This book is a celebration. It praises the many innovative aspects of Irina Sandomirskaja’s contributions to a variety of fields in the humanities and Slavic studies, in particular through the numerous colleagues who mirror the impact of her work in their own research and thought. As such, this celebration is also an expression of academic gratitude and a gesture of friendship.

The present article proposes a reflection on the relation between music and language setting out from the experience of listening to words and listening to music. It relies to a certain extent upon an existential-phenomenological approach and develops the distinction between the sounding of sounds (sounding words) and the sound of sounding (musical sounds). From this distinction, a redefinition of rhythm is suggested based on the experience of listening and on the close listening to some pieces of music.

Departing from a reading of the Black Notes, I will present and discuss Heidegger’s apocalyptical vision at the basis of his concept of the History of Being. I will follow his figuration of the end as endless end and its relation to the thoughts of the other beginning as the main point in his conflictive relation to theology and Christianity and compare to his later thoughts on the end, presented in the later essay about the end of philosophy and the task of thinking. This discussion about the Apocalypse of Heidegger is in my view an important path to understand both his Anti-Semitism and anti-Christianism. © The Author(s) 2017.

In this article, a discussion about memory in exile is presented that takes up the thesis that exile is a condition of post-existence and afterness. The main claim is that exile is not only existence after a cut and separation but is an existing as afterness, in a "present tension" of being with the without and without a with. It reveals a sense of the present and of presence as multi-directed movements, as clusters of echoes and delayings. In exile, memories are not the continuous simultaneity of double images but are rather "photisms," shimmering between images, the coming and going between languages, experiences, a longing back and forth. Exilic memory is the experience that bears witness to the present as the movement of presencing, of appearing while sliding away.

The 'end of the world' opens up philosophical questions concerning the very notion of the world, which is a fundamental element of all existential, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. Is the 'end of the world' for us 'somebody's' death (the end of 'being-in-the-world') or the extinction of many or of all (the end of the world itself)? Is the erosion of the 'world' a phenomenon that does not in fact affect the notion of the world as a fundamental feature of all existential-ontological inquiry?

This volume examines the present state of these concerns in philosophy, film and literature. It presents a philosophical hermeneutics of the present state of the world and explores the principal questions of the philosophical accounts of the end of the world, such as finality and finitude. It also shows how literature and cinema have ventured to express the end of the world while asking if a consequent expression of the end of the world is also an end of its expression.