This paper examines the profile of the Albatros Publishing House in Bucharest (specialising in youth literature) and the activity of its director, writer Mircea Sântimbreanu. He held this position for almost two decades and recounted his experience in a volume of memoirs. I tried to explore these memoirs mainly in parallel with accounts from archival documents and secondary literature. The Albatros Publishing House was a micro-universe for assessing the impact of successive ideological offensives by the Romanian (...) Communist Party on book production and on the youth in general (mainly the July 1971 Theses and the other party directives of the 1970s, as well as the Mangalia Theses of 1983). By the 1980s, the regime’s propaganda had acquired ultra-nationalistic nuances. This paper will also exemplify such developments by discussing the scandal generated by the 1983 publication of Saturnalii by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a volume of poems with strong antisemitic tenor. Using mainly diaries, journals, secondary literature and archival documents, this article also analyses the strategies deployed by the communist regime in order to coerce the young generation – through the agency of publishing houses – to assume the new literary-political ideology of revolutionary humanism (the Socialist Realism of the Ceaușescu era). (shrink)

This article documents the existence of a vibrant republic of letters stretching from Cairo to Karachi in the middle of the twentieth century. On the basis of private letters, memoirs, and modern editions of classical texts, this article recreates the scholarly and personal commitments of a new class of professional editors. These editors were responsible for the emergence of some of the most influential publishing houses in the Islamic world, and their contribution to the production and circulation of pre-modern (...) texts has had a profound impact on the intellectual development of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They believed that cultivating a republic of letters was necessary because it served the world of learning and scholarship. In this way was fashioned a virtual community, separated by national and political borders, but united by visions of history and a shared sense of moral and intellectual duty. (shrink)

In this new publication, Cristina Cormos professionally addresses a sensitive issue, complex and difficult in the same time, and ambitiously manages to give us a picture of international migration viewed through identity change. Starting from the hypothesis that "migration is a change that simultaneously occurs in both physical and socio-cultural realms, which implies not only movement from one community to another, but also the disintegration of structural bonds in the departure area, paralleled by a cultural assimilation of the destination environment", (...) the author analyzes identity changes of the emigrants throughout the entire migration process, the factors underlying these changes, as well as the consequences and implications of these factors in the return migration. The issues addressed within this book also cover the changes occurred in the family and community of origin as a result of the absence of one of its members and of the manifestation of identity changes respectively. (shrink)

In 1922, philosopher Jakob Klatzkin and Zionist politician and later president of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann founded the Eschkol publishing company in Berlin and began their major work on the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Eschkol was active during the Weimar Republic, where culture and politics were shaped by a Jewish renaissance and by the sustained migration of Jews from Eastern Europe. Most of the publisher’s books and brochures show emblematic historical ruptures and the migration of knowledge to new spaces, (...) languages, and cultures. This article analyzes Eschkol’s publications and cultural agenda from the perspective of a material culture of printed works, and focuses on its textbook program. It concentrates the discussion on the historian Simon Bernfeld and Jakob Klatzkin, two formative scholars of that period. (shrink)

The article is a philosophical reflection of the author, caused by M.N. Epstein’s book “Children’s Questions: Dialogues” (Moscow, 2020). The book presents more than 300 children’s questions, covering the most diverse facets of being: from the universe as a whole to psychological, moral, social, aesthetic problems. The idea of the book is to engage children and adults in a general conversation about the most important phenomena of the universe. The author of the article weaves the material of the book into (...) the outline of existential comprehension of truth. (shrink)

Author of more than 80 studies and articles of theology and bibliotheconomy and of the book: Cenzurarea presei ortodoxe în comunism, but alsoPhD in philology and member of important associations and cultural institutions, Silviu-Constantin Nedelcu is already a name known in the Romanian cultural space. His recent book, entitled: O scurtă istorie a bibliotecilor byzantine, published by the acclaimed Lumen Publishing House from Iassy, comes to offer a new testimony of the quality of his investigations.

The review is devoted to a new book by the writer and literary historian Natalia A. Gromova, in which, on the basis of letters and archival documents, the love story of Varvara Malahieva-Mirovich and Lev Shestov is reconstructed. According to Gromova, their relationship became an impulse that had a key influence on the formation of Shestov as an existential thinker, whose philosophy is not based on speculative contemplation, but is inextricably linked with life experience. Shestov’s philosophy of tragedy grows out (...) of the relationship between Shestov and Malakhieva-Mirovich. On the basis of Shestov’s letters addressed to Malahieva-Mirovich, recently found in the family archive of Shik-Shakhovskie, the author of the book reconstructs the autobiographical events of the philosopher’s life, when for him “the time is out of joint” and he experienced an ideological and psychological crisis that marked the beginning of a new stage in his work. Gromova shows how the events of his life are reflected in Shestov’s writings: in his writings, the philosopher seeks answers to the questions that his relationship with Varvara Malahieva-Mirovich poses to him. Gromova introduces into scientific circulation the previously unpublished correspondence between Shestov and Malahieva-Mirovich, letters from Malahieva-Mirovich to her friend Leonilla N. Tarasova, as well as the memoirs of Malahieva-Mirovich about the actress of the Moscow Art Theater Nadezhda S. Butova. The book contains unique information about Shestov’s circle in Russia (for example, about the decadent poetess Anastasia Mirovich), including the so-called “shestovites”, a.i. the poetess and writer Varvara G. Malahieva-Mirovich, philosopher, lawyer and publisher Semyon M. Lurie, actress Nadezhda S. Butova, who is trying to find a philosophical and religious “justification” for the actor’s craft. (shrink)