COURAGE

connecting collections

Sruoga was a famous Lithuanian writer, poet, literary theorist and playwright. In 1914, he began studying literature at St Petersburg University in Russia, and later he continued his studies at Moscow University. In 1918, Sruoga returned to Lithuania. In 1921, he enrolled in the University of Munich, where he received his PhD in 1924 for his doctoral thesis on Lithuanian folklore. After returning to Lithuania, Sruoga taught at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. He also wrote various articles on literature. From 1930, he began writing dramas. In 1939, he began teaching at Vilnius University.

Sruoga's best-known work is the novel The Forest of the Gods (Dievų miškas), based on his own experiences as a prisoner in Stutthof concentration camp. In 1943, he and forty-seven other Lithuanian intellectuals were arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. Sruoga was freed by the Red Army, and returned to Soviet Lithuania in 1945. He wrote the novel The Forest of the Gods the same year. The manuscript of the novel was severely criticised by Party officials, and was first published in Soviet Lithuania in 1957.

Henri H. Stahl (b. 1901, Bucharest – d. 9 September 1991, Bucharest) was one of the most respected sociologists in Romania, a member of the so-called Bucharest School of Sociology, which, in the interwar period, developed under the guidance of Dimitrie Gusti the method of monographic study of villages with the help of a multidisciplinary team. At the same time cultural anthropologist, social historian, and rural sociologist, Henri H. Stahl became a key name in each of these fields. He was the son of the writer and historian Henri Stahl, who is known for his creation of an original system of shorthand and for founding the Romanian schools of graphology and palaeontology. The same family of Alsatian-Swiss origin, an unusual background even for pre-war Bucharest, produced another two very well-known intellectuals of the interwar period: the novelist Henriette Yvonne Stahl and the theoretician of social democracy Şerban Voinea, sister and half-brother respectively of Henri H. Stahl. Having graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1921, Stahl began his collaboration with the founder of Romanian sociology, Dimitrie Gusti, in 1930. As part of the famous monographic teams that roamed the villages of Romania, he made his mark as one of Gusti’s closest and most creative collaborators, working as his assistant in the Department of Sociology, Ethics, and Politics of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Bucharest. As a sociologist, he published numerous studies, especially about rural sociology, but also regarding methods of sociological investigation. In 1943, he moved to the newly founded Department of Rural Sociology, before going on to become head of the Department of General Sociology.

In 1948, with the full installation of the communist regime in Romania, the study of sociology was forbidden because the discipline was considered a “bourgeois subject.” Consequently, Henri H. Stahl was forced out of teaching, despite the fact that he was among the few genuine leftist intellectuals in Romania. As he himself put it, his convictions were purely theoretical and not political; in any case, their origins lay in Marxist tendencies, but not in Bolshevism: “I was convinced that historical materialism was an admirable tool of scientific research, but that was all. I wasn’t even particularly enthusiastic as a socialist. Kautskyist, Kautskyist, but I had read Bernstein too, not to mention many others as well. I was very impressed by Proudhon, by the French communist socialists; I wasn’t at all convinced that Marx was right when he said that we would inevitably arrive at a socialist society. And in any case, I wasn’t at all convinced that a socialist society would look like what the Bolsheviks wanted. I couldn’t go along with that business. […] I was up-to-date with all these debates. And I was convinced that the social democrats were right. Kautsky was for me a great teacher. […] Indeed that was one of the faults that was held against me when I was judged and put out of the Communist Party. As a social democrat, I was passed to the communists, and there I was judged and thrown out” (Rostás 2000, 14).

After being purged from the University, he had to work at the Institute of Urbanism in a marginal professional capacity, as a technical draftsman, until 1956, when he was forced to take early retirement. It was only ten years later, in 1966, after the reintroduction of sociology as a section of the Faculty of Philosophy, that he was called back to teaching. Starting from this period, he contributed to the revival of Romanian sociology, within frameworks well coordinated and controlled by the Romanian Communist Party, together with Miron Constantinescu, himself an important figure both in the political circles of the first three decades of Romanian communism and in academic circles. At the same time he had the opportunity to publish extensively on themes regarding rural sociology and research methods and techniques. Particularly deserving of mention is the volume Amintiri şi gânduri din vechea şcoală a monografiilor sociologice (Memories and thoughts from the old school of sociological monographs) (1981). This was initially rejected for publication in the format of a history of Dimitrie Gusti’s sociological school including a contribution by Traian Herseni, Stahl’s former colleague in the teams carrying out monographic studies of villages, an intellectual of the extreme right between the wars and a former political prisoner under communism. After Herseni’s death, however, Stahl managed to publish his contribution to this history in the form of a memoir under the title mentioned above. In view of this example of differentiated treatment of authors, it may be said that in the Ceaușescu period Henri H. Stahl’s pre-communist leftist convictions contributed to his rehabilitation by the regime. In 1969, he was elected a member of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences, and, from 1974 he was a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. It was only after the fall of communism that he became a full member of that institution, in 1990. He was also a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Włodzimierz Staniewski was a student of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University and later at the University of Wroclaw. As a student he joined Krakow's Theatre STU. He worked with Grotowski's Laboratorium theatre in 1971-1975. Before founding his own theatre centre, he had travelled extensively throughout eastern Poland in the 1970s. His ethnographic research trips were aimed at finding a new, natural environment for creativity, and at creating theatre in which the line between pop and elit culture would be mingled. In the 1980s he organised a number of international symposia attended by representatives of the humanities and theatres around the world. He also gave lectures, i.e. at the U.S. universities, in Dallas, New Hampshire, New York, as well as Mexico City and the Theatre Academy in Paris.

András Stark (1948-) is a doctor, psychiatrist, and professor. Together with Ferenc Erős, he led the interview project on the experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors.

Stark completed his PhD at the medical university. He graduated in 1972. He is an expert on psychoanalysis. In 1979, Stark and Erős decided that they would do interviews with second-generation Holocaust survivors. The idea was prompted primarily by their family histories. Their Jewish origins played a major role in their scientific interests. As a psychiatrist, Stark dealt with the Holocaust and traumas which ensued from the suppression of the memories of these traumas within families.

Judith Kestenberg’s study on the children of people who had suffered persecution was an inspiration for them. They planned similar research. Initially, they held lectures in a professional circle about their conclusions. The first public presentation was organized as part of an event held by the Hungarian Psychiatric Society in 1983. (The title of the presentation was “A társadalmi diszkrimináció hosszantartó hatása a személyiségfejlődésre: A holocaust utáni nemzedékek identitásproblémái” or “The Effect of Social Discrimination on Personality Development: Identity Problems of the Generations after the Holocaust.”) Some of their colleagues were disgusted by this topic, and they contended that it was not “relevant” and would foster the Antisemitism.

Iryna Stasiv-Kalynets (b. 1940-d. 2012 in Lviv)  was a poet, philologist, member of the „sixtiers” and human rights movements in Ukraine. She was arrested in 1972 along with much of her social circle for „anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation.” Stasiv-Kalynets studied Slavic languages and literatures at university in Lviv in 1959-1964, after which she worked as a teacher and librarian in local schools. In 1969, she began teaching Ukrainian language and literature at Lviv Polytechnic Institute and also published a number of children’s books at this time. As a result of Khrushchev’s thaw, she took great interest in developments in neighboring Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which radicalized her. In 1970, she and nine others signed a letter of protest in response to the arrest of historian Valentyn Moroz, after which she was fired from her job. The following year she and her husband declared their public support for the microbiologist Nina Strokata, a human rights activist arrested in 1971.

After her own arrest in 1972, along with many of her other dissident compatriots, nearly 100 of her students were interrogated by the KGB, of which only a handful submitted denunciations against her. She was sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment in a forced labor camp and three years of exile in the far reaches of Siberia, in the village of Undino-Poselye, Zabaykalsky Krai, Russia (with her husband Ihor Kalynets, who was arrested and sentenced to a similarly long imprisonment). Her sentence was not commuted despite exhortations on her behalf that this verdict was far too harsh a response for writing non-conformist poetry. 

After her release in 1981, she returned to Lviv, where she returned to active life but struggled to find employment. She was finally able to find work after the intervention of the KGB itself, as a cashier and secretary in the regional teachers’ center. In 1987, Stasiv-Kalynets played an active role in reviving cultural and civic life in Lviv. In November, she and her husband Ihor were among the founders of a Ukrainian association for an independent creative intelligentsia. She gave public lectures about Vasyl Stus, worked with independent cultural journals, helped found the Ukrainian branch of “Memorial” as well as the Popular Movement of Ukraine (Rukh), which was part of the republic’s democratic opposition.

Stasiv-Kalynets was also involved in the revival of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (UGCC). In 1988-1989, she participated in many rallies and meetings, many of which had not been sanctioned by the authorities. She was detained on several occasions as a result. Her participation in a rally on January 22, 1989, which marked the 80^th anniversary of the 1919 declaration of an independent Western Ukrainian National Republic, resulted in 10 days of custodial arrest. She was also detained in February 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Lviv.

In 1990, Stasiv-Kalynets was elected a deputy to Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada. In May 1990, she became head of the Lviv Regional Department of Education, playing an active role in school reform.  In 1992-1994, Stasiv-Kalynets served as chairperson of a parliamentary subcommittee on education. Prior to her death in 2012, she also played an active role in making the Prison on Lonskogo St. a museum-memorial for all the inmates incarcerated there.