History
“We envied the Russians their samizdat...and then we went a few steps further.”
– Adam Michnik
Duplicator Underground is the first comprehensive in-depth English-language discussion of Polish independent publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. This anthology provides wide-ranging analyses of uncensored publishing and printing in communist Poland between 1976 and 1989. It gives a broad overview, historical explanation, and assessment of the phenomenon of the Polish “second circulation,” including discussions of various aspects of underground printing, distribution, and circulation of independent publications. The documentary part of the book is comprised of contemporary narratives and testimonies of the participants, including editors, printers, and distributors of underground literature. The book argues that rather than being a form of samizdat, Polish underground printing reached a semi-industrial scale and was at the same time a significant social movement.
Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays in the History and Culture of a Medieval City-State is one of several major works Henrik Birnbaum produced as part of his extensive research in this area, including a second book with Slavica in 1996 (Novgorod in Focus, still in print as of this writing). Two other books appeared with other publishers, so this topic manifestly constituted one of the major touchstones of his long and eminent research career.
Slavica would like to express its sincere thanks to Marianna Birnbaum for graciously granting permission for this reprint. We welcome comments on this and other forthcoming titles to be released in this series.
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Medieval Slavic Texts, Volume 1 is a collection of medieval texts, reprinted for students of Slavic philology, and representing a wide range of genres, language variants, and orthographic systems. As the title implies, the original intention was to continue the series with later texts, but this never actually happened. Nevertheless, this collection provides a selection of useful texts in accessible form. It should be noted that in the original print work, most pages were presented in portrait orientation, but some were landscape, and in this .pdf version we have rotated these pages to make them suitable for on-‐‑screen reading. Our sincere thanks to Charles E. Gribble, co-‐‑founder and long-‐‑time owner of Slavica, for granting permission for this reprint. The publisher welcomes comments on this and other forthcoming out-‐‑of-‐‑print titles to be restored in this series.
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How did Russian workers develop the revolutionary outlook and the level of political consciousness and organizational experience that made them the crucial political and social force in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917? Creating a Culture of Revolution offers an alternative reading of the revolutionary workers’ movement, with circle activity and propaganda literature at the center of a developing “culture of revolution.” Pearl focuses on four popular genres of propaganda literature: revolutionary skazki or tales, expositions of political economy, poetry and song, and foreign novels in translation. Her analysis of the grassroots revolutionary subculture of radical workers contributes to a reevaluation of the broader history of the Russian revolutionary movement.
This book is Volume 8 of the Allan K. Wildman Group Historical Series
World War I’s Eastern Front was located in the midst of the Russian Pale of Settlement, where up to a third of the urban population was Jewish. The war resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and severe damage to the entire region’s economy. Urban populations suffered the worst from artillery shell-ing, requisitions, and outright robbery. In addition, each retreating army made an effort to destroy all that it could before surrendering a city to the enemy, lest valuable resources fall into hostile hands. As early as the first months of the war, a large portion of the Jews in Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna were bankrupt and destitute, becoming fully dependent on welfare societies.
This book is Volume 5 of the series New Approaches to Russian and East European Jewish Culture.
A recently published review of the book by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee can be accessed here.