Émigré

Abstract: Between his birth in 1818 and his death sixty-five years later, Karl Marx became one of Western civilization's most influential political philosophers. Two centuries on, he is still revered as a prophet of the modern world, yet he is also blamed for the darkest atrocities of modern times. But no matter in what light he is cast, the short, but broad-shouldered, bearded Marx remains-as a human being-distorted on a Procrustean bed of political "isms," perceived through the partially distorting lens of his chief disciple, Friedrich Engels, or understood as a figure of twentieth-century totalitarian Marxist regimes. Returning Marx to the Victorian confines of the nineteenth century, Jonathan Sperber, one of the United States' leading European historians, challenges many of our misconceptions of this political firebrand turned London emigre journalist. In this deeply humanizing portrait, Marx no longer is the Olympian soothsayer, divining the dialectical imperatives of human history, but a scholar-activist whose revolutionary Weltanschauung was closer to Robespierre's than to those of twentieth-century Marxists. With unlimited access to the MEGA (the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the total edition of Marx's and Engels's writings), only recently available, Sperber juxtaposes the private man, the public agitator, and the philosopher-economist. We first see Marx as a young boy in the city of Trier, influenced by his father, Heinrich, for whom "the French Revolution and its aftermath offered an opportunity to escape the narrowly circumscribed social and political position of Jews in the society." For Heinrich's generation, this worldview meant no longer being a member of the so-called Jewish nation, but for his son, the reverberations were infinitely greater-namely a life inspired by the doctrines of the Enlightenment and an implacable belief in human equality. Contextualizing Marx's personal story-his rambunctious university years, his loving marriage to the devoted Jenny von Westphalen (despite an illegitimate child with the family maid), his children's tragic deaths, the catastrophic financial problems-within a larger historical stage, Sperber examines Marx's public actions and theoretical publications against the backdrop of a European continent roiling with political and social unrest. Guided by newly translated notes, drafts, and correspondence, he highlights Marx's often overlooked work as a journalist; his political activities in Berlin, Paris, and London; and his crucial role in both creating and destroying the International Working Men's Association. With Napoleon III, Bismarck, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin, among others, as supporting players, Karl Marx becomes not just a biography of a man but a vibrant portrait of an infinitely complex time. Already hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a major work ...likely to be the standard biography of Marx for many years," Karl Marx promises to become the defining portrait of a towering historical figure.

Abstract: Long recognized as the best and most comprehensive work on its subject, Edward J. Brown's fine book is now thoroughly revised and updated. It provides a compendious treatment of Russian literature from the revolutionary period to the early 1980s. Every stage in the evolution of Russian literature since 1917, every major author, all the important literary organizations, groups, and movements, are sharply outlined, with a wealth of often unfamiliar detail and a notable economy of means. Critical essays on Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Olesha, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin, Erofeev, and many others offer sophisticated formal and thematic analyses of a very large array of literary masterpieces. The book examines and makes intelligible the persistent conflict between the writer and the state, between the literary artist's urge for untrammeled self-expression and the pervasive control of intellectual activity exercised by the Soviet government. Chapters on "The Levers of Control under Stalin," "The First Two Thaws," "Into the Underground," and "Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps" reveal the conditions under which Russian literature was produced in various periods and investigate the forces that drove an important segment of the literature into clandestine publication or into exile. "Exiles, Early and Late" deals with some of the leading figures in emigre literature and examines the condition of exile as an influence on literary creation. "The Surface Channel" describes and analyzes a number of significant works published aboveground in the Soviet Union during the sixties and seventies. Brown abandons the old distinction between Soviet and emigre literature, treating all Russian writing as part of a single stream, divided since 1917 into two currents not totally separate but subtly interrelated.

Abstract: The confiscation of émigré property reveals the many different, conflicting ways that property was used in Revolutionary France. Studying the question of property and the process of émigré confiscation from the perspectives of law, politics, administration, social relations, and economic activity, the dissertation shows that as the Revolutionary leadership reduced the legal limits of property to a right held by individuals, they continued to rely on other relationships secured by property in their vision of the revolutionized polity. Still, this vision conflicted with the ways that citizens used property to secure relationships and create wealth. The project contextualizes a core piece of global political and economic systems in the historical contingency from which it emerged, offering a new way to think about the French Revolution.

Abstract: French emigre literature is both under-explored and under-valued by scholars. This thesis aims to rehabilitate the female emigre novel within its nineteenth-century landscape, putting to the fore its originality and pertinent contribution to contemporary movements such as Romanticism and the realist novel. Recent work has unearthed the emigre-specific way of narrating the Revolution; yet no clear definition has yet been established. This thesis defines what the emigre novel is based on the dichotomy for novelists of having experienced the exile first-hand or not. The memoirs and novels of three emigre noblewomen, Madame de Boigne, de Souza and de Duras, who all spent a decade in London during the 1790s, are scrutinized for this purpose. Three angles of research frame this comparative analysis: the search for the genre of the emigre novel, or how several genres intertwine in this ‘sub-genre’; trauma of the emigration as the core characteristic of the novels; and gender questions, or how the emigree is using her stay in Britain as inspiration to convey more genuine relationships for post-revolutionary French society. This thesis goes against the idea that to interpret a novel based on the life of the author is reductive: instead it rediscovers the creative potential of the autobiographical which the emigrees chose to inject in their fiction works. Likewise, it establishes that the trauma of the Revolution and exile is visible in the selected emigre novels in the way it is camouflaged, enhanced and fictionalised, which constitutes their originality and distinguishes them from non-authentic emigre fictions. Finally this thesis considers the gender modernisation asked for in the plots, based on the fact that the selected novelists had enjoyed more freedom of action, uprooted from French social etiquette and within British society.