Testaments Betrayed

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Among Popov’s allies are members of another Praxis offshoot: the Belgrade Circle, a small nongovernmental organization. Its president, Obrad Savic, was one of the students the Praxists led in the protests of 1968. Savic has been unsparing in his criticism of Markovic and Tadic’s turn to nationalism; in return, Tadic has denounced him as the founder of “anti-Serb mondialism.” Originally published in 1976, Kundera’s delightful but powerful novel proves endlessly entertaining in this audio production helmed by the gifted Richmond Hoxie. Telling the tale of eight locals in a Continue reading » At its inception, the philosophical journal Praxis was merely the successor to Pogledi, a political journal issued from Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, in the 1950s. Pogledi was a casualty of state interference: It lasted only three years. Chief among the defunct journal’s contributors had been the University of Zagreb sociologist Rudi Supek, who participated in the French Resistance as an emigre during World War II and later led an underground prisoners’ organization when he was interned at Buchenwald; and the University of Zagreb philosopher Gajo Petrovic, a Serb from Croatia who gravitated toward the early Marx, existentialism, and Heidegger. Birnbaum remembers, “Supek and Petrovic were impressive for their moral rigor, their utter disdain of careerism. They were people you loved to be around.” From the ashes of Pogledi, Supek, Petrovic, and their colleagues went on to start their summer school on Korcula in 1963 and a new journal, Praxis, in 1964. The group that formed around these ventures consisted of a close-knit circle of friends and colleagues — some from Supek’s and Petrovic’s departments at the University of Zagreb and another eight from the philosophy department at the University of Belgrade. The trial in Kafka's novel is the one that Kafka brings against himself, K. being nothing but his alter ego Many people have read Markovic as being a cynic and a betrayer of Praxis,” says Bernstein. But in Markovic’s distorted vision, Bernstein suspects, “Serbia represented the progressive element of Yugoslav society” — the element bent on keeping Yugoslavia united and on preserving its socialist structure. Over time, he lost all perspective. “That’s the tragedy of Mihailo Markovic,” says Bernstein. “Instead of seeing the dark and ugly side of Serbian nationalism, he committed himself to it.”

TESTAMENTS BETRAYED | Kirkus Reviews TESTAMENTS BETRAYED | Kirkus Reviews

Norman Birnbaum, now a law professor at Georgetown University, explains, “When we went to Yugoslavia at that time, we did think the nationality question had been solved. It was the Titoist truce, or illusion, or parenthesis.” Croatian-born historian Branka Magas puts it differently. The Western leftists who took up with Praxis as late as the 1980s and early 1990s, she says, “never really saw Yugoslavia. They saw self-management. They only saw the country through the lens of what interested them.” People best know Czech-born writer Milan Kundera for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.

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Testaments betrayed : an essay in nine parts - WorldCat.org Testaments betrayed : an essay in nine parts - WorldCat.org

In his second novel written in French (after Slowness), Czech-born novelist Kundera employs spare prose in the service of a meditation on the precarious nature of the human sense of self. Recently Continue reading » Why? After all, according to the Harvard political theorist Seyla Benhabib, “the name Praxis has a distinguished history. It was used by dissidents against Stalinism and identified with the project of democratic socialism.” Sher’s dissertation, later published as Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Indiana, 1977), explored what seemed a promising strain of humanist thought emerging from the University of Zagreb and the University of Belgrade. In the 1960s and 1970s, a glittering roster of Western intellectuals attended the Praxis group’s yearly retreats on the Adriatic island of Korcula: Jürgen Habermas, A.J. Ayer, Norman Birnbaum, Lucien Goldmann, and Herbert Marcuse were just a few of those who gathered around the Yugoslav group and served on the editorial board of its eponymous journal. Strange, then, that today the term “Praxis” and the names of some of its leaders are just as often associated with the notoriously anti-humanist rhetoric of Serbian nationalism and the murderous politics of Slobodan Milosevic. This was particularly evident when Puhovski himself edited a special issue of Praxis in 1973. He received a submission from the well-known Serbian novelist Dobrica Cosic. It was a short piece that argued that true socialism was not possible in an unenlightened society and that faith in the people — of which Cosic claimed to have little — was the “last refuge for our historically defeated hopes.” Which people and what hopes? The article did not specify. But Puhovski detected a disturbing nationalist message all the same. Nor was he impressed with the article’s argument or its rigor: “I had the junior approach of believing that philosophy and sociology were specialized fields,” he recounts with a touch of sarcasm. “I didn’t think Cosic’s piece was up to the level. It was bad nationalist propaganda.” He turned it down. So it was a surprise to many of the Belgrade Praxists’ admirers when three key members of the group — Markovic, Tadic, and Zagorka Golubovic — signed a 1986 petition in support of the Kosovo Serbs. Cosic also signed. It was not just that the petition painted a florid picture of Serbian suffering in the southern province. It was also that the signatories obliquely urged the government to revoke Kosovo’s autonomous status — something Serbian nationalists had been pushing the parliament to do. After all, the petitioners reasoned, with its “unselfish” aid to the impoverished province, Serbia had amply demonstrated that it took the Albanians’ interests to heart. Ominously, the petition’s authors intoned: “Genocide [against Kosovo’s Serbs] cannot be prevented by … [the] politics of gradual surrender of Kosovo … to Albania: the unsigned capitulation which leads to a politics of national treason.”

Kundera begins with a riff on Rabelais and leads us on a wild tour of European literature from Cervantes to Gombrowicz, with special attention to authors that I love including Musil and Broch. I found his continual focus on the ideas of literature attractive enough; but he assays music as well including a wonderful chapter on Janacek. Liberated from fascism by partisan struggle, after 1945, socialist Yugoslavia claimed to offer an alternative to the bureaucratic Soviet model. Although Communist leader Josip Broz Tito remained firmly in command until his death in 1980, his party promised equality among the nationalities, workers’ self-management in industry, and a degree of cultural freedom unparalleled elsewhere in the socialist world. Kundera's essay has been written like a novel. In the course of nine separate sections, the same characters meet and cross paths with each other. Stravinsky and Kafka with their odd friends Ansermet and Brod; Hemingway with his biographer; Janácek with his little nation; and Rabelais with his heirs - the great novelists. Faber Members have access to live and online events, special editions and book promotions, and articles and quizzes through our weekly e-newsletter.

Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in - OceanofPDF [PDF] [EPUB] Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in - OceanofPDF

Individual is only a sum of the suggestions and requirements that emanates from the well of the past That is to say, timeless habits, archetypes, which — having becomes myths passed on from one generation to the next — carry an enormous seductive power and control us (says Mann) from "the wall of the past" Of the Belgrade 8, none disgraced himself as thoroughly as Markovic, but there can be no question that nationalism captured the hearts and minds of many other Praxists. Consider the case of Svetozar Stojanovic and his ally, Dobrica Cosic. Four forms of communism's disintegration, which also means the collapse of four ancient European ventures The rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s were disappointing years for the Belgrade 8. They organized what they called the Free University, which mostly consisted of seminars held in private homes, but they could not advertise these meetings, and they were constantly on guard for police interruption. At least one Free University session convened at the novelist Dobrica Cosic’s house. Neither a Marxist nor a philosopher, Cosic was a personal friend and shadowy influence on the Praxis group although never an actual member. In the 1980s, his ties to Praxis pulled tighter; but to what extent the Praxists already shared his incipient nationalism remains a mystery. Cosic collaborated with Tadic on two projects in the early 1980s: One, a proposed journal that would criticize bureaucracy and champion freedom of expression, was immediately suppressed by the government; the other, a petition against censorship laws, was also swiftly defeated. The government press denounced Cosic and his Praxis friends as “hardened nationalists and open advocates of a multi-party system,” but the group continued to convene as a committee to promote freedom of expression.View of Grbavica, a neighbourhood of Sarajevo, approximately 4 months after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord that officially ended the war in Bosnia.