By Vladimír Macura
ISBN-10: 0299248941
ISBN-13: 9780299248949
A prepared observer of tradition, Czech author Vladimír Macura (1945–99) committed an entire life to illuminating the myths that outlined his country. The Mystifications of a Nation, the 1st book-length translation of Macura’s paintings in English, bargains essays deftly interpreting a number of cultural phenomena that originate, Macura argues, within the “big bang” of the nineteenth-century Czech nationwide Revival, with its party of a uniquely Czech identity.
In reflections on centuries of Czech background, he ponders the symbolism in way of life. Bridges, for example—once a strength of civilization connecting varied peoples—became an indication of destruction in global warfare I. Turning to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, Macura probes a variety of richly symbolic practices, from the naming of the Prague metro method, to the mass gymnastic monitors of the Communist interval, to post–Velvet Revolution preoccupations with the nationwide anthem. In “The Potato Bug,” he muses on one of many stranger moments within the chilly War—the declare that the USA used to be intentionally shedding bugs from airplanes to wreak havoc at the plants of Czechoslovakia.
whereas getting to the distinctively Czech parts of such phenomena, Macura finds the bigger styles of Soviet-brand socialism. “We have been its cocreators,” he broadcasts, “and its research touches us as a scalpel grew to become by itself body.” Writing with erudition, irony, and wit, Macura turns the scalpel at the authoritarian country round him, demythologizing its mythology.
Read Online or Download The Mystifications of a Nation The Potato Bug and Other Essays on Czech Culture PDF
Best russia books
Download e-book for iPad: The Great French Revolution 1789-1793 Volume 2 by Peter Kropotkin
Kropotkin's moment quantity keeps his interpretation of this old occasion through focusing on the conflict among the Jacobins and their rivals - the Hebertistes, Enrages and Anarchists. during this conflict among authoritarians and anti-authoritarians, Kropotkin attracts out the origins of Marxism and Leninism in the Jacobins.
New PDF release: Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824
Aleksandr Nikitenko, descended from once-free Cossacks, used to be born into serfdom in provincial Russia in 1804. one in all 300,000 serfs owned by way of count number Sheremetev, Nikitenko as grew to become fiercely made up our minds to achieve his freedom. during this memorable and relocating publication, the following translated into English for the 1st time, Nikitenko remembers the main points of his early life and formative years in servitude in addition to the six-year fight that eventually added him into freedom in 1824.
Read e-book online Rosa Luxemburg Speaks PDF
Simply weeks sooner than her homicide, Rosa Luxemburg instructed her comrades:
"Today we will be able to heavily set approximately destroying capitalism once
and for all.
"Nay, extra; now not only are we at the present time able to practice this
task, no longer purely is its functionality an obligation towards the proletariat, but
our resolution deals the single technique of saving human society from destruction. "
Such was once the conviction that guided her life.
To an international simply rising from the holocaust of the 1st global War
her phrases had a pointy immediacy. Fifty years and a number of other devastating
wars later, the choice she poses - socialism or extermination -
still continues to be the alternative dealing with humanity.
- From the creation by way of Mary-Alice Waters
Get Historians as Nation-Builders: Central and South-East Europe PDF
A variety of papers from a convention held in honour of Professor Hugh Seton-Watson at the get together of his retirement in l983. the purpose of the individuals is to demonstrate the function of the historian within the political lifetime of vital and East eu countries.
- Armies of the Middle Ages
- The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics
- Russia and the Soviet Union: An Historical Introduction from the Kievan State to the Present
- In the Shadows of Poland and Russia The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Sweden in the European Crisis of the mid-17th Century
- A Window On Russia
- My Russian Family
Extra info for The Mystifications of a Nation The Potato Bug and Other Essays on Czech Culture
Sample text
With a little imagination, we can visualize this man in the street at a later time and in a different place. He stands among a rather small crowd that has gathered in 1910 at a former vineyard tower on Vítkov Hill at the unveiling of a memorial plaque celebrating the ancient victory * The Pentecostal Uprising took place in Prague from 12 to 17 June. It was the culmination of the 1848–49 revolutions in Bohemia. † Václav Vladivoj Tomek (1818–1905) was a Czech historian and politician. His chief work is the twelve-volume History of the City of Prague (1855–1901).
Here are the Czech sources of the notion of Central Europe, revived by Kundera’s essays as well as by those of other Czech exile and “samizdat” publicists and historians of the 1970s and ’80s. ” Remarks concerning the cultural region characterized by the wish for “synthesis,” the Central European passion “for variety,” the Central European “entwining of influences, languages, and traditions” only appear to contradict the Revivalist attempt to create a coherent and uninterrupted Czech tradition using foreign remnants.
The beginning of the nineteenth century was simply a period unusually inclined to mystificatory behavior. * This, however, did not prevent Čelakovský from smuggling the unmasked sham poetess into a representative collection of translated Czech poetry, John Bowring’s Cheskian Anthology (1832). ‡ Čelakovský’s preserved correspondence is full of various mystificatory jokes as well. The main point here, however, is not the amount of recorded forgeries but, rather, something much more fundamental. Jungmann’s decision in favor of “Czech culture” as a complete and entire structure with all the appropriate appurtenances—Czech physics, chemistry, mathematics, military science, aesthetics, philosophy, and so on—was perforce far ahead of immediate needs.
The Mystifications of a Nation The Potato Bug and Other Essays on Czech Culture by Vladimír Macura
by James
4.1