The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins

Imagining Utopia, 1870s - 1920s

Professor Maria Todorova (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

384 Seiten

2020
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-15033-1 (ISBN)

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Maria Todorova’s book is devoted to the ‘golden age’ of the socialist idea, broadly surveying the period in and around the time of the Second International. It critically examines the promise for an alternative socialist utopia from 1870 to the 1920s. Todorova brings in the experience of the periphery in a comparative context in the belief that the margins can often elucidate better the character of a phenomenon, and de-provincialize it from essentialist notions. In doing so, The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins moves beyond the traditional historiographical emphasis on ideology by looking at different intersections or entanglements of spaces, generations, genders, ideas and feelings, and different flows of historical time.

The study provides a social and cultural history of early socialism in Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Bulgaria, arguably the country with the earliest and strongest socialist movement in Southeast Europe, and one that had a unique relationship to both German and Russian social democracy. Based on a rich prosopographical database of around 3500 biographies of people born in the 19th century, the book addresses the interplay of several generations of leftists, looking at the specifics of how ideas were generated, received, transferred and transformed. Finally, the work investigates the intersection between subjectivity and memory as reflected in a unique cache of archival materials containing over 4000 documentary sources including diaries, oral interviews, and unpublished memoirs. A microhistorical approach to this material allows the reconstruction of ‘structures of feeling’ that inspired an exceptional group of individuals.

Maria Todorova is Gutgsell Professor of History Emerita at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is the author of Imagining the Balkans (revised edition, 2009), which has been translated into 15 languages; Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero (2009); Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (revised edition, 2006); and Scaling the Balkans: Essays on Eastern European Entanglements (2018). She led large scale international research projects resulting in several edited and co-edited volumes, including: Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (2002); Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation (2010); Postcommunist Nostalgia (2010);and Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experiences in Southeastern Europe (2014). She has held awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and The Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and is the recipient of honorary degrees from the European University Institute in Italy, the University of Sofia, Bulgaria and Panteion University in Greece. In 2022, she received the Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Award and was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Preface
Part I – Centers and Peripheries
1. Accommodating Bulgarian Social Democracy within the Socialist International
2. Provincial Cosmopolitans and Metropolitan Nationalists
Part II - Generations
3. The Prosopography of the Bulgarian Left
4. Tales of Formation
5. Socialist Women or Socialist Wives
Part III – Structures of Feeling
6. Dignity and Will: The Odyssey of Angelina Boneva
7. Love and Internationalism: The Diary of Todor Tsekov
8. Romanticism and Modernity: Koika Tineva and Nikola Sakarov
Coda
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	04.09.2020
Zusatzinfo	50 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	708 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
ISBN-10	1-350-15033-9 / 1350150339
ISBN-13	978-1-350-15033-1 / 9781350150331
Zustand	Neuware