Testaments Betrayed

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Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces were already on a collision course by the mid-1980s, but even the most astute Western observers did not perceive what lay ahead. The most visible sign of trouble was in Kosovo, where martial law had only stoked the flames of ethnic strife. The Serb minority clamored for Belgrade’s attention: In 1985 Kosovo’s Serbs sent a petition to the central government, claiming that Serbs had been raped, murdered, and driven from their homes by the province’s ethnic Albanians. Couldn’t Belgrade do something? Lost Letters introduces the theme of man and history in its basic version: man collides with history and its crushes him Praxis International‘s American editors were not particularly perturbed that, with the exception of Supek, they had lost the Zagreb contingent. Says Seyla Benhabib, “The question of ethnicity was irrelevant. They were all Yugoslavs. To us outsiders, it wasn’t even like asking, ‘Are you Italian American or Irish American?’ It was more like asking, ‘Are you Bavarian or from Berlin?'”

Testaments Betrayed – HarperCollins

So it was a surprise to many of the Belgrade Praxists’ admirers when three key members of the group — Markovic, Tadic, and Zagorka Golubovic — signed a 1986 petition in support of the Kosovo Serbs. Cosic also signed. It was not just that the petition painted a florid picture of Serbian suffering in the southern province. It was also that the signatories obliquely urged the government to revoke Kosovo’s autonomous status — something Serbian nationalists had been pushing the parliament to do. After all, the petitioners reasoned, with its “unselfish” aid to the impoverished province, Serbia had amply demonstrated that it took the Albanians’ interests to heart. Ominously, the petition’s authors intoned: “Genocide [against Kosovo’s Serbs] cannot be prevented by … [the] politics of gradual surrender of Kosovo … to Albania: the unsigned capitulation which leads to a politics of national treason.”

Dostoevsky's aesthetic: his characters are rooted in a very distinctive personal ideology, according to which they act with unbending logic Two weeks later, Zivotic was dead. “He was extremely tormented by what had happened,” says Magas. “He died of a broken heart, I think.”

Financial Times Milan Kundera, author, 1929-2023 - Financial Times

Well, you know,” he reasoned, “a lot of our editorial board members are Jewish. There are just some issues we don’t touch.”Phenomenal drinking habits, chronic sleep deprivation, and a dangerous taste for the lowlife didn't seem to dampen Bacon's productivity. Perhaps they even fueled it. During his turbulent lifetime Continue reading » Kundera begins with a riff on Rabelais and leads us on a wild tour of European literature from Cervantes to Gombrowicz, with special attention to authors that I love including Musil and Broch. I found his continual focus on the ideas of literature attractive enough; but he assays music as well including a wonderful chapter on Janacek. A paragraph from this book (and Kundera’s essayistic writing in general) is sometimes worth more than the entire collected works of some other author. I have been reading from it, but I can no longer delay a full read, especially as it talks about Kafka so much.

Testaments Betrayed | Faber Testaments Betrayed | Faber

The philosophers published their new journal in a Serbo-Croat Yugoslav edition and in a multilingual international edition. And its editorial collective adopted an agenda that was more unified than anything Pogledi had ever set forth: The Praxis group advocated freedom of speech and of the press, and they believed that Stalinist authoritarianism had to be redressed in practice and rooted out of Marxist theory itself. To this end, they prescribed a return to Marx’s romantic early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx’s more influential later work would emphasize the iron laws of historical determinism. But the 1844 Manuscripts waxed lyrical about the creative potential of human activity, through which man might realize his “species being.”It is typical of recent Serbian politics that those Praxists who sought power were the ones who differed least with the ruling regime. Other Belgrade Praxists kept a greater distance from politics but continued to agitate for a genuinely democratic future. It was a member of the Belgrade 8 — Nebojsa Popov — who co-founded one of Serbia’s most principled and least popular parties, the Civic Alliance of Serbia, in 1991. Among its stated aims was “to overcome nationalist and class collectivism.” As the little brother of the two largest opposition parties, the Civic Alliance joined the Zajedno coalition that led protests at the University of Belgrade in 1996 and 1997. In one of the more surreal scenes to emerge from 1990s Belgrade, Popov appeared on Nikola Pasic Square with a pot of beans in February 1997. He and his colleagues were cooking beans for “all those hungry for freedom, truth, and democracy.” They pledged to continue “beaning” for 330 days or until Milosevic was deposed. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-03-23 08:06:48 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40408720 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier But Zivotic and his followers made their real reputation as peace activists. During the war years, the Belgrade Circle expanded to include a motley array of workers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and artists. At its height it had five hundred followers, who convened every Saturday for public events geared toward interethnic dialogue and peace. The appearance of nationalist tensions within the Praxis group was a harbinger of tensions that would soon spread across the country. Years later, when war raged in Kosovo, American newspapers would plug 1989, the year Milosevic revoked Kosovo’s autonomy, as the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia. But many Serbs would say the country’s fate was sealed as early as 1974. That was the year a controversial revision of the Yugoslav constitution went into effect, devolving broader powers than ever before to the six republics and granting full autonomy to two provinces within the republic of Serbia: Kosovo and Vojvodina. Since the Serbs were scattered across the republics — more than a million lived in Bosnia and at least 500,000 in Croatia — these constitutional reforms were to feed a growing sense of grievance among the Serbs. The historical and psychological exploration of myths, of sacred texts, means: rendering them profane

Testaments Betrayed | Faber - Kundera~AP Argument | AP Testaments Betrayed | Faber - Kundera~AP Argument | AP

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. A novelist who writes eloquently about the wrenching dislocations of history, Kundera explains that his fictions use historical circumstances only to thrust his characters into a ""revelatory Continue reading »In 1997, Zivotic gave a talk in London about the anti-Milosevic demonstrations that were then taking place at the University of Belgrade. He knew that the West had high hopes for the activists, but he also knew that their leaders were themselves nationalists. Branka Magas was at this talk. “He was very disappointed with the Praxis people,” she says. “He was a humanist.”