology of the target language. Cultural equivalent: it means replacing a cultural word in the SL with a TL one. However, "they are not accurate". The replacement of the word culture from the source language into the target language. However, "the word is not accurate". Pajamas party (staying together) and bachelor party (party together before the wedding). Functional equivalent: it requires the use of a culture-neutral word. Functional equivalent: it is necessary to use neutral cultural words. Contractor 'translated into Persian is' Moghatekar' (contractor is translated in Persian as Moghatekar 'common-law wife' (concubine) à concubine.

Kate Soffel's Life of Crime: A Gendered Journey from Warden's Wife to Criminal Actress

Kate Soffel's Life of CrimeA Gendered Journey from Warden's Wife to Criminal Actress Kristi Good (bio) Many residents of Pittsburgh are well acquainted with the story of the "Biddle Boys," Edward and John (Ed and Jack), who escaped from the Allegheny County Jail in winter 1902, with the help of the warden's wife, Kate Soffel. Their escape from the city and the ensuing horse-drawn sleigh chase across the snowy roads of Butler County thrilled newspaper readers across the country. The final confrontation between law enforcement and the "desperadoes," as journalists characterized them, was a bloody shoot-out that left the Biddles and Soffel on the brink of death. Soffel survived, but the public's excitement about her role in these events waned much more quickly than did their enthusiasm for the event itself. In Medea's Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills, Jennifer Jones posits, "Idealized 'woman' has traditionally been constructed as self-sacrificing, passive, and nurturing; therefore, when actual women become violent, some sense must be made of their actions if the myth of feminine passivity is to be maintained."1 Jones cites as a major influence the work of Ann Jones, who, in her book Women Who Kill, analyzed how various historical murder trials have perpetuated the subordination of women. Jones builds on this feminist analysis by exploring the dramatic texts that spring from these criminal events and legal proceedings and argues that dramatic representations of female criminality serve as similar historical documentation to "contain and control cultural anxiety" regarding the abnormality of the criminal woman.2 The jailbreak itself was a public spectacle that held the interest of the American people from coast to coast, and a popular true-crime melodrama [End Page 53] by Theodore Kremer quickly followed the newspaper headlines. A Desperate Chance detailed the sensational events of the Biddle jailbreak and debuted in the same year as the escape. Kremer's play functions as Jones suggests: a morality play that warns women of "the dangers of self-determination" and encourages them to "embrace their submissive status."3 But Kremer wrote his play before Soffel served her jail time, and her determination to cultivate a public life for herself post incarceration was not consistent with the narrative of passive femininity that the media, the courts, and Kremer had constructed to assure society that this unnatural, criminal woman was no longer a moral threat. While A Desperate Chance played across the country for years following the crime, Soffel's attempt to reclaim her life through a career in the theatre was met with opposition, particularly in her home region. This article serves as an act of feminist reclamation by documenting Soffel's involvement with the Biddles as well as her attempt to reenter society, a period heretofore unexamined in her life, and intervenes in the current historical narrative by painting her as a model not of submissive femininity but of feminist subversion. Peter Soffel and Kate Dietrich were married in the German Evangelical Protestant Church in Pittsburgh on December 9, 1886.4 They started a family within the first years of marriage and had four children. Aside from her duties as a mother, Soffel regularly ministered to men incarcerated at the Allegheny County Jail, where her husband was the warden. This was how she came into contact with Ed and Jack Biddle in 1901, as they sat waiting for their execution dates. The Biddles were sentenced to execution for fatally shooting a Mount Washington grocer named Thomas Kahney during a robbery in April 1901. Police profiled the Biddles and an accomplice named Walter Dorman, who were understood to be members of a group of robbers known as the Chloroform Gang. The day following the shooting in Mount Washington, police arrested Dorman and his common-law wife, Jennie Seebers, at their residence. At another house nearby, authorities arrested Jack Biddle on the ground floor before a shoot-out began upstairs. By the end of the skirmish, a police officer was killed, Ed Biddle was in custody but close to death, and a woman named Jessie Bodyne was arrested while trying to flee.5 The Biddles were the only two of...

Overlooking Guantánamo

Overlooking Guantánamo Stephen Benz (bio) One day, our dispatch-boat found the shores of Guantánamo Bay flowing past on either side. It was at nightfall, and on the eastward point a small village was burning, and it happened that a fiery light was thrown upon some palm-trees so that it made them into enormous crimson feathers. The water was the colour of blue steel; the Cuban woods were sombre; high shivered the gory feathers. The last boatloads of the marine battalion were pulling for the beach. —Stephen Crane, "War Memories" Twenty years ago, I went to Santiago de Cuba to gather material for a magazine article on the centennial of the Spanish–American War. Over the course of several days, I visited Daiquirí, Siboney, Las Guásimas, El Caney, and of course San Juan Hill—all the main sites associated with that war. All, that is, except one: Guantánamo Bay. But visiting Guantánamo was practically impossible, even then, five years before it became a detention camp for prisoners of the "War on Terror." The sites related to the Spanish–American War were located inside the perimeter of the US Naval Base—"Gitmo," to use the military's shorthand designation—and there was no access to the base from Cuba proper. The only way to enter Gitmo was to fly in on a Navy transport airplane from Virginia Beach, Virginia. And to do that, I would have to obtain permission—rarely granted—from naval authorities. So, much as I would have liked to visit the scene of the war's first clash between Spanish and American troops, I had to accept the impracticality of such a visit. Forgoing Guantánamo was especially disappointing because of Stephen Crane's connection to the place. Crane's writing about the war and his various adventures in Cuba had long intrigued me. He was one of the few reporters to witness both the landing of the Marines at Guantánamo and their subsequent skirmish with Spanish troops. He wrote several accounts of the event, a couple of which are counted among his best work. In fact, a significant portion of Crane's writing concerns Cuba, including a book of short stories (Wounds in the Rain), a long semiautobiographical essay ("War Memories"), and some of his best journalism. The time he spent on the island—a little over five months all told—holds outsized significance in his biography and his oeuvre. It was in Cuba that Crane—already famous for writing a war novel—finally witnessed warfare firsthand and up close. Shortly after hostilities ended, Crane came down with a severe bout of either yellow fever or malaria and had to be evacuated in a state of delirium. The "Cuban fever," as he called it, certainly exacerbated his latent [End Page 114] tuberculosis; nevertheless, while he was still recovering Crane mysteriously returned to Cuba—well after the other correspondents had left—and spent the better part of four months living a kind of underground existence in Havana. Though he filed an occasional report for Hearst's Journal, he was for the most part incommunicado; even his closest companions and his common-law wife had no idea where he was or what he was doing. The Havana sojourn remains something of an enigma in Crane's biography. As it turned out, though I had all but given up on the possibility of visiting Gitmo, while I was in Santiago I fortuitously learned of an opportunity to see the base—or at least to see into it. I was told that a Cuban travel agency, Gaviota, offered tours to a Cuban military facility, an observation post called Mirador de Malones, located on a hillside just outside the American-occupied site. From there, one could look through a telescope and spy on the naval base. It sounded too bizarre to be true—as so many things in Cuba do; but when I inquired at the Gaviota office in Santiago, the bizarre turned out to be true—as it so often does in Cuba. The agent told me that a German tour group was going to the military lookout the next day...

The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times by Brewster Chamberlin (review)

Reviewed by: The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times by Brewster Chamberlin David Wyatt (bio) Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (University Press of Kansas, 2015), 395 pp. “Friendship is what we have,” Stanley Plumly writes, in his exuberant new book about the immortal dinner hosted in London in 1817 by painter Benjamin Haydon and attended by friends Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb, and other persons long since forgotten by history. The sentence came to mind when Stanley—his office is next to mine in Tawes Hall at the University of Maryland—informed me that he was listening to the audio book of Seán Hemingway’s “Restored” edition of A Moveable Feast, a book he admitted to having read in its original form “at least ten times.” The obvious pleasure Stanley was taking in revisiting Hemingway’s memoir of the days of awe in Paris struck me as touching, and a little counterintuitive, since one moral of Hemingway’s story is that friendship is what we lose. If love and work are the central concerns when telling the story of any great writer’s life—in Hemingway’s case, the four marriages and the ever-increasing count of “works” (as of this writing, the number stands at thirty-five, eighteen of which have been published posthumously)—then friendship is a kind of third force, a barometer measuring where the writer [End Page 608] thinks he stands in relation to the men he has allowed to get close to him. At the heart of male friendship, Hemingway’s story reveals, lies something deeply competitive, and, in Hemingway’s case, the intensity of the ambition, as well as the moodiness induced by his psycho-chemical make-up, made the effort of maintaining enduring friendship a challenging thing. These thoughts are induced by a reading of Brewster Chamberlin’s The Hemingway Log, an almost day-by-day chronology of “where he was and with whom.” What one looks for in a book of this kind are the long structures, and the one that stands out most, apart from the deepening mystery of the marriages, is the making and breaking of friendships. Bill Smith provides the first major instance. On page 8, under the year 1895, Chamberlin writes: “August 20: William Smith (Kate’s brother) is born in Saint Louis, Missouri.” Smith and EH meet on page 16, in July, 1916, at Horton Bay. They spend summers together and Ernest falls half in love with Bill’s older sister Kate. Bill is on hand for the summer of 1920, when Ernest, clearly at sea after his return from the wars in Italy, is ejected by his mother from the Windemere cottage after sneaking “out of the house for a midnight picnic.” Moving to Chicago, Ernest bunks with Bill’s brother Y. K., only to discover that Y. K. has a common-law wife named Doodles. Shocked by the arrangement, Ernest very explicitly uninvites Y. K. from his parent’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Four months later Bill sends “a letter to EH breaking off their friendship.” It is February 1922 now, and the newly-married Hemingway has moved to Paris. Bill and Ernest have ceased to correspond. Then, in April 1924, Y. K.’s “probable lover” shows up at his residence, fires a gun at Doodles, and kills Henry Manning, “an elderly building caretaker.” The shooter—a former Chicago assistant US attorney named Wanda Stoper— then poisons herself at the Hotel Statler in Detroit. On April 25, Ernest reads in a French newspaper about Stoper’s attempt on Doodles’s life. In December, “realizing that much of what EH said about his brother Y. K.’s quasi-marriage to Doodles was true, BS writes a reconciliation letter to his best friend.” Ernest writes at length to Bill in response and the friendship is resumed. In the next act in the story, Hemingway convinces Smith to travel to Paris where he promises to find him editing work. Bill referees a boxing match between Ernest and Jean Prévost but not before his friend asks him to shorten the rounds “in which he tired and Prévost...

Blood Cries Out from the Ground: Reflections on Ferguson

I know Ferguson, Missouri. St. Stephens Episcopal Church, a parish of the Diocese of Missouri, is there, and as Bishop of Missouri, I have been in and out of Ferguson more times than I can count. Founded in 1888, the parish is mostly middle-class and working people, not unlike the surrounding community. Settlement in Ferguson began in 1854, and the town incorporated in 1894. An inner-ring suburb, the city early on became one of the first bedroom communities around St. Louis, with easy rail access into the city. Major industry did not come to the town until the 1940s, when Emerson Electric, then the largest manufacturer of airplane armaments in the world, moved to Ferguson from St. Louis. Emerson provided good work for the residents of Ferguson and helped the community thrive. Now, however, and despite being number 121 of the Fortune 500 Companies, it is as if Emerson were not there. Corporate headquarters remain in the city, at 8000 West Florissant Avenue, the street made famous for protests and riots in the aftermath of Michael Browns shooting death on August 9, 2014. But manufacturing jobs have mostly moved offshore, a common tale for any working-class community in the United States. Few people living in Ferguson work at the company, but Emerson has at least increased its involvement in the community in the months following August 9.As recently as 1970, Fergusons population was almost entirely European-American, and in 1990, that portion was still 74 percent. By 2010, however, the population had shifted to 67 percent AfricanAmerican, with 29 percent identifying as European-Americans. Fergusons demographic began to change when more affluent residents, mostly European-Americans, began to move west in St. Louis County and then into St. Charles County. Again, here is a pattern common throughout the nation, and white flight does characterize the changing demographics in many cities in the United States. A closer reading of the particular history and politics of St. Louis, not drawing solely on general trends, will help make clear why the place where I live is one of the most racially divided in the country.Two hundred and fifty years ago, in 1764, a group of French and Creole settlers came to a place some twenty-five miles south of the confluence of the two great American rivers, the Missouri and Mississippi. The iconic arch on the grounds of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial marks the site of the trading village that these settlers established. Pierre Laclede, his common-law wife Marie Therese Chouteau, and stepson Auguste Chouteau led this endeavor. Thus began St. Louis. By the time of Auguste Chouteau's death in 1829, the family had accumulated thirty-six slaves, all of African descent. So began the long disparity in power and privilege enjoyed by European-Americans and African-Americans in St. Louis. The disparity dates from the time of the region's beginnings, but it continues in later chapters of the region's history. Understanding the strength of slavery's hold on the region's economy, politics, and identity is key to making sense of the present racial crisis.Both leaders of the Corps of Discovery, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, were slave owners. This expedition, leaving St. Louis in 1804 to find the headwaters of the Missouri and a path to the Pacific Ocean, included Clark's slave named York, a bondservant since childhood. William Clark was territorial governor when Missouri became a state-a slave state-in 1821. Reaching statehood became possible because of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which defined how slaveiy might spread, or not, in the huge territories of the West. It is interesting to note that Clark, though not an Episcopalian, was a charter signatory for the founding of Christ Church, now our cathedral, in 1819. Slavery continued to define the places for blacks and whites in Missouri history, a fact deeply rooted in the region's DNA.Slave labor accounted for much of the region's wealth gained during the heyday of the steamboat years, roughly 1820 to 1860. …

Well, Fun and Games What?

Well, Fun and Games What? Tomasz Stompor (bio) Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974. Bill Morgan, ed. Ecco Press. http://www.harpercollins.com/imprints/index.aspx?imprintid=517997. 480pages; cloth, $35.00, paper, $35.00, Kindle eBook, $14.99. William S. Burroughs was a man of letters, not only in the sense of being “a humble practitioner of the scrivener’s trade,” as he described himself in his last journals, but in its most literal sense, as a writer of letters. Of course, all writers keep correspondence of varying scope, but Burroughs’s epistolary exchange is exceptional insofar as it is inextricably linked to his literary production in sheer material and technical terms, in the beginning of his career as a source for his books, and later for his cut-up experiments. The writing of letters was for Burroughs a ritualized artistic activity, as he made clear in his instructions on “The Lost Art of Letter Writing” to his friend Brion Gysin in 1964: “The letters you write are your messengers. Your messengers should be well informed neat and special to your correspondent. No time is ever saved by doing anything improperly. You are a writer? a painter? Any letter you write is or should be your best work.” The interdependence between literary production and epistolary communication echoed in this quotation has been well documented in the first volume of Burroughs’s correspondence that contains a considerable number of routines, brief vignettes charged with grotesque humor, which would later make up large parts of Naked Lunch (1959). In material terms, this interconnectedness can be best demonstrated by pointing to the fact that the routines are not attachments to the letters, but instead, they are an integral part of their textual body. The insight about the importance of the epistolary for Burroughs’s writing is rather new among Burroughs scholars, and has been stressed and examined on numerous occasions by Oliver Harris, the editor of the first volume of the writer’s correspondence. Rub out the Words (2012) is the long-awaited follow-up, which features a treasure-trove of hitherto unavailable letters that shed light on a decisive period in the writer’s life and career. The book was edited by Bill Morgan, who is known for his work as a biographer and editor of Allen Ginsberg’s correspondence. The division of Burroughs’s biography into two distinct periods created by these two volumes inevitably begs for a comparison of the content and of editorship. As for the content, New York Times reviewer Luc Sante set both volumes in direct comparison by remarking that: “Rub out the Words, unlike its predecessor is longer on argument than on incident.” To some extent, Sante is right, the previous volume does cover a tumultuous period in Burroughs’s life: his failed farming enterprise in South Texas; his sojourn in Mexico, which ended in the tragic shooting of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer; his arduous odyssey through Central and South America in the search of the drug yagé; and finally his stay in Tangier, defined by his opiate addiction and the recovery therefrom that allowed him to write Naked Lunch, the novel that would make him famous. On the other hand, Sante’s assessment seems very debatable in the light of the biographical and historical events that marked the writing of these letters. The period 1959–1974 was no less eventful than the previous fifteen years. Burroughs was very productive and busy during this time. He ascended to the status of an underground icon, who continued traveling, writing, and taking personal and artistic risks. The most striking difference between the first and the second volume of Burroughs’s letters is a shift in correspondents. While the focus of Burroughs’s correspondence during 1945–1959 was on Allen Ginsberg, it shifted during 1959 and onwards towards the painter Brion Gysin, who became Burroughs’s close friend, collaborator, and artistic influence. After the publication of Naked Lunch in the summer of 1959 and the ensuing censorship controversies, Burroughs’s work and his persona gained a wider public attention. In the fall of the same year Gysin discovered, by a...

The Fabian Mystique

The Fabian Mystique

Beat Mexico

William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg felt that they needed to leave their own culture in order to see it more clearly, and they were almost magnetically drawn to Mexico. Each of these writers spent formative years in the early 1950s living in Mexico, and each was startled by the perspectives afforded by what Burroughs characterized as an “oriental culture.” Mexico was still quite impoverished in the 1950s—Gulf oil development created a middle class in Mexico only in the 1960s. What these writers saw in Mexico and the circumstances of their lives there (e.g., Kerouac's destitution and vagrancy, Burroughs's awareness that drugs would become his subject and his fatal shooting of his common-law wife) would find reflections in Burroughs's novels like Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch; Kerouac's On the Road and Tristessa; and such poems by Ginsberg as the early “Siesta in Xbalba” and “Howl.” Crucial letters, journals, and other writings on the Mexican experience have helped me to chart the evolution of respective views—Kerouac at first sees Mexico as a pastoral idyll, Burroughs as an opportune occasion for libertarianism; Ginsberg experiences a place “beyond Darwin's chain.” Such evolving views affected the development of each of their own literary voices.

P2-S6.01 Social, behavioural characteristics, and seroprevalence of HIV infection among men who have sex with men (MSM): about 92 cases collected in a community medical center named Centre Oasis “of Association African SolidaritÉ (AAS), Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso”

BackgroundLike many African countries, the issue of sex between men in Burkina Faso remains taboo and is often the cause of social exclusion. Our objective in this study was to...

Blood Debt: Reparations in Langston Hughes’s Mulatto

Framed around contemporary legal efforts for and theories of political reparations, the essay analyzes how Langston Hughes's Mulatto , written in 1930 and first produced in 1935, functions as a call for racial remuneration. Set in the post–World War I South, Mulatto , the longest-running black-authored play on Broadway before Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, focuses on the revolutionary figure of Robert, the son of a white landowner, Colonel Tom Norwood, and his black housekeeper cum common-law wife, Cora. Robert returns from schooling in the North to challenge the household's status quo and in particular his father, who refuses to recognize him as his own. Seeking access to the rights of white privilege as well as redress for his father's psychic abandonment, the headstrong Robert serves as a complicated agent of redress. Colonel Norwood's refusal to acknowledge his son represent not just an individual betrayal; it reflects the refusal of the state's culpability in racial disenfranchisement. Consequently, the blood debt is not simply what is owed Robert and Cora, but what is due to African Americans. Hughes is not after payment, not even back-pay, but payback —payback in the form of symbolic reordering of the social and political hierarchy.

Remission From Depression Comorbid With Chronic Illness and Physical Impairment

"This therapy aims to address this complex comorbidity so that physically impaired elders can reverse the depression-disability spiral and build a satisfactory life for themselves."

Marc Chagall on Art and Culture , and: Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (review)

BENJAMIN HARSHAV, ed. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 225.BENJAMIN HARSHAV. Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 1026.Almost all discussions of modern Jewish art begin with Marc Chagall. Chagall's whimsical paintings of Russian shtetl life - complete with an iconic fiddler on the roof-and imagery based on the Hebrew Bible have long served Jewish culture as a proud example of artistic production. Tapestries and mosaics based on Chagall's designs decorate Israel's Knesset, he created the twelve stained-glass windows that enclose the synagogue at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, and the Israel Museum's collection boasts ten works on canvas and more than two hundred prints and drawings. Avram Kampf's survey of Jewish art in the modern era, in which Chagall's name appears in the title (Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art), further asserts the artist's prominence in the Jewish canon; Kampf features thirty-six works by Chagall, with no other artist showing more than nineteen (Chagall's Russian compatriot El Lissitzky).1This Jewish fascination with Chagall (born Moyshe Shagal)-as opposed to art history in general-reaches its finest moment in Benjamin Harshav's new publications. It is not the visual matter of Chagall's life, however, that Harshav explores in his two volumes on the artist. Instead, in Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Harshav presents and translates from French, Russian, and primarily Yiddish the artist's public comments, including essays, articles, speeches, and lectures, as well as two interviews and the first book on Chagall's art (published in Russia in 1918). In Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative, Harshav reconstructs Chagall's world through one third of the artist's correspondence, to which the author had access. Harshav includes the artist's letters in addition to responses from his correspondents, and other letters relevant to Chagall's life; for example, communications written by his common-law wife Virginia Haggard, his second wife, Valentina Brodsky, his daughter Ida, and Monroe Wheeler, director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1940s. Other documents constitute an early version of his oft-published autobiography (1924; the better-known Ma Vie was reworked and then published in 1931) and reviews of his work, complete with Harshav's annotations. An exhaustive index makes these documents easily accessible (pp. 1005-17). comprehensiveness of these materials, translated from French, Yiddish, Russian, German, and Hebrew, is extraordinary, truly an example of international detective work (p. xii), to use the author's own words. Looked at as a whole, the primary documents within these two books fully explicate the influence of Jewish and Yiddish ideas on Chagall's art and thinking, even more firmly securing him as an artist of the Jewish experience.The more concise Marc Chagall on Art and Culture opens with a preface delineating Harshav's intent, including the caveat that he and his co-translator Barbara Harshav intend to present the data without commentary, allowing the reader to proffer his or her own interpretations (p. xiii). Nonetheless, an introductory essay follows, The Texts of a Multicultural Artist, setting the stage for the book. Here Harshav presents Chagall's basic biography and does in fact provide some analysis of the materials found in the subsequent pages. Harshav's main point is that Chagall's identity was multifaceted, an amalgamation of his Jewish, French, and Russian identities. After reading Chagall's copious comments on such topics as a Jewish art museum, Jewish and Yiddish culture, his impressions of French painting, and his hometown of Vitebsk, the reader can see how Harshav reached his conclusion. Harshav's point is valid; however it is important to note that Chagall's blending of his identities does not constitute an isolated case and, further, to understand that the artist's openness about his Jewishness was not always the norm. …

?In Thicket?:Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff, Robert Creeley and the Crisis of Masculinity at Mid-Century

In Thicket":Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff, Robert Creeley and the Crisis of Masculinity at Mid-Century1 Andrew Mossin you see, you sld know what you do, delivering to me up clean out of the delicate sure fingers of yr mind, such things, & Blake, &, for as much as I can take, crist Charles Olson to Frances Boldereff, 18 January 1950 I. In 1947, Charles Olson, then 39 years old, encountered two individuals who would quickly become two of the three central figures of his "defining company," to use Robert Creeley's apt phrase. He met the first, Robert Duncan, while on a trip to California researching a projected book on the American West. Duncan, who had recently completed writing a collection of poems titled Medieval Scenes with fellow San Francisco poet, Jack Spicer, was then at the forefront of the Bay Area poetry scene, now known as the first Berkeley renaissance. Olson wouldn't actually meet the second, Frances Boldereff, in person until the fall of 1949. But in 1947, he and Boldereff, a book designer then living in Woodward, PA, began an exchange of letters that would lead two years later to their becoming lovers. Olson, then living with his common-law wife, Connie Wilcock, courted Boldereff with an extraordinarily active and passionate correspondence (sometimes three letters a day) that nearly rivaled [End Page 13] the similarly decisive correspondence Olson began the following year with a third key individual. In April 1950, Olson started corresponding with Creeley, who had dropped out of Harvard in his final year to pursue a career as a writer. Creeley, then living on a farm in New Hampshire and earning a subsistence level income raising chickens, had been working hard to establish a mode for the early prose work that would go into his 1954 collection, The Gold Diggers. Olson's letters to Creeley demonstrate the range and impact of a relationship that, along with the bond with Boldereff, would absorb his emotional and intellectual energies and become vital aspects of his production as a poet and scholar. We know of both the Creeley and the Boldereff relationships through two indispensable collections of letters. The first and most voluminous is that between Olson and Robert Creeley, at ten volumes surely one of the preeminent and most intensively "personal" documents of post-war American poetry and poetics. These are the letters of which Olson has said, "Creeley and I have engaged in perhaps the most important correspondence of my life" (CORC V.1 ix). These letters, written between 1950 and 1952 (where Volume 10 of the correspondence ends) trace Olson and Creeley's early efforts as they sought to establish their footing as writers. These letters served as an extraordinary prelude to the face-to-face encounter between the two men that finally took place in 1954 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—four years after Olson's initial April letter. The second collection, between Olson and Frances (Motz) Boldereff and dating from late 1947 through the summer of 1950, sharpens in pivotal ways our understanding of the period that Olson termed "a riot in my soul" and that saw a paradigmatic shift in his thinking about poetry, the practice of his craft, and the feminine principle as both ideal and fact of consciousness. The Boldereff letters were not published until 1999; the first volume of the Olson-Creeley letters appeared in 1980, with the final, tenth volume published in 1996. The gap in publication history and reception is telling, for it suggests the ways in which the former collection, shielded from public view until recently, has remained very much an unwritten part of the history of this time—and of Olson's development as a writer and thinker. Olson's letters to Creeley are vital in their own right as documents of post-war American poetry and cultural thought. Yet at the same time, the letters to Boldereff suggest another, in certain ways more complicated (though no less culturally saturated) relationship: that of the lover and brother cum suitor, the poet as passionate admirer and mentor, working in collaboration with his muse under the sign of Eros. "I want some day to see...

"In Thicket": Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff, Robert Creeley and the Crisis of Masculinity at Mid-Century

In Thicket":Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff, Robert Creeley and the Crisis of Masculinity at Mid-Century1 Andrew Mossin you see, you sld know what you do, delivering to me up clean out of the delicate sure fingers of yr mind, such things, & Blake, &, for as much as I can take, crist Charles Olson to Frances Boldereff, 18 January 1950 I. In 1947, Charles Olson, then 39 years old, encountered two individuals who would quickly become two of the three central figures of his "defining company," to use Robert Creeley's apt phrase. He met the first, Robert Duncan, while on a trip to California researching a projected book on the American West. Duncan, who had recently completed writing a collection of poems titled Medieval Scenes with fellow San Francisco poet, Jack Spicer, was then at the forefront of the Bay Area poetry scene, now known as the first Berkeley renaissance. Olson wouldn't actually meet the second, Frances Boldereff, in person until the fall of 1949. But in 1947, he and Boldereff, a book designer then living in Woodward, PA, began an exchange of letters that would lead two years later to their becoming lovers. Olson, then living with his common-law wife, Connie Wilcock, courted Boldereff with an extraordinarily active and passionate correspondence (sometimes three letters a day) that nearly rivaled [End Page 13] the similarly decisive correspondence Olson began the following year with a third key individual. In April 1950, Olson started corresponding with Creeley, who had dropped out of Harvard in his final year to pursue a career as a writer. Creeley, then living on a farm in New Hampshire and earning a subsistence level income raising chickens, had been working hard to establish a mode for the early prose work that would go into his 1954 collection, The Gold Diggers. Olson's letters to Creeley demonstrate the range and impact of a relationship that, along with the bond with Boldereff, would absorb his emotional and intellectual energies and become vital aspects of his production as a poet and scholar. We know of both the Creeley and the Boldereff relationships through two indispensable collections of letters. The first and most voluminous is that between Olson and Robert Creeley, at ten volumes surely one of the preeminent and most intensively "personal" documents of post-war American poetry and poetics. These are the letters of which Olson has said, "Creeley and I have engaged in perhaps the most important correspondence of my life" (CORC V.1 ix). These letters, written between 1950 and 1952 (where Volume 10 of the correspondence ends) trace Olson and Creeley's early efforts as they sought to establish their footing as writers. These letters served as an extraordinary prelude to the face-to-face encounter between the two men that finally took place in 1954 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—four years after Olson's initial April letter. The second collection, between Olson and Frances (Motz) Boldereff and dating from late 1947 through the summer of 1950, sharpens in pivotal ways our understanding of the period that Olson termed "a riot in my soul" and that saw a paradigmatic shift in his thinking about poetry, the practice of his craft, and the feminine principle as both ideal and fact of consciousness. The Boldereff letters were not published until 1999; the first volume of the Olson-Creeley letters appeared in 1980, with the final, tenth volume published in 1996. The gap in publication history and reception is telling, for it suggests the ways in which the former collection, shielded from public view until recently, has remained very much an unwritten part of the history of this time—and of Olson's development as a writer and thinker. Olson's letters to Creeley are vital in their own right as documents of post-war American poetry and cultural thought. Yet at the same time, the letters to Boldereff suggest another, in certain ways more complicated (though no less culturally saturated) relationship: that of the lover and brother cum suitor, the poet as passionate admirer and mentor, working in collaboration with his muse under the sign of Eros. "I want some day to see...

The Performance of Pastoral Politics: Britten's Albert Herring

British historians and cultural commentators have tended to fight shy of opera as a site of critical and political engagement. Dismissed as a rich person's entertainment, its radical possibilities are ignored by all but a specialist few. Opera has, however, always been a critically political force, from Claudio Monteverdi's uncompromisingly humanist critique of sensual and political corruption in L'Incoronazione di Poppea (1642-3), to John Adams's controversial exposition of the terrible symmetry of Israeli and Palestinian enmity in The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), an opera which was jointly commissioned by Glyndebourne but has yet to be performed there. Opera has a long and honourable tradition of championing in song the otherwise voiceless. In the season of 2002, for instance, Covent Garden staged an opera concerming the tragic collapse of a destitute soldier, victimized into insanity and provoked into the murder of his common-law wife by the selfishly deluded experiments of an exploitative doctor, and the selfrighteously patronizing injunctions of an army captain. Alban Berg's Wozzeck is an uncompromising score, inspired in part by its composer's experience of dehumanization as a member of the Austrian army in the First World War; like so many Viennese of the generation that came of age around 1900, Berg was fascinated by the misfortunes of the socially marginalizedI Earlier in 2002, English National Opera had memorably staged Berg's Lulu, the drama of a street-girl who both exploits and is exploited by the fatal

George Green: An Enigmatic Mathematician

The mathematics developed by George Green has been widely applied in modern physics and quantum electrodynamics yet his life has remained something of a mystery. There is no reference to him in the main volumes of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography: he is belatedly and briefly included in the Supplement of 1976. The bicentenary celebrations of his birth in 1993 focused increasing attention on the man who gave the world Green's functions. This MONTHLY has already published an authoritative account [3] of Green's first and seminal publication, An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism, which examined in some detail his use and development of mathematical sources. What is presented here is a short survey of Green's life and an examination of the circumstances and the social environment in which he lived. The great problem is the lack of material concerning Green. His output was small; ten papers including the Essay, written in the space of eleven years, amounting to less than 250 pages of print. There are no manuscripts, no working papers, no diaries, no memorabilia. There are a dozen letters to his patron, but no replies. There is no portrait or photograph. There was no established family house for his common-law wife, Jane Smith, and their seven children, and when the last, Clara, died in 1919, the family was thought to be extinct. The few official facts of Green's life were established and published by H. G. Green (no relation) [5]. His paper included two valuable letters written in 1845 by Green's cousin and brother-in-law, William Tomlin, and Edward Bromhead, his patron. In the 1970s Green's letters to Bromhead came to light-the only information extant in Green's own hand, the only testimony to his mathematical thought and the only revelation of his personality. Green died at the age of forty-seven, just at the time when his work was about to be recognized: in consequence he established no reputation in his lifetime. Green was born in 1793 and died in 1841. He was the only son of a Nottingham baker, who prospered sufficiently to extend his bakery business and build his own mill in the nearby village of Sneinton. Later he built a family house next to the mill; he acquired further property and died in 1829, sufficiently affluent to allow his son George to live on his income for the rest of his life. At fourteen George was apprenticed to his father's mill manager, William Smith, father of Jane. He found his duties as a miller irksome but as the only son he was obliged to work for his father. By the age of eight he had shown a passion for mathematics, such that his father sent him to an expensive town school, Robert Goodacre's Academy, but he left the following year and started work in his father's bakery. Nothing more is known of George Green's life for certain until he reached the age of thirty and became a member of the Nottingham Subscription Library. No other serious library facilities existed in Nottingham at this period, but the Subscription Library was in effect a gentlemen's club, housed in the elegant

STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT, SMALL TOWNS AND GFRARIAN GHANGE IN SOUTH AFRICA

ON 10 NOVEMBER 1993, while seeking to test a questionnaire on farm removals in the Orange Free State (OFS),1 I encountered JMM, a 27-year-old man who detached himself from a yard in the Tweespruit New Location-a sprawl of corrugated-sheeting shacks and volunteered to answer my questions. We went to his own shack, on the southern edge of the settlement, to pursue the interview. He had been allocated a site by 'MaComrade', the ad hoc committee of ANC youth whose authority in a volatile political climate was acknowledged in the township for many purposes, including that of granting research permission to errant foreigners. JMM had built the shack two weeks previously, and lived there with his common-law wife ATM and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. He and his wife were both unemployed. They had left school in Standard 8. JMM had just been evicted by a new owner from the farm where he had spent most of his youth. His elderly mother, who had worked in the farmer's garden, but was now a pensioner, remained on the farm. His father had worked for the farmer as a herdsman from 1977 until his death in 1986.

Unmarried cohabitation: A threat to the patriarchal family? An essay review

The text under review is the sixth book on cohabitation outside marriage to be published in Britain since 1981. We now have a detailed statement of the law for practitioners [1] ; a guide for social workers [2] ; three handbooks for use by cohabitees themselves [3] and the work under review here. Cohabitation Without Marriage is written by two well-known academic family lawyers and takes a socio-legal perspective similar to Michael Freeman's earlier studies on domestic violence [4]. The book is sub-titled "An Essay in Law and Social Policy" and this appropriately describes its position within academic writing. It is neither an expository law text nor a theoretical work within an explicit sociological tradition. Instead, it attempts to place a series of legal developments within a social context, accompanied by a mild dose of theory and, arguably, an overdose of normative statements as to what the legal policy should be. One says legal rather than social policy because no political strategy is outlined. This essay summarizes the main arguments of the book, looks at some of its strong points and then suggests a number of defects, internal to the book itself and more generally. The book starts from the premise that "there can have been few developments relating to the organization of the family as dramatic as the rise in incidence of cohabitation outside of marriage in the 1970's." The writers define cohabitation as "a stable, more or less permanent, relationship between two persons of the opposite sex who are not married to each o t h e r . . . and who share living facilities." After a brief note on terminology ("living together," "common law wife," "cohabitee" which is unaccountably said to have explicitly sexist imagery "cohabi tant" etc.) the authors provide a short history of the definition of marriage within English and Welsh law. We are correctly told that the line between marriage and cohabitation was not as clearly drawn as it is today and are then presented with some historical evidence of illegitimate children being registered as