The Ukrainian city Lviv's many names (Lviv, Lvov, Lwow, Lemberg, Leopolis) bear witness to its conflicted past - it has, at one time or another, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Russia and Germany, and has brought forth numerous famous artists and intellectuals. My Lwow, Jozef Wittlin's short 1946 treatise on the city he left in 1922, is a wistful and lyrical study of an electrifying cosmopolis, told from the other side of the catastrophe of the Second World War. Philippe Sand's essay provides a parallel account of the city as it is today: the cultural capital of Ukraine, its citizens played a key role during the Orange Revolution, and its executive committee declared itself independent of the rule of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. The City of Lions includes both old black-and-white photos showing Lviv during the first half of the twentieth century, and new photographs by the award-winning Diana Matar, of the city as it is today.
"[Wittlin's essay My Lwów is] for many Poles the definitive evocation of one of their great lost cities. . . a loving, sensuous, but also gently ironic reconstruction. . . Sands’s perspective is closer to that of the contemporary reader, who struggles with the juxtaposition between beauty, faded grandeur, and whimsical visions of a cosmopolitan past on the one hand, and savage mass murder on the other." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Congratulations to Pushkin Press for bringing lovely, haunted Lviv to a new audience." — Times Literary Supplement
"A walk down memory lane, a meditation on time, politics and remembrance." — Dublin Review of Books
"Wittlin takes us on a detailed tour of the city... well-illustrated." — East-West Review
"Beautiful and disturbing songs in prose." - Kazimierz Wierzyński
Józef Wittlin, born in 1896, was a major Polish poet, novelist, essayist and translator. He studied in Vienna, where he met Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. His experiences during that war inspired him to write The Salt of the Earth, which was first published in 1935. It was awarded the Polish National Academy Prize, won Wittlin a nomination for the Nobel Prize, and has since been translated into 14 languages. Józef Wittlin also translated Homer's Odyssey into Polish, published several collections of poetry, many of which were strongly pacifist, and penned numerous essays including 'My Lwów', which is included in City of Lions, also published by Pushkin Press. With the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to France and then to New York, where he died in 1976.
View titles by Jozef Wittlin
The Ukrainian city Lviv's many names (Lviv, Lvov, Lwow, Lemberg, Leopolis) bear witness to its conflicted past - it has, at one time or another, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Russia and Germany, and has brought forth numerous famous artists and intellectuals. My Lwow, Jozef Wittlin's short 1946 treatise on the city he left in 1922, is a wistful and lyrical study of an electrifying cosmopolis, told from the other side of the catastrophe of the Second World War. Philippe Sand's essay provides a parallel account of the city as it is today: the cultural capital of Ukraine, its citizens played a key role during the Orange Revolution, and its executive committee declared itself independent of the rule of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. The City of Lions includes both old black-and-white photos showing Lviv during the first half of the twentieth century, and new photographs by the award-winning Diana Matar, of the city as it is today.
Reviews
"[Wittlin's essay My Lwów is] for many Poles the definitive evocation of one of their great lost cities. . . a loving, sensuous, but also gently ironic reconstruction. . . Sands’s perspective is closer to that of the contemporary reader, who struggles with the juxtaposition between beauty, faded grandeur, and whimsical visions of a cosmopolitan past on the one hand, and savage mass murder on the other." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Congratulations to Pushkin Press for bringing lovely, haunted Lviv to a new audience." — Times Literary Supplement
"A walk down memory lane, a meditation on time, politics and remembrance." — Dublin Review of Books
"Wittlin takes us on a detailed tour of the city... well-illustrated." — East-West Review
"Beautiful and disturbing songs in prose." - Kazimierz Wierzyński
Author
Józef Wittlin, born in 1896, was a major Polish poet, novelist, essayist and translator. He studied in Vienna, where he met Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. His experiences during that war inspired him to write The Salt of the Earth, which was first published in 1935. It was awarded the Polish National Academy Prize, won Wittlin a nomination for the Nobel Prize, and has since been translated into 14 languages. Józef Wittlin also translated Homer's Odyssey into Polish, published several collections of poetry, many of which were strongly pacifist, and penned numerous essays including 'My Lwów', which is included in City of Lions, also published by Pushkin Press. With the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to France and then to New York, where he died in 1976.
View titles by Jozef Wittlin
