Duančić, Vedran. Lysenko in Yugoslavia, 1945–1950s: How to De-Stalinize Stalinist Science.

Duančić, Vedran. Lysenko in Yugoslavia, 1945–1950s: How to De-Stalinize Stalinist  Science. Journal of the History of Biology (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09598-2

Abstract:
By the summer of 1948, socialist Yugoslavia seemed determined to follow in the footsteps of its closest ally, the Soviet Union, and strike a decisive blow to “reactionary genetics.” But barely a month before the infamous VASKhNIL session, the Soviet–Yugoslav split began to unravel, influencing the reception of Lysenko’s doctrine in Yugoslavia. Instead of simply dismissing it as yet another example of Stalinist deviationism, Yugoslav mičurinci carefully weighed its political and ideological implications, trying to negotiate the Stalinist origins of Michurinist biology with political and ideological reconfigurations in post-Stalinist Yugoslavia. The essay examines the strategies employed by supporters and opponents of Lysenko’s doctrine, as well as those sympathetic to it but yet unconvinced of its scientific validity and political appropriateness. It emphasizes globally unique attempts to de-Stalinize Michurinist biology and use it in the political-ideological struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union, pointing to local agency and the bottom-up nature of attempts both in support of and against the doctrine.

Keywords:
Lysenkoism, Michurinist biology, Genetics, Marxism, Yugoslavia, Tito–Stalin Split

Dóra Vargha, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. (open access)

By the end of the 1950s, Hungary became an unlikely leader in what we now call global health. Only three years after Soviet tanks crushed the revolution of 1956, Hungary became one of the first countries to introduce the Sabin vaccine into its national vaccination programme. This immunization campaign was built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West, in which scientists, specimens, vaccines and iron lungs crossed over the Iron Curtain. Dóra Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. She argues that despite the antagonistic international atmosphere of the 1950s, spaces of transnational corporation between blocs emerged to tackle a common health crisis. At the same time, she shows that epidemic concepts and policies were influenced by the very Cold War rhetoric that medical and political cooperation transcended.

This title is also available as Open Access.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108355421

Saskia Metan: Wissen über das östliche Europa im Transfer Edition, Übersetzung und Rezeption des „Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis“ (1517). Böhlau Verlag Köln 2019, ISBN: 978-3-412-50022-1

Wissen über das östliche Europa im Transfer

Der 1517 gedruckte „Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis“ des Krakauer Gelehrten Maciej z Miechowa beschrieb das östliche Europa zwischen Weichsel und Kaspischem Meer, von antiken Autoren Sarmatien genannt, erstmals quellenkritisch und realitätsnah. Zahlreiche Auflagen sowie Übersetzungen ins Polnische, Deutsche, Italienische und Niederländische belegen die Relevanz des Werkes im frühneuzeitlichen Raumdiskurs. Die philologisch-kulturwissenschaftliche Studie erschließt die Edition, Übersetzung und Rezeption des „Tractatus“, rekonstruiert seine Zirkulation im Europa des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts und analysiert, wie das Zusammenspiel von raumzeitlichem, editorischem und sprachlichem Transfer zu Modifikationen des Wissens über „Sarmatien“ führte.

Saskia Metan ist Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Slavistik der TU Dresden.

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