Ricerche slavistiche. Nuova serie

Slavs, Germans, Jews: migrations, borders, experiences. Preface

Roberta Ascarelli, Ramona Pellegrino, Laura Quercioli — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Preface by the curators of the monographic section "Slavs, Germans, Jews: migrations, borders, experiences".

Prejudices, adventures and silences. Polish intellectuals and Berlin’s Haskalah

Roberta Ascarelli — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Berlin Haskalah is characterised by sharp contrasts, not only between the souls of Judaism – on the one hand the more traditionalist one that Chassidism radicalised and on the other hand the new rationalist demand indebted to the European Enlightenment – but also between two countries Germany, represented above all by a king enlightened in religious issues like Frederick II, and Poland, the place of origin of many of its representatives, which is branded as barbaric, uncivilised, ignorant and backward. The gaps in the life stories of some figures among the Polish emigrants and the contradictions in contemporary reconstructions suggest a revision of the well-established historical-critical that highlights a radical contrast between these two worlds. The aim is to outline the presence of a rationalist tradition among the Polish Jews that contributed decisively to the impressive Jewish renewal in the 18th-century Berlin.

Herderian echoes at the roots of Shloyme An-sky’s ethnographic thought

Giovanni Gorla — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The work of the Russian-Jewish writer Semen An-sky (1863-1920) is profoundly heterogeneous. The common denominator of his production in the fields of publishing, activism, drama and fiction is his commitment to ethnographic studies. This article aims to explore the theoretical background of An-sky’s ethnographic thought, focusing in particular on its philosophical nuances. At a methodological level, the following procedure will be applied: in the first part, the author’s biographical path will be reconstructed, revealing the stages that first brought him into contact, at a political level, with revolutionary socialism and then, at a literary level, with Russian populism. What emerges is a fascination for ethnographic study aimed, at first, at deepening contact with the Russian worker and, at a later stage, at safeguarding the ethnographic heritage of Jewish culture through expeditions to the Chassidic shtetls in the Ukrainian regions of Podolia and Volinia in 1912 and 1914. This transition from the Russian to the Jewish world results from An-sky’s probable reading of the philosophical works of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), to whom the second part of this article is dedicated. Based on the comparison of textual excerpts from three of Herder’s works and three articles by An-sky, the comparison reveals the philosopher’s influence on the ethnographer on three thematic levels: folk tradition as the repository of a people’s soul, spirituality as the essential vehicle for the transmission of this tradition, and the significant value of childhood in the preservation of this heritage. The result of such an examination is, therefore, a rather concrete influence that Herder’s philosophical ideas exerted on An-sky’s ethnographic thought, an influence attested in the scholarly literature (Lukin 2006: 284), but never, it seems, actually deepened. In a rather rich and in-depth body of studies on An-sky’s multifaceted activity, therefore, the present article expresses the intention to scrutinise more carefully the sources of theoretical, literary and philosophical inspiration at the origin, in particular, of the last phase of An-sky’s activity, almost entirely dedicated to the collection of folkloric material that would allow the preservation of Jewish tradition and stimulate the creation of a totally Jewish art.

Jewish Anarchists in Eastern Europe’s Melting Pot. The Case of Max Nacht (Nomad)

Piotr Laskowski — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article traces the linguistic choices Max Nacht (later Nomad, 1881-1973) made during the period of his intense involvement in the anarchist militancy in the Habsburg Empire and Switzerland between 1902 and 1908. Nacht was a prominent figure of Eastern and Central European radical milieus in the first decade of XX century, specifically during the Revolution of 1905, and an exemplary case of multilingual anarchist. His autobiographical book, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues (1964) is a treasury of information about Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and German radicals at the time. Born and raised in Buczacz, a Galician town at the north-eastern peripheries of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Nacht was a careful and critical observer of the nationalisms tearing Galicia apart – in particular the politically dominant Polish nationalism. The article focuses on Nacht’s collaboration with the Ukrainian anarchist Mychajlo Lozyns’kyj, with whom he published, in 1904, the only issue of an anarchist newspaper in Polish, “Wolny Świat”, until their paths diverged due to Lozyns’kyji’s involvement in the left-wing Ukrainian national movement, and subsequent Nacht’s adherence to the ideas of the Polish revolutionary Jan Wacław Machajski. Nacht and Lozyns’kyj’s political strategies and their linguistic choices are embedded in the theoretical framework developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly the distinction between majority, minority and minoritarian becoming.

Nathan Samuely – A Jewish Writer from Galicia

Alois Woldan — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article is dedicated to Nathan Samuely (1846-1921), a little-known Jewish author from Galicia, and his main work, the two volumes Cultur-Bilder aus dem jüdischen Leben in Galizien (1885, 1892), written in German. Samuely, who also wrote in Hebrew, was one of the most important representatives of so-called ghetto literature, which was intended to familiarise non-Jewish readers with the life of the Jewish community in the segregated area of the small Galician town, which was predominantly populated by Jews. In the numerous short stories from these two volumes, the author deals with all the important aspects of Jewish life, education, contacts with the non-Jewish environment, the question of assimilation and the insistence on Jewish traditions, Jewish women and types, cult and idyll. The political history of Galicia is only rarely addressed in these tales; they also draw on events from the history of neighbouring Russia, which leads to a contamination of different historical narratives. Where Samuely describes conflicts and tensions between Jews and non-Jews as well as within the Jewish community, there is a tendency to harmonise and balance the opposites; a happy ending to the plot serves to eliminate conflicts. However, this does not apply to those stories in which the author depicts the stark social differences within the Jewish community – the rich dominate society, the poor perish. In these stories, Samuely probably holds up a mirror to his own Jewish group. Of particular interest is the question of the genre of the Cultur-Bild, which Samuely probably adopted from K.E. Franzos, but which is clearly different in his work: the tales only comprise a few pages, longer forms are missing. The story is reduced, with characters and genre scenes dominating. Both the genre and its form allow a comparison between Samuely and other important representatives of ghetto literature (K.E. Franzos, Leo Herzberg-Fränkel, Hermann Menkes), but they also reveal parallels to Polish authors from Galicia in the second half of the 19th century.

Rudolf Maria Holzapfel and Stanislaw Vincenz, i.e. Crossing Not Only Religious Borders

Stanislaw Obirek — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this article is to tell the story of the unusual philosophical friendship between Rudolf Maria Holzapfel (1874-1930) and Stanisław Vincenz (1888-1971). Both were born and raised in a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious Galicia. Holzapfel began writing his life's work, Panideal, at the end of the 19th century and completed it a few years before his death. Vincenz not only translated the Panideal into Polish in close collaboration with the author, but was deeply inspired by it. In fact, without this inspiration, he probably would not have written his life's work, On a High Uplands. For both of them, the main objective was to bring out the unifying force present in each other's lives, as we read in the Panideal: “It is necessary first to bring these often mysterious phenomena, as if in a deep living well, of consciousness, creativity, the experiences of art, the ideal and religion, into the daylight of full consciousness, in order to discover the conditions of their perfection, of their synthetic fusion into a harmonious creation of the ideal whole”. Apparently, not only their philosophical and literary works, but also their activism in various fields allows us to see the same philosophical idea in them. For both Holzapfel, who came from a Jewish family, and Vincenz, rooted in the Christian tradition, crossing religious and cultural boundaries was a way to realise the ideal whole (Panideal).

Linguistic Reflections in German and Russian in Julya Rabinowich: A Comparative Study of Oral Autobiographical Narrative and the Novel Spaltkopf

Michaela Burger-Koftis, Ramona Pellegrino — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Austrian author Julya Rabinowich, born in Leningrad in 1970 to a family of Russian Jews and emigrated to Vienna at the age of 7, is one of the most renowned representatives of contemporary literature in the German language. Rabinowich made her literary debut in 2008 with Spaltkopf (Split Head), her most strongly autobiographical novel. In 2012, the writer was interviewed by Michaela Bürger-Koftis as part of the research project Polyphonie. Mehrsprachigkeit_Kreativität_Schreiben. This interview can be understood as a linguistic biography, as Rabinowich recounts her experiences related to the languages in her linguistic repertoire, focusing particularly on German and Russian. From this account, the author’s Spracheinstellungen (linguistic attitudes), as well as the impressions and emotions related to her two main languages, emerge. The aim of this study is to compare the interview passages in which Rabinowich expresses herself regarding German and Russian with excerpts from Spaltkopf where the relationship of the protagonist, Mischka, with these two languages emerges. In this way, it will be possible to determine whether Spaltkopf reflects not only the author’s migratory experience but also her linguistic biography. Furthermore, it will be analyzed if and to what extent the expression of linguistic attitudes and emotions related to German and Russian differs between the novel and the oral autobiographical account. To examine how Rabinowich expresses her linguistic experiences and emotions related to German and Russian, a qualitative analysis of the texts will be conducted, with a theoretical approach based on the concepts of linguistic biography and verbalization of emotions developed by Brigitta Busch and Reinhard Fiehler.

Out of the theatres of memory: the plural Judaism of Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Marija Stepanova

Valentina Parisi — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article deals with literary representations of Jewishness in Sasha Maria Salzmann’s recent works. While her oeuvre has been often juxtaposed to those of other German writing authors who immigrated from the former Ussr to Germany during the 1990s as Jewish quota refugees (namely Olga Grjasnowa, Lena Gorelik and Dimitrii Kapitelman), an unprecedented comparison is here drawn with a Russian writing poet and novelist, Marija Stepanova, whose acclaimed book Pamjati pamjati (translated in German under the title Nach dem Gedächtnis) represented for Salzmann a point of reference, as reflections about post-traumatic memory are concerned. The theme of “postmemory” (to quote Marianne Hirsch) is also at the core of Salzmann’s first novel Außer sich, (Beside Myself), published in 2017 almost simultaneously with Stepanova’s book. By establishing a possible filiation between Außer sich and Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (Mameloschn Mothertongue, 2012), the article shows how concepts of Jewishness are enmeshed in the main characters’ quest for the possibility to shift among different identities. This is echoed by Salzmann’s criticism of exploitations of Jews in the ongoing public debate in Germany, in the framework of what the sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann called “the German Theater of Memory”. On one hand, Salzmann’s own experience as a post-Soviet Jew allowed to deconstruct her the equation Jew = victim, on the other, her sensibility for supranational and multicultural hybridization led her to pledge for the valorization of plural Jewish identities.

“The landscape from which I come [...] it was a district of men and books”. The reception of Paul Celan’s work in Ukraine

Liliana Giacoponi — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article aims to investigate the reception of Paul Celan’s work in Ukraine after long years during which his name had been erased from the country’s cultural life. The work attempts to trace the path that led to the translation of his opera omnia, highlighting its difficulties and vicissitudes. By analysing the impact Celan’s poetry had on the Ukrainian’s intellectual life, it will elucidate the peculiar aspects of the reception in the works of the most prominent contemporary Ukrainian artists, writers, poets and musicians.

Vom Zuviel war die Rede, vom Zuwenig. Paul Celan in the Works of Mirosław Bałka

Laura Quercioli — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was perhaps, among the poets of the past century, the one whose influence on the figurative arts was most profound. However, when it comes to visual artists who illustrated, or were inspired by, his work, we find generally mentioned the German Anselm Kiefer, the Polish-American Daniel Libeskind, the Hungarian-German László Lakner, or even the Italians Giosetta Fioroni or Giuseppe Caccavale. Extraordinarily important, however, is the presence of Celan in the work of Mirosław Bałka. Generally regarded as Poland’s greatest figurative artist/sculptor, Mirosław Bałka (b. 1958), in a recent interview with Friederike Günther (Friederike Günther interviews Miroslaw Balka, 02.03.2023, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin), speaks openly about a relationship that his admirers and connoisseurs have always known about, namely his almost amicable bond with Paul Celan. Celan’s poetry, says the artist, has been known to me since 1990 (the first translations into Polish of the poet from Czernowitz, by Ryszard Krynicki, appeared as early as 1972) and has been with me ever since, even when I do not mention it explicitly. This article will therefore attempt to account, at least in part, for the multiple presence of Celan in the works of the Polish artist: from direct quotation, as first in Me Reading Lichtzwang of 2011, to which the largest part of this text is dedicated. The use of black and white empty space also marks some of the affinities between the sculptor and the poet. The presence of Celan’s “person” and work is also bound, in Bałka, with the question of the use of the German language, which has, in this author, a singular two-faced aspect. Not only does German carry the echo of war and extermination, not only is it the essentially incomprehensible and foreign, ‘non-Polish’ language par excellence. German, thanks to the many lexical borrowings in the field of craftsmanship, also has, for Bałka (whose father and grandfather were stonemasons) the sound of a familiar language, and symbolises the ethics and dedication to work, including manual work, to which this artist is so attached.

Velimir Chlebnikov, Poesie. Saggio, antologia e commento di Angelo Maria Ripellino. Intr. di Alessandro Niero. Nuova ed. a cura di Alessandro Niero e Riccardo Mini. Einaudi, Torino 2024

Gabriele Mazzitelli — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht: Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute. Hrsg. Peter Geist, Friederike Reents, Henrieke Stahl. Metzler, Heidelberg 2021

Alessandro Achilli — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Olena Ponomareva, Dizionario Hoepli Ucraino: Ucraino-Italiano. Hoepli, Milano 2020

Salvatore Del Gaudio — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Zuzana Nemčíková, Ivan Šuša, Antológia súčasnej slovenskej literatúry / Antologia della letteratura slovacca contemporanea. Istituto Slovacco a Roma, Roma 2023

Josef Sikola — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Memories of Professor Algis Kalėda (1952-2017), founder of Polish Studies at Vilnius University

Irena Fedorowicz, Kinga Geben — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper offers a series of memories of Professor Algis Kalėda, who passed away in 2017, and a short survey of some of his main publications, dedicated to several aspects of Polish literature in a comparative Polish-Lithuanian perspective.

Italian Loanwords in Contemporary Bosnian Language

Tarik Cusic — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article is about Italian loanwords in the contemporary Bosnian language. The article illustrates the ways of adaptation and integration of Italianisms into the Bosnian language system, on the phonetic-phonological and orthographic, morphological and semantic level, with the aim of at least partially shedding light on this alloglottic element in contemporary Bosnian language. Phonological adaptation essentially means replacing phonemes from the donor language with phonemes from the recipient language in each borrowed word. Therefore, special attention was paid to, among other things, Italian diphthongs, Italian semivowels, geminated consonants, and individual sounds, i.e. those phonological features of the Italian language that were particularly emphasized in the adaptation process. The orthographic differences between Bosnian and Italian are most noticeable in the category of recording individual consonants and consonant groups. In the process of adapting Italianisms at the morphological level of the linguistic structure of Bosnian, the main task is to compare the basic forms of words in the source language with the basic forms of the same words in the recipient language with the aim of determining similarities and differences between them. That is why the focus of the research was noun Italianisms (nouns that have the same gender in Italian and Bosnian, as well as nouns that have different genders in Italian and Bosnian), verb Italianisms, adjective Italianisms and adverbial Italianisms. The adaptation of Italian loanwords at the semantic level implies a comparative examination of the meaning of the original word in Italian in relation to the meaning that the loanword has in Bosnian. That’s why Italianisms with an unchanged meaning, as well as Italianisms with a changed meaning, were analyzed.

The Slavic names of the municipality of Nikolsdorf (East Tyrol) - Slavia Tirolensis VII

Emanuel Klotz — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, the author presents the Slavic onomastic heritage of the municipality of Nikolsdorf (Tyrol). The results presented here originate from the work on the author’s project named Slavia Tirolensis in which the Slavic loans within Eastern Tyrol are analysed and etymologised based on the latest scientific findings. To ensure high quality etymologies, the phonetic features of the local dialect are presented in the first chapter. This allows for an adequate interpretation of the dialectal pronunciation of the names in question. For instance, unlike in most other dialects of the Tyrolean Slavia submersa, MHG ei as in zwei ‘two’ is reflected as [aː] ([ˈtsvaː]). The main section of the paper lists the treated names in alphabetical order. For each name, documentary evidence is provided if available, followed by an etymological interpretation and a discussion of the noteworthy sound changes the loan has undergone. It turns out that, although the Nikolsdorf municipality is (and has always been) the major transit axis between today’s Tyrol and Carinthia, it harbours many very recent loans, as can be seen from the missing accent retraction onto the first syllable, typical for integrations before 1050. Therefore, the Slavic language must have been still alive in the investigated area after this very date.

Hanna Komar at the Start of a Very Promising Career as Poet and Translator

Arnold McMillin — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to introduce to a new audience of English speakers, a talented poet and translator who, like so many other young Belarusians, now lives outside her country of birth. Hanna Komar's enterprisingly original poetry, at a still relatively early stage, is already striking in its thematic boldness and honesty, making use of wide-ranging and original imagery, great assonance and a broad lexical spectrum, without succumbing to the influence of Russian, so ubiquitous elsewhere. Deeply patriotic, she not only describes the protests and their barbaric suppression, but also attempts to record in verse, based on interviews, the feelings and impressions of those who have been driven abroad by a ruthless regime. Her poetry has been widely translated and she has shown herself to be resourceful and capable in translating Charles Bukowski's work into Belarusian. It is hoped that Komar will soon receive the wide recognition she undoubtedly deserves.

Chekhov's Na Puti: a story within a story

Giacoma Strano — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Na puti (On the Road) occupies a central place in the chekhovian fiction. An analysis of the text allows us to understand the narrative processes, the relationship with contemporaneity and the writer’s Weltanschauung at the moment when Antosha Chekhonté became Anton Chekhov. Published as a Christmas story on 25 December 1886 in Aleksei Suvorin’s newspaper “Novoe Vremia”, built on the theme of travel and encounter, Na puti turns into a discourse on the intelligentsia. In the vicissitudes of the hero, literary models (Turgenev’s Rudin and Bazarov, Chernishevski’s Rakhmetov) and historical events of the 1860s-1880s are combined. This figure is thus created by the author through hyperbole. Likharev’s “confession” is punctuated with references to the women’s question, to Chernii Peredel, to a “nun-nihilist” (Vera Zasulich), to Ivan Aksakov, to Tolstoism. We also find there the keywords of Chekhov’s ethical code and poetics: truth (pravda), righteousness (spravedlivost’), conscience (sovest’). The narrator portrays the characters in both outward appearance (somatic features, clothes) and “psyche” (through actions), yet leaves an underlying ambivalence in each. Likharev’s surname itself, coined on the adjective likhoi, has a double meaning. The heroine, the barishnia Maria Ilovaiskaia, is an active, efficient landowner, and at the same time a sensitive lady. But sharp features give her face “a biting expression”, she is “slim as a little snake” and in speaking “she moistened her lips with her sharp, little tongue” The author also seems to create this figure in opposition to contemporary real and literary female types (nihilists, kursistki, Turgenev’s heroines). The reader has been able to observe the characters through numerous details, has been able to listen to them, has been drawn into the story by the constant references to contemporaneity: finally, he will be able to formulate his own judgement. The chronotopic dimension, in which the story is set, plays an important function in the text. The hero and heroine meet in a transitory space-time: the traveller’s room (proezzhaiushchaia) of a tavern and Christmas night. In the morning, each resumes his or her own “road” (put’) towards divergent destinations and beyond the threshold, antithetical spaces loom up: the house for Ilovaiskaia, the steppe, the mines for Licharev.

Verlibre as Hermeneutics: Experimental Translations by M. L. Gasparov

Elina Sventsytskaja — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I analyze the collection of free-verse translations of Russian and foreign works from antiquity to the 20th century by M. L. Gasparov, a well-known specialist in versification and translator. Gasparov’s book is undoubtedly interesting not only as an experiment, but also as a work of a poet and a scholar keen to demonstrate the possibilities of vers libre as a means of interpretation. The analysis has led to the conclusion that interpretation in this case is not only focused on a particular text. It also articulates the laws of genre and even of a particular literary movement. In essence, the author connects voices far apart in time; the text becomes a venue for the encounter of different creative subjects, the basis of a perspective of meaning that is both comprehensive and unique.