CEU Press Classics – serie

The Latvian Janis Ezerins's best work was created in the genre of the short story. Among his literary models were Boccaccio, Maupassant and Poe. During his active literary working life, which lasted approximately five to six years of his short life, Ezerins seemingly grasped an encyclopaedia of possibilities and subject matter, as well as the versatility of storytelling, not avoiding either classical subjects or the repetition of characters so traditional in short stories. For the twenty-first century reader his stories evoke the atmosphere of the post-war, newly independent, fairly multicultural Latvia, rural mysticism hued with the fine neurosis of the emerging modern era. In many of his stories Ezerins disputed the single-dimensional (e.g., good/evil) portrayal of a human being. The people in his prose are individuals with their own unique characteristics, often ambivalent, and subject to change in time and situations. As is common in modern literature, Ezerins often blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, frequently making his reader laugh about the serious while aching when reading the humorous.

The Prose of the Mountains contains three tales of the Caucasus by Aleksandre Qazbegi, one of the most prescient and gifted chroniclers of the Georgian encounter with colonial modernity. His stories offer an invaluable counterpoint to the predominantly Russian narratives that have hitherto shaped scholarly accounts of the nineteenth-century Caucasus. “Memoirs of a Shepherd” poignantly chronicles the young author’s decision to pass seven years of his life as a shepherd with Georgian mountaineers. “Eliso” (the name of a Chechen girl) offers one of the most searing accounts on record of the forced migration of this people from their homeland to Ottoman lands. Set in the sixteenth century, “Khevis Beri Gocha” (the name of a Georgian village chief) classically chronicles a tragic misunderstanding between a severe father and his loving son.

In this novel, written by the esteemed novelist in 1901, a provincial composer and organist from Croatia struggles to find his way along the perilous frontier between the worlds of artistic vocation and humdrum family life. The local kapellmeister—-a Czech, in good Habsburg tradition, and a confidant of Gaj and Palacky, influential politicians of the time—-recognizes young Amadej Zlatanic as a prodigy and persuades the stingy mayor and stubborn parish priest to pack the teenager off to the conservatory in Prague. After several years of sordid student purgatory, Amadej returns to Croatia—-ready for love and ready to make great art.The world of Central Europe in the 1860s flows past, and Amadej tries to keep abreast of political change. At the same time he ducks and dodges predatory relatives and townspeople in his native district, to which he has returned for the sake of employment. Despite his marriage to the impressionable and vulnerable local beauty, Adelka, and his devotion to their daughter Veruska, Amadej is sorely troubled by the political corruption and isolation of Croatia. His wife takes ill and his family is poor. Yet ultimately it is the vulgar, populist notion of Croatian identity—-symbolized by the worship of the tamburica, a local musical instrument—-that crushes Amadej's career. As it does so, he contemplates the two worlds of national greatness, amidst the Croatian national awakening, and international fame. Finally, frustrated beyond relief by unsuccessful affairs both amorous and professional, and tortured by the philistinism surrounding him, Amadej leaves the world of sanity for a mind-blowing descent into the maniacal and inescapable world of hallucination, paganism, and paranoia.

This gem of Slovak naturalism was written in 1940. The story takes the reader to a mountain village. The protagonist narrates the vicissitudes, suffering, and success he experiences as he pursues a love affair, resulting in the triumph of pure love. Peter has been in love with a girl—Magdalena—since childhood and asks her to marry him. But he is too late, because a rich man, Jano Zapotocný, has already proposed to Magdalena, a proposal that her greedy mother promptly accepted on her behalf. Magdalena, out of respect for her mother's wishes, accepts the engagement. However, Magdalena promises Peter that she will put off marrying Jano and will marry him instead if he can prove that he truly loves her. He must build a house and earn a living. After almost two years Peter returns to show her that he kept his promise. But Magdalena is already married; Jano has raped her and she is pregnant. Desperate, Peter is tempted to take out his anger on Jano, nevertheless he resists the impulse. In the end, the author finds a way to reward Peter's faith in love and morality.

The House of a Thousand Floors is one of the earliest science-fiction novels in European literature, published first in 1929. Besides being a pioneer in its genre, the book is highly regarded for its general merits as psychological literature. The novel tells the story of a dream in fever of a soldier wounded in World War I. He finds himself in the stairway of a gigantic (and kafkaesque) tower-like building, which is a metaphor for modern society. He learns that his task is to rescue Princess Tamara from Muller, the lord of the edifice. After a number of surrealistic encounters in the building, during which he is hailed as a liberator by many and is hunted by the cruel security guards, the main character finds Tamara and faces the cruel lord of Mullerdom. The novel makes fine use of a range of experimental styles and techniques. At times, linear storytelling gives way to a collage of incongruous elements: excerpts from fictitious books, encyclopedia articles, radio broadcast transcripts are used as a shortcut to describe places or events; other narrative ingredients include fanciful advertisements, ludicrous administrative documents or political slogans which highlight the idiosyncrasies of this decadent world.

In Avala Is Falling, Jovanović’s breakout success in 1978, a young woman challenges the expectations that teachers, parents, bus drivers, and doctors have for her. The “Avala” of the title refers to a mountain south of Belgrade which is home to some of Serbia’s most important nationalist monuments and shrines; it is also the site of the main mental hospital for the region, and its “falling” is the unexpected fulfillment of a prophecy from a traditional Serbian folk song. Jovanović’s use of stream of consciousness in her characters’ thinking and speaking, as well as of intertextuality in description and plot advancement heralded the arrival of an innovative new writer who was determined to break with the of traditional concerns of earlier women writers. This book is now recognized as much more than “jeans prose,” although the fame the book achieved under that characterization eventually pushed it to cult status. Jovanović is now considered a major avant-garde writer, whose stylistic innovations were as challenging as her women-centered themes.

This historical novel - Visoška kronika in the Slovene original - is about two generations of the owners of the Visoko estate in the Duchy of Carniola, a predominantly Slovene province of the Habsburg Empire, in the seventeenth century. The events of the estate and the fate of its owners are affected by witchcraft persecutions, the mistreatment of Protestants, and the Thirty Years’ War. These themes are key to the construction of a Slovene national identity, which was going through a decisive phase as Tavčar was writing. By the time the novel was released in 1919, his nation had left the Habsburg Crown for the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.The work is both romantic and realistic. The deeply romantic motive of crime, repentance, and punishment intertwines the lives of father and son. The very acquisition of the estate is connected to a murder, which casts a long shadow over the next generation. Tavčar insists on the principle of man’s full responsibility for his acts, which can be repaired with action and determination. The author’s bleak realistic description of the farm life at Visoko reflects his polemical view of the Slovene farmer of his time.

This farcical tale tells how the British bombing of a Finnish port city changes the life of the Russian governor, his wife, their cook, and the cook's Finnish fiancé. The story takes place during a Nordic offshoot of the Crimean conflict, known as the Åland War, in which a British-French naval force attacked military and civilian facilities on the coast of the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1854–1856. The location of the novella is Åbo, today’s Turku, where soldiers in the Russian garrison enjoy life, Cossacks dance and drink, and the governor’s wife is preoccupied about her cook’s marriage to a local lad, against which the governor and the English admiral devise a plot.After studies in Swiss and German universities, Carl Spitteler worked in Russia between 1871 and 1879 as the private tutor in the family of a Finnish general. In the process he came to know Finnish and Baltic noble families in Saint Petersburg and Finland. He published this story in 1889, and went on to become, in 1919, the first Swiss winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The Bombardment of Åbo is an ironic Western gaze on life and culture in the Tsarist Empire. Spitteler’s deeply held pacifism breaks through his otherwise sarcastic description of the characters and episodes in the novella.

Bijeg is a novel by the Croatian writer Milutin Cihlar Nehajev, here translated into English by Damir Janigro with the title Fugue. Regarded as a paramount example of Croatian literature from the Modernist era, it offers a captivating portrayal of the culture in pre-World War I Austro-Hungary. The story revolves around Duro, a talented and aspiring writer who abandons his studies in Vienna to take up a teaching position in Senj, a small coastal town in Croatia. Duro's aspirations include marrying a woman from Zagreb, but his plans are thwarted when her family objects due to the absence of the inheritance he had hoped for from his deceased uncle. The central theme of the novel explores the struggles faced by a gifted and principled individual in an inhospitable environment that often fails to comprehend his efforts to improve the world. The male and female characters are well-crafted and captivating, and the novel contains breathtaking descriptions of the natural beauty of the Croatian coast.

On Shaky Ground is a modernist novel written in the late 1930s and early 1940s and was originally published in Nazi occupied Kharkiv in 1942. One of the best examples of intellectual fiction of the time, the work summarizes the struggles of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when totalitarian reality, together with rampant industrialization, started to affect everyday life. V. Domontovych is the pen name of Viktor Petrov, a historian and archaeologist, a representative of neoclassicism in Ukrainian literature. The novel follows the trajectory of art historian, Rostyslav Mykhailovych, who goes on a work trip from the capital city of Kharkiv to provincial Katerynoslav (today Dnipro), the place where he spent his childhood. In the late 1920s, a section of the Dnipro River became the place of a major industrial project, the construction of the largest hydroelectric station in Ukraine (Dniprelstan), which flooded the rapids over the river and led to serious ecological and social changes in the region. While the main goal of the trip is to save an old church from being turned into a museum, the journey becomes a philosophical reflection on dislocation and loss of connection with one’s birthplace, traditions, religion and more globally, a sense of security.

Set in the decaying, multicultural port town of Sulina at the edge of the Danube Delta, Europolis is a hauntingly atmospheric novel that captures a world on the brink of vanishing. In this isolated outpost, where Greek, Romanian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Turkish, and Armenian characters coexist amid steamships and faded empires, the return from America of Nikola Marulis—rumored to be a wealthy émigré—sparks a wave of gossip, ambition, and dreams. But Nikola’s homecoming is not what it seems. As illusions unravel, passions flare, and destinies collide, Europolis transforms from a tapestry of port life into a poignant meditation on disillusionment, mortality, and the slow erosion of a once-vital community. First published in 1933 and now available in English for the first time, Bart’s masterpiece is an elegy for a town, a time, and the lost promise of modernity.

Estonian literature in its written form is little more than a century old. As Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, then of the Soviet Union, it is something of a miracle that the powerful presence of the Baltic Germans, the periods of Russification, and other more subtle forms of cultural pressure, have not eradicated Estonian as a serious literary language. One of the central figures to credit for this was Friedebert Tuglas. The nine stories, and the essay, featured here were written during the World War One, or in the first years of Estonian independence in the early 1920s. They reflect the troubled spirit of the times, but exhibit the influence of a wide selection of writers, ranging from O. Wilde and M. Gorky, to F. Nietzsche and Edgar Allan Poe. The subject matter of Tuglas' stories represented here ranges from a starving prisoner, via a luckless pharmacist's hallucinations from childhood, a wandering soldier who encounters weird spirits, to a young man sitting in a park, accosted by a devilish lunatic who wants to introduce a new brand of devil worship to the world.

The Coming Spring (Przedwiosnie), Zeromski's last novel, tells the story of Cezary Baryka, a young Pole who finds himself in Baku, Azerbaijan, then a predominantly Armenian city, as the Russian Revolution breaks out. He becomes embroiled in the chaos caused by the revolution, and barely escapes with his life. Then, he and his father set off on a horrendous journey west to reach Poland. His father dies en route, but Cezary makes it to the newly independent Poland. Cezary sees the suffering of the poor, yet his experiences in the newly formed Soviet Union make him suspicious of socialist and communist solutions. He is an outsider among both the gentry and the working classes, and he cannot find where he belongs. Furthermore, he has unsuccessful and tragic love relations. The novel ends when, despite his profound misgivings, he takes up political action on behalf of the poor. Zeromski, whose vivid, assured style is instantly recognizable, was a writer with a strong social conscience, taking up the concerns of the poor and downtrodden.

This is a collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bittersweet stories of life among the inhabitants of the Little Quarter of nineteenth-century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth-century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech rather than an Austrian city. Prague Tales is a classic by a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klíma, who contributes an introduction to this new translation.

The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich is a lyrical, deeply moving story of love and the pain of emancipation, set in the now vanished world of rural East European Jewish village life. Hanna is the most beautiful girl in all Polona, a Hasidic community in the remote province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Involvement in the exciting new movement of Zionism takes her away to a commune in a nearby town. But there she meets and falls in love with the strangely named Ivo Karajich: a Jew, yet not a Jew. The agonizing drama that follows, plants into her beautiful almond-shaped eyes the hard grain of sorrow that her children, too, will inherit.Olbracht's novella is both a great love story and a marvellous portrait of a world that modernity threatened and Hitler destroyed.

Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's work is familiar to every Polish reader, yet remains unknown to the outside world. The stories in this selection were all written in the 1930s, and provide an extraordinary evocation of Poland's first brief era of independence between the wars. They are also timeless sonatas of love and loss. In 'A New Love', Iwaszkiewicz uses masterful brevity to take a wry, comical look at the illusion of romance from the viewpoint of a jaded, cynical lover. One of his best-known works, 'The Wilko Girls', tells of a middle-aged man's quest to recover his lost youth in the aftermath of the First World War, which has left him psychologically scarred. He travels to the scene of his pre-war summer holidays in the eastern borderlands, where he renews his friendship with the fascinating sisters whom he knew when they were girls. But no one is the same and nothing can be as it was. 'The Birch Grove' is the moving story of a woodsman who, spiritually destroyed by the death of his wife, has buried himself away in an isolated forest. When his lively younger brother unexpectedly comes to stay, his self-centred peace is disrupted. But his brother has come home to die. The lives of two young men, one a deeply religious poet, the other a sceptical, worldly estate owner, are touchingly contrasted in 'The Mill on the River Utrata'. Confirming these stories' central place in Polish cultural history, 'The Wilko Girls' and 'The Birch Grove' were made into classic films by Andrzej Wajda, Poland's leading director.

The novel Martin Kacur, which dates from 1907, tells the engrossing story of a young schoolteacher who moves from one provincial Slovene town to the next, trying to enlighten his countrymen and countrywomen but instead receiving only the mistrust and scorn of the traditional-minded and petty population. The novel is ruthless in its analysis and self-analysis of the failure of this abstract idealist. Brilliant descriptions of Slovenia’s natural beauty alternate with the haze of alcoholic despair, rural violence, marital alienation, and the death of a young and beloved child. The Slovene prose writer, poet, and dramatist Cankar’s characterizations of duplicitous political and religious leaders (the village priest, the mayor, other teachers, doctors, etc.) and the treacherous social scene are remarkable in their engaging clarity. No doubt the raw emotional impact of Martin Kacur derives partly from Cankar’s portrayal of the way society isolates people, denying them sympathy and solidarity. Cankar's style here owes a debt both to naturalism and to symbolism and contains, in its sometimes frantic pace and associative interior monologues, hints of early expressionism.