Contra spem spero. Spotkania Herlinga z Szałamowem

Author(s): Grzegorz Przebinda / Language(s): Russian,Polish Issue: 2/2019

The article is an attempt at a comprehensive, synthetic description of the attitude of Gustav Herling-Grudzinski (1919–2000) – a great Polish writer in exile, a prisoner of Stalinist labour camps (1940–1942), and then the author of A World Apart (1951) – to the work of Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) – an eminent Russian writer who wrote in the USSR and had been a former long-term prisoner of the Soviet labour camps (1929–1931; 1937–1951). Shalamov is primarily known as the author of the brilliant, but extremely dark Kolyma Tales (written in 1954–1962, and published 1966–1967), autobiographical, but above all describing the state of the human being of the first half of the 20th century in extremely inhuman conditions. Eagerly reading Shalamov from the beginning of the 70s until the end of his life, Herling sought from this Russian brotherly soul of his (whom he had obviously known from his publications only) the answers to both historical and metaphysical questions. On the one hand, the attitude and creative works of people like Shalamov proved to him that “another Russia” did exist – as a sort of “underground source” in the process of liberating of Eastern and Central Europe from the yoke of Communism – inevitable in Herling’s view. On the other hand, the Polish writer did not accept Shalamov’s extremely pessimistic picture of the world and the human being, strongly believing that there is a “hard core” in man, in Franz Kafka’s language, that cannot be eradicated by even the most inhuman system, neither Nazism nor Communism, referred to by Herling as “twin brothers”. The Polish writer finally recognized Shalamov – a convinced atheist it should be added – as a saintly person, alongside with the noteworthy figures who were so important for Europe – Father Maksymilan Kolbe, Janusz Korczak, Albert Camus or Franz Kafka.

Участието на Османската империя на международното изложение във Филаделфия през 1876 година

Author(s): Simeon Tonchev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2023

The article examines the presentation of the Ottoman Empire at the Philadelphia International Exposition in 1876, putting two main tasks in the study. On the one hand, it follows the coverage of the exhibition in the press of the Bulgarian Revival period, mostly by the American Protestant newspaper Zornitsa, which introduced to its readers the five main sections of the exposition, some inventions shown for the first time, and specific exhibiting countries. On the other, the Turkey’s preparations, participation in the fair and its results are studied in detail. For this purpose, a comparative and an idiographic approachеs are applied. In the end, new information on the subject regarding the preparation in places in the empire, as well as examples of Bulgarian participation, is presented. Turkey impresses visitors with high-quality carpets and an authentic Turkish café. Foods, goldsmith’s works, coming from the Bulgarian lands, and rose oil of two Kazanlak companies are exhibited.

Историята на Хераклея Синтика през призмата на aрхеологията

Author(s): Ivo Topalilov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2023

Балканските войни в полезрението на военните историци

Author(s): Boyan Zhekov,Kalin Ranchev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2023

В новите броеве на списанията на ,,Аз-буки“ четете

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2023

Sadyści zamiast owładniętych ideologią? Odpowiedź na polemikę Oscara Szerkusa „Ruch oporu? Terroryści!”

Author(s): Bartłomiej P. Szyprowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Bartłomiej Szyprowski took part in the polemic around the monograph: Oscar Szerkus, Die Sondergerichtsbarkeit des Polnischen Untergrundstaates (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2019.)

Sytý portrét pozapomenuté revolucionářky a feministky

Author(s): Jana Burešová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2023

The politician and journalist Luisa Landová-Štychová was a lifelong feminist who, as a member of the Parliament of the First Czechoslovak Republic (in the years 1918–1923 and 1925–1929), entered the public consciousness mainly through her fight for the legalization of abortion. In addition to working for women’s equality, she was involved in many other areas, including atheist associations, the anti-Austrian resistance during the First World War, organizing workers’ aid, the anti-fascist movement, scouting, and the popularization of astronomy. Politically, she always stood on the left. She gradually moved from a social-democratic to an anarchist and national-social orientation, until finally aligning herself with communismin 1925. After the war she moved even further left, to Stalinist positions. The reviewer evaluates Stanislav Holubec’s biography entitled "Nešťastná revolucionářka: Každodennost a myšlenkový svět Luisy Landové-Štychové (1885–1969)" [An Unfortunate Revolutionary: The Mental World and Everyday Life of Luisa Landová Štychová,1885–1969] in the context of the gradually awakening interest on the part of Czech women historians (less so male historians) in the history of the women’s emancipation movement and the gender aspects of modern political movements. The book under review is one of the few biographies of Czech or Czechoslovak women political figures. Based on an extensive archival legacy, the author has managed to vividly present the personality of Luisa Landová-Štychová in the span of her diverse interests, activities and personal ties, and in close connection with her era and social environment, making her biography a valuable historical and sociological probe into the cultural and political history of Czech society in the twentieth century, especially into the social milieu of the First Republic leftwing intelligentsia and Prague’s left-wing civil servants.

Anotace

Author(s): Vojtěch Češík,Hana Bortlová-Vondráková,Jiří Křesťan / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2023

BÁRTA, Milan (ed.): Člověk v soukolí StB. Praha,Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů 2020, 318 s., ISBN 978-80-88292-72-2; BRASÓ, Broggi Carles: Los médicos errantes: De las Brigadas Internacionales y la revolución china a la guerra fría. Barcelona, Editorial Crítica 2022, 419 s., ISBN 978-84-9199-375-9; TEIGE, Karel: Deníky 1912–1925. Eds. Jan Wiendl a Tereza Sudzinová. Praha, Filip Tomáš – Akropolis – Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy – Památník národního písemnictví 2022, 792 s., ISBN 978-80-7470-416-1, 978-80-7671-037-5 a 978-80-87376-84-3; VYHLÍDAL, Milan: Vojenští zpravodajci proti nacistické okupaci: Odbojová skupina Tři konšelé. Praha, Academia 2022, 332 s., ISBN 978-80-200-3274-4; ZUDOVÁ-LEŠKOVÁ, Zlatica a kol.: Židia v Slovenskom národnom povstaní / Židé v Slovenském národním povstání. Banská Bystrica – Praha, Múzeum SNP – Historický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i., 2021, 368 s., ISBN 978-80-89514-97-7 a 978-80-7286-384-6.

Преоткриване на аграрните движения от Източна Европа от първата половина на ХХ век.

Author(s): Nikolay Poppetrov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

Book Review

TERRITORY AND REAL ESTATE IN KARDZHALI AND ITS DISTRICT IN THE 1920S AND 1930S

Author(s): Maria Markova / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

This publication traces the markers and the dynamics of the anthropological borders of the territory and the real estate during the 1920s in a specific region of Bulgaria. It encompasses Kardzhali (in Tukish Kırcaali) and its district, which have been annexed to the state in 1912 and were mainly populated by Turks up until the end of World War One. The subjective dimensions of the historical processes are enlightened through the memories and the stories of a part of the participants in the events – the Bulgarian refugees, who settled in the region. During the 1920s Kardzhali and its district radically changed. The Bulgarians and the Turks were the ones that were most often separated. The space, inhabited by the old Turkish population, shrank and Bulgarian-populated neighborhoods appeared, as well as mixed zones. Furthermore, places, which have been previously empty, became populated. In practice, the Bulgarians managed to wedge themselves in between the Turks of Kardzhali and its district and to change their traditional look. In the Bulgarian zones appeared buildings, connected to the Bulgarian national institutions – ecclesiastical and scholastic, as well as ones that marked the beginning of the modernization.

Buddhist Concepts in Mihai Eminescu’s Poems

Author(s): Marinică Tiberiu Șchiopu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

Mihai Eminescu’s indianism has been researched by scholars and critics like Amita Bhose or Mircea Itu, but the Buddhist component of his writings was not thoroughly analysed. The present study aims to investigate some fundamental Buddhist concepts that the Romanian writer recycled in his works. All of Mihai Eminescu’s friends knew about his keen interest in Buddhism, as Cătălin Cioabă’s book Mărturii despre Eminescu (2022) revealed to the public, and his fascination for this particular philosophical Indian system was reflected in his poems. The main research questions of this paper are: “Which are the Buddhist concepts that Mihai Eminescu intertextually used in his works?” and “Why did he choose those philosophical ideas?” In the analysis of the Buddhist dimension of Eminescu’s poetry, the following methods will be indispensable: close reading, hermeneutics, intertextuality and stylistics.

A Phenomenological Quest for the Concepts of Dasein in Tribal Metaphysical Enterprise: Prospect towards Tribal Onto-Theology

Author(s): Zodinsanga Toimoi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

It is misunderstood that tribal people have no proper awareness of phenomena of a thing. Perhaps it is for this reason that in any academic scholarship concerning tribal state of affairs, metaphysics in particular and philosophy in general has been dislocated from tribal enterprise. Their physical problems such as landlessness, hunger, poverty including liberation from these sufferings have been the age-old headlines in tribal studies. Many have miscalculated that tribal people solely rely on the objective revelation in defining reality without truly participating in it. In fact, tribal people suspend neither subjective nor objective affirmation; they keep harmonious relationship between the two. It is in the harmonious environment through being in the world that tribal identity has been acknowledged, and the objective truth has also been understood. Being-in-the-world (Dasein) as a methodology for doing tribal theology helps tribal in building authentic existence and in direction towards ontological theology.

A Comparative Overview between Zangs gling ma and Previous Texts on Padmasambhava

Author(s): Iulian Lucian Maidanuc / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

This paper compares the five texts regarding Padmasambhava written before Zangs gling ma (dBa’ bzhed and four manuscripts discovered in Dunhuang - Pelliot tibétain 44, IOL Tib J 321, IOL Tib J 644 and Pelliot tibétain 307) with the texts from Zangs gling ma, in an attempt to identify similarities and differences between them and to reach conclusions resulting from examining them together. The paper also addresses the question of historical credibility of Zangs gling ma, taking into consideration its connection with dBa’ bzhed, as well as the question on length of Padmasambhava’s stay in Tibet, by identifying texts in Zangs gling ma that refer to places in Tibet where the master stayed.

Wendy Doniger, An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-1964, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2022, 254 pp., ISBN: 978-93-5447-285-5

Author(s): Cătălina-Ioana Pavel / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

Review of: Wendy Doniger, An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-1964, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2022

Mihaela Gligor and Elisabetta Marino (Eds.), Tagore beyond Borders: Essays on His Influence and Cultural Legacy. London, New York: Routledge, 2023, 150 pp., ISBN: 978-1-032-11208-4 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-032-13334-8 (pbk).

Author(s): Diana-Viorela Burlacu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

Review of: Mihaela Gligor and Elisabetta Marino (Eds.), Tagore beyond Borders: Essays on His Influence and Cultural Legacy. London, New York: Routledge, 2023.

Rajendra K. Jain (editor), Changing Indian Images of the European Union. Perception and Mispercetion, and Rajendra K. Jain (editor), India and the European Union in a Turbulent World

Author(s): Alexandru Balas / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

Review of: Rajendra K. Jain (editor), Changing Indian Images of the European Union. Perception and Mispercetion, Palgrave MacMillan Singapore, 2019 Rajendra K. Jain (editor), India and the European Union in a Turbulent World, Palgrave McMillan Singapore, 2020

TOWARDS WELL-BEING, THROUGH EDUCATION AND CULTURAL INTEGRATION. A CASE STUDY OF ROMANIAN WHITE-COLLAR IMMIGRANTS IN BRUSSELS

Author(s): NICOLA Sanda / Language(s): English Issue: 17/2022

The decision to emigrate is almost always preceded by a period of unhappiness, and those who leave their homeland rely on this major change to improve their well-being. The strategies used by immigrants to integrate socially in the host country differ depending on several factors, such as: age, education, marital status, religion, connection to pre-existing support networks between compatriots, language proficiency or their long-term projections. In this paper we deliver a case study revealing a new pattern of migration: exponents of the Romanian middle class who choose emigration in their mid-life considering that Brussels, more than any other potential destination, ensures favourable conditions to reach their wellbeing aspirations. The study is a qualitative research based on data obtained through semistructured interviews and questionnaires, correlated with official quantitative data provided by Statbel, Eurostat, the European Commission, and the European Parliament on the migration of Romanians, particularly focusing on those with tertiary education. The findings of this research define the highly skilled Romanian immigrants in Brussels as a population that capitalizes on 1) European citizenship 2) tertiary achievement and 3) multilingualism, thus obtaining a transnational lifestyle and a stage of well-being that was still inaccessible in their country of origin, regardless of social status.

Dobrostan zwierząt gospodarskich w PRL

Author(s): Gabriela Jarzębowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 11/2023

The subject of this analysis is what the life conditions of farm animals in the Polish People’s Republic looked like and how they were reflected in professional discourse. My main aim is to show how good practices in husbandry were understood before the rise of the notion of animal welfare. As I demonstrate, their evolution was strictly linked with rhetorical changes in the discourse. I delineate the main material-discursive historical shifts that shaped further breeding practices.

Oživené osudy žien z Ravensbrücku

Author(s): Monika Vrzgulová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2023

In her monograph "Zpřetrhané životy: Československé ženy v nacistickém koncentračním táboře Ravensbrück v letech 1939–1945" [Broken Lives: Czechoslovak Women in the Nazi Concentration Camp of Ravensbrück, 1939–1945], Pavla Plachá focuses on the fate of women imprisoned in this camp who were citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic before 1 October 1938. This framework allows her to comprehensively and at the same time diversely examine women from diverse ethnic, social, cultural and territorial backgrounds: from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from the Czech borderlands occupied by the Germans after the Munich dictatorship, from the wartime Slovak Republic, and from the areas rewarded to Hungary after the First Vienna Arbitration. In the first part, Plachá traces the transformations of memorial culture in relation to Ravensbrück in different periods of post-war Czechoslovakia – which was selectively shaped according to the interests of the communist regime – focusing her research on the then overlooked groups of imprisoned women. In the second part, she presents the history of the Ravensbrück camp and various aspects of the status and camp life of the imprisoned women, not avoiding sensitive topics such as sexualized violence, homosexual relations and prostitution, pregnancy and abortion, and the violence and conflicts in the immediate aftermath of liberation. In the central third part, she categorizes and systematically examines Czechoslovak women in Ravensbrück, separately singling out groups of political convicts, the “anti-social and criminal”, Jews, Roma and Sinti, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. She enriches the collective analysis with dense biographies of selected women prisoners. The reviewer evaluates the monograph asa significant “Czechoslovak” contribution to international research on the history of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, cultures of memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as gender studies.

От молдовския Кортен до Алтай и обратно в Тарутино, Украйна. „Голямата“ тема за съветските депортации в „малките“ истории на българите от Бесарабия. Част 3

Author(s): Galin Georgiev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

The present text, the first parts of which are published in the previous two issues of “BulgarianEthnology” journal, presents the last, concluding part of an ethnological study conducted within the framework of an IEFSEM – BAS project and dedicated to an important and current problem in the post-Soviet space. It is about the ‘big all-Union’ topic of repressions and deportations in the former USSR, illuminated on the basis of the ‘small’, private example of a Bulgarian settlement in the Bessarabia region. The purpose and tasks of the study are aimed at revealing the main aspects of the collective memory of those deported in 1949 as a result of the collectivization in the then Moldavian SSR of 80 Bulgarian families from the village ofKorten (or Kiryutnia) and of their residence for about ten years in the Altai region of today’sRussia. The research is the result of the field ethnographic expedition conducted in the summer of 2021 in the town of Tarutino, Odesa region of Ukraine, where after the death of Y. V. Stalin and their subsequent rehabilitation, some of those people settled down to live, returning from the far northern lands in Bessarabia. However, those declared by the authorities as kulaks are not allowed to settle closer than 40 km from their native village and they choose as their newport the former German colony – well-known for them before the so-called lifting, i.e. before deportation, a market and business centre with the old name Chokrak.The main object of study in the first two and in the present last part of this text are the trajectories of memory about deportation, about forced migration and about the return from exile, i.e. for the return journey from Altai again to Bessarabia. The analysis text, built almost entirely from the author’s own field materials, aims to reflect the main points of reference, the accents in the memories, through which our interlocutors nowadays present and empathize with the events that took place in their childhood and youth years.