Suchergebnisse

"In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska." Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century

Annotation

ABSTRACT: This essay draws on phenomenological and psychoanalytical insights to explore, comparatively, manifestations of evil during the twentieth-century totalitarianism and the post-truth present. The regimes of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Alexander Lukashenko provide contemporary examples. Special attention is paid to the genre of performative confession in Stalinist times and in the present. Authors mentioned include: Anne Applebaum, Hannah Arendt, Anton Chekhov, Nathan Englander, Sigmund Freud, René Girard, Jan Tomasz Gross, Irena Grudzińska Gross, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Edmund Husserl, Leszek Kołakowski, Ivan Krastev, Marcin Król, Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Czesław Miłosz, Jan Patočka, Tadeusz Słobodzianek, and Tomas Venclova.

This essay juxtaposes two thinkers: the French literary critic and philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) and the Czech playwright, essayist, and dissident Václav Havel (1936–2011). In particular, the text examines Havel's 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless through the lens of Girard's structuralist model of mimetic desire, violent sacrifice, and a cultural order sustained by prohibition, ritual, and myth. Arguing against the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), Girard insisted on a reality behind the text: myths disclosed real victims. Girard and Havel shared a merciless anti-populism: society was guilty. They shared something else as well: in an age of a loss of faith in Marxism and all grand narratives, and of skepticism about the possibility of any stable meaning, subjectivity, and truth, Havel and Girard insisted on the ontological reality of both truth and lies, and on the ontological reality of the distinction between them.

AbstractThis article explores communism – including its pre-history and aftermath – as a generational history. The structure is diachronic and largely biographical. Attention is paid to the roles of milieu, the Second World War, generational cleavages and a Hegelian sense of time. Nineteen sixty-eight is a turning point, the moment when Marxism as belief was decoupled from communism as practice. The arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague meant a certain kind of end of European Marxism. It also meant the coming of age of a new generation: those born in the post-war years who were to play a large role in the opposition. The anti-communist opposition was organically connected to Marxism itself: the generation(s) of dissidents active in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood as a further chapter in the generational history of communism. Nineteen eight-nine was another moment of sharp generational rupture. The new post-communist generation, Havel's great hope, possessed the virtue of openness. Openness, however, proved a double-edged sword: as eastern Europe opened to the West, it also opened a Pandora's box. Perhaps today the most poignant generational question brought about by 1989 is not who has the right to claim authorship of the revolution, but rather who was old enough to be held responsible for the choices they made under the communist regime. There remains a division between those who have to account for their actions, and those who do not, between those who proved themselves opportunists, or cowards or heroes – and those who have clean hands by virtue of not having been tested.

This essay examines the vexed question of the relationship between Jews and communism. Drawing largely on archival material, I examine the experiences of several Polish-Jewish communists before, during and after the Second World War. I argue that "Judeo-Bolshevism" is perhaps best understood neither as a antisemitic stereotype or as a sociologically (over)determined proclivity but rather as biography, as epic human drama. A Freudian motif—in particular Oedipal rebellion—frames the essay, which begins and ends with the children and grandchildren of "Judeo-Bolshevism."