Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.
This is an extraordinary collection of tales that is sure to appeal to all readers of the weird and supernatural. Written in French by a Polish nobleman and first published, almost secretly, in St. Petersburg in 1804. During the wars in Spain, an officer of the Walloon Guards finds, in a deserted castle in Saragossa, a manuscript of such absorbing interest that he carries it with him on his campaign. Taken prisoner by the Spaniards, he falls into the hands of a Spanish officer who claims that the manuscript belonged to his family. The Spaniard proceeds to dictate to his prisoner, now an honored guest in the officer's house, the remaining stories in this collection.
These eight short plays by Louis Carmontelle, Thomas Gueulette, Jan Potocki, and Russian Empress Catherine II the Great (of all people!) were all the rage in eighteenth-century France--short skits that could easily be performed by amateur companies. Since they weren't writing "literature," the authors of these pieces could create anything without adhering to the "dramatic rules." And invent they did! Bawdy, even obscene humor permeates many of these works. All of them are wacky, anything-for-a-laugh comedies with little or no attention paid to logic, plots, or themes--just a series of zany, lewd, funny actions near enough to reality to be slightly discomfiting to the popular audiences who loved them. And they still remain as sidesplitting today as they were 200 years ago!
The present book for the first time links the thoughts of modern Western sociologists of literature with an overall description of the literary activities, attitudes, and views in late eighteenth-century Poland. Inspired by the studies of Bourdieu on literary fields and, more particular, S.J. Schmidt's study of the history of the rise and development of the social system 'literature' in Germany in the eighteenth-century (cf. Schmidt 1989), the author tries to establish whether Poland witnessed the rise of a more complex and (relatively) autonomous literary field or, as Schmidt calls it, a functionally differentiated literary system in the age of the reign of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-1795). Functionally differentiated literary systems - systems in which an increased number of literary agents and institutions produce, sell, buy, and criticize literary works according to capitalist principles - are the literary systems of today. As most scholars believe, their origins are to be found in most European nations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did such a modern literary system, albeit with certain limitations, rise in Poland in the years of the rule of Stanislaw A. Poniatowski? - this is the question the author of the present volume will attempt to answer. This volume is of interest to theoreticians and empirical researchers approaching literature from a sociological point of view, historians, and, of course, slavists interested in eighteenth-century literary developments in Poland.
Wouldn't you rather do whatever you want? This manual is your complete reference for independent living, thinking, making money, teaching and getting things done scientific way. Whether you regular Joe or revolutionary, politician or sociologist you will refer to this book again and again. You will discover: What are money and democracy. What are revolutions, religions and reality. What are science and scientology. What are chicks, sluts and prostitutes. Why apples so important in history. Why freedom of speech doesn't exist. Why Nobel Prize winners did nothing for humanity. Why government governs and you listen.
Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.
Belief in the afterlife is still very much alive in Western civilisation, even though the truth of its existence is no longer universally accepted. Surprisingly, however, heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all ideas which arrived relatively late in the ancient world. Originally Greece and Israel - the cultures that gave us Christianity - had only the vaguest ideas of an afterlife. So where did these concepts come from and why did they develop? In this fascinating, learned, but highly readable book, Jan N. Bremmer - one of the foremost authorities on ancient religion - takes a fresh look at the major developments in the Western imagination of the afterlife, from the ancient Greeks to the modern near-death experience.
In the golden years of the baroque era, Poland expressed creative ties to East and West in extraordinary works of fine and decorative art. This illustrated book displays more than 150 pieces that celebrate the cross-cultural richness of Poland's creative output during this period. From the dramatic uniform of the winged hussar complete with feathered wings and leopard skin to traditional portraits of royalty to a Turkish-style beverage service, these splendid objects represent Poland's diversity and breadth at a time when it was the largest land empire in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. This book is the catalogue for a major exhibition at The Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. The Art Institute of Chicago, Huntsville Museum of Art. The San Diego Museum of Art. The Philbrook Museum of Art, and the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
The present book for the first time links the thoughts of modern Western sociologists of literature with an overall description of the literary activities, attitudes, and views in late eighteenth-century Poland. Inspired by the studies of Bourdieu on literary fields and, more particular, S.J. Schmidt's study of the history of the rise and development of the social system 'literature' in Germany in the eighteenth-century (cf. Schmidt 1989), the author tries to establish whether Poland witnessed the rise of a more complex and (relatively) autonomous literary field or, as Schmidt calls it, a functionally differentiated literary system in the age of the reign of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-1795). Functionally differentiated literary systems - systems in which an increased number of literary agents and institutions produce, sell, buy, and criticize literary works according to capitalist principles - are the literary systems of today. As most scholars believe, their origins are to be found in most European nations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did such a modern literary system, albeit with certain limitations, rise in Poland in the years of the rule of Stanislaw A. Poniatowski? - this is the question the author of the present volume will attempt to answer. This volume is of interest to theoreticians and empirical researchers approaching literature from a sociological point of view, historians, and, of course, slavists interested in eighteenth-century literary developments in Poland.
Drawing on newly accessible archives as well as memoirs and other sources, this biographical dictionary documents the lives of some two thousand notable figures in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. A unique compendium of information that is not currently available in any other single resource, the dictionary provides concise profiles of the region's most important historical and cultural actors, from Ivo Andric to King Zog. Coverage includes Albania, Belarus, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Moldova, Ukraine, and the countries that made up Yugoslavia.
The Treaty of Riga of March 1921 did not signify real peace. It was soon followed by the outbreak of a Polish-Soviet cold war, which in the early 1920s threatened to reach a boiling point. One of the salient fronts on which it was fought was Ukraine and the Ukrainian question. The means by which it was waged – first by Poland, and subsequently, more successfully, by the Soviets – was by attempts to stir up centrifugal tendencies on enemy territory, leading eventually to the splitting up of the neighboring state along its national seams. Polish-Soviet rivalry over Ukraine had flared up at the Riga peace conference. In the following years both antagonists struggled to win over the sympathies of Ukrainians living on either side of the frontier River Zbrucz (Zbruch) and dispersed in various émigré centers, and the weapons employed were propaganda, diplomacy, nationalities policy, economic projects, political subterfuge, and armed irredentism. Jan Jacek Bruski's book addresses the first, very important phase of this Polish-Soviet tussle.
Cavanaugh's scholarship is distinguished by several qualities: detailed knowledge, a rare comparative awareness of adjacent disciplines, and of course, a substantial, synthetic knowledge of modern artistic developments in Western Europe and the U.S. Out Looking In will be relevant to a large and varied public."--John E. Bowlt, author of Forbidden Art: Soviet Nonconformist Art, 1956-1988 "This is an essential book for scholars of modernism who are eager, in the wake of post-structuralist and post-modernist reevaluations of the construction of modernism's history, to broaden discussions beyond a narrow French orientation. It will serve as an important stimulus for rethinking European art in general in this period."--Linda Dalrymple Henderson, University of Texas, Austin "Clearly written and well organized, [Out Looking In] will be the indispensable reference work in English on early modern Polish art. Cavanuagh's treatment, based on solid research and critical insight, is illuminating."--Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, Professor of Art, Queen's University "The visual richness and comprehensiveness of Out Looking In will make it a primary resource in the West for images of early modern Polish art as well as arguing for the centrality of Polish art to the discussion of European modernism. This is revisionism at its most insightful."--Wendy Salmond, author of Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia "This book goes a long way in correcting our geographically narrow understanding of European modernism. While arguing for Poland's place in the annals of artistic modernism, Cavanaugh elegantly manoeuvers between the sensitive issues determining national artistic identity and the international context of this debate."--Myroslava M. Mudrak, Ohio State University "This is one of the most important critical analyses of turn-of-the-century Polish art. Out Looking In will inspire a broad response from a wide international cricle of historians of art, literature, and artistic culture."--Wieslaw Juszczak, Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters and Art History Department, University of Warsaw
This definitive study provides a comprehensive diplomatic history of Poland during the most seminal period in its existence, when its destiny lay in the hands of France, Great Britain, and the United States. Although sovereign in principle, Poland was little more than an object of the Great Powers’ politics and rapidly changing relationships from the end of WWI to the end of WWII. Focusing on the shifting policies of the Great Powers toward Poland from the Treaty of Versailles to Yalta, the book ends with Poland’s tragic abandonment by the West into the hands of the Soviet Union. Enriched by unique anecdotal and archival material, this book will be essential reading for all those seeking to understand Poland’s role in twentieth-century history.
This book reviews a selection of organic-geochemical investigations, dealing with the characterization and environmental behaviour of organic contaminations of German river and groundwater systems. Topics include comprehensive non-target screening as well as isotope analysis of contaminants in water and sediments, detailed characterisation of bound residues, recording riverine pollution histories and an extensive application of the anthropogenic marker approach.
Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the Polish Underground, and as one of the first accounts of the systematic slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis, this volume is a remarkable testimony of one man’s courage and a nation’s struggle for resistance against overwhelming oppression. Karski was a brilliant young diplomat when war broke out in 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Red Army, which had simultaneously invaded from the East, Karski narrowly escaped the subsequent Katyn Forest Massacre. He became a member of the Polish Underground, the most significant resistance movement in occupied Europe, acting as a liaison and courier between the Underground and the Polish government-in-exile. He was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, and entered the Nazi’s Izbica transit camp disguised as a guard, witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust. Karski’s courage and testimony, conveyed in a breathtaking manner in Story of a Secret State, offer the narrative of one of the world’s greatest eyewitnesses and an inspiration for all of humanity, emboldening each of us to rise to the challenge of standing up against evil and for human rights. This definitive edition—which includes a foreword by Madeleine Albright, a biographical essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an afterword by Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously unpublished photos, notes, further reading, and a glossary—is an apt legacy for this hero of conscience during the most fraught and fragile moment in modern history.
By combining historical and political analysis with a sophisticated sociological approach, Jane Gross offers a new itnerpretations of the German occupation of Poland during World War II. Based on his hypothesis that a society cannot be destroyed by coercion short of the physical annihilation of its members, his work has a twofold aim; to examine the model of German occupation in theory and in practice, and to identify the patterns of collective behavior that emerged among the Polish people in response to the social control exercised over them. The author argues taht when an occupier provdies no institutions through which a lcoal population can at least minimally satisfy its social needs, the subjugated populace builds substituted institutions on the remnants of previous forms of its collective life. These substitutes constitute the society's self-defense, to which the occupier must in some way adjust if its goals of manipulation and exploitation are to be achieved. Professor Gross points out numerous ways in which the Poles under the General gouvernement circumvented the goals and authority of the German occupiers. Most significant was the emergence of the Polish underground, which took on the leadership, social welfare, political, and financial functions of an independent state. This phenomenon, he concludes, shows that resistance should not be conceived merely as a military movement but rather as a complex social phenomenon. Jan Tomasz Gross is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
History and collective memories influence a nation, its culture, and institutions; hence, its domestic politics and foreign policy. That is the case in the Intermarium, the land between the Baltic and Black Seas in Eastern Europe. The area is the last unabashed rampart of Western Civilization in the East, and a point of convergence of disparate cultures. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz focuses on the Intermarium for several reasons. Most importantly because, as the inheritor of the freedom and rights stemming from the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian/Ruthenian Commonwealth, it is culturally and ideologically compatible with American national interests. It is also a gateway to both East and West. Since the Intermarium is the most stable part of the post-Soviet area, Chodakiewicz argues that the United States should focus on solidifying its influence there. The ongoing political and economic success of the Intermarium states under American sponsorship undermines the totalitarian enemies of freedom all over the world. As such, the area can act as a springboard to addressing the rest of the successor states, including those in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Russian Federation. Intermarium has operated successfully for several centuries. It is the most inclusive political concept within the framework of the Commonwealth. By reintroducing the concept of the Intermarium into intellectual discourse the author highlights the autonomous and independent nature of the area. This is a brilliant and innovative addition to European Studies and World Culture.
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