 | To hell with the new society! It's only Gennady who can get wrapped up in it and spend hours reading what Lenin and Stalin said and about the achievements of our Soviet Union.
Nina is not the only Stalinist adolescent whose diary has come down to us, but she is one of the most singular personalities. The historians Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin have suggested that Soviet citizens in the 1930s had no choice but to think within a Soviet framework because no other was available, just as they had no language other than 'Sovietspeak' in which to express their thoughts. If they kept diaries, these historians suggest, it was almost always part of a self-conscious discipline aimed at producing the New Soviet Person and eliminating all traces of the pre-Soviet one. Bildungs diaries of this sort exist: that of the kulak's son Stepan Podlubnyi was published in German in 1996 by Hellbeck as Tagebuch aus Moskau; and schools and the Komsomol probably encouraged young people to keep them. But Nina's diary is another thing altogether. Read more of the London Review of Books |
It's all Greek to me ;-D
Stephen Halliwell GREEK LAUGHTER A study of cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity In the third century BC, when Roman ambassadors were negotiating with the Greek city of Tarentum, an ill-judged laugh put paid to any hope of peace. Ancient writers disagree about the exact cause of the mirth, but they agree that Greek laughter was the final straw in driving the Romans to war. One account points the finger at the bad Greek of the leading Roman ambassador, Postumius. It was so ungrammatical and strangely accented that the Tarentines could not conceal their amusement. The historian Dio Cassius, by contrast, laid the blame on the Romans’ national dress. “So far from receiving them decently”, he wrote, “the Tarentines laughed at the Roman toga among other things. It was the city garb, which we use in the Forum. And the envoys had put this on, whether to make a suitably dignified impression or out of fear – thinking that it would make the Tarentines respect them. But in fact g...
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