Central-European Studies is an interdisciplinary yearbook devoted to Central Europe and neighbouring regions viewed from a comparative perspective. Olga V. Khavanova is the editor-in-chief. The Central-European Studies series was founded in 1999 at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences by Tofik. M. Ismailov and Aleksandr S. Stykalin. The early issues of the series contained the proceedings of conferences devoted to Central-European history and culture from the Middle Ages to the present day or were festschrifts in honour of Russian historians who had made a significant contribution to the research of the region. In total, 9 issues were published between 1999 and 2017. In 2018, the publication was transformed into a yearbook intended to publish both the proceedings of conferences held under the auspices of the Interdisciplinary Central-European Seminar and articles complying with the scope of the yearbook. Founder and publisher — Institute of Slavic Studies RAS, Leninskii Prospekt, 32A, Moscow, Russia, 119334
Exploitation of Social Dispersion: The Socio-Political Experience of Post-War Poland
The monograph by Piotr Borowiec provides a comprehensive view of the social and political dynamics that shaped the post-war history of Poland. Carefully examining class, religious and regional divisions, the author resumes that the political leaders of both post-war and democratic Poland used existing social differences to consolidate their power and mobilize public support. The book highlights the negative consequences of exploiting social divisions for ideological advantage. The author offers a blueprint for understanding current political challenges, based on historical facts and parallels, as well as on empirical and theoretical achievements of scholars dealing with the structure of Polish society, which allows the reader to take a fresh look at the features of the contemporary political landscape in Poland.
Copyright (c) 2024 Central-European Studies
Shared Sufferings, Shared Interests, One Hope for Freedom
The article critically reviews the collection of articles with the title “Nations and Borders. The Emergence of New States in Central and Eastern Europe after World War I”. The collection was published in 2022 as part of the series “History from the Central European Perspective”, a platform welcoming academic discussion centred around the medieval, modern, and contemporary history of Poland and so-called Central and Eastern Europe. The articles were written by historians from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania. They focus on the “emancipation” of the peoples of the region during and after World War I, when the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, and Poland began restoring its statehood. The authors look closely into the formation of statehood and the steps associated with it, that is establishing territories and borders, defining the population and its status / status hierarchy, creating power structures and organisations, and singling out the executive branch and the armed forces. The collection research also delves into national sovereignty and its domestic and external sources. For example, the authors analyse the impact Great Britain, the US, France, Germany, and Russia had on the formation of Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Latvian statehood, with the restored Polish state acting both as a participant and as a factor of national and state creation. The author of the review praises the contribution of the collection creators to contemporary Eastern and Central European studies, listing historiographical value as its strength, as it shows that big imperial narratives are being reinterpreted from a national perspective.
National and European Components in the Concept of Sovereignty in the EU Countries:
The two-hundred-year long history of the independent Greek is intrinsically connected to the history of Europe as a whole. Contemporary Greek national identity has a pronounced European element. On the other hand, independent Greece has, throughout its history, been consistently influenced by the great powers (both European powers and the USA), which to some extent determined the course of its foreign and domestic policies. Membership in the EU does require a country to transfer part of its sovereignty to the transnational organisation. This issue has been drawing the attention of both politicians and researchers since the beginning of European integration. In Greece it became an especially prominent part of the political discourse in 2010, with the advent of the financial and economic crisis. For several years, the Greek economy and financial policies were put under control of the “troika” of external creditors — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, severely limiting national sovereignty and leading to a rise in popular scepticism towards the idea of European integration. The Greek crisis revealed an imbalance within the Eurozone, with economically more powerful countries easily influencing less powerful ones by using the political tools of the EU, despite nominally being equal partners within the Union. This core-periphery asymmetry made the European integration a tool, and the EU itself an arena, for expanding the influence of economically powerful states (for example, Germany). The sovereignty of more and less powerful countries was not treated in the same way, which by itself made the integration process more difficult. The situation led to, among other consequences, a re-examination of Greek relations with the EU and the limits it had put on the country’s sovereignty in Greek political discourse, including the emerging notion of Greece becoming a “debt colony” of Europe. The tension between Greece and Turkey, as well as the Balkan vector of Greek foreign policy, can be productively examined through the lens of Greek participation in the European integration project, which can reveal the interrelation of the national and European components in the Greek concept of sovereignty.
Economisc and Liberty: The Past and the Present
The Concept of Economic Freedom in Czechoslovak Emigrant and Samizdat Magazines (1985-1989)
The analysis of the publications of émigré and samizdat journals reveals the essence of the concept of “economic freedom” as interpreted by Czech dissidents. The author emphasises that it became a central element of the transformation of the country’s economic system in the 1990s. It is stressed that perestroika in the USSR and Mikhail Gorbachev himself became a powerful external factor that intensified the process of its conceptualisation. The content of the concept was analysed through the prism of such aspects of economic development as state regulation, the phenomenon of private property, the tax system, the principle of the rule of law, and the existence of free access to all sectors of the economy. The author concludes that the Czech dissidents’ vision of economic freedom was in many ways consistent with both prevailing and later developed ideas about economic freedom and its place in society and the state. The article also shows the diversity of attitudes and perceptions about the future of Czechoslovakia in the “window of opportunity” that opened for it, without losing sight of the central role of economic freedom in achieving a free society. In addition, the study of Czech dissidents’ views on perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev’ role in it made it possible to trace the development of their attitude to the processes both in the Soviet Union and in their own country. The analysis of this position is also valuable because it allows us not only to show what image of the USSR and of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee himself was created on the pages of illegally published magazines, but also to determine the degree of development of economic thought in Czechoslovakia, which evolved under difficult conditions after the suppression of the Prague Spring, but was nevertheless able to absorb and generate advanced ideas.
French Legislation of the Napoleonic Era in the Kingdom of Poland:
According to the decision by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Austria, Prussia and Russia, which included parts of the territory of the Duchy of Warsaw, assumed mutual obligations to ensure the rights of the Polish population. In the Kingdom of Poland, established on Polish lands within the Russian Empire, which was granted a constitution, preserved state institutions and some political and civil liberties, the French Civil Code (Code Napoleon) and the French Commercial Code continued to apply. Thus, the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland were involved in the process of systematising state and civil law, which took place in many European countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the same time, from the end of the 1820s onwards, the legislation of the Kingdom of Poland was brought closer to that of the Empire. This process, especially after the suppression of the Polish Uprising of 1830-1831, accompanied by the restriction of political and civil liberties granted by the Constitution of 1815, favoured the incorporation of the Polish lands into the Russian state. At the same time, the 1809 incorporation of the French Commercial Code into the national legal system of the Duchy of Warsaw, which was also in force in the Kingdom of Poland, even after the creation of the independent Polish state in 1918, contributed to the creation of legal and economic unity, which was perceived as a manifestation of economic and political freedom under conditions of a significant restriction of national rights. The implementation of French legislation in the early ninettenth century had a significant impact on the systematisation of state and civil law in the Kingdom of Poland.
French Civil Code (Napoleon Code) and the French Commercial Code in the Polish lands
the constitutional period of the history of the Kingdom of Poland
the Russian Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century
systematisation of the legislation of the Russian Empire
Ethics and Pragmatics of Freedom: Author, Hero, Reader (Olga Tokarczuk and Janina Duszejko)
The article is devoted to Olga Tokarczuk’s “moral thriller” Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, introducing a heroine who is endowed with a demonstratively morally controversial freedom of action: by sharpening the ideas of critical posthumanism, the author describes a collision with the unpunished killing of hunters by an eccentric defender of animal rights. The organisation of textual space and its perception are analysed from the perspective of ethics and pragmatics of freedom as understood by the author, the hero, and the reader, from the perspective of interaction between the reader's and the author's vision of fiction’s ethical limits, as well as the functions and possibilities of literature. The conflict in the novel, which — from a socio-psychological and discursive point of view — represents a conflict of individual and conventional behaviour, is embodied at the level of eventuality through the diverse use of the sphere of unpredictability, which affects the semantic structure of the text and the horizon of the reader's expectation. The article analyses the interaction of the logic of genre settings, the narrative logic of plot and fabula, both from a fictional, autobiographical and extra-textual stance. Tokarczuk’s novel is an (accomplished) artistic provocation, understood as the organisation of a dialogue with the reader in such a paradoxical way as to inevitably induce meaning-generating reflections by the latter. The main mechanism employed by the text is the absence of the expected plot element in the finale (punishment / conviction / repentance of the heroine). Manipulating the boundaries of the heroine's freedom of behaviour, undermining the oppositions characteristic of the detective, the author challenges not only specific stereotypes of the worldview, but also the very principle of binary closure. Tokarczuk’s understanding of the ideas of integral and “sensitive” narrative about the world, meliorist ethical and psychological functions and possibilities of literature (in particular, the literature of the “in-between”, combining ludic and intellectual elements) is close to the concepts of pragmatic aesthetics: fiction is a specific way of transmitting and acquiring experience, it is performative knowledge, involving imagination and mechanisms of identification and empathy, constituting an element of social communication.
Choosing Unfreedom: the Anschluss of 1938 as Depicted in the Austrian Press
With the establishment of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime in Austria in the 1930s, the Austrian press came under strict state control, which, to a certain extent, led to its unification and high controllability by public opinion. These trends manifested themselves most clearly during the preparation and implementation of the Anschluss in 1938. Despite the differing political orientation of the newspapers that were formally representing the entire spectrum of social thought, every issue would broadcast identical patterns, whose content depended on the government’s position at any given moment. Throughout January and February, every newspaper actively made patriotic statements justifying the viability of an independent Austrian state and defending the government’s policy of maintaining close ties between the First Austrian Republic and the Third Reich. However, as the government of Kurt Schuschnigg showed more and more compliance with the demands of the German Führer for the reunification of the two German-seaking states, the tone in the Austrian press moved towards increasing approval of the idea of the Anschluss and justifying the need to hold a referendum on the fate of Austria. As a result, after the occupation of Austrian lands by German troops, the local press quickly reoriented itself towards supporting the Nazification of Austria and called for voting for the inclusion of the state in the German Reich in the plebiscite on 10 April. Such adaptability of the Austrian press was to a large extent impelled by the authoritarian regime of Dollfuss/Schuschnigg and reflected the disappointment in the viability of one’s own state that had taken shape among the Austrian population by the end of the 1930s.
Opinion Journalism, Periodicals, Propaganda
Historical Narratives in Burgenland Local History Journals Between the Two World Wars
Border regions of nation states have always played an important role in the process of national identity construction. The region of Burgenland was transferred to Austria in 1921. After the First World War, the country was compensated with a territory that had previously been a part of Hungary. Since the “birth” of the region, it has been heavily contested, mostly by Hungarian historians. Of course, the Austrian historical writing was eager to integrate Burgenland into its national histories. The aim of my study is to show how local history journals participated in creating a new regional identity in Burgenland. Three journals will be at the centre of my attention: Burgenland, Mitteilungen des Burgenländischen Heimatschutzvereins, and the fusion of these two: the Burgenländische Heimatblätter. I demonstrate the differences and debates between these journals, as they often polemicised against each other to determine who should dominate the discourse about the history of Burgenland. The journal Burgenland had close ties to the regional government and was oriented towards German nationalism. In contrast to the Burgenland, the Mitteilungen was published by the Burgenländisches Heimatschutzverein, an organisation of civil society. In the volumes of Mitteilungen nationalism was less present, rather, we can observe criticism against industrialism and a strong romanticisation of nature. Burgenland was financed by the regional authorities, whereas Mitteilungen relied mainly on donations and membership fees. I also introduce debates between Hungarian and Austrian authors (Otto Aull and Gyula Gáyer) about this region to present a nuanced and balanced picture about the Burgenland-debate in the interwar period. The article shows that the historical narratives of these journals were shaped by encounters with rival interpretations of the past, and as a result, the dominant völkisch interpretation emerged, and Mitteilungen, as a journal with a more conservative agenda, was defeated.
Some Aspects of Soviet-German Economic Relations and David Kandelaki’s Mission (1935-1937):
In the middle of the 1930s, Stalin decided to intensify trade and economic relations with Germany in order to obtain long-term loans to finance mainly supplies of military and dual-use products. At the same time, the Nazi regime, despite its anti-Soviet foreign policy, was interested in establishing stable economic ties with Moscow, as it was experiencing an increasing dependence of the German economy on supplies of strategic raw materials from the USSR. The combination of these factors predetermined the Kremlin’s decision to entrust the Trade Representative in Germany David V. Kandelaki with a special mission, which was not limited to solving economic problems, but also included the creation of an atmosphere of trust, which is so crucial for negotiations on the supply of sensitive military products. At the same time, long-term loans would be a significant guarantee of the sustainability of such relations. According to Stalin's plan, all this was to be a preparatory stage for political negotiations with the German leadership. Actively contributing to the implementation of the five-year loan granted to the USSR in 1935, Kandelaki achieved serious concessions from the German side, including the agreement to supply some military products previously prohibited to export to the USSR. However, all the attempts by the Trade Representative to ensure the solution of the political problem, conditioning further expansion of economic relations with Berlin’s consent to negotiations on a political settlement, led to nothing. The reason for this was the unrealistic tasks set by Stalin, ignoring the “Hitler factor” and his political and ideological attitudes that determined the nature of German-Soviet relations.
Central Europe Between the Two World Wars
The Croatian Issue in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. 1918-1929
Russian historians, as well as Serbian and Croatian authors, when speaking about the Croatian question in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, refer to the activities of the Croatian (Republican) Peasant Party, often awarded the epithet “national movement”. No distinction is made between Serbian-Croatian relations, the “Serbian-Croatian conflict” and its interaction with Serbian parties and, above all, with the People’s Radical Party, which is also called the representative of the entire Serbian people. One cannot help but see the vulnerability of such generalisations. If parties are “national movements,” how should we evaluate their ideological inconsistency and tendency to form unexpected alliances? Did these qualities correspond to a similar inconstancy of the masses, or did the party leaders sometimes not pursue the popular aspirations, which were more or less stable, but their personal motives instead? The vulnerability of identifying party conflicts with interethnic contradictions prompts us to narrow the angle of consideration of the Croatian issue to a phenomenon of political life. This does not mean that it is impossible to trace the connection between what was happening in the political arena and interethnic relations. Politics served as a reflection of the mood of the masses. Unfortunately, our understanding of them is limited by the lack of sociological data, so inter-party struggle can be considered the main indicator of the severity of Serbian-Croatian contradictions, but not the only one. The activities of “people’s” organisations were another influence.
“I Did not Aspire and Do not Aspire to Become a Diplomatic Representative…” Solomon I. Gillerson and the Soviet Red Cross Mission in Czechoslovakia (July 1920 — June 1921)
This article examines the main areas of activity of the first Soviet mission in the Czechoslovak Republic — the mission of the Red Cross of the RSFSR. The author provides extensive evidence that the mission performed functions that went far beyond its official task: providing assistance to former Russian prisoners of war and their repatriation. Considerable attention is paid to the diplomatic activities of the mission: establishing and maintaining contacts with Czechoslovakian officials, negotiations on the neutrality of Prague in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 and on the recognition of the Soviet state. For Moscow, the Soviet Red Cross mission was an important source of information about the internal political and economic situation in Czechoslovakia, its foreign policy, and international relations in Central and South-Eastern Europe. The article demonstrates the conspiratorial activities of the mission, its support for the revolutionary movement in Czechoslovakia and neighboring countries, its mediating role between the Comintern and left-wing radical organisations in the region, and its work among former legionnaires in the ranks of Russian and Ukrainian emigrants. The author focuses on the personality of the head of the mission, Solomon I. Gillerson, his attitude towards some problems of the domestic and foreign policy of Soviet Russia, towards the communist movement in Czechoslovakia, and towards the directives he received from Moscow. The conflict between Gillerson and the Comintern agent V. Vishnevsky is examined in more detail. The article is based on the study of the funds of Russian and Czech archives, which contain documents of the mission itself (telegrams, letters, reports, and reviews sent to Moscow, and dispatches and instructions by the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR addressed to the mission), as well as materials relating to its position in Prague (diplomatic and other official and personal correspondence, reports from Czechoslovak police agents).
revolutionary movement in Czechoslovakia
Attempts to Restore the Power of Charles Habsburg in Hungary in 1921: The Position of French Diplomacy
Contemporaries have expressed contradictory opinions about the line of behaviour taken by Paris during the two attempts at Habsburg restoration in Hungary in 1921 (especially the first one), and the historians’ interpretations were not unified, either. This article aims to analyse the position of French diplomacy during the attempted restoration of Charles I Habsburg’s power, and to identify the key influential factors. The article is based on a corpus of published and archival documents characterising the activities of the central apparatus of the Foreign Ministry of the Third Republic, the French High Commissioner in Budapest, Maurice Fouchet, and a number of diplomatic missions. The author concludes that the stance of French diplomacy was ambiguous. On the one hand, there was a “hard core” which defined the “red lines” regarding Hungary. Paris did not want to radically worsen its relations with partners from the Big and the Little Entente because of the “Hungarian question”; the latter was not supposed to provoke a wide scale instability in East-Central Europe, and the basic parameters of the Versailles regulation had to be preserved. The potential benefits of the Habsburg restoration did not outweigh the foreign policy costs, and, most importantly, putting these benefits into practice could only take place in the case of Charles' successful actions. On the other hand, French diplomats did not rule out that the return of the Habsburgs to power could have some favourable consequences for France, including reducing the risks of Hungary's gravitation towards Germany and creating a possible ground for Austro-Hungarian rapprochement as an alternative to an Anschluss. Finally, the government of Aristide Briand added some volatility to Paris’ position, which, however, remained far from offering any really serious support to Charles’ endeavours.
Henry Moser — Benjamin Kallay’s Man in Paris: To the History of Alfons Mucha’s Participation in the Design of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion at the 1900 World Exhibition
This article is devoted to a hitherto unexplored aspect of the work of Benjamin Kállay, who was Minister of the joint Ministry of Finance of Austria-Hungary from 1882 to 1903 and in this capacity supervised the transformation of the province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He succeeded in creating an administrative framework for the formation of an independent Bosnian nation, based on the principle of equality between Muslim and Christian communities, and successfully integrated the province into the liberal constitutional organisation of the dual monarchy. To promote the successes of Bosnian modernisation, Kállay established non-governmental representation in France in 1895, promoting—through various medial strategies—a positive image of the country in the eyes of the international community that would dispel the bloody memories of the religious conflicts. In the course of archival research in the Historical Museum of Bern, Switzerland, the author of this article discovered the personal archive of Heinrich (Henri) Moser, a merchant and orientalist, a connoisseur of the Muslim world of Central Asia and a confidant of Kállay, who for about 10 years successfully interacted with the world press, attracted foreign investment to Bosnia, promoted Bosnian goods on world markets, and turned Bosnia into a popular tourist destination with an oriental flavour. Moser’s correspondence and other documents from the Swiss museum made it possible to reconstruct in detail the history of the creation of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion at the World Exhibition in 1900 and the involvement of the Czech painter Alfons Mucha, who lived in Paris, in the creation of the innovative art nouveau style circle depicting the country’s history, which became the main artistic attraction of the world exhibition.
Austria-Hungary and the Discourse of Freedom
Anti-German Protests in Ljubljana in September 1908 — an Episode of the Slovenes’ Struggle for National Freedom
This article examines the specifics of the anti-German riot of the Slovenes on 18-20 September 1908 in Ljubljana, which took place in the context of a general tightening of Slovenian-German confrontation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also analyses their results and significance for the further development of the national struggle of the Slovenian people. In response to the anti-Slovenian protests by the Germans in Ptuj on 13 September 1908, Slovene liberals held a protest rally in Ljubljana on 18 September, which escalated into street riots where Germans were attacked by Slovenes. These were the most powerful incidences of public unrest in the city since the revolution of 1848. As late as 20 September, they were suppressed by government troops, while several Slovenians were injured and two were killed. The shooting of Slovene protesters had serious consequences. Anti-German and anti-Slovenian protest rallies and demonstrations pervaded the empire, the Germans were outraged by the actions of the Slovenian nationalists, and the majority of the Austrian Slavs expressed their solidarity with them. One of the consequences of the September protests in Ljubljana was a boycott against the Germans initiated by Slovenian politicians, which not only infringed on their national dignity, but also incurred serious economic damage to them. Previously, Slovenian historians assessed the September events in Ljubljana as a milestone in the development of the national self-awareness of the Slovenes; modern researchers believe that they should not be considered to be of so much importance. In any case, anti-German unrest in Ljubljana caused a rise in nationalism among the Slovenes, dissatisfaction with the actions of the army and the government, and sharply worsened Slovene-German relations. In addition to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary a few days later, the riots gave impetus to the intensified development of the Slovenes’ own version of the trialism programme, which was already adopted in January 1909 by both Catholics and liberals at a meeting of the Carniola provincial assembly.
The Discourse of Freedom in the Austrian Pedagogical Press of 1867–1914 as a Tool of Protest Against Public Control
Ever since their emergence, state systems of secular schooling have been regularly influenced not only by pedagogical theories, but also by socio-political movements and official ideologies. After the dualist monarchy of Austria-Hungary was established, the school and its issues turned into an arena of nationalist and political struggle and it also became an object of increased state control. All stakeholders considered schools and teachers as an effective tool for enhancing their influence. As schools felt growing pressure from the state, political parties, and national organisations, the word “freedom” sounded increasingly loud in public speeches during meetings of teachers’ associations and appeared more frequently in the pedagogical periodicals. The article analyses teachers’ journals and newspapers, which were the press organs of teachers’ associations of different political background, where Austrian schoolteachers used the discourse of “freedom” to express their views on their profession, their identity, and their role in society. The author identifies the following main meanings of freedom in the Austrian teachers' polemic: personal freedom and civil liberties, professional freedom, freedom in fulfilling one's national mission, and freedom from political engagement. At the same time, special attention is paid to the policies of the Viennese Ministry of Culture and Education and the actions of the Habsburg bureaucracy, which triggered the teachers’ demand for freedom for schools. This allows for a correction of the findings in the historiography, which previously ignored the role of state officials in the development of Austrian schooling. The author questions the thesis about the passivity of Habsburg officials in the face of the nationalist onslaught and argues that teachers’ protests against the restriction of their freedom were caused by the bureaucracy’s desire to improve the quality of teaching in schools and to provide civic and patriotic education for pupils that was aimed at developing a sense of “Austrianness”, love for the “great Fatherland” and loyalty to the ruling dynasty.
After the War: “Virulent” Nationalisms and Collective Memory Traumas in East-Central-Europe
The collection of articles edited by Hungarian historians László Szárka and Attila Pók focuses on the consequences of the First World War for the peoples of East-Central Europe, the efforts of national minorities to achieve their own goals with the support of ethnically related states, and the nation-building strategies announced by these minorities. Avoiding the search for an answer to the question of personal and collective responsibility for the consequences of the global armed conflict, the authors of the specific-historical articles of the collection add new valuable details to the history of the countries and peoples of the region in the period of the world wars.
dissolution of Austria-Hungary, national minorities, histriography
Copyright (c) 2023 Центральноевропейские исследования
Pavel Pierling (1840–1922), his Works and his Archive
Pavel Pierling, a Russian historian and member of the Society of Jesus, is the author of the fundamental five-volume work La Russie et le Saint-Siège, published in French in Paris from 1896–1912. He wrote this great work based on collections of Russian and European (primarily Italian) archives. Pierling gathered a significant part of these documents in the process of his own research and correspondence conducted with the archives and fellow historians. The historian published a substantial number of collected documents, either in the form of separate publications or as appendices to his research and cites from many of these in his works. At the same time, a lot of material was preserved in his personal archive. It was originally stored as part of the Slavic Library in Paris (Bibliothèque slave de Paris), which he presided over from 1877 to 1922. In 1901, due to the tightening of French legislation in relation to religious associations, most of the library had to be transported to Brussels. In 1905, it was moved again to new, more spacious premises. In 1908, Pierling arrived from Paris with the remainder of his books and spent the rest of his life here. In 1923, the Slavic Library was again transported to Paris, until it was moved to a suburb of Paris in 1982, together with the library’s archive, in Le Centre d’études russes de Meudon. In 2002, this extensive collection, including Pavel Pierling’s personal archive, was divided into two larger parts: documents related to the history of the Society and the personal funds of its members were transferred to the Archives françaises de la Compagnie de Jésus in Vanves, while the rest ended up as part of the Bibliothèque Diderot de Lyon. The extensive collection of Pavel Pierling makes it possible, firstly, to get acquainted with his large private and professional correspondence networks; secondly, to get an idea of his activities as a priest, member of the Society of Jesus, and researcher; and thirdly, to get acquainted with the collections of documents that he had been carefully collecting for his work and which reflect all the subjects and topics of his research. Based on this, one can identify important details of his biography and comprehend the personal and scholarly achievements of this bibliophile, Slavist, and major researcher of the relations between Russia and the Holy See.
Russian Catholics of the nineteenth century
The Intricacies of Diplomatic Protocol. Preparations for János Kádár’s Visits to Yugoslavia in 1973 and 1977
By the time János Kádár — the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party — visited the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1973 and 1977, dozens of top-level trips had already been organised to that country. Tito himself had also visited many countries abroad. Inasmuch as the algorithms of the activity of the Yugoslav protocol service staff of that period were basically settled, the organization of the Hungarian leader’s journeys can be considered as a typical task. This study is focused on some nuances of the duties of the Yugoslav protocol service staff, such as determining the form of the visit, the status of negotiators, places of reception and accommodation of the guests, organization of solemn greeting and farewell procedures, seating arrangements, compiling festive menus for gala lunches and dinners, drafting concert programmes, or selecting memorable gifts and souvenirs. The author applies the gift theory by Marcel Mauss to examine the symbolic value of gifts in diplomacy. Eventually, the efforts of the protocol services created a formal and ceremonial background against which the charm of the charismatic Yugoslav president stood out in stark contrast, and this, in turn, created a favourable ground for non-protocol diplomacy, concluding personal, unofficial agreements.
Copyright (c) 2023 Central-European Studies
Female Ethno-National Personifications in the Austrian Political Caricature of the Period of the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–1878)
This paper is devoted to the gender aspect of ethno-ational representations in political cartoons. The content of the study is formed by the materials of the political cartoon presented on the pages of the satirical magazines of Austria-Hungary during the Great Eastern (Balkan) crisis of the 1870 s. (Die Bombe, Der Floh, and Kikeriki). An attempt is made to systematize the feminine images of the Austrian political caricature during the Balkan crisis. Among them stand out: images of the Virgin Martyr (feminine passive-suffering personifications of the Balkan peoples and states along with the Ottoman Empire); feminine images of Austria (national representations of the country in the image of the Mother and heroized personifications of the Holy Roman Empire); images that are the personification of the theme of female deceit / “seduction” in politics and various variations of the harem theme in relation to the Ottoman Empire; feminine personifications of the infernal distortion of the Woman’s essence (war in the guise of the Gorgon Medusa, etc.). Such problems are considered as the formation of characteristic preferences of the Austrian political caricature in the distribution of variations of feminine images in relation to the image of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires and the Balkan peoples and states; ways of opposing feminine and masculine symbols of the countries participating in the main events of the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878. The methodology of the research is based on “deciphering” the figurative and metaphorical way of constructing feminine ethno-national representations based on references to mythology and national history within the framework of imagology approaches, along with identifying the historical context of the international politics of the “great powers” in the Balkan region in the 1870s.
Slavic Feminative Suffixes in Linguistic Geography Presentation
The article deals with the linguistic geography analysis of the words meaning women and female animals containing the suffixes *-ica, *-ъka/*-ьka, *-ixa and *-ynja /*-inja on the material of “Slavic Linguistic Atlas”. The research object are schematic maps compiled on the base of its seven volumes of lexical and word-formation series. On each of them the main localization of the forms with one of the affixes in both meanings is given. As a result of their analysis the conclusions about the degree of area matching of words in both meanings is made. It appears that the areas of the highest concentration of the suffixes in both lexical groups in most cases match only partly. Its main part is located in different Slavic languages. The most clear examples of such spatial differentiation are the following: the low frequency of woman designations with the suffix *-ica in Polish and Czech along with quite numerous fixations of female animal names with the same formant. On the contrary, in the Slovak language the forms with *-ica meaning “woman” strongly prevail over female animal names. Whereas, in contrast, the suffix *-ъka/*-ьka in Polish and Czech mostly appears in woman nominations but Slovak largely has it in female animal names as well. It is noteworthy that there is a difference in the suffix *-ica functioning between the Serbian East Shtokavian dialects and Macedonian language on the one hand and Bulgarian on another hand: in the first pair it is mainly used in woman designations in contrast to female animal names in Bulgarian. Although this South Slavic area is united by the high frequency of the suffix *-ъka/*-ьka in both lexical groups. This feature opposes it to Croatian and West Shtokavian dialects of Serbian. The same formant determines word-formation differentiation of the East Slavic languages: Ukrainian differs from Belarusian and Russian by high concentration of words with the suffix *-ъka/*-ьka.
“Man is Soul, Body, and Narrator”: Olga Tokarczuk’s Narrative Strategy
The article is devoted to the prose of Olga Tokarczuk, one of the greatest Polishwriters of the turn of the twenty-first century. The most important constant of Tokarczuk’s worldview is the category of corporeality/materiality. The logic of corporeality/materiality on different levels determines the organization of texts, generates connections across motives and a common semantic field. The narrative of corporeality/materiality, leveraged by means of the writer’s frequent use of empathetic narrative, acts as a special construct by means of which Tokarczuk explores the reality of the surrounding world, but also communicates with it (through the potential recipient of the text). The article analyses the specificity of Tokarczuk’s visualisation of body practices in her prose (representations of the body, interaction of bodies, interaction of the body with the environment) and significant elements of the narrative structure directly connected with corporeality/materiality: the system of characters, the specificity of comparisons, basic ideas, the role of boundaries as an aesthetic and ethical category, as well as an artistic tool, and the moral purpose of the narrative.
The Image of a Romantic Female-Beloved between Two Cultures:
The study of the evolution of the narratives created by the Don Cossacks in the first half of the nineteenth century is a difficult research task because apart from records, only individual texts, often taken out of context, have survived from this time. Nonetheless, research on such topics seems quite promising. The texts of Don authors often clearly demonstrate the mechanism of transformation of the works of high culture of the nineteenth century when interpreted by amateurs. Taking into account the inevitably individual character of such a transformation in each single case, within the framework of a microhistorical approach we have examined a particular variant of such a transformation, that is the translations of Adam Mickiewicz’s love lyrics by a Cossack officer, Ivan S. Ul'inov (1803–1874). He was a nineteenth-century Don public figure, major-general, and writer. His extensive legacy, most of which has never been published, includes hitherto unknown prose translations of the Polish poet's lyrics, made in the 1820s. Nine of the eleven poems translated by Ulyanov are lyrical works about the inaccessibility of the beloved or separation from her. At the same time, within the framework of traditional Cossack matrimonial practices, the main form of interaction between the sexes was the marriage contracted by the will and in the interests of the parents and involving long separations between husband and wife due to regular service outings. Deviations from the traditional Cossack understanding of the gender role of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are often found in the texts (including autobiographical ones) of other Don Cossacks who were influenced by European culture. In a similar context, Ul'ianov’s inept translations demonstrate how the text about Polish culture changed its meaning when transferred to the Cossack environment: poems on the theme of the inaccessible beloved familiar to the Polish reader were translated into prose about the possibility of a different gender role of a woman, a complete novelty for the Cossack reader.
Serbian Women’s Movement in Austria-Hungary from the Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries: Ideology, Organisations, and Leaders
This article explores the development of feminist ideology and the formation ofthe Serbian women’s movement in Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emergence of the movement can be explained by the views put forward by the leaders of the Serbian political youth group Omladina, who outlined the role of women in nation-building processes, as well as in the formation of Serbian identity and the achievement of sovereignty in particular. The leaders of the socialist and liberal movements used the principal Serbian female images — assistants and mothers — for ethno-political mobilization. The image of the mother was of major importance for preserving a Serbian identity under the Habsburg rule, in the face of the threat of assimilation after the Compromise of 1867. The participation of women in solving national problems and their social importance led to the dissemination of feminist thinking and the subsequent emergence of the women’s movement. The article suggests that Draga Dejanović (1840–1871) and Milica Tomić (1859–1944) played an important role in this development. It was in the early 1870s that Dejanović advocated equal access to secondary and higher education and developed the idea of “enlightened motherhood”, which encouraged liberal figures of the national movement to defend the interests of women. In addition, mono-ethnic women’s groups pursuing humanism and education were established, providing women from privileged social strata with culturally acceptable means of participation in the public life of the Serbian community in Austria-Hungary. The Serbian women’s movement had undergone a significant ideological evolution perpetuated by the magazine Žena (“Woman”) and its editor-in-chief Milica Tomić. The article suggests that Milica Tomić initiated a realignment of the movement away from purely national goals and towards greater emancipation both on a social and a legal scale.
The Sokol Movement, the Sokol Culture, and Gender Relations in Bohemia and Moravia from the 1860s to the early 1870s
Socially constructed gender relations are explored by the example of the Sokol (Czech for “falcon”) movement and the Sokol culture in Bohemia and Moravia in the 1860s and at the beginning of the 1870s. The Sokol clubs combined Czech nationalism with gymnastics. The study is based on the analysis of newspapers and other primary sources. The majority of Czech nationalists followed the pre-modern gender discourse, which implied the subordination of women. This discourse included the idea of male virtues that influenced the image of Sokol as the embodiment of Czech national masculinity. The Czech nationalist image of Germans, as well as the German nationalist image of Czechs, was associated with the others’ lack of masculinity. Another important component of the Sokol identity was the sense of beauty. Although nineteenth-century society had acknowledged the existence of only two genders and had denied the possibility of gender transition, there were some cases of crossing traditional gender boundaries. The role of women in Sokol events reflected gender inequality and gender stereotypes. As a political religion, nationalism assigned political meaning to the romantic relationships between men and women. The positive approach of Czech nationalists to the women’s movement was to a great extent caused by the mother’s role in the formation of the child’s identity. Sokols cooperated with the Prague American Ladies’ Club and supported the Gymnastic Club of the Ladies and Girls of Prague (1869). This club sought to avoid public attention, didn’t use the masculine elements of Sokol culture and promoted gymnastics as a part of female education. In the late 1860s the club was the only one of its kind in Central Europe. Limited dissemination of the modern gender discourse and its interrelation with the premodern one corresponded with the intermediate phase of modernization processes and their non-linear nature.
Gymnastic Club of the Ladies and Girls of Prague
The author of the article investigates the main stages of scientific activity of the famous Czech professor of history at Charles University in Prague Vera Olivová (1926–2015). This paper is based on the analysis of her publications. In the 1950s and 1960s Vera Olivová published a fundamental monograph on Czechoslovak-Soviet relations from 1918 to 1922 with a large appendix of documents, as well as a series of articles on the relations of the Czechoslovak Republic with neighbouring countries — Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Despite the fact that they were written in line with the Marxist-Leninist methodology that prevailed at that time in the historiography of socialist countries, it is due to the wealth of archival material being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, and to the diversity and depth of research, these works by Olivová were an important contribution to the study of the history of the foreign policy of the Czechoslovak Republic and international relations in Central Europe. During the Prague Spring of 1968, she highlighted the key problems of the political and diplomatic history of Czechoslovakia from a new perspective, which was reflected in the book Czechoslovakia in a disrupted Europe, as well as various articles and reports presented at scientific conferences. After being dismissed from Charles University in 1970 and banned from teaching and conducting scientific work, Vera Olivová published several books on the history of sports and games, which brought her worldwide fame. After the “Velvet Revolution”, she returned to Charles University to teach and to continue her research on the history of Czechoslovakia. In 1991, she was elected chairman of the Edward Beneš Society and launched avid scholarly, organisational and publishing activities. The works of Vera Olivová are deeply imbued with loyalty to the democratic ideals of the founders of the Czechoslovak Republic — Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edward Beneš.
The Founder of the “Second Smolny” in the Kingdom of Serbs,Croats and Slovenes Nataliia Kornelievna Erdeli
Based on unpublished (archival materials) and published sources (records and memoirs), as well as literature, the article shows the efforts of Nataliia Kornelievna Erdeli, graduate of the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens in Saint Petersburg, aimed at reviving this women’s school abroad, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 — Kingdom of Yugoslavia) in the town of Velika Kikinda (in northern part of Serbia). After leaving Russia in 1920, this young, talented and energetic woman realized the need to create conditions for children who were forced to leave their homeland to receive an education. And Erdeli vigorously set to work: in 1921, after receiving permission and funds from the authorities of the country to open a school, which, at the suggestion of the Ministry of Education of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was to be called the “First Russian-Serbian Girls’ Gymnasium-Boarding School”, she founded an educational institution for girls that resembled Smolny and then became its headmistress. Despite the institution’s official name, students were inculcated with Smolny traditions, such as wearing uniforms and following the rules of this institution. In order to obtain permission to name the school “Second Smolny”, Erdeli went to Denmark in 1924 to see the Empress Maria Feodorovna, a former patroness of the Smolny Institute. Although she managed to achieve this, an unexpected death prevented the formal renaming. Erdeli died in 1925 at the age of thirty-six. Nonetheless, it was not before 1931 that the authorities closed the school. Overall, more than 160 girls graduated from it.
First Russian-Serbian Girls’ Gymnasium-Boarding School
Adeline Paulina Irby and Her Way to the Heart of Bosnia
Adeline Paulina Irby was born in 1831 into a noble English family. She became famous for her charitable work in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What Irby saw during her first visit to Bosnia in 1862 led her to consider the importance of promoting women’s education in that Slavo-Turkish region. In 1865 she co-founded the Association for the Promotion of Education among the Slavic Children of Bosnia and Herzegovina. With funds raised in Great Britain, it was decided to open a school for girls in Sarajevo, which operated from 1869 to 1911 (until Irby’s death) and was founded with the support of the Kaiserswerth Deaconess Society. Initially, it faced difficulties and accusations of promoting Protestantism. Irby moved to Sarajevo in 1871 and took over the school’s management. Little information has survived about this period in Ottoman Bosnia. One of the aims of this study was to reconstruct the history of the school and Irby’s work in Bosnia between 1869 and 1875. The main sources were unpublished documents from Russian archives. The main object of focus are the reports by the Russian consul in Sarajevo, Aleksei N. Kudriavtsev, to the embassy in Constantinople, which describe the difficulties that Adeline P. Irby had to face. The article also briefly mentions Irby’s activities during the uprising of 1875–1878 and after the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. These demonstrate the English lady’s development from being regarded as a “suspicious Englishwoman” to becoming one of the most revered women in Bosnian history.
Sándor Petőfi: the Story of a Literary Career in Nineteenth-Century Hungary
Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) is the best-known Hungarian poet. It was not only the innovative poetic tools of his poetry that caused a stir among his contemporaries, but also his radical political thinking. In recent decades, three trends have dominated literary research: close readings of the poems by Petőfi have shown what radical poetic tools he used to create the language of modern Hungarian poetry. The second direction deals with the influence of Petőfi and reveals how the Hungarian national memory policy conjured him up as a historical figure. The third direction explores the poet's biography in various socio-historical contexts. Through the analysis of Petőfi's career, it is also possible to examine what opportunities nineteenth-century Hungarian intellectuals had to advance their careers. This essay presents Petőfi’s career from a socio-historical perspective, while also touching on issues of cult history and literary history poetry.
New Materials about the Russian Admiral Matija Zmajević in the State Archives in Zadar
During the reign of Peter I, the Republic of Venice and the Russian Empire cooperated in various fields. Primarily, however, they fortified their maritime relations, with subjects of Serenissima playing a major role in the creation of the modern Russian navy, passing on their knowledge and experience. Of these Venetian subjects, those from the eastern Adriatic coast were the most prominent, among whom was Matija Zmajevic (1680–1735), a representative of an influential seafaring family from Perast in the Bay of Kotor. Matija served in Russia during the reign of Peter the Great and his successors, reaching the rank of admiral and laying the foundation for the subsequent establishment of the Russian Black Sea fleet. The article introduces new archival information about his interesting and controversial personality, based on documents from the Karaman family's collection in the State Archives in Zadar. Members of the Karaman family were related to Zmajević, with especially close relations between Matija and his brother Vicko Zmajević with Matej Karaman, who himself lived in Russia for some time and left valuable written testimony about that period. The review of the works on this topic and analysis of materials from the aforementioned collection aims at encouraging historians to conduct further research into the life and works of Admiral Matija Zmajević.
Family Resemblance: The Zrínyi Brothers Identities
Brothers Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664) and Péter Zrínyi (1621–1671) were two significant politicians and poets of the early modern Kingdom of Hungary. They not only succeeded each other as Bans of Croatia (one of the highest positions in the Kingdom), but represent a peculiar chapter in the history of European Baroque literature. Both authors wrote a heroic epic about the history of the siege of Szigetvár in 1566, and the tragic death of their great-grandfather, Miklós Zrínyi. In the nineteenth century, they turned into important figures of the identity discourses in both Croatia and Hungary. This article focuses on two areas where different visions manifested and where the changes in the visions can be documented: the different versions of the genealogy of the family and the linguistic and ideological differences between the two epic poems. Their originally common agendas diverged over time. Péter abandoned his first attempt at translating the epic (which would have closely followed the Hungarian version in many respects), and instead his finished version reflects his new linguistic-poetic agenda, which aimed at the unification and standardization of Croatian dialects. After the death of Miklós, he replaced the legends of Northern descent (propagated by his brother), with those of Illyria. Both revisions served the same aim. Instead of reforming the Hungarian political system, they aimed at establishing an imagined Illyrian community, which shows how these seventeenth-century baroque literary genealogies and epic poems can be seen as precursors to nineteenth century national ideologies.