Forefathers' Eve [Dziady] is a four-part dramatic work begun circa 1820 and completed in 1832 - with Part I published only after the poet's death, in 1860. The drama's title refers to Dziady, an ancient Slavic and Lithuanian feast commemorating the dead. This is the grand work of Polish literature, and it is one that elevates Mickiewicz to a position among the "great Europeans" such as Dante and Goethe.With its Christian background of the Communion of the Saints, revenant spirits, and the int...

Bohdan Ihor Antonych. The remarkable Ukrainian poet and literary critic Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-1937) lived for only a brief 28 years. Originally from the mountainous Lemko region in Poland, where a variant of Ukrainian is spoken, he was home-schooled for the first eleven years of his life until 1920 when he entered the Queen Sophia State Gymnasium in Syanok, which he completed eight years later. Antonych then matriculated at Lviv University. Lviv is the cultural center of Western Ukraine...

An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a tendency to collapse into itself, often forcing the reader to reevaluate a word or line, to reread a p...

Leonardo’s Handwriting is a romantic morality tale, with an unconventional woman at its heart. Nature has given the heroine, Anna, the gift of clairvoyance, and it is this that determines her singular fate. The characteristic “left-handed mirror handwriting”, which in psychology came to be known as “Leonardo’s handwriting” (since that’s how the Renaissance genius wrote his notes), simply adds to the “weirdness” both of Anna’s personality and the twists and turns of the nov...

Boryslav in Flames by Ivan Franko is a pioneering novel that depicts the rise of the labour movement in Western Ukraine. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the industrial revolution in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the 1860s. As industry burgeons in Boryslav, a nascent working class emerges, inspired by socialist ideals – a unique phenomenon in mostly agrarian Galicia.

Central to the narrative is Benedio, a lowly mason’s assistant who organizes the striking workers. This is of...

Andrejevs actieve periode als schrijver besloeg zo'n twintig jaar in een tumultueuze periode van de geschiedenis van Rusland. Hij ondersteunde de eerste Russische Revolutie daadwerkelijk en kwam voor het verbergen van medeplichtigen en het organiseren van geheime bijeenkomsten in de gevangenis terecht. Toen in 1907 de reactie op de revolutie kwam, nam de schrijver afstand van alle revolutionaire opvattingen, omdat volgens hem de opstand van de massa slechts lijden en slachtoffers zou brengen....

Lee Mandel's historical novel Moryak revolves around the story of Lieutenant Stephen Morrison, a naval officer sent by President Theodore Roosevelt on a top-secret mission in 1905. Morrison's assignment is to work with British agent Sidney Reilly to kidnap Tsar Nicholas II and remove him from Russia before he can sabotage the upcoming Portsmouth Peace conference.Main description: Lee Mandel's historical novel Moryak revolves around the story of Lieutenant Stephen Morrison, a naval officer sen...

Based on previously sealed war archives and rare witness records of the survivors, Khatyn is a heart wrenching story of the people who fought for their lives under the Nazi occupation during World War II.

Through the prism of the retrospect perception as narrated by the novel's main character Flyora - a boy who matures during the war - author Ales Adamovich beholds genocide and horrific crimes against humanity. The former teen partisan goes back in time and remembers atrociti...

Edited, translated, and introduced by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, this bilingual anthology presents Russian short poems of the last half-century. It showcases thirty poets from Russia, and displays a variety of works by authors who all come from different backgrounds. Some of them are well-known not only locally but also internationally due to festival appearances and translations into European languages; among them are Gennady Aigi, Gennady Alexeyev, Vladimir Aristov, Sergey Biryukov, Konstantin K...