Roger Caillois: The Writing of Stones (1970/1985)

“The Writing of Stones is a fascinating meditation on the human imagination contemplating the interior of stones. Caillois examines patterns that are revealed by polishing sections of minerals such as agate, jasper, and onyx. He considers the impact these configurations have had upon the human imagination throughout history and he reviews man’s attempt to categorize and explain them.

Marguerite Yourcenar [in her introduction] points out that ‘there had taken place in [his] intellect the equivalent of the Copernican revolution: man was no longer the center of the universe, except in the sense that the center is everywhere; man, like all the rest, was a cog in the whole system of turning wheels. Quite early on, having entered ‘the forbidden laboratories,’ Caillois applied himself to the study of diagonals which link the species, of the recurrent phenomena that act, so to speak as a matrix of forms.’ Caillois found the presence throughout the universe of a sensibility and a consciousness analogous to our own. One way which this consciousness expresses itself is in a “natural fantasy” that is evident in the pictures found in stones. Man’s own aesthetic may then be no more than one of many manifestations of an all-pervasive aesthetic that reveals itself in the natural world.”

First published as L’ecriture des pierres, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, Genève, 1970
Translated by Barbara Bray
With an Introduction by Marguerite Yourcenar
Publisher University Press of Virginia, Charlotesville, 1985
ISBN 0813910501, 9780813910505
108 pages
via pink panter

Commentaries: Marina Warner (Cabinet), 50 Watts.
Interview with author (video, 26 min, 1974, ina.fr, in French, via Véfa Lucas)

PDF (5 MB, updated on 2020-11-19)

Alexander Bogdanov: Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (1908–) [FR, EN, DE]

A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist.

The book also includes Engineer Menni, a historical novel about the social revolution on Mars, first published in 1913, and the poem A Martian Stranded on Earth, first published as a supplement to the second edition of Red Star in 1924, about a Martian who has reached Earth but is unable to return to his native planet. where mankind has attained a superior level of communist civilization.

Edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites
Translated by Charles Rougle
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1984
ISBN 0253173507, 9780253173508
257 pages

Reviews: Andy Cunningham (Socialist Review), Paul Josephson (Technology and Culture).

Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)

L’Étoile rouge (French, 1913-14, HTML, added on 2014-3-27)
Red Star (English, trans. Charles Rougle, 1984)
Der rote Planet (German, undated, HTML, added on 2014-3-27)

See Monoskop wiki for further writings of Bogdanov.

Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince (1532–) [IT, EN, RO, FR, CZ, DE, PT, SK, ES]

“Here is the world’s most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince … a king … a president. When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion. Today, this small sixteenth-century masterpiece has become essential reading for every student of government, and is the ultimate book on power politics.”

Wikipedia

Il Principe (Italian, ed. Sálvio Marcelo Soares, 2009)
The Prince (English, trans. Luigi Ricci, 1903/1921)
Principele (Romanian, trans. Sorin Ionescu [pseudonym of Nina Façon], 1943, added on 2014-9-3), 1999 edition
Le prince (French, trans. Jean-Marie Tremblay, 1962)
The Prince (English, trans. James B. Atkinson, 1976/2008)
The Prince (English, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, 1985/1998, blanked out sections repaired on 2018-9-1 via Nathan Hoepner)
Vladař‎ (Czech, trans. Josef Hajný, 1986)
Der Fürst (German, trans. Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski, 1990)
O Príncipe (Portuguese, trans. Maria Julia Goldwasser, 1990/2001)
Vladár (Slovak, trans. Pavol Koprda and Blahoslav Hečko, 1992)
The Prince (English, trans. Peter Bondanella, 2005)
O Príncipe (Portuguese, trans. Antonio D’Elia, 2006)
El Príncipe (Spanish, undated)