The Blue Rose

A Play in Five Acts

Lesia Ukrainka

translated by Nina Murray with an introduction by Tamara Hundorova

Where is the line that separates the “normal” from the “abnormal”? Liubov, a young Ukrainian woman of small nobility, struggles with this question in Lesia Ukrainka’s The Blue Rose. Living in Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century, she finds herself outside the norms for a woman: she reads “thick books,” follows music and art, and is interested in science and psychology. She hosts a salon and challenges men in discussions about politics and culture. Liubov is also an orphan whose mother died in an asylum, and she worries about inheriting her mother’s disease as well as passing it on to future children. When Liubov falls in love with Orest, she proposes a radical solution to her dilemma: to pursue something as rare as a blue flower—“pure love” that foregoes the physical and abandons the requirement of marriage and motherhood.

In her commanding debut as a playwright, Ukrainka created a deep psychological rendering of an unattainable ideal. The Blue Rose highlights themes such as women’s struggles for liberation, social progress and its reliance on science, and resistance to change in traditional societies. Written in sophisticated Ukrainian, Ukrainka’s nuanced play helped Ukrainian culture break free of the Russian imperial mold that sought to first provincialize and then erase it. Presented here in contemporary English translation, The Blue Rose illuminates Ukraine’s intellectual history and its connections with Western culture.

Lesia Ukrainka (pen name of Larysa Kosach-Kvitka; 1879–1913) was one of the most prominent Ukrainian writers, poets, playwrights, literary scholars, and activists of the late nineteenth–early twentieth century.

Nina Murray is a poet and an award-winning translator of Ukrainian literature, including works by Oksana Zabuzhko, Oksana Lutsyshyna, Serhiy Zhadan, and Lesia Ukrainka.

February · drama · 200 pages · 5 x 8

Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute cloth · 9780674294363 · $29.95 • £26.95 paper · 9780674294370 · $19.95 • £17.95

The Rustic Style

Ernst Kris

translated by Linda B. Parshall with an introduction by Robert Felfe • Anatole Tchikine

Originating as a doctoral dissertation and first published in 1926, Ernst Kris’s The Rustic Style is a pioneering inquiry into the relationship between art and nature in early modern decorative arts and garden design. This precocious study—by a young Viennese museum curator who would subsequently make his name as a leading psychoanalyst—was an attempt to define the character of late-sixteenth-century naturalism. It put scientific observation at the service of elite artistic production, and the result was an ambivalent blend of lifelike plasticity, organic texturing, and material richness in which the use of advanced technologies, such as life casting, deliberately blurred the boundary between products of natural processes and human craft. This hybrid aesthetic, which Kris described as the “rustic style,” was championed by the two main protagonists of his essay, the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer and the ceramist Bernard Palissy. It found a broader characteristic expression in the design of Renaissance grottos, where classical iconography and all’antica ornamentation often came to encode the environmental knowledge of the age.

This Ex Horto edition of The Rustic Style, accompanied by introductory essays by Robert Felfe and Anatole Tchikine, is made available in English for the first time in a masterly translation by Linda B. Parshall. A long overdue tribute to Kris’s pathbreaking scholarship, this lavishly illustrated book should appeal to anyone interested in the intersections of early modern art and natural history.

Linda B. Parshall is Professor Emerita of German Literature at Portland State University.

Robert Felfe is Lecturer and Professor of Art History at Graz University.

Anatole Tchikine is Curator of Rare Books at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

February · cloth · 192 pages

8 x 10 · $40.00 • £34.95 · Art

9780884024989

16 photos, 80 color photos

Ex Horto: Dumbarton Oaks Texts in Garden and Landscape Studies

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection