Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in the summer of 1812 was his last and greatest effort to secure the French imperium in continental Europe. It resulted in war on a colossal scale and produced results diametrically opposite to those the French emperor wished to attain. This six-month long campaign furnished numerous episodes of triumph and hardship, transcendent courage and wanton depravity, but it offered many military lessons as well. In the grandeur of its conception, its execution, and its abysmal end, this war had no analogy until the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. The campaign had a profound impact on political situation in Europe. Its direct result was the general uprising against Napoleon in northern Germany and the complete overthrow within one year of the French imperium in Central Europe.

In the first half of this constellation, Alyssa Quint and Michael Steinlauf bring us from the arrival of Jews in Poland through to the nineteenth century, the explosion of Jewish culture after 1905, when Russia relaxed its laws on cultural production, and the Second World War when the Jewish population was decimated in the Holocaust. While some histories ignore postwar Jewish theatre in Poland, this essay demonstrates its continued presence despite waves of emigration in response to multivalent anti-Semitic social and political factors and the re-engagement with Jewish history and identity in the new millennium. Martynas Petrikas then offers a detailed analysis of Polish theatre in Vilnius, a city that he argues was central to the formation of mythogenic narratives for Lithuanians, Poles, Belarusians and Jews. This reveals the city as the site of a dynamic interweaving of performance cultures.