In 1991 Mariusz Wilk, a Polish journalist long fascinated by the mysteries of the Russian soul, decided to take up residence in the Solovki islands, a lonely archipelago lost amid the far northern reaches of Russia's White Sea. For Wilk these islands represented the quintessence of Russia: a place of exile and a microcosm of the crumbling Soviet empire. On the one hand, they were a cradle of the Orthodox faith and home to an important monastery; on the other, it was here that the first experimental gulag was built after the 1917 revolution. Over the course of years Wilk came to know every single one of the islands' 1000 or so residents. From his remote home, from which he sent regular despatches to the Paris-based Polish newspaper Kultura, he attempted to observe and come to terms with the complexities and contradictions of Russian history, its glorious past and the cruelty of Soviet Communism. In the process, he has written a most unusual travel book, a beautifully descriptive work that belongs in the best tradition of writers such as Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Claudio Magris.
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 1990.
Pendant le voyage en bateau de la mer Blanche au lac Ladoga, j'ai pris des notes, j'ai écrit mes pensées et mes rêves, le parcours, les rencontres avec les gens, la nourriture, les odeurs et les noms des plantes, les couleurs des nuages et les directions du vent ainsi que des bribes d'histoire lues pendant l'hiver. En un mot, j'ai jeté sur le papier le moment qui passait" Le monastère de Kiji et son église de bois aux vingt-deux coupoles argentées ; les innombrables lacs du Nord sous le soleil laiteux des nuits blanches ; un village revenu à la vie après avoir été l'une des " zones " du Goulag ; une liqueur de canneberge et un gâteau de poisson partagés dans une fête villageoise... Voici quelques-unes des images évoquées au fil des notes de voyage de Mariusz Wilk dans le Nord russe. L'écrivain-voyageur sillonne les îles Solovki, ce " microcosme de l'ex-Empire soviétique ", et trace son chemin à travers la Carélie. Il remonte en voilier le canal de la mer Blanche (Belomorkanal), construit sur l'ordre de Staline pour relier la mer Blanche à la mer Baltique, au prix de la vie de dizaines de milliers de forçats. Iconoclaste, provocateur, exilé volontaire en Russie et avide de décrire ce qu'il voit dans sa langue âpre et rude, Mariusz Wilk envisage le voyage comme un sentier qu'il faut inventer, au gré des rencontres et des détours inspirés par la beauté de la nature sauvage. Nul ne sait comme lui nous insuffler sa passion des grands espaces.
In 1991 Mariusz Wilk, a Polish journalist long fascinated by the mysteries of the Russian soul, decided to take up residence in the Solovki islands, a lonely archipelago lost amid the far northern reaches of Russia's White Sea. For Wilk these islands represented the quintessence of Russia: a place of exile and a microcosm of the crumbling Soviet empire. On the one hand, they were a cradle of the Orthodox faith and home to an important monastery; on the other, it was here that the first experimental gulag was built after the 1917 revolution. Over the course of years Wilk came to know every single one of the islands' 1000 or so residents. From his remote home, from which he sent regular despatches to the Paris-based Polish newspaper Kultura, he attempted to observe and come to terms with the complexities and contradictions of Russian history, its glorious past and the cruelty of Soviet Communism. In the process, he has written a most unusual travel book, a beautifully descriptive work that belongs in the best tradition of writers such as Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Claudio Magris.
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 1990.
Shells are basic structural elements of modern technology and everyday life. Examples are automobile bodies, water and oil tanks, pipelines, aircraft fuselages, nanotubes, graphene sheets or beer cans. Also nature is full of living shells such as leaves of trees, blooming flowers, seashells, cell membranes, the double helix of DNA or wings of insec
This book is the first study of the mentality of anti-Communist underground fighters and presents, especially, their thinking, ideals, stereotypes and customs. The models and psychological processes that the volume analyses are relevant not only to the Polish partisans, but also to members of other underground organisations, in East-Central Europe, South America and Asia. It explores how the underground organizations were created, who joined them and why, what thoughts and emotions were involved, and what were the consequences of the decisions to join them. Experiences and situations are illustrated with excerpts of diaries and memoirs which reveal the thinking of people in extreme situations, when their lives are in danger, when they are caught in desperate conflicts, or are fighting against overwhelming government forces. The Mentality of Partisans is useful for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the history of Europe, resistance movements, anticommunism, military and political conflicts, World War Two and non-classical historiography.
The authors develop a comprehensive theory of conformal graph directed Markov systems in the non-Riemannian setting of Carnot groups equipped with a sub-Riemannian metric. In particular, they develop the thermodynamic formalism and show that, under natural hypotheses, the limit set of an Carnot conformal GDMS has Hausdorff dimension given by Bowen's parameter. They illustrate their results for a variety of examples of both linear and nonlinear iterated function systems and graph directed Markov systems in such sub-Riemannian spaces. These include the Heisenberg continued fractions introduced by Lukyanenko and Vandehey as well as Kleinian and Schottky groups associated to the non-real classical rank one hyperbolic spaces.
This book examines the unique socialist-modernist architecture built in the twentieth century in Central and Eastern Europe as a source of heritage and of existing and potential value for the present and future generations. Due to the historical context in which it was created, such architecture remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the wider public associates it with the legacy of the unpleasant period of the real socialist economic regime. Yet, on the other hand, it is also a manifestation of social modernization and the promotion of a significant proportion of the population. This book focuses particularly on concrete heritage, a legacy of modernist architecture in Central and Eastern Europe, and it was this material that enabled their rebuilding after World War II and modernization during the following decades. The authors search for the value of modernist architecture and using case studies from Poland, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, Lithuania and Slovenia verify to what extent this heritage is embedded in the local socio-economic milieu and becomes a basis for creating new values. They argue that the challenge is to change the ways we think about heritage, from looking at it from the point of view of a single monument to thinking in terms of a place with its own character and identity that builds its relation to history and its embeddedness in the local space. Furthermore, they propose that the preservation of existing concrete structures and adapting them to modern needs is of great importance for sustainability. With increasing awareness of the issue of preserving post-war architectural heritage and the strategies of dissonant heritage management, this multidisciplinary study will be of interest to architecture historians, conservators, heritage economists, urban planners and architects.
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