Young Europe and the Birth of Modern Nationalism in the Slavic World


Book Description

Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe and the Birth of Modern Nationalism in the Slavic World examines the intellectual currents in Eastern Europe that attracted educated youth after the Polish Revolution of 1830–1. Focusing on the political ideas brought to the Slavic world from the West by Polish émigré conspirators, Anna Procyk explores the core message that the Polish revolutionaries carried, a message based on the democratic principles espoused by Young Europe’s founder, Giuseppe Mazzini. Based on archival sources as well as well-documented publications in Eastern Europe, this study highlights that the national awakening among the Czechs, Slovaks, and Galician Ukrainians was not just cultural, as is typically assumed, but political as well. The documentary sources testify that at its inception the political nationalism in Eastern Europe, founded on the humanistic ideals promoted by Mazzini, was republican-democratic in nature and that the clandestine groups in Eastern Europe were cooperating with one another through underground channels. It was through this cooperation during the 1830s that the better-educated Poles and Ukrainians in the political underground tied to Young Europe became aware that the interests of their nations, bound together by the forces of history and political necessity, were best served when they worked closely together.




Mazzini


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This biography of Giuseppe Mazzini re-examines his ideological impact and portrays Mazzini as a vigorous proponent of patriotism, and a pre-eminent figure in the struggle for Italian independence and unity. His ideas also brought him into contact with Marx, Carlyle, Mill and Bakunin.







Joseph Mazzini


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Joseph Mazzini


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Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy


Book Description

This groundbreaking study considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, he examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.




Garibaldi


Book Description

What adventure novelist could have invented the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi? The revolutionary, soldier, politician, and greatest figure in the fight for Italian unification, Garibaldi (1807-1882) brought off almost as many dramatic exploits in the Americas as he did in Europe, becoming an international freedom fighter, earning the title of the "hero of two worlds," and making himself perhaps the most famous and beloved man of his century. Alfonso Scirocco's Garibaldi is the most up-to-date, authoritative, comprehensive, and convincing biography of Garibaldi yet written. In vivid narrative style and unprecedented detail, and drawing on many new sources that shed fresh light on important events, Scirocco tells the full story of Garibaldi's fascinating public and private life, separating its myth-like reality from the outright myths that have surrounded Garibaldi since his own day. Scirocco tells how Garibaldi devoted his energies to the liberation of Italians and other oppressed peoples. Sentenced to death for his role in an abortive Genoese insurrection in 1834, Garibaldi fled to South America, where he joined two successive fights for independence--Rio Grande do Sul's against Brazil and Uruguay's against Argentina. He returned to Italy in 1848 to again fight for Italian independence, leading seven more campaigns, including the spectacular capture of Sicily. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln even offered to make him a general in the Union army. Presenting Garibaldi as a complex and even contradictory figure, Scirocco shows us the pacifist who spent much of his life fighting; the nationalist who advocated European unification; the republican who served a king; and the man who, although compared by contemporaries to Aeneas and Odysseus, refused honors and wealth and spent his last years as a farmer.







Adam Mickiewicz


Book Description

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Poland's national poet, was one of the extraordinary personalities of the age. In chronicling the events of his life--his travels, numerous loves, a troubled marriage, years spent as a member of a heterodox religious sect, and friendships with such luminaries of the time as Aleksandr Pushkin, James Fenimore Cooper, George Sand, Giuseppe Mazzini, Margaret Fuller, and Aleksandr Herzen--Roman Koropeckyj draws a portrait of the Polish poet as a quintessential European Romantic. Spanning five decades of one of the most turbulent periods in modern European history, Mickiewicz's life and works at once reflected and articulated the cultural and political upheavals marking post-Napoleonic Europe. After a poetic debut in his native Lithuania that transformed the face of Polish literature, he spent five years of exile in Russia for engaging in Polish "patriotic" activity. Subsequently, his grand tour of Europe was interrupted by his country's 1830 uprising against Russia; his failure to take part in it would haunt him for the rest of his life. For the next twenty years Mickiewicz shared the fate of other Polish émigrés in the West. It was here that he wrote Forefathers' Eve, part 3 (1832) and Pan Tadeusz (1834), arguably the two most influential works of modern Polish literature. His reputation as his country's most prominent poet secured him a position teaching Latin literature at the Academy of Lausanne and then the first chair of Slavic Literature at the Collége de France. In 1848 he organized a Polish legion in Italy and upon his return to Paris founded a radical French-language newspaper. His final days were devoted to forming a Polish legion in Istanbul. This richly illustrated biography--the first scholarly biography of the poet to be published in English since 1911--draws extensively on diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and the poet's literary texts to make sense of a life as sublime as it was tragic. It concludes with a description of the solemn transfer of Mickiewicz's remains in 1890 from Paris to Cracow, where he was interred in the Royal Cathedral alongside Poland's kings and military heroes.