This play, by Futurist poet Bruno Jasienski, is an outstanding example of the joining of left-wing politics and avant-garde interest in human mechanization that characterized the experimental theatre of Poland in the inter-war years. Stalinism and the purges cut short Jasienski's career and prevented productions of his play for many years - except for a brilliant constructivist staging in Prague in 1933. The Mannequins' Ball can now take its place along with Capek's R.U.R. as one of the major twentieth-century dramas making use of the themes and techniques of human automata. Reproduced in this volume are the eight woodcuts by Moor which accompanied the original Moscow publication in 1931.

This play, by Futurist poet Bruno Jasienski, is an outstanding example of the joining of left-wing politics and avant-garde interest in human mechanization that characterized the experimental theatre of Poland in the inter-war years. Stalinism and the purges cut short Jasienski's career and prevented productions of his play for many years - except for a brilliant constructivist staging in Prague in 1933. The Mannequins' Ball can now take its place along with Capek's R.U.R. as one of the major twentieth-century dramas making use of the themes and techniques of human automata. Reproduced in this volume are the eight woodcuts by Moor which accompanied the original Moscow publication in 1931.

While Carlo Collodi's internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book's appearance on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses. And the puppets, marionettes, and other forms that figure so vividly and provocatively in modernist and avant-garde drama can, according to Harold Segel, be regarded as Pinocchio's progeny. Segel argues that the philosophical, social, and artistic proclivities of the modernist movement converged in the discovery of an exciting new relevance in the puppet and marionette. Previously viewed as entertainment for children and fairground audiences, puppets emerged as an integral component of the modernist vision. They became metaphors for human helplessness in the face of powerful forces -- from Eros and the supernatural to history, industrial society, and national myth. Dramatists used them to satirize the tyranny of bourgeois custom and convention, to deflate the arrogance of the powerful, and to breathe new life into a theater that had become tradition-bound and commercialized. Pinocchio's Progeny offers a broad overview of the uses of these figures in European drama from 1890 to 1935. It considers developments in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In his introduction, Segel reviews the premodernist literary and dramatic treatment of the puppet and marionette from Cervantes' Don Quixote to the turn-of-the- century European cabaret. His epilogue considers the appearance of puppets and marionettes in postmodern European and American drama by examining worksby such dramatists as Jean-Claude Van Itallie, Heiner MA1/4ller, and Tadeusz Kantor.

A fresh interpretation of the contexts, meanings, and consequences of the revolutions of 1989, coupled with state of the art reassessment of the significance and consequences of the events associated with the demise of communist regimes. The book provides an analysis that takes into account the complexities of the Soviet bloc, the events' impact upon Europe, and their re-interpretation within a larger global context. Departs from static ways of analysis (events and their significance) bringing forth approaches that deal with both pre-1989 developments and the 1989 context itself, while extensively discussing the ways of resituating 1989 in the larger context of the 20th century and of its lessons for the 21st.Emphasizes the possibility for re-thinking and re-visiting the filters and means that scholars use to interpret such turning point. The editors perceive the present project as a challenge to existing readings on the complex set of issues and topics presupposed by a re-evaluation of 1989 as a symbol of the change and transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

Bruno Jasieński was a bilingual Polish-Russian writer who died in exile in Siberia in 1939. This volume traces his literary evolution. The introductory biographical sketch is followed by a discussion of Jasieński's contribution to Polish poetry, specifically the Futurist movement which, like its parallels in Russia and Italy, revolutionized poetic language. An analysis and evaluation of Jasieński's prose work sheds light on the relationship between politics and literature in early twentieth-century Poland and Russia. Most of Jasieński's novels and short stories were written in the approved Soviet tradition of Socialist Realism. His Man Changes His Skin is considered one of the best Soviet industrial novels of the 1930s. The author's comprehensive and skillful treatment of Jasieński's literary production, the first to appear in English, also makes a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Futurism in Eastern Europe and Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union. The volume contains numerous quotations from Polish and Russian literature, both in English translation (prepared by the author) and in the original. It will be of interest to students of Slavic literature, comparative literature, and the literature of ideology.