East and Central European History Writing in Exile 1939−1989 eds. by Maria Zadencka, Andrejs Plakans, and Andreas Lawaty (review) in Ab Imperio 4/2017 pp. 327-330 (original) (raw)
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ILCEA. Revue de l'Institut des Langues et Cultures d'Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie, 2024
This special issue of ILCEA is dedicated to the work that eight exiled researchers have been able to carry out within their new host structures in Grenoble. Coming from different disciplines of the humanities, these works testify to the richness and diversity of the contributions these researchers have made in the field of Slavic studies (and beyond), in literature, history or linguistics.
From Exile to Migrancy: Eastern and Central European Models of Cosmopolitical Writing
Journal of Austrian-American history, 2018
In a comparative reading of Central European authors emigrating to the United States, I analyze the shifting role of the writer in the changing models of migrancy. World War II emigrations were often permanent, and the need to sustain contact with the old country as a repository of traditions turned the old country into a sacrosanct space. Writers were expected to support and reinforce the old country ethos. In post-World War II emigrations, including exiles repressed by communist regimes, a similar need is visible. Émigré writers were expected to assume the role of national bards, politically engaged in the cause of freedom for their compatriots. Reading authors who emigrated to the United States-Henryk Grynberg, Janusz Głowacki, and Dubravka Ugresić-I trace the development of what I propose to call the "cosmopolitical" agenda (a neologism linking cosmopolitanism with politics) in global migrant writing. The distinguishing feature of such cosmopolitical migrant writing from Central Europe is a particularly acerbic and language-driven sense of humor based on a self-deprecating, anarchistic attitude toward reality. They also offer subversive representations of the United States, where this space of freedom for an exile from a communist regime was also a space of oppression, repression, and silencing.
On the periphery: Contemporary exile fiction and Hungary
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021
This article explores the concept of the periphery as a geopolitical and aesthetic category in the works of three exilic writers of Hungarian origin, Agota Kristof, Tibor Fischer, and Zsuzsa Bánk. These three novels, which have not previously been studied in a comparative framework, explore resistance, terror, and trauma in postwar Eastern Europe, mobilizing a set of tropes that portray the limits of everyday life in Hungary during and after the Second World War. Relying on the concept of "peripheral aesthetics", it argues that a close reading of Kristof's The Notebook (Le Grand Cahier [1986]), Fischer's Under the Frog (1992), and Bánk's The Swimmer (Der Schwimmer [2002]) reveals that the peripheral spaces these novels depict are associated both with the geopolitical location of Hungary and with the traumas of the postwar period. The three novels make use of various strategies of peripheral aesthetics which reflect different stages of coping with the collective traumas of the region.
The Chronotope of Exile in the Post-Yugoslav Novel and the Boundaries of Imaginary Homelands
COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA No. 7. Against Homogeneity. Transcultural and Trans-Lingual Strategies in Cultural Production, 2018
Although the chronotopic approach to the novels of exile is almost self-explanatory, the specific features of post-Yugoslav exile narrations evoke a separate chronotopic interpretation. First of all, post-Yugoslav literature is loaded with an additional identity burden as the areas abandoned in the 1990s do not disappear for the exiled writer at a metaphorical level, by turning into a mnemotope, but in the actual breakup of the political entity, whereby the imaginary supranational heritage is transformed into a kind of counterculture, mostly affirmed exactly by the mediation of exile writers. Therefore, return to the once abandoned area often becomes possible only as a return to the past. In this paper, the literary theme of exile will be comparatively followed, starting from the reflective nostalgia in the prose of Dubravka Ugrešić ("The Ministry of Pain"), through global exile which mirrors the history of the relationship between European persecutions and America as an unfair homeland which destroys all identity countenance in the novels of Aleksandar Hemon ("Nowhere Man"; "The Lazarus Project"). This theme will then proceed to the intra-Yugoslav “inherited” exile in the novels of Goran Vojnović ("Chefurs Raus!"; "Jugoslavija, moja dežela" [Yugoslavia, My Homeland]), which, like a curse of the genus, fathers left to their sons. In the texts mentioned above, the chronotope of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotope that includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotopes or motifs, which are fundamental to exile narration. We also encounter these motifs in other genres, but in exile narration they are a pillar of the genre. They are, by nature, chronotopic as they are realised through the binary spatial-temporal categories of presence and absence, affiliation and non-affiliation, anchoring and nomadism. In this paper, I will look at three such chronotope motifs: 1) the motif of a home as a non-place or a place of absence; 2) the motif of the other/mirror country and the other/“mirror” history; 3) the motif of return and travel (by train), which regularly invokes the stereotypical representation of a place and the past.
Displaced History? A New “Regime of Historicity” among the Baltic Historians in Exile (1940s-1960s)
In this article I submit, first, a theoretical argument about the specific nature of history writing in exile, and second, try to test the validity of this argument on the work of Baltic exile historians from 1940s to 1960s, with a particular focus on Estonian exile historiography. The argument consists of the claim that in the situation of exile time becomes one of the main devices of intelligibility and orientation. More specifically, I argue that in exile a new "regime of historicity", a new way of articulating the relationship between the categories of past, present and future, is likely to emerge. To prove this thesis, I discuss three key topics in Baltic exile historiography: first, the writing of general national and Baltic histories for both internal and external consumption, second, the rise of contemporary history and attempts to make sense of the fate of the Baltic States in World War II, and third, new interpretations of Baltic prehistory.