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The Triumph of Provocation, collected essays by Józef Mackiewicz
Original Polish title: Zwycięstwo prowokacji
Rights status: available for all languages less Polish and English.
Published by: English - Yale University Press (2009), Polish - Kontra, Russian - Zarya, German - Bergstadtverlag W.G. Korn
This masterful political treatise, first published in 1962, examines the history and nature of Communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and in Poland. Józef Mackiewicz, known for his relentless opposition to Communism, argues that accommodation with the Communists simply helped them to impose their vision of the world and pursue their goal of global domination. He compares Communism to Nazism and insists that the former was the greater threat to the future of humanity.
Mackiewicz's unique interpretation of the differences and similarities between Communism and Nazism is highly relevant to debates about these two systems and to major contemporary issues which are of particular importance to the U.S. and Europe, including radical Islam and the necessity of war and the responsibility for war.
"Mackiewicz, who knew the Nazi and Communist systems at first hand, retains a freshness and a directness that can aid historians and thinkers who today grapple with the problem of understanding Hitler and Stalin together." -- Timothy Snyder, Yale University
"... A work of genius. ...Mackiewicz is one of the most intelligent men we have ever heard." -- Andrei Navrozov, Chronicles
"This salutary book is a reminder of the terrible damage wrought by Communism and of the need, amid the War on Terror, not to lose sight of other ideological challenges to Western values. ... The importance of this work in part rests on the degree to which the autocracy, and indeed the accommodation of the autocracy, that he depicts are not restricted to the case of Communism." -- Jeremy Black, foreword to the 2009 Yale University Press edition
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Tomorrow There Will Be Happiness, edited by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2013, NF)
Rights sol to: Russia - AST, Poland - ŚWIAT KSIĄŻKI
In 2012, Ludmila Ulitskaya launched the major documentary project “After the Great Victory,” for which people who were children between 1945 and 1953 were invited to send in their childhood memories. Work that Ulitskaya selected was published by AST in 2013 in the collection “Tomorrow There Will Be Happiness” with Ulitskaya’s preface and comments.
This book is yet another project in social portraiture by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Its goal is to restore historical memory in Russia, a country burned many times over and still being burned. Ulitskaya chooses the relatively rare genre of folk memoir – the stories and witness accounts of “little people”. Written quite subjectively and without artifice, together they create the magical effect of compound vision, where space and the objects in it are simultaneously seen from all sides. Besides these mini-memoirs, the book also contains eighteen forewords by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and a recollection by the noted writer Alexander Kabakov. All this is framed in a wonderful photo gallery – photos from personal archives.
Voices of different people, men and women, villagers and city folk, meld into a many-voiced choir, into a shared story of how they all grew up together. How they embraced in the glow of the fireworks on May 9, 1945, how they pined for a piece of bread, how they dressed in castoffs, went around in father’s patched army shirts, washed in public baths, played with sticks and stones because there were no toys. The details of postwar life emerge sharp and dimensional, long-lost characters step out onto the stage – the result is a vast canvas of a shared life, utterly poor, soaked with fear, but full of hope for an imminent happiness for all.
Ludmila Ulitskaya says: “The genre of this book is close to a documentary, but not quite: collage gives it a very special quality. This book has a long history. My first stories came out of my childhood memories; they were published as the “Childhood 49” in the early 2000s. In 2012 the book was reprinted. This time it created a lot of interest, many readers responded, and it turned out that people had a need to share their memories of growing up after the war with their grandchildren, who knew little about the life of older generations (and weren’t very interested). So my publisher suggested that I compile a book of the memories of children from that time. We ran a story contest – and got bundles of letters. They were amazingly interesting; with descriptions of a life such as we will never see again, with kerosene lamps, food rations, gangs of street urchins, bread cards, photos with faces cut out, cruel games and generous giving… At first I despaired, because I couldn’t imagine what to do with this mountain of raw material that just kept growing. Then I realized that I needed to find some common themes and use them to organize the telling: “how we ate”, “how we drank”, “how we washed”, “our school”, “our neighborhood”. The frame came completely naturally: the time between two key events – end of World War II and Stalin’s death.”
”This book is bitter medicine. It's hard to swallow whole; you have to take it in little spoonfuls.”-- Maya Kucherskaya, literary critic
“Lyudmila Ulitskaya has brought the eight years after the war as close to us as humanly possible. If you remove the patina of officialdom from the expression ‘portrait of an era’, that’s exactly what it is.” -- Evgeniy Belzharsky, literary critic
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