Canadian Slavonic Papers

Les staliniens. Une expérience politique 1944-1956 by DOMINIQUE DESANTIReview by: William O. McCagg, Jr.Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 18, No. 2 (June 1976), pp. 222-223Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40867246 .

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222 I Canadian Slavonic Papers

The reviewer recently met a Slovene language professor who resigned his post as lecturer at the University of Zagreb because he was homesick for his native Slovenia, a bare 20 miles distant. Casting his memory back farther to the year 1945, when Austrian Carinthia was overrun by Slovenes who had fled their homeland, he vividly recalls trying to restrain a young woman threatening to drown herself in the Wörther Sea because she feared she would never be able to return to her native Slovenia.

By way of introduction, Dr. Heiliger elaborates the repetitive social- psychological problems which all centre around aspects of nostalgia. The themes of alienation, mental passiveness, social backwardness, and massive emigration, which result in uprooted and nostalgic yearnings, are basic to Cankar's work.

The prime concept of Heiliger's interpretation is that nostalgic reaction is a basic human value. A nostalgic reaction is caused by feelings of aliena- tion, melancholy, depression, hopelessness. It is a yearning for irretrievable time, accompanied by a longing for the past and a search for lost values. It is a desire to bring back memories to the conscious mind. Nostalgia is also evoked by changed localities, and it occurs as a yearning for a beautiful landscape. Another basic cause of nostalgia is mother-love, so vividly por- trayed in the story "Na klancu" (On the Hillside).

After giving an interpretation of the theme of nostalgia in some of the main writers of European literature, the writer analyzes it in depth in a number of Cankar's works. In "Tujci" (Foreigners) a classical example of homesickness ends in suicide, whereas in "Kriz na gori" (The Cross on the Hill) the nostalgia, which appears at the very moment of the hero's depar- ture from his home landscape and his beloved later becomes a source of creative inspiration. In other works, Cankar expresses through his charac- ters his yearning for his youth and his home village, Vrhnika, which lies on the Trieste highway a few miles outside Ljubljana.

In conclusion, Heiliger examines Cankar's contribution to the solution of the sociological and psychological phenomena in the field of emigration. His book is well conceived and thoroughly documented. Unfortunately, a number of printing errors in the German text have not been corrected, but the Slovene quotations are free from this defect.

[Alexander W. Wainman , University of British Columbia]

Les staliniens. Une expérience politique 1944-1956. Dominique desanti. Paris: Fayard, 1975. iii, 385 pp.

Mme. Desanti joined the underground Communist Party of France during the war. During the late Stalin years she was a leading CPF journalist. Although not herself a Party leader, she was close to the centre socially, because her husband was an important theoretician. She became disillusioned in the mid-fifties and turned first to novel writing, then to history and sociology. The present volume resembles Vladimir Dedijer's Battle Stalin Lost in that it contains memories consolidated by historical research.

Desanti's book would interest students of eastern Europe even if it

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Book Reviews | 223

were only an account of her role in the history .of that region. As a jour- nalist, she developed an intimacy immediately after the war with the French- oriented Communists of the East. Ehrenburg, Lukács, Rajk, Kostov, Modze- lewski, Grotewohl - she knew them all. Further, in 1946 she was the vehicle for Tito's first criticism of the French Communists. Then, in 1948, she attended the congress of progressive intellectuals at Wroclaw, and in 1949 she covered the Kostov trial. On both occasions she played a notable role in calming Western Communist apprehensions. Her discussion of these persons and events valuably supplements our knowledge of a fateful era and milieu.

The greatest value of the book for East Europeans, however, lies in its recollection of the all-European revolution that Stalin suppressed. History books often describe 1944 as a year quite different from the great revolu- tionary years of the European past - 1789, 1848, 1917. They admit that Soviet intervention in eastern Europe in 1944 launched revolutionary changes, but suggest that these stemmed not from below and within European society, and that they affected only the East. Mme. Desanti vividly recalls that this standard version of 1944 is false.

Insurrectionist tendencies existed throughout Europe on the eve of the liberation. Marxists expected an all-European revolution. In the West, however, Stalin's coalitionary tactics led the revolutionaries to disarm; in the East, Stalin subjected them to long, slow torture, constructing after 1948 a new order that bore little resemblance to what the native revolu- tionaries had planned. Subsequently, Mme. Desanti recounts, despite the divergence of East and West, a core group of the revolutionary intellectuals of 1944 experienced in East and West alike an extraordinary fate. Perhaps because Stalin had defeated them between 1944 and 1948 gradually, by little steps, these revolutionaries did not fall into disillusionment such as had affected revolutionaries in 1797 and 1850. Instead, by developing myopia towards Stalin, they kept their faith and were available for a new surge of all-European revolutionary purism after 1953. We have had intima- tions of these phenomena before, but perhaps never so clearly.

This book focuses its attention, of course, not on eastern Europe, but on the leading cadres of the French and Italian CPs. Further, it contains certain exaggerations, for example of the lasting importance of the Comin- form. But it is fascinating reading for all who are interested in comparative Communism and in the modern Slavic world.

[William O. McCagg, Jr., Michigan State University]

Greece and the Near Eastern Crisis, 1875-1878. evangelos kofos. Thes- salonike: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1975. 283 pp.

The Eastern question and especially the events of 1875-78 in southeastern Europe have once again during these centennial years attracted the attention of scholars. Various conferences have been held and several books have been published or are being planned. Kofos has approached his topic through a general examination of all relevant aspects of Greece's policy during those

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