“Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-) Communist Literature.” In: Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, ed. D. Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik (Leiden-Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015), ISBN 978-9-004-30384-3, pp. 139-159. (original) (raw)
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literature, trauma and recovery in the czech republic and beyond
What is the relevance of writing through times of political and personal crisis, the methodology behind the creative process of post-experimental texts? This paper looks to answer this question, to define a most ethereal art form by attempting to solidify a world of ideas. As in the case of Kafka"s dark and brooding spaces, the architecture for the narratives of remembering and non-remembering, this thesis will explore the way in which literature sets up grids or spaces, urban and rural, for the psychology of the unconscious to be mapped out. While it is not my particular purpose to unearth or logically calculate the workings of the unconscious, this paper intends to look at pieces of literature and literary criticism that do just this, allowing the works themselves to speak for themselves.
Post-Soviet Contexts and Trauma Studies. In: Slavonica, Volume 17, Number 2, November 2011.
The goal of this article is to consider the agendas that shape the field of post-Soviet cultural studies through an examination of post-Soviet Russian appropriations of the traumatic memory of the Soviet past. Post-Soviet scholarship, in questioning collectivizing constructions of identity, has begun to question its own agendas and cohesion. Parallel with developments in Trauma Studies, post-Soviet scholarship considers the relationship between individual and collective experience while enabling a narrative of self-determination on the part of Soviet subjects and those who study them. By working around the poststructuralist emphasis upon partiality and contingency that has impaired the ability to assert 'an absolute foundation of shared experiences upon which to build an invincible moral stance' (Ball 2000), scholars, contemporary artists and online fora stage interventions that reveal the instability of institutional discourses and reveal the political stakes of discussions about post-Soviet trauma.
Taking Stock: Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research, 2020
This reading of three recent literary texts from Slovakia-the novel Határeset (2008) by Péter Hunčík, the play Holokaust (2012) by Viliam Klimáček, and the collective play Povstanie (2014) by eight authors-utilises postcolonial approaches to explore how the trope of colonialism might be used to analyse Central European identities. It suggests that postcolonialism contributes new methods and instruments to Comparative Literature , not only expanding comparative opportunities but also reframing the questions around which literature is discussed. Postcolonialism is seen as the most important development in Comparative Literature over the last 25 years, bringing new ways for con-ceptualising literariness, interliterary relations, and literary history, as well as culture and identity. It is argued that contemporary literature from Slovakia self-consciously performs postcoloniality, claiming a place in the field of postcolonial literature and overcoming a national paradigm towards both local and European identifications.
2012
There is a new army marching onto the field of contemporary Russian literature: veterans of the recent Chechen Wars. The war veteran as author and/or protagonist has become increasingly popular, bringing to light social issues concerning the wars, including the presence of social disadaptation, a term I will define in this thesis, due to war trauma. This thesis analyzes the appearance of war trauma in contemporary works, connecting themes arising in the literary works to Russian psychological literature written about war trauma from 2000-2011. The first chapter focuses on the works of Arkady Babchenko, Andrei Gelasimov and Denis Butov and examines the similarities and differences in the manifestation of war trauma in their works. In particular, the thesis shows that the protagonists in each examined work all suffer or suffered from war trauma and disadaptation and are at different steps in the process of recovery from trauma. The second chapter will analyze the discourse in Russian psychological literature over the past twelve years, drawing mainly from studies and discussions presented in Military Medical Journal (Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal) and Journal of Psychology (Psikhologicheskii zhurnal). This psychological literature provides insight into the work being done in the field of war trauma today, highlighting similarities and divergences in the specific case of Russian veterans of the Chechen wars. v Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………...…………………………………... iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………… vi entirety of this project, from the very first days of brainstorming to the final product. To my readers, Beth Holmgren and Anna Krylova, for all of their time, help and input to strengthen the quality of this project. To the faculty of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University for providing me with the opportunity to further my language and cultural studies, explore this thesis topic and for the various forms of help and support over the past two years. And to my parents for their unwavering support and encouragement of my endeavors, however diverse or bizarre they may be.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS POST. REVISITING THE TRAUMA OF COMMUNISM IN STYLE
University of Bucharest Review, 2013
This article is part of a larger effort to explain national identity construction as any of four available discourse types informed by as many master tropes. I am looking at Pray for Brother Alexandru, Constantin Noica's memoirs of communist imprisonment in order to show that rhetorical irony and logical/philosophical paradox are the tropological mechanism of coping with the colonial trauma of both Western and Soviet modernization. My discourse-oriented approach (a subjective variant of constructivist theories of nationalism) rests on the premise that (post)communism has been for the Soviet republics and satellite states a " softer " and more complicated form of colonization than that of Third World countries. Noica's use of paradox is complicated by the internal dialogism of his narrative in such a way that it can be made to voice both a radical opposition to communism, capitalism, modern civilization and all received opinion, and also a philosophical contradiction or irony which he uses in order to convert defeat into victory and passivity into action, turning colonial history's victims into victors. Paradox is, therefore, the rhetorical tactic of withstanding the effects of cultural colonization by total acquiescence, of adopting the vocabulary and stance of the colonial oppressor only to undermine and alter its very essence.
Mediating Historical Responsibility: Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures, 2024
The chapter focuses on three texts devoted to articulating personal memories of “difficult pasts” of Central and Eastern European societies: Herta Müller’s 2009 Atemschaukel [The Hunger Angel (2012)], a portrait of the Gulag detainment of a fictional character based on factual accounts of several Romanian Germans, including the author’s mother; Katja Petrowskaja’s 2014 Vielleicht Esther [Maybe Esther (2019)], an attempt at reconstructing the author’s family’s experiences during the Holocaust in Poland, Ukraine, and Austria; and Maria Stepanova’s 2019 Памяти памяти [In Memory of Memory (2021)], a portrayal of the difficulty of articulating a family narrative of the author’s Jewish Russian ancestors through tsarism, National Socialism, and Communism. These three texts belong to a boom of testimonies of both victimisation by and involvement in twentieth-century dictatorships and totalitarianisms that marks twenty-first-century literatures from Central and Eastern Europe. They portray complicity with Nazi occupation, Stalinist, Soviet, or other terror both in contemporaries and in their subsequent silence and repression. What the three texts have in common is that they all address the question that the boom raises: whence the interest in past complicities now?
Cristina Șandru, “Complicities and Resistance: the ‘Overcoded Fictions’ of East-Central Europe”
The paper will delineate briefly the complex trajectories of complicity and resistance in the post-1945 cultures of East-Central Europe, with particular focus on literary and filmic modes (from documentary realism to dystopian vision, from historiographic metafiction to magical realism and black humour). Its main focus will be the distinct but interrelated types of what I have termed ‘overcoded fiction’ – i.e. texts which centre on an ‘absent cause’ that cannot be openly expressed in words, and whose gravitational centre rests on the significant silences and implicit statements that inhabit their visible textual surface. The interpretive framework will borrow from and build on postcolonial reading practices, particularly on their thematization of mimicry, liminality, ambiguity and textual ambivalence, appropriating the critical paradigms from which they emerged and adapting them to the communist/post-communist context. Reflecting the indistinct cultural borderlines of the colonial/ postcolonial model, postcommunism will not be restricted to a post-1989 ‘transition’ space, but will define a range of cultural practices that Havel had called post-totalitarian, and which emerged as a response to communist ideological colonisation both before and after the nominal fall of communist political regimes.
The persisting trauma of dictatorship in the fictions of helen dunmore and svetlana alexievich
ПРАКТИКИ И ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ. ТОМ 7 (1), 2022
This article presents a comparative study of fictional representation of one type of collective trauma – the trauma of dictatorship. Two contemporary writers – the English Helen Dunmore and the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich – explore the spirit of the Soviet post-war years. Dunmore fictionalizes the historical fact – the infamous “Doctors’ Plot”, using documentary evidence, while Alexievich documents live narrative, turning living memory into document. Both writers explore the mechanism of dictatorial suppression resulting in mass trauma; its major tool being fear in various forms. The traumatic discourse in both novels is shown as disrupted, silenced and distorted, while such defence mechanisms as displacement, acceptance, dissociation, humility, introjection, repression and rationalization are reenacted trough the narrative and plot.
Voicing Memories, Unearthing Identities, Studies in the Twenty-First-Century Literatures of Eastern and East-Central Europe, 2023
In the region known as Eastern and East-Central Europe, the framework provided by memory studies became highly valuable for understanding the overload of interpretations and conflicting perspectives on events during the twentieth century. The trauma of two world wars, the development of collective consciousness according to national and ethnic categories, stories of the trampled lands and lives of people, and resistance to the rule of authoritarian and totalitarian terrors—these trajectories left complex layers of identities to unfold. The following volume addresses the issue of identity as a pivot in studies of memory and literature. In this context, it addresses the question of cultural negotiation as it took shape between memory and literature, history and literature, and memory and history, with the help of contemporary authors and their works. The authors take the literature of countries such as Estonia, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia as the point of departure, and explain its significance in terms of geographical, theoretical, and thematic perspectives.