Volume Of Memoirs Research Articles

Linguistic Image of DOM ‘home’ in Wojciech Piotrowicz’s Autobiographical Prose

The aim of the article is to describe the concept of dom ‘home’ in Wojciech Piotrowicz’s idiolect by using the methodological assumptions of Lublin ethnolinguistics school. Research on which this paper is based consists of two main parts: we present the writer’s biography, which introduces a representative of the Polish intelligentsia in Lithuania, and an analysis of the concept of dom ‘home’. The presented biography emphasizes the origin and formation of the personality of the recognized writer and social and cultural activist, whose life is an example of the formation of the Polish intelligentsia in Lithuania. The subject of research is a textual data coming from his volume of memoirs, which contains the writer’s memories and reflections. The analysis of the dom ‘home’ concept focuses on two profiles: physical and symbolic, specific features were grouped onto facets. In the conclusions, we underline the specific character of home in Wojciech Piotrowicz’s autobiographical prose which has some differences comparing to home described in Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian languages by EUROJOS project.

The Oil Lamp and the Electric Light: Progress, Time, and Nation in Central Asian Memoirs of the Soviet Era

The Oil Lamp and the Electric LightProgress, Time, and Nation in Central Asian Memoirs of the Soviet Era Artemy M. Kalinovsky (bio) and Isaac Scarborough (bio) Over the last 20 years, newly appearing autobiographical accounts of Soviet politicians, government officials, spies, diplomats, artists, writers, dissidents, and even “ordinary” people have significantly informed almost every aspect of Soviet historiography. Studies of Soviet foreign policy, of behind-the-scenes political drama, and even Soviet economic management regularly draw on the memoirs or diaries of key participants, most of them made public only after 1991. Our current understanding of the Terror, the Gulag, and the Soviet dissident movement is unimaginable without the memoirs and diaries that recount personal experiences of these events.1 First-person accounts have also informed cultural histories of the Thaw era and Soviet citizens’ travel abroad.2 First-person accounts remain at the center of debates about Soviet subjectivity in the Stalin era and beyond.3 With few exceptions, however, these accounts have been based upon, and concerned with, ethnic Russian actors. Autobiographical writing from Central [End Page 107] Asia and the Caucasus has yet to make a substantial impact on how these regions are studied by historians, and on the historiography of the USSR more generally. This is partially due to the fact that the histories of the Soviet Union still privilege Russia and Soviet European territories, such as Ukraine and the Baltics. At the same time, there are also objective barriers to the inclusion of a greater number of peripheral Soviet voices. Aside from the range of languages needed to access non-Russian-language accounts, the limited production and haphazard circulation of autobiographical writing in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus makes any systematic collection of such materials far more difficult than with those produced in Russia, Ukraine, or the Baltic states. In contrast to the memoirs of many Russian politicians, intellectuals, and artists, which are carried by major publishing houses, available in bookstores and international libraries, and sometimes even in translation, Central Asian memoirs are often self-published and difficult to find. Their print runs are frequently small; even when published by an established press, they are badly distributed and available almost exclusively through local networks and used booksellers in the region. Although historians of Soviet Central Asia have sometimes made very good use of oral history, they have rarely made extensive use of memoir literature.4 While Central Asians may not have produced the same volume of memoirs and autobiographies as their counterparts in Russia or Ukraine, however, they nevertheless began to leave published first-person accounts of their lives and experiences in the Soviet period and have produced many more since. This opens up space for an important reengagement with the region’s period of Soviet (20th-century) history, using the lens of Central Asians’ own memories and voices to consider and evaluate events in that history. It also presents a series of important research questions: What new perspectives do these memoirs provide on Soviet history and how it is remembered? How are Central Asian memoirs different from Russian ones? What particular challenges do they present to the researcher, beyond those common for memoirs in general? This article employs and analyzes a new online collection of memoirs that have been collected and digitized over the past few years; they are [End Page 108] currently available at http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/collections/show/18 as a joint project of the Russian Perspectives on Islam initiative and George Washington University’s Central Asian Project. The purpose of this collection is to give researchers access to memoirs that they might not be able to find otherwise or might not even be aware of. The initial collection described here includes approximately 70 volumes collected by the authors in the course of our research in Tajikistan. We hope that these will be later supplemented by donations from other scholars working elsewhere in post-Soviet Central Asia; the volumes presented here are most likely a fraction of what is out there. In what follows, we situate the collected volumes in their context, considering and evaluating the conditions in which they were written and distributed. Second, we analyze some...

Albatros – a Publishing House for the Romanian Communist Youth, 1970-1989

This paper examines the profile of the Albatros Publishing House in Bucharest (specialising in youth literature) and the activity of its director, writer Mircea Sântimbreanu. He held this position for almost two decades and recounted his experience in a volume of memoirs. I tried to explore these memoirs mainly in parallel with accounts from archival documents and secondary literature. The Albatros Publishing House was a micro-universe for assessing the impact of successive ideological offensives by the Romanian Communist Party on book production and on the youth in general (mainly the July 1971 Theses and the other party directives of the 1970s, as well as the Mangalia Theses of 1983). By the 1980s, the regime’s propaganda had acquired ultra-nationalistic nuances. This paper will also exemplify such developments by discussing the scandal generated by the 1983 publication of Saturnalii by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a volume of poems with strong antisemitic tenor. Using mainly diaries, journals, secondary literature and archival documents, this article also analyses the strategies deployed by the communist regime in order to coerce the young generation – through the agency of publishing houses – to assume the new literary-political ideology of revolutionary humanism (the Socialist Realism of the Ceaușescu era).

The Idiolect of Wojciech Piotrowicz: A Vocabulary of Autobiographical Prose

Wojciech Piotrowicz (born in 1940) is a Vilnius poet, prose writer, translator, journalist, social and cultural activist. He is the author of several poetry collections and volumes of memoirs. Research on which this paper is based consists of two main parts: we present the writer’s biography, which introduces a representative of the Polish intelligentsia in Lithuania, and an analysis of his lexis from his collection of short stories Moja czasoprzestrzeń (My Space-Time) (2015). The aim of the research is to investigate the lexical layers in the idiolect of the writer. Piotrowicz’s idiolect is the domain where the erudite vocabulary of the standard language blends in with the dialectical vocabulary of the Švenčionys district, in which words of rural life are frequent. In the vocabulary of his idiolect, we distinguish the following groups of lexemes: words from family language, archaisms, dialect words, and postwar Russian borrowings, referred to as “Soviet words”. The multi-layer nature of Piotrowicz’s idio­lect is a result of a complicated reality on the border between cultures, languages, times, and evidence of changes in social stratification. To summarize the research results, it can be stated that the analysis of 179 words (phrases) from the writer’s individual language shows a world of concepts, thoughts, and values that are characteristic of representatives of the intelligentsia of peasant origin, born in the 1940s. The authors of the paper consider that this study is only a contribution toward determining the peculiarities of the Polish language spoken by the intelligentsia in Lithuania in the 20th century, and that this article does not exhaust all issues of Wojciech Piotrowicz’s idiolect.

„Entretiens” Stanisława Augusta z ambasadorem rosyjskim Ottonem Magnusem von Stackelbergiem i „Mémoires” ostatniego króla Rzeczypospolitej

Entretiens of King Stanislaus Augustus with Russian ambassador Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, and Memoirs of the Commonwealth’s last king Among the most important historical sources for the reign of Stanislaw August one should list Entretiens abbreviated notices of Stanislaw August’s talks with the Russian Ambassador Otto von Stackelberg. This article approaches the structure, the state of survival, the date of composition and the authorship of the Entretiens as well as their content and the nature of information included. The Entretiens , firstly conceived as short notes, evolved into more and more complex and specific reports, so the king could easily find every essential piece of information about Polish-Russian relations in one place. Some of the talks recorded in the Entretiens were later included in King’s Memoirs , hence the second part of this article attempts at a comparison between the two. It reveals that the order of events described in Memoirs agrees with what we find in Entretiens , therefore we know that the latter was exploited during the composition of the Memoirs . The author of the present study was lucky to have found among the documents reclaimed from Russia a clean copy of Entretiens from 1779, which allows us to hope that in Russian archives there are still even later the yearbooks, which supposedly might have helped the King in the work on other volumes of Memoirs . Moreover, the author’s intention was to suggest a method which would allow to evaluate reliability of the Memoirs . Owing to a partial comparative analysis of both sources one can conclude that the king wanted to protect his loved ones from being seen as anti-Russian and to avoid criticism of Catherine II. Stackelberg was the only one described exactly as how the king knew him. However, it does not undermine reliability of the Memoirs in general.

«Пишу исключительно по памяти…»: новый сборник воспоминаний о начале Великой Отечественной войны 1941-1945 гг.

The review of the collection of documents ‘I’m writing entirely from memory ...’ assesses the research potential of this new corps of the Great Patriotic War participants’ memoirs. The novelty of the sources introduced into scientific use is determined by the nature and the composition of the materials, as well as by high standard of archaeographic preparation of the publication. The two-volume collection contains materials of the questionnaire survey of the Red Army formation and unit commanders of the western military districts who had to face the war on June 22, 1941. The survey was conducted by the Military History Department of the General Staff of the Soviet Army in 1949-1956. The document collection compiler publishes not just the answers and the memoirs of the commanders, but also the questions asked by the General Staff, and these he provides with a detailed historical reference. The author of the review analyzes the content and the structure of the questions addressed to commanders and considers them a professional historical reflection of military historians of the late 1940s - early 1950s. An analysis of the contingent of respondents, the circumstances and the time of writing offer a means to see respondents as a collective author. This approach is supported by a detailed biographical data included in the collection. It allows to paint a kind of ‘intellectual portrait’ of the Red Army commanders in the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The review also attempts to connect volume and contents of the materials with time of their creation and also with posts held by the authors of memoirs and their war-time career. The author underscores the fact that most memoirs and responses were written after 1953, and their size increased considerably over the volume of 1949-1953 materials. Moreover, another correlation has been detected: between the volume of memoirs and answers and the respondents’ promotion in the war-time. The review concludes that the new collection of memoirs has a high research potential for studying the eve and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

<b>Ensino da aritmética na escola de primeiras letras no século XIX: as memórias de Humberto de Campos

Este artigo focaliza a narrativa de Humberto de Campos em seu primeiro volume de memórias (1886-1900) no que se refere à educação escolar do autor. Inicialmente, enfatiza-se a importância da escrita autobiográfica para a pesquisa em História da Educação, e especialmente para a história da educação matemática. Em seguida, apresenta-se o autor, situando-o no cenário da literatura brasileira, e discorre-se sobre os fundamentos teórico-metodológicos adotados na pesquisa com fontes memorialísticas. O núcleo do texto é composto pela abordagem das principais experiências escolares narradas por Humberto de Campos na cidade de Parnaíba, no interior do Piauí, na década de 1890, com destaque para práticas que envolvem conhecimentos matemáticos. As lembranças escolares registradas na obra do escritor maranhense ressaltam a precariedade material da instrução elementar, o ensino de muitos alunos de diferentes níveis em escolas de um só professor e os métodos de ensino, baseados na repetição e memorização e apoiados em práticas punitivas de castigos e humilhações dos estudantes.

The Anthropology of Transcultural Storytelling: <em>Oui mon commandant!</em> and Amadou Hampâté Bâ's Ethnographic Didacticism

This article examines the relationship between literary virtuosity and ethnographic exposition in Oui mon commandant!, the second volume of memoirs by Malian writer and anthropologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ. In this memoir, Hampâté Bâ recounts his early career as a colonial civil servant before beginning professional training in anthropology. He offers an in-depth ethnographic look at the political universe of French colonial bureaucracy while inserting carefully honed stories and vignettes designed to instruct non-African readers about “traditional” African cultures and about everyday life under colonial rule. I call this narrative strategy “ethnographic didacticism” and argue that it allows Hampâté Bâ to connect his prowess as a storyteller to a broader anthropological knowledge project while reimagining the African autobiography as a cross-disciplinary palimpsest. Further, I suggest that Oui mon commandant!’s ethnographic didacticism provokes us to reimagine anthropology and cosmopolitanism as narratives of modernity with African genealogies.

Duty: memoirs of a secretary at war

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War By Robert M. Gates New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014 618 pages $35.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Duty is Robert Gates' second volume of memoirs and covers his time as Secretary of Defense in the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Few people are better versed in how Washington works (or doesn't work) than Gates. He spent twenty-seven years in the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council before becoming the only Secretary of Defense asked to stay in office when the White House changed hands between political parties. Because of this, the book's released caused a major stir, particularly in Washington. Gates' anger and unvarnished opinions about senior policymakers and elected officials, including some still holding office drew the most initial attention. While he respects the two presidents he served, Gates indicts Washington's hyperpartisan climate in general and Congress in particular which he describes as Uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities (such as time appropriates), micromanagerial, parochial, thin-skinned, [and] often putting self (and reelection) before country. He is particularly disdainful of Senator Harry Reid, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and Vice President Joe Biden, at times resorting to unnecessary low blows as when he sarcastically writes that Biden presumed to understand how to make CT (counterterrorism) work better than Stan (McChrystal) even though Biden was talking about policy and strategy and General McChrystal's expertise was at the operational level of Like any memoir, Duty does not weigh all sides of the story equally but concentrates on explaining Gates' position on key issues, particularly the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. One theme that will appeal to military readers was Gates' fierce dedication to the men and women in uniform, particularly those in combat zones. Time after time he excoriates the Department of Defense for its preoccupation planning, equipping, and training for future major wars with other nation-states, while assigning lesser priority to current conflicts and other forms of conflict, such as irregular or asymmetric war. At times this compelled him to take things into his own hands. He proudly recounts his efforts at forcing improvements in the care of wounded warriors and jamming through production of Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected (MRAP) armored fighting vehicles and increased intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. The crush of managing two wars and the daily operations of one of the world's largest and most complex organizations left Gates little time for broad questions about American strategy. But there is also no indication in Duty that he would have done so even if given the opportunity. For all of his talents, Secretary Gates was not a strategic visionary. For instance, there is no indication that he seriously questioned the assumptions that justified US involvement in Afghanistan even during the Obama administration's major review of US strategy. …

Asa Briggs and the Emergence of Labour History in Post-War Britain

Now in his 90s, Asa Briggs can look back on a life rich in labour and achievement. A practising historian for more than seven decades, he has made important contributions not only to the discipline and its popularisation but to intellectual life more generally, and the development of Britain’s universities more particularly. He has not finished yet. Sixty-nine years after his first book appeared he is about to publish a third volume of memoirs.1 Introducing the essays presented to Asa on his seventieth birthday, Derek Fraser emphasised four historiographical themes which categorised his achievement. Most scholars will recognise his significance in the evolution of the fields of social history, urban history and the study of broadcasting and communications from the 1940s.2 Younger historians may be less familiar with his engagement with labour history, given that subject’s marginality in both universities and popular discourse since the 1990s and the dominant role typically accorded to Marxist historians when it was in vogue between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Yet it was a feature of his career from 1945 to the 1970s. The substantial and sometimes overlooked part he took in its take-off after 1960 was propelled by an enduring interest rooted in his background, his intellectual development, his times and the challenges that they presented to the expansion, modernisation and maturation of the discipline.3

Learned Critic, Working Stiff

Learned Critic, Working Stiff David Heddendorf (bio) Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike. (Knopf, 2007. xxii + 704 pages. Illustrated. $40) “I never miss a high-school class reunion,” writes John Updike, “and never come away without a story.” The first half of that sentence, from a note on one of his recent short stories, epitomizes Updike the small-town Pennsylvanian returning to the place he loves and can never outgrow. In the second half of the sentence, Updike changes with a wink into the resourceful writer, long since flown from Shillington to the world of art and literature. He is Rabbit Angstrom and he is Henry Bech, two “slices from opposite sides of my pie,” as he explains in an essay about recurring characters in his work. When he writes nonfiction, Updike gets to alternate between Rabbit and Bech in a way his fiction doesn’t easily permit. His essays and criticism express the nuanced sensibility that has distinguished a long career of book reviews and art commentary, but at any moment the restless cosmopolitan intelligence can give way to the vulnerable musings of the average American. Perhaps this is because, for Updike, ideas are only half the story. His drive to render sensations in all their immediacy and availability keeps him a fervently democratic observer, ever noticing the mica chips in the sidewalk, the beat-up hassock on the living-room floor. In Due Considerations, his ninth nonfiction collection (not counting Self-Consciousness, a volume of memoirs), Updike gathers another bulky sheaf of “odd jobs” and “picked-up pieces,” to borrow two of his other titles. By the term due consideration he means not only the respectful treatment a critic owes his or her subject, but any writing with a deadline, any writing that’s due, such as a high-school book report or a reporter’s story. Due Considerations thus provides yet another way to shoulder his double burden as learned critic and working stiff. If this last nonfiction collection has a theme, it’s the author in old age: looking back over a crowded past, surveying a new and not always inviting present, anticipating a worrisome future. “Late Works,” one of the longer essays, brings the theories of Edward Said and Theodor Adorno to bear on the last difficult works by Shakespeare, Hawthorne, James, and others. Lighter pieces recall Updike’s long experience with cars and, what is surprising, poker. He mourns past glories in everything from Disney movies to book design. Yet, although Updike in 2000, at age sixty-eight, writes of packing his bag, and describes his desk as “ominously clean,” the hundreds of pages produced after that year tell a different story. For decades he had been writing about growing old and slowing down, all the while maintaining the same brisk pace and exacting standards. Sizing up the current scene as a critic in his seventies, he sounds bemused but never bewildered, amused but never condescending. Nowhere is his undiminished vigor more apparent than in the sixty-two [End Page xliii] book reviews contained in Due Considerations. In the foreword to his story collection Licks of Love, Updike admits that reviewing eats away at the time he once devoted to stories, but consoles himself that, while ultimately “contingent and dispensable,” book reviews “demand a kindred spurt of energy and strive for somewhat similar harmonies and resolutions.” The reviews in the new collection amply display this craftsmanship, as Updike gathers his research, analysis, and personal experience into a whole that instructs and entertains. Conveying the atmosphere of a novel with a synopsis and a handful of quotations is comparable to showing off an opulent room through a keyhole or, at best, through Venetian blinds; but Updike tackles the job with precision and panache, no matter how abstruse the plots of storytellers like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Orhan Pamuk. Only after much patient and sympathetic reading does Updike come down with a mild yet firm judgment. Along the way he tosses off plenty of gems of his own, such as this comment on the centrality of a child character in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: “The newer novelists, having inherited...

Die Exterritorialität des Denkens: Hans Sahl im Exil by Andrea Reiter

914 Reviews Die Exterritorialit?t desDenkens: Hans Sohl imExil. ByAndrea Reiter. G?ttingen: Wallstein. 2007. 398 pp. 38. ISBN 978-3-8353-0223-5. There are few scholars better equipped towrite about Hans Sahl thanAndrea Reiter, who has published and lectured extensively on thisauthor. InDie Exterritorialit?t des Denkens: Hans Sahl imExil Reiter both draws together and considerably expands her previous insights on Sahl, this time?adopting a very ambitious approach positioning her author within thewider cultural and ideological framework of his times. The writer and translator Hans Sahl, whose dates alone (1902-1993) suggest him to be exemplary of his century, also serves inmany ways as an exemplum of the exile fromNational Socialist Germany, as the intellectual caught up in the ideological conflicts of his age. Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Sahl saw himself primarily as a political rather than a racial exile. Having worked as a journalist inGermany for the liberal and left-wingpress, he fled the country in 1933 and, following a familiar path of the German political emigration, made his way to Paris via Prague and Zurich. In Paris, in the late 1930s (the exact date is disputed), deeply disillusioned by theMoscow trials, Sahl made his break with Communism. Although never actually a Partymember but rather a fellow traveller, he nevertheless became a renegade in the eyes of the comrades with whom he had closely associated. Itwas this searing experience that led Sahl to view his own position as one of twofold exile, 'das Exil im E as he later entitled one of his volumes ofmemoirs. Indeed thisperception remained with him beyond his stay inFrance and throughout his far lengthier period of exile in theUnited States (which he reached only in 1941 with the aid of the legendary Varian Fry). InAmerica, initially life was hard?indeed it would be nearly twentyyears, when his career as a translator bore fruit,before he was able tomake amore comfortable living.Despite takingAmerican citizenship in 1952, he failed to feel at home in theUnited States; however, his attempt to return to Europe in 1953 also proved unsuccessful because of the prevailing political climate of Adenauer's Germany. A classic example of an exile caught between ideologies, cultures, and countries?even continents?Sahl finally returned to Germany in 1989, shortlybefore the 'Wende', where he lived out the last few years of his life. Yet it was Sahl's perception of himself as belonging on neither side of theAtlantic, as fulfilling the function of guest and observer in both America and Germany, that appears tohave fittedhim for the role of intermediary: he became a prolific translator ofAmerican drama for theGerman stage and, as a journalist, reported not only on American artistic events fora European readership but also on European affairsfor American readers, as Reiter records. Relating to the process ofmediation, Reiter brings into play concepts of exterritoriality and extemporality as shedding lighton the state of exile per se as well as in connection with Sahl's life and work in exile, the latter including his semi-autobiographical novel of exile, Die Wenigen und die Vielen. For thepresent study,Reiter has drawn on thehuge Sahl archive in Marbach, some of it scarcely or never consulted before, consisting of sixty-two boxes and MLR, 104.3, 2009 915 some eight thousand letters,aswell as SahPs diaries stretching over decades. For the most part Reiters painstaking depiction of SahPs lifeand work is enhanced by its broader intellectual and theoretical framework, encompassing separate discussions of identity or diaspora theory, for example, or widening out to consider parallel biographies (such as that of Bertolt Brecht). Occasionally, however, the complex structure of Reiters work does lead to a loss of focus. That said, though, thiswork amounts to an impressively researched study that adds significantly to the literature on a previously under-researched writer. Imperial College London Charmian Brinson Jedes Wort wandelt dieWelt: Dolf Sternbergerspolitische Sprachkritik. ByWilliam J. Dodd. G?ttingen: Wallstein. 2007. 358 pp. 29. ISBN 987-3-8353-0230-3. When Aus dem W?rterbuch des Unmenschen appeared in book form in 1957, it caused considerable controversy?the so-called Sprachstreit of the early 1960s? about methods of language critique, inwhich linguistics scholars took...

In command of history: Churchill fighting and writing the Second World War

Churchill fought the war twice over as Prime Minister and again as its premier historian. In 1948-54 he published six volumes of memoirs which secured his reputation and shaped our understanding of the conflict. Using the drafts and correspondence for The Second World War, David Reynolds opens our eyes to Churchill the author and to the research syndicate' on whom he depended. We see how the memoirs were censored by Whitehall to conceal secrets such as the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and how Churchill himself censored them to avoid offending current world leaders. This book forces us to reconsider much received wisdom about the war and illuminates an unjustly neglected period of his life the Second Wilderness Years of 1945-51, when Churchill, now over seventy, wrote himself into history, politicked himself back into Downing Street and delivered some of the most important speeches of his career.

Guy Debord, or The Revolutionary Without a Halo

OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 39–45. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Long taken for a nonentity, in other words passed over in silence, then taken for a brilliant if rowdy character of chilly arrogance, the chances are good that Guy Debord will purposely spare himself the third stage of embalming: that of being taken for a remarkable writer.”1 So wrote journalist and author Claude Roy in 1974 at the time of the release of Debord’s first feature-length film, The Society of the Spectacle, and at the time this appeared to be a rather reliable prediction. Debord was still thought of primarily as one of the founders and associates of the (recently defunct) collective enterprise known as the Situationist International, and as the author of the concise but dauntingly dense text upon which his film was based. His colleague Raoul Vaneigem tended to be considered the better writer, even if both were criticized for muffling their arguments “under [a] dense Hegelian wrapping.”2 The intervening thirty years, however, have provided ample evidence to contradict Roy’s confident forecast: it has, perhaps ironically, become a commonplace that Debord’s legacy is precisely that of a great author-essayist, a memoirist and moralist in a long line of classical French writers. If we were to date the arrival of this unanticipated reception of his work, we could do worse than to point to the year 1989 and the publication of his Panegyric, a slim volume of memoirs that was quickly and unexpectedly hailed by Philippe Sollers in the pages of Le Monde.3 Since that date Sollers has written a series of important articles on Debord for the French literary press, has aided in the publication of his works by the prestigious firm of Gallimard, and has even produced a television documentary on him; perhaps no single figure has played a greater role in defining Debord’s legacy for the reading public, at least in France. Sollers has been instrumental in consolidating Debord’s reputation as the author of a distinct and exemplary oeuvre: “Guy Debord’s style

Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946 by Edward E. s> Roslof (review)

REVIEWS 765 The military historian will be disturbedby a number of inaccuracies. For example, ajefreiter is a corporal not an NCO trainee, what is described as a signal-man is a bugler, and there are several references to soldiers being awarded 'Crossesof the Order of Saint Gregorius'insteadof Saint George. The author has a tendency to read more into some remarksin his sources than was probably originallyintended. Thus the emphasis in some accounts on the food and drinklaid on forthe guardsmenbefore theirdeparturefor the theatreof war 'maywell have been implyingthatwar would be a sortof feast, too' (p. I 26). When Sergeant-MajorJernvall (who became a legendaryfigure in the Finnishconscriptarmyformedin I88I) recordedthat the men thanked God fortheirinitialsafejourney, Laitalastatesthat 'byimplication,thismeant that the Guards'journey was under divine protection and that its missionwas just' (p. 132). Praise of Bulgarianvillages and the gloriouslandscape is taken to imply 'that in general virtuous people, including Finns, should be free' (p. ) This revieweris scepticalof such claims. However, Laitala'sconclusions appearsound. Loyaltyto the Russian army and the Emperorwas the reasonwhy the Finnswent willinglyand uncritically to fight in the Russo-Turkish War and why they accepted the hardships involved. As Finns, they also developed ideals derived from the heroism of theirforefathersto create a militaryidentificationwhich was loyal not only to the Emperorbut also to the nascent nationalidentityof Finland. Berkhamsted J. E. 0. SCREEN Roslof, Edward E. RedPriests.Renovationism, RussianOrthodoxy, andRevolution, I905-I946. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Indiana University Press,Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2002. XViii+ 259 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography.Index. [34.50. AFTER the Bolshevikscame to power a number of Russian Orthodox clergy attempted to found a church which would supportthe fledgling Soviet state, promote socialjustice, and enhance the role of ordinary('black')clergyin the church's internal life. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union the main source for information on the 'renovationist'movement were the three volumes of memoirs by Anatoli Levitin and Vadim Shavrov published in the West as Ocherki po istoriirusskoi tserkovnoi smuty(Ktisnacht, I977). Now in his important new study Edward Roslof makes systematic use of newly-available material from Russian archives to flesh out the story. His analysis produces no big surprises;it is encouraging to find that previous scholarship in the field has been largelyon the righttrack. The impulse towards renovation started with the failed ecclesiastical reforms of the nineteenth century, and various groups and individuals had different priorities ranging from structuraland liturgical reform within the church to the development of a full Christian Socialist programme. These varioustendencies remained in tension within renovationismthroughout. Roslof shows that encouraging factionalismwithin renovationism (as well as in the patriarchalchurch) was part of the Bolshevikstrategyultimately to undermine religion in the Soviet Union. He tracesthe complex development 766 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 of the three-way relationship between the Soviet authorities and the two Orthodox churches:the authorities'attemptto use the renovationiststo defeat the patriarchalchurch duringWar Communism; the policy of letting the two churches fight it out amongst themselves during NEP from 1923; and finally the repressionof all religion from I929. Quite often the dissonance between theproclaimedlong-termaim of the governmentto achieve the disappearance of religion and the short-term tactical need to promote one religious group against anotherled to genuine confusion at grass-rootslevel and the necessity for 'decoupling', when local officials separated official ideology from their everyday implementation of church policy. The archive sourcesallow Roslof to offersome tellingillustrationsof thiskindof outcome. 'Ironically,'as Roslof notes, 'the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 194I, and not the success of the Stalinist Revolution provided the final nail in renovationism's coffin' (p. I90). There followed a new policy whereby the Soviet government recognized the institutionallegitimacy of the patriarchalchurch.The lastrenovationistparishin the Soviet Union closed in July I946 with the death of its charismaticpriest and one of the founders of the renovationistmovement, AleksandrVvedenskii. 'Scholarsdebate reasonsforthe mutualattractionof suchvariedpersonalities as Granovskii, Boiarskii, and Vvedenskii', observes Roslof (p. iI). He himself does not go very far in comparing and contrastingtheir motives, but his basic assumption is that they 'generally acted out of genuine religious conviction' (p. x). Forhim one of the most strikingaspectsof the movement to emerge from archival records is that even during the comprehensive...

A journey to a nineteenth-century shtetl: the memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik

A masterpiece of modern Yiddish literature, the first volume of memoirs by Yekhezkel Kotik, is now available in English. Originally published in Warsaw in 1913, this beautifully written memoir offers a panoramic description of the author's experiences growing up in Kamieniec Litewski, a Polish shetl connected with many important events in the history of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewry. Although the way of life portrayed in this memoir has disappeared, the historical, cultural, and folkoric material it contains will be of major interest to historians and general readers alike. Kotik's story is the saga of a wealthy and influential family, through four generations. Masterfully interwoven into this story are colorful vignettes featuring Kotik's family and neighbors, including rabbis and zaddikim, merchants and the poor, hasidim and mitnaggedim, scholars and illiterates, believers and heretics, matchmakers and informers, teachers and musicians. Stories of personal warmth and despair intermingle with descriptions of the rise and decline of Jewish communal institutions and the relationships between Jews and the Russian authorities and Polish lords. Such events as the brutal decrees of Tsar Nicholas I, the abolishment of the Kahal, and the Polish revolts against Russia are reflected in the lives of these people. The English edition includes a complete translation of the first volume of memoirs and contains notes elucidating terms, names, and customs, as well as bibliographical references to the research literature. A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl not only acquaints new readers with the talent of a unique storyteller but also presents an important document of Jewish life during a fascinating era.

The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant (review)

Reviews 125 Some readers might wish, in a work devoted to the construct of autobiography, for more discussion of the notion of feminine and masculine discourse. Abbott's Julian, however, works in a theological and psychological framework that is gender-neutral where 'the conscious realization of the soul is experienced indivisibly as a conscious realization of the indwelling Christ' (p. 160). In such a world personhood cannot be viewed only materialistically as validation of the human body by identity with the physical suffering of Christ. Abbott also eschews the simplistic division of male/raft'o and female!affectus as alternative approaches to understanding. Rather, for Julian the intellectus is the source of meaning, a faculty which requires both affectus and ratio (p. 83). The solid and scholarly book will be useful to those who study religious literature generally; the discussion of identity is a valuable case study for those interested in cultural and social aspects of the Middle Ages; and the subtle exploration ofthe continuity of a realist incarnational theology must be addressed by those who believe the late medieval church suffered disruption in a nominalistdominated world. There are some minor typographical errors, but this is a refreshing book which, as all good criticism should, urges a return to the sources. Rosemary Dunn School of Humanities James Cook University Balestracci, Duccio, The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant, trans. Paolo Squatrini and Betsy Meredith, University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999; paper; pp. xxvi, 146, 5 b/w illustrations, 1 map; R R P US$14.95; ISBN 0271018798. Many historians dream of finding unknown sources that illuminate a poorly documented aspect ofthe past. Imagine then the excitement ofDuccio Balestracci when in the early 1980s he discovered at archives in Siena two volumes of memoirs kept by a family offifteenth-centurypeasants, yes, peasants! The resulting book, La Zappa e la Retorica: Memorie Familiari di un Contadino Toscano del Quattrocentro, appeared in 1984. The book under review is an abridged and revised version of the original, with 'the hoe and the rhetoric' of the original title replaced by the more commercially promising The Renaissance in the Fields. Rather than family memoirs, these are account books with entries 126 Reviews dating from 1439 to 1502, kept primarily by one member ofthe family, Benedetto del Massarizia. The Massarizia family lived and farmed in the three villages of Marciano, Montalbuccio, and Carciano located in the 'Masse,' the area within four tofivemiles of the walls of Siena. Neither Benedetto nor any other members of the family could write, although Benedetto could probably read the entries, which were written by those with w h o m he had business. As a result, the books contain none of the intimate details that occur in the inquisition registers of Jacques Fournier, which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie used to reconstruct peasant life at Montaillou, nor do they contain any of the information on family affairs that occur in the memoirs of Gregorio Dati and Buonaccorso Pitti. Balestracci edits one of the account books in the appendix, fourteen pages in length including Balestracci's lengthy introduction. Typical of the entries is one dated 1475: 'And I, Iachomo Pini, have received 4 lire from Benedetto de Masaritia for lady Giovanna degli Schotti, as he promised our Giovanni Pini. These are for a hayfield sold at Bascani.' A bit more revealing is the following, dated 1479: 'Giovanni Lapini and Paolo, his son and m y son-inlaw , who currently live on the edge of Uvile in their own house, are owed sixtytwo lire on November xxvi, which are for a hooded gown of French-style cloth, like new, one bed, one bedstead like new, assessed by Guido di Simone, jacketmaker , and Fruosino di Finuccio, as recorded by the contract drawn up by Bernardino Placiti, which is, by common agreement, a portion of the dowry of m y daughter Bernardina, as I promised.' Rather than using the account books to illuminate the lives of fifteenthcentury Italian peasants, Balestracci uses recent work on the social history of late medieval Italy to illuminate the account books. The best example of this is the short, seven-page chapter entitled...

Imagining a Life

ABSTRACT Born in Ohio in 1876 to wealthy parents, Natalie Clifford Barney is today better known for the freedom of her lesbian life-style than for her writing. Nevertheless, she was a serious writer, and consciously engaged in writing from a specifically lesbian point of view. With her lover Renée Vivien, she attempted to revive the cult of Sappho, and thus to revitalize a lost lesbian literary tradition. Through her weekly salon, Barney encouraged women writers, serving as a mentor and muse, and often as a lover. She enjoyed enduring friendships with many well-known women and men of letters, such as Gertrude Stein, Remy de Gourmont, Colette, and Dolly Wilde. Fictional characters based on Barney appear in novels by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Liane de Pougy, Djuna Barnes, and Radclyffe Hall. Barney's own writing consists of one novel (The One Who Is Legion, an eccentric meditation on gender and personality); a few collections of plays, poetry, and “portraits” of women; several volumes of memoirs; and two major volumes of “pensées,” or aphorisms, in which she comments on society, politics, and sexuality using a variety of urbane personae. Natalie Barney's work deserves more recognition than it has received, and her life still can serve as a model of self-creation uninhibitied by social strictures.

Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space

It's through that hole, I thought, that I am returning to my birthplace. --Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag In the Romanian folk poem Miorita, shepherd boy is warned by his beloved ewe, Miorita, that his fellow shepherds plan to murder him and take his flock. Instead of resisting, he accepts his fate, asking only that go in search of his mother and tell her the story not of how he was betrayed, but of how he was married to the daughter of powerful King. Thereafter, wherever the ewe wanders, she tells the story--not the true, unadorned facts of death and betrayal, but beautiful fiction of transcendent wedding. This simple story, told and retold in countless versions, is Romania's most enduring cultural text.(1) The popularity of the can be attributed to the power and simplicity of its poetry, but even more to its mythic structure. The myth has been used to define the Romanian character by several authors, including Mircea Eliade, who has called the cosmic marriage of the an example of cosmic Christianity--part pagan, part Christian, but in any case wholly Romanian--dominated by nostalgia for nature sanctified by the presence of Jesus.(2) But the most controversial concept of Romanian identity to be derived from the poem is the concept of defined by the Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga. For Blaga, the path of Miorita's wandering delineates what he calls space, geography of the Romanian poetic imagination, or, as recent historian of the Romanians describes it, a philosophical attempt to explain the Romanian spirit through the Romanian landscape, which [Blaga] saw as the stylistic matrix of Romanian culture (Georgescu 205). Blaga's critics have charged that this concept has become liability, nationalistic, escapist and fatalistic. For political analysts, Blaga has been criticized as romantic aesthete, self-absorbed and disengaged from political realities, while pursuing mystical communion with nature.(3) In this view, mioritic space is an escapist dream of romantic nationalist that encourages political apathy. For ethnographers, it is romantic distortion of the Romanian peasantry's connection to the land that ignores political and historical reality. These critics suggest that it may even account for the tendency of the Romanian people to suffer oppression passively: one 'cause' of the seeming passivity of the Romanian population may be the fatalistic Weltanschaaung implicit in the Miorita (Kligman 356). But to Blaga, mioritic space was simply way of locating the Romanian poetic spirit. these theories and criticisms may seem like much ado about boy and his sheep, but the story has great resonance to country long troubled by internal conflicts and external conquerors. It has often been noted that Romania is, geographically, inside-out, its mountains in the interior, its plains on the borders, leaving it vulnerable to invasion. More than once has the Romanian spirit had to take refuge from the threats presented to its exposed borders by escaping to the mountains and forests of its interior. When the threat was institutionalized within its own borders during the Turkish and Communist regimes, the Romanian spirit could survive only by going into physical (usually political) or metaphysical exile. One such exile, both physical and metaphysical, is the Romanianborn American poet and translator of Blaga, Andrei Codrescu. Having fled the Stalinist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu in the mid-1960s, Codrescu traveled to number of European countries before embracing America, then in the throes of mostly benevolent revolution, as the country most likely to listen to what he had to say, in the language that he was most likely to say it in. Since then, he has published twenty volumes of poetry (including translations of Max Jacob and Lucian Blaga), four volumes of fiction (including the recent bestseller, The Blood Countess), several collections of his commentaries for National Public Radio's All Things Considered program, and four volumes of memoirs. …

Alexander Benois and the Russian Revolution

Alexander Benois was a dedicated diary-keeper. Diaries must surely have underpinned his two published volumes of Memoirs, ending as the celebrated Russian seasons began in 1909. All trace of diary entries has vanished in these polished autobiographies, but he could hardly have produced them forty years later without such help. It is frustrating that the published Memoirs end where they do, for although Benois' role as Diaghilev's closest collaborator was over, he nevertheless gave the rest of a long lifetime to art and ballet. He was active in his native country until 1926, later in Paris, New York and London. He died in Paris in 1960, a few weeks before his ninetieth birthday. Although Benois never resumed his autobiographies, in early 1956 he considered publishing a diary running from September 1916 to January 1918. A copy of the MS is now in the hands of the Society for Dance Research, a typewritten document of sixtyone A4 pages. Benois, who was already eighty-five years old, had had his diary entries typed up from handwritten originals. The transcript is dated December 1955/January 1956. The typist was sometimes obliged to leave spaces blank to be filled in! Benois wrote an introduction, and the next step would have been getting the 12,500 word MS translated from Russian into French or English. Matters did not get that far. In the first place, Benois' view of the document changed. His typewritten title page had announced 'Memoirs of A. N. Benois' indicating the intention to continue the series of autobiographical volumes commenced and published a few years previously. But among the many amendments Benois made to the typewritten MS was the deletion of 'Memoirs' in favour of 'Vyborg Places. Diary 1916-1918 of Alexander Benois'. The implication is clear. Benois had realised that the main content of the diary related to the revolutionary period, and accordingly selected a new title with revolutionary associations. Vyborg is the suburb of St Petersburg containing the Finland