bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Berberova, Nina Nikolaevna (БЕРБЕРОВА, НИНА НИКОЛАЕВНА) (1901–1993)
Authors: Palmer Isobel
Published: September 2018

Nina Nikolaevna Berberova (1901–1993) was a prominent Russian émigré writer, journal editor, and memoirist. She was born to an Armenian father and Russian mother in St. Petersburg, and died in Philadelphia. Berberova left Russia in 1922 with her then-lover, Vladislav Khodasevich. The couple lived in various European cities during the 1920s as part of Maxim Gorky’s household, before settling in Paris in 1925. Berberova emigrated alone to the USA in 1950. There she held various jobs before joining the Slavic department at Yale in 1958. From 1963 until 1971 she taught at Princeton University, where she was prized as one of the last living links to Russian Silver Age culture. The incisive, understated style of Berberova’s short stories about émigré life in Paris has been compared to that of Turgenev and Chekhov. Many of these stories were published in émigré publications, for which she also wrote reviews and critical articles. In 1947, she helped found the émigré weekly Russian Thought [RusskaiaMysl’]. Berberova is also the author of several biographies, including one of the poet Aleksandr Blok and one about Tchaikovsky — notable for its frank discussion of the composer’s homosexuality. She is perhaps best known for her memoirs The Italics Are Mine (1969; first published in Russian as Kursivmoi in Munich in 1971). A source of controversy in the émigré community due to their candour, and accused of fabrication, the memoirs provide a vivid record of her generation, its leading figures, and their post-revolutionary fate.
Dupuy, Françoise née Michaud (1925--) and Dupuy, Dominique (1930--)
Authors: Andus L’Hotellier Sanja
Published: September 2018

Françoise and Dominique Dupuy are French dancers, teachers, choreographers, and writers who met in Paris in 1946 and were married in 1951. Along with Jacqueline Robinson, Karin Waehner, and Jerome Andrews, they are key figures in the development of modern dance in France. In 1955 they founded Les Ballets Modernes de Paris (BMP), one of France’s first modern dance companies and initiated a collaboration of more than six decades as members of Jean Weidt’s company, Ballets des Arts. Prolific writers as well as choreographers, in 1969 they founded Rencontres Internationales de Danse Contemporaine (International Encounters of Contemporary Dance, RIDC), a pioneering teacher training institution, and in 1996 Le Mas de la Danse (Provençal House of Dance), a research and study center for contemporary dance as well as a publishing house. Une Danse à l’œuvre, a co-authored collection of essays on their dance practice, was published in 2001. They continue to explore the themes of heritage, memory, and the aging dancer.
Berkman, Alexander (1870–1936)
Authors: Cohn Jesse S.
Published: September 2018

Alexander Berkman (21 November 1870–28 June 1936), while largely remote from literary concerns, was closely connected to a number of key modernist figures, helping to bring radical concerns to American modernism. Upon initial analysis, it might seem odd to include Berkman, editor of Mother Earth (1907–1918) and The Blast (1916–1917), in a reference work on modernism. As a lifelong anarchist militant, jailed for his attempt to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1892) and deported for his opposition to the First World War I (1919), he was neither an author nor a critic of modernist works per se. However, his links to key modernist figures, particularly in New York, are numerous. Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912) was reviewed in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review (1914), and lauded by Mabel Dodge Luhan. His ideas were debated in Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist (1915–16), while Lola Ridge dedicated a poem to Berkman and his lover, Emma Goldman, in Reveille (1920). Additionally, the Ferrer Centre, a popular education initiative Berkman and Goldman sponsored in New York in 1911, drew participation from such figures as Eugene O’Neill, Hart Crane, Isadora Duncan, Jack London, Man Ray, Robert Henri, Upton Sinclair, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Berkman committed suicide while in exile in France.
Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne Martinius (1832–1910)
Authors: D’Amico Giuliano
Published: September 2018

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson is one of the most important Scandinavian writers of the second half of the 19th century, a novelist and playwright as well as a journalist, theater director, and political activist. In the Scandinavian context, he was a pioneer of a variety of literary forms, including late Romantic prose, historical and bourgeois drama, and the modern novel. He was deeply involved in the literary and political debates of his age, both in Norway and elsewhere in Europe, where he enjoyed, at least until his death, a degree of public recognition. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1903.

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson made his literary debut in 1857 with SynnøveSolbakken, the first of a series of prose works which combined a late Romanticism with an interest in the contemporary period and its problems. The main characters Synnøve and Thorbjørn, and the contrast between good and evil they represent, are still dependent on the stylization of Romanticism, but the environment in which they grow comprises a problematic social space in which alcoholism and bigotry plague the population. Such a duality is also evident in Bjørnson’s historical plays published between 1857 and 1862. His production took a turn towards the Modern Breakthrough with the play En Fallit [A Bankruptcy] (1875), which introduced theatrical realism in Scandinavia and paved the way for Henrik Ibsen.
Madge, Charles (1912–1996)
Authors: Davis Thomas S.
Published: September 2018

Charles Madge is best known as a founder of Mass Observation, but he was also an accomplished poet, a journalist, and a social scientist. Madge was born in Johannesburg and educated at Cambridge (he never completed his degree) where he learned from I. A. Richards and came into contact with Surrealism. T. S. Eliot championed Madge’s poetry and published the latter’s The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1941). Madge’s verse was deemed exemplary enough of his era to be included in W. B. Yeats’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1938). With Eliot’s help, Madge secured a job as a reporter for The Daily Mirror in 1935 and he became increasingly aware of a breach between the daily lives of British citizens and the operations of those in power. With Humphrey Jennings and Tom Harrisson, Madge launched Mass Observation in 1937, hoping to marshal poetry, sociology, and anthropology to reconnect the desires of the population with the workings of the state. Madge and Harrisson’s personalities were often in conflict during the early years of Mass Observation. Madge left Mass Observation and took up more mainstream research work with J. M. Keynes at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research from 1940 to 1942. Despite his lack of academic training, Madge assumed the first chair in sociology at the University of Birmingham in 1950, a position he held for twenty years.
Federal Dance Project (1936–1938)
Authors: Graff Ellen
Published: September 2018

The Federal Dance Project (FDP) was formed in January 1936, as part of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although it was originally a component of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project (FTP), forceful lobbying by New York City dancers, under the leadership of Helen Tamiris, led to the creation of a separate dance unit. In keeping with the FTP ideal of bringing culture to the masses, the FDP aimed to bring the new modern dance to the people. The FTP was organized by regions, and dance units were formed in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, in addition to New York City. Choreographers affiliated with the project included Helen Tamiris, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Ruth Page, and Katherine Dunham. The FTP and FDP were surrounded by political conflict from the beginning, and when funding cutbacks hit the Federal Theatre Project as a whole, the Federal Dance Project was absorbed back into the theater project in October 1937. However, dance productions continued under the aegis of the Federal Theatre Project, until further political controversy led to the dismantling of the FTP two years later in 1939. Despite its short life, the Federal Dance Project demonstrated the power of federal funding for dance and anticipated the recognition of dance as a separate genre when the National Endowment for the Arts was established in 1965.
Coffey, Brian (1905–1995)
Authors: Keatinge Ben
Published: September 2018

Brian Coffey was an Irish modernist poet whose life and work are closely associated with fellow Irishmen Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Denis Devlin (1908–1959), and George Reavey (1907–1976). Sometimes called the 1930s Irish Modernists, these poets published their early work in the 1930s, mainly from Paris. However, Brian Coffey’s reputation as a poet rests primarily on work published after World War II. His early volume Third Person (1938) was followed by a period of poetic silence broken by the publication of his best-known poem, "Missouri Sequence," in 1962. This was followed by the long poems Advent (1975)—regarded by some as his masterpiece—and Death of Hektor (1979), and the late volume of lyrics Chanterelles (1985). The most complete selection of Coffey’s poetry appeared in 1991 as Poems and Versions 1929–1990. Coffey’s modernism is paradoxical. A lifelong Catholic, he admired the "surrealistic reliance on the free flow of imagery from the dark within." An Irishman who never lost his affection for home, he was obliged to live his life in exile. Rejecting Yeats, he nonetheless absorbed the earlier poet’s influence. Formally, Coffey uses ellipses and unconventional spacing to give his poems an indeterminate feel. His poetry can be densely allusive, approaching an Eliotic "mythical method" in Death of Hektor, which has earned him his reputation as both a difficult and a neglected poet.
Esenin, Sergei (1895–1925)
Authors: Baraban Elena V.
Published: September 2018

Sergei Alexandrovich Esenin was one of Russia’s major lyrical poets. He described himself as "the last poet of the village." Raised in a peasant family, Esenin drew inspiration for his poetry from Russian folklore, Orthodox faith, and traditional pagan beliefs that were wide-spread among peasants. Esenin’s early contemplative lyrical verse (1914–1916) idealized Russian nature and the village. The poet originally supported the October Revolution but was later disillusioned by the Bolshevik regime. In his poetry, he lamented the destruction of the traditional peasant way of life. Esenin was a founding member of the Imaginist group (1919–1924), which insisted on the primary role of the image in literature. Esenin’s poetry of the 1920s is markedly pessimistic. Following the poet’s suicide in December 1925, Esenin’s poems that expressed decadent attitudes toward life and his sensational self-destructive behaviors were criticized by Bolshevik leaders and critics as "eseninshchina" [Eseninism]. Esenin’s works were not republished in the Soviet Union until the 1960s. However, despite this unofficial ban, his poetry was always popular and often circulated in handwritten copies.
Fogel, David (1891–1944)
Authors: Baroukh Rina
Published: September 2018

David Fogel was born in 1891 in the town of Satanov in Podolia. In 1912 he moved to Vienna where he stayed until 1925. During World War I, he was arrested and spent time in internment camps. In 1917, he began publishing short lyrical poems in the Hebrew press. He married in 1919, but his wife soon died from tuberculosis, an illness he also suffered from since 1920. His collection of poetry, Lifnei ha-sha’ar ha-afel (Before the Dark Gate), was published in 1923 in Vienna. In 1925 he moved to Paris and settled there. While in Paris, he wrote prose and poetry and remarried. In 1929 he and his new wife emigrated to Palestine and his daughter was born. However, their settlement in Palestine was not successful, and soon after they returned to Paris. Upon his return to Europe he gave a series of lectures concerning language and style in modern Hebrew literature. When World War II erupted, Fogel and his family were in Paris. His wife and daughter were saved, but he was arrested by the Vichy Police. The last time he was seen alive was in 1942. From this point on he disappeared; information concerning his whereabouts was fragmentary and contradictory. He was probably released from internment camp, but in 1944 he was arrested again by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, a transit camp for French Jews. He was later sent to Auschwitz and murdered there.
Fondane, Benjamin (1898–1944)
Authors: Rubens Andrew
Published: September 2018

A primarily francophone Jewish poet and writer of Romanian origin, Fondane became known as a critic, poet and dramaturge in Romania before leaving Bucharest for France in 1923. In Paris, he mixed with the avant-garde of the 1920s both as a poet and as a critic and philosopher of cinema. An admirer of René Clair and Man Ray, he emphasized the liberating and transgressive possibilities of silent cinema and became first a scriptwriter and then a director, shooting the avant-garde film Tararira in Argentina in 1936. He became close to the Dadaists, the Grand Jeu group (Roger Gilbert Lecomte, René Daumal) and dissident surrealists. He also represented the Romanian avant-garde in Paris with the magazine Intégral and wrote a remarkable essay on Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture in 1929.
Fuller, Loie (1862–1928)
Authors: Garelick Rhonda
Published: September 2018

Loie Fuller was a founding figure of modern dance. After an early career in American vaudeville, she moved to Paris where she created a new genre that drew on popular cabaret motifs combined with free-flowing, more natural movements performed in bare feet and flowing robes, and—crucially—the incorporation of technology. Gaining acclaim for her incorporation of electric lights, mechanical stagecraft, and her oversized silk costumes—all her own design—she used her many patented inventions to transform herself on stage into whirling sculptures of colored light and floating fabric. Known as the electricity fairy, Fuller was extremely popular with audiences, was often considered as a kind of magician, and became one of the most famous Americans in Europe. Midway through her career Fuller assembled a troupe of young dancers—Les Ballets Loie Fuller—who toured the world performing with her. In her later years she experimented with cinema, becoming one of the first women filmmakers in the world. Prominent artists and writers such as Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Stéphane Mallarmé were particularly interested in Fuller, and used her as a subject for their sculpture, painting, and poetry. She was also a popular subject for early photographers. Her fame was so great, and the French embraced her so thoroughly, that at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, she was the sole performer to be granted her own theater, designed for her by esteemed Art Nouveau architect, Henri Sauvage.
Heifetz-Tussman, Malka (1893–1987)
Authors: Koenig Raphael
Published: September 2018

Malka Heifetz-Tussman was a twentieth-century American Yiddish poet. She was born in 1896 in the region of Volyn in Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), and immigrated to the USA with her family in 1912. Unlike Celia Dropkin (1887–1956) or Anna Margolin (1887–1952), Heifetz-Tussman was not based in New York, the major centre of Yiddish literary creation in America. Instead, she lived in Chicago and Milwaukee, taught Yiddish language and literature at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and eventually settled in Berkeley, California, where she remained until her death in 1987. She received the Itsik Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature in 1981. Inspired by Walt Whitman, her poems strike a balance between a concise, dense writing style, and a quest for simplicity and accessibility. Her work focuses on the sensory experiences of the lyrical ‘I’ as it encounters the natural world, reaching an intensity often expressed in mystical terms. Although never directly engaging with the experience of the Shoah, she thought of her poetry as an act of resistance and uncompromising affirmation of her right to exist.
Henein, Georges (1914–1973)
Authors: Bardaouil Sam
Published: September 2018

The son of an Egyptian diplomat and Italian-Egyptian mother, surrealist writer Georges Henein spent his childhood between Cairo, Madrid, Rome, and Paris. It was in Paris that he completed his secondary education at the Lycée Pasteur de Neuilly, going on to study at the Sorbonne. His cosmopolitan upbringing allowed Henein to master Arabic, Italian, Greek, English, and French equally, enabling him to navigate the various worlds in which he roamed with ease and confidence.

In 1935 Henein’s leftist and surrealist leanings began to surface in contributions made to two publications, Un Effort, a monthly periodical published in Cairo by Les Essayistes (a Francophone literary group); and Les Humbles, a Marxist-Leninist journal that was printed in Paris. In 1936 Henein met André Breton, who had revealed his awareness of the former’s efforts to promulgate surrealism in Egypt in a 1936 letter. Later the same year, during a sojourn in Paris, Henein attended the surrealist meetings where Breton called attendees to take a stand against what became known as the Moscow Trials. A manifesto, or more precisely a declaration, entitled La Verité Sur Le Procès de Moscou was read by Breton in a meeting on the 3rd of September of 1936 and signed by those present, including Henein.
Ivanov, Georgy Vladimirovich Ivanov [Иванов, Георгий Владимирович] (1894–1958)
Authors: Chandler Robert
Published: September 2018

Along with Khodasevich and Tsvetaeva, Georgy Ivanov was one of the three great Russian poets of émigré Paris – and the most important representative of the so-called ‘Parisian Note’.

As a young man in St Petersburg, he had been close to the Acmeists. For several years after settling in Paris with his wife, the poet and memoirist Irina Odoevtseva, he wrote little, but in the early 1930s he began writing the poems by which he is remembered – poems of brilliant despair that both anticipate Existentialism and look back to the French Symbolists, and to their Russian translator, Innokenty Annensky. He went on writing better and better, his formal grace coexisting with an ever more startling emotional directness. He composed much of his finest work during his last few months, when he knew he was dying.

Ivanov was a controversial figure. Several memoirs portray him as a monster of egotism, nihilism and worse. He incurred the fury of Anna Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandelstam and others by publishing a memoir, Petersburg Winters, that mixes fact, rumour and fantasy. He was accused of Nazi sympathies and even of complicity in a murder in St Petersburg. It is now clear that these rumours were unfounded.
Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim (1920–1994)
Authors: Mejcher-Atassi Sonja
Published: September 2018

Born in Bethlehem, Palestine, in 1920, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was a distinguished intellectual whose literary writing, translation, and criticism played an important role in Arab cultural life in the second half of the 20th century. A painter, art critic, and founding member of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art in 1951 (together with the Iraqi artists Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said), Jabra’s most significant contribution to modern art was perhaps his writings as an art critic, particularly his publications JawadSalimwa-nasb al-hurriyya (JewadSelim and the Monument of Freedom, Baghdad, 1974) and al-Fann al-‘iraqi al-muasir (Iraqi Art Today, Baghdad, 1970), with which he introduced modern art in Iraq to a broader public. Jabra also wrote about his first encounters with art, and more broadly about visual culture, in his autobiography al-Bi’r al-ula (The First Well, 1987).
Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich [ХАРМС, ДАНИИЛ ИВАНОВИЧ] (1905–1942)
Authors: Scotto Peter
Published: September 2018

Co-founder (with Aleksandr Vvedensky) of the short-lived Obedinenie real’nogo iskussta, or OBERIU (The Association for Real Art), Kharms was one of the leading figures of the Leningrad poetic avant-garde in the late 1920s and 1930s. Best known as the author of darkly comic, absurd, and often violent prose miniatures, Kharms was unable to publish either his poetry or prose "for adults" during his lifetime, and survived by writing brilliantly inventive children’s verse beloved by several generations of Russian speakers. Both his poetry of the 1920s and his prose of the 1930s eschew logic and revel in nonsense on the premise that language is otherwise unable to convey the nature of the real. The unmotivated and existential violence that shadows the comic surfaces of his prose has been read as a reflection of the pervasive violence of Stalinist Russia. Arrested in 1931 and again in 1941, he died in an NKVD psychiatric prison hospital in 1942, likely from starvation. Following his arrest, his manuscripts were, miraculously, recovered and kept safe by friends to await the 1970s, when the process of returning his work to Russian literature began.
Gert, Valeska (1892–1978)
Authors: Elswit Kate
Published: September 2018

Valeska Gert was a dancer, actress, and cabaret artist best known for her radical solo performances during the Weimar Republic. She attracted attention for her physical stage choices and presence (both of which were often discussed in terms of the grotesque) and for her commitment to making work that staged contemporary issues without mystifying them, as she claimed many of her contemporaries did. She also acted in many plays and films by well-known modernist directors. During the Nazi years, Gert left Germany and, among other activities, ran the Beggar Bar in New York City, one of the more successful exile cabarets and the second of the seven venues she opened during her career. After her return to Germany in 1949, her work changed substantially, both stylistically and in terms of medium, as her aggressive performance style softened and she relied increasingly on spoken text. In the decades after her death, she became an icon of rebellious and experimental performance for younger artists across Europe.
Kluge, Alexander (1932--)
Authors: Weigel Moira
Published: September 2018

Alexander Kluge is a German author, film director, and television producer who has also worked as a lawyer, teacher, and political lobbyist. A founding figure of the New German Cinema, he has continued to publish numerous works of fiction and social criticism, and to make experimental films and "film essays" for television.

Kluge was born in Halberstadt in 1932. After studying at the University of Marburg, he earned a doctorate in law at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in 1956. During this time, Kluge began writing short stories. He also befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was then teaching at the Institute for Social Research. The encounter with critical theory would profoundly shape Kluge’s work. Adorno also introduced the young writer to director Fritz Lang.

In 1960, Kluge made his first film, Brutalitätim Stein (Brutality in Stone), a twelve-minute, black-and-white montage of Nazi architecture, intended to open discussion of Germany’s recent past that public discourse had suppressed. It premiered at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1961. The following year, Kluge signed the Oberhausen Manifesto with twenty-five other filmmakers. This document, usually identified as the beginning of the New German Cinema, declared that "Daddy’s cinema is dead." Celebrating the innovative potential of experimental shorts, it called for greater political and creative freedom for, and a better system for financing and distributing, independent films. Lutze argues that Kluge belongs to a distinctly modernist tradition of figures who have opposed what they see to be the dominant culture of capitalist society, taking adversarial stances on mainstream aesthetics and politics alike.
Lau, Alan Chong (1948--)
Authors: Jeon Joseph Jonghyun
Published: September 2018

Alan Chong Lau is an American poet and visual artist. Lau began his poetic career in the wake of the 1970s Asian-American movement, a surge of racial political consciousness inspired by the civil rights and anti-war protest movements. His first book, published with friends Garrett Kaoru Hongo and Lawson Fusao Inada, was entitled The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (1978) after the name they had given to themselves for a 1977 performance in Long Beach and after the highway that connected their childhood homes in different parts of California. The book is a series of peripatetic romps in a beat style refashioned for an Asian-American context. In comparison, Songs of Jadina (1980), Lau’s first monograph and the winner of an American Book Award in 1981, is a much more contemplative, nuanced exploration of Chinese American history and the poet’s ancestry. In 2000, he published his second monograph, Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker’s Journal, which is a poetic record of his experiences in Seattle. His most recent book of poems, no hurry (2007), is a reflection about his travels to Japan. Beginning in the late 1970s, Lau also became an active painter, developing a unique style that blended elements of Chinese calligraphy and the Northwest School. A retrospective of his work was shown at the Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle in 2012.
Levertin, Oscar (1862–1906)
Authors: Johnsson Henrik
Published: September 2018

Oscar Levertin was born at Gryt Manor in Norrköping, Sweden. He pursued an academic career at Uppsala University, where he received his doctorate in 1888. Beginning in 1893 he taught literature and art history at Stockholm College, where he became a professor in 1899. Levertin was also employed as a literary critic, joining the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in 1897. Although Levertin made his literary debut in the early 1880s, he rose to prominence as an author and critic allied with a neo-Romantic school of literature—in Swedish often simply referred to as the "ninety-ists" ["nittiotalisterna"]—a movement which defined itself through its opposition to the naturalism of the 1880s and whose most notable members included Verner von Heidenstam and Selma Lagerlöf. This assault on naturalism was launched in the pamphlet Pepitasbröllop (1890), co-authored with Verner von Heidenstam. In this essay a new aesthetic is proposed which self-consciously embraces the ideals of literary Romanticism.
Livesay, (Kathleen May) Dorothy (1909–1996)
Authors: Barclay Adèle
Published: September 2018

Dorothy Livesay was a Canadian poet, journalist, activist, social worker, instructor, field worker, and author of short fiction, literary criticism, radio plays, and autobiography. Her collection of poetry Day and Night (1944) was lauded as a significant socialist, modernist text.

Livesay was born on 12 October 1909 in Winnipeg, Manitoba to journalist parents. She received a BA Honours in modern languages (1931) from the University of Toronto. Influenced by IMAGISM, she published her first collection of poetry Green Pitcher (1928), a well-received book of lyric poetry, while still an undergraduate student. Livesay studied at the Sorbonne, earning a Diplôme d’Études Supérieures (1932). Her thesis was entitled "Symbolism and the Metaphysical Tradition in Modern English Poetry." In Paris, she was exposed to Marxism and the effects of the Depression in Europe, and developed her left-wing politics in response. Upon returning to Canada in 1932, she published a second book of poetry, Signpost, enrolled in the School of Social Work at the University of Toronto, and joined the Young Communist League.
Nayi Kavita
Authors: Govind Nikhil
Published: September 2018

Nayi Kavita [New Poetry] is a movement associated with Agyeya (1911–1987) and the seven poets published in Agyeya’s 1943 collection Tar Saptak (the name refers to a musical term for ‘higher register’). Agyeya went on to edit three other anthologies entitled Dusara [Second] (1951), Tisara [Third] (1959), and Chautha [Fourth] (1979) Saptak. The prefaces written by Agyeya and the poets became famous in their own right. There, Agyeya probed the place of modernism and tradition, of literary groupings and manifestos, of form and registers of language. Agyeya also insisted that no single criteria or aim unified their diverse formal and thematic experimentations. All the other poets of that collection were to become venerable figures in Hindi literature — Nemichandra Jain, Bharat Bhushan Agrawal, Prabhakar Machwe, Girirajkumar Mathur (1919–1994) and Ramvilas Sharma (1912–2000). Perhaps the most famous find of the first anthology was the young Muktibodh (1917–1964). Muktibodh’s theorizations of many of the questions that engaged Agyeya were to give the New Poetry in Hindi a robust intellectual infrastructure from which poets of the 1960s and 1970s could initiate points of departure. Though New Poetry is often contrasted with the poetry of the Progressives, which engaged social inequality, it is more meaningful to contrast New Poetry with the generation of the 1920s and 1930s — the Chayavadi poets (Chayavadi literally means ‘poets of shadows’). That older generation, writing in the noon of nationalism, asked the same questions of tradition, appropriate thematics, language and sound, and came up with a very different set of answers.
Parnok, Sofia Yakovlevna [Парнок, София Яковлевна] (1885–1933)
Authors: Chandler Robert
Published: September 2018

Sofia Parnok was born into a Jewish family, in the southern Russian city of Taganrog. Her father was a pharmacist; her mother, a doctor, died when Sofia was six. After decades of neglect, Parnok is now recognized as a gifted and original poet.

Parnok studied music and law before deciding to devote herself to poetry. In 1909, after divorcing her husband, she settled in Moscow. She converted to Orthodox Christianity; she appears always to have seen herself as Russian rather than Jewish.

In 1914 she and Marina Tsvetaeva fell in love. Tsvetaeva wrote about their affair in her poem-cycle ‘The Girl-Friend’, and Parnok in her first book, Poems (1916). No Russian poet before her had written so directly about female—let alone lesbian—sexuality.

In the 1920s she published four collections of poetry, the last two through The Knot, a publishing co-operative she had co-founded in 1926. An influential critic, she was the first to pick out the four now considered the greatest Russian poets of their time: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and Mandelstam. After 1928, unable to publish her own work, she supported herself mainly through translations from French.
Penrose, Valentine (1898–1978)
Authors: Marwood Kimberley
Published: September 2018

Valentine Penrose was born Valentine Boué in south-west France. She met and married Roland Penrose in 1925. Her small oeuvre consists of poems influenced by surrealist writers such as Paul Éluard and collages inspired by Max Ernst, whom she encountered through her husband, who was a champion of the surrealist movement. The first English translation of Penrose’s collected work, Poems and Narrations, appeared in 1977 containing the works Dons des Féminines [Gifts of the Feminine] (1951) and Martha’s Opera (1945).

Penrose’s poems are often supplemented by collages. By using similar source material to Max Ernst, Penrose parodies his collages, focusing on female relationships and thus giving power and prominence to women rather than men. This is a theme she subsequently returned to in her major literary work, La ComtesseSanglante (1962, later published as The Bloody Countess in English in 1970), a semi-historical account of the life of Erszébet Bathory. Her marriage to Roland broke down in 1934 and they were divorced in 1937. Roland later married model and photographer Lee Miller, with whom Penrose remained friends. She returned to live with the couple at Farley Farm in East Sussex, where she died in 1978.
Peretz, Yitskhok Leybush (1835–1917)
Authors: Mahalel Adi
Published: September 2018

Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, or I. L. Peretz (1835–1917), was a Yiddish and Hebrew writer, known for introducing modernist trends into Yiddish literature. Born in the town of Zamość Poland, he lived significant parts if his life in Warsaw, which he helped make a center of modern Jewish and Yiddish culture.

Peretz had been a Hebrew writer since the 1870s and was then known mostly as a Hebrew poet, although he was also capable of writing in Polish. He first expressed his ideas concerning Yiddish in his letters to Sholem Aleichem in the late 1880s; he "confessed" his affinity to Yiddish, referring to it as "the language of Beril and Shmeril," in a Hebrew poem. His Yiddish writing debut was the long poem Monish (1888), which is considered to be the first folk narrative to be employed in modern Yiddish literature, with a style and plot heavily influenced by Goethe’s Faust.

His early Yiddish prose included a collection of stories titled Bekante bilder (1890). These texts embody psychological complexity, employing the form of internal monologues, and are considered to represent a significant development in modern Yiddish fiction. "The Messenger" (Der meshulakh) tells the story of the dying traditional Jewish-shtetl economy through the confessional story of an old man suffering from chest pains, reminiscing and hallucinating about his life, who is carrying a sum of money and a contract that he needs to deliver. "The Crazy Idler" (Der meshugener batln; in English often translated as "The Mad Talmudist"), consists of the internal monologue of a person suffering from a split personality disorder.
Hoffman, Gertrude (1886–1966)
Authors: Cohen-Stratyner Barbara
Published: September 2018

Gertrude Hoffman (Hoffmann) was an early twentieth-century Broadway dance director and performer, and the first woman to receive a dance direction—or choreographic—credit on Broadway. From her first credited choreography for Punch, Judy & Co (1903), through to her retirement in the early 1940s, she was known for her clever and innovative staging of women’s precision choruses for both the Broadway and the international stage. As a solo performer, however, she is remembered as an impersonator of other vaudeville and theater performers and concert dancers, developing a vaudeville feature act called The Borrowed Art of Gertrude Hoffman. Hoffman developed and performed in the first U.S. productions of the Ballets Russes repertoire (1911–15), was the first woman admitted to the Theatrical Managers’ Protective Association, and, after buying herself out of her previously signed contracts, set up her own producing organization. In the 1920s and 1930s, she created and staged dance specialties for precision dance teams, known as The Gertrude Hoffman Girls, comprised of twelve to twenty-four performers. Her troupes appeared in the Shuberts’ annual Broadway revues and musicals, as well as in ‘‘picture palaces’’ and large cinemas in America and Western Europe. She retired when World War II closed access to the European entertainment industry.
Altenberg, Peter (1859–1919)
Authors: Kim David
Published: September 2018

Born in Vienna on 9 March 1859, the Jewish-Austrian poet Peter Altenberg (birth name: Richard Engländer) became a literary sensation with his characteristically telegraphic writing style. The purpose of this narrative form, he explained, was to capture Kleinigkeit (the smallness) of modern life—fleeting, ordinary, and unembellished. His so-called prose poems went on to garner the admiration of contemporary artists, architects and writers who belonged to the Young Vienna. They included, among others, Hermann Bahr, Gustav Klimt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus and Arthur Schnitzler. Suffering from pneumonia, Altenberg died in Vienna on 8 January 1919.

Opposed to the assignment and expectation of specific social roles in a conservative Austro-Hungarian Empire, Altenberg took on a nom de plume to redefine his cultural identity in the image of the oppressed, including children, women and non-Europeans. This act of political resistance in writing became a lifelong commitment to exposing the divided and hypocritical world around him, although some of his works portrayed those in suffering with a certain degree of eroticization and prejudice. By focusing on moments of ambiguity, contradiction, monotony and triviality in social interaction, he exposed the clash of cultures between old provincialism and new cosmopolitanism in contemporary Vienna while pushing new limits of mimetic representation.
Rosenberg, Isaac (1890–1918)
Authors: Peters John
Published: September 2018

An important but underappreciated British poet of the First World War, Isaac Rosenberg made a significant contribution to the literature that came out of the war. Throughout his life, Rosenberg was beset by poverty, and unlike many other young men of that time enlisted when the war broke out primarily for the steady pay cheque. Rosenberg comments on nature’s indifference to the tragedy occurring in its midst and exposes the precarious position of men in the conflict. He invokes religious imagery to interrogate the role of deity amidst the carnage of the battle. Highly sceptical when he entered the conflict, Rosenberg responded to the war not with feelings of disenchantment, but with a modernist scepticism toward Western civilization and the Western worldview. His unique response to the war gives him a place with Wilfred Owen as one of the most important British poets to write about their First World War experience. Had Rosenberg survived the war, it seems possible that he might have become a powerful voice in Modernist literature.
Shkurupii, Geo (1903–1937)
Authors: Ilnytzkyj Oleh S.
Published: September 2018

Ukrainian futurist poet and prose writer Shkurupii was a close collaborator of Mykhail Semenko, the founder of Ukrainian Futurism. He penned articles about Marinetti and the Art of Noises in 1922. He debuted as a Futurist poet (‘King of the Futurist Prairies’) that same year with a perplexing collection, Psykhetozy [Psychetosis], distinguished by eroticism, narcissism, neologisms, Dadaist elements, and typographic experiments. The poems were ironic, anti-aesthetic, focused on urban themes, speed, and machines. Opposed to the symbolist cult of the poet, Shkurupii’s later poems were topical, narrative and rhetorical in form; he blasted conservatism and philistinism, while showing enthusiasm for the new Soviet revolutionary order. In 1923 he also embraced prose. Determined to develop a mass readership, Shkurupii focused on plot, defamiliarisation, mystification and canonical popular genres like the detective story. His acute formalism sometimes turned to self-conscious, meta-artistic practices, characterised by commentary on literary conventions that he set out to undermine in his writings. His most controversial novel was Dveri v den’ [Gateway into Day] (1929), a mélange of literary and documentary forms for which Soviet literary critics condemned him. In 1930 he edited two issues of the futurist publication Avanhard-Al’manakh proletars’kykh myttsiv Novoi generatsii [Avant-Garde: Almanac of the Proletarian Artists of the New Generation]. Shkurupii was executed during the Stalinist terror in 1937.
Shuji, Terayama (1935–1983)
Authors: Yamaji Smith Jordan A.
Published: September 2018

Terayama Shūji was an avant-garde Japanese poet, playwright (for stage and radio), filmmaker, and photographer associated with New Wave cinema and underground theatre movements such as post-shingeki. Born in Aomori Prefecture, then raised by relatives after his father died in the Pacific War and his mother moved to distant Kyushu to work, he settled in Tokyo, where he would spend the majority of his adult life. After studying literature at Waseda University, he began writing poetry, making his mark with a major prize for new tanka writers in 1954. In 1967, with his wife Kujo Kyoko, he co-founded the experimental theatre group TenjoSajiki [天井桟敷,] usually called ‘The Gallery’ in English; the title is taken from the Japanese translation of Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis. The same year, he founded ‘Universal Gravitation Drama Laboratory’ [Engeki-jikkenshitsu BanyuInryoku] an experimental gallery, cinema, and theatre space which later spun off the theatre group ‘A Laboratory of Play: Ban’yuInryoku.’ His films investigate the relationship between revolution, eroticism, youth culture, family psychology, and identity. Terayama’s works explore new formal and aesthetic techniques, while simultaneously forwarding and constantly questioning the radical politics of post-Second World War avant-garde arts in Japan.
Zolotoe runo [The Golden Fleece] (1906–1909)
Authors: Chuchvaha Hanna
Published: September 2018

The successor to the World of Art, the Symbolist art-literary journal Zolotoeruno [The Golden Fleece] (1906–1909) was published in Moscow by Nikolai Riabushinsky (1877–1951), the offspring of a wealthy merchant family, and ran for 48 issues. It became a rival to the literary periodical The Vesy [Scales] (1904–1909), edited by Symbolist poet Valery Briusov (1873–1924). The quest implied in the title and expressed in the journal’s editorial manifesto was an articulation of the Symbolist notion of the search for beauty and the value of art. Contemporaries, however, criticized the journal and believed that it did not express anything new or fresh. For the first six months it was published in Russian and French, and articulated the cosmopolitan desire to promote Russian art and literature in Europe. The Symbolist artists of the future art group Golubaiaroza [Blue Rose] (organized in 1907) created the look of The Golden Fleece. The periodical printed the highest quality reproductions and used expensive imported enamelled and silk paper. By 1909, the journal gradually lost its luxurious look, and ceased publication after Riabushinskii’s bankruptcy.
Verma, Nirmal (1929–2005)
Authors: Govind Nikhil
Published: September 2018

Nirmal Verma was among the most prominent and distinguished Hindi novelists, essayists, and short story writers of the second half of the 20th century. Though he was briefly enamored of the ideals of communism, he lost his faith in the mid-1950s, especially after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He lived in Prague from 1959 to 1968, where his work at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences included translating prominent Czech writers into Hindi. As a result of his work, certain Czech writers—most famously Milan Kundera (1929--)—became known to Hindi readers before achieving fame in Western Europe and the United States. Many of his later works directly thematized Indian traditions and modernism. His later sympathetic treatment of tradition, when his critics began to accuse him of leaning to the right, revealed a controversial evolution of political and literary thought. At his best, Verma was able to write so that there was only a transparent line between on the one hand the mundane and on the other hand an elusive but palpable accumulation of mood.
Young Vienna
Authors: George Alys
Published: September 2018

Young Vienna was an informal, heterogeneous literary circle that existed in Vienna for little more than a decade, beginning in approximately 1890. Hermann Bahr and his protégés Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Felix Salten formed the core of the group, while Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg were later, peripheral participants. Many other writers, most now forgotten, were involved to varying degrees. These included Felix Dörmann, Friedrich Michael Fels, Paul Goldmann, Jacques Joachim, Eduard Michael Kafka, Julius Kulka, Rudolf Lothar, and Richard Specht. The group often met at Café Griensteidl and, later, Café Central.

Unlike the naturalists in Berlin and Munich, Young Vienna put forth no coherent literary program, manifestos, or theories, and their literary production ranged from naturalism and impressionism to aestheticism, symbolism, and decadence. The only commonality among the writers, according to Bahr, was that they wanted ‘in all things and at all costs to be modern’ (in allen Dingen um jeden Preis modern zu sein).
Birney, (Alfred) Earle (1904–1995)
Authors: Johnston Jasmine
Published: September 2018

Earle Birney was a Canadian poet, novelist, dramatist and professor. Born in 1904 in Calgary, Alberta, he spent his childhood in rural Alberta and British Columbia. His adult life was predominately spent in Canada, the USA, and the United Kingdom, although he travelled extensively. He died in Toronto in 1995. While Birney’s poetics were influenced by his academic training in Old English and Middle English, he frequently experimented with the avant-garde use of typography, orthography, dialect, and sound media. Following studies at the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of London, he accepted a professorship in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia in 1946. His teaching led to the foundation of the Department of Creative Writing at University of British Columbia in 1965. In the same year, however, he departed to the University of Toronto to serve as the school’s first writer-in-residence.
Howard, Andrée (1910–1968)
Authors: Jones Susan
Published: September 2018

Andrée Howard belonged to a group of British choreographers, including Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor, who began their careers with the Polish-born Marie Rambert in London. As a choreographer Howard worked predominantly within a ballet idiom, but she extended and exploited this to develop the potential for dramatic expression in the medium of modern ballet. Her versatile approaches to genre included the use of abstract and narrative forms and a witty penchant for comedy; her styles ranged from lyrical and poetic to strikingly theatrical. During the 1930s and 1940s, Howard danced with, and created many ballets for, Rambert’s Ballet Club and the Ballet Rambert Company. She found artistic collaboration within the intimate atmosphere of a small group, and her best choreography is represented by ‘‘chamber’’ ballets created among individuals familiar with her working methods. As a talented visual artist, she frequently designed the sets and costumes for her ballets. Her major choreographic innovations belonged to the field of narrative ballet, where her focus on psychological expression was often inspired by literary text, as in Lady into Fox (1939) and La Fête étrange (The Strange Celebration) (1940), although she did not exclusively work in this medium. She also produced pure dance works throughout her career, including Assembly Ball (1946) and Veneziana (1953) for Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
Åkesson, Birgit Anna Ida (1908–2001)
Authors: Hammergren Lena
Published: September 2018

Birgit Åkesson (b. March 24, 1908, Malmö, Sweden; d. March 24, 2001, Stockholm, Sweden) is considered one of Sweden’s foremost modern choreographers. In the late 1920s and early 1930s she studied at Mary Wigman’s school in Germany. After completing the Wigman course, she found it difficult to stay in Germany because of the rise of fascism, and in 1934 she made her choreographic debut in Paris. Critics described her as an intellectual choreographer and "the Picasso of dance," due to her use of acrobatic and often angular body postures. Åkesson frequently choreographed for theater and opera. Her works at the Swedish Royal Opera during the 1950s and 1960s introduced a modernist dance technique to the classically trained company. In 1963 she co-founded the Choreographic Institute in Stockholm, later renamed the University of Dance and Circus. Åkesson had a keen interest in non-Western culture and she undertook research on traditional dances in African and Asian countries, publishing an account of dances south of the Sahara in her 1983 book Källvattnets mask (Mask of the Spring Water). In the history of Swedish dance, Åkesson and Birgit Cullberg became known as "The Mothers of Modern Dance."