REGISTER: Bette’s Speakeasy Zoom Salon with Dr. Marci Shore on The Ukrainian Night
Bette members: please register for our Sunday Speakeasy zoom salon with Yale intellectual historian Dr. Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night and Caviar and Ashes
***Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join our community Speakeasy and Happy Hour events, please take out a membership and support independent investigative journalism in a time of grave deception.***
Bette’s Calendar at a glance — our next event is Sunday, 12/15:
Sunday, Dec. 15, 4 pm PT — We will be joined at our Sunday Speakeasy by Yale professor Dr. Marci Shore on her book The Ukrainian Night.
Tuesday, Dec. 17, noon PT — Bette’s Holiday Happy Hour with special guests. We must still have a happy life.
Sunday, Jan. 5, 4 pm PT — Author Dr. Nancy MacLean joins Bette’s Speakeasy to discuss US Resistance efforts and her updated version of Democracy In Chains.
Each event is open to all levels of membership. To join our monthly Founder’s Day events, please upgrade your subscription to Founding Member — you can choose any amount above a full annual membership.
“I cling to the story of the Maidan, which was so important to me at the time, and if anything is only more important now, because it was what in German they call that augenblick — that blink of an eye, that flicker of a second in which you see that human beings are capable of something better.”—Dr. Marci Shore
“You weren’t afraid of the titushki?” I asked them. “Why be afraid of them?” Ruslan answered. “We’re tough, too.”—The Ukrainian Night
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Now on to our main event…
Sunday Speakeasy, 12/15, 4 pm Pacific with Dr. Marci Shore
I have been telling anyone who will listen that my work in this time will be divided up between before I read The Ukrainian Night and after I read this vital work.
Details here:
Marci Shore — author of The Ukrainian Night — is an intellectual history professor at Yale University. She has spent much of her adult life in Central and Eastern Europe. Shore teaches modern European intellectual history. She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and her Ph.D from Stanford University in 2001; she taught at Indiana University before coming to Yale. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution (paperback edition, 2024). In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current book project, a history of phenomenology in East-Central Europe, tentatively titled “Eyeglasses Floating in Space: Central European Encounters That Came about While Searching for Truth.” She is a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Presently she is co-curating a Public Seminar/Eurozine forum “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life” (title stolen from Nietzsche): https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-last-time-i-saw-them-new-democracy-seminar-forum/
Her articles and essays include “Philosophy in the Time of Revolution” (The Interlocutor: Journal of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas); “Can We See Ideas? On Evocation, Experience, and Empathy” (Modern European Intellectual History); “Entscheidung am Majdan: Eine Phänomenologie der Ukrainischen Revolution” (Lettre International); “Jews and Cosmopolitanism: An Arc of European Thought” (Historická Sociologie), “(The End of) Communism as a Generational History” (Contemporary European History); “‘If we’re proud of Freud…: The Family Romance of Judeo-Communism” (East European Politics and Societies); “Rescuing the Yiddish Ukraine (New York Review of Books) “Die Zerbrechlichkeit des Liberalismus oder Das Ende vom ‘Ende der Geschichte’” (Transit: Europäische Revue); “Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, Żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism” (Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History); “Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism, and the Berman Brothers” (Jewish Social Studies); “Czysto Babski: A Women’s Friendship in a Man’s Revolution” (East European Politics and Societies); “Engineering in the Age of Innocence: A Genealogy of Discourse Inside the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, 1949-1967” (East European Politics and Societies); “In Search of Meaning after Marxism: The Komandosi, March 1968, and the Ideas that Followed” (Warsaw: The History of a Jewish Metropolis); “Dissidents, Intellectuals, and a New Generation” (The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History); (Modernism in) “Eastern Europe” (The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism); “On Cosmopolitanism and the Avant-Garde, and a Lost Innocence of Mitteleuropa” (Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility); and “Wspomnienie o Krzysztofie Michalskim (1948-2013)” (Zeszyty Literackie).
The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution is a “vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential.”
From Yale’s website:
“What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. The Maidan was an illumination of the human capacity for natality, the ability to act, to begin anew at this moment. It was the turning point without which Ukrainian resistance to the full-scale Russian invasion cannot be understood. In this lyrical and piercing book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian revolution. Grounded in interviews with activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.”
“Shore brilliantly captures the contingency, uncertainty, and chaos that was transmuted into the remarkable, seemingly transcendent solidarity of the Maidan’s unified resistance to a corrupt and cruel régime.”—Charles Taylor, professor emeritus of philosophy, McGill University
If you are not yet a member of Bette, you can watch RadPod’s interview with Marci here.
Thank you to everyone who supports our authors by buying their books. And thank you to everyone who supports my writing.
In the words of Nobel Peace Laureate journalist Maria Ressa:
“First, they came for the journalists, we don’t know what happened next.”
Writers matter. History matters.
In solidarity, reality, truth, and unity,
Heidi xo
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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REGISTER HERE FOR OUR EVENT WITH DR. MARCI SHORE (AND YOU CAN ALSO PREREGISTER FOR OUR JANUARY EVENT WITH DR. NANCY MACLEAN):
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