These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. West describes finding these mean conditions in her travels interspersed with remnants of the admirable peasant cultures of the Balkan peoples. Imperialism, she argues, had created the material and spiritual squalor, and what she interpreted as the distorted gender roles, of some communities in Yugoslavia. West reads this incident as emblematic of the effects of imperial oppression by the Turks, the Austrians, the Italians, the Russians, and the Hungarians over centuries in the Balkans. Although West did not converse with the couple, she felt able to sum up their situation and explain the condition of the cafe’s repast by drawing on Balkan history (894–5). As the man conversed with the hotel-keeper, the woman stood nearby, unable to sit down, with ‘a blue shadow of fatigue’ on her face. The woman had ‘the better part of a plough’ tied to her back while the man ‘went free’. As they sat at a hotel cafe in Prishtina, with elbows ‘on a tablecloth stained brown and puce’ eating ‘chicken drumsticks … meagre as sparrow bones’, a Serbian couple walked towards them, clearly having traveled a great distance.

Urn:oclc:864442781 Scandate 20091208190915 Scanner the end of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her sprawling, compelling, encyclopedic account of traveling through Yugoslavia in the late 1930s, Rebecca West describes a spectacle she and her husband witnessed. OL55278W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 97.99 Pages 1200 Pdf_module_version 0.0.15 Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:1306594553 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 16:53:14 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA107514 Boxid_2 CH120121112-BL1 Camera Canon 5D City Harmondsworth Donor

Black lamb and grey falcon