This book offers a nuanced exploration of Donetsk and Luhansk regions prior to the 2014 Russian invasion. While the region, collectively known as Donbas, frequently appears in news headlines, it remains under-researched by scholars, and myths about it abound. Combining rigorous research and captivating narration, Kateryna Zarembo debunks common myths about the region, such as its long-standing...

This first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a place (throughout its history called ‘new Athens’, ‘Ukrainian Manchester’, ‘the Brezhnev`s...

A Ukrainian journalist ends each day “scorched by another person’s grief.” A schoolgirl in Croatia cherishes her Barbie and learns to dread air raid sirens more than her geometry homework. A poet imagines the spiritual life of a fish who escapes the hook. An exiled artist recreates her homeland in the shape of a bird. The writers assembled in this volume dream and document and remember, they...

The anthology presents translations of literary works by Series guests that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today’s Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays by fifteen Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.

Sometimes called the ‘last epos in world literature,’ Pan Tadeusz (first published in Paris in 1834) is a classic tale of romance, mystery, war, and patriotism set in the turbulent Napoleonic era. The old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lies dismembered and erased from the political map of Europe by the great powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. A brief ray of hope rekindles national...

Before 1917, the Russian Tsar wielded absolute power over a vast empire, where more than 5 million Jews lived in isolation and segregation. Under the rule of Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), policies toward Jews became especially oppressive. Nicholas sought to erase Jewish identity by forcing their conversion to Christianity and promoting assimilation through mixed marriages. One of his most...

It is human nature to want to fit in. The lengths people have gone to do so have provided creative minds with material for centuries. This book explores the consequences of being marked an outsider in the Russian-speaking world through a close study of several seminal works of Russian literature. The author combines the fields of literary studies, linguistics, and sociology to illuminate what...

Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky first plunges the reader into Raskolnikov’s fevered brain, creating sympathy for him, and she explains why most readers root for him to get away from the scene of the crime. Dostoevsky subsequently provides outsider perspectives on Raskolnikov’s thinking, effecting a conversion in reader sympathy. By examining the multiple justifications for murder...

Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had...

Following the imposition of Habsburg rule on Ottoman Bosnia in 1878, a new garrison was constructed in the old citadel of Trebinje. By using a micro-historical approach, this innovative book tells the story of the garrison in times of peace and war, describing the way in which the Austro-Hungarian administration rapidly transformed Trebinje into a tree-lined city dominated by the army.

Established in 1918, as a new state the First Czechoslovak Republic was keen to project a distinct image. Participation in World Fairs offered the perfect opportunity-. In this comprehensive account of Czechoslovak participation in international exhibitions of the interwar period Marta Filipová looks beyond the sleek façade of the modernist pavilions to examine the intersections of...

Best known for the anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted writer of short fiction. The stories she wrote throughout her life reflect her political activism as well as her deep engagement with myth; they are also some of her most formally experimental work. This selection of Seghers’s best stories, written between 1925 and 1965,...