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The Triumph of Provocation, collected essays by Józef Mackiewicz
Original Polish title: Zwycięstwo prowokacji
Rights status: available for all languages less Polish and English.
Published by: English - Yale University Press (2009), Polish - Kontra, Russian - Zarya, German - Bergstadtverlag W.G. Korn
This masterful political treatise, first published in 1962, examines the history and nature of Communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and in Poland. Józef Mackiewicz, known for his relentless opposition to Communism, argues that accommodation with the Communists simply helped them to impose their vision of the world and pursue their goal of global domination. He compares Communism to Nazism and insists that the former was the greater threat to the future of humanity.
Mackiewicz's unique interpretation of the differences and similarities between Communism and Nazism is highly relevant to debates about these two systems and to major contemporary issues which are of particular importance to the U.S. and Europe, including radical Islam and the necessity of war and the responsibility for war.
"Mackiewicz, who knew the Nazi and Communist systems at first hand, retains a freshness and a directness that can aid historians and thinkers who today grapple with the problem of understanding Hitler and Stalin together." -- Timothy Snyder, Yale University
"... A work of genius. ...Mackiewicz is one of the most intelligent men we have ever heard." -- Andrei Navrozov, Chronicles
"This salutary book is a reminder of the terrible damage wrought by Communism and of the need, amid the War on Terror, not to lose sight of other ideological challenges to Western values. ... The importance of this work in part rests on the degree to which the autocracy, and indeed the accommodation of the autocracy, that he depicts are not restricted to the case of Communism." -- Jeremy Black, foreword to the 2009 Yale University Press edition
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BEFORE AND DURING, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: China - PEKING UNIVERSITY PRESS, France - PHÉBUS, Italy - VOLAND, Serbia - UTOPIA, World English - DEDALUS
Set in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal surroundings on a series of fantastical excursions into the Russian past. The novel invokes real historical events and people (Tolstoy, Madame de Staël, Saint John of Kronstadt, Alexander Scriabin, and Stalin, among others), swirling them into a phantasmagoric alternative chronology. Stories germinate within other stories, unfolding in astonishing variations.
We meet Leo Tolstoy’s twin brother, eaten by the great writer in his mother’s womb, only to be born as Tolstoy’s ‘son’; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Staël who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass palanquin and becomes Fyodorov’s lover; and the composer Alexander Scriabin, who preaches to Lenin on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies – all described in a serious, steady voice – Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God.
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