4,994 words

Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

4,083 words

The memoirs of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are unique in his vast body of work given that they serve more as metadata than data regarding the man’s impact upon the culture and perspective of the political Right. I’m sure this could be the case with the memoirs of any important person. However, with Solzhenitsyn, so often his work was his life. He drew directly from his experiences as a zek to develop his early works, such as his prison plays, his unproduced screenplay The Tanks Know the Truth (about a gulag uprising),  (more…)

2,263 words

Cecile Tormay
An Outlaw’s Diary: The Commune, An Account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Hungary
Antelope Hill Publishing, 2020

“Pole and Hungarian brothers be.” Poland and Hungary have enjoyed a long and special relationship since the Middle Ages. It was the ethnic Magyar Stephen Báthory (yes, of the same family as the infamous “Blood Countess”) whom Polish noblemen voted into power as the king in 1576. (more…)