bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Maw, (John) Nicholas (1935–2009)
Authors: Venn Edward
Published: September 2018

Nicholas Maw was one of the leading British composers of his generation. His music balances modernist sensibilities with musical and expressive impulses derived from Late Romanticism, often on a large scale and with reference to traditional genres. In later life he relocated to the United States of America, where he died from heart failure.

Though born into a musical family in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Maw only began composing at the instigation of a school music teacher at the age of 15. Later he studied at the Royal Academy of Music (1955–58) with Lennox Berkeley. Both the Academy and London in general provided an environment in which he could encounter early-twentieth-century modernist music for the first time (in particular that of the Second Viennese School) and more contemporary idioms. Supported by a French Government scholarship, Maw continued his education in France with Nadia Boulanger (who helped him secure the Lili Boulanger Prize, which allowed him to remain in Paris for a further six months) and Max Deutsch. Though Maw’s earliest works, such as the Eight Chinese Lyrics (1956) and Nocturne (1957–58), already demonstrated familiarity with the music of the Second Viennese School (as well as that of Britten), the compositions that Maw produced on his return to England, such as the Six Chinese Songs (1959), revealed a Boulezian influence.
Mercure, Pierre (1927–1966)
Authors: Bazin Paul
Published: September 2018

In 1952, Pierre Mercure became the first director of the CBC musical television broadcasts. His long-standing concern with the interaction between the different arts gave dance and movement an important place in his repertoire and has left behind him a series of innovative and often visually experimental productions. He was a student of composers such as Darius Milhaud and Luigi Dallapiccola, and surrounded himself with professionals of artistic fields as varied as theater (Gabriel Charpentier), dance (François Riopelle), and poetry (Fernand Ouellete). At an early age, he composed symphonic pieces evoking those of Milhaud and Honegger (Kaleidoscope, 1948, rev. 1949). Art songs taken from his Dissidence cycle (1955) were later integrated into the Cantate pour une joie (1955), which became one of his most celebrated works. During the last years of his career, Mercure devoted his work to a synthesis of traditional and electronic musical means in a major triptych (Psaume pour abri, 1963; Tétrachromie, 1963; Lignes et points, 1964).
Mitterer, Wolfgang (1958--)
Authors: Cassidy Aaron
Published: September 2018

Wolfgang Mitterer (1958--) is an Austrian composer and organist noted for his work with live electronics and improvisation. Born on 6 June, 1958 in Lienz, East Tyrol, Mitterer studied organ and composition at the University of Music and the Performing Arts Vienna, followed by a year-long residency at the studio for electroacoustic music (EMS) in Stockholm. An exceptionally prolific composer, Mitterer’s output spans a staggeringly broad range of approaches to music making, including works for tape, chamber music of various formations, experimental pop songs (Sopop), works for large orchestra, music for theatre and opera, music for film, and sprawling site-specific installations and performance events (turmbau zu babel, for example, is scored for 4,200 singers, 22 drums, 48 brass players, and 8-channel tape). His works list includes over 200 entries and demonstrates a particularly catholic, pluralistic, non-dogmatic approach to instrumentation, duration, venue, scale, and function.

Despite this diversity, Mitterer’s work maintains several important central tendencies: stylistically, the music is often characterized by layers of crackles, twitches, clicks, and pops (both electronic and acoustic), with a rustling, flickering, chirping, gestural energy. These more fragmented, granular layers are quite often combined with gradual, elongated, atmospheric, and lyrical material, though generally a sense of instability and unpredictability remains.
Musical Modernism in Bali and Java
Authors: McGraw Andrew
Published: September 2018

Musical modernism was not domesticated within Balinese or Javanese culture to the extent that it was in other parts of Asia. Although a handful of composers have engaged the specific languages of Western musical modernism, more common is a distinctly Indonesian approach, combining modernist philosophies regarding innovation and art’s role in society with developments in local musical styles. Although Western musical genres—primarily Christian liturgical and colonial military music—had slowly diffused throughout the Indonesian archipelago since the late fifteenth century, Western classical music was not widely domesticated in the Dutch East Indies colony, being primarily limited to upper-class Dutch and mestizo communities in Batavia (Jakarta), Central Java, and Surabaya (East Java). In the early twentieth century these communities overwhelmingly preferred light classical song (seriosa) to classical or modernist styles.
New Musical Resources
Authors: Nickleson Patrick
Published: September 2018

New Musical Resources is a book written by Henry Cowell in 1919, unpublished until 1930. In it, Cowell proposes a theory of musical relativity in which pitch, rhythm, and the progress of music history are grounded through reference to the structure of the overtone series: the "living essence from which musicality springs." Ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger encouraged a young Cowell to rationalize the compositional tools he had been developing, which ultimately led to the creation of this book.

In the book’s first section, Cowell presents the development of Western harmony as progressive upward movement through the overtone series. He suggests the continuation of this same logic into chords based on the ratios beyond the minor seconds that he was using to create "cluster chords." His rhythm chapter proposes the whole-note as the basic unit of time, encouraging division beyond the standard multiples of two into the next numbers in the harmonic series—creating third-notes, fifth notes, etc. This method enables the composition of rhythmic patterns that rely on the same ratios as are present between various melodic and harmonic intervals. Many American composers—notably Conlon Nancarrow—have utilized Cowell’s concepts, which predate the development of similar ideas in integral serialism by several decades.
Papineau-Couture, Jean (1916–2000)
Authors: Bazin Paul
Published: September 2018

Grandson to Quebec’s art music scene pioneer Guillaume Couture (1851–1915), composer Jean Papineau-Couture (1916–2000) played a major role in the development of the province’s musical life throughout the century. A composer, pianist, pedagogue, and administrator, Papineau-Couture’s contributions range from his involvement with the foundation of the Canadian League of composers (Toronto, 1951) to the fulfilment of his academic function as Dean of the music faculty at Université de Montreal (1968–1973). He also participated in the creation of both the Society for Canadian Music (Montreal, 1954) and the Montreal bureau of the Canadian Music Centre (1973)—the former being a music society dedicated to the performance of Canadian music, the latter one of today’s most active institutions in the dissemination of Canadian art music—and acted as an administrator of the Société de musique contemporaine du Quebec, founded in 1966 and for which he served as president starting that very first year up to 1972. His teaching of music is stringed across these many accomplishments.

The catalogue of Jean Papineau-Couture includes many stylistically diverse works. His music evolved throughout his life, moving from a form of neoclassicism most probably influenced by the composer’s many encounters with Igor Stravinsky—some by way of Nadia Boulanger, whom he studied with, along with Quincy Porter, at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts—to an atonal idiom. Papineau-Couture composed many concertante-style works, as demonstrated in his Clair-obscure (1986), a double concerto for contrabassoon, double bass, and orchestra. The composer also wrote many pieces of chamber music, most often for soloist and piano accompaniment (Caprices, 1962; Discussion animée, 1997), as well as a substantial number of orchestral works.
Paz, Juan Carlos (1897–1972)
Authors: Nigro-Giunta Violeta
Published: September 2018

Juan Carlos Paz (1897–1972) was an Argentine composer, critic, writer, and self-described "compositional guide" who played a key role in twentieth-century Argentine contemporary music. Known for his rebellious attitude towards traditional institutions and academia, and as an advocate of avant-garde music throughout his life, Paz was a pioneer in the use of the twelve-tone technique in Latin America. Paz founded such groups as Grupo Renovación [Renovation Group] and Asociación Nueva Música [New Music Association], both devoted to promoting and performing new music. Paz wrote music for solo instruments, chamber music, orchestra, and theatre, as well as film scores. He published three important books dedicated to new music and three volumes containing his memoirs, and collaborated intensively with the press and magazines (Crítica, Reconquista, Acción de Arte, La Protesta, La Campana de Palo, Argentina Libre, among others).
Scelsi, Giacinto (1905–1988)
Authors: Drott Eric
Published: September 2018

Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian avant-garde composer best known for the single-note style he developed during the 1950s and 1960s, which minimizes harmonic and melodic activity in order to allow microtonal fluctuations and subtle transformations in timbre, intonation, dynamics, and articulation to come to the fore. Although his works were little known and infrequently performed during his lifetime, they gained considerable acclaim in the 1980s. Scelsi’s œuvre has proven extremely influential, and is generally regarded as a precursor to the spectral movement.

Many of the elements of Scelsi’s biography remain uncertain, due in part to the composer’s penchant for self-mythologization. His family belonged to the southern Italian nobility, and it was in their ancestral chateau in Irpinie that Scelsi’s interest in music first manifested itself. He had little in the way of formal musical training, apart from receiving private piano lessons in his youth. Scelsi spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad, principally in France and Switzerland. It was during this period that he composed his first pieces, most notably Rotativa for pianos, strings, brass and percussion (1930). His early music was stylistically eclectic, embracing post-impressionist, neo-classical and twelve-tone idioms at various points in his life.
Bennett, Arnold (1867–1931)
Authors: Peters John
Published: September 2018

A prolific and popular author, English writer Arnold Bennett was one of the most important Realist/Naturalist writers of the early twentieth century. Strongly influenced by George Moore, Bennett made valuable contributions to this literary tradition, achieving distinction alongside contemporaries H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy.

Enoch Arnold Bennett was born in Burslem, Staffordshire in 1867. Bennett showed promise as a student, but at sixteen left school to work in his father’s law office and then later as a clerk in a London law office. In 1893, Bennett left his job to become assistant editor of the journal Woman, later becoming editor-in-chief. He had been writing occasional pieces for the Staffordshire Sentinel for several years before he published his first story, ‘A Letter Home’ (1895), in The Yellow Book. His first novel, A Man from the North, appeared in 1898. Modelled after the fiction of George Moore, it tells the story of a man from the Potteries district of Bennett’s youth who tries to acclimatize to a life as a clerk in London. Emboldened by his initial literary success, in 1900 Bennett gave up his position with Woman to become a full-time writer.
Delsarte, François (1811–1871)
Authors: Preston Carrie J.
Published: September 2018

A performer and teacher of voice and movement, François Delsarte developed a theory of expression that influenced modern dance, actor training, poetic recitation, silent film, and physical culture in the early twentieth century. His ideas and methods were brought to the United States in 1871 by his student, Steele Mackaye (1842–1894), and then adapted by performers, physical culturists, and reformers into a diverse set of movements known as Delsartism. Extremely popular from the 1880s through the 1920s, Delsartism promoted physical exercises and poetic recitation for health and personal development as well as for professional performance. The movement traveled back to Europe to establish trajectories in many fields of modernist aesthetics and education, all emphasizing bodily expression, classical ideas of beauty, and a unique, improvable selfhood.
Togni, Camillo (1922–1993)
Authors: Roderick Peter
Published: September 2018

Camillo Togni was an Italian composer, aesthetician and pianist. Launching a career in the midst of the chaos of World War II, he played his part in the trends and polemics that emerged from Italian art music in the late 1940s, but his prominence faded into the 1960s as Italian musical modernism diversified.

A precocious talent from an early age, Togni left his hometown of Brescia aged 17, on the outbreak of war, to commence study with a string of artistic luminaries: Alfredo Casella (1883–1947) for composition, Luigi Rognoni (1913–1986) for esthetics and Benedetto Michelangeli (1920–1995) for piano. Togni’s career subsequently thrived in the heady atmosphere of postwar crisis that beset Italian music in the late forties, and he was a veteran of the numerous conferences and congresses accompanying the quasi-evangelical turn towards serialism and other high-modernist compositional techniques in Italy during this period. An early adopter of serialism (for instance, in the "Variazioni" of 1945–46), Togni demonstrated a rigorous adherence to the method combined with a block-like approach to musical texture, similar in substance to Stravinskian serial efforts and the later work of Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–1975).
Héctor Tosar (1923–2002)
Authors: Juarez Camila
Published: September 2018

Héctor Tosar was a composer, pianist, director, and composition teacher in Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the United States. One of the best-known Uruguayan composers of his generation, his works have been presented in festivals worldwide. He started studying piano with Wilhelm Kolischer, harmony with Tomás Mujica, and composition with Lamberto Baldi, and completed his studies in the United States and France where he studied composition with Aaron Copland, Arthur Honegger, Jean Rivier, and Darius Milhaud, and orchestral direction with Serge Koussevitzky, Eugène Bigot, and Jean Fournet.

The defining characteristics of his works are his use of a compositive principle based on "groups of sounds" and his search for musical communication by means of expressiveness and lyricism. His catalogue includes soloist works, mainly for piano, as well as symphonic, chamber, and vocal works, and, in his last period, compositions with new instruments, such as the synthesizer.
Vivier, Claude (1948–1983)
Authors: Bazin Paul
Published: September 2018

Claude Vivier is perhaps the best known of all Quebec composers, both in Canada and abroad. In 1967, after being removed from the religious establishment where he was preparing to become a priest, Vivier registered at the Montreal Conservatory of Music where he studied until 1970. He first attended composer Gilles Tremblay’s classes at the conservatory, and studied piano with Irving Heller there before traveling to Europe. A number of scholarships that Vivier received from the Canadian Arts Council (CAC) brought him to Utrect (1971–72) where he studied electroacoustic composition at the Instituut voor sonologie with composer Gottfried Michael Kœnig, and also to Cologne where he became a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Claude Vivier is the author of a catalogue bearing many traces of an intense journey of self-discovery. An opera, Kopernikus (1979) and three orchestral art songs (Lonely Child, 1980; Wo bist du Licht, 1981; Bouchara, 1981) are among his most affecting works. His major work for strings, Zipangu (1980), leaves an impression as lasting as his Pulau Dewata (1977) succeeds in invoking atmospheres typical of the Balinese gamelan sound world. Vivier was murdered in Paris in 1983, leaving behind a supposedly symbolic, unfinished work titled Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? [Do you believe in the immortality of soul?].
Zorn, John (1953--)
Authors: Garlitz Dustin
Published: September 2018

John Zorn is an American avant-garde saxophonist and composer. Zorn performs on alto saxophone and is one of the leading figures in New York City’s "Downtown music" scene. Zorn has recorded on major record labels and releases music on his own independent experimental record label, Tzadik. His piano-less jazz quartet Masada, using instrumentation first made popular in 1959 by avant-garde jazz alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, was considered one of the leading small bands in jazz in the 1990s and 2000s and has recorded dozens of his compositions on many volumes of album releases. Zorn has focused on East Asian influences in new music, especially traditional Japanese influences. These influences were evident in his work as early as the early 1980s. He has also spent time producing albums by contemporary Japanese noise or sound artists and has performed and recorded with them on those musical releases as well. He has devoted time in his artistic career to composing music for independent films and, more notably, has released many volumes of film-inspired musical works, mostly on his own record label.
Denby, Edwin (1903–1983)
Authors: Feinsod Harris
Published: September 2018

Edwin Denby is best remembered as one of the preeminent critics of dance modernism, yet he was also an accomplished poet and an experienced dancer, choreographer, and librettist. Both his poetic gifts and his practical experience in the theater informed his dance criticism, first collected in Looking at the Dance (1949) and amplified in Dancers, Buildingsand People in the Streets (1965). As the title of his 1965 volume suggests, Denby placed primacy on the pleasures of perception, recording what he saw rather than advocating for a distinct point of view, as did his contemporaries Lincoln Kirstein and John Martin. Denby’s sensibility was widely admired in New York’s postwar avant-garde milieus, and he became an important friend, muse, mentor, and tutelary spirit to visual artists—including Rudy Burckhardt, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Alex Katz—and to New York School poets—especially Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman. In the last several decades of his life, Denby continued to be a key figure in the downtown scene across several performance genres.
Abdel Sabour, Salah (1931–1981)
Authors: Hammouda Sally
Published: September 2018

Salah Abdel Sabour (also Abd-al Sabur) is an Egyptian writer, poet, and playwright. He is considered a pioneer of modern Arabic poetry and a prominent figure in Arabic modernism and the Arabic free verse movement.

Born in a small town in the Eastern Delta of Egypt in 1931, Abdel Sabour showed an interest in literature at a young age. He began writing verse at the tender age of thirteen. His talent reached full maturity by the 1950’s. Though his regular education enabled him to develop an appreciation for the long tradition of classical Arabic poetry, his modern sensibility was sharpened through readings in European poetry, especially that of symbolists Rilke and Baudelaire, and the English poetry of Donne, Yeats, Keats and T.S. Eliot. He was also influenced by prominent Arab Sufis such as Al-Mutanabbi, and Persian mystic poet and Sufi writer Mansur Al-Hallaj.

He graduated from the Department of Arabic Language, at the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, in 1951. In 1957 his first collection of poetry Al-Nass Fi Biladi [People of my Country] using free verse was published, catapulting the poet into fame. It caught both readers’ and critics’ attention alike for its use of unique imagery and everyday common language. It broke away from the constricting rigid structure of Arabic classical poetry.
Shelem Yankev Abramovitsh 1835–1917
Authors: Mahalel Adi
Published: September 2018

Above, Shelem Yankev Abramovitsh (1835–1917), commonly known by his literary persona Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele the Book Peddler), is considered to be the founding father of both modern Yiddish and modern Hebrew prose literature. Born in the town of Kapulye (Kopyl) in Belarus, he lived significant parts of his life in the Eastern European cities of Berdichev and Odessa. While in Berdichev, he published his first novel, Limdu hetev (Learn to Do Well). Published in Hebrew in 1862, this work was a product of the Jewish Enlightenment, i.e. the Haskalah, with its didactic tone and its emphasis on the need for reform in Jewish education. He twice rewrote and republished Learn to Do Well, first in 1868 and again from 1909–1912. Such revisions were typical of Abramovitsh throughout his long writing career, and also characterized his adaptations of his own works from one language to another. He adapted many of his early novellas to full-fledged novels in Yiddish and in Hebrew. He also adapted science books into Hebrew, as part of his "enlightening" project.
Dudley, Jane (1912–2001)
Authors: Phillips Geduld Victoria
Published: September 2018

Jane Dudley, a key figure in the radical dance movement of the 1930s, was a choreographer who developed her own distinctive voice within the modern dance idiom and an educator who trained numerous dancers both in the United States and in England. An early member of the New Dance Group (NDG), she oversaw the creation of group works such as Strike (1934), while choreographing solos such as Time is Money (1934), in which she used the modern dance idiom to embody a worker’s oppression on the assembly line. A striking performer, Dudley joined the Martha Graham Company in the mid-1930s. At the same time, she continued to develop her own repertoire, in part through the Dudley–Maslow–Bales Trio, whose founders—Sophie Maslow, William Bales, and herself—remained committed to the social ideals of the 1930s long after they had abandoned the making of overtly political works. Dudley’s loyalty to NDG extended over several decades during which it became a major New York training venue, offering inexpensive classes and professional training to promising students, including many African Americans. From 1970 to 2000, Dudley directed the London School of Contemporary Dance, transforming it into one of Europe’s leading modern dance institutions.
Asturias, Miguel Ángel (1899–1974)
Authors: McGinn Emily
Published: September 2018

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974), the recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the most decorated Guatemalan writers in history. He was born in Guatemala City in 1899 during the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Under Cabrera, Asturias’ father, a lawyer and judge, was persecuted and forced out of his position, causing the family to flee to the countryside. Living in rural Salamá as a child, Asturias learned many of the myths of the Maya from his caretakers. His time there would greatly influence his views on the social politics of Guatemala as well as his innovations in narrative form. Asturias’ narrative technique is modernist in both its use of anthropology as its methodology and in its experimental form that combines a mythical past with a contemporary, experiential narrative structure.
Barnard, Mary (1909–2001)
Authors: Barnsley Sarah
Published: September 2018

Born in Vancouver, Washington, Mary Barnard was a writer best known for Sappho: A New Translation (1958) and her correspondence with Ezra Pound, which she initiated in 1933 after reading a range of modernist works in college. Impressed by the economy of her verse (which reminded Pound of H. D.’s Imagism) and her interest in Greek cadences, Pound supervised Barnard’s early exercises in Sapphics. After winning Poetry’s Levinson Prize in 1935, Barnard relocated to New York where she came under the influence of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Williams’ tutelage provided a counterpoint to Pound’s, initiating what Barnard called her ‘spare but musical’ style of poems in the American grain, resulting in Cool Country (1940) and A Few Poems (1952). She later translated this style into fiction, writing mysteries and fables, but also into the clarity and measured rhythms of her Sappho translation. Research on Sappho led to an essay volume, The Mythmakers (1966), which anticipated Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, and Time and the White Tigress (1986), an essay-in-verse exploring time myths. These experiences and creative stages were retold in her memoir Assault on Mount Helicon (1984). Her archive joined the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library following her death in 2001.
Benda, Julien (1867–1956)
Authors: Koenig Raphael
Published: September 2018

Julien Benda was a French writer, literary critic, and political thinker. An atypical figure in French literary history, Benda opposed most of the intellectual trends of his time, including Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration; Charles Maurras’s integral nationalism; dialectical materialism; and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. Influenced by the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, he condemned what he perceived as the irrationalist tendencies of his contemporaries. Benda’s fight for rationalism in the philosophical realm was inseparable from his commitment to democratic values in the political realm. In his most famous essay La Trahison des clercs [The Betrayal of the Intellectuals; 1927], Benda argued that intellectuals had fallen prey to political passions such as nationalism and socialism, embracing particular interests of class or nation instead of defending universal values, reason and democracy. Benda remained a prolific literary polemicist in the 1930s, warning against the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. Due to his political convictions and Jewish background, he was forced to spend most of the Second World War in hiding. He published a new edition of The Betrayal of the Intellectuals in 1952, in which he described the collaboration of French intellectuals with the Nazi regime as the result of yet another political passion, the fascination for totalitarian social order.
Bergelson, Dovid (1884–1952)
Authors: Koenig Raphael
Published: September 2018

Dovid Bergelson was a major Yiddish prose writer and essayist. He had a lasting impact on Yiddish fiction writing, introducing new narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse. He brought literary creation in Yiddish to new heights, appropriating the language for the purposes of an Impressionist, high literary style. He was also a prolific essayist, committed to the notion of the social role of the writer, and to the ideals of Yiddishism, the creation of a new secular Yiddish culture in the name of a Jewish national project rooted in Eastern Europe and distinct from Zionism. These political ideals partly explain Bergelson’s conversion to Soviet state socialism in 1926: in his view, the Soviet Union was the only place compatible with the Yiddishist project. He settled there permanently in 1934. His later literary production radically differed from his earlier writings, and conformed to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. In 1942, he joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, supporting the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. After the war, Stalin turned against the Committee. Bergelson was arrested in 1949, then executed on 12 August 1952, together with twelve other Jewish writers and intellectuals.
Bernanos, Georges (1888–1948)
Authors: Valour Vincent
Published: September 2018

Although still widely read in the 1950s, Bernanos has now become an out dated author, if not entirely forgotten. Though he had a very high reputation among his fellow writers — Claudel, Mauriac, and Malraux admired him — Bernanos has always remained an isolated figure. His Catholic faith was the driving force behind his whole work, as a novelist and a polemicist, and is likely to be the reason why his writings have become obsolete. Fulminating against the liberalizing spirit of modern France, which led to spiritual decadence, Bernanos was part of the circle of Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet until 1932. Maurras and Daudet were the intellectual leaders of the monarchist and extreme right movement L’Action Française. Nevertheless, Bernanos deeply denounces the violence of the pro-Franco, as well as the dangers associated with Fascism and Nazism, in his famous pamphlet Les GrandsCimetières sous la lune (1938). His novels, always extremely profound, present the spiritual conflict of good and evil. His two most famous novels, Sous le soleil de Satan (1926) and Journal d’un curé de campagne (1936), revolve around the humble figure of a country priest confronted with the apparent absence of God in the gloomy landscapes of Northern France; they exemplify the Christian message of salvation in the face of failure and death.
Brutus, Dennis (1924–2009)
Authors: Masemola Kgomotso
Published: September 2018

Dennis Brutus was an author born in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). He was raised in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He was classified as a ‘coloured’ because of his racially mixed parentage. A political activist as well as a writer, he spent eighteen months on Robben Island for defying a banning order in 1963. Subsequently, he went into exile but continued working as an activist, a poet, and an academic. Banned for many years in South Africa, he wrote ten volumes of verse, from Sirens, Knuckles,Boots (1963) for which he won the Mbari Prize (he returned the prize because it was reserved for non-whites) to Leafdrift (2005). His poetry is notable for its pared-down realism, its social commentary, and its resilience in the face of oppression. Brutus won the Langston Hughes prize in 1987 and the Paul Robeson Award in 1989, rare feats considering that these prizes are traditionally reserved for the best African-American poets. He held faculty positions at the University of Denver, Northwestern University, and the University of Pittsburgh; he subsequently returned to South Africa as an acclaimed writer and academic after being officially unbanned in 1990.
Burroughs, William S. (1914–1997)
Authors: Lam Joshua
Published: September 2018

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, William S. Burroughs was a major figure of the Beat Generation. He is known primarily for his controversial novel Naked Lunch (1959)—the subject of a US obscenity trial—and for his use of the cut-up technique, developed by his friend, British-born artist Brion Gysin. The technique involves cutting up and reassembling text or film in random order to produce non-linear anti-narratives; influences include Dadaist collage procedures and T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land." Using this technique, Burroughs collaborated with Gysin and filmmaker Anthony Balch to produce short experimental films, including Towers Open Fire (1963), The Cut Ups (1967), and Bill and Tony (1972). The films juxtapose and overlay documentary footage of Burroughs and others with stock footage, as well as surreal, pornographic, and science-fiction imagery. Burroughs also narrated portions of the films, in part using text appropriated from Scientology manuals and film scripts—notably Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). Fragments from The Soft Machine (1961), part of the science-fiction Nova Trilogy, appear in the narration of Towers Open Fire. Burroughs also appeared in numerous feature films.
Erdman, Nikolai Robertovich (ЭРДМАН НИКОЛАЙ РОБЕРТОВИЧ) (1900–1970)
Authors: Rudova Larissa
Published: September 2018

Nikolai Robertovich Erdman was a Soviet playwright, screenwriter, and poet. He was born and died in Moscow. In his youth he associated with the Russian avant-garde movement and became known for his two tragic-farcical plays, Mandat [The Mandate] (1924) and Samoubiitsa [The Suicide] (1928). Both plays were staged by the famous avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940)—although the latter production was stopped by the Soviet authorities for its subversive content. Further attempts to stage The Suicide in the early 1930s were also thwarted. Also during the 1930s, Erdman co-wrote screenplays for the two blockbuster comedies, Veselye rebiata [The Jolly Fellows] (1933) and Volga-Volga (1938), directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov (1903–1983). In 1933 Erdman was arrested for writing political poetry and exiled to Siberia. After World War II he worked primarily on theatrical sketches and librettos for Moscow theaters, but his most significant achievement belongs to children’s cinema and animation. He created screenplays for such immensely popular fairy tale films as Gorod masterov [The City of Masters] (1965) and, with Mikhail Volpin (1902–1988), Morozko [Jack Frost] (1964) and Ogon’, voda i … mednye truby [Fire, Water and Brass Pipes] (1968). In the 1960s Erdman was active at Moscow’s Taganka Theater, which tried to revive the theatrical tradition of the Russian avant-garde.
Fante, John (1909–1983)
Authors: Ardoin Paul
Published: September 2018

American author John Fante (8 April 1909–8 May 1983) is best known for his Arturo Bandini novels, including The Road to Los Angeles (written 1933, published 1985), Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Dreams from Bunker Hill (published 1982), and in particular Ask the Dust (1939). While his interwar novels and short stories were met with critical acclaim, he found far more financial success working in the film industry, where he wrote scripts for figures such as Orson Welles while socializing with other contract writers such as William Faulkner. His highly autobiographical fiction frequently showed the influence of, and made reference to, figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken. His work dealt largely with the experiences of working-class Americans of Italian descent and their interactions with other marginalized groups.
Frame, Janet (1924–2004)
Authors: Pottroff Christy
Published: September 2018

Janet Frame was a celebrated New Zealand author with a prolific literary career and a dramatic personal history. Mirroring Frame’s own life, her writing frequently addresses poverty, marginalization, and the artist’s struggle in a conformist society. Both her prose and her poetry combine elements of modernism with magical realism. After a suicide attempt at university, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and spent eight years in mental hospitals in New Zealand, including the notorious Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where she received numerous electroshock treatments. In 1952, while Frame was in the asylum, New Zealand’s Caxton Press published her collection of short fiction entitled The Lagoon and Other Stories, which was awarded a prestigious national literary prize, the Hubert Church Prose Award. At the time, Frame was scheduled to have a lobotomy—until hospital officials discovered that she had won the award. In total, Frame was the author of twelve novels, four short story collections, one book of poetry, and three volumes of autobiography. She received many awards and honors, and her writing has garnered numerous literary prizes and much critical attention.
Garborg, Arne Aadne Eivindsson (1851–1924)
Authors: D’Amico Giuliano
Published: September 2018

Arne Garborg was one of the most prominent Norwegian writers of the latter half of the 19th century, and the first decades of the 20th century. He was among the first to write in Norway’s second official language, landsmål (later nynorsk), and his works range from novels to short stories, poems, drama, newspaper articles, and essays. Many of his early works are embedded in the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and naturalism. In the 1890s he turned to a more psychologically oriented form of writing, inspired by literary decadence and by an emergent modernism. Garborg was one of Norway’s major interpreters of the conflict between old and new ways of thinking about literature, religion, and society. He was married to the Norwegian writer Hulda Garborg.
Leonov, Leonid Maksimovich (1899–1994)
Authors: Berkovich Nadja
Published: September 2018

Loenid Maksimovich Leonov was a Russian prose writer and playwright. Born in Moscow, Leonov volunteered as a soldier and journalist in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Adopting an ornamental prose style and the skaz idiolect, his early works—including "The End of the Petty Man"—incorporated revolutionary themes and the revolution’s impact on village life, along with the notion of the "little man." His works established continuity with the traditions of Gogol and Dostoevsky, expanding the trope of the little man to include the educated class while adding an animalistic twist. In his novels The Badgers (1924) and The Thief (1927), Leonov depicted the New Economic Policy (NEP) and resistance to the Bolshevik regime. His novella Evgenia Ivanovna (1935), censored for several decades, portrayed Russian immigration and the yearning for the motherland. Before and during World War II he wrote plays influenced by socialist realism. His 1957 environmental novel, The Russian Forest, brought him the Lenin Prize, and in 1967 he was awarded the Hero of the Socialist Labor for his achievements in literature. His last novel, The Pyramid, on which he worked for forty years, was published prior to his death in 1994.
Lie, Jonas (1833–1908)
Authors: Krouk Dean
Published: September 2018

Jonas Lie was a leading Norwegian novelist during the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a period of literary realism and naturalism spanning 1870 to 1890. His major novels of the 1880s employ impressionistic narrative techniques to portray social changes in the process of modernization, especially regarding the status of women. Although Lie became associated with the Modern Breakthrough movement, he was never fully aligned with its goals. Lie thought that the indirect effects of literary texts were more important than overt socio-political criticism, and this put his impressionistic narrative art at odds with the standard Modern Breakthrough paradigm of critical realism. Lie left Norway in 1878 for a quarter-century abroad in Germany and France. In collaboration with his wife Thomasine, he produced his most important work during this period. Around 1890, Lie turned his artistic eye to darker depths of the psyche and used his longstanding interest in northern legends and lore to explore the irrational. From the turn of the century until his death in 1908, Lie continued to develop these themes, while also returning to the impressionistic domestic interiors of his earlier work.
Margolin, Anna (1887–1952)
Authors: Zaritt Saul Noam
Published: September 2018

Anna Margolin is a Yiddish poet of the first half of the twentieth century, and though she produced only a single volume of poetry, Margolin is often considered one of the most important and influential Yiddish modernists. Born Rosa Lebensboym in the Lithuanian town of Brisk, she travelled widely and restlessly between eastern and western Europe, Palestine and the USA, before settling in New York in 1913. While reporting on women’s issues for the Yiddish press, including the urgent issue of women’s suffrage, she began contributing to Yiddish literary journals of the time under the pseudonym Anna Margolin, which she would later adopt as her own name. Her poetry, at times impressionist, symbolist and post-symbolist, imagist and expressionist was difficult to categorize for the critics of the period and as a result she was both praised and harshly criticized by her contemporaries.
Molodowsky, Kadya (1894–1975)
Authors: Legutko Agnieszka
Published: September 2018

Known as ‘the first lady of Yiddish literature,’ Kadya Molodowsky published continuously between 1927 and 1974. Molodowsky earned renown as a prolific poet, prose writer, playwright, essayist, and as the co-founder and editor of such Yiddish literary magazines as Svive [Milieu] (one of the first apolitical Yiddish periodicals), and Heym [Home].

Born in Bereza Kartuska, Belarus, Molodowsky made her literary debut after surviving the Kiev Pogrom in 1920. Her first book of poetry, Kheshvendikenekht, featured ‘Froyen-lider’ (‘Women-Poems’), her most famous sequence of poems addressing the modernist struggle between the newly acquired sense of female subjectivity, and the religious and societal constraints imposed on Jewish women. Kheshvendikenekht, along with her other early volumes of poetry, Mayselekh, Dzhike Gas, and Freydke, despairingly evoked the poverty and desperate situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Before she emigrated to New York in 1935, she developed poetry for and about children. In 1946 she published a volume of poetry, Der melekhDovidaleynizgeblibn (widely considered her finest work), dealing indirectly yet profoundly with the loss of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Throughout her oeuvre, Molodowsky explored the issues surrounding the reconciliation of the Jewish identity with modernity.
Nayi Kahani
Authors: Govind Nikhil
Published: September 2018

The Nayi Kahani [New Story], a literary movement in Hindi literature, is associated chiefly with the names of Nirmal Verma (1929–2005), Rajendra Yadav (1929--), Mohan Rakesh (1925–1972), Kamleshwar (1932–2007), Mannu Bhandari (1931--) and Bhisham Sahni (1915–2003), among others. The period referred to is approximately from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, although the end date of the movement remains unclear and open-ended. New Story narratives dealt chiefly with problems between the sexes, especially with the emergence of the working woman. The context was a newly independent, rapidly urbanizing and industrializing India. Independence had solved none of the problems of unemployment or underemployment, housing and petty corruption that plagued the growing—but still small and unprotected—middle class. The style of the prose mirrored a sense of this difficulty in the everyday negotiations of urban life and work. The movement in this sense defended its middle-classness against a certain hectoring from the Party Left that required them to write more on the problems of the peasantry and organized or unorganized labour. To validate middle-class difficulties, and especially ones related to gender and family, was itself no easy task. The critique from the Right was that the nayi kahani movement was impatiently disbelieving of the potentialities of tradition in moderating their sense of anomie.
Sørensen, Villy (1929–2001)
Authors: Fauth Søren R.
Published: September 2018

Villy Sørensen was a prominent intellectual figure of 20th-century Denmark. His work spanned social commentary, philosophy, and literature. He was a sophisticated literary critic, author of tales based on Norse and Greek mythology, and an outstanding translator of Latin and German literature, particularly of modernist writers of the German-language tradition such as Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch. His fiction comprises only a small part of his oeuvre, the most notable being the early tales Sære historier (1953) and Ufarlige historier [Harmless Tales] (1955), and a later collection of short prose, Formynderfortællinger [Tutelary Tales] (1964). The remainder of his legacy consists of philosophical and cultural treatises, and literary criticisms such as Digtere og dæmoner (1959). In this latter work, Sørensen, who was especially oriented towards German letters, provides in-depth perspectives on such modernist writers as Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and Thomas Mann. To the philosophy of culture belongs Seneca—humanisten ved Neros hof [Seneca: The Humanist at the Court of Nero] (1976), in which Sørensen’s impressive scholarship and overview are displayed to the full. Moreover, his body of work includes a number of renderings, collections of lectures, speeches and essays, and newspaper commentaries.
Salinas, Pedro (1891–1951)
Authors: Cardona Silvia Colás
Published: September 2018

Pedro Salinas was a poet, essayist, and playwright. Known as the poet of love of the Generation of ’27, and as the senior member of the group, he spent most of his life teaching in universities. He obtained his PhD from the Sorbonne, where he also lectured for several years, specializing in Marcel Proust, whose work he would translate into Spanish. His extensive academic career started at the University of Seville in 1918. It was during his years in Seville that he met Luis Cernuda, on whom he would exert a great influence and who would also become a member of the Generation of ‘27. After teaching at the University of Cambridge and the University of Murcia, he started working at the University of Madrid in 1926, where he founded a literary magazine called Índiceliterario [Literary Index]. In 1933, the Spanish Republican Government appointed him secretary-general of the Universidad Menéndez Pelayo.
Shlonsky, Abraham (1900–1973)
Authors: Ofengenden Ari
Published: September 2018

Abraham Shlonsky can be regarded as the main architect of modern Hebrew poetry. He was born in 1900 to a socialist revolutionary mother and a Chassidic father in Kryukovo (East Ukraine) and emigrated to Palestine in 1922. Shlonsky first worked in agriculture as a pioneer at the kibbutz Ein Harod. He later moved to Tel Aviv to become a journalist, editor and translator. Early on Shlonsky rebelled against the romantic nationalism of Hayim Nahman Bialik and created a modernist symbolist style of poetry that was hegemonic in Israel from the 1930s until the early 1960s. Shlonsky’s poetry has had a decisive impact on Hebrew literature; more than any other poet, he is responsible for the transition from romantic to modernist poetry. The unique style that he developed became prevalent in Hebrew poetry from the 1930s until the early 1960s. More recently (2005), this style has experienced a renaissance via an influential group of young poets associated with the literary magazine Ho.
Semenko, Mykhail’ [Семенко, Михайль] (1892–1937)
Authors: Ilnytzkyj Oleh S.
Published: September 2018

Mykhail’ Semenko was the founder, theoretician, and major poet of the Ukrainian futurist movement, as well as the editor of the journal Nova generatsiia [New Generation] (1927–1930). He was executed during the Stalinist terror on trumped-up charges of Ukrainian nationalism. A prolific poet, he began writing in the spirit of Symbolism, but turned to Futurism in 1914 with the collections Derzannia [Bravado] and Kvero-Futuryzm [Quaero-futurism] (1914), which created a major scandal. His 1924 collection, Kobzar, appropriated the title of Ukraine’s greatest romantic poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), further alienating a conservative public. Semenko relished being the "bad boy" of Ukrainian poetry, offering a broad spectrum of innovative—and sometimes shocking—verse, ranging from vers libre to playful trans-sense lyrics to self-deprecating, prosaic love poems. He wrote visual poetry, dubbed "poetry-painting." Urban themes and satirical topical verse are a hallmark of his creativity. As a theoretician, Semenko developed Panfuturism, which he defined in 1922 as being "at once Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Dadaism—but […] not simply a synthesis of these useful things" (Semenko 12). Influenced both by Italian and Russian Futurism, Semenko rightly insisted on the originality and autonomy of his movement, which became a major force in transforming Ukrainian culture in the 1910s and 1920s.