Slavica Tergestina 19 (2017/II)

The article deals with the representation of Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt by Russian travel writers between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The text will focus on the hiatus between their a priori idea of North Africa as a cradle of an ancient and timeless civilization (an idea which reveals the contact with the orientalist European tradition) and their disappointment once they understand how modernized and “europeanized” this geographical area is. In these travelogues two different “Others” can be identified: while the first one is clearly North Africa, the second one, more subtle, is Europe, which emerges as something completely alien to the Russian mind. Modern North Africa and Europe are here described as symmetrical doubles, while Russia stands apart.

Viktor Fischl (Avigdor Dagan, 1912–2006) was an important writer, a journalist and a diplomat of Czech Jewish origin. During the inter-war period, he wrote about the topic of Judaism, during the WWII he helped to defend Czechoslovak interests in the service of Czechoslovak government-in-exile. In his second home Israel, holocaust and parallels between the Nazis and the Communist totality in Soviet satellites became his topic. He was active in public affairs as a writer and as a diplomat (he was Israeli chargé d´affaires in Japan, in Burma and ambassador in Poland, Yugoslavia, Norway and Austria). This study searches for the sources of Fischl´s life philosophy and describes the formation of his cultural and national identity while using his texts and analyzing the Czech cultural discourse.

В статье рассматривается категория ответственности (в философском плане) в ее различном восприятии М.М. Бахтиным, Р. Ингарденом, П.П. Пазолини.