Czesław Miłosz’s Self-presentation in English-Speaking Countries

Kosovo’s education system is divided along a Serb-Albanian line, with consequences for the non-Serb minorities. While Serb-Albanian relations have been researched and analyzed extensively, relations among non-Serb minority communities have typically been neglected. Although there are some studies addressing the treatment and rights of individual minority groups in Kosovo, there is very little written on the dynamics and relations those groups establish among themselves. This article uses education as the backdrop for analyzing the emerging inter-minority relations in Kosovo. The paper provides some background about minority education rights and the consequences of their partial implementation for those minority groups—i.e., the Kosovo Bosniaks and Turks—whose members opt to follow the Albanian (Kosovo) educational system. In addition, it offers insights into some of the economic and political considerations behind the decision of the Gorani community to endorse the Serbian educational system. Finally, I analyze the relations between the Goranis and Bosniaks that have been developing around education and language rights.     

Władysław Konopczyński: a Polish Historian of European Caliber

Władysław Konopczyński, a Polish scholar and an investigator of modern history, certainly deserves to be recalled and to reappear yet again in all-European awareness. It must be done due to the fact that the name of that very outstanding and titled pre-war scholar was forced to disappear completely from the European humanities for fifty years. The decision of expelling Konopczyński from the world of European historians was made by the communist leaders of Poland. However, before that time, Konopczyński had played an important role in Europe. It is just enough to mention that during Poland's twenty years of independence after World War I, in the year 1931, Konopczyński was granted a membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Moreover, he was awarded the Swedish Royal Order of the Polar Star and the French Legion of Honour. Furthermore, the historian participated in many international congresses and his works were printed in many countries of Western Europe. In 1947 in Stockholm the heir to the throne himself attended Konopczyński's lecture. An erratum to this article is available at .     

The Downfall of Gomułka

Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1934 “Chërt” (The Devil) forms a central part of the cycle of autobiographical prose she wrote in emigration. This article assembles clues to the hidden origins of the Devil she describes in prose about her grandfathers, some of it censored in pre-1990 editions of her works. Tsvetaeva’s Devil is not simply metaphysical: it has the unusual appearance of a Great Dane. Though she goes on to trace its appearances in the literature and culture of her childhood, some of its physical features (eyes, nose, colour and posture) link it with other people in her life. The vivid details of the Devil suggest relationships, though peculiarly mediated ones, to members of her own family, especially her maternal grandfather, Aleksandr Danilovich Mein. The poet describes herself using Pushkin’s poem “Utoplennik” to camouflage her own sense of self from her mother. Much of the rest of “The Devil” describes her recognition of the Devil in varying symbolic or even phonetic guises, tracing how the poet stayed faithful to him even after he ceased to appear visibly, how she found and read his symbols in surrounding reality—e.g., card games, toys, rituals for finding lost objects—and in unexpected, otherwise respectable, parts of society, including her own grandfather. As always, Tsvetaeva creates a story that affirms her identity as a poet and illustrates the work she had to do to achieve that identity.     

Jewish epitaphs from Białystok, 1892–1902: embracing the spirit of Dubnow

In the early twentieth century, Polish historian Mejer Ba?aban delivered a most telling condemnation of Jewish epitaphs as “blatantly baroque,” “overloaded with epithets” and difficult to understand. In the late nineteenth century, the maskil Simon Dubnow had delivered a plea to the maskilim (intellectuals) and mithnagdim (traditionalists) of his day to engage in documenting and writing the woefully lacking past history of Yiddish civilisation as a means to unite past history with emerging nationalistic inclinations. Dubnow specified gathering epitaphs as part of this documentation. Despite Dubnow's plea it is Ba?aban's condemnation that has held sway in American and English-speaking European academies and which has not yet been fully reversed in the scholarship of the century since then. In the spirit of Dubnow, the current paper examines the first decade of extant epitaphs from Bagnowka Beth Olam in Bia?ystok, Poland, dating from 1892 to 1902, as an example by which we can move towards establishing the potential that Jewish epitaphs hold as another evidentiary source corroborating or enriching Jewish history. In this first decade of epitaphs from Bagnowka Beth Olam, we will encounter the world of the mithnagdim amidst which the minority of the maskilim are in evidence. Place names bring remembrance of the cities, towns and shtetlekh from which Jews migrated to Bia?ystok. Surnames evoke remembrance of founding families that would continue to build Jewish Bia?ystok in the coming decades. Unexpected historical and biographical details remind the reader of the professions and businesses in which Bia?ystoker Jews engaged and life's circumstances that prompted charitable responses. Subtle words or a unique phrase, intentionally or unintentionally incorporated into the epitaphs, are telling of the realities of the harshness of everyday life at the turn of the twentieth century and telling of what is significant to both individual and collective memory. One singular epitaph serves as a portent of the violence that would soon descend upon Bia?ystok. Through these representative examples we are offered a microcosm of Jewish Bia?ystok from 1892 to 1902, and a glimpse of the changing trends to be revealed in the next five decades as written upon the matzevoth of Bagnowka Beth Olam.     

'The Sense of Taking Part': Feminist Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborska

Abstract

This essay examines the poetry of the Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet in the context of contemporary ecofeminist thought, especially the work of Karen J. Warren, Sandra Harding, and Anthony Weston. I propose to look at Szymborska's ecological ethics (her view of humanity and other species as equals), her epistemology (questioning and non-hierarchical thinking), and her formal practice (irony, humour, dialogic form, decentring of the human point of view) as consequential, logically interdependent elements of an underlying philosophical system. This system has its foundation in ecofeminist multicentrism: the view of the world as comprised of many centres, i.e. many moral agencies, human and more-than-human, and many points of view, all different yet of equal value. Ecofeminist philosophy provides a framework and a vocabulary that explains the provocative and puzzling aspects of Szymborska's poetry as elements of a strong political statement in defence of the earth and all beings that inhabit it.     

Jewish epitaphs from Białystok, 1905–6: towards mending the torn thread of memory

In the centre of the Jewish cemetery of Bagnowka in Bia?ystok, Poland, stands a black pillar that serves as a memorial to two 1905 massacres and the 1906 pogrom that devastated this Jewish community. The historical record has not yet recognised that, in addition to this Memorial Pillar, another evidentiary source exists within Bagnowka Beth-Olam, marking violence from 1905 to 1939. This recently uncovered source consists of nearly 100 of the extant 2300 epitaphs from this cemetery. The current paper specifically examines the provenance, formulaic structure and content of the epitaphs commemorating the victims of the 1905 and 1906 violence. Set against those of their period, the memorial matzevoth replicate stone type, shape and stonecutter's hand dating c. 1900 to 1910. Their formulaic components similarly parallel epitaphs from this time with two exceptions: the addition of specific language referencing death by violence, and, occasionally, inclusion of specific details delineating distinct circumstances of death. Consideration of the presence of these memorial matzevoth also provokes the question: why memorialise by both pillar and matzevoth? While pillars and matzevoth are attested to as memorials in Eastern Europe, Bagnowka Beth-Olam stands at present unparalleled in combining both architectural structures in its form of remembrance. Such remembrance, as we will see, is not simply duplication; rather each structure serves a distinct function. Equally provocative is that several deceased remembered on these memorial matzevoth are also remembered by epitaphs on matzevoth in sections outside the memorial area. No such duplication of epitaphs exists for individuals after the violence of 1905–6, suggesting that memorialisation by pillar, memorial matzevoth and personal matzevoth was intentional, marking violence unprecedented in Bia?ystok's history.     

“Ready to Lay Down His Person and Fortune at Her Feet”: Prince Bogusław Radziwiłł’s Proposal for Marriage with Mary Stuart,Princess Royal of England and Princess of Orange in 1653–1654

The author appends and discusses two documents, of which the most significant is the hitherto unknown “relation” of Sir Alexander Hume, which he prepared at the close of 1654 for Sir Edward Hyde, Chancellor of the Exchequer, pertaining to Bogus?aw Radziwi??’s proposal for marriage with Mary Stuart. Prince Boguslaw Radziwi?? (1620–1669), a Calvinist, was a wealthy and powerful magnate and one of the best-known Protestant leaders in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Mary Stuart (1631–1660/1661), a staunch Anglican, since 1650 the widow of William II of Orange, was the eldest daughter of Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, and Henrietta Maria of France. Although an abstract of this “relation” was published already in 1869, it appears that biographers of Boguslaw and Mary, including those of their family members and close associates, took notice neither of it nor the actual document. The author suggests that the marriage plans of Radziwi?? may have been connected, among other reasons, with his ambition to gain the elective throne of Poland.