Albania: To Be or Not to Be?

Albania: To Be or Not to Be? PDF

Author: Bejtullah Destani

Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers

Published: 2023-03-31

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1398480037

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‘‘We ourselves, at the outset of the war, received from a responsible Serbian source this frank announcement: “We will extirpate the Albanians.” Now that this system of annihilation is being persisted in without modification, despite all European protests, we deem it our duty to reveal the designs of the gentlemen of Belgrade without more ado... In this matter facts speak more loudly than any confessions could. Since Serbian troops crossed the borders last autumn and occupied districts there inhabited by Albanians, one blood-bath has followed another in sequence. In isolated cases the conqueror may have been forced in self-defence to proceed with all martial vigour against an Albanian village from which his troops were perhaps fired on from behind. But to raze hundreds of villages to the ground, to butcher tens of thousands of non-combatants, men, women, and children, these are deeds which no martial law, no precept of self-preservation enjoins...”

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History PDF

Author: Lea Ypi

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0393867749

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Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.

High Albania

High Albania PDF

Author: M. Edith Durham

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2017-04-23

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1365912825

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In High Albania, Victorian anthropologist and travel writer M (Mary) Edith Durham presents a vivid and fascinating insight into the culture, customs, people, and the lands of Northern Albania as it was in the early 20th century.

National Romanticism

National Romanticism PDF

Author: Balázs Trencsényi

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2007-01-10

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 6155211248

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67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.

Essays on World Literature

Essays on World Literature PDF

Author: Ismail Kadare

Publisher: Restless Books

Published: 2018-02-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1632061759

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The Man Booker International–winning author of Broken April and The Siege, Albania’s most renowned novelist, and perennial Nobel Prize contender Ismail Kadare explores three giants of world literature—Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare—through the lens of resisting totalitarianism. In isolationist Albania, which suffered under a Communist dictatorship for nearly half a century, classic global literature reached Ismail Kadare across centuries and borders—and set him free. The struggles of Hamlet, Dante, and Aeschylus’s tragic figures gave him an understanding of totalitarianism that shaped his novels. In these incisive critical essays informed by personal experience, Kadare provides powerful evidence that great literature is the enemy of dictatorship and imbues these timeless stories with powerful new meaning. With eloquent prose and the narrative drive of a great mystery novel, Kadare renews our readings of the classics and lends them a distinctly Albanian tint. Like Mark Twain’s Mississippi River, Márquez’s Macondo, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kadare’s Albania emerges as a microcosm of civilization; here, blood vengeance in mountain communities reaches the dramatic heights of Hamlet’s dilemma, funereal rites take on the air of Greek tragedy, and political repression gives life the feel of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. Like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Essays on World Literature casts reading itself as a daring act of resistance to artistic suppression. Kadare’s insights into the Western canon secure his own place within it.

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