Literary Estate Research Articles

National Identity Formation in the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire: The Skerst Family in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The modern history of the Baltic provinces of the former Russian Empire has essentially been written from an ethnic/national perspective. It is basically the story of the formation of the Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian and German 'communities', of their 'specific' national identities and eventually of nation states. With those who acquired a German identity, the focus has essentially been upon the landed nobility, the so-called 'Baltic Barons', the traditional elite that formed a minority even of the ethnically German population. The existence of other German groups has been recognised, such as the 'literary estate' (Literatenstand), which in the nineteenth century 'brought into Baltic higher culture, rationalist viewpoints and represented a potential threat to noble control of local politics.' However, such groups have received comparatively little attention from historians, especially among those publishing in English. Even then there is limited acknowledgement of their possessing distinctive cultural and other forms of self-identification. A recent study by a Canadian scholar of the Germans of Riga before 1914 tends to impose the values of the landed elite upon them. In works published in post-1945 (West) Germany by emigres from the region, there is an inclination to present a distinctive 'Baltic German' identity that is largely derived from the experience of the landed elite.

Cultural determinants: The publishing house and the Australian literary estate 1960‐1980

Cultural determinants: The publishing house and the Australian literary estate 1960‐1980

História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 2História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 3História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 4

História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 2História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 3História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 4

Agee on Film

From the evidence, James Agee wrote his film reviews very early in the morning, after everyone else had gone to bed. Many times he was simply editing down what he had said to friends through the night about movies and the thousand other things that come up in the pieces, in apartments and bars around New York City. The reviews, then, almost can be considered transcripts of Agee's voice. And they are evidence that if there was ever an American talker as unblinkingly fine as James Agee, he or she died without writing it down. Agee's film column began appearing in The Nation in 1942. The reviews he produced in the following years are starkly different from his more well-known writings. His literary estate is populated by several major works: the wild spray of his Alabama-sharecropper book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; the hushed novel of childhood, A Death in the Family; as well as early poetry and late screenwriting (The Night of the Hunter being his most famous script). These works remind one that Agee once considered becoming a priest; most have a sacred aim and very often a scriptural rhythm. The reviews are the less holy Agee, the moralist with appetites and a super-fine-grain eye and what Manny Farber once called his aristocratic junkyard wit.(1) Agee remains one of the semi-religious American writers in reputation. People still get overwrought about him. His admirers talk about him as if he were a barefoot saint from Tennessee who spent a decade-long imprisonment in the Time-Life Building (that Bastille for writers), where Agee was a journalist during the Depression. Then there is the early interest in serving God, the very serious drinking, the idea that he was crushed early by his times and probably by his country, the other idea that he was too good to live happily. But the truth is that Agee's life was not exceptional. His writing, especially The Nation reviews, was. What one saw immediately in Agee's film reviews was that three things that seemed irreconcilable in a critic had come together and were now working at great heights: a hungry largeness of mind, a snapping wit, and a strong, embattled compassion. Coming at you for the first time, Agee was big and shockingly graceful, and still he thought like a Jesuit. What one thought of, really, was an athlete doing shattering things on a field he would transform forever. Agee was a possibilist. That maddened a few of his contemporaries: this critic, they said, reviews the movie that should have been made but wasn't. It's true, in a way. Agee knew the odds - both corporate and individually human - against good and great films getting made in Hollywood and elsewhere. But he seemed, by constitution, attuned to the potential of every single person, animal, and scrap of furniture in a film, and he could state clearly what they were and how each had been fulfilled or compromised. This capacity, and the occasional ferocity with which he used it, came partly from a desire to fulfill his own ambitions in movies; Agee even could be accused of blueprinting his own unmade projects in the back pages of The Nation. But it's from this place that his greatness rolled out. In fact, it is Agee's other writing that was limited by what Dwight MacDonald called his oceanic sympathies. What D. H. Lawrence wrote about Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature applies equally to Agee; Lawrence mocked Whitman's desire to merge with everyone he met, to know everything from the contents of the man's stomach to his thoughts on the Union. Agee had the same essential nature, completely and - unlike even Whitman - for the whole of his life. He also has proved to be one of its last public examples. No clearer example of this sensibility is needed than Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee was twenty-seven when Life sent him down South with Walker Evans to report on the lives of sharecroppers. The experience opened him up like a knife. Agee's desire to reconnect with the people that his family had parted with a few generations back is one of the most intense literary efforts in American letters - and a sometimes diabolical one. …

Editorial

Editorial Stephen Jobe reports via e-mail news he picked up from Susan Gunter, who had the word from Alexander James, the son of William James's grandson Alexander James—the sad news that the elder Alexander James died in Portugal this past January 17." Considering the many kindnesses that Alexander James has shown to Jamesians," Professor Jobe writes, "I thought you might want to note his passing in the HJR." Mr. James was long the executor of his great-uncle Henry's literary estate, a post that occasioned those many kindnesses (and that he inherited from John James, Billy James's son, in 1969). It is my understanding that the executorship now passes to the Houghton Library at Harvard University. "We join the James family in mourning the passing of Alexander James. Jamesians may also be interested in a forthcoming conference at Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury, May 6,1995: "A Celebration of Two Lives: William Kingdon Clifford (1845) and Lucy Clifford (1846-1929)." Lucy Clifford, a bestselling writer of novels, plays, and short stories, was (as Leon Edel puts the matter) one of Henry James's "oldest and most cherished London friends. " James's letters to Lucy Clifford are indeed memorable parts of the James epistolarium. Her husband William was recognized as a genius mathematician and outspoken atheist. Further information about the conference is available from Professor J. S. R. Chisholm, Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NF, telephone 0227 764000; fax 0227 475453; e-mail j.s.r.chisholm@ukc.ac.uk. Let me add, too, a reminder about the James-Conrad Conference, also at the University of Kent this summer (July 5-9,1995), a joint project of the Henry James Society and the Joseph Conrad Society (U.K.). For additional information, please write to Professor Keith Carabine, 8 Ethelbert Road, Canterbury, England, e-mail K.Carabine@ukc.ac.uk.—DMF ...

Ferenczi's “Madness”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJudith DupontJudith Dupont, M.D., member of the Association Psychanalytique de France; executor, Sándor Ferenczi's literary estate; editor, Le Coq Héron.

Marxism and Anti-Semitism: Kautsky's Perspective

Karl Kautsky's views on the Jewish question are of great import precisely because they are Kautsky's. In the years following Engels' death, Kautsky was the leading orthodox Marxist theoretician, executor of Marx's literary estate, editor ofDie Neue Zeit, and a prolific author of popular Marxist tracts. It was Kautsky who drafted the theoretical part of the Erfurt Program of 1891, and Kautsky who wrote the classic rebuttal to Bernstein. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that an entire generation of socialists around the world were taught Marx through Kautsky. There is a sense in which Kautsky's views on the Jewish question were even more influential than were his views on other matters. For Kautsky was perceived as an authority on the Jewish question even by many Marxists who were, or eventually became, sharply critical of his views on other questions.

Tracing the Figure of Redemption Walter Benjamin's Physiognomy of Modernity

Only recently has it come to seem likely that Benjamin will be given at long last his proper place as a major literary theorist of the century.* Philosophers and theorists of divergent lineages and varying temperaments now seem to have found a curious meeting place in the literary estate of Benjamin. The exact nature of his legacy and the actual territory of Benjamin scholarship, however, are not easily defined, nor is the landscape necessarily peaceable at the moment. The disquiet presumably stems from the internal tension in Benjamin's own work, the tension which is often described as the adversarial relation between his political and religious interests. Drawing upon some of the more violent designations given by his critics, one might say that his redemptive impulse' and his fitful kind of Marxism2 have turned his estate into a war zone, and this war is being fought, so it seems, on as

Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?

Nobody, including me, would be permitted to put his cotton-picking typewriter to work on Ernest's prose to 'improve' it. Except for punctuation and the obviously overlooked 'ands' and 'buts' we [Charles Scribner's Sons and I] would present his prose and poetry to readers as he wrote it, letting the gaps lie where they were. Where repetitions and redundancies occurred, we would cut. We would not add anything. Mary Hemingway, on the second principle of procedure that would guide her as executor of her husband's literary estate.'

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Journal Article REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access EUSTACHIO ROMANO: MUSICA DUORUM (ROME, 1521). Edited from the Literary Estate of Hans T. David by Howard Mayer Brown and Edward E. Lowinsky. (Monuments of Renaissance Music, Vol. VI.) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975. xvii and 179 (182) pp. JAMES HAAR JAMES HAAR Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume LXI, Issue 4, October 1975, Pages 615–618, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/LXI.4.615 Published: 01 October 1975

Sean O'Casey:

THE NINETIENTH ANNIVERSARY of Sean O'Casey's birth and the recent acquisition by the New York Public Library of the papers of his literary estate afford an opportunity to view, once more, the remarkable achievements of a dramatist of universal distinction. A passionate believer in the cause of man's dignity and freedom, whose plays touched off riots and sparked off controversies, whose works wrung the beauty and passion and heartaches from the experiences of everyday life and ‘whose lips were royally touched’—to quote J. C. Trewin's recent colourful phrase—O'Casey was, with Shaw, one of the few incomparably great playwrights of the present century. Not without his detractors: one critic's jibe that O'Casey is ‘an extremely overrated writer with two or three competent Naturalist plays to his credit, followed by a lot of ideological bloat and embarrassing bombast’ is the kind of factitious reaction one expects from critically immature minds. Shaw's plays, at first, were slighted, but they survived, and today are flourishing; predictably, O'Casey's will enjoy a similar fate. O'Casey is a world dramatist in the widest sense, because he viewed the theatre in the same epic way as Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans.

Attempt at a classification of unpublished sources in the more recent history of astronomy in german-speaking countries

The foundations of the author's work are his researches into the sources connected with editing the correspondence of Alexander von Humboldt. In this context about a hundred archives, manuscript-files and collections in Germany and in other countries had to be searched: a by-product was a survey of the present position as to the sources of recent history of astronomy in German-speaking countries. An attempt has been made to classify the various types of sources, with particular emphasis on their reliability and accessibility. Also the literary estates and autograph catalogues are discussed with a view to facilitating the study of the history of astronomy.

The life and work of Peter Nightingale

The paper is concerned with a medieval astronomer called Petrus Philomena de Dacia, who was particularly active during the period 1291–1303. The very few primary sources of the story of his life are mentioned, together with a list of about a dozen treatises ascribed to him; they are contained in about two hundred manuscripts. The unity of this literary estate is discussed. Finally, the author tries to present a reconstruction of Peter's most original contribution to medieval astronomy, namely his Semissa, or Equatorium, which constituted an important step forward in the history of astronomical “computing-machines”, being the first instrument capable of computing the ecliptic longitudes of all the planets by means of a single device. A reconstruction of this instrument is exhibited.

The Literary Estate of Lorado Taft

the 361 great Americans proposed for inclusion in A National Program for the Publication of Historical Documents a report made to the President in 1954 by the National Historical Publications Commission 47 have worked in the fields called in current academic parlance the humanities, which in the Report are limited to architecture, music, painting, literature, and sculpture. The name of only one sculptor appears in the first group of 112, whose papers were recommended for immediate attention Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1 848-1 907), uOne of the greatest of American sculptors. Three others, in the second group, are listed by name and dates only: William Rimmer ( 181679), William Rush (1 756-1 833), and Lorado Taft (1 860-1 936). Though the authors of the Report made it abundantly clear that their recommendations were neither complete nor final, it is somewhat puzzling to see the physician-would-be-artist Dr. Rimmer listed at all, whereas a casual scanning of Lorado Taft's History of American Sculpture suggests any number of worthier subjects Henry Kirke Brown or Taft's contemporary Daniel Chester French, for instance. There is no doubt that Lorado Taft was himself of national

The Thomas Mann Archive in Zurich

In an address entitled ZUirich Stiitte des Thomas Mann Archivs,' Richard Schweizer traced the origin and development of the Archive which now houses the author's entire literary estate. In August, 1955, a short time after Thomas Mann's death, his family first expressed a desire to leave to posterity, als unteilbares Gut, all of Mann's papers and to present them to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the EidgenSssische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. Inasmuch as the author had made no decision about their future dis-