Soviet Empire and Operatic Realm : Stalinist Search for the Model Soviet Opera
This paper analyzes the phenomenon of classical opera used (and abused) by the Soviet officials as an instrument to re-build imperial common consciousness on a new, Soviet ground, and, thus, create ...
The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky
List of plates Acknowledgements Introduction List of abbreviations 1. Lunacharsky 2. The establishment of Narkompros 3. School education 4. Technical and higher education 5. Proletkult 6. The arts 7. Towards reorganization of Narkompros 8. Reorganization 9. Narkompros after reorganization 10. Narkompros and the New Economic Policy Appendices Notes Bibliography Index.
The Scholar's Pleasant Life: The History of Irish Education
"Aoibheann beatha an sc61aire" is a well-known but anonymous poem of uncertain date that praises the scholar's life as the finest in Ire land. T h e scholar is subject neither to prince nor prelate, is free from servile labour by night or day, and when the spring comes he grasps not a ploughshaft but a goosequill. A n d if he pleases he can take a turn at checkers or harpplaying, or indeed at love-making, courting some fair-haired woman. (1) A n y resemblance between this idealised portrait and reality vanished with the overthrow of Gael ic society in the seventeenth century and the enactment of penal laws that bore particularly hard on Catholics, making it illegal for them to conduct schools or to educate their children abroad. T h e Gael ic scholar-poet disappeared, to be replaced during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the poor scholar who, acquiring his knowledge in hedge schools, was supported by the peasantry as an act of piety and of homage to learning. It was not uncommon for the intending cleric or schoolmaster to make his way to South Ulster where the hedge schools enjoyed a reputation for classical learning, or to Munster for math­ ematics. I n due course the scholar himself set up a school i n an area where parents were wi l l ing to support him, usually by providing h i m with some k i n d of lodging, gifts in k ind , and a weekly payment of a few pence per child. T h e term "hedge school" is to be taken literally, since when weather permitted classes were frequently held i n the shelter of a hedge or ditch. W i t h the gradual weakening of the penal laws later i n the eighteenth cen­ tury it was possible for more permanent accommodation to be provided, though the general poverty ensured that a sod hut or a draughty shed was still the schoolroom in many areas. T h e gradual replacement of Gael ic by