Slovo 

Abstract: By PER HOGSELIUS. Pp. 294. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. $30.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9781137293718. Click Here to read the review

Abstract: Memoirs offer unique human testaments to historical events. This article analyses a sample of seven Gulag memoirs that recount experiences of imprisonment at the height of the Stalinist repression in Romania, between 1947 and 1964. The paper looks at the literary conventions employed by the authors in the recounting of their stories. The memoirs were chosen for the broad range of perspectives they represent, with particular attention being paid to the gendered experiences of imprisonment. The texts will be approached through the lenses of literary criticism, as this article analyses common tropes, motifs, characters, and techniques of narration elements that make Gulag memoirs a ‘genre’ in its own right. A close reading of the text will uncover not only the gruesome realities of Communist persecution, imprisonment, and torture, but also the prevailing mentalities of that era. The literary components of the texts provide clues that help in decoding the authors’ self and their understanding of history.

Abstract: This paper analyses the subversive strategies of ‘Aesopian language’ with reference to the discourse of the Romanian literary criticism written under late communism (1971-1989). The first two sections of the paper signal certain gaps and inconstancies in defining Aesopian language and in delineating its forms of manifestation; at the same time, they explain the spread of this subversive practice in the political and cultural context of Romanian communism. The following three sections analyse the manner in which Aesopian language materialized in the writings of some of the most important contemporary Romanian critics: Mircea Iorgulescu, Nicolae Manolescu and Mircea Martin. The final section of the study considers a revision of the current definitions of Aesopian language (through the concept of “triggers” theorized in this paper), a new classification of the rhetorical strategies acting globally in a subversive text, as well as a re-evaluation of the relevance of Aesopian language in the context of ‘resistance through culture’, which was the main form of opposition against the communist regime in Romania.

Abstract: This paper attempts to uncover the textual relationships between Croatian manuscripts of the Story of Akir the Wise and other South Slavonic copies of the same text. The Story of Akir the Wise, an apocryphal text originating in the ancient Middle East earlier than 500 B.C., was translated into Church Slavonic, probably in the 12th or the 13th century. The story was disseminated mostly among the Orthodox Slavs, but was also transmitted to the Catholic Slavs in Croatia. The South Slavonic copies, although outnumbered by the Russian ones, include the oldest extant manuscript preserved at the Savina Monastery in Montenegro. The question of the Slavonic archetype of the Story is still open because of the absence of a Greek recension. In Croatia, three copies have been preserved in Glagolitic, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts. This paper treats the South Slavonic copies of the Story, composed from the 14th to the 17th century inside and outside Croatia, and points out some textual features connecting the Croatian copies with other Cyrillic copies composed in Serbia and Bulgaria. Based on text-critical analysis, it is argued that the Croatian copies have a common source, which is a descendent of another older source that appeared in the Slavia Orthodoxa; some Serbian and Bulgarian copies also derived from that source. The paper also argues that the scribes of the Story not only copied their source texts but furthermore intentionally engaged in editing their texts in accordance with the language practices and social environment within which they worked.