History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe
Cornis-Pope, Marcel; Neubauer, John; eds. History of the Literary
Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th
and 20th Centuries. 4 volumes. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2004-2010.
Esperanto is mentioned in vols. 1-3. Vol. 4 mentions Sándor Szathmári.
Vol. 1 (2004): In the article "National operas in East-Central Europe" by John Neubauer (pp. 514 -523), there is a mention of an Esperanto translation (p. 515):
As a touching gesture of compensation, an enterprising Pole published in Paris an Esperanto translation of Włodzimierz Wolski’s libretto for Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Halka.Bibliographic reference (p. 620):
Wolski, Włodzimierz. Halka. Esperanto trans. Antoni Grabowski. Paris: Hachette, 1912.Vol. 2 (2006): In the article "Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in East-Central Europe" by Seth L. Wolitz (pp. 314-331), on the Ashkenazi linguistic panorama (p. 328):
"It was not by accident that an Ashkenazic Jew, Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, born in Bialystok and at first a Yiddishist, invented Esperanto (hope), a synthetic language designed to serve as an international expression of peace and thus to escape the nationalist baggage weighing any national tongue. Language was thus problematized by Jews around 1900, and the chosen medium indicated an ideological, political, and cultural commitment ranging from nationalist/religious/socialist confrontations around Hebrew and Yiddish, to an accommodationist use of the dominant language of the State, and further to the invention of a new tongue with an implied federalist agenda."In another article: "Monuments and the Literary Culture of Riga" by Irina Novikova (pp. 40-56), on Russian poet Vsevolod Cheshikhin (pp. 44-45):
"His interest in creating a universal language similar to Esperanto reflected his faith in the internationalism of poetic culture."From Wikipedia: Pan-Slavic language:
"Neposlava (Непослава) was created by Vsevolod Evgrafovich Cheshikhin (Всеволод Евграфович Чешихин) in 1915 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. In 1913 he created a system to construct zonal languages based on Esperanto affixes which are used with national roots and called it Nepo. Then in 1915 he created a nepo-language based on the Slavic lexicon - Neposlava ("Slavic Nepo"). He also used this system to construct other "new Esperantoes" based on Latin-Romance and Germanic languages."Vol 3: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions (2007): From the "General Introduction" by John Neubauer (with Inna Peleva on Bulgaria and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák on Kölcsey and Széchenyi) (pp. 1-38), on competing Hebrew and Yiddish revivals (p. 13):
"The rivalry was unique even on a purely linguistic level, for unlike Croatian and Serbian or Czech and Slovak, Hebrew and Yiddish represented two radically different languages and cultures, both of which lived embedded in other linguistic environments (Russian, Polish etc.) that had reached already more advanced stages in their own awakening. Esperanto was invented by an Ashkenazi Jew, Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof, as an attempt to overcome this Babel."Vol. 4: Types and Stereotypes (2010): Introduction to section on women authors (pp. 221-227) in a discussion of dystopias mentions Sándor Szathmári (p. 226):
The most famous East-Central European dystopia R.U.R. (see Veronika Ambros's article in this volume), in which the robots kill off all but one of their makers on a remote island. Since they arenot programmed to generate successors, the robots also seem doomed to extinction, but a love affair between a male and a female robot offers some hope for species survival. The ending resembles that of Imre Madách's Az ember tragédiája (Tragedy of Man; 1862), where Adam, having surveyed the history and the projected future of mankind, wants to commit suicide and thus terminate mankind but is prevented from it by Eve's announcement that she is pregnant. Such pessimistic projections of a future surely qualify as dystopias, even if they do not involve totalitarian visions of society. Dystopic in this sense are also two Hungarian novels, Sándor Szathmári's Kazohinia (1941), one of the most important novels written in Esperanto, and Ferenc Karinthy's Epepe (1971), published in English with considerable success in 2008.
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