Publication of
Lord David Cecil's The English Poets by
William Collins in London, first of the 'Britain in Pictures' series devised by
Hilda Matheson (died 1940) to celebrate British identity.[7]
The
Iași pogrom in Nazi-allied Romania is witnessed by the Italian war correspondent
Curzio Malaparte, who recounts it in a chapter of his novel Kaputt (
1944), for long the only work to deal with the events.[14]
August 18 – Pilot Officer
John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a 19-year-old poet of American paternity serving in Britain with the
Royal Canadian Air Force, makes a high-altitude test flight in a
Spitfire V from
RAF Llandow in Wales, and then by September 3 completes the
sonnet "High Flight" about the experience. On December 11 he dies in an air collision over England.
September – In Nazi-allied Romania,
George Călinescu publishes his companion to
Romanian literature (Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent). It is condemned in the far-right press for including entries on Romanian Jewish writers, whose work has been explicitly banned.[17] It is eventually withdrawn from circulation, but its own racist undertones are criticized by intellectuals such as the Jewish (
Felix Aderca and
Mihail Sebastian) and the Romanian (
Șerban Cioculescu,
Mihai Ralea and
Vladimir Streinu).[18]
November –
Brendan Behan is released from
Borstal in England and deported back to Ireland.
December
During the
Siege of Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, second wife of
Russian avant-garde poet
Danil Kharms (arrested this summer for treason and imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1, where he will die in
1942), trudge to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building to collect a trunk of manuscripts, so preserving his work and that of
Alexander Vvedensky's for decades until it can be circulated.[21] Vvedensky, arrested in September in
Kharkiv for "counterrevolutionary agitation", is evacuated, but dies of
pleurisy on the way.
The poet
Ezra Pound applies unsuccessfully to return to the U.S. from Italy. He begins appearing on Rome Radio with
antisemitic broadcasts sympathetic to the
Axis powers.[25]
^Carney, Michael (1995). Britain in Pictures: a history and bibliography. London: Werner Shaw.
ISBN9780907961093.
^Therese Giehse interview with W. Stuart McDowell, 1968, in "Acting Brecht: The Munich Years," The Brecht Sourcebook, Carol Martin and Henry Bial, editors (Routledge, 2000) p. 71.
^Bradford, Richard (2012). The Odd Couple: The curious friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. London: Robson Press.
ISBN9781849543750.
^Day, Barry (2005). Coward on Film: The Cinema of Noël Coward. Scarecrow Press. p. 83.
ISBN0-8108-5358-2.
^"Piccadilly Theatre: Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward". The Times. No. 48968. London. 1941-07-03. p. 2.
^Stykalin, A. S.; Sereda, V. T. (2001). "1941. György Lukács la Lubianka". Magazin Istoric (12): 48–52.
^Gheorghiu, Mihai-Dinu (2011). "The Iași Pogrom in Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt: Between History and Fiction". In Glăjar, Valentina; Teodorescu, Jeanine (eds.). Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 47–56.
ISBN978-1-349-29451-0.
^Rotman, Liviu (2008). Demnitate în vremuri de restriște. Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania & Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania. pp. 174–177.
ISBN978-973-630-189-6.
^Boia, Lucian (2012). Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 și 1950. Bucharest: Humanitas. pp. 238–245.
ISBN978-973-50-3533-4.
^Epstien, Thomas (2004).
"Vvedensky in Love". The New Arcadia Review. 2. Boston College Honors Program. Archived from
the original on 2010-12-08. Retrieved 2006-12-08.
^Hopkins, Chris (2007). English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 138–57.
ISBN0826489389.