Europe at 27 – Second Part

Latvia. Born on 27 February 1947 in Riga, Gidon Kremer began studying the violin at the age of four with his father and grandfather, both professional violinists, then at the Riga Music School and finally at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. Known for his wide-ranging repertoire from Bach to the present day, and considered one of the greatest violinists and musicians of his generation, his concert partners include Martha Argerich, Mischa Maïsky, Keith Jarrett, Yo-Yo Ma and many others. Refusing to forget his roots, in 1996 Gidon Kremer founded the chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica, made up of young musicians from the Baltic States.

Lituania. They're watching him, they're after him, they're after his life. Vytautas Vargalys knows: they are everywhere and Vilnius belongs to them... As the librarian in charge of cataloguing the dangerous works they have put on the index, his battle is to foil their traps. Guardian of history, the last of the Vargalys sinks into a delirium fueled by a burning feeling of abandonment. Only Lolita, a saintly seductress with a troubled past, can convince him that life is possible. A hallucinatory paranoid epic, Vilnius Poker is a proclamation of the omnipotence of freedom, which hit the world like a bomb when it was published and was the catharsis of a gagged people, propelling Ricardas Gavelis to the rank of an immense writer.

Luxemburg. In 1928, while Paris was living according to the rhythm of the Roaring Twenties, the dancer Ida Rubinstein commissioned Maurice Ravel to write the music for her next ballet. Petrified and lacking inspiration, the composer flipped through the pages of his life - the failures of his early career, the fracture of the Great War, the impossible love he felt for his muse Misia Sert... Ravel then plunged into the depths of himself to create his universal work, the Bolero. The story of this piece, one of the most frequently performed in the world, is brought to life by Anne Fontaine, the Luxembourg screenwriter and director.

Malta. Of course Hugo Pratt is not Maltese, since he was born in Rimini, Italy, on 15 June 1927. Corto Maltese, on the other hand, was born in Malta on 10 July 1887, and this mysterious, romantic, libertarian and ironic adventurer, who has taken us with him to the remotest corners of the globe, often in the company of unlikely characters, wears the colors of the island where he was born proudly.

Netherland. Following the success of The Dream of Europe, Geert Mak continues his story at the dawn of the new millennium. Based on interviews and encounters, he examines both the great movements of history and the lives of the citizens who have had to suffer the consequences, highlighting what binds us together, but also what divides us as Europeans. This highly topical essay invites us to revisit the events that have marked the beginning of the 21st century, from the tragedy of 9/11 to Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine. The Dreams of a European in the 21st Century offers a powerful panorama of the last two decades.

Poland. Janina Doucheyko lives alone in a small hamlet in the heart of the Sudetenland. A retired engineer, she has a passion for nature, astrology and the work of the poet and painter William Blake. One morning, she finds a neighbor dead in her kitchen, suffocated by a small bone. This is the beginning of a series of mysterious crimes, at which animal tracks are found. The police investigates. The victims all shared a consuming passion for hunting... Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018.

Portugal. The Book of Disquiet is the diary that Pessoa kept for most of his life, attributing it to a modest Lisbon office worker, Bernardo Soares. With no earthly ambitions, but hungry for spiritual greatness and combining a critical mind with a wild imagination, Bernardo Soares embraced his "intranquillity", to overcome it better and, through art, go to the very edge of himself, to that frontier of our condition where mystics reach fulfilment "because they are emptied of all the emptiness of the world". He constructs for himself a personal universe that is vertiginously unreal, and yet in a sense truer than the real world. The Book of Intranquillity is considered Fernando Pessoa's masterpiece.

Czech Republic. Boros is a fishing village in a mysterious Eastern European country. As the lake that borders it dries up, Nami grows up alongside his grandparents in a place where vodka flows freely, where women are held in low esteem and where the children are all affected by a strange eczema. Left to his own devices when he reaches adolescence, Nami decides to leave this oppressive village and move to the big city... A fascinating coming-of-age story, this powerful novel examines family ties and is also deeply political in its evocation of foreign political influence, and just as topical in its denunciation of industrial pollution and the way it affects the most disadvantaged.

Romania. Eugen Dimitri Ionescu, better known as Eugène Ionesco, was born in Slatina, Romania. He is one of the most important playwrights of the theatre of the absurd. Rhinoceros depicts an imaginary epidemic of "rhinoceritis", a disease that frightens all the inhabitants of a town and soon transforms them into rhinoceroses. A tragic and comic metaphor of the rise of totalitarianism at the dawn of the Second World War, it shows the dangers of conformism, which, by allowing individual thought to disappear, encourages the establishment of totalitarian regimes.

Slovakia. "The life of a mafioso is beautiful, but short. "In crime-ridden Slovakia in the 1990s, the Slovak Intelligence Service and its corrupt police reign supreme. Lieutenant Molnár, an idealistic young policeman, seems to be the only one who wants to cleanse the city of crime, thus becoming the man to kill. Miki Miko, his partner, has long understood the workings of the machine. But when Moly is killed and the justice system does its utmost to protect the killers, all he has left is revenge. In his third novel, Arpád Soltész plunges us into the underbelly of a country that is rotten to the bone, a country where it is very difficult to be a hero. (Not available in english yet)

Slovenia. "... I divide humanity into two fundamentally different categories: a handful of people who know what the realities are and the enormous majority who do not. "At the end of the 11th century, entrenched in his citadel overlooking the plain, the great master Hassan Ibn Sabbâh led a holy war in Iran. Starting from almost nothing, with no army, no land and no support at court, he ended up dominating the world. A millennium later, the manipulation of the masses, as he put it into practice, continues to shake modern empires. A blend of adventure and political philosophy, Alamut evokes the violence of the plots of the time only to return to the crucial problems of modern civilizations.

Sweden. With Millénium, Stieg Larsson gave a new lease on life to the thriller genre and influenced hundreds of writers. His character, Mikael Blomkvist, a brilliant investigative journalist drawn into a forty-year-old kidnapping investigation, enabled Stieg Larsson to write a saga that exposed the intolerance, hypocrisy, violence and cynicism of our contemporary world - on a political, economic, social and family level - while turning these elements into an addictive thriller of unbearable suspense, hailed by millions of readers and an international critical success.

Germany. The post-Second World War period was marked by the division of Germany from 1949 to 1990. Major literary works were produced on both sides of the Wall. In the West, in 1959, Günter Grass wrote about the Nazi past of a German family from Danzig (now Gdansk) in The Tin Drum. Its main character is a boy who, at the age of three, decides not to grow up any more. In the East, Christa Wolf created They Divided the Sky in 1963, a great contemplative work about a loving couple torn apart by political division, shortly before the construction of the Wall. The two books became bestsellers on both sides of the wall, and were each magnificently adapted for the screen by Volker Schlöndorff (1979) and Konrad Wolf (1964).