Search

This volume explores the influence of the Socratic legacy in the Russian, East European, and Soviet contexts. For writers, philosophers, and artists, Socrates has served as a potent symbol—of the human capacity for philosophical reflection, as well as the tumultuous (and often dangerous) reality in which Russian-speaking and Soviet intellectuals found themselves. The thirteen chapters include surveys of historical periods and movements (the 18th century, Nietzscheanism, and the “Greek Renaissance” of Russian culture), studies of individual writers and philosophers (Skovoroda, Herzen, Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Bely, Narbut, and many others), and investigations of Socratic subtexts (e.g., in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita and Nosov's Neznaika series for children). The volume concludes with a “Socratic Texts” section of new translations. The plurality of these topics demonstrates the continued relevance of the Socratic myth not only for Russian-speaking culture, but for the world.

What is'Europe'in academic discourse?While Europe tends to be used as shorthand, often interchangeable with the'West', neither the'West'nor'Europe'are homogeneous spaces. Though postcolonial studies have long been debunking Eurocentrism in its multiple guises, there is still work to do in fully comprehending how its imaginations and discursive legacies conceive the figure of Europe, as not all who live on European soil are understood as equally'European'.This volume explores this immediate need to rethink the axis of postcolonial cultural productions, to disarticulate Eurocentrism, to recognise Europe as a more diverse, plural and fluid space, to draw forward cultural exchanges and dialogues within the Global South. Through analyses of literary texts from East-Central Europe and beyond, this volume sheds light on alternative literary cartographies — the multiplicity of Europes and being European which exist both as they are viewed from the different geographies of the global South, and within the continent itself.Covering a wide spatial and temporal terrain in postcolonial and European cultural productions, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, global South studies and European studies.

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory'. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area's contested heritage.

Shows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined the concept of Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, the eastern European dissident writers György Konrád, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera revived the concept to counter a perceived Cold War memory vacuum, aligning themselves with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire. Their observations gave rise to a protracted public debate that posited literature against politics. This debate was both anticipated and expanded upon in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria, and Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma, and Dubravka Ugrešić in (the former) Yugoslavia, all of whom questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.Yvonne Zivkovic draws on space and memory studies to show how Mitteleuropa emerged as an alternate memory discourse that reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective that examines civic values against public tendencies of memory manipulation.

In 1984 Czech writer Milan Kundera published his essay'The Tragedy of Central Europe'in The New York Review of Books, which established the framework for disputes about the space ‘between East and West'for the following 30 years. Even today, the echo of those debates is still audible in spatial narratives. Discussing the way in which literary figures are positioned within new hierarchies such as gender, class, or ethnicity, this volume shows how the space of the imagined Central Europe has been de- and reconstructed. Special attention is paid to the role of the past in shaping contemporary spatial discourse.

The trespassing character of literature is expressed in a fascinating and relevant way—also from the perspective of cultural studies—by those literary works which convey the experience of forming a personal identity and that of otherness in the context of international and intercultural encounters. Those works from East Central European literature which discuss changes of identity especially, such as moving from one language to another, or changing someone's political stance or national commitment, have been selected for this volume. The plethora of studies it contains provides not only different approaches to the borderline problems of forming an identity from a poetic point of view, but extends beyond the terrain of strictly conceived literary criticism: they testify that literature could contribute to individuals overcoming personal and collective traumas. With contributions by Miłosława Borzyszkowska-Szewczyk, Marion Brandt, Ivana Cahová, Iván Halász, Kornélia Horváth, Anikó Kurucz, Orsolya Lénárt, Marcell Mártonffy, Illés Molnár, Magor Plugor, Mihály Riszovannij, Csilla Szalagyi, Eliza Szymańska, Karl Vajda, Paul Videsott, Zoltán Zsávolya.

Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures'is the first published work to offer a variety of alternative perspectives on the literary and cultural Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and emphasize the dialogic relationship between the ‘centre'and the ‘satellites'instead of the traditional top-down approach. The introduction of the Soviet cultural model was not quite the smooth endeavour that it was made to look in retrospect; rather, it was always a work in progress, often born out of a give-andtake with the local authorities, intellectuals and interest groups. Relying on archival resources, the authors examine one of the most controversial attempts at a cultural unification in Europe by providing an overview with a focus on specific case-studies, an analysis of distinct particularities with attention to the patterns of negotiation and adaptation that were being developed in the process.

Ein Vierteljahrhundert nach den demokratischen Transformationen in Mittel- und Osteuropa ziehen polnische, österreichische, deutsche, ungarische und tschechische Literaturforscher eine Zwischenbilanz über die Bedeutung dieser politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Veränderungen für die mitteleuropäische Literaturlandschaft. Die in diesem Band versammelten Stimmen gehen der Fragestellung aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven nach: Sie ergründen sowohl die Folgen der «Wende» für das Literaturschaffen (neue poetische Verfahrensweisen und Gattungen, neue Themenbereiche, neue Identitätsentwürfe) als auch die Thematisierungen der «Wende» in den Werken der SchriftstellerInnen aus Mittel- und Osteuropa sowie der ehemaligen DDR.

Auch für den Krimi gilt: Der Westen Europas kennt den Osten selten gut - dennoch ist er von ihm fasziniert. Neben westlichen Krimis werden immer mehr Geschichten aus dem Osten gelesen, die ›dort‹ oder ›hier‹ geschrieben werden. Breslau, Budapest, Kiew, Moskau, Prag, Triest und Zagreb werden zu Krimi-Schauplätzen. Für jede dieser Städte wird eine spezifische Topographie des Verbrechens produziert, die zwischen historischer, mythischer und touristischer Darstellung schwankt. Die Beiträge in diesem Band untersuchen, wie sich Krimiautoren - kritisch oder klischeehaft - mit den Ordnungskomplexen Gewalt, Gerechtigkeit und Moral auseinandersetzen. Diese Themen sind einerseits genretypisch, weisen aber andererseits in Ost- und Mitteleuropa eine wendebedingte Brisanz auf.

This collection of essays aims to recapitulate the state of grotesque poetics in modern and post-modern writing. It concentrates on Central and Eastern Europe, introducing the Western reader to the variety and ingenuity of this region's literary traditions, ranging from German and Russian to Lithuanian and Romanian literatures. At the same time, it seeks to highlight the importance of the grotesque mode of writing in the region. It includes new insights and interpretations of theories on grotesque and Menippean satire including (but not limited to) the works of Mikhail Bakhtin.The historic scope of the volume ranges from the legacies of Nazi dictatorship and exile to the post-communist times, but it is especially focused on the Soviet era. Scholars, not only from Central and Eastern Europe, but also from Great Britain, Ireland, and Turkey, analyze the literary devices of the grotesque, examining the relationship between the socio-political background and subversive representations of the grotesque. Many studies take on a comparative and transnational approach. Alternatively, some studies aim to present important and innovative creators of grotesque texts in greater detail.This book, which features, among others, contributions by Professor Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Chair of Queen Mary College at the University of London; Professor Alexander Ivanitsky of the Russian State University of Humanities; Professor Algis Kalėda of the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore; Professor Peter Arnds of Trinity College, Dublin; and Dr Carmen Popescu of the University of Craiova, Romania, will appeal to a broad academic readership, including both students and professors wanting to discover more about the literary grotesque and modern Central and Eastern European literature and culture.

Les systèmes totalitaires s'étant attaqués en priorité à la mémoire, il a fallu attendre les années quatre-vingt-dix et une situation politique et éditoriale nouvelle dans'l'autre Europe', pour que la littérature contemporaine commence à refléter le passé ou le retrouve enfoui. Ce retour du refoulé prend évidemment une valeur libératoire et renoue les fils d'une histoire et d'une identité occultées. Spécialistes de ces différentes cultures, nos chercheurs présentent un état des lieux sans complaisance.

On se complaît aujourd'hui à parler de la crise de l'Histoire en corrélation avec la crise des idéologies et des valeurs. Ce phénomène est présent dans les littératures est-européennes qui, face à l'histoire officielle, mettent en oeuvre différentes stratégies littéraires (autofiction,mise en scène,déformation grotesque). C'est à travers de grands textes littéraires contemporains (polonais, tchèques, slovaques, bulgares, serbes, hongrois, slovènes, roumains, baltes et sorabes) que les auteurs se sont efforcés de mettre en lumière le rôle crucial de ce dialogue entre fiction et histoire.