FOREWORD
contents Amelia Earheart: The Conquest of the Sky
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The present issue of magazine “W” is dedicated to the events of 1928. I have found out that letter “W” is symbolically multifunctional and covers the main concepts of 1928 - the concepts are WAR and WOMEN. The world was in the after-shock of the most destructive and violent at that time Great War influenced almost on each aspect of life, political, social, economic and cultural. Also in 1928 the considerable attention should be given to the changeable role of woman in the society. “W” symbolizes Western World as well that the magazine is primarily focused on. If to turn “W” over, we get “M” that is a starting letter of Modernism, a new flow of thinking embracing the life after the World War One, and the force that women wanted to challenge, Masculinity.
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
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The cover was inspired by the work of Pablo Picasso that he created in 1928. It belongs to his famous series of “Bathers”. Light and bright colors corresponds to the external mood of that time - searching for peace and srability, while the figure belongs to a woman whose beauty during the modernist era has changed from the classical understanding of aesthetics. In 1920s Picasso was influenced by the surrealist movement1. On this picture we see a naked woman on the beach playing with a ball, her proportions are transformed and distorted in a way that her body creates a symbol or a sign, the meaning of which one finds himself.
Pablo Picasso, Gallery
Dear reader,
Pablo Picasso. 1928. «Baigneuse4»
Kellogg-Briand Pact: to OutlaWar? Alexander Fleming: Penicillin Discovery
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Erich M. Remarque: All Quite on the Western Front
References
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Amelia Earheart: The “Friendship” made a long way from the Harbor in Trepassey to the Welsh Coast in England, having not held till the initial point of its destination, Southampton, because of difficult weather conditions9.
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the Conquest of the Sky
n the 18th of June 1928 Fokker monoplane “Friendship” landed in Wales after 20 hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean. There were three pilots on the board, Wilmer Stultz, Louis E. Gordon and Amelia Earhart who at the age of 30 became the first woman flied across the Atlantic1.
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This event was a turning point not only individually in Earhart’s air career, but also more generally in the American society showing the changing role of woman in it. Although Amelia was not the first female pilot in history, by her flight in 1928 she brought woman’s issue into the aviation in the most vigorous way making people speak about it and recognize the increasing role of women in the spheres that were predominately owned by men2. Before 1928, Amelia in parallel with occupying different jobs was interested in aviation. In 1921 and 1923 she got her flying licenses what became one of key reasons why the rich American woman, Amy Phillips Guest, decided to choose Amelia on the role of the first woman crossing the Atlantic Ocean3. Moreover, Amelia looked like Charles Lindberg, the first man flying solo across the Atlantic4.
When Amelia stepped on the ground from the plane before two thousand of amazed public she immediately became a sensation and a star of mass media, although during the flight she acted more as a passenger than a pilot, while Stulz and Gordon took the control of the plane on themselves. “All I did was
lie on my tummy and take pictures of the clouds…I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes” 5. Her attempts that day to bring attention to the actual
pilots, Shultz and Gordon, were futile, she was the only one public wanted to praise and to admire.
June 14, 1928. Amelia Earheart in front of «Friendship»10.
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The sky which was associated with men’s nature, simbolyzing power and freedom, became available for women who belonged to the nature of earth, passive and confined. Women in the air moved the In this remarkable for her year, Amelia wrote a book society towards the equal perception and treatment of gender “20 hrs 40 min.:Our Flight in the Friendship” and promoting democracy and independence. Individuals like became the first woman pilot who wrote about her aerial experience for a public6. Amelia Earhart proved that women were capable of doing what men used to do7.
Amelia did not call herself a feminist, but still she propagated the equality of men and women in different spheres of activities where the decisive factor was one’s ability and not the gender8 .
After that key event Amelia became an embodiment of a new woman, brave, independent and self-sufficient. 2
Virginia WOOLF:
“Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering impulse. I want fun. I want fantasy.”1 It is interesting that in 1928 another female writer Radclyff Hall published her novel «A Well of Loneliness» that was considered lesbian along with Woolf’s «Orlando». «A Well of Loneliness» was subjected to censorship and was consequently banned, while Orlando became a best-seller and had contributed to the growing recognition of Woolf as a writer. There is a common view that Woolf’s fantastic story wrapped into the satiric style helped the novel to avoid censorship, while the straightforward manner of Hall’s writing only aggravated the British government’s dislike4.
ORLANDO
Lesbian theme is revealed when Orlando one day woke up and realized that he had become a woman, nevertheless his/ her former feelings towards other women in time when he was a man stayed unchanged5.
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Woolf’s lesbianism was a sexual passion and the liberation of the self6. Lesbian love and sensuality in «Orlando» were skillfully written in a tacit way, hidden under the fantastic transformation of Orlando from one sex into another. This transformation complicates the perception of him/her in the sense that it is difficult to refer Orlando to a particular sex, rather he/she contains both sex’s features. The notion is called androgyny, neutral sexual identity. Androgyny is slightly different from hermaphroditism, concentrating more on the ambiguity of psychological traits rather than on physical differences7.
n the 11th of October 1928 Virginia Woolf published her sixth novel «Orlando: A Biography».
This is a story about a man Orlando who was born during the time of Queen Elizabeth. Fantastically he lives for more than three hundred years, beginning from XVI century till 1928, the date when the novel ends. In no less fantastic way, in the middle of this time Orlando changes into a woman and continues his life being in this sex2. The prototype of Orlando and the inspirer for Woolf was Vita Sackville-West, a poetess to whom Virginia was attached and had a love affair for four years3.
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«Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory — but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’ — her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. (Orlando, 133)7»
Woolf was concerned with the surpressed role of woman’s voice in English literature, she proposed the idea of the synthesis of male and female voices in the writing, putting androgynous mind into the priority. In this way nobody needs to fulfill particular gender’s expectations allowing the creative potential to be fully expressed8. Virginia Woolf
«Orlando» has become Woolf’s experimentation with the modernist novel, bringing the idea of androgyny onto the surface, in this way tacitly implying her lesbian sensibility and the desire to challenge the sexual prejudices of her time about the «naturalness» of gender relations9. 4
KELLOGG -BRIAND PACT: to outlaWar? On the 27th of August in 1928 fifteen countries signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact in order to outlaw war and to resolve any conflicts by peaceful means only. Peace. «I had hoped - and I still hope - for a better task than this.»6 The horrifying scale of World War One (1914-1918) is reflected on the table below through the total numbers of people which the war didn’t pass by on the both sides of barricades1. Mobilized 65,038,810
killed 8,528,831
wounded 21,189,154
missing 7,750,919
total casualty 37,466,904
Apart from human victims, the Great War left the countries-participants with high levels of unemployment, inflation and international tensions. In particular, Europe was in the state of tremendous instability. Subsequent after-war arrangements were aimed on the promotion of peace in the precarious and damaged world. In 1919 Treaty of Versailles was signed, then in 1920 League of Nations started to function due to the initiative of the United States that In 1920s acted in the role of international intermediary and a promoter of peacemaking actions and cooperation between countries2. In 1927 French Prime-Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand proposed a peaceful agreement between France and the United States. France needed a strong alliance because of possible threat from Germany. The United States were not so enthusiastic about the agreement on several reasons. A chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Borah, doubted the nonbinding condition of the agreement, “We seem to have no faith in the power of public opinion or in an appeal to the moral sense of the people. When it comes to affairs between nations, we build all our schemes upon force.”3. The United States President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg did not quite agree with the bilateral nature of the contract, later it would become multinational4. On August 27, 1928, the Kellogg-Briand pact was signed by fifteen states at Paris. Signatories included France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Japan.5
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August 27, 1928. The signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in Paris8
Notes7: •Later USSR and sixty more countries signed the pact •Kellogg-Briand Pact was highly criticized due to its consequent inability to prevent the World War Two that occurred ten years later and other wars after 1928. •After the end of World War Two the measurers taken from the pact were implemented against German Nazis. 6
Alexander Fleming
“One sometimes finds what one is not looking for”1
Before penicillin there was no effective and real treatment against such infections as pneumonia, rheumatic fever and gonorrhea2.
When World War One began, Mr. Fleming moved to France and set up a battlefield hospitable lab. There he witnessed a huge number of soldiers dying on the hospital’s beds rather than on the battle due to the absence of effective antibiotic. After the war Fleming returned to his laboratory in London with a purpose to find antibacterial substance. He discovered lysozyme that had natural antibacterial effect, but was not strong enough to fight stronger infections3. Fleming was working at the growing of staphylococcal bacteria in Petri dishes in his highly disorganized laboratory. After a month of vacation, he occasionally found out that in the pile of Petri dishes forgotten in the sink, one dish contained a blue fungus around which all staphylococcal bacteria were killed. Fleming found out that the mold belonged to penicillium notatum and that it was able to kill most of the infectious bacteria4. It was Penicillin.
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On the picture Petri dish with Penicillin6.
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After his discovery Fleming with the assistants could not isolate Penicillin from the mold juice, because it was highly unstable. • The following year, 1929, he published the work describing Penicillin that was ignored by the public. • Only ten years later, during the World War Two, with the help of other professionals and scientist, Penicillin was put on the scale production and contributed to rescue of the thousands of lives. 8
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE: All Quiet on the Western Front/ Im Westen nichts Neues “We’re no longer young men. We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don’t believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.” Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabruck on June 22, 1988. Having studied in Catholic School, in 1917 he was sent to the front in Flanders and was wounded. Before the appearance of his novel All Quiet on the Western Front in 1928, he was occupied in different jobs, that later would be reflected in his further novels1. The novel is built by episodes demonstrating the pieces of life of the young German soldier Paul Baumer who was sent to war at the age of 18. Through the memories of Paul we can follow the war’s realities, death of close comrades, crash of ideals and life pivots among youth, constant fear and terror, feelings of patriotism, killing of people, hospital experiences, and the lost life beyond the front. The narration of Paul abruptly stops at the end of the novel, signifying his death in one of the quiet days on the front in 1918,when war was almost over2. Remarque wrote the novel in 1927, it was difficult for him to find a publisher who would agree to issue it. The theme of war seemed to be unpopular among German readers because of unhealed and fresh wounds. Ultimately the publishing house Ullstein in Berlin accepted Remarque’s novel and in 1928 “All Quiet on the Western Front” appeared in the Ullstein’s journal Vossische Zeitung. “All Quiet in the western front” didn’t leave the audience with indifference, having become a bestseller until it was banned and censored by Nazi Party3.
Erich Maria Remarque
The novel reveals the inner world of a young boy that had to undergo a transformation into a soldier, somebody who must kill, fight and be patriotic even if the purpose of the war becomes lost and intangible. Remarque claimed that the novel in spite of the depicted miserable events was not pessimistic, on the contrary it was written with a hope to overcome a meaningless human violence4. «All Quiet on the Western Front» is a good opportunity for non-German readers to be on the other side of the barricades and to understand that no matter where you are, the war is the same.
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GALLERY
PABLO PICASSO
«Baigneuses au ballon1», 1928
«Baigneuses au ballon3», 1928 11
«Baigneuses sur la plage», 1928
«Baigneuse4», 1928 12
REFERENCES Alexander Fleming
Amelia Earheart 1, 9. Raymond, Allen. “Amelia Earhart Flies Atlantic, First Woman To Do It; Tells Her Own Story of Perilous 21-Hour Trip to Wales; Radio Quit and They Flew Blind Over Invisible Ocean”. The New York Times 1928. Web. Feb. 15, 2014. http://www.nytimes. com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0617.html
1. Pettinger, T. Alexander Fleming Biography. Biography Online. Oxford, 2009. Web. Feb. 17, 2014. http://www.biographyonline.net/ scientists/alex-fleming.html 2., 3 . People and Discoveries. PBS. Web. Feb. 17, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bmflem.html
2.. Erisman, Fred.” The Earheart Era: 1925-1940”. From Birdwomen to Skygirls : American Girls’ Aviation Stories. USA: TCU Press, 2010. Web. Feb 16, 2014.
4,5, 6. Wei, James. “Medicine: Penicillin”. Great Inventions that Changed the World. New York: Wiley, 2012. 133-137. Web. Feb.20, 2014.
3, 5. Erisman, Fred.” The Earheart Era: 1925-1940”. From Birdwomen to Skygirls : American Girls’ Aviation Stories. USA: TCU Press, 2010. 65-70. Web. Feb 16, 2014.
Erich Maria Remarque
4, 6, 7. Turner, Denice.”Masculine Spaces and Women Flyers”. Writing the Heavenly Frontier : Metaphor, Geography, and Flight Autobiography in America 1927-1954.New York: Editions Rodopi , 2011. 113, 109. Web Feb.15, 2014.
1. Erich Maria Remarque Bio. Web Feb. 22, 2014. http://www.em-remarque.ru/biografija.html 2. Remarque, Erich Maria.Introduction. Im Westen Nichts Neues.Florence: Routledge, 1984. 1-25. Web. Feb. 21, 2014. 3. Erich Maria Remarque. Bibliography. Web Feb. 22, 2014. http://www.em-remarque.ru/bibliografija/Na-Zapadnom-fronte-bezperemen.html 4. The interview with AXEL EGGEBRECHT, 1929. Web. Feb. 22, 2014. http://www.em-remarque.ru/publ/razgovor-s-remarkom-1929. html
8. Ware, Susan. “Writing Women’s Lives: One Historian’s Perspective”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 413-435. Web Feb.14, 2014. 10. n.a. “UNEXPLAINED SHADOW 600FT UNDER PACIFIC COULD BE AMELIA EARHART’S MISSING PLANE”.The Independent. Web. Feb.20, 2014.
Virginia Woolf
Picture is taken from http://weheartit.com/entry/11802409
Pablo Picasso
1, 4, 5. Parkes, Adam. “Suppressed Randiness”. Modernism and the Theater of Censorship. Cary : Oxford, 1996. 165-166. Web. Feb. 10, 2014. 2, 6, 7, 8. Parsons, Deborah. “Gender and the Novel”. Theorists of the Modernist Novel. New York: Routledge, 2008. 82-84,106-107. Print. 3. Smith, Victoria L.»Ransacking the Language: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando”. Journal of Modern Literature 29.4 (2006): 57-75. Web. Feb. 10, 2014.
Foreword 1. A World History of Art. A juggler with form. Web. Feb. 25, 2014. http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/picasso10.html Gallery Pictures are taken from «Bathers» at http://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/theme-kupalshitsy.php
9. Sellers, Susan.”Virginia Woolf and Sexuality” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.184-187. Print Picture is taken from http://webneel.com/webneel/blog/25-awesome-pictures-half-man-half-woman-photographed-and-photoshoped
Kellog-Briand Pact 1.
WWI Casualty and Death Tables. Web. Feb. 18, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/resources/casdeath_pop.html
2. Merriman, John. “The Elusive Search for Stability in 1920s”. A History of Modern Europe.New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2010.956-989. Print. 3. Nichols, Christopher McKnight. “New Internationalism”. Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.303. Web. Feb. 20, 2014. 4, 5, 7. US Department of State. Office of the Historian. Milestones: 1921–1936. Web. Feb. 19, 2014. https://history.state.gov/ milestones/1921-1936/kellogg 6. Punch. Web Feb. 21, 2014. http://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000M8IXnT.P_t8 8. Corbis Images. Web Feb. 21, 2014. http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/VV12803/united-states-senators-atsigning-of-kelloggbriand
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