Journal of European Studies articles from December 1993

Journal of European Studies archives from December 1993

Adam at odds with Eve: Ionesco and the woman's mission. (gender roles in the works of playwright Eugene Ionesco)
December 1, 1993... A good deal of critical confusion surrounds the interpretation of the woman's role in Ionesco's plays. It arises principally from the conflicting statements made, on the one hand, by critics, and on the other, by the playwright himself. The...

Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition.
December 1, 1993... Reading scholarly books about intellectuals is almost invariably less exciting and challenging than reading intellectuals themselves: a Valery, an Aron or a Sartre outstrip in interest the accumulating volumes seeking to chart the...

Alexander Pushkin: 'Eugene Onegin.'
December 1, 1993... Non-Russian-speakers know that Pushkin was Russia's greatest writer only because Russians tell them so. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii have burst the dam of language to flow into the European mainstream; Chekhov is an English country-house dramatist;...

Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov.
December 1, 1993... W J. Leatherbarrow's concise introduction to The Brothers Karamazov is mainly devoted to an interpretation 'centred upon the novel's preoccupation with justice, order and disorder' (p. 3). Beginning with Fedor Karamazov's paternal neglect,...

Symbolism and After: Essays on Russian Poetry in Honour of Georgette Donchin.
December 1, 1993... That the whole of this Festschrift is considerably more than the sum of its excellent parts is in itself an eloquent tribute to the inspirational powers of the collection's dedicatee, Georgette Donchin, author of the seminal The Influence of...

Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer.
December 1, 1993... The shorter first part of Linda Scatton's study of Zoshchenko summarizes his personal and literary biography and concludes with a chapter on 'The writer as household word', which surveys the extraordinary popularity among readers, both in...

Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other.
December 1, 1993... Julian Connolly's book begins with analyses of early and often neglected stories such as 'Vozvrashchenie Chorba'; this, and the inclusion of comment on stories and sketches from the 1930s, offers a more chronologically complete analysis of...

Iurii Trifonov: Unity Through Time.
December 1, 1993... 'Not I have changed, but the time has changed incredibly Time has taught me to look upon familiar events with different eyes.' These words by Trifonov are not only a very accurate reflection of his preoccupation, but also an apt comment on...

'Pod seniiu Ekateriny': Vtoraia polovina XVIII veka.
December 1, 1993... On being shown a draft of Catherine II's famous Nakaz, or Instruction to the forthcoming Legislative Commission (1767), Count Nikita Panin said, according to the Empress's own account, 'Ce sont des axiomes a renverser des murailles'. But did...

Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History.
December 1, 1993... Following a bout of severe racial unrest in the American city of Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1906, a leading new New York journal pronounced that 'temporarily, civilization has been suspended'. The title of the article - 'An American...

Perestroika Under the Tsars.
December 1, 1993... In the broad sweep of Russian history, one is tempted to argue, there is nothing new under the sun. Tsars and regimes come and go, but the problems facing the country remain - a huge and vulnerable land border, perennial economic backwardness...

United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia: 1900-1914.
December 1, 1993... For obvious reason historians have always been fascinated by the Duma Monarchy - was Russia evolving towards bourgeois democracy; could the Revolution have been avoided if the regime had managed to stay out of the First World War? In this...

Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union.
December 1, 1993... Until recently the position of women in modern Russian history attracted little attention. Most texts concentrated on the ~male' aspects of the collapse of tsarism, the Revolution, the construction of the Soviet state and the development of...

Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900.
December 1, 1993... What is popular culture? How does it function in modernizing societies? And how is it articulated in the kind of authoritarian regimes which have obtained in Russia for most of this century? Richard Stites's monograph tackles questions like...

Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis of the New Economic Policy.
December 1, 1993... Any appreciation of Stalin's triumph in 1929 and the launch of the ~Great Breakthrough' in industry and agriculture requires an understanding of the grain crisis of the late NEP years. Hughes's tightly argued study tells the story of the...

Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933-1953.
December 1, 1993... To claim to show that the traditional representation of the ~Stalin period' is in many ways quite inaccurate is tantamount to issuing a hopeless challenge to the time-honoured patterns of thought which we are used to applying to political...

The Soviet Household Under the Old Regime: Economic Conditions and Behavior in the 1970s.
December 1, 1993... This book essays a detailed analysis of the economics of the Soviet household in the penultimate decade of Soviet power. It contains an introductory chapter and a number of interlinked studies organized into discrete sections. Chapter 2...

What is Neorealism? A Critical English Language Bibliography of Italian Cinematic Neorealism.
December 1, 1993... This is a welcome book. Well presented, clearly written and informative, it offers in the first section a critical bibliography similar in style to a collection of review articles on individual books. This is intended to be representative...