There’s an ongoing campaign in Spain to locate mass graves of victims who were executed during the early days of the Spanish Civil War and through the decades of the fascist Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the country. With 15,000 euro, archaeologists have identified regions in which bodies may have been buried. One of those bodies is likely the remains of the playwright and poet Federico García Lorca.
It wasn’t easy for David Lean to bring Boris Pasternak’s twentieth-century epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) to the silver screen. Despite the fact that Lean had already won critical acclaim with previous films like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Lean’s adaptation of the sweeping Russian novel came with difficulties and triumphs. For starters, the movie cost $11 million and took three years to make — no small amount of money or length of time for a cinematic feature in 1965.
In an early issue of Life Magazine from 1966, a reviewer described Lean’s film as one in which the director “flung onto the screen both the chaos and the compassion — the devastation of history’s onrush and its splintering effects on the people caught up in it.” To be sure, the feature closely follows the narrative of the Nobel Prize-winning novel. But do you want to know some interesting secrets about the making of Doctor Zhivago? If yes, keep reading.
Australia is a vast country with a long Aboriginal past and a more recent history of colonization and violence. Yet when we think of this region of the world, these aren’t always the topics that immediately come to mind. To be sure, many of us think of adventures in the Outback, waves crashing along Bondi Beach, or sounds emanating from the Sydney Opera House. Rather than focus on tourist tropes of the country, however, we’d like to offer you some reading recommendations that can bring to light the intertwining histories of this immense region.
Between the World Wars, a “little world war,” as Time Magazine described it, took place from 1936-1939. The Spanish Civil War pitted the Republicans, backed by international leftist allies, against the Nationalists and soon-to-be-tyrant General Francisco Franco. You might know a little bit about the history of the Spanish Civil War and its significance in Europe. Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany supported the dictator, turning the relatively localized war into a prescient event for the megalomania and political atrocities that have come to define World War II. As the Associated Press described it, the “conflict became a battlefield of ideologies . . . fascism against elected socialists and communists.”
How much do you know about the novelists and poets who not only depicted battles through language, but also fought alongside the Republicans in various regions of the country? From Pablo Neruda to Ernest Hemingway to George Orwell, let’s take a relatively quick guided tour through the literary history of the brutal war in Spain.
The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia has a fantastic dust jacket collection. We had the chance to talk with David Whitesell, a curator in the Special Collections library and faculty member at Rare Book School, about some of the many dust jackets the university owns and the significance of these items.
On the corner of Klapparstígur and Hverfisgata, located in the heart of downtown Reykjavík, sits the last remaining antiquarian bookstore in Iceland. Bókin, the bookstore itself, is located on the first floor, but the owner has more rooms upstairs with books that haven’t yet been shelved. Downstairs, the books are in order by genre...sort of. Sections include, for instance, “Poetry,” “Novels,” “Icelandic authors,” and even a nebulous portion entitled “Mixed books.” Upstairs, the texts have been placed as they’ve come in, and the book hunting becomes even more exciting. I happened to spot a number of first and early editions, in the original Icelandic, of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldór Laxness. In addition to books in Icelandic, the shop has a number of titles in English and Danish.
What is the relationship between literature and contemporary Chinese politics? China has a long literary tradition, but works written in both Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese haven’t always been available in translation to Western audiences. As such, many of us don’t have as much knowledge as we’d like to have about the links between fiction and current sociocultural matters. Let’s remedy that, at least in part, by thinking about some of the greatest known Chinese writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the role their fiction plays in our understanding of Chinese politics.
Have you ever thought about taking a trip to Iceland? If you fly into Reykjavík, you’re only a short drive from Gljúfrasteinn, the home of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldór Laxness. Laxness was born in 1902 in Reykjavík, and he traveled through Europe in his 20s before settling down in Iceland. Some of the author’s most prominent works include The Great Weaver from Kashmir (1927), Independent People (1935), The Atom Station (1948), The Fish Can Sing (1957), and Under the Glacier (1968). A short while ago, we took a tour of his home and learned more about Laxness’s possessions, writing habits, and deep love for the landscape of his country.
If you can’t read much Japanese, you’ll likely have some difficulty finding books of any particular authors on your list. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t wholly enjoy browsing in Kyoto’s antiquarian bookstores. Indeed, from Ukiyoe (woodblock prints) to handmade artists’ books, you’ll be amazed by the beautiful objects lining the shelves of the shops in Japan’s former imperial capital.
What is resistance literature? Many academics link the term with early work on postcolonialism. For instance, world literature scholars might point you to Barbara Harlow’s seminal work, Resistance Literature (1987), which discusses the ways in which fiction can help us to think through the struggle against colonial and imperial forces outside the narrowly defined Western world. But can we also give the term other meanings? While imaginative literature that engages with the struggle against colonialism is of great significance to any thinking about power and inequality, we might also think a bit further back to World War II. While their works might not necessarily fall under a rubric of resistance literature, we’d like to highlight some of the resistance writers who took up textual arms against the Axis powers.
