The peasantry accounted for the large majority of the Russian population during the Imperialist and Stalinist periods - it is, for the most part, how people lived. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin provides a comprehensive, realistic examination of peasant life in Russia during both these eras and the legacy this left in the post-Soviet era. The book paints a full picture of peasant involvement in commerce and local political life and, through Boris Gorshkov's original ecology paradigm for understanding peasant life, offers new perspectives on the Russian peasantry under serfdom and the emancipation. Incorporating recent scholarship, including Russian and non-Russian texts, along with classic studies, Gorshkov explores the complex interrelationships between the physical environment, peasant economic and social practices, culture, state policies and lord-peasant relations. He goes on to analyze peasant economic activities, including agriculture and livestock, social activities and the functioning of peasant social and political institutions within the context of these interrelationships. Further reading lists, study questions, tables, maps, primary source extracts and images are also included to support and enhance the text wherever possible. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin is the crucial survey of a key topic in modern Russian history for students and scholars alike.

In this volume, Alessandro Grazi offers the first intellectual biography of the Italian Jewish writer and politician David Levi (1816-1898). In this intriguing journey through the mysterious rites of Freemasonry and the bizarre worldviews of Saint-Simonianism, you can discover Levi's innovative interpretation of Judaism and its role in modernity. As a champion of dialogue with Catholic intellectuals, Levi's importance transcends the Jewish world. The second part of the book presents an unpublished document, Levi's comedy "Il Mistero delle Tre Melarancie", a phantasmagorical adventure in search of his Jewish identity, with an English translation of its most relevant excerpt.

In this analysis of the life of Arnost Frischer, an influential Jewish nationalist activist, Jan Lanicek reflects upon how the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia dealt with the challenges that arose from their volatile relationship with the state authorities in the first half of the 20th century. The Jews in the Bohemian Lands experienced several political regimes in the period from 1918 to the late 1940s: the Habsburg Empire, the first democratic Czechoslovak republic, the post-Munich authoritarian Czecho-Slovak republic, the Nazi regime, renewed Czechoslovak democracy and the Communist regime. Frischer's involvement in local and central politics affords us invaluable insights into the relations and negotiations between the Jewish activists and these diverse political authorities in the Bohemian Lands. Vital coverage is also given to the relatively under-researched subject of the Jewish responses to the Nazi persecution and the attempts of the exiled Jewish leadership to alleviate the plight of the Jews in occupied Europe. The case study of Frischer and Czechoslovakia provides an important paradigm for understanding modern Jewish politics in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making this a book of great significance to all students and scholars interested in Jewish history and Modern European history.

Robert Knight's book examines how the 60,000 strong Slovene community in the Austrian borderland province of Carinthia continued to suffer in the wake of Nazism's fall. It explores how and why Nazi values continued to be influential in a post-Nazi era in postwar Central Europe and provides valuable insights into the Cold War as a point of interaction of local, national and international politics. Though Austria was re-established in 1945 as Hitler's 'first victim', many Austrians continued to share principles which had underpinned the Third Reich. Long treated as both inferior and threatening prior to the rise of Hitler and then persecuted during his time in power, the Slovenes of Carinthia were prevented from equality of schooling by local Nazis in the years that followed World War Two, behavior that was tolerated in Vienna and largely ignored by the rest of the world. Slavs in Post-Nazi Austria uses this vital case study to discuss wider issues relating to the stubborn legacy of Nazism in postwar Europe and to instill a deeper understanding of the interplay between collective and individual (liberal) rights in Central Europe. This is a fascinating study for anyone interested in knowing more about the disturbing imprint that Nazism left in some parts of Europe in the postwar years.

In an age characterized by religious conflict, Protestant and Catholic Augsburgers remained largely at peace. How did they do this? This book argues that the answer is in the "emotional practices" Augsburgers learned and enacted-in the home, in marketplaces and other sites of civic interaction, in the council house, and in church. Augsburg's continued peace depended on how Augsburgers felt-as neighbors, as citizens, and believers-and how they negotiated the countervailing demands of these commitments. Drawing on police records, municipal correspondence, private memoranda, internal administrative documents and other records revealing everyday behavior, experience, and thought, Sean Dunwoody shows how Augsburgers negotiated the often-conflicting feelings of being a good believer and being a good citizen and neighbor.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality crisis which affected Eastern Europe and the republics of the former USSR at the time of the transition to a market economy was arguably the major peacetime health crisis of recent decades. Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe and the Old USSR discusses the importance of that crisis, surprisingly underplayed in the scientific literature, and presents evidence suggesting a potential role of the Chernobyl disaster among the causes contributing to it.

Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary "Song of Myself," much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its pleasures, contradictions, and discontents. Beautiful Enemies examines this obsession with the problems and paradoxes of friendship, tracing its eruption in the New American Poetry that emerges after the Second World War as a potent avant-garde movement. The book argues that a clash between friendship and nonconformity is central to postwar American poetry and its development. By focusing on of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets-the New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka-the book offers a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. At the same time, this study challenges both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion. Beautiful Enemies foregrounds a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to individualism and dynamic movement that runs directly counter to an equally profound devotion to avant-garde collaboration and community. Delving into unmined archival evidence (including unpublished correspondence, poems, and drafts), the book demonstrates that this tense dialectic-between an aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship-actually energizes postwar American poetry, drives the creation, meaning, and form of important poems, frames the interrelationships between certain key poets, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Combining extensive readings of the poets with analysis of cultural, philosophical, and biographical contexts, Beautiful Enemies uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of twentieth-century American poetry