Caviar and ashes : a Warsaw generation's life and death in Marxism, 1918-1968 / Marci Shore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shore, Marci.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communism--Poland--History--20th century.

Communism.

Poland--Intellectual life--1918-1945.

Poland.

Poland--Intellectual life--1945-1989.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxii, 457 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska." Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920's who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920's. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically. Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

Contents:

Front matter

contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Cast of Characters

Introduction when god died

chapter one Once upon a Time, in a Café Called Ziemiańska

chapter two Love and Revolution

chapter three A Visit from Mayakovsky

chapter four A Funeral for Futurism

chapter five Entanglements, Terror, and the Fine Art of Confession

chapter six Autumn in Soviet Galicia

chapter seven Into the Abyss

chapter eight Stalinism amidst Warsaw's Ruins

chapter nine Ice Melting

chapter ten The End of the A¤air

Epilogue

Conclusion does history go on?

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 379-446) and index.

ISBN:

1-281-72198-0

9786611721985

0-300-12862-2

OCLC:

748528192