The article proposes an analysis of the representations of the Tatars in two historical novels published in Poland and Romania, respectively, from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the ...20th century. First of all, the article discusses the history of Sienkiewicz's reception in the Romanian literary field and interrogates the possible interferences between two (semi)peripheral literatures (Romanian and Polish) as symptoms of the polysystem (Even-Zohar) of the Central and Eastern European literary field. Secondly, the case study on Sienkiewicz's With Fire and Sword and Mihail Sadoveanu's Neamul Şoim restilor The Şoim reşti Clan discusses the imaginary constructions articulated in the description of the Tatars ethnic minority. Using the "frontier Orientalism" concept (Andre Gingrich), the article shows how the representation of the Tatars has different roles, being a pretext for defining national identity and becoming a pretext for "the creation of transnational communities" (Terian). Therefore, the paper aims to identify the ideological stakes behind the representation of the Tatars, as well as to discuss the intersections between Sienkiewicz and Sadoveanu and their effect on the historical novel's evolution.
The translation of Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel Without Dogma into Finnish, entitled Anielka (1913), generated considerable interest in the Finnish press, evidenced by as many as twelve reviews of the ...work. The article analyses these reviews, describes them in terms of a paradigm and presents their functioning on the book market. Taking into account cultural distance between Poles and Finns, the reviews are approached as a testimony to intercultural communication, which was enabled thanks to community – the paradigm of European culture and its common motifs, such as the mal du siècle or l'improductivite slave, the latter highlighted by Sienkiewicz and particularly interesting for Finnish reviewers. Cultural distance turns out to be a factor that reveals new aspects of interpretation of Without Dogma and, more broadly, the specificity of Finnish thinking about Poland.
Sienkiewicz’s Bodies focuses on the work of the most popular Polish writer from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It discusses the surprising success of ...Sienkiewicz’s writing in relation to the dissection of optimistic illusion that takes place during a reading of its cruel prose. Sienkiewicz is seen as something more than a juggler of genius in narrative prose. This conservative writer, like the modernists, knew that there was no longer any way to construct a representation of reality in a morally non-contradictory fictional discourse. The energy of his narratives and his linguistic drive disturb the order of narrative and expose the heteronomy of a superficially unified style, thus generating fissures, but never ruining the architecture of the text.
The nineteenth century was the period of nation building in East-Central Europe. Historical novels played a role in the process, especially in encouraging the development of national identity by ...looking for the national essence in the past, or rather creating ideas about a national essence in the medium of history. This paper analyses several late-nineteenth-century historical novels from the region (by Alois Jirásek, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ferenc Herczeg, and Géza Gárdonyi) to show the ways fictitious traits of a supposedly reliable historical background served contemporary political and ideological needs. These traits, which can also be described as anachronisms or author’s mistakes, both contribute to characterising national ancestors as us and also historical enemies as the other.
This dissertation reconstructs the interconnected cultural histories of film and literature in Shanghai and Buenos Aires in the period 1927-1937. Through readings of previously untranslated texts on ...film form and film technology by Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), Mao Dun (pen name of Shen Yanbing, 1896-1981), and Xia Yan (pen name of Shen Naixi, 1900-1995), I identify a movement in cinepoetics common to Latin America and East Asia that mobilized local popular culture for global working-class political goals. My research investigates into key points in the history of the encounter between cinema and literature in these two cities and links internationalist movements in revolutionary politics with the vibrant film cultures emerging in these two cities—as seen through the eyes of each writer. Through a close textual, visual, and auditory analysis of film clips, film reviews, film-poems, reportage, film-inspired fiction narrative, screenplays, and soundtracks, each case study tracks the work of these writers as they participated in a transpacific intellectual network of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics during the period of rising fascism, class conflict, socialist solidarity, and political upheaval in the years prior to the Second World War. My study finds that their experiments with film pushed the boundaries of traditional writing forms. Moreover, in developing new critical practices of viewing and listening to cinema Storni, Arlt, Mao Dun, and Xia Yan each contributed to a politically engaged internationalist current of cinematic modernism. During this brief period of resistance to the globalized dominance of Hollywood entertainment commodities, each of these writers exemplified the strengthening of cultural movement based in cinema, which presented the cinematic experience as grounds for a renewed modern social experience with the potential to radically disrupt sociopolitical formations of class, nation, and state. As a collaboratively produced and collectively consumed cultural form, cinema presented each of these writers with a means for reinventing political thought in ways that embraced the intricacies of urban life in cities on the periphery of globalized circuits of capital. Linked by an attention to film as a politically volatile fusion of mass art and mass spectacle—an attention that, at key moments, gave these writers common cause in resisting cultural exports that extended the reach of European and American empire—my study discovers these radical intellectuals as leaders in a transpacific cultural front that ultimately aimed at establishing cinema as a mass art that could unify worldwide movements against the capitalist exploitation of the working classes.
Quo vadis ?, le grand roman historique des temps néroniens de Henryk Sienkiewicz, le premier Prix Nobel polonais, a connu dans le monde entier une immense popularitě. Ce succes de librairie est vite ...devenu une sorte de caisse de résonance et ses nombreuses transpositions ont envahi toutes les spheres de la vie culturelle et artistique. L'article présente les résonances cinématographiques françaises du roman sienkiewiczien. L'auteur s'interroge également sur le rapport unissant les premiers Quo vadis portés a l'écran et l'œuvre dont ils s'inspirent ainsi que sur la disponibilité de ces transpositions sur le territoire polonais.
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