Thomas Bernhard (born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard; February 9, 1931 – February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II,"[1] is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors

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Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen, Netherlands as an illegitimate child to Herta Fabjan (née Herta Bernhard, 1904–1950) and the carpenter Alois Zuckerstätter (1905–1940). The next year his mother returned to Austria, where Bernhard spent much of his early childhood with his maternal grandparents in Vienna and Seekirchen am Wallersee north of Salzburg. His mother's subsequent marriage in 1936 occasioned a move to Traunstein in Bavaria. Bernhard's natural father died in Berlin from gas poisoning; Thomas had never met him.
Bernhard's grandfather, the author Johannes Freumbichler, pushed for an artistic education for the boy, including musical instruction. Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer.
Bernhard's Lebensmensch (companion for life), whom he cared for alone in her dying days, was Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he met in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the

Thomas Bernhard's House, Video by Christiaan Tonnis, 2006
Suffering throughout his youth from an intractable lung disease (tuberculosis), Bernhard spent the years 1949 to 1951 at the sanatorium Grafenhof, in Sankt Veit im Pongau. He trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1955–1957) and was always profoundly interested in music: his lung condition, however, made a career as a singer impossible. After that he began work briefly as a journalist, then as a full-time writer.
Bernhard died in 1989 in Gmunden, Upper Austria. His attractive house in Ohlsdorf-Obernathal 2 where he had moved in 1965 is now a museum and centre for the study and performance of Bernhard's work. In his will, which aroused great controversy on publication, Bernhard prohibited any new stagings of his plays and publication of his unpublished work in Austria. His death was announced only after his funeral.

Robert Walser (15 April 1878 – 25 December 1956), was a German-speaking Swiss writer.
Life and work t
1879–1897[edit
Walser was born into a family with many children. His brother Karl Walser became a well-known stage designer and painter. Walser grew up in Biel, on the language border between the German- and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and grew up speaking both languages. He attended primary school and progymnasium, which he had to leave before the final exam when his family could no longer bear the cost. From his early years on, he was an enthusiastic theatre-goer; his favorite play was The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller. There is a watercolor painting that shows Walser as Karl Moor, the protagonist of that play.[citation needed]
From 1892 to 1895, Walser served an apprenticeship at the Bernische Kantonalbank in Biel. Afterwards he worked for a short time in Basel. Walser's mother, who was "emotionally disturbed", died in 1894 after being under medical care for a long period.[citation needed] In 1895, Walser went to Stuttgart where his brother Karl lived. He was an office worker at the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt and at the Cotta'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung; he also tried, without success, to become an actor. On foot, he returned to Switzerland where he registered in 1896 as a Zürich resident. In the following years, he often worked as a "Kommis", an office clerk, but irregularly and in many different places. As a result, he was one of the first Swiss writers to introduce into literature a description of the life of a salaried employee.

Péter Nadas (born 14 October 1942) is a Hungarian writer,
playwright, and essayist.

He was born in Budapest as the son of Laszlo Nadas and Klara Tauber.

After the takeover of the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross Party on 15 October 1944, Klara Tauber escaped with her son to Bačka and Novi Sad, but returned to the capital directly before the Siege of Budapest. Péter Nadas survived the siege together with his mother in the flat of his uncle, the journalist Pal Aranyossi.

Even though his parents were illegal Communists during World War II and involved with the Communist administration later on, as well, they had both their sons—Péter and Pal—baptized in the Reformed (Calvinist) Church of Pozsonyi Street. His mother died of an illness when he was 13.

In 1958, his father—head of department in one of the ministries, slandered with accusations of embezzlement, then exonerated by the court of all charges—committed suicide; Péter Nádas became an orphan at 16.

Magda Aranyossi became the guardian of the two children.
Between 1961 and 1963 Péter Nádas studied journalism and photography. He worked as a journalist at a Budapest magazine (Pest Megyei Hírlap) from 1965 to 1969. He also worked as a playwright and a photographer. Since 1969 he has been a freelancer.
In 1990 he married Magda Salamon (with whom he had been living since 1962). In 1984 they moved to a small village in western Hungary, Gombosszeg, where they have resided ever since, though he also has a residence in the Castle District of Buda.
In 1993, he was elected member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts.
Since the early 1970s, he has frequently spent time in Berlin, Germany, attending lectures at Humboldt University or reading in the Staatsbibliothek. He has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study. In 2006, he was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. He enjoys a high reputation in Germany.

After publishing volumes of short stories, he published his first novel The End of a Family Story in 1977.

He published his second novel, A Book of Memories in 1986. It took Nádas twelve years to write this book. The epigraph of this novel is from the Gospel according to John: "But he spake of the temple of his body" (John, 2.21). In this novel, Nádas describes the world as a system of relations linking human bodies to each other. This book earned Nádas comparisons to Proust.

He published his latest novel, the three-volume Parallel Stories (I: The Mute Realm, II: In the Depths of Night, III: A Breath of Freedom) in 2005. This novel is a multitude of independent stories that melt into one single narrative. It took Nádas eighteen years to complete this book. The novel has been described as "a virtuoso combination of nineteenth-century high realism with the experimentalism of the nouveau roman", while "the real narrative is that of bodies' actions on one another, their attraction and desires, their mutual memories" (Gábor Csordás).

The plot is constructed around the histories of two families: one—the Lippay-Lehrs, who are Hungarian, the other—the Döhrings, who are German. These two main threads link irregularly up to one another via specific events or figures.
Nádas' other novels include Lovely Tale of Photography, Yearbook, On Heavenly and Earthly Love, and A Dialogue with Richard Swartz.

Death is a recurrent theme in Nádas' work, particularly in Own Death, based on his experience of clinical death.

His writing has been described as intellectual, detailed, strong, innovative, and demanding.

A volume of interviews with Péter Nádas, by Zsófia Mihancsik (Nincs mennyezet, nincs födém) was published in 2006.
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كيم يو جونغ

هو كاتب تؤدي قراءة كتبه إلى إدمان القارئ لفصل الربيع ، فكل صفحة وكل سطر يحمل في طياته رائحة الربيع، ويمكن أن نجد ذلك واضحاً في مؤلفاته" الكاميليا" و"ربيع ربيع" التي تتضمن قصصا بسيطة وصادقة .
إذن هيا بنا يا أصدقائي نستنشق رائحة النسمات الربيعية عبر حديثنا عن "كيم يو جونغ".

حياة بائسة

ولد "كيم يو جونغ" في مدينة شونشون بمقاطعة كانغ وون عام 1908.كان "كيم "ينتمي لعائلة ثرية، ولسوء الحظ توفيت والدته وهو في السابعة من عمره ،
ثم لحق بها والده بعد عامين (وهو في التاسعة )، فعاش "كيم" في منزل أخيه الأكبر ، وكان هذا لا يمنعه من الاشتياق لأبويه طوال الوقت ، مما أدى به لأن يكون شخصية ساكنة وهادئة أغلب الوقت.

Yiannis Ritsos (Greek: Γιάννης Ρίτσος) (Monemvasia 1 May 1909 - Athens 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II.

Early life

Born to a well-to-do landowning family in the Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and his eldest brother from tuberculosis, the commitment of his father who suffered with mental disease and the economic ruin of losing his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos, himself, was confined in a sanitarium for tuberculosis from 1927 - 1931.[1]
Literary start[edit source]

In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractor in 1934, inspired of the futurism of Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair.
The landmark poem Epitaphios, published in 1936, broke with the shape of Greek traditional popular poetry and expressed in clear and simple language a message of the unity of all people.[1]
Political upheaval and the poet[edit source]

In August 1936, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power and Epitaphios was burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. Ritsos responded by taking his work in a different direction: exploring the conquests of surrealism through access to the domain of dreams, surprising associations, explosion of images and symbols, lyricism which shows the anguish of the poet, soft and bitter souvenirs. During this period Ritsos published The Song of my Sister (1937), Symphony of the Spring (1938).[1]
Axis occupation, Civil War and the Junta[edit source]

During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) he became a member of the EAM (National Liberation Front), and authored several poems for the Greek Resistance. Ritsos also supported the left in the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949); in 1948 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps. In the 1950s 'Epitaphios', set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, became the anthem of the Greek left.
In 1967 he was arrested by the Papadopoulos dictatorship and sent to a prison camp in Gyaros.
Legacy[edit source]



The tomb of Yannis Ritsos at Monemvasia,Greece
Today, Ritsos is considered one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century, together with Konstantinos Kavafis, Kostas Kariotakis, Giorgos Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age." He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as the Stalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared "this prize is more important for me than the Nobel".
His poetry was banned at times in Greece due to his left wing beliefs.
Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953).
One of his most important works is Moonlight Sonata:
I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
alone to faith and to death.
I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
Let me come with you.
—from Moonlight Sonata. Translation by Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley