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DUBLIN REVIEW OF BOOKS (NOVEMBER)
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Finishing Lolita wasn't easy. But things came to a head when in the winter of 1953, as Tim Groenland explains in an essay in "Dublin Review of Books", "Nabokov spent sixteen-hour days poring over the typescript (while the indefatigable Véra marked his exam papers) and before long the novel was finally complete". Having the work published was no easier:

"Most agreed with Viking Press' Simon Covici that anyone who took it on would risk a jail sentence. When a publisher was eventually found, the promotional strategy for the novel revolved around the possibility of court action (not to mention Nabokov's anxieties about a possible threat to his continued employment at Cornell)."

Lolita sparked debates about artistic freedom in France and a police raid on the premises of a Sydney newspaper in search of the copy from which it had published extracts. Comedians, Groenland recalls, were also among those to make the book a household name. As Groucho Marx once remarked: "I've put off reading Lolita for six years, till she's 18."

Today, the story of Lolita is likely no less controversial than when the book was first published: "Our heightened twenty-first-century awareness of the pervasive and destructive nature of child abuse also makes its representation, if anything, more of a taboo."

In "our hyper-vigilant times", argues Groenland, in which Will Self "wrote angrily in August of this year about his experience of being stopped by police while walking in Yorkshire with his son […], this might, strangely, be more dangerous territory for artists today than in the comparatively innocent 1950s."

More about Dublin Review of Books
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KRYTYKA 7-8/2013
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In "Krytyka" (Ukraine), Yuri Matsievskyj focuses on the signing of the Association Agreement at the Eastern Partnership summit at the end of November in Vilnius. Matsievskyj forecasts the political situation in Ukraine after the summit: "If the Agreement is signed, the Ukrainian elites will have an external incentive to escape the trap of a 'hybrid' regime and move towards democracy. If the Agreement is not signed, Yanukovych will find himself in a very difficult situation. To stay in power after [the next presidential elections in] 2015, he may have to go down the path of Putin or Lukashenka." However, Matsievskyj argues, the country's "structural limitations" will render Yanukovych's attempts at further sliding into authoritarianism unsuccessful.

Yulia Tymoshenko's two bodies: As the release of Yulia Tymoshenko from jail seems unlikely and hopes of signing the Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine fade, it is worth noting how Tymoshenko's clever use of her miserable condition contributed greatly to the EU's adamancy on the issue. As Tatiana Zhurzhenko writes in "Yulia Tymoshenko's two bodies", "as a popular Ukrainian politician with a strong pro-European and pro-democratic image, [Tymoshenko] has repeatedly called on the West for moral and political support in her desperate fight with Yanukovych. Identifying her imprisoned and tortured body with the Ukrainian nation captured and humiliated by the 'criminal regime', she has appealed to 'Europe' as a moral arbiter and legal authority while painting Yanukovych and his politics as non- and even anti-European."

The silent majority: Mykola Borovyk questions the established periodization of the Ukrainian "short twentieth century". He suggests an alternative periodization based not only on the lives of powerful elites, but primarily on those of ordinary people. "If historians finally agreed to grant a voice to the 'silent' majority, then maybe we should allow them to break down time their own way?", writes Borovyk.

The full table of contents of Krytyka 7-8/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-06-25-zhurzhenko-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/zhurzhenko.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/krytyka/issue/2013-10-30.html>

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OSTEUROPA 9/2013
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Russia doesn't side with the West. When it comes to conflicts in the Middle East, this may be due to economic interests, a desire for geopolitical equilibrium or simply to oppose the West in order to divert attention away from other issues. But none of the above seems to explain Russia's take on Syria. In past conflicts Russia always had allies either in China or in the Arab world or both. In "Osteuropa" (Germany) Roy Allison asks: "Why does Russia dig its heels in so insistently regarding the Syrian crisis, in a way that opposes not only the West but also most Arab and Muslim states?"

For Allison, two aspects in particular stand out: "On the one hand there is the fear that, should the rebels succeed in Syria, Islamicist networks could then take the uprising over to the North Caucasus; on the other, there is the perception that Syria is another example where the western powers question the political legitimacy of an authoritarian state and its leadership."

Roundtable: "There is a great fear of the Islamicization of the Middle East, which would also destabilize the Islamic regions of Russia. Moscow has invested heavily in preserving the status quo for as long as possible", says Fyodor Lukyanov in conversation with Efraim Karsh, Mark Katz, Margarete Klein, Marie Mendras and Georgy Mirsky. Like Roy Allison's text, the roundtable too focuses on Russia's motives concerning Syria. Despite all the difference of opinion, it seems clear that Russia considers itself vulnerable to any changes in the Syrian system.

The full table of contents of Osteuropa 9/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/lukyanov.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/osteuropa/issue/2013-11-20.html>

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COGITO 74 (2013)
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In "Cogito" (Turkey), Haldun Gulalp demolishes many of the arguments supporting the presidential system that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proposed to replace Turkey's parliamentary democracy. Turkey's real problems are to be found in a lack of judicial scrutiny and over-powerful political parties that bind lawmakers "not to their constituencies but to the party administration", Gulalp argues. In addition, the lack of a culture of compromise means a presidential system could render the state impossible to manage. Placing power in the hands of one person "no matter who it is, will bring disaster", Gulalp says.

The linkage between the proposed constitution and the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers' Party presents another danger, he warns. An oppressive new constitution could spark more violence, not less, and authorities should look to Jürgen Habermas' constitutional patriotism if they really want to build a sense of "common participation in a social project".

Far from democratic: Demirhan Burak Celik examines the details of the suggested constitutional changes and finds them "far from democratic" not just because of their content, but also because of the references to the Ottoman Empire made by their advocates.

Embracing the other: When Fenerbahce defender Gokhan Gonul hugged the coach of rival Istanbul football team Galatasaray after a derby match last year, he became the target of a Twitter hate campaign for betraying not only his team, but his gender too. Cigdem Yazici takes this as a point of departure for exploring the possibilities of a new philosophy of gender. The fuss over the player underlined again the pervasive power of clichés concerning masculinity, argues Yazici; for "there cannot be said to be any single and hegemonic type of masculinity". She draws attention instead to a "hidden creative and critical" power in minority modes of existence.

The full table of contents of Cogito 74 (2013)
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/cogito/issue/2013-11-18.html>

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DIALOGI 5-6/2013
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In contrast to the explosion of culture that the title European Capital of Culture promised to effect in the Slovenian city of Maribor in 2012, the project's legacy is tied to its steady implosion. In the wake of the hype and the corruption and in the absence of any new infrastructure, the city has learned its lesson, writes Boris Vezjak in Dialogi (Slovenia):

"The next time merchants of culture pass through our town with dynamite strapped to their bodies, let's be careful. Culture and dynamite do not go together. And we mustn't lose even a minute before stopping them. Because we will be feeling the negative effects for a long time to come."

The full table of contents of Dialogi 5-6/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-11-20-vezjak-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/vezjak.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/dialogi/issue/2013-10-29.html>

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ESPRIT 11/2013
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The centenaries of the birth of two monumental twentieth-century thinkers both fall in November: Albert Camus, chronicler of everyman in relation to the here and now, and Paul Ricœur, the hermeneutic philosopher who explored man in relation to cultural history. "Esprit" (France) is therefore launching a collection of articles on Camus previously published between 1950 and 2012. And this month's issue of the journal features a hitherto unpublished essay by Ricœur on post-Kantian views of ancient Greece.

Ricœur draws upon the Nietzschean distinction between monumental, antiquarian and critical approaches. Classical Greece, he writes, may be perceived either as timelessly renewed and reinvented, or turned to in search of origins and links with our own thinking – or conceived of critically, in the context of our view of the future.

Originality: François Hartog argues that, during the Enlightenment, when classical antiquity, and Greece in particular, ceased to be viewed as a guide and thinkers looked instead to the future, Germany proved an exception to the trend. For thinkers like Johann Joachim Winckelmann, classical Greece not only offered a demonstrable cultural source but a model and, moreover, one that, unlike French culture, had not been mediated by the Romans:

"Thus, since Greece was, for Winckelmann, the place where 'good taste' had begun to evolve, imitation of the Greeks was obviously 'the only way to become great and, if possible, inimitable'. For the Germans, this represented the possibility of taking a separate path. Imitation became a struggle for an identity, an opting for originality."

Also: Zaki Laidi likens the redistribution of commercial power between the US and Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other to a tectonic shift that will radically change the rules of multilateral negotiations on issues such as trade and climate.

The full table of contents of Esprit 11/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/esprit/issue/2013-11-19.html>

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SCHWEIZER MONAT 11/2013
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Bill Clinton received some attention for his recent quote that whistleblower Edward Snowden made him "think that we are on the verge of having the worst of all worlds: we'll have no security and no privacy". Compared to this analysis, Hanspeter Thür in Schweizer Monat comes across as mildly optimistic. Thür focuses less on the NSA and associated scandals and more on the impact that big data and data evaluation have in general, whether the data are gathered in the legal grey zones in which various intelligence agencies feel at home or on a voluntary basis via social media.

Under "the tyranny of the algorhythm", the human "is exhaustively mapped and his or her behaviour predicted", writes Thür. He argues that, for a long time, people felt secure in the knowledge of the huge amounts of data collected. They assumed nobody would find a needle in the haystack. Today we know that no amount of data is too big to be processed and that large sets of data actually facilitate better profiling and more accurate predictions of behaviour. However, Thür sees a possibility to master the situation and bring the use of data under control, but that would require a broad public debate and a strong citizens' movement.

The full table of contents of Schweizer Monat 11/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/schweizermonat/issue/2013-11-20.html>

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MITTELWEG 36 5/2013
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The notion of violence has so far been strangely neglected in social research, writes Jan Philipp Reemtsma in Mittelweg 36 (Germany). He proposes a framework for the analysis of the use of violence "as a brutal mode of shaping social relations".

In modern societies, Reemtsma notes, perpetrating acts of violence is delegated to the state monopoly on violence. And yet, even if on the surface "everything remains the same", a violent coup d'état always fundamentally transforms society:

"It is not that violence is visible everywhere […] or looming over everything. What is important is that inflicting violence comes across as arbitrary, that is: at any time, in any place, violence may well be inflicted. It is not that everyone must live in the permanent consciousness of this being so – unless you find yourself in a place of intense violence such as Guantánamo. It is important to note that the momentum of the personalization of violence shapes behaviour, even where in specific cases, no personal calculations can be discerned. Reorientations take place. The social roles upon which modern societies are based and which determine behaviour within them are no longer sufficient in order to act socially."

The West and the new wars: Sönke Neitzel shows that since the end of the cold war, the armies of western European states such as Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany have still not found new identities. Taking Germany as an example, Neitzel shows how the demands identified by scientists – the soldier "at work on the streets or as a social worker or as an arbitrator, as a neutral negotiator between fronts" – and the military reality fundamentally differ.

With political scientist Harald Müller, Neitzel asks "whether society and its political leadership are overtaxing the mental, psychological and social capabilities of the men and women they are sending into extremely difficult jobs. […] Today's ideal of the democratic soldier is a bewildering collection of military and civilian professional skills, personal capabilities and social and individual moral virtues, hardly ever found in combination in real human beings."

The full table of contents of Mittelweg 36 5/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/reemtsma.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/neitzel.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-11-20-neitzel-de.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/mittelweg36/issue/2013-10-30.html>

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VIKERKAAR 10-11/2013
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In a double issue of Vikerkaar (Estonia), Gennaro Carotenuto provides a bird's eye view of recent developments in Latin America. The "pink wave", the anthropological turn, regional integration, the rejection of the Washington consensus, the decrease in inequality and the increase in street crime and drug trafficking all feature.

And, though the progressive political wave has receded, some movements seem destined to continue. Increasing economic independence and regional economic integration provide for a sense of closure concerning the dependency that characterized Latin American history for the last five centuries. Carotenuto concludes: "Latin America is in surprisingly good health, politically stable and capable of taking over from Asia as the engine of global development".

Uprooted: Toomas Gross comments on the rise of pentecostalism and other protestant denominations in Latin America. It is these that have adapted best, argues Gross, to meeting the needs of a recently urbanized population.

Also: Oudekki Loone on the rise and rule of Hugo Chávez; and Mele Pesti on the perspectivist approach of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

The full table of contents of Vikerkaar 5/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/vikerkaar/issue/2013-11-20.html>

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DZIEJASLOU 65 (2013)
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In Dziejaslou (Belarus), literary scholar and avant-garde poet Viktar Zybul responds to the cultural pessimism of historian Eduard Dubianiecki. Zybul makes short shrift of Dubianiecki's charges against contemporary artists' proclivity for the sexual, the hideous and the vulgar. Zybul insists on recognizing how futurist and avant-garde modes of expression have enriched literature, Belarusian literature being no exception. He concludes by drawing attention to the "paranoia that, six or seven years ago, was rife among state publishers. One simply could not mention the name of certain authors who had in some way shown themselves to be disloyal to the regime. In Belarus today it is still virtually impossible to defend a dissertation about an emigré author where the title includes the words 'avant-garde'."

Literature: Shortly after the German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded its Peace Prize to Svetlana Alexievich at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Dziejaslou features a generous excerpt from Alexievich's work Second Hand Time: The End of the Red Man. Further literary contributions include Andrei Khadanovic's Belarusian translations of Wislawa Szymborska.

The full table of contents of Dziejaslou 65 (2013)
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/dziejaslou/issue/2013-11-18.html>