Stanislaw Baranczak, a Polish writer in exile, turns to his colleagues and their plights, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, to explain why oppressive regimes could not succeed in their attempts to transform the Eastern European into Homo sovieticus.
These superb essays focus on the role that culture, and particularly literature, has played in keeping the spirit of intellectual independence alive in Eastern and Central Europe. Exploring a variety of issues from censorship to underground poetry, Baranczak shows why, in societies where people struggle to...
Stanislaw Baranczak, a Polish writer in exile, turns to his colleagues and their plights, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union,...
The leading Polish poet still residing in his native land, Zbigniew Herbert as not been the subject of a book-length study in English until now. Stanislaw Baranczak, himself a poet, critic, and translator, emigrated from Poland only in 1981, and is therefore eminently qualified to supply a politico-cultural context for Herbert while describing and analyzing the texts and themes of his poems.
Herbert's poetry is based on permanent confrontation--the confrontation of Western tradition with the experience of a "barbarian" from Eastern Europe, of the classical past with the modern era,...
The leading Polish poet still residing in his native land, Zbigniew Herbert as not been the subject of a book-length study in English until now. St...
Boleslaw Prusis often compared to Chekhov, and Prus's masterpiece might be described as an intimate epic, a beautifully detailed, utterly absorbing exploration of life in late-nineteenth-century Warsaw, which is also a prophetic reckoning with some of the social forces--imperialism, nationalism, anti-Semitism among them--that would soon convulse Europe as never before. But The Doll is above all a brilliant novel of character, dramatizing conflicting ideas through the various convictions, ambitions, confusions, and frustrations of an extensive and varied cast. At the center of...
Boleslaw Prusis often compared to Chekhov, and Prus's masterpiece might be described as an intimate epic, a beautifully detailed, utterly abso...
-Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . Szymborska's] is the best of the Western mind--free, restless, questioning.- -- New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Editors' Choice
-Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end. There's no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin.- -- Vogue
One of Europe's greatest poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. -If you...
-Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . Szymborska's] is the best of the Western mind--free, restless, questioning.- -- New York Times Book Revie...
