This article draws upon the remarkable diaries of Vojtěch Berger
to offer an original perspective on left-wing politics and the transformative effects of war, occupation, and violence in early twentieth-century Central Europe. Berger, a trained carpenter from southern Bohemia, began writing a diary at the turn of the century when he was a member of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party in Vienna. He continued to write as he fought for the Habsburg monarchy during World War I; moved to Prague and joined the Communist Party; endured the Nazi occupation; and questioned the
Communist Party, and his place in it, after liberation in 1945. Berger’s diary speaks to two constituencies that deserve more attention from historians: Czech-speaking veterans of World War I and rank-and-file members of the interwar Communist Party. The article argues that Berger’s politics, while informed by his experiences and framed by party ideologies and structures,
obtained significance through relationships with like-minded “comrades”. Furthermore, the article examines how Berger used his diary to create political self-understanding, to fashion a political self. Each world war, the article concludes, threw this sense of self into disarray. Each world war also spurred Berger to reshape his political self, and with that to reconstitute his political beliefs, his public relationships, and his sense of belonging in the world. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
This article deals with the Hindu cosmological imagery of water as presented in the Indian novel in English. The writers show a great interest in water as a means of depicting a transformation and/or re-birth of both the Indian society and the individuals in it relying on the water as symbolizing a beginning of a new life/identity in the Hindu cosmology. This is rendered vividly, for example, through the Nārada and Mārkandeya myths, where the two sages, after a passage through water, experience a new identity or a world perception totally different from that known to them before. R. K. Narayan, an author who lived all his life in India, deals in his novel The English Teacher with the spiritual transformation of the main character, Krishnan, which is accompanied and accomplished by different entities of water. He is oppressed both by the colonial condition and by personal tragedy, whereas Saleem, the main character of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, who is made to represent the country, acquires in the jungle of the Sundarbans an understanding of the necessity of adopting elements of other cultures. Two other authors, Anita Desai and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, develop the theme of the woman’s condition as a representation of the counterpart and contradictory images of water and sun/fire. Desai’s Fasting, Feasting relates the Indian condition to that of another culture and Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices addresses the problems of the Indian concept of marriage in the diaspora while using mythological imageries of other cultures.