unlike the benevolent orphan found in charlie chaplin's the kid or the sentimentalized figure of little orphan annie, the orphan in postwar eastern european cinema takes on a more politically fraught role, embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and grappling with an unknown future under soviet rule. by exploring films produced in postwar hungary, the german democratic republic, czechoslovakia, romania, and poland, parvulescu traces the way in which cinema envisioned and debated the condition of the post-world war ii subject and the "new man" of soviet-style communism. in these films, the orphan becomes a cinematic trope that interrogates socialist visions of ideological institutionalization and re-education and stands as a silent critic of the system's shortcomings or as a resilient spirit who has resisted capture by the political apparatus of the new state.

the great slavic medieval epic, the igor tale, recounts the story of a russian prince who leads his men into battle against the mongols. in 1935, soviet scholar p.n. berkov began to compile a bibliography of western european translations of the poem, later followed by several soviet union biographies compiling the works on the epic that had appeared in the russian empire or the soviet union. here, cooper attempts to remedy the shortcomings of previous scholar work: to seriously survey the large body of non-soviet scholarship on the poem particularly western contributions to igor scholarship. originally published in 1978, cooper traces foreign scholarship and translations from 1900-1976 from a wide variety of western and some eastern nations including the united states, great britain, france, italy, poland, japan and many other countries. this title is a valuable resource for students of literature and slavic studies.