Based on a short story by Anton Chekhov, Kama Ginkas’ astounding re-imagining highlights and builds off of the Chekhovian tension between the beauty of life and the tragedy of how it is lived. The story tells the the tragic tale of philosophy student Andrey Vasil'ich Kovrin (stage and screen star Sergey Makovetskiy).. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Kovrin decides to visit his childhood friend Tanya Pesotsky at the estate of her father. As...

From 1914 to 1921, while Ireland faced revolution at home, James Joyce was abroad, slowly laboring on his great masterpiece, Ulysses. In this first of three lectures about this famous epic and its relation to Irish history, Professor Conner provides a lucid overview of the story, its characters, its style, and its structure.

The beginnings of the end of Eastern European communism came with the firing of a shipyard worker in Gdansk, which led to a workers uprising and the founding of the Solidarity political movement. Dive into these exciting events, from rebellion to state crackdown, and meet some of the key players who altered the course of history..

On St. Martin’s Lane in London, a popular spot for street performers, a busker (Charles Laughton) works a poor girl (Vivien Leigh) into his act. As her popularity rises, he guides her to stardom even though it means sacrificing his love for her.. Leigh is mesmerizing in her final film before Gone With the Wind..

Follow Irish history through the age of rebellions sweeping across Europe and America, and find out how figures such as Wolfe Tone founded the quest for Irish republicanism. Delve into the cultural expressions of the 18th and 19th centuries, when poets and musicians kept ancient traditions alive.

Rene Clair’s sparkling comedy of manners is a witty, delicate, inspired satire on propriety and behavior in the bourgeois mind-set. Transposing the action of the perennial stage farce from 1851 to a summer wedding day in 1895 – the birth of cinema – Clair recalls detail, costume and design captured by the first movies. The Italian Straw Hat (Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie) triumphantly survives its 1927 journey from stage to screen; a dozen...

Eastern Europe has long been thought of as the "Other Europe", a region rife with political upheaval, shifting national borders, an astonishing variety of ethnic diversity, and relative isolation from the centers of power in the West. It has also been, and continues to be, pivotal in the course of world events. A History of Eastern Europe offers a sweeping 1,000-year tour with a particular focus on the region's modern history. In 24 insightful lectures,...

The combined nation of Poland and Lithuania was a powerful force in the 18th century—and its dissolution is one of the great crimes of the modern era. Civil strife provided the pretext for neighboring empires to swoop in and annex the nation. Consider the results of this partition and the political problem that would plague the region for the next century..

Tracey is pregnant and happily married to Lawrence, an architect. She has few cares in the world until the day a maniac breaks into the house, rapes her, and ultimately causes her to miscarry. Tracey falls to pieces and is so affected by the encounter she finds men repulsive, including her husband. Her attitude does not soften with time, and sooner rather than later, her husband takes up with his secretary. But in the meantime, the Scotland Yard detective...

In his later years, Yeats created an enigmatic spiritual system, and his poetry continued to evolve. Take a tour of his later writing, including two books that became some of the most significant works of poetry in the 20th century—both for their artistic power and their lens on Irish history.