This term was used to describe the period often referred to as Gierek’s decade (1970-1980) in Poland. Edward Gierek, the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza PZPR) came to power in December 1970 following a wave of strikes that had been provoked by the announcement of a drastic food price increase. After many years of economic stagnation under Gomułka’s rule Gierek promised the nation economic reforms and industrial modernisation. His new political style raised hopes that the socialist system might be reformable and was well received by the majority of people.
 
Through foreign loans new companies sprang up and consumer goods were filling the shops. Products that had been absent from the shelves in previous decades such as bananas, oranges, chewing gum and the symbol of ‘the rotten West’, Coca-Cola, were easily available.

Gierek aimed at mass motorisation so that every worker could afford a car. He also relaxed travel restrictions, allowing people to travel to the previously forbidden West.  At the beginning of this ‘bonanza’ a lucky potential traveller could even purchase 150 dollars in a bank at a competitive tourist rate (this was usually half the rate on the black market), so the standard of living rose considerably.

Gomułka’s ideology was replaced by Gierek’s consumerism. His language of political propaganda included a broad range of populist slogans of which the most popular were ‘building a second Poland’,  ‘economic miracle’, and  ‘let Poland grow strong and people be prosperous’.  ‘Will you help?’ was the first phrase spontaneously formulated by Gierek at the very beginning of his rule and is now regarded as the basic catchword in the linguistic canon of that period.  

The period of prosperity was, however, short-lived. In the mid-70s the signs of the coming economic crisis were apparent. 1976 saw another wave of protests in response to a planned massive increase in food prices. The repressions which followed led to the formation of illegal opposition groups and this, in turn, laid the foundation for the growth of the Solidarity movement in 1980. 

Not without reason the Polish People’s Republic was seen as the jolliest barrack in the socialist camp. Poland enjoyed a comparatively high degree of freedom among the countries of the communist bloc. In such a climate humour and satire flourished, targeting the distortions of the system and its weaknesses. Satire was regarded as a form of social resistance, and also helped people to survive turbulent times. To pass the censor’s approval cartoonists had to employ subtle allusions and hidden metaphors.  Any cartoon which might have had the slightest anti-communist undertone was immediately censored. There were, however, cases of the withdrawal of the entire circulation of a paper because of a joke that escaped the censor’s attention.

The current British Library exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion  includes some examples of the works by Andrzej Krauze, a great Polish illustrator and cartoonist noted for his allegorical drawings. He lives and works in London. His illustrations have been published in The Guardian since 1989 and in other prominent newspapers and journals around the world.

Magda Szkuta,  Curator of Polish Studies

 

Cartoon from Andrzej Krauze’s Poland. (London,  1981)  X.958/7224. (By kind permission of the author and publisher)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the latest part of the BBC’s running adaptation of Pepys’ Diary on the radio this week it seems a good moment to consider a continental angle to his writing. To quote D. S. Grey’s excellent website :

 “Pepys’ diary was written in shorthand so could not easily be read by a casual browser. There are, however, some passages of a secretive nature where, for reasons of concealment or because his passion deserves a special language, he resorts to a private code involving words based on Spanish, French and Italian.”

One rather gets the impression that Pepys’s active French was better than his Spanish.  I haven’t found much unambiguously Italian in the Diaries.  In places Pepys is macaronic: “I aime [love] her de todo mi corazon [with all my heart]”; “trouvant [finding] my muger  [my wife] at home”.

The website collects various of the passages: here is a small anthology of Spanish examples.

tocar mi cosa con su mano: to touch my thing with her hand

hazer me hazer la grande cosa: to make me make the great thing

abaxo: underneath

hazendo doz vezes con mi moher: doing twice with my wife

tomando su mano: taking her hand

su marido: her husband

de todo mi corazon: with all my heart

la mosa: the maid

obtener algun cosa de ella como jo quisiere sino tocar la: to obtain any thing from her as I would wish except touch her

demasiado: too much

corason: heart

su hija: his daughter

hazer la costa [sic for cosa]: do the thing

two of my neighbor hermosa mohers: two of my neighbours’ beautiful wives .

His Spanish is none too sophisticated and could well have come out of a dictionary.  Cosa does indeed have the meaning that Pepys gives it (it is well documented in bawdy poetry: see Jammes), but I wonder if this is just chance.

His spelling well matches what we know about the pronunciation of Spanish in his time.  He’s wrong though to write doz, which in standard Spanish then as now is dos.  Moher should be mujer:  Pepys accurately uses “h” to represent the guttural Spanish “j”.  He uses both corason and corazon: the Spanish pronunciation of “z” as “th” was only just coming in in his time, so Pepys may well be bearing witness to this changeover period.  La mosa is now moza, but Pepys was surely right by contemporary standards.

His grammar is a bit wobbly: hazendo should be haziendo and he fails to make hermosas and mujeres agree in number (he got their gender right though).  But como jo quisiere (note the future subjunctive) isn’t bad at all.  Jo should be yo by modern norms, but io was perfectly OK in the 1660s, and “i” and “j” were still interchangeable.

Of course, among us bibliographers Pepys is best known for his collection of Spanish plays and 76 chapbooks, now in Cambridge.  (The illustration shows a BL copy, C.63.g.19(3), of a chapbook of which Pepys had a copy.)  His reading knowledge was obviously sophisticated.  We know that he travelled in Spain, but this need not have translated into high-level speaking and writing skills.

But his commitment to Spain is not in doubt.  As he wrote in his diary for 30 September 1661:

“And indeed we do naturally all love the Spanish, and hate the French.”

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies

References:

Edward M. Wilson, ‘Samuel Pepys and Spain’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 7, no. 3 (1979), 322-37 [Ac.9678.]

Robert Jammes et al. (ed.), Poesía erótica del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona, 1984) [YA.1994.a.4515]

Visitors to the independent Ukraine cannot fail to notice a decisive-looking woman’s face on the banknote of its national currency, the hryvnia. Who is she, and why was she honoured to have her face depicted on a 200-hryvnias banknote (of quite considerable value)?

200 hryvnia banknote. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ukrainians, of course, know her face very well and will eagerly explain to foreigners about this strong “daughter of Prometheus” (a clichéd description from Soviet times), born as Larysa Kosach in the small town of Novohrad-Volynskyi , then  part of the Russian empire. As a 13-year-old  poet,  publishing her first poem Lily of the Valley in the journal Zoria in Lviv, she took the pen- name Ukrainka (meaning “Ukrainian woman”) – a bold step in a country where the words “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” were forbidden and discouraged. She was the one who kept the whole nation going in moments of despair with a famous poem with the Latin title “Contra spem spero”.

The 42-year-old Lesya Ukrainka was a famous poet, dramatist, essayist, translator, collector of folk songs and social activist. She died 100 years ago, on 1 August 1913, of tuberculosis of the bones, in the Georgian health resort of Surami, where there is a museum.

Monument to Lesya Ukrainka in the Georgian city of Telavi. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lesya Ukrainka was a true pioneer in many fields. Here is just one example: her name is familiar to specialists on the subject of Don Juan  as she was the first woman in world literature to create her own original version of the legendary character. Her drama The Stone Host was written in 1912. The famous contemporary Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko made an important point by stating that Lesya Ukrainka presented “not a version of the legend, but a subversion of it” by giving the central role to a female character, Donna Anna.

The British Library holds the first edition of Lesya Ukrainka’s second book of poems Dumy i mrii (“Thoughts and dreams”) [20009.e.44]. 

Title page of Dumy i mrii. 

The book was published in 1899 in Lviv, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as books and pamphlets in the Ukrainian language were banned in the Russian empire from 1876 by a secret decree known as the Ems Ukaz. Many other editions published after the death of Lesya Ukrainka are part of our rich Ukrainian collections, including the 12-volume edition from the 1970s.

Visitors to modern Ukraine have opportunities to see the dramas of Lesya Ukrainka in theatres, especially her popular The Forest Song (based on Ukrainian folklore) as well as a ballet in three acts by Mykhailo Skorulsky, created in 1936. The Yara Art Group in the USA developed its own original production. Highly intellectual dramas, such as  The Orgy (her last tragic drama, based on the history of ancient Greece under Roman occupation), the modernist psychological drama The Azure Rose and the historical drama Boyarynia (“The Noblewoman”, suppressed in the Soviet era) -  to mention just  a few - are now often staged in Ukrainian theatres.

Lesya Ukrainka continues to challenge new generations of readers and theatre-goers worldwide. It is time to study and perform her works more widely. She is not just a pretty lady on a banknote.

Olga Kerziouk, Curator of Ukrainian Studies

Further reading:

Spirit of flame. A collection of the Works of Lesya Ukrainka. Translated by Percival Cundy. (New York, 1950). 12263.d.14

From Heart to Heart: Selected Prose fiction by Hrytsko Hryhorenko and Lesya Ukrainka. (Saskatoon, 1999). YA.2000.a.4892

In a Different Light: A Bilingual Anthology of Ukrainian Literature. Translated into English by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps as Performed by Yara Arts Group, compiled and edited by Olha Luchuk. (Lviv, 2008). YF.2009.a.28990