Article list

06.07.2021.

Opatija Noir

It wouldn’t be a seaside town if it didn’t have a dark side

06.07.2021.

A Life in the Woods

Felix Salten, Bambi the Deer, and Twentieth-Century Vienna

26.05.2021.

Empire in Crumbs

Dominique Kirchner Reill’s new book The Fiume Crisis takes an iconoclastic new look at the history of Rijeka after World War I

26.05.2021.

Iron in the Soul

It is forty years since Andrzej Wajda’s epoch-defining Man of Iron walked away with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

17.12.2020.

4 x fiction, 4 x fact

Eight books that made a difference in 2020.

17.12.2020.

Jazz Messenger

Komeda: A Private Life in Jazz by Magdalena Grzebałkowska tells the story of Poland’s most talented musician of the jazz generation, and reveals what exactly jazz meant to a Polish society in the throes of rapid change.

14.10.2020.

The Nowhere Man

With the late Bekim Sejranović’s award-winning novel From Nowhere to Nowhere appearing in English for the first time, we look back at the career of an extravagantly talented writer

14.10.2020.

Kovač Through the Looking Glass

Marc Casals takes a look at Mirko Kovač‘s novel The City in the Mirror, a classic of post-Yugoslav literature that is yet to appear in English translation

17.06.2020.

Living the Dream

Central Europe, Milan Kundera and Yugoslavia

17.06.2020.

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Višnja Vukašinović looks back at a classic modernist novel about holidays gone horribly wrong

12.05.2020.

Dropping the baton: Tito, youth culture and the Slovene syndrome

Tito’s cult of personality prevailed for a few years following his death in May 1980. By the end of the decade, however, this legacy was in a serious state of dissipation.

11.05.2020.

Stalker at Forty

Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1980, Tarkovsky’s meditative masterpiece continues to cast its spell

04.11.2019.

Rebel Rebel

The time is ripe to rediscover the work of cult Croatian writer Janko Polić Kamov

04.11.2019.

The Battle for Rīga

It is 100 years since a combined force of Germans and Russians were beaten back by a nascent Latvian army, backed up by British and French warships

06.09.2019.

Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Culture of Violence

Was the Italian soldier-poet a liberator? Or a warning of the dark times to come?

24.06.2019.

Yugoslavia in the Year 2000

Throughout 1960, Globus magazine ran a series of articles about what they thought the country would look like in the year 2000. Casting their eyes over existing plans for concrete suburbs and high-rise cities, Globus’s writers were essentially saying that, thanks to socialism, the future was already here.

12.09.2018.

Journey to Russia

Miroslav Krleža’s masterpiece of mid-Twenties reportage is a compelling hybrid of travelogue, personal memoir and political essay

11.09.2018.

Caution, Futurist Approaching

Marinetti, World War I, and why he ended up in Rijeka in 1919

10.09.2018.

The Elusive Emperor

Few people are so central to the history of Split as Roman Emperor Diocletian. And yet it’s surprising how little we know about the man.

05.01.2017.

Man in a Suitcase

Why we should be rereading Joseph Roth in 2017

14.12.2016.

Sachertorte, Sacher-Masoch

So what is it that makes Vienna the capital of sex?

22.9.2016.

Subversive Soundtracks

Forty years ago members of Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe were put on trial for playing music that the country’s communist rulers didn’t like the sound of.

22.9.2016.

(Come on Baby) Light my Choir

Traditional choral festivals provided a natural focus for the so-called Singing Revolution, which swept across the Baltic States in 1987-1990.

11.4.2016.

Throwing Shapes

Siluett was one of the most seductive fashion magazines of the 1960s. And it was produced in Soviet-occupied Estonia.

10.4.2016.

We Play World War: Karl Kraus and the end of Austria

Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was one of the few people who wrote against World War I from start to finish: not because he thought there was anything wrong in defending one’s flag, but because he saw how patriotism was hijacked by the mass media.

16.3.2016.

Crucif*cked: the extraordinary career of Egon Bondy

Outside Czech-speaking circles, underground writer and philosopher Egon Bondy remains almost unknown; however it’s hard to see where the Czech literary scene would be without him

15.3.2016.

Power Ballads: Marta Kubišová and the Velvet Revolution

The story of Marta Kubišová’s song A Prayer for Marta reveals much about the power of popular culture - and the desire of those in government to place it under control.

10.3.2016.

Ruritania returns

The time is ripe for a rereading of Gregor von Rezzori, one of Central Europe’s most distinctive voices

5.3.2016.

Station to Station

Yevgeni Voishvillo and Yuri Kiselev: two of the best sci-fi illustrators you’ve probably never heard of