"Yugoslavia as a subject had a tendency to swallow its students whole. When Rebecca West set about explaining the country after a brief visit in 1937, she found herself drawn into research on the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, on early Christianity, the Catholic-Orthodox schism, the origins and rise of nationalism, on Fascism and Nazism, on the nature of heroism and the nature of Evil (emphatically with a capital E). She came to believe that in Yugoslavia’s urgent moral questions could be glimpsed — and perhaps grasped! — keys to understanding all mankind, all human history and God, and after four years of writing, she loosed on the world what must surely be the longest travel narrative in the history of literature, the 1,100 densely packed pages of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And even within that cavernous space, she succeeded only in representing the Serb viewpoint."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from EnglandEssayists from EnglandLiterary criticsWomen academics from EnglandCritics from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
, The Impossible Country : A Journey through the last days of Yugoslavia, London, Mandarian Paperbacks, 1996.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rebecca_West
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Rebecca West
1892 – 1983
irische Schriftstellerin
38 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Rebecca West →
Related Quotes
"Older children always sit down to paint or write after they have seen a picture or read a story that appeals to them,…"
"Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased c…"
"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I exp…"
"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."
"Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe."
"There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know a…"
"It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by…"
"For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Uni…"
"There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the anci…"
"It would seem … that man has been shocked by the war into forgetting how to be a political animal. This suspicion is …"