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Regardless of the subject matter, our studies are always searching for a sense of the universal in the specific. Drawing, etchings and paintings are a way of communicating ideas and emotions. The key word here is to communicate. Whether the audience sees the work as laborious or poetic depends on the creative genius of the artist. Some painters use the play of light passing through a landscape or washing over a figure to create an evocative moment that will be both timeless and transitory. The essential role of art remains what is has always been, a way of human expression. This is the role that our participants concentrate on as they discuss art as the expression of the spirit, a creative a...
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'Russia is the motherland of elephants' - this phrase from a Soviet-era anekdot (a peculiar genre of Russian jokes, often political, or obscene, or both) takes the mickey out of historical propaganda. The phrase is symbolic of the somewhat light-hearted approach to history, which is quintessential to this book. This is not an official history but a series of sketches, often humorous, on various aspects of Russian life over the centuries, of people, institutions, natural and political phenomena and local products of interest. The book also offers glimpses of Russia's historical relations with the West, chequered, complex and fraught with chronic mutual misunderstanding.
Baron Friedrich vom Stein's leadership of the reform movement in Prussia has long been considered part of a critically important phase of early nineteenth-century German history. R. C. Raack describes in vivid detail the combination of forces and circumstances which brought about Stein's fall from power as chief minister of Frederick William III. Most of the major Prussian political figures of the period were deeply embroiled in the complex, and sometimes curious, series of events which culminated in the nomination of his successors, and Raack's incisive study provides an enlightening reappraisal of both the roles of the individuals concerned and the intricate domestic political situation.
By the Koscielski Prize-winning author of Dream and Stones, In Red is the gripping cautionary tale in which real and unreal combine explosively, making us question the nature of the work itself. Set in an imaginary fourth partition of Poland, In Red retraces the turbulent history of the Twentieth Century in a labyrinth of greed, inheritance, and entropy, enacting—word by tremulous word—the claustrophobia of a small town from which there seems to be no escape. Never have Tulli's trademark precision of language and her crystalline storytelling been put to such brilliant use.