Aus unseren Neuerwerbungen – Slavistik 2021.12

The Alpha­bet of Dis­cord: The Ide­ol­o­giza­tion of Writ­ing Sys­tems on the Balka­ns since the Breakup of Mul­ti­eth­nic Empires
What is the rela­tion­ship between writ­ing sys­tems and nation­al­ism? How can dif­fer­ent alpha­bets coex­ist in the same coun­try? What is the des­tiny of the Cyril­lic alpha­bet in Europe? Giusti­na Selvelli’s orig­i­nal work pro­vides detailed answers to these far-reach­ing and poten­tial­ly divi­sive ques­tions and many more by exam­in­ing sev­er­al intrigu­ing debates on top­ics of alpha­bets and nation­al iden­ti­ty in a num­ber of coun­tries from the Balkan area over the course of the last 100 years. Fol­low­ing an encom­pass­ing per­spec­tive on alpha­bet­ic diver­si­ty, Selvel­li, an expert on South­east Euro­pean Stud­ies, recon­structs the ide­o­log­i­cal con­text of nation­al dis­cours­es con­nect­ed to the Latin and Cyril­lic alpha­bets, also tak­ing a look at the Ara­bic and Glagolitic scripts, and inter­weav­ing issues on the sym­bol­ism of the alpha­bet with the com­plex recent his­to­ry of the region, marked by the par­al­lel influ­ences of the East and the West. She also sheds light on the impact of a range of alpha­bet poli­cies on eth­no­lin­guis­tic minori­ties, propos­ing a new def­i­n­i­tion of “alpha­bet­ic rights” with spe­cial regard to the mul­ti­eth­nic lega­cy of the for­mer Ottoman and Hab­s­burg empires. This com­pre­hen­sive book makes us dis­cov­er the priv­i­leged role that writ­ing sys­tems played in the region’s del­i­cate post-impe­r­i­al and post-social­ist tran­si­tions, leav­ing us cap­ti­vat­ed by pecu­liar sto­ries such as that of the utopi­an “Yugoslav alpha­bet”.
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It’s only a joke, com­rade! Humour, trust and every­day life under Stal­in (1928–1941)
In the shad­ow of the Gulag, Sovi­et cit­i­zens were still crack­ing jokes. They had to.
Draw­ing on diaries, inter­views, mem­oirs and hun­dreds of pre­vi­ous­ly secret doc­u­ments, It’s Only a Joke, Com­rade! uncov­ers how they joked, coped, and strug­gled to adapt in Stalin’s brave new world. It asks what it real­ly means to live under a dic­ta­tor­ship: How do peo­ple make sense of their lives? How do they talk about it? And whom can they trust to do so?
Mov­ing beyond ideas of ‘resis­tance’, ‘dou­ble­think’, ‘speak­ing Bol­she­vik’, or Stalin’s Cult of Per­son­al­i­ty to explain Sovi­et life, it reveals how ordi­nary peo­ple found their way and even found them­selves in a life lived along the fault-lines between rhetoric and real­i­ty.
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