Juliette Bretan
@JCBretan
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PhD @englishunicam on modernism, East-Central Europe, and political geography. RA on Baltics @camgeopolitics . Words @publicdomainrev @thetls & more.
Cambridge/Lincolnshire
Joined January 2018
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Really delighted that my article on ‘T.S. Eliot, Post-War Geopolitics and “Eastern Europe”’ has just been published in Critical Quarterly (open access, too!).
Dedicated to my mum.
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Obsessed with the potato vending machine (Potatomat) in Wrocław:
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A silent protest for LGBTQ rights at Warsaw’s Piłsudski Square earlier this evening. Participants wore coloured shirts and laid in rows to form a rainbow.
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Around 70 years ago, my Poland- born grandparents arrived as refugees to the UK, unable to speak a word of English. A few decades of our melting-pot family later, and I’m graduating with a First from Cambridge in English Literature. I carried their name on this journey. Always.
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Katherine Anne Bretan
23/02/1956-03/12/2023
My mum passed away this morning, after a short but so courageous battle with cancer. She was at home, with the people who loved her, and the last thing she said to me was that she loved me. I love you so much, mum - all the way round.
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Obsessed with this Wehman Brothers’ Easy Method for Learning Polish Quickly - a phonetic guide to essential grammar, words and phrases - from 1914.
‘Chi moovish po Polskoo?’ -
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Really excited to have my first piece in
@ozm
about Polish designer Roza Janusz, and her edible, compostable alternative to plastic packaging:
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Spotted in Gdynia - ‘Zażółć gęślą jaźń’, the shortest sentence (or pangram) containing all of the letters with diacritics in Polish.
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Interwar Polish railway posters, for Warsaw, Kraków, Lviv and Vilnius, by Stefan Norblin. Fascinating snapshot of history. From: .
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A rare photo of one of the last remaining Pierogisaurus herds in the wild
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It’s become a bit of a family tradition for mum to make me a Poland-themed birthday cake each year. So...here’s this year’s:
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A selection of tourist posters of Poland from the 1920s and 1930s, by Stefan Norblin.
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Józef Pankiewicz, ‘Warsaw Old Town Square at Night’, 1892. A masterful depiction of the drizzly gloom - you can almost hear the crunch of the cab across the wet stones, glinting under the streetlights.
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My mum always made the best birthday cakes for me, which I will miss very much, so here are three of them: pierogi cake; vodka cake; Kafka cake…. :)
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Polish State Railways poster, showing the distance between Poznań and other major European cities (designed for the Polish General Exhibition, 1929).
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Cover of an English-language brochure for trips to Poland (1930s)
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So: life stuff.
This is a bit of a thread, both about personal things over the last few months, and the broken state of the NHS. I still can’t quite believe all of this has happened; believe the things I’ve seen. But I have to write about it. /1 (-21)
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Completely shocked & thrilled to announce I’ve received full funding for my PhD in English at
@Cambridge_Uni
with a Vice-Chancellor's & Newnham College Scholarship. An absolute dream come true. 1/2
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The National Museum in Warsaw has challenged people to recreate their favourite works of art. Here are some great examples - more can be found on their Facebook page:
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And so to today. Today we were told she now has days to weeks left.
I’m sad and angry.
Cancer is horrendous. Yet what happened over the last two months has made it so much, so unbearably, worse - and especially for my mum, who never ever deserved this. I love her so much. /end
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Found a glorious poster for such a glorious day (hungry already - is eating pączki at 1.30am socially acceptable?)
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Obsessed with this photograph from 1936: passengers on a Polish train (in a cinema car), watching a film about a Polish train. Meta
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Some Very Good dogs keeping to lockdown restrictions in Poland
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Map of interwar Poland, showing the state of war damage in 1923. The darkest orange shows areas which had over 20,000 buildings requiring reconstruction.
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A fabulous photograph of the Old Town in Warsaw.
Photo: Warsaw By Drone.
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Bernard Newman on Polish. “British people are afraid of the Polish language,” he writes. “To our eyes, it is a confusing medley of syllables which include an inordinate use of the letter ‘z’...”
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Polish State Railways poster for the Wieliczka salt mine, 1938. (Huge respect for the lady clad in hat and stole, what an outfit)
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Tymek Borowski, ‘Rubble Over Warsaw’ (2015) - a visualisation of the millions of tonnes of rubble left in Warsaw following the Second World War, superimposed onto the modern city skyline.
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A Luxtorpeda train in Zakopane, Poland, 1936. (From NAC).
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In other news: received a conditional offer for a PhD in English at Cambridge today...
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English-language tourism guide to Poland, 1937. With information on railway, motoring, and sea and air connections, and sights. (From Poland’s League for Promotion of Tourism, Polish State Railways, .)
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Interesting programme on Wojtek the soldier bear which was on the World Service today:
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15 Polish doctors will be flying to Lombardy tomorrow for a 10-day medical mission to gain experience in treating coronavirus cases:
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Raising a glass of mum’s homemade sloe gin to her this evening
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First Mother’s Day since my mum died, which is weird. She loved being a mum, my mum; I loved her being my mum. This morning, my dad and I went on the number 65 bus in London, where she first met him in the 1980s.
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A railway map (and a half...)- Poland’s state railway lines, 1939. With expanded, colour-coded sections for major city regions... From:
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All my pierogi dreams are coming true (and they are playing ‘Sen o Warszawie’ in the background which is APT)
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Tram and bus map of Warsaw, from the 1938-9 ‘Warszawa: Wczoraj, Dziś i Jutro’ (Warsaw: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow) exhibition. It shows plans for a future metro network, scheduled to be completed in the 1940s. The war meant this wasn’t to be. The metro finally opened in 1995.
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Usually, around about this time each year, I’m jetting off to Warsaw. Sad I can’t be there this summer, so here are some photographs of one of my favourite places in the city - the spectacular and almost otherworldly University of Warsaw Library:
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For the first time in English, the full story of Ina Benita, the captivating Interwar Polish actress whose post-war survival was kept a mystery until now. My latest for
@culture_pl
- I’m so proud to tell this story:
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Two more Polish transport exhibition posters.
1: Poster for a transport exhibition in Lwów, by Tadeusz Gronowski, 1927.
2: Front cover for a list of exhibits in the Ministry of Transport’s pavilion in the Polish National Exhibition in Poznań, by Halina Kosmólska, 1929.
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Railway stations of various sizes, by self-taught Lemko painter Nikifor (1895-1968). Born in Krynica (then in Austria-Hungary, now in Poland), Nikifor painted tens of thousands of works inspired by his local area, often on scraps of paper.
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Obsessed with W. Somerset Maugham’s description of Żubrówka (bison grass vodka), in The Razor’s Edge (1944): ‘It smells of freshly mown hay and spring flowers, of thyme and lavender, and it’s so soft on the palate and so comfortable, it’s like listening to music by moonlight.’
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Nice table for writing (and suitably in the Poland section)
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For a Saturday evening - a matching ‘simultaneous’ dress and car, designed by Ukrainian-French artist Sonia Delaunay, 1925.
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A tip from Bernard Newman on how to pronounce the name Przemyśl: “Primrose Hill with the vowels left out”
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A 1931 English-language tourist guide to Poland - ‘a country of extraordinary interest.’ From: .
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Then someone asked her if she thought it would be “worth it” to be resuscitated. “You have lung cancer, do you want someone pressing down on your chest and breaking your ribs?” they said.
I will never - ever - forgive them for this. /13
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Amazing photos of sunrise from Warsaw’s Varso Tower. Once completed, Varso Tower will become the tallest building in Poland and in the EU.
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Hundreds of Polish women, some dressed as handmaids from The Handmaid’s Tale, protested today after the Polish government suggested they could pull out of the Istanbul Convention, a treaty which prevents and combats domestic violence
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Another day, another editor expecting me to work for free on a 1000-word article, with interviews. I know many of us are struggling to get by at the moment. But exploitation - which is exactly what this is - is now endemic in the journalism industry. And it’s not okay.
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Picked up an incredible Polish-English phrasebook, published in Warsaw in 1958. Includes “Go straight on till you come to Portland Place” and “This suburb was completely destroyed during the war”. And the ol’ classic “Madam looks five years younger now”..
@StanleySBill
@culture_pl
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Made spicy vodka pasta for the first time this evening - this is Polish cooking, right? Right?
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The Hotel Bristol in Warsaw just after the outbreak of war, September 1939. Picture taken by American photographer Julien Bryan.
From: .
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Mum is home - we saw a rainbow as we travelled back in the ambulance, she has had a nice cup of tea, and she is with her family and the people who love her. That is all that matters.
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A poster for an exhibition of hundreds of Polish artistic and documentary photographs, held in Edinburgh in 1942. From ‘Co Słychać’, a Polish weekly (modelled on ‘Reader’s Digest’) which was published in Scotland during the war.
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I don’t post stuff like this a lot, but Tier 3 Lincolnshire feeling quite grim tonight - so, positivity...
Here’s a pic of me in Warsaw, from 2015 (before Uni/journalism etc). Just a girl who was v keen on Poland (!)
Feeling proud & thankful about the things I’ve done since then.
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Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad died
#OTD
in 1924.
In her obituary on Conrad, Virginia Woolf referred to him as “our guest”; a “mysterious” figure who had taken up “lodging” in Britain.
Conrad became a British citizen in 1886 and lived in Britain for nearly 40 years.
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Interwar advertisement for Bronisław (Baruch) Rudzki’s music shop in Warsaw. It was known as one of the most luxurious shops in the city, selling records and musical instruments.
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Real-time video portal in Vilnius, Lithuania, connected with Lublin, Poland (digital Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?)
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With the hot weather, I’m dreaming about Chopin concerts in the summer sun at Łazienki Park in Warsaw. This from last year:
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Wonderful to finally catch up with
@BDStanley
after three years, in (not) Prochownia Żoliborz…
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It’s that time of year again when I share my favourite Polish 1930s Easter postcards. I love the pisanka cable-car - but wouldn’t mind hopping into that swish pisanka-shaped motor, either.
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Things I miss about Warsaw no. 284629: Cukiernia Pawłowicz.
A
@BDStanley
recommendation.
Currently wishing I had bought pączki by the boxful for stockpile purposes.
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A new computer rendering of Fryderyk Chopin, based on his death mask, by Hadi Karimi.
Frédéric Chopin
#CG
#Likeness
Sculpted in
@pixologic
#ZBrush
the color map was painted in
@Substance3D
#Painter
Rendered in
@AdskMaya
with
@arnoldrenderer
used
#Xgen
core for the hair.
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Completely thrilled but also dazed and a little dumbfounded to say that I will be graduating Cambridge with a First. Clearly Polishness IS welcome in the Cambridge English Department...
I really can’t believe it. Now for the vodka!
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Powiśle in Warsaw is featured in The Guardian’s list of ‘10 of the coolest neighbourhoods in Europe’. It’s described as resembling a “carnival every summer”:
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It’s been a while, Klub Polonia…. (note: not all vodkas were for me)
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Back at the retro Polish armchair travelling with this advert for a Polish pre-war Luxtorpeda train, from a 1934 timetable. This one looks to be taking passengers home from a holiday in Zakopane.
More pictures of the timetable can be found here: .
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Some interwar Polish tourism/automobile/road-trip ephemera - from: .
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Whilst the world fights a real pandemic, my story for
@culture_pl
on the two doctors who engineered a fake typhus epidemic in occupied Poland during WWII, saving 8000 lives:
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Today was travelling from Cambridge to Munich by train - early, murky, pre-dawn start, but very doable in one day…
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Joseph Conrad on English critics’ views of his literature as “ungraspable”.
“This is my Polishness,” he writes. From: .
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Covers of Polish books for learning English, and vice versa, printed during WWII. From Polona.
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Reminiscing about Fogg and Polish music over blueberry pierogi and tea with none other than Halina Szpilman, wife of Władysław Szpilman. In her nineties and sharp as a tack. Wonderful memories!
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In Woodhall Spa (rural Lincolnshire), looking at the ‘Polish eagle tree’. Polish troops were stationed in Woodhall from 1945-47, and many settled in and around the area when they were demobbed. This looks like a Polish eagle to me...I wonder who carved it, and when?
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Metallica played Czesław Niemen’s ‘Sen o Warszawie’ in Warsaw yesterday evening (Wednesday): Cc
@notesfrompoland
@StanleySBill
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‘See Poland’ - a Polish (English-language) travel brochure, from the 1930s. Particularly intrigued by the “chimney forests” of Silesia “wrought through intense and feverish work”...
From:
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Conrad’s graphical depiction of how his and HG Wells’s views differ
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Cannot think of any better way to plan the shape of a PhD than over Polish food & beer at Klub Polonia - and with Leo Mellor (not on Twitter) and
@StanleySBill
….
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