The Mannequins' Ball

The Mannequins' Ball
Author: Daniel Gerould
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 101
Release: 2014-07-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134425341

This play, by Futurist poet Bruno Jasienski, is an outstanding example of the joining of left-wing politics and avant-garde interest in human mechanization that characterized the experimental theatre of Poland in the inter-war years. Stalinism and the purges cut short Jasienski's career and prevented productions of his play for many years - except for a brilliant constructivist staging in Prague in 1933. The Mannequins' Ball can now take its place along with Capek's R.U.R. as one of the major twentieth-century dramas making use of the themes and techniques of human automata. Reproduced in this volume are the eight woodcuts by Moor which accompanied the original Moscow publication in 1931.

Pinocchio's Progeny

Pinocchio's Progeny
Author: Harold B. Segel
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780801852626

While Carlo Collodi's internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book's appearance on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses. And the puppets, marionettes, and other forms that figure so vividly and provocatively in modernist and avant-garde drama can, according to Harold Segel, be regarded as Pinocchio's progeny. Segel argues that the philosophical, social, and artistic proclivities of the modernist movement converged in the discovery of an exciting new relevance in the puppet and marionette. Previously viewed as entertainment for children and fairground audiences, puppets emerged as an integral component of the modernist vision. They became metaphors for human helplessness in the face of powerful forces -- from Eros and the supernatural to history, industrial society, and national myth. Dramatists used them to satirize the tyranny of bourgeois custom and convention, to deflate the arrogance of the powerful, and to breathe new life into a theater that had become tradition-bound and commercialized. Pinocchio's Progeny offers a broad overview of the uses of these figures in European drama from 1890 to 1935. It considers developments in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In his introduction, Segel reviews the premodernist literary and dramatic treatment of the puppet and marionette from Cervantes' Don Quixote to the turn-of-the- century European cabaret. His epilogue considers the appearance of puppets and marionettes in postmodern European and American drama by examining worksby such dramatists as Jean-Claude Van Itallie, Heiner MA1/4ller, and Tadeusz Kantor.

The End and the Beginning

The End and the Beginning
Author: Vladimir Tismaneanu
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2012-06-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 6155053677

A fresh interpretation of the contexts, meanings, and consequences of the revolutions of 1989, coupled with state of the art reassessment of the significance and consequences of the events associated with the demise of communist regimes. The book provides an analysis that takes into account the complexities of the Soviet bloc, the events' impact upon Europe, and their re-interpretation within a larger global context. Departs from static ways of analysis (events and their significance) bringing forth approaches that deal with both pre-1989 developments and the 1989 context itself, while extensively discussing the ways of resituating 1989 in the larger context of the 20th century and of its lessons for the 21st.Emphasizes the possibility for re-thinking and re-visiting the filters and means that scholars use to interpret such turning point. The editors perceive the present project as a challenge to existing readings on the complex set of issues and topics presupposed by a re-evaluation of 1989 as a symbol of the change and transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

Bruno Jasienski

Bruno Jasienski
Author: Nina Kolesnikoff
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1983-01-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0889207410

Bruno Jasieński was a bilingual Polish-Russian writer who died in exile in Siberia in 1939. This volume traces his literary evolution. The introductory biographical sketch is followed by a discussion of Jasieński's contribution to Polish poetry, specifically the Futurist movement which, like its parallels in Russia and Italy, revolutionized poetic language. An analysis and evaluation of Jasieński's prose work sheds light on the relationship between politics and literature in early twentieth-century Poland and Russia. Most of Jasieński's novels and short stories were written in the approved Soviet tradition of Socialist Realism. His Man Changes His Skin is considered one of the best Soviet industrial novels of the 1930s. The author's comprehensive and skillful treatment of Jasieński's literary production, the first to appear in English, also makes a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Futurism in Eastern Europe and Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union. The volume contains numerous quotations from Polish and Russian literature, both in English translation (prepared by the author) and in the original. It will be of interest to students of Slavic literature, comparative literature, and the literature of ideology.

Caviar and Ashes

Caviar and Ashes
Author: Marci Shore
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 959
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300128622

""In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a cafe called Ziemianska."" Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the ""fin de siecle,"" They sat in Cafe Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. ""Caviar and Ashes"" tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically. Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafes to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

Soccer Conditioning

Soccer Conditioning
Author: Simon Thadani
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2015-11-26
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1408109581

Soccer conditioning is aimed at managers and coaches of soccer teams from semi-professional through to Sunday League, including youth and children's teams. Including: - Principles of conditioning, speed and strength development - Fitness requirements for specific positions and formations - Planning the season - Developing individual and team programmes - Conditioning drills - How to train young players This book gives detailed and accessible guidance on how to introduce fitness and conditioning routines into training to support and improve soccer performance.

Soccer Speed

Soccer Speed
Author: Richard Bate
Publisher: Human Kinetics
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2014-09-11
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1492584800

The world’s most popular sport is also one of the most demanding. Stronger, smarter, and more agile players have increased the intensity and tempo of the game. Success hinges on the ability to read, react, and execute. For individual players and teams alike, speed is a necessity. Soccer Speed is a groundbreaking work—more than a training guide, but an all-encompassing execution plan for success in today’s aggressive, attacking, and fast-paced game. Inside, you’ll learn how to develop these skills: - Quickness, agility, and balance for defending, attacking, reacting, and executing - Most effective techniques, such as heel passes and stride changes, to challenge opponents and keep them off balance - Soccer intelligence, or the ability to instantly recognize and exploit the opposition’s weakness - In-game decision making with and without the ball Every aspect of the game is covered, including step-by-step instruction and drills for developing technical and tactical speed in passing, receiving, dribbling, scoring, counterattacking, and defending. Soccer Speed is the one and only guide for outpacing, outsmarting, and outplaying the opposition.

The Grotesque in the Works of Bruno Jasieński

The Grotesque in the Works of Bruno Jasieński
Author: Agata Krzychylkiewicz
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2006
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9783039112173

This book is the first critical attempt made in any language to re-examine the entire oeuvre of Bruno Jasieński (1901-1938). It takes into account the writer's lifelong concerns but places them in the context of the universal value of his writing, generated by his modernist passions and his fascination with the grotesque - an artistic device that was consonant with his need to portray life in all its complexities. The author relies on the grotesque as an element that unifies Jasieński's futuristic poetry with his prose. Especially important in this regard is the close reading of Jasieński's satiric grotesques written in the Soviet Union. The author does not avoid the intricacies and difficult questions of Jasieński's ideological commitment but focuses mainly on the consequences that the highly ambivalent and ambiguous nature of the grotesque has on the interpretation of his work.

Being Poland

Being Poland
Author: Tamara Trojanowska
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 853
Release: 2018-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442622520

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland’s return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland’s cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland’s modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.