Swedish Proletarians towards Freedom: Ideals of Participation as Propaganda in the Communist Children’s Press of the 1920s
Alfred Andersson witnessed as a young boy the social and economic downside of Swedish class society during the mid-1920s. He was one of capitalism’s victims, doomed to a life of hard labour under unequal conditions. But Alfred refused to remain a victim: he fought back by organizing himself. This is, of course, if you believe his testimony in a two-piece letter published in the Swedish communist children’s periodical The Young Comrade (Den unge kamraten) in the beginning of 1924. In the letter he describes why he became a communist and how he successfully organized a local revolutionary children’s club.1 His is a model letter in the radical paper that targeted children between the ages of nine and 14. Young Alfred’s story touches upon several themes promoted by the editors. For instance, he doesn’t stay silent or accept things as they are. Rather he depicts himself in the position of an opponent to the current societal regime. In that position he opposes, for example, the inherited poverty that is most likely to make his a hard life as it had done his father’s. Furthermore, he opposes bourgeois children’s organizations such as the Scout movement or the Christian Sunday school. He turns to communism, therefore, as a way of liberating himself from oppression. From the editors’ point of view, his letter served as an inspirational didactic example depicting the need for class struggle.
Worker Correspondents: Between Journalism and Literature
AAAiile journalism is often seen as the antithesis of literature, the two enjoyed a close and productive relationship in the Soviet Union in the decade following the Revolution.1 The influence of the Bolshevik press was key to Red victory in the Civil War, and much of Bolshevik journalism's power stemmed from its application of literary methods to factual genres and harnessing of literary talents such as Vladimir Mayakovsky.2 Early Soviet journalism's innovative emphasis upon the presentation of factual material for political persuasion rather than information was the inspiration for remarkable 1920s cultural forms such as Dziga Vertov's revolutionary newsreel and the ubiquitous newspaper feuilleton.3 Yet this groundbreaking approach to propaganda was not the most unusual feature of 1920s Soviet newspapers. This honor belongs to journalists' active solicitation of readers' letters leading to "a volume of mail probably unprecedented in world history."4 By 1922 such letter-writing had been christened the movement of "worker correspondents" (rabochii korrespondent, or rabkor). For writers Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Zoshchenko the torrent of correspondence furnished source material for stories of disputes in restaurants,
Looking for regional words in late seventeenth-century England: Bishop White Kennett and his glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695) 1
The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent dearth of direct textual evidence which might provide trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical setting of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might contribute to bridging the gaps still existing in the history of lexical provincialisms at the time.