Wiola has a black cat called Blackie. Wiola's father was a deserter but now he is a taxidermist. Wiola's mother tells her that killing spiders brings on storms. Wiola must never enter the seamstress's 'secret' room. Wiola collects matchbox labels. Wiola is a good Catholic girl brought up with fables and nurtured on superstition. Wiola lives in a Poland that is both very recent and lost in time.Swallowing Mercury is about the ordinary passing of years filled with extraordinary days. In vivid prose filled with texture, colour and sound, it describes the adult world encroaching on the child's. From childhood to adolescence, Wiola dances to the strange music of her own imagination.

    In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.

    In this comprehensive and scholarly study Keith Hitchins traces these complex processes and explores how Rumania's leaders attempted to transform the ideology of modern nationhood into strong political, economic, and social institutions and to find ways of preserving independence in an international political and economic order dominated by the great powers.As the new Rumania took shape, the threads of historical continuity remained strikingly evident: in government a strong administrative centralization prevailed, despite the maturing of parliamentary institutions and the diversity of political expression; the national economy remained beholden to agriculture, despite the steady growth of industry; and in cultural life traditional values persisted, despite the adoption of modern forms. In foreign relations the most pressing aim was to untie all Rumanians in a single state and to defend its sovereignty within an uncertain international order. In all of these endeavours, the measure of achievement was the West. After the Second World War, when the Communist Party came to power, this historical continuity was broken. The earlier experiment in nation-building gave way to a new ideology, and Rumania now turned to the Soviet political and economic model.

    This substantially revised and updated edition sets the Soviet era in the context of the rise, fall and remarkable rebirth of an indomitable nation.

    

    He accepts the commission, but without any clear idea of whether he will actually go through with the self-immolation. He spends the rest of the day wandering the streets of Warsaw, being tortured by the secret police and falling in love. Both himself and Everyman, the character-author experiences the effects of ideologies and bureaucracies gone insane with, as always in history, the individual struggling for survival rather than offering himself up on the pyre of the greater good. Brilliantly translated by Richard Lourie, A Minor Apocalypse is one of the most important novels to emerge from Poland in the last twenty five years.

    Historian Grace Cole steps back and reviews the long history of barbarian invaders who pushed into Europe from the steppes of Asia, beginning 3,000 years ago with the nomadic Scythians, and then traces the tribes from Scandinavia, who migrated south to plague the empire until it finally crumbled. She examines the successes and failures of the principal barbarian tribes over the six centuries of their dominance and explores the surprising role of the Church as the era progressed. She covers the rise of France and the Holy Roman Empire and shows how the last great wave of barbarians - the Vikings -colonized a new world in Greenland and North America. Finally, she explains feudalism, the strange structure that held society together into the early Renaissance, outlining how it foreshadowed and laid the foundations for the civilization that became Europe. This rich heritage - the flowering of learning, the bold exploration and colonization of the globe, new political and economic structures, the idea of personal freedom - all were, in large part, the fruit of barbarism. And finally, the belief that barbarians and medieval Europe belonged to a dark age is conclusively put to rest.

    Here, in this compelling account of his early life, the author sketches his moral and intellectual history from childhood to the early fifties, providing the reader with a glimpse into a way of life that was radically different from anything an American or even a Western European could know.Using the events of his life as a starting point, Native Realm sets out to explore the consciousness of a writer and a man, examining the possibility of finding glimmers of meaning in the midst of chaos while remaining true to oneself.In this beautifully written and elegantly translated work, Milosz is at his very best.

    Madame is an unexpected gem: a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity, which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth.Our young narrator-hero is suffering through the regulated boredom of high school when he is transfixed by a new teacher --an elegant "older woman" (she is thirty-two) who bewitches him with her glacial beauty and her strict intelligence. He resolves to learn everything he can about her and to win her heart.In a sequence of marvelously funny but sobering maneuvers, he learns much more than he expected to--about politics, Poland, the Spanish Civil War, and his own passion for theater and art--all while his loved one continues to elude him. Yet without his realizing it, his efforts--largely bookish and literary--to close in on Madame are his first steps to liberation as an artist. Later, during a stint as a teacher-in-training in his old school, he discovers that he himself has become a legendary figure to a new generation of students, and he begins to understand the deceits and blessings of myth, and its redemptive power.A winning portrait of an artist as a young man, Madame is at the same time a moving, engaging novel about strength and weakness, first love, and the efforts we make to reconcile, in art, the opposing forces of reason and passion.

    This classic insider's account has been updated and supplemented with rare photographs from the LRDG collection in the Imperial War Museum.

    Since known as “The Miracle of the Vistula,” it remains one of the most crucial conflicts of the Western world. Drawing on both Polish and Russian sources, Norman Davies shows how this war was a pivotal event in the course of European history.

    His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. “The heart of my Europe,” Stasiuk tells us, “beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna.”  Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi—loose wires hanging from the dashboard—by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, “simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky.”  A brilliant tour of Europe’s dark underside—travel writing at its very best.

    Includes the famous Golem legend and also of many different city landmarks.

    New York Times bestselling historian Emma Moreau exposes and analyzes the events that turned ordinary French citizens into revolutionaries - from the attack on the Bastille to the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the bloodthirsty Reign of Terror that claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people.

    This empire dominates western Europe from 800 until 1806, when it is defeated by Napoleon. The Second Reich: All of Germany is united behind Prussia under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, victor of the Franco-Prussian War. Only Germany's defeat in World War I can break the power of the second German empire.What was the Third Reich?In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany after convincing other members of the Reichstag that the Nazi party was better for the country than their feared rivals, the Communists. Within the year, the President of the German Republic will be dead, and Hitler will declare himself supreme leader of Germany.But how did it happen?The Third Reich: Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, World War II and The Last German Empire takes you on a guided tour of German history for the last thousand years. You'll study the constitution of the Weimar republic and the Treaty of Versailles, and come to understand why Hitler believed it was crucial to build a new Nazi empire that was second to no one other nation in Europe in terms of military development. You'll learn how Hitler used the rhetoric of racism and nationalism to transform himself from a democratically elected member of government into a dictator whose word was law.Most importantly, you'll learn how those changes paved the way to World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust.