Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Facing the East in the West

138

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Facing the East in the West Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture

Edited by

Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker and Sissy Helff

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover Image: The images reproduced on the cover are used with kind permission by the following organisations and individuals: The Romanian Cultural Centre, London; Bridging Arts/I Packed This Myself, UK; Kerstin Fest; Barbara Korte; Eva Ulrike Pirker. Realisation: Georg Zipp. Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3049-7 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3050-3 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Barbara Korte Facing the East of Europe in Its Western Isles: Charting Backgrounds, Questions and Perspectives

1

East and West: Mirrorings Elisabeth Cheauré Infinite Mirrorings: Russia and Eastern Europe as the West’s “Other”

25

Mike Phillips Narratives of Desire – A Writer’s Statement

43

Christiane Bimberg ‘A glimpse behind the scenes’, ‘trying to capture the very soul of things Russian’: Literary Representations of Intercultural East-West Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes

49

Kapka Kassabova From Bulgaria with Love and Hate: The Anxiety of the Distorting Mirror (A Writer’s Perspective)

67

Two Poems Kapka Kassabova Our Names Long and Foreign The Travel Guide to the Country of Your Birth

80 81

Journeys, Encounters, Cultural Translations Elmar Schenkel To Russia with Love: Maurice Baring (1874-1945)

85

vi Dirk Wiemann A Russian Romance: 1930s British Writers as Wishful Participants in the Soviet Revolution

95

Sissy Helff From Euphoria to Disillusionment: Representations of Communism and the Soviet Union in Arthur Koestler’s The Invisible Writing

111

Eva Ulrike Pirker The Unfinished Revolution: Black Perceptions of Eastern Europe

123

Cinzia Mozzato Looking Eastwards: Borders and Border-Crossing in the Work of Ken Smith

145

A Play in One Act Mike Phillips You Think You Know Me But You Don’t

163

Stereotypes: Staying Power and Subversion Vedrana Veliþkoviü Balkanisms Old and New: The Discourse of Balkanism and Self-Othering in Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries and Inventing Ruritania

185

Michael McAteer A Troubled Union: Representations of Eastern Europe in Nineteenth-Century Irish Protestant Literature

205

Jonas Takors ‘The Russians could no longer be the heavies’: From Russia with Love and the Cold War in the Bond Series

219

Wolfgang Hochbruck, Elmo Feiten and Anja Tiedemann ‘Vulchanov! Volkov! Aaaaaaand Krum!’: Joanne K. Rowling’s “Eastern” Europe

233

vii

Nadia Butt Between Dream and Nightmare: Representation of Eastern Diaspora in Eastern Promises

245

Susanne Schmid Taking Embarrassment to Its Extremes: Borat and Cultural Anxiety

259

Martin Hermann Immigrants, Stereotypes and the New Ireland: Czech Identity in and in Response to the Film Once

275

Christian Schmitt-Kilb Gypsies and Their Representation: Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green

293

Polish Identities in Perspective: Accession – Integration – Perception Joanna Rostek and Dirk Uffelmann Can the Polish Migrant Speak? The Representation of “Subaltern” Polish Migrants in Film, Literature and Music from Britain and Poland

311

Przemysáaw Wilk Images of Poles and Poland in The Guardian, 2003-2005

335

Marie-Luise Egbert “Old Poles” and “New Blacks”: The Polish Immigrant Experience in Britain

349

(Re-)Visiting Eastern Spaces in Contemporary British Fiction Corina Criúu British Geographies in the Eastern European Mind: Rose Tremain’s The Road Home

365

viii

Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz West Faces East: Images of Eastern Europe in Recent Short Fiction

381

Michael Szczekalla ‘Under Western Eyes’: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare and Carl Tighe

397

Ingrida Žindžiuvienơ Images of Lithuania in Stephan Collishaw’s Novels

411

Claudia Duppé Tourist in Her Native Country: Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name

423

Doris Lechner Eastern European Memories? The Novels of Marina Lewycka Interview with Marina Lewycka

437 451

Notes on Contributors

461

Index

469

Acknowledgements

For her invaluable help in editing this volume, we would like to thank Katja Bay. The conference from which this book emerges was generously supported. A literary evening with Kapka Kassabova and Mike Phillips as well as a series of film screenings were hosted by the Freiburg Haus für Film und Literatur. Our special thanks go to Stefanie Stegmann of the Literaturbüro Freiburg, the crew of the freiburger film forum and Hans Steiner of the Büro für Migration und Integration Freiburg. We are indebted to the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding the academic programme.

The Editors

Barbara Korte

Facing the East of Europe in Its Western Isles: Charting Backgrounds, Questions and Perspectives 1. (Re-)Encountering the East 2009 witnessed the celebration of two anniversaries with significance for how the “West” used to face the European “East”: In 1989, the series of revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, epitomised in the fall of the Berlin Wall, marked the climax of a process during which the Iron Curtain1 had been gradually raised. The Cold War had finally ended, and with it a period in which the world was neatly bisected into ideological hemispheres. Another twenty years earlier, in 1969, man’s first step on the moon had still been considered a major triumph of Western technology and world views over the Eastern bloc. Today, Russian spacecraft take wealthy Western tourists into space. Only two decades since the opening of old borders, East-West relations have undergone considerable change. The present volume, which unites contributors with “Western” and “Eastern” backgrounds, sets out to consider this change, as well as the continuities of meaning(s) which the East – a notoriously shifting signifier – has long had for the West. Its special focus is on Britain as a Western country that has engaged with Eastern Europe for centuries in diverse ways and as a contact zone. As others have noted before, the European East has always been a construct of the imagination more than a geographical fact. While the British Isles are actually situated in the far West of the European continent, the “Easts” with which this book is concerned are sometimes more westerly located than some capitals of the so-called “West”, which is itself another construct, of course. The Western invention of Eastern Europe as “other” originates, as Larry Wolff has pointed out, not in the Cold War, but much earlier: ‘It was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other half in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment’2 – an 1 2

The term was famously coined by Winston Churchill in 1946. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p.4. Representations of the eighteenth century are thus different in quality from those of the Renaissance, when Russia in particular was already depicted in travel writing. For a selection cf. Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. by Jack Beeching (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp.60-66. On the representation of Russia in Shakespeare’s time cf. also Daryl W. Palmer, Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For the wider context cf. also An-

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age, that is, which defined its own progressive “civilisation” against other cultures’ alleged barbarism and backwardness. Ever since, the West has tended to speak about “Eastern Europe” in highly general and often crude terms, as in the extremes of cold-war rhetoric when more precise knowledge about the East was neither desired nor opportune: ‘A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,’ Churchill observed, and that shadow too was cast upon the map, darkening the lands behind the iron curtain. In the shadow it was possible to imagine vaguely whatever was unhappy or unpleasant, unsettling or alarming, and yet it was also possible not to look too closely, permitted even to look away – for who could see through an iron curtain and discern the shapes enveloped in shadow? […] Throughout the Cold War the iron curtain would be envisioned as a barrier of quarantine, separating the light of Christian civilization from whatever lurked in the shadows, and such a conception was all the more justification for 3 not looking too closely at the lands behind.

Even today, in a “free Europe”, the West is often still blind to the many differences of and within the “East”: the historical and cultural distinctions between the old and new countries of Central Europe, the Balkans, the Baltic, Russia – or the (former) German Democratic Republic, for that matter. However, it is hard to overlook that, since the 1990s, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the cessation of Soviet influence over its former satellite states has resulted in dramatic change, for the better and the worse, and not only in these countries themselves. From being a “margin” and an “other” to the West, some countries of the old East have moved westward in terms of ideology and political bonding, and this was also the direction taken by many people from the former Eastern bloc, a considerable number of whom moved to Europe’s far-western Isles. They came as exiles and refugees, notably from the wars in Former Yugoslavia, an early disaster area of the “new Europe”, but most frequently, especially since 2004, as economic migrants and from the so-called accession eight (A8) countries. In Britain, like in other countries receiving these migrants, their presence has had a considerable impact on recent debates about integration, human rights, citizenship, cultural diversity and national identity. This impact is fundamental for the make-up of British society and goes beyond the more scandalous manifestations of new Eastern presences noted in media headlines, such as the Russian Mafia and its traffickings, Russian oligarchs who own English football clubs and newspapers (the Evening Standard), or the post-cold-war activities of secret services, such as the poisoning with radioactive material of Putin’s opponent Alexander Litvinenko in the heart of the British capital.

3

drew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). Wolff, pp.1f.

Charting Backgrounds, Questions and Perspectives

3

Not only Easterners move west, however. In the other direction, Westerners have been newly attracted by an East now easily accessible for travel as well as for Western capital, and there has been renewed interest in Eastern culture(s), both past and present. The Royal Shakespeare Company, for instance, launched a special Revolutions season in the summer of 2009, intended as A Celebration of Theatre in Russia and the Former Soviet Union. It was proclaimed, in the company’s promotional leaflet, as a new chapter in the RSC’s historic relationship with this daunting, great, paradoxical nation. Join us to explore the breadth of Russian culture through a dynamic series of events. Hear talks and debates with leading cultural commentators and practitioners, listen to readings of work from new and established Russian dramatists, see the latest in visual arts and experience Late Night Young Russia, an explosive mix of words, music and breakdancing.

Indeed, given the new political and cultural constellations, the former “East” and its developments since 1989 have re-entered the Western imagination with vigour, but there are earlier instances of intensive interest of British intellectuals in the cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, which often entailed extensive travel: Maurice Baring was an important intermediary between Russia and Britain early in the twentieth century (see ELMAR SCHENKEL’s article);4 the “red” 1930s saw the British left visiting and commenting about Soviet Russia as “wishful participants” (see DIRK WIEMANN’s contribution), while other sojourners became disillusioned by their experience of socialism in the real, like Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler (see SISSY HELFF’s investigation). As CINZIA MOZZATO points out, Ken Smith (1938-2003), a poet of the English North, was intrigued by Eastern Europe as a border region – of landscapes and memories – long before its borders became more permeable. That the shifting meanings of Eastern Europe depend on those who encounter it also becomes clear when one looks at the long tradition of black travel to and writing about the East (see EVA ULRIKE PIRKER’s article). The disintegration of the Eastern bloc and the westward movement of Eastern Europe, however, significantly intensified such interest and have since challenged the entire spectrum of contemporary British culture: theatre, cinema, the visual arts,5 poetry and fiction. Accordingly, representations of Europe’s post-communist East, and migration from this East, display a wide 4

5

Baring was a chief promoter of Russian literature in the West. He is credited with having discovered and introduced Anton Chekhov for the British literary audience. His Landmarks in Russian Literature appeared in 1910, An Outline of Russian Literature in 1914 and The Oxford Book of Russian Verse in 1924. Polish-born installation artist Goshka Macuga was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008. Cf. also a project on migration from Eastern Europe by the Bridging Arts organisation: I Packed This Myself.

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range of modes, styles and perspectives, hovering between inside and outside views, uninformed clichés and real knowledge of the countries and people concerned.6 It is no coincidence that the British Council-sponsored New Writing series has featured a significant number of short stories about Eastern Europe since the 1990s (presented by BARBARA PUSCHMANN-NALENZ). British novelists as diverse as Rose Tremain, Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian McEwan or Stephan Collishaw have engaged with the post-1989 East and its memories, using the perspectives of Western visitors as well as Eastern characters (see the readings offered by MICHAEL SZCZEKALLA, CORINA CRIùU and INGRIDA ŽINDŽIUVIENƠ). In the field of historical fiction, James Meek has received the critics’ acclaim for The People’s Act of Love (2005), a novel set in Siberia during the Russian Revolution and praised as ‘a truly Russian novel, with its huge horizons’.7 With a fictional world peopled by escaped convicts, religious fanatics and a stranded division of the Czech army, Meek presents the revolutionary period from quite a different angle than older and more popular narratives such as Doctor Zhivago (1957), which most Westerners will know not from Boris Pasternak’s novel but its adaptation by British director David Lean (1965). The readings of recent fiction about Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans assembled in the present volume suggest that the East, for many writers in Britain today, is a space not only to be re-discovered, but also a mirrorspace that helps the West to complement and destabilise its conceptions about itself, its stereotypes about the East, and its ideas about Europe and the European cultural heritage. Such engagement with West and East, and their meanings for each other, has an eminent – and significantly transnational – predecessor in English literature, as CHRISTIANE BIMBERG reminds us: Joseph Conrad was born as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowki of Polish parents in a Russian-dominated Ukraine. His novel Under Western Eyes (1911), with its pronounced technique of juxtaposing the optics of West and East and thus subverting stereotypes that both sides have of each other, is paradigmatic in our context.

6

7

For a discussion of other writers and works than presented in the present book cf. a number of essays in When the World Turned Upside-Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. by Kathleen Starck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009) and in Literary Views on Post-Wall Europe: Essays in Honour of Uwe Böker, ed. by Christoph Houswitschka and others (Trier: WVT, 2005). Anthony Beevor qtd. on the cover of the paperback edition: James Meek, The People’s Act of Love (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005).

Charting Backgrounds, Questions and Perspectives

5

2. Stereotypes and Counter(ing) Stereotypes While there is certainly a tendency in contemporary British writing to follow in Conrad’s footsteps and to destabilise fixed patterns of representation, old shadows linger on, to borrow Larry Wolff’s metaphor. As critics concerned with “Balkanism” in particular have pointed out,8 Eastern Europe as imag(in)ed in Britain and other Western cultures today is still burdened by accumulations of clichéd images, some positive, more negative, but always inscribing the European East as an essential “other” to the West. Even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter world draws on some of these clichés (see the contribution by WOLFGANG HOCHBRUCK, ELMO FEITEN AND ANNA TIEDEMANN), the most blatant of which reflect the cold-war binarisms found, for instance, in Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love (1957). Here the “Russians” demonstrate Eastern authoritarianism, militarism, danger and extreme ugliness, all of them embodied, quite unappealingly, by the grotesque Comrade Colonel Rosa Klebb, an a-sexual creature with a figure like a cello, ‘pale, thick chicken’s skin’ and ‘big peasant’s ears’.9 The novel is compared in this volume by JONAS TAKORS to its later film adaptation, which already toned down some of the worst stereotypes.10 In post-communist thrillers such as David 8

9

10

The term refers to a Western perception of the Balkans and was coined in analogy to Edward Said’s notion of “orientalism”. Cf. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) and Vesna Goldsworthy, ‘Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization’, in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. by Dušan I. Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp.25-38. Cf. also the discussion of Balkanism in Vedrana Veliþkoviü’s article in this volume. Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp.63f. However exaggerated such descriptions seem, they have staying power. As late as 1989, a book by one of Britain’s most popular travel writers, Eric Newby, was advertised in terms of the old rhetoric. The blurb for the paperback edition of The Big Red Train Ride (London: Picador, originally published in 1978) promises a travel adventure heightened by the strictures and oddities of Soviet society: ‘Terrorised by awesome Soviet conductresses, hindered at every station by officialdom and bureaucracy, and hampered by the lack of palatable food and drink, Eric Newby’s party nonetheless heroically completed the journey from Moscow to Nakhodka in 1977.’ On British cold-war films cf., for instance, Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London: Tauris, 2001). In Chapter 3 of this study, ‘And Never the Twain Shall Meet’, Shaw notes the strict bipolarity established in British cold-war films: ‘Scores of mainstream feature productions released during the 1950s and 1960s showed the public what they were fighting for and against in the conflict. [...] Together, these films conveyed an array of negative and positive images, seamlessly contrasting Western “virtues” with Eastern “vices”. In the process, they helped to characterise the Cold War as a bipolar phenomenon fought between sides whose mores, values and governmental systems represented mutually exclusive ways of life.’ (pp.63f.)

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Cronenberg’s 2007 film Eastern Promises (discussed by NADIA BUTT), the image of the dangerous East is transferred to the Russian Mafia, but in modern guise, the film also reprises a basic fear evoked in the Gothic fantasia of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – that something evil from the East will infiltrate Britain. Stoker’s novel, whose very beginning is famously composed of Jonathan Harker’s border-crossing from the West into a highly unfamiliar East (for which the Danube in Budapest forms a “natural” border11), is a key text in discussions of Western imaginations of the East, and it is not unique. By the late nineteenth century, Eastern Europe had become a site of projection for all kinds of fears and desires emerging from Western modernity. Anthony Hope’s Ruritania, located somewhere east of Dresden in The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), is designed as an old-fashioned counter-world to a contemporary English present baffled by the Woman Question, in which Hope’s hero is challenged, right in the first sentence, by a resolute woman: ‘“I wonder when in the world you’re going to do anything, Rudolf?”, said my brother’s wife.’12 There is nothing to be done by the English gentleman in Britain, but Ruritania gives him scope for manly adventure and true love with a “womanly” woman. Decades later, a feminist writer used the East for other fantasies, but still in terms of a clichéd otherness. When Angela Carter wrote her magic-realist novel about the late Victorian period, Nights at the Circus (1984), she adopted the view of the East as a wild space where strange things may happen. Carter takes her protagonists, a winged circus artiste and her American admirer, from London to Siberia, and only there, in an extreme Eastern space peopled by convicts and shamans, can they find the freedom to discover the selves they were denied to develop in the West: ‘[W]e were translated into another world’, narrates Fevvers, ‘thrust into the hearts of limbo to which we had no map.’13 The James Bond films are a good example for how some of the West’s most blatant stereotypes about the East turned into caricature long before the Eastern bloc began to crumble. But even as caricatures, or in satirical and humorous presentation, stereotypes can still make an impression and be perpetuated. Perhaps the least offensive use of stereotypes is a satirical one that lashes out against both East and West, as in Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange (1983), a novel written a few years before the collapse of the so11

12 13

‘The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.’ Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.1. Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda (New York: Airmont, 1967), p.11. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage, 2006), p.265.

Charting Backgrounds, Questions and Perspectives

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cialist world. Himself a frequent traveller for the British Council, Bradbury in this novel depicts the mishaps of an academic tourist in the People’s Republic of Slaka, a fictitious nation in Central-Eastern Europe which Bradbury invented complete with its own language. The unworldly hero, Dr Petworth from Bradford college, struggles through a space that is disconcertingly strange from the very moment he crosses the Slakian border (predictably, one of the novel’s epigraphs is taken from Dracula) and is intimidated by a female customs official of the Colonel Klebb type: The books are what the lady attends to first. She lifts them and looks at each one: Chomsky on Transformational Grammar; Lyons on Chomsky; Chomsky on Chomsky; Chatman on socio-linguistics; Fowler on Chomsky and Lyons and Chatman. ‘Porno?’ she asks. ‘Na, na,’ says Petworth. ‘Scienza, wissenschaft.’ ‘Ha,’ says the lady, lifting one of the books (Fowler’s, actually) and looking doubtfully through it; then she lifts another and inspects it page by page. ‘Ka,’ she says, handing it out to Petworth. There is an illustration of writhing human organs. ‘It’s a speech act,’ cries Petworth. ‘The mouth engaged in a speech act.’ ‘Ha,’ says the lady, setting the books aside, suddenly seeming to find them dull. Instead she turns her attention to the scattered texts of Petworth’s own lectures. [...] It is probably not one of Petworth’s best, a well-worn, anodyne piece entitled ‘The Eng14 lish Language as a Medium of International Communication.’

Educational Travel – this time in the other direction – and the failure of international communication also carries the satire in the mock-documentary Borat (2006, dir. by Larry Charles). In this internationally successful film, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, of Ali G. fame, sent up both ‘The Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan’, a fictitious agglomeration of Balkanist stereotypes, and the equally glorious nation of George W. Bush’s America (both sides took offence). As SUSANNE SCHMID points out, Baron Cohen’s aggressive humour exposed the worst stereotypes of his Western interviewees, but also hurt the sensitivities of Kazakhs and Romanians (Romania being the country where the film was actually shot with extras from the Romany community). The same satirical projection of stereotypes on a fictitious Eastern European country occurs in the successful (Australian) mock travel-guide Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry (2004) (see fig.1 on p.27 and the comments by KAPKA KASSABOVA and ELISABETH CHEAURÉ). As emerges from the preceding remarks, travel and travel literature are prominent sites for negotiating relationships between and mutual perceptions of East and West. For much of the twentieth century, more Westerners had opportunities to travel east than Easterners had opportunities to travel west. The reverse ratio applies to travel with the purpose of settlement, i.e. migration.

14

Malcolm Bradbury, Rates of Exchange (London: Arena, 1984), pp.41f. Bradbury returned to Eastern European settings in Why Come to Slaka (1986) and Doctor Criminale (1992).

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3. Migrant Figures and Migrant Voices It was in the late nineteenth century that the first major wave of migrants from Eastern parts of Europe reached Britain. It has become fashionable to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a novel expressing imperialist anxieties of reverse colonisation.15 But to a greater extent this novel was also a reaction to matters connected with the East: the presence of Russian anarchists in London,16 and British concerns about the Eastern Question (i.e. how the Ottoman parts of Eastern Europe would develop after the predictable fall of the Ottoman Empire).17 The latter was an issue which, as MICHAEL MCATEER points out, could also be read in light of the Irish Question of the day. Dracula also responded to the waves of Jewish migrants who, persecuted in the Tsar’s empire, began to arrive in England from the early 1880s.18 They settled, among other places, in London’s East End (which they began to abandon in the 1960s, making room for the rapidly growing Bangladeshi community). These Jewish migrants “easternised” the East End, looking and sounding distinctly foreign with their traditional dress and earlocks, and speaking Yiddish. They seemed exotic, strange and oriental, just like the world beyond the Danube tinged with Turkish elements which Jonathan Harker enters at the beginning of Dracula. Their foreignness was represented even by one of their own community: The writer Israel Zangwill was born in London in 1864 to Eastern European migrants; his inside views of Jewish life in Whitechapel, especially in Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892), were a popular contribution to the East End fiction of his time. Zangwill portrayed the Jewish community with sympathy but also confirmed nonJewish perceptions of Eastern-Jewish life as “other”. The ‘Proem’ of Children of the Ghetto not only identifies these ‘children’ as social abjects living in poverty, but also associates them with another place and time. The Jews in modern London’s East End, Zangwill’s text suggests (in a language that itself sounds outlandish), belong to a double alterity of Orient and Middle Ages: 15

16

17

18

Cf. Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33 (1990), 621-645; for a critique of Arata’s position cf. William Hughes, ‘A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.88-102. Cf. Jimmie E. Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in ‘Dracula’ and ‘The Lady of the Shroud’ (London: McFarland, 2006). Cf. Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); chapter 3 is devoted to Dracula. ‘Between 1881 and 1914 some 150,000 Jewish settlers came to Britain for good.’ Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Abacus, 2005), p.229.

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Not here in our London Ghetto the gates and gaberdines of the olden Ghetto of the Eternal City; yet no lack of signs external by which one may know it, and those who dwell therein. Its narrow streets have no speciality of architecture; its dirt is not picturesque. [...] Natheless, this London Ghetto of ours is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality; a world which hides beneath its stony and unlovely surface an inner world of dreams, fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where they were woven, of superstitions grotesque as the cathedral gargoyles of the Dark Ages in which they had birth. And over all lie tenderly some streaks of celestial light shining from the face of the great Lawgiver.19

The Jews depicted by Zangwill eventually gave occasion to the Alien Act of 1905. A member of the Royal Commission preparing the Act, Major W. Evans Gordon, published a book about The Alien Immigrant in 1903. He distinguished the recent wave of migrants from earlier migrants in English history, such as the Huguenots, who ‘became merged in the population’,20 while the Jews kept to themselves and transformed the East End into an EasternEuropean enclave within the British capital: The Hebrew colony, then, unlike any other alien colony in the land, forms a solid and permanently distinct block – a race apart, as it were, in an enduring island of extraneous thought and custom. And the dense crowding in this island is intensified by what may, perhaps, be called the Ghetto habit – a habit due not to any primal tendency of the Jewish people, but to the calamitous conditions under which many of them have lived so long. […] East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town. In the by-streets north and south of the main thoroughfares it is an exception to hear the English language spoken. […] When visiting the towns of Western Russia within the Jewish pale, I was surprised to find myself in the familiar surroundings of the East End. The life, the language, the people, the shops and their contents were the same.21

Later waves of migrants to Britain from Eastern Europe caused less anxiety, and none gave occasion to an Alien Act.22 In the 1930s, Britain accommodated refugees from the Hitler-occupied Continent. Migrants from Hungary, for instance, included cultural practitioners who would soon become influential in Britain, such as publisher André Deutsch, makers of essentially “British” films such as Alexander Korda and Emeric Pressburger, and George Mikes, whose How to Be an Alien (1946) is a classic lampoon of the British national character, even officially used, to its author’s surprise, as 19

20 21 22

Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (London: Heinemann, 1902), p.1. W. Evans Gordon, The Alien Immigrant (London: Heinemann, 1903), p.6. Ibid., pp.6-10. On the history and politics of this migration see European Immigrants in Britain 1933-1950, ed. by Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (München: Saur, 2003); Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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a guidebook for Polish refugees to Britain.23 These Poles were a visible presence in war- and postwar Britain. The Polish government-in-exile was located in London, ‘bringing some three thousand officials and loyalists with it, and settling in South Kensington and Earl’s Court, an area which soon became known as Little Poland.’24 The Poles played a significant role in the deciphering of Hitler’s Enigma machine, and their contingent of pilots in the Royal Air Force downed ten per cent of all shot-down German planes during the Battle of Britain. After the war, more than a hundred thousand Poles stayed in Britain, and although there was some resistance from the trade unions, their integration in areas of labour shortage, for instance in mining and farm work, was comparatively smooth. Many maintained an expatriate identity and preserved family and cultural ties with their home country, intending to return should political conditions in Poland change. As Robert Winder suggests, the sympathetic reception of the Poles in postwar Britain can be explained not only by their active involvement in winning the war, but also the fact that, ‘once the Iron Curtain had descended, [...] there was no possibility that they would be joined by hordes of their countrymen.’25 In the present volume, the cultural production by and representation of Polish migrants to Britain, both of the older, postwar phase and the wave of economic migrants after 1989 is the subject of contributions by MARIE-LUISE EGBERT and DIRK UFFELMANN AND JOANNA ROSTEK,26 who between them cover images of Polish migrants in novels, films, plays and pop music, as well as PRZEMISàAW WILK, who offers a linguistic analysis of The Guardian’s discourse around Poland’s accession to the European Union. That the postwar refugees and exiles from communist Europe would be limited in number also accounts for the supportive reception of refugees who came to Britain in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the end of the Prague Spring in 1968 – while non-white migrants from former British 23

24 25 26

Cf. Mikes’s preface to the twenty-fourth impression of his book in 1958: ‘I expected the English to be up in arms against me but they patted me on the back; I expected the British nation to rise in wrath but all they said, was: “quite amusing”. It was indeed a bitter disappointment. While the Rumanian Radio was serializing (without my permission) How to be an Alien as an anti-British tract, the Central Office of Information rang me up here in London and asked me to allow the book to be translated into Polish for the benefit of those many Polish refugees who were then settling in this country. “We want our friends to see us in this light,” the man said on the telephone. This was hard to bear for my militant and defiant spirit. “But it’s not such a favourable light,” I protested feebly. “It’s a very human light and that is the most favourable,” retorted the official. I was crushed.’ George Mikes, How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp.7f. Winder, p.319. Ibid., p.326. A volume edited by Uffelmann and Rostek, Contemporary Polish Migrant Culture in Germany, Ireland, and the UK is forthcoming (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010)

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colonies, at the same time, were treated with open hostility.27 The situation of East-European political migrants before 1989 also contrasts with today’s more reserved and sceptical attitude of the British towards migrants from the post-communist East. When Former Yugoslavia fell apart – and cooled the euphoria over a liberated East and newly united Europe – Bosnians, Serbs and Kosovans took refuge in a Britain that was implicated in the Balkan wars in political, military and humanitarian terms and thus had to accept them in certain numbers. The Yugoslavian wars and their consequences for Britain gave rise to a significant number of cultural representations from a wave of Bosnia plays in the 1990s to popular film and television productions such as Welcome to Sarajevo (1997, dir. by Michael Winterbottom) and Beautiful People (1999, dir. by Jasmin Dizdar), or an episode of the police procedural Prime Suspect.28 In all three instances, former Yugoslavians are brought to Britain as refugees, and the violence of their civil wars is shown to spill over into British life.29 Far more than by political refugees, however, post-1989 Britain has been affected by (and concerned with) the presence of economic migrants from the former Eastern bloc, especially after several of the countries joined the European Union in 2004. A popular Irish musical film of the year 2006, Once (analysed here by MARTIN HERMANN), presents the friendship and love between a Czech migrant and an Irishman in the genre of romance,30 but Ken Loach’s 2007 feature film It’s a Free World... (one of the examples discussed by ROSTEK AND UFFELMANN), employs social realism to depict a strained and exploitative relationship between a young British “entrepreneur” and Polish migrants that occasionally erupts into violence. 27

28

29

30

This difference is vividly illustrated in a collection of migrants’ views gathered and edited by Jonathon Green in 1989. Cf. Jonathon Green, Them – Voices from the Immigrant Community in Contemporary Britain (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989). Among the interviewees were first-generation migrants from diverse Eastern European Countries, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Mike Phillips was among the Caribbean interviewees. Episode 6, ‘The Last Witness’, was first aired by ITV in two parts in November 2003. Jane Tennison, the Detective Chief Inspector played by Helen Mirren, investigates the murder of a Bosnian refugee and is deeply affected by how immigrants from former Yugoslavia are still haunted by war crimes committed and endured by them. On these and other films cf. also Barbara Korte, ‘Wars and “British” Identities: From Norman Conquerors to Bosnian Warriors. An Overview of Cultural Representations’, in War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain, ed. by Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp.9-24 and Barbara Korte, ‘War and Britishness after 1945: Narrating Bosnia’, Erfurt Electronic Studies in English, 6 (2005) . Ireland’s economic boom, the Celtic Tiger, turned this country, with its own long history of emigration, into a favoured country of immigration for Eastern Europeans.

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The fact that an awareness of “gypsies” has re-surfaced in recent years seems to be linked with a general new scepticism towards economic migration from Eastern parts of Europe. As “unsettled” travellers, Romanies have long been suspect in all European cultures (including those of the East). In Britain, these traditional fears reached a new intensity around the year 2000 when The Sun, as Robert Winder notes in Bloody Foreigners, revived ancient prejudices in its ‘Britain Has Had Enough’ campaign that was directed against an accumulation of beggars in the British capital: ‘It called them “the grasping nomads of Eastern Europe”, which was also reminiscent of the language used against Jews in the 1930s. […] [T]he lack of sympathy for their many misadventures was remarkable. These travellers had walked thousands of miles to escape persecution in Romania and Hungary, wading across rivers and begging for food as they went.’31 The ways in which corrective images of Gypsies are presented in two British novels, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle, is discussed by CHRISTIAN SCHMITT-KILB. Doughty’s own roots lie in the Romany community, which the novel depicts from an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective. Other representations aimed to expose British prejudice against this community include the film Gypo (2006, directed by Jan Dunn), which depicts how a disintegrating working-class family is further disturbed when their daughter befriends a young Romany Czech refugee. Despite all anxieties about new economic migrants and widespread British scepticism of a united Europe (the UK has neither joined the Eurozone, nor signed the Schengen agreement), post-communist migration has had a considerable impact on Britain’s self-image as a multi-ethnic society. The consequences of migration for British society and identity used to be negotiated with a strong focus on the influx from former British colonies.32 Today’s discourse shows an awareness of more varied patterns of migration, contemporary as well as historical. This is reflected, for instance, in the excitement about a play performed in 2009 on the National Theatre’s main stage. In Richard Bean’s satire England People Very Nice,33 migrants are encountered 31 32

33

Winder, p.434. Earlier studies of migration, of course, were also aware of Eastern Europe; see, for instance, Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). And there were also attempts to raise the public awareness of that immigration, for instance in Channel 4’s documentary Passage to Britain (1984), which included episodes on the Jews, Hungarians and Poles alongside episodes on West Indians and Southern Asians. However, at the time it was aired, the series seems not to have made a lasting impact. Richard Bean, England People Very Nice (London: Oberon Books, 2009). Bean wrote a number of state-of-the-nation plays, including The English Game (2008), a play using the cricket metaphor. England People received praise from some critics and members in the au-

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at two time levels. In the present, a group of asylum seekers from Eastern Europe and the Third World wait for a decision regarding their applications for residence in the UK at an immigration detention centre. While waiting, they perform a play within the play about earlier migration to Britain, including that of the nineteenth-century Jews who, according to one reviewer, were portrayed as ‘Fiddler-on-the-Roof caricatures’.34 It seems that whenever immigration is shown on the contemporary British stage, migrants from Eastern Europe now have to be part of the picture. Another recent state-of-thenation play, Testing the Echo (2008) by David Edgar,35 presents a group of characters from various parts of the world that are instructed for their citizenship test or have successfully passed it and are admitted to citizenship ceremonies. They include Albanians, Kosovans and Serbs. Let There Be Love (2008), a play by the black British playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, shows how the new migrants from Eastern Europe meet with the West Indian community, which, now in its second, third and fourth generation, is commonly identified as British. As EGBERT also suggests in this volume, the situation of Polish economic migrants today and their representation in literature, film, music and the press bears a certain resemblance to that of West Indian migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the encounter of old West Indians and new Poles, as performed in Kwei-Armah’s play, has its frictions: The main male character, 66-year-old Alfred Morris, who migrated to Britain from Grenada and has lived in London since 1963, is an embittered old man suffering from terminal cancer. He is estranged from his two daughters and still longs for the wife who deserted him long ago. Alfred seems to hate everyone, white Britons like his son-in-law just as much as his Asian doctor: ‘[Y]ou think dem like we? More West Indian dead in this town from bad advice from Indian than cock does crow’.36 When his daughters hire a young Polish home help for him, this relationship too starts on the wrong foot. Alfred only calls Maria ‘Polish’ or ‘Ms Polish’ at first and hurls all kinds of prejudices at her – many of exactly the kind West Indian migrants had to put up with in the postwar decades. Alfred claims that the Poles are ‘thieving the

34

35

36

dience, but it enraged the Bangladeshi community, some of whose members launched a campaign against the National Theatre. Kate Muir, ‘England People Very Nice Causes a Very English Fuss’, The Times (7 March 2009) [accessed 14 December 2009]. David Edgar, Testing the Echo (London: Nick Hern Books, 2008). Edgar wrote a whole series of plays about Eastern Europe after 1989: Pentecost (1994), The Prisoner’s Dilemma (2001) and The Shape of the Table (2005). All page numbers in parentheses refer to Kwame Kwei-Armah, Plays 1: Elmina’s Kitchen, Fix Up, Statement of Regret, Let There Be Love (London: Methuen Drama, 2009); Let There Be Love on pp.257-330 (here I.i., p.263).

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Englishman job’ (I.ii, p.269), and he insults Maria deeply when he carelessly refers to her as Czech: Alfred Don’t come in my house and order me about! You not in the Czech Republic now, you know! Maria I’m not from Czech… Alfred Same ting, all you people have tendency to autocratic rule. […] Maria […] But what you say very rude. Alfred That you have a tendency to autocratic rule? Maria That I Czech. I hate Czech. I look like Czech to you? We not look all the same, you know. Maria is upset. He see [sic] and calms. Alfred (trying to be warm) Sorry … you’re right. That’s how I feel when people call me Jamaican. (I.iii, p.285)

In turn, Alfred is insulted when Maria suggests that he must have become ‘English’ after more than four decades in London: ‘Don’t you ever call me that!’ (I.ii, p.277) However, Alfred is more at home in England than Maria, and he can help her adjust and improve her English. He empathises with her when she misses home (‘That never changes, no matter how long you here’, I.ii, p.277), and he offers her refuge in his house when she leaves her brutal and womanising Polish boyfriend. Alfred eventually realises that Maria is a better ‘daughter’ to him than his natural, British-born offspring. She shares, for example, his love for the Nat King Cole records he plays on Lillie, his beloved old gramophone, the first piece of furniture he bought after his arrival. By the second act (II.ii), Maria and Alfred have developed an interest in each others’ cultural backgrounds. Alfred reads Polish poetry in translation (by Czesáaw Miáosz), while Maria performs a Calypso for him, mimicking the calypsonian Lord Invader, about whom she has found information on the internet (pp.308f.). Eventually, Maria even arranges Alfred’s reconciliation with his daughters and his former wife, tricking him into a family reunion in Grenada, and, most importantly for him, she helps him commit suicide so that he will not have to die in hospital. Let There Be Love expresses the possibility, already suggested in the title borrowed from Nat King Cole, that migrants of different origins and generations can develop transcultural understanding and will contribute to the further consolidation of Britain as a multi-ethnic society. The play also illustrates how a black British perspective has begun to blend into the discourse about post-Wall Europe. A writer who has played a pioneering role in this field of cultural interaction, MIKE PHILLIPS,37 has contributed his short play 37

For instance with his novel A Shadow of Myself (2000), which is discussed by Ingrid von Rosenberg and Gerd Stratmann, ‘New Thrills: John Le Carré and Mike Phillips Discover the Wild East of Post-Cold War Europe’, in Houswitschka and others, pp.65-82 and Eva Ulrike Pirker, ‘Keine weiße Geschichte: Mike Phillips’ Thriller über ein geteiltes und vereintes Eu-

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You Think You Know Me But You Don’t (2005) to this volume. PHILLIPS wrote this monologue of a Romanian migrant from the conviction that the “new Europe” challenges English literature to struggle for platforms from which the coming-into-being of a new European identity can be explored. British writers with a postcolonial background may indeed have a special role to play in this process, but a major contribution is made by migrant voices from the East, both second-generation, i.e. descending from earlier refugees and expatriates, and first-generation arrivals after 1989. George Szirtes, for instance, who was born in 1948 in Budapest and came to England as a refugee following the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, is an established voice in British poetry with strong intercultural concerns. Not only is Hungary a frequent theme in his poems; Szirtes is also a translator and promoter of Hungarian literature in Britain.38 In the early 2000s, many new writers – in particular women – came to the fore with their first novels and autobiographies: Joanna Czechowska, whose novel The Black Madonna of Derby (2008) is discussed by EGBERT, is the daughter of immigrants from Poland. Vesna Goldworthy’s origins lie in Former Yugoslavia; her memoir Chernobyl Strawberries (2005) is read against her theoretical work on Balkanism by VEDRANA VELIýKOVIû, who demonstrates how Goldsworthy, in her reminiscences, breaks through the stereotypes she uncovered in her academic work and reveals the complexities of belonging to the East and the West, including a difficult process of self-othering. Such acts of othering are also discussed by CLAUDIA DUPPÉ for Kapka Kassabova, who, born and raised in Bulgaria, migrated to New Zealand and currently lives in Edinburgh. However, Kassabova is a keen traveller (and travel writer), and DUPPÉ thus discusses her as a distinctly transnational author and a tourist in her own former homeland. Kassabova’s memoir Street Without a Name (2008) reflects the double perspective of being an insider to communist, but an outsider to post-communist Bulgaria. In her own essay in this volume, KASSABOVA reflects on the situation of an expatriate who faces her country of origin from a distance, but with strong memories of a life once spent there and hopes for the new Bulgaria. Still susceptible to clichés about her former homeland, Kassabova is sensitive to what Bulgarians think about her work as Street Without a Name and some of her recent journalism have provoked a conflicted Bulgarian self-image.

38

ropa A Shadow of Myself, in Geschichte im Krimi: Beiträge aus den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. by Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek (Köln: Böhlau, 2009), pp.241-254. A short discussion of the text is also provided in her contribution to the present volume. On Szirtes cf. also John Sears, ‘Dimensions of the Present Moment: George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages and the Hungarian Experience of 1989’, in Starck, pp.12-23.

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Marina Lewycka is a highly popular voice in Eastern migrant writing. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) became an international bestseller hyped for its humour. The disturbances created when a Ukrainian sex bomb bursts into a settled Ukrainian-British family are witty indeed, and sometimes hilarious. But its high entertainment factor also made the novel precarious in the eyes of some critics since the irony with which stereotypes are employed here – in a manner similar to Borat and Molvanîa – is easily overlooked or forgotten. DORIS LECHNER examines the writing and marketing strategies that turned Lewycka into the figurehead of Eastern-EuropeanBritish writing – and a writer under suspicion of “betraying” her origins and selling them to Western readers long used to stereotypical representations of Europe’s East. This reproach is reminiscent of earlier debates around black and Asian writing and film-making, for which theorists such as Kobena Mercer have observed a special ‘burden of representation’.39 Does Lewycka carry such a burden, and should she have to bear it in the first place? The writer herself, as the interview attached to LECHNER’s article shows, appears to be more concerned about being pigeon-holed for East-European topics, and she significantly departed from this thematic area in her third novel. Nevertheless, a struggle of coming into acceptable representation seems to be a problem that concerns the writing about Eastern Europe and migrants from those regions just as much as it used to concern the postcolonial subject.

4. The “Ballad of East and West” Revisited? Theoretical Approaches and Questions for Further Research As has emerged from the preceding pages, concepts from colonial and postcolonial studies transfer easily to the representation of Eastern Europe and Eastern European migration – especially in the British context where the European East has stood beside, and sometimes amalgamated with the colonial East of the former British Empire.40 The famous beginning of Dracula, or the passage quoted above from Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto illustrate how smoothly an Orientalist vocabulary blends with a rhetoric of Balkanism. The British “Ballad of East and West” appears more complex when its entanglements with migration from Eastern Europe and with other imperialisms (Russian, Austrian and Ottoman) are taken into the picture. Kipling’s Kim (1901), for instance, is set in the struggle between the British and Russians for influence in the Middle East, and in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) a 39

40

Cf. for example, Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text, 10 (1990), 61-78. For this framework of discussion, cf. also Nataša Kovaþeviü, Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008).

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Russian makes a strange appearance in the dark continent, the unnamed ‘son of an arch-priest’, dressed like a harlequin, whom Marlow encounters on his quest for Kurtz.41 As several articles in this volume demonstrate, applying key concepts from (post)colonial studies to representations of Eastern Europe certainly yields results: ROSTEK AND UFFELMANN show how Spivak’s question ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ directs our attention to the different positions from which Polish migration to Britain has been represented over the past few years. Other echoes from postcolonial, migrant and transcultural studies in the present book include notions of alterity, hybridity, cultural hegemony, imperialism of the mind, burdens of (mis)representation, homeland and diaspora, displacement, contact zone, transculturality, border-crossing and others more. However, parallels have to be drawn with caution and awareness of essential differences between a postcoloniality deriving from the former British Empire and the situation in Eastern Europe or of Eastern European migration, as VELIýKOVIû and EGBERT remind us in their discussions of Goldsworthy and Czechowska. Even the concept of Orientalism requires modification in order to be adaptable to the European East. Larry Wolff notes how the construction of Eastern Europe in the West has always entailed a special, paradoxical transculturality of simultaneous ex- and inclusion: ‘Eastern Europe defined Western Europe by contrast, as the Orient defined the Occident, but was also made to mediate between Europe and the Orient. One might describe the invention of Eastern Europe as an intellectual project of Demi-Orientalization.’42 The element of a mutual definition of East and West is taken up by several contributors to this volume: Analyses of new writing (PUSCHMANNNALENZ and SZCZEKALLA) suggest that for British writers today and their readers engaging with Eastern European characters and narrators can be a way of developing new perspectives on the East and of testing their own established points of view. BIMBERG’s reading of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes shows how this novel, whose title already signals its fundamental concern with ways of seeing, depicts Western and Eastern perceptions as mirrors and complements for each other. This is an idea also pursued by SCHENKEL for Maurice Baring’s dialogic interculturality and made particularly prominent by CHEAURÉ, who shows how Russia has traditionally understood itself not only as an other imagined by the West, but as an essential other of the West: a space in which alternatives to the West have been realised and are disturbingly re-projected at the West.

41 42

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p.91. Wolff, p.7.

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CHEAURÉ’s article, like the collaboration of ROSTEK AND UFFELMANN, adds the perspective of Slavonic Studies to this book and indicates the potential of an intensified dialogue between Slavonic and English Studies. It will help to transcend the focus on imagology and alterity which is still dominant in the theoretical and critical discussion of East-West relations to date and shift attention to the dialogicity of the relationship. The cultural relationship between West and East has always been dialogic, and it is especially so at the current cultural moment. Not only does the West represent the East; the East also “writes back”, as ROSTEK AND UFFELMANN show by their inclusion of Polish texts on migration to Britain, and it “reads” back: The work of Eastern expatriates and migrants in Britain reaches audiences in Eastern Europe, sometimes even in translation (see the contributions of EGBERT and KASSABOVA), and the World Wide Web even provides opportunities for transcultural reception studies. HERMANN’s analysis of Czech comments on the film Once, for instance, reveals a mixture of pride in a Czech migrant character portrayed by a Czech actress in an internationally successful film, but also indignation at still being depicted in terms of a clichéd and generalised East as imagined by Western filmmakers. Issues of gender are raised in several contributions, notably by CHEAURÉ, who compares the relationship between Russia and the West to the mutually defining difference of the feminine and the masculine. BUTT emphasises the exploitation of the Eastern female migrant by the male community of the Russian Mafia as shown in Eastern Promises, and VELIýKOVIû pleads for a new direction in the study of Balkanism that pays greater attention to the role of gender, class and race, i.e. a programmatically “intersectional” perspective that has become prominent in sociological studies in recent years. KweiArmah’s Let There Be Love actually puts such intersectionality on the stage, asking the audience to reflect on migration to Britain through characters that belong to different countries of origin, genders and age groups, and who have different memories. Indeed, as several contributions to this book also indicate, memory studies are of great significance in the study of the new EastWest relations. Not only do migrant writers work in the genre of the memoir (Goldsworthy, Kassabova). British writers have also explored the East as a site of memories and histories which the West has yet to recover and reassess – not least in relation to Europe’s cultural heritage and European history. A truly united Europe will have to accommodate Central and Eastern Europe, but also Europe’s Western Isles. Facing and re-imag(in)ing Eastern Europe, and reflecting its own position in this encounter, will continue to challenge British culture and those who study this culture.

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Works Cited Arata, Stephen D., ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33 (1990), 621-645 Bean, Richard, England People Very Nice (London: Oberon Books, 2009) Bradbury, Malcolm, Rates of Exchange (London: Arena, 1984) Cain, Jimmie E., Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in ‘Dracula’ and ‘The Lady of the Shroud’ (London: McFarland, 2006) Carter, Angela, Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage, 2006) Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) Edgar, David, Testing the Echo (London: Nick Hern Books, 2008) Fleming, Ian, From Russia with Love (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2004) Gibson, Matthew, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Gordon, W. Evans, The Alien Immigrant (London: Heinemann, 1903) Goldsworthy, Vesna, ‘Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization’, in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. by Dušan I. Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp.25-38 —, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) Green, Jonathon, Them – Voices from the Immigrant Community in Contemporary Britain (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989) Guyver, Lynn, Post Cold War Moral Geography: A Critical Analysis of Representations of Eastern Europe in Post 1989 British Fiction and Drama (Warwick: University of Warwick Press, 2001) Hakluyt, Richard, Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. by Jack Beeching (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) Hammond, Andrew, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007) Hansen, Randall, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Holmes, Colin, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 18711971 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) Hope, Anthony, The Prisoner of Zenda (New York: Airmont, 1967) Houswitschka, Christoph and others, eds., Literary Views on Post-Wall Europe: Essays in Honour of Uwe Böker (Trier: WVT, 2005)

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Hughes, William, ‘A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.88-102 Korte, Barbara, ‘War and Britishness after 1945: Narrating Bosnia’, Erfurt Electronic Studies in English, 6 (2005) —, ‘Wars and “British” Identities: From Norman Conquerors to Bosnian Warriors. An Overview of Cultural Representations’, in War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain, ed. by Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp.9-24 Kovaþeviü, Nataša, Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008) Kwei-Armah, Kwame, Plays 1: Elmina’s Kitchen, Fix Up, Statement of Regret, Let There Be Love (London: Methuen Drama, 2009) Meek, James, The People’s Act of Love (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005) Mercer, Kobena, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text, 10 (1990), 61-78 Mikes, George, How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) Muir, Kate, ‘England People Very Nice Causes a Very English Fuss’, The Times (7 March 2009) [accessed 14 December 2009] Newby, Eric, The Big Red Train Ride (London: Picador, 1989) Palmer, Daryl W., Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) Pirker, Eva Ulrike, ‘Keine weiße Geschichte: Mike Phillips’ Thriller über ein geteiltes und vereintes Europa A Shadow of Myself’, in Geschichte im Krimi: Beiträge aus den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. by Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek (Köln: Böhlau, 2009), pp.241-54 von Rosenberg, Ingrid and Gerd Stratmann, ‘New Thrills: John Le Carré and Mike Phillips Discover the Wild East of Post-Cold War Europe’, in Literary Views on Post-Wall Europe: Essays in Honour of Uwe Böker, ed. by Houswitschka and others (Trier: WVT, 2005) pp.65-82 Sears, John, ‘Dimensions of the Present Moment: George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages and the Hungarian Experience of 1989’, in Starck, pp.12-23 Shaw, Tony, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London: Tauris, 2001)

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Starck, Kathleen, ed., When the World Turned Upside-Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) Steinert, Johannes-Dieter and Inge Weber-Newth, eds., European Immigrants in Britain 1933-1950 (München: Saur, 2003) Stoker, Bram, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) Todorova, Marija N., Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Winder, Robert, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Abacus, 2005) Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) Zangwill, Israel, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (London: Heinemann, 1902)

EAST AND WEST

MIRRORINGS

Elisabeth Cheauré

Infinite Mirrorings: Russia and Eastern Europe as the West’s “Other” None of the current scenarios of a growing Europe even comes close to including the enormous “empire” Russia as part of their vision of Europe as a political unit. The external frontier of the European Community in the East is thus clearly marked by the Russian border. This political and territorial delimitation stands in stark contrast to the European reception of Russian literature and art: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov (to name only a few examples) are regarded as vital contributors to European culture. Considering this discourse from a Russian perspective opens up even more complexities: Russian culture is marked by an ambivalent relationship towards both Western Europe and Asia, a relationship characterised by tensions between similarity and difference. This ambivalence can be traced back to the eighteenth century when Russia began to construct her national identity in opposition to the West, by defining herself as “the West’s other”. Russian culture has thus become a relational field which is closely and inseparably connected to the West through its proclaimed “otherness”. This identity construction draws strongly on the bipolar metaphoric of gender oppositions (the female as the male’s “other”) and myths of femininity are of particular importance for an alterity-focussed Russian self-conception. This paper centres on the question of to what extent aspects of gender theory can be put to use in the description and explanation of the extremely ambivalent relationship between Western Europe and Russia.

1. Eastern Europe as a Western Stereotype As a first approach to the complex topic of the relationships between the “West” and “Eastern Europe”, one can consider random samples of literature from recent international bestseller lists. In the extensive novels of Stieg Larsson,1 for instance, the late Swedish thriller writer, it is not only the Swedish Secret Service who are portrayed as the enemy. Its profound malevolence is emphasised through its connection with the Russian mafia prostitution and brutality. The Russian-Ukrainian chief villain Zalatschenko, a criminal incarnate, achieves his wealth through the organised trafficking of women. His violent actions towards his wife and daughter reveal his brutality, and he is not even shocked by the murder of his own daughter. Moral or even ethical criteria do not appear to apply to him in any way. Marina Lewycka’s bestseller with the gripping title A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian takes us into the migrant scene in Britain, from where

1

Stieg Larsson, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); The Girl Who Played with Fire (London: MacLehose Press, 2009); The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (London: MacLehose Press, 2009).

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the author herself originates.2 It centres around a kind of family saga about the strange relationship between an 84-year-old man of Ukrainian descent and a 36-year-old well-endowed blonde from his old homeland. Their conjugal relationship increasingly emerges as a vehicle through which legal residency and status symbols (such as a car) can be attained, as well as the possibility of smuggling a whole tribe of relatives from Ukraine to England. ‘Pack verschlägt sich, Pack veträgt sich’ (cads’ fighting when ended is soon mended) is how a German review describes the manner in which clichés of Eastern European migrants in this novel, specifically of women, are handled and at the same time satirically exaggerated.3 A third bestseller whose publication was accompanied by exclusively positive reviews, can be attributed to the emerging genre of the mock travel guide. Molvanîa depicts a fictitious postsocialist country that pushes the Western collective image of Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans to the point of embarrassment.4 As the sample page reproduced here (cf. fig. 1) and the book’s official website illustrate, the satire emphasises the country’s cultural and technological backwardness. Numerous photos and texts demonstrate that Molvanîa is uncivilised and unenlightened, including sexist outbursts and discriminating statements regarding homosexuality. We could interpret these texts, saturated as they are with negative imagery and caricatures of Eastern Europe, as gestures of Western superiority. However, this would only be partly accurate, since similar clichés about the “East” can be found not only in contemporary Russian literature but also in many Russian texts from past centuries. The fact that in the following only Russia and/or Russia and the West is spoken of is meant to signalise that the “East” is in no way a homogenous entity which can be easily comprehended and described. Rather, attention should be paid to the East’s differentiations and various cultural traditions.

2

3

4

Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (New York: Viking, 2005). For an analysis of Lewycka’s novel see the contribution by Doris Lechner in the present volume. Stefan Mesch, ‚Pack verschlägt sich, Pack verträgt sich: Marina Lewyckas Immigranten-Burleske Kurze Geschichte des Traktors auf Ukrainisch fehlt es nicht an Herz – aber an Verstand’, Rezensionsforum Literaturkritik.de, 11 (November 2006) [accessed 12 January 2010]. Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistiry, Jetlag Travel Guide (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2004); sample reviews can be found on the guide’s official website: Molvanîa, ‘Reviews’ [accessed 25 November 2009].

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Fig. 1: On the guide’s website (www.molvania.com.au) one can listen to the anthem’s somewhat cacophonic instrumental version, which claims to convey the country’s cultural, technical and civilising backwardness.5

5

The editors would like to thank Working Dog® for the permission to reproduce this page from Cilauro/Gleisner/Sitch, p.17.

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In 2006, the novel Den’ Oprichnika [A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik] by the famous postmodern Russian author Vladimir Sorokin attracted attention both in and outside of Russia.6 This novel portrays a dystopia: China has become the biggest and basically the only industrial power in the world, whereas America and Europe have been obscured to insignificance. Russia has partitioned itself from the West with a wall, and has partially cut off the supply of natural gas and crude oil. The country is ruled by a terrible “Prince” (Gossudar), an all-powerful despot whose power is supported by a horde of Oprichniks, a protective force whose name is reminiscent of the disastrous times of Ivan the Terrible. These guards murder, torture, rape, pillage and flog any deviants, even finding these acts arousing. In its numerous German reviews, the novel is being read as a satirical roman à clef on autocratic structures in Russian politics today. In a review in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, by contrast, a different and more interesting reading has been offered under the subtitle ‘The Russian Soul, Sauerkraut, and a Bodyguard on the Loose: Vladimir Sorokin Serves his Readers in the West’: from the very beginning, the reader experiences an increasing sense of suspicion […] that this book is not as Russian as it purports to be. China, autocracy, resources – these are all Western reservations about a Russia that must be as Russian as the harem pants of Yul Brunner in the American film adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov by Richard Brooks (1957). This horror story is not only unsuccessful because its author has made a pact with the sensation of violence, but also because he has adopted the perspective of a foreign audience.7

Sorokin’s text is no unique case and, regardless of its violent content and rude style, has paradigmatically attached itself to discourses of national identity formation which are influenced by an oscillation between internal and external perspectives.

2. “Russia” and “the West” Viktor Erofeev, one of the most well-known contemporary Russian writers in Germany today, writes in his text Muzciny (‘Men’): – Does Central Europe know anything about Russia? – No matter how badly I know Central Europe, it knows Russia worse than I know Central Europe. Well, of course, some time in the past they have read Tolstoy and Dostoy-

6

7

Vladimir Sorokin, Den’ Oprichnika (Moscow: Zakharow Books, 2006). An English translation will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the near future. Thomas Steinfeld, ‘Und weil mich doch der Kater frisst: Die russische Seele, das Sauerkraut und eine entfesselte Leibgarde: Vladimir Sorokin bedient seine Leser im Westen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 February 2008, p.16, my translation.

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evsky, and even some daughters of suburban bus drivers have gone into detail, but all of this is not the right thing. Casting pearls before swine. What do they know about Russia? On the one hand, they were told by their grandmothers that a Russian is not to be trusted, even when a Russian comes with a gift. These late grandmothers were right. How are Russians to be trusted? Russians do not consider anyone as human beings except themselves. And if one were to consider the fact that they think of themselves as shit, then it all fits.8

The Russian way of thinking and Russian intellectual history frequently refer, directly and indirectly, to Western traditions of thinking, Western models and stereotypes. This reference can – as in the example above – be ironic or playful. It can also, if one considers Turgenev or Dostoyevsky, occur in a highly elaborated form, for instance when these authors engage with Western philosophy. However, this appears to be only one side of the coin. ‘Look Westward, Putin!’, was the sensationalist title of the German weekly Die Zeit on 4 January 2001 regarding Chancellor Schröder’s visit to Putin, accompanied by the following diagnosis: ‘Russia is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship, neither a really European nor an Asian country. “Who are we?” remains the most Russian of all questions.’9 This diagnosis is undoubtedly correct, and it is difficult to fully view Russian attempts to answer this question. I would like, however, to turn this question around or, in a seemingly paradoxical fashion, refine it by asking: To what extent is the question ‘What is Eastern Europe?’ relevant for Western cultures, and which role would answers to this question play for identity formation in Russia? Is this not about an infinite mirroring of questions and answers that appear to be inextricably and paradoxically interwoven? Perhaps it would be fitting at this point to consider the fact that the stereotypes with which Russia is connected today extend as far back as the Russian Middle Ages. The reports of Western travellers from the sixteenth century onwards describe the unfathomable splendour and wealth of the new world centre, the Muscovite Empire, which had explicitly inherited the legacy of the fallen Byzantine Empire. At the same time, legends of the drunkenness, slovenliness and worthlessness of Russians are spread. The stereotypes begin to repeat themselves: fornication, alcoholism, debauchery, cruelty, haughtiness, xenophobia, rudeness.10 Alongside these one finds piety and superstition.

8 9

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Viktor Erofeev, Muzhchiny (Moscow: Podkova, 1997), p.87, my translation. Michael Thuman, ‘Schau westwärts, Putin!’ Die Zeit, 2 (2001) [accessed 12 November 2009], my translation. Cf. for instance the famous travel report by the Austrian ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein from the sixteenth century titled Rerum Moscoviticarum comentarii (Wien, 1 March 1549), which has been rereleased and referenced multiple times.

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The coming into power of Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth century ushered in the new historical epoch of the Enlightenment and Westernisation, in a quasi ambush-like fashion, and Russia committed itself to the European path of development. It is part of Peter the Great’s myth that he promoted this Europeanisation as a theurgical act of will, with rational, masculine vision, scrupulous planning and personal effort (that he personally cut off the beards of the Boyars is part of this myth). The brutality of Peter’s reforms and the great drain on his people are easily overlooked here since symbolically they belong to the arbitrariness, bloodiness and irrationality of the “Old Russia”, which was meant to be overcome. The new and old ways of thinking are revealed in the topography of Russia’s old and new capitals: Moscow, the grown city which expands naturally in concentric circles, reminds one of a matryoshka doll – a doll within a doll – and in this way reflects both the touristy cliché of Russia and the myth of Mother Russia. St. Petersburg, on the other hand, is a planned metropolis sprung from the drawing board. There cannot be many other cities whose rise and existence has been ideologised to the same extent and therefore can always only be thought of in an eternal dichotomy with Russia’s actual capital, Moscow.11 St. Petersburg, emblem of the West in Russia, has become a myth with both positive and negative connotations. The city is on the one hand a symbol of arrogance towards God and nature, standing for death and for literally being swallowed up. Yet at the same time it is a symbol of hope and Russia’s pledge to belong to Europe. However, does Russia belong to Europe at all? The question as to where Eastern Europe begins and, more importantly, where it ends, is also controversial from a Western point of view. With the admission of the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovenia to the European Union, the question of whether or not these lands belong to Europe has been solved, at least politically. It can also be expected that negotiations with the so-called “accession candidates”, especially with the excluded Balkan states and Ukraine, will intensify. Yet none of the scenarios consider the possibility that the vast Russian empire could be imagined politically as a “European” country. Therefore, Europe’s Eastern frontier is clearly marked by its border to Russia. From the Russian point of 11

The academic literature covering the cultural meanings of both cities has become too extensive to survey. The cultural-theoretical approaches of Vladimir Toporov and Jurij Lotman have been particularly influential. Vladimir N. Toporov, ‘Peterburg I peterburgskij tekst russkoi literatury’, in Semiotika goroda I gorodskaja kul’tura. Peterburg, ed. by A. Ơ. Mal’c, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 18 (Tartu: Tartuskij univ., 1984), pp.4-29 and Jurij M. Lotmann, ‘Simvolika Peterburga I problemy semiotiki goroda’, in Semiotika goroda I gorodskaja kul’tura. Peterburg, ed. by A. Ơ. Mal’c, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 18 (Tartu: Tartuskij univ., 1984), pp.30-45.

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view, however, this question is not so easy to answer, for the “European question” has been a central topic of the discourse on Russian identity since the eighteenth century. One of the difficulties appears to lie in the fact that Russian history is not a history of continuous development but a history of ruptures. Russia personifies the ahistorical as formulated by Boris Groys, a Russian art and culture critic.12 The discontinuity of history, the defeat of the Kievan Rus by the Mongols, the troubled times following the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the violent process of Europeanisation under Peter the Great, the immense push for secularisation through the October Revolution, and last but not least the upheaval at the end of the twentieth century are just some of the events to be named in this context. Thus Russia has continuously faced the need to recreate itself from scratch or to reinvent itself. This “reinvention” was largely determined by Russia’s geographic location as a kind of experimental region between the great civilisations of the East and West. Using a term from reception aesthetics, Russia was portrayed a kind of “gap” in this conflict area, and such gaps easily assume the function of projection surface: ‘Russians became victims of their own virtues. I do not know any other nation where the degradation went as far as with Russians. It is not a nation anymore but a pillow case into which one can stick, squeeze, pour, shove anything.’13 In his essay collection Die Erfindung Russlands [The Invention of Russia], Boris Groys places this aspect at the centre of his investigation as he demonstrates that Russian history and its intellectual history are shaped by one deciding factor: a lack of its “own” tradition. According to Groys, Russia’s tradition has been above all composed of certain elements taken from Western culture, namely those elements and currents which were rejected by Western culture itself as oppositional or alternative. Thus certain aspects which constitute an integral component of Western culture were, appropriated and transformed – in order then to be levelled ideologically against the West as a whole. In this way, Groys describes Russian cultural and intellectual history as a process which portrays Russia not as “different to the West”, but as “the other of the West”. Relevant examples would include the takeover of Christendom in its Byzantine variant, or the adoption of communism as a philosophical and political concept that was developed (but not lived) in a Western cultural context. The communist ideology was taken from the West and then appropriated in order to be used polemically against the West. 12 13

Boris Groys, Die Erfindung Russlands [The Invention of Russia] (München: Hanser, 1995). Viktor Erofeev, Ơnciklopedija russkoj duši. Roman s ơnciklopediej [Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul: A Novel with an Encyclopedia] (Moscow: Podkova, 1999), p.179, my translation.

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It was in the West that communism was born in order to transform the Western social order from the inside out. Communism therefore embodied one of the possible answers of the West to the question of its own, Western civilisation. The alternative that might have been realised within the Western order itself turned into an alternative for this order. That which was rejected and excluded stroke back – a process which could also be described in psychoanalytical terminology. It is this process, one might argue, which made the communist Soviet Union so dangerous from the Western perspective, leading to such legendary designations as the “Iron Curtain”, the “Evil Empire”, and others. Groys even goes so far as to view the current inflammation of Russian nationalism as a tendency which, despite having been rejected in the West, might also be described as a possibility within Western culture. Russians, for instance, are not historically familiar with nationalism; they never saw themselves as a nation but rather as the people of a state, whether it be the current Russian Federation or the Soviet Union. They understood themselves as the collective subject of a universal, supranational ideology represented by the state. Contemporary Russian nationalism can therefore be conceived as a product of the West that has now – as a result of its Russian transformation – manifested itself as a threat to the West. One could also apply this model to contemporary Russia’s “wild capitalism”, coupled with the growth of the Mafia and an increase in poverty and economic refugees. That which we claim to have under control in our society, namely disorder, chaos, poverty and illness, is now seen as a characteristic trait of Russia and a threat to the West which must be repelled with a new form of the Iron Curtain, now known as the border of the Schengen countries or the EU’s Eastern border. From the Western perspective, this threat can be understood in the fact that Russia realises the West’s alternatives, living (and even radicalising) that which has not (yet) been lived in the West, holding itself up to the West as a distorting mirror. Following Boris Groys, one could also characterise Russian culture as extremely sensitive to the West’s dissatisfaction with itself, providing a projection surface for those longings and desires which find no fulfilment in the Western political and cultural systems. Russia is simultaneously seeking a connection with and an opposition to the West. It takes on Western elements in order to fight them – and at the same time falls in love with Western dreams, making them its own. In this way, a peculiar effect of alienation arises in the mind of the observer of Russian political and cultural events: that which is familiar remains familiar, yet at the same time begins to function in a foreign and unexpected way. One becomes disoriented, feeling simultaneously threatened and fascinated. In Russia, the effect that the country has on the West is traditionally well known and consciously played on. As Boris Groys writes: ‘Cultural practitioners in

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Russia deal reflexively and strategically with the gaze of Western observers. This gaze can never get to the “reality” of Russian culture, not because it is incorrectly focused, but because this culture is nothing other than a play on the Western gaze.’14 When the Russian contemporary artist Oleg Kulik15 behaves like a yapping dog in his performances in Western Europe, he reinforces the Western view of Russia as the land of the uncivilised, animalistic and irrational. When Ivan Goncharov contrasts the idle protagonist of his novel Oblomov (1869), who always only dreams of great projects, with the rational and acting Stoltz (with his German telling name) it is not only the situation in Russia that is referred to. At the same time, the Western gaze on Russia and on itself is ironically played with. Even the contemporary writer Victor Erofeev works with this Western gaze and Western expectations in his ‘Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul’: – One does not become Russian, my dear son, – mother said. – One is born Russian. – How come? How come? – Seriy was puzzled. – Ask your father, – she said dryly, lathering up Seriy’s hair. – He is not going to answer, – said Seriy with certainty. He is lying drunk in a ditch. In the yard. By the fence.16

Structurally, this passage demonstrates great parallels to the mock travel guide Molvanîa in that Western prejudices of the “East” and Russia are strikingly reproduced. Yet the question of whether we are dealing with a Russian self-image or a play on the Western gaze on Russia remains unanswered. However, one fact is already supported by the few text passages quoted so far: “Russia and the West”, “Russia or the West” or “Russia as the other of the West” appear to be central questions not only for Russian intellectual history. They are also of great significance for and closely interwoven with Western Europe. In relation to the stereotypical question “What is Russia”, it is instructive to take a look at Russian history of the nineteenth century, when Russia, stimulated from the Napoleonic Wars, attempted anew to take on Western ideas and, in the spirit of Romanticism, to describe the originality of its own culture in history and the present. This adoption of Western thought, which is particularly reflected in the works of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, 14 15

16

Groys, pp.10f., my translation. Oleg Kulik and Aleksandr Brener, Tollwütiger Hund, oder das Letzte Tabu, bewacht von einem einsamen Zerberus [in English known under the title Last Taboo] (original performance, Moscow: Galereja Gel’mana, 25 November 1994); for commentaries on the performance in Zurich (30 March 1995) cf. Gesine Drews-Sylla, ‘A Reservoir Dog in Zürich: Oleg Kulik, Niko Piosmani, the Russian Avant-garde and Quentin Tarantino’, Junges Forum Slavistischer Literaturwissenschaft (September 2002) [accessed 12 November 2009]. Erofeev, Ơnciklopedija russkoj duši, pp.202f., my translation.

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first led to Russia’s undertaking of a radical introspective analysis. This selfcriticism then led to the split within the Russian intelligentsia between Slavophiles and Westerners. The former turned the tables and transformed the selfcriticism into a “Russian critique of the West” – of rationalism, individualism and materialism. In these discourses, Russia is stylised as the radical other and contrasted with rationality, intellect and world history. Russia is thus effectively constructed as the “unconscious” of the Western, historical world. It is, however, an unconscious that – at least in the imaginings of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) – cannot be understood as a blind, irrational, destructive force, but rather as an unconscious in which rationality itself can find its highest orientation. A kind of salvation can be found in the synthesis of both of these principles, not only for Russia, but as an epitome of holistic life. The being and material world of Russia is contrasted with the logos of the West, yet this is a material world which cannot be conceived of in the Western, rational sense. It is not a world that one could “rationally” study. This being, this matter eludes the logos, rationality and the word. How, with such a background, can one speak of Russia at all, either in the West or in Russia itself? Famous verses from the quill of the Russian poet Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873) seem to provide a definitive answer: ‘Russia is a thing of which / the intellect cannot conceive. / Hers is no common yardstick / You measure her uniquely: / in Russia you can believe!’17 Paradoxically, however, no topic was and is more often written and thought about in Russia than this one. Apparently words have been found, with special attention to the symbolisation of masculinity and femininity, and with a significant use of gender metaphors.

3. National Identity and Gender In 1880, Dostoyevsky held his famous speech for the dedication of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow, a great event in Russian intellectual history. Dostoyevsky established not only Pushkin’s role as a Russian national poet, but also, with his enthusiastic evaluation of the female protagonist Tatiana from Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin (1833), managed to capture, on a metalevel, a process which since the eighteenth century has proved dominant in Russian culture and in discourses about this culture and society. In Dostoyevsky’s view Tatiana was the basic embodiment of the beauty of the Russian woman, with whom the intellectual renewal and moral perfection of the society is 17

This is Frank Jude’s translation of Tyutchev’s untitled poem, in The Complete Poems of Tyutchev [accessed 08 December 2009].

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connected. This concept of ideal femininity is also increasingly linked to the crunch question of national identity and in a sense ontologically confirmed: Tatiana does not symbolise Russia, Tatiana is Russia. A few examples should highlight how dominant this discourse actually became at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. For instance, in Nicolay Berdyaev’s novel Sud’ba Rossii (1916), one reads: The Russian people do not want to be a masculine nation-builder, its nature is defined as feminine, passive and submissive in matters of state, it always awaits a bridegroom, a man, a ruler. Russia – is a submissive and feminine land. The passive, receptive femininity in regard to the state power – is characteristic for both the Russian people and for Russian history.18 Mother Earth for the Russian people is Russia. Russia is transformed into the Mother of God. Russia – is a God-bearing land. Such a feminine, national-elemental religiosity has to be imposed upon men, who take upon themselves the burden of spiritual activity, they bear the cross, they lead spiritually.19 How to understand this enigmatic contradictoriness of Russia, this equal veracity of mutually exclusive theses? Here too, like everywhere, with the question of the freedom and slavery of the soul of Russia, of its numbness, we are facing the mystery of the interrelation between the masculine and the feminine. The root of these deep contradictions lies in the disunion of the masculine and the feminine within the Russian spirit and the Russian character. The unbounded freedom turns into unbounded slavery, eternal wandering – into eternal stagnation, because the masculine freedom does not take possession of the feminine national element of Russia from within, from the depths. The masculine beginning principle is always awaited from the outside, the personal beginning principle does not reveal itself within the Russian people. Hence the eternal dependency on the foreign.20

To name another example: Vladimir Solovyov’s complex work on Saint Sophia and his religious-philosophical sophiologic model connect Sophia not only with ideal femininity but also the wisdom of God, the world soul, the deification of matter as cosmic life and concrete sensual and erotic experiences.21 At the same time Sophia remains connected with Russia as a mystical symbol in that she is thought to bring about a mystical marriage with the Antichrist of the West and in this way to save the West. The feminine figure of Sophia is also meant to bestow peace upon the soul of the Russian intellectual, torn between Western culture and the Russian unconscious. This mystical marriage between the active yet perverted 18

19 20 21

Nikolay Berdyaev, Sud’ba Rossii [Russia’s Destiny], in Russkaja ideja. Sud’ba Rossii (Moscow: Izd. V. Shevchuk, 2000), pp.222-537 (p.229f.), my translation. Ibid., p.234. Ibid., pp.238f. Cf. Vladimir Solovyov, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, ed. by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, transl. by Boris Jakim, Judith Kornblatt, and Laury Magnus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

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spirit of the West and the passive but loyal Russian Sophia promises to give birth to a new logos, the third and final testament. This is not the place to portray in detail Solovyov’s philosophy, which was also further developed in Russia. My primary task here is to demonstrate to what extent femininity is attached to fantasies of salvation and connected with Russia. In fact, there is a large range of female figures in Russian literature who ideally embody the image of Russia. Numerous studies of female figures in Russian literature have shown that these figures are almost too perfect. Projected onto them are precisely those positive qualities and that life purpose which are coveted by the searching, superfluous male heroes, more or less intelligently, but without success. Only the female figures, Tatiana Larina in Yevgeny Onegin and a multitude of other bearers of hope, provide fantasies of healing and salvation. At the same time, they are the embodiment of Russia, the Russian idea, the Russian earth, of everything that is not alienated. The protagonist of Anna Karenina (1878) by Lev Tolstoy, however, is in several respects alienated from the “Russian” and contrasted with the figure of Kitty. It is of great symbolic meaning that Tolstoy lets Anna oscillate between the two capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow. In this way, Tolstoy inscribes himself into a discourse which connects the two cities with all those themes I have highlighted as fundamental to the Russian mentality and intellectual history: a Russia of feminine, passive connotations on the one hand and the masculine, fertile West on the other. St. Petersburg, like the later Leningrad, is masculine in terms of grammatical gender, whereas Moscow (Moskva) is feminine. Attached to this is the myth and the uninterrupted discourse in Russia regarding the difference in character of both capitals in terms of gender connotations. The brides live in Moscow, the bridegrooms in Petersburg: Gogol and numerous other writers play with this cliché,22 including Pushkin with Yevgeny Onegin. In this tradition, St. Petersburg stands for the principles of the masculine West and therefore rationality, restraint, taciturnity, calculation, heartlessness, enlightenment, coldness, sedateness, and death. Moscow, in contrast, is excessively seen as emotional, confused, chatty, extravagant, kindhearted, homely, idle, lazy, and incapable. Thus it becomes evident that in Russia itself the debate about national identity and the discourses regarding the relationship between Russia and the West are encoded to a great extent as a gender debate, and cannot be considered without reference to gender symbolism. That this goes back to ancient Slavic myths of the female as the source of the earth, the moist Mother Earth, to the rusalki (mermaids) and baba yagas (witches), can only be hinted at in the context of this paper. The Christian tradition, which in its Russian Ortho22

Cf. Lotman, pp.30-45 and Toporov, pp.4-29.

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dox variant sees the Mother of God above all as a nurturing mother rather than a virgin, should also be mentioned in this context. It is indicative, however, that these discourses about femininity and Russia and “feminine Russia” respectively, are not only shaped by highly positive conceptions and fantasies of salvation. They are accompanied at the same time by strategies of devaluation and defence. No other folk culture has such a cynical relationship with women as Russia, writes Viktor Erofeev; Russian folk wisdom is saturated with misogyny and sneering contempt.23 Yet it is not only popular wisdom and everyday culture that operates with these ambivalent and paradoxical images of femininity. As we have already seen, Berdyaev in Sud’ba Rossii captures not only the distinctiveness of Russia but also its backwardness in metaphors of femininity and the passivity they connote: ‘The Russian soulfulness, so well-known to everyone, is connected with this warmth and moistness; in it there is still much flesh and not enough spirit. But flesh and blood do not inherit eternity, and eternal can be only the Russia of spirit.’24 It almost seems as if speaking about Russian culture in Russia presupposes clearly defined gender boundaries and masculine and feminine symbolism. “Russia” can only be thought of as female in Russian intellectual history – just like the ideas of homeland, the Earth, love and others. Russia needs discourses of feminity to assure itself of its identity or to construct it anew. This is particularly relevant for the present, where these discourses are enjoying a startling boom. Reflection regarding the recent Soviet past, for instance, is connected in a significant way with myths and metaphors of femininity, attributions and projections. And this debate too is shaped by feminine paradoxes: On the one hand, it reflects the mythical conception of Russia’s salvation through “the woman” and the “feminine principle”, whereas on the other hand the collective guilt of the past is bestowed upon the woman. Thus the trauma of the Soviet Union, with its terror, persecutions and physical liquidations, is projected upon femininity. Critics Mikhail Ryklin and Ivaylo Ditchev observes a kind of expansion of the feminine principle in the Soviet Union since the thirties, implying that women occupied precisely those positions in the social system in which power was exercised most directly: in kindergartens, schools, clinics and other institutions.25 Others see the sin of the Soviet system in its gender politics and the “enforced androgyny” supposedly connected with it. The general loss of values and the often

23 24 25

Erofeev, Muzhchiny, pp.22-24. Berdyaev, p.312, my translation. Cf. Michail Ryklin and Ivaylo Ditchev, ‘Katastroika: Zur Psychoanalyse der sowjetischen Gesellschaft’, Lettre International, 14 (1991), 48-50.

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hopeless situation in contemporary Russia are therefore often directly connected to the abolishment of gender differences.26 The last ray of hope takes the form of a very particular, specifically Russian type of femininity, with which the myths of femininity imagined in Orthodoxy and classical Russian literature are being regenerated. This “feminine culture” comprises all common stereotypes of femininity: care, motherhood, domesticity, beauty and so forth. To be a woman signifies love, goodness and mercy. “Feminine culture” is in this way something “universal”, something inherent in all women. Irrespective of her upbringing and education, the woman is not only associated with ethical and moral values, but above all with culture and tradition. In this sense it is the women who ensure the survival of the people and guard and protect its soul.

4. A Final Glance at the West To conclude, we should take a glance at the Western occidental culture without which – as already demonstrated – Russia cannot be conceived and could not even conceive of itself. As we know from feminist criticism, this Western culture is equally saturated with gender symbolism. Male-dominated occidental thinking is shaped by fundamental dualisms, or one could even say fundamental contradictions, such as culture and nature, intellect and feeling, mind and body, activity and passivity, having and being.27 The conceptions of masculinity and femininity are inscribed to such a large extent in these fundamental dualisms – and here I am proceeding in a deliberately simplistic manner – that they can be intuitively ascribed to one or the other sex. We also know that all the terms I mentioned have never and will never be used neutrally, but are always conceived of in terms of hierarchy and asymmetry, and that this hierarchy has been naturalized in modern thinking since Rousseau. In this system, femininity is primarily associated with lack; it is the nonmasculine, to be seen as outside but also as defined against the notion of the modern, masculine-connoted subject. Femininity is not positively-determined, independent otherness. It can only be described in relation to masculinity, and in this cultural construction functions as a kind of imaginary container into which desires but also the repressed, the irrational, the uncon-

26

27

Cf. also Elisabeth Cheauré, ‘“Eine Frau ist eine Frau…”: Beobachtungen zur russischen Feminismus-Diskussion’, in Frauen in der Kultur: Tendenzen in Mittel- und Osteuropa nach der Wende, ed. by Christine Engel and Renate Reck (Innsbruck: Universität Innsbruck, 2000), pp.129-140. Cf. Cornelia Klinger, Der Diskurs der modernen Wissenschaft und die gesellschaftliche Ungleichheit der Geschlechter: Eine Skizze (Innsbruck: Wissenschaftsladen, 1995).

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scious, and that which has not been lived are projected – especially, it seems, in the fantasies of literary texts. The female figures of literature, grouped around the poles of the whore and the saint, femme fatale and femme fragile, the “red” and the “white” woman, can be seen as focusing these cultural constructions. At the latest since Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, a larger public has become aware of how much within our Western culture is described through individual and collective processes of repression and forgetting, and to what extent these processes are inseparably connected to polarised conceptions of femininity.28 Rationality versus irrationality, restriction versus illimitability, order versus disorder, logic versus chaos, perfection versus imperfection, masculine versus feminine – the list goes on. This describes the way of thinking which has been inscribed in the occidental culture for centuries. It does not consider gender in merely implicit terms but uses it in order to legitimise the gender hierarchy. In this order, the feminine, the woman, symbolises the excluded, the rejected, the repressed. Irrationality, illimitability, disorder, chaos – are these not the exact epithets with which the West has traditionally thought of Russia and from which it distinguishes itself, borders itself, isolates itself? Are these not the exact processes with which the modern self affirms its identity, first drawing its boundaries in terms of gender, distinguishing itself from the other, bordering itself off? And at the same time, it has to reassure itself of these boundaries, because it desires the excluded and the rejected to the same degree that it is at the mercy of the unconscious that threatens to devour it. Our Western way of dealing with Russia is significantly defined in terms of fantasies of fusion on the one hand and fear of being engulfed on the other. This also delineates the discourses about Russia which exist in the West. In its relation to Russia, Western culture, with its world of things and numbers, rationalisation and economisation, thus appears remarkably irrational. In Western culture, which can be understood as being essentially determined by the dichotomy of gender, Russia effectively plays the female role. Like the constructions of femininity in our culture in general, this role is characterised by desire and the need to be confined and devaluated on the one hand, and by an idealised elevation on the other. Our Western culture only functions in terms of othering, through the defamation of one section of humanity. Only in this way can the chaos, disorder, squalor – the animalistic – be kept under control. Our relationship with Russia and Eastern Europe has therefore become a mirror of

28

Cf. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, transl. by Stephan Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

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the way we relate to ourselves. We are ‘strangers to ourselves’, writes Julia Kristeva,29 and to recognise this is obviously no easy task.

Works Cited Berdyaev, Nikolay, Sud’ba Rossii, in Russkaja ideja. Sud’ba Rossii (Moscow: Izd. V. Shevchuk, 2000), pp.222-537 Cheauré, Elisabeth, ‘“Eine Frau ist eine Frau…”: Beobachtungen zur russischen Feminismus-Diskussion’, in Frauen in der Kultur: Tendenzen in Mittel- und Osteuropa nach der Wende, ed. by Christine Engel und Renate Reck (Innsbruck: Universität Innsbruck, 2000), pp.129-140 Cilauro, Santo, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry, Jetlag Travel Guide (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2004) Drews-Sylla, Gesine, ‘Ein Reservoir Dog in Zürich: Oleg Kulik, Niko Pirosmani, die russische Avantgarde und Quentin Tarantino’, Junges Forum Slavistische Literaturwissenschaft (September 2002) [accessed 12 November 2009] Erofeev, Viktor, Enciklopedija russkoj duši. Roman s ơnciklopediej (Moscow: Podkova, 1999) —, Muzhchiny (Moscow: Podkova, 1997) Groys, Boris, Die Erfindung Russlands (München: Hanser, 1995) Jude, Frank, ‘untitled poem’, in The Complete Poems of Tyutchev [accessed 08 December 2009] Klinger, Cornelia, Der Diskurs der modernen Wissenschaft und die gesellschaftliche Ungleichheit der Geschlechter: Eine Skizze (Innsbruck: Wissenschaftsladen, 1995) Kristeva, Julia, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Ruodiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) Lotman, Jurij M., ‘Simvolika Peterburga I problemy semiotiki goroda’, in Semiotika goroda I gorodskaja kul’tura: Peterburg, ed. by A. Ơ. Mal’c, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 18 (Tartu: Tartuskij univ., 1984), pp.30-45 Mesch, Stefan, ‘Pack verschlägt sich, Pack verträgt sich: Marina Lewyckas Immigranten-Burleske Kurze Geschichte des Traktors auf Ukrainisch fehlt es nicht an Herz – aber an Verstand’, Rezensionsforum Literaturkritik.de, 11 (November 2006) [accessed 12 January 2010] 29

Cf. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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Molvanîa, ‘Reviews’ [accessed 25 November 2009] Michail Ryklin and Ivaylo Ditchev, ‘Katastroika: Zur Psychoanalyse der sowjetischen Gesellschaft’, Lettre International, 14 (1991), 48-50 Steinfeld, Thomas, ‘Und weil mich doch der Kater frisst: Die russische Seele, das Sauerkraut und eine entfesselte Leibgarde: Vladimir Sorokin bedient seine Leser im Westen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 February 2008, p.16 Solovyov, Valdimir, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, ed. by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, transl. by Boris Jakim, Judith Kornblatt, and Laury Magnus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) Sorokin, Vladimir, Den’ Oprichnika (Moscow: Zakharow Books, 2006) Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, transl. by Stephan Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) Thuman, Michael, ‘Schau westwärts, Putin!’, Die Zeit, 2 (2001) [accessed 12 November 2009] Toporov, Vladimir N., ‘Peterburg I peterburgskij tekst russkoi literatury’, in Semiotika goroda I gorodskaja kul’tura: Peterburg, ed. by A. Ơ. Mal’c, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 18 (Tartu: Tartuskij univ., 1984), pp.4-29

Mike Phillips

Narratives of Desire – A Writer’s Statement The response of British fiction to the changes taking place in Eastern Europe over the last two decades has been playing itself out at a number of different levels. These vary in importance, but one of the first questions which needs to be asked about this strand of fiction is about the point of our critical investigations; that is, what is the point of analysing and exploring a specific area of literary work within the context of a specific moment of social and political change? The first clue about a useful answer comes from the history of the recent (twentieth-century) relationship between English writing and the region. In fact, by the opening of the last century English fictional representation of the region was already deeply imprinted by the legend of Lord Byron. Byron is famous for fighting in the Greek Wars of Independence, but his brief sojourn in Albania with Ali Pasha (cf. fig. 1) fixed an important part of the imagery of Eastern Europe in the British literary imagination, amplified, for instance, by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). A century and a half later British popular fiction’s view of Eastern Europe was still dominated by vampires, romantic bandits, post-feudal aristocracy and endless communal conflicts. The clearest exposition of this trope can be seen in the genre crated by Hammer Horror in the middle of the century, when Hammer’s version of Transylvania became, in the popular British imagination, a surrogate for the entire landscape of Eastern Europe. At the same time another, more acute, form of representation was emerging, initially prompted by the ferment of Balkan nationalist politics which sparked off the assassination that led to the start of the First World War. The major fictional representations of the twentieth century drew on this background and following the Soviet occupation, British fiction about the region went through subtle mutations. The result was that content segued neatly from a preoccupation with the intrigues and betrayals of post-feudal nationalism to an obsessive interest in the intrigues and betrayals associated with the conduct of totalitarian regimes. A straight conceptual line can be drawn between Olivia Manning’s prewar Bucharest, drenched as it is in terror and anxiety, to Eric Ambler’s assassin-haunted Balkans, and Graham Greene’s dangerous Vienna. All of these tropes are gathered up and achieve a climax in the spy genre popularised by such writers as John le Carré and Len Deighton.

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Fig. 1: In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), Lord Byron describes a multiethnic Albania under the reign of Ali Pasha. The portrayal above by Thomas Phillips, from the year 1835, shows Byron in traditional Albanian attire. 1 Childe Harold provides readers with the prototypical Western Orientalist gaze of the early nineteenth century: ‘Here men of every clime appear to make resort. // The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Moor, / Here mingled in their many-hued array, / While the deep war-drum’s sound announced the close of day. // The wild Albanian kirtled to his knee, / With shawl-girt head and ornamented gun, / And goldembroidered garments, fair to see: / The crimson-scarfèd men of Macedon; / The Delhi with his cap of terror on, / And crooked glaive; the lively, supple Greek; / And swarthy Nubia’s mutilated son; / The bearded Turk, that rarely deigns to speak, / [...] / Are mixed conspicuous [...].’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 2,56,92,59,1) 1

The image, a replica of the original for which Byron sat in 1813, is reprinted with kind permission by the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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It is certainly not astonishing that the concerns of writers operating in a specific region should differ markedly from those of outsiders. On the other hand, it is clear that the concerns sketched out in British fiction have, so far, failed to meet the challenge of a new East European context. Part of this failure can be traced to the relative weakness of our collective grip on the politics, history and current forms of organisation in the region. However, knowledge is only part of the problem. By tradition, when British fiction looks outwards it turns its gaze towards the USA, and more recently towards the former colonies of the New Commonwealth. This is not simply a matter of habit and familiarity. Writers’ interests are contained within a framework of concerns which largely characterise the environment in which they live. In this world history refers to events, trends or periods which achieve some popular significance, and what these events tend to leave behind is a view, a network of beliefs and attitudes, an imagery which forms a platform for popular stereotypes. Writers and artists work within this chronological process, and by and large they tend to give shape to these perceptions rather than challenging them. As a result fiction’s ability to see new features in a moral or political landscape is almost necessarily determined by external interventions. The point can be most easily grasped by considering some trends in literary criticism and their effects on fiction writers. It is a truism that criticism has thrived most crucially in moments of fracture. For example, John Ruskin and his relationship with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, and his effect on our ability to negotiate a moral chronology through different stages of European art and culture, in a moment when industry and the technology of industry had begun to introduce far-reaching changes to the world. On another rung of the ladder is F.R. Leavis, and his reassessment of the processes which fuelled creativity in a renewed relationship with the real world and against the perspective of an all-pervasive Romanticism. In the latter part of the twentieth century fiction has been hugely influenced by the achievements of such critics as Michel Foucault, once again in the context of seismic changes in the structure of culture and society. Typically, all of these critical moments established a bridge between trends in the real world and the fictional imagination, calling attention to new perspectives, and creating sites where the imagination of writers and artists could flourish. In the latter part of the twentieth century the logic of at least some of these new perspectives delivered us into the post-colonial moment, which focused attention on the consequences and meaning of cultural change, on notions like authenticity, and on attempts to reanimate the importance of nativist traditions in the world outside Europe.

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There are generic similarities between the period when former British colonies achieved independence and the successful struggle to break free of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the differences are instructive. The British already had a developed feeling for the history of their Empire, nourished and reinforced by a succession of postwar conflicts from the ending of the Raj to the battle for the Suez Canal and the war against the Mau Mau in Kenya. In many ways, therefore, British fiction anticipated the postcolonial themes and concerns which were to become integral to its future. At another level, the fact that the British shared the English language with the colonised opened up a landscape of political and emotional detail which offered British fiction unprecedented access to the ideas and dreams of individuals abroad. This included the fiction emerging from the post-migrant segments of the population. Against this background, fiction had to become a tool or instrument in cultural and artistic developments within Britain itself. Eastern Europe could not offer the British any access of this kind. Few, or hardly any, of the more notable fiction writers from the East are translated into English. Contacts between individuals and organisations in the various countries remain limited, as does our knowledge about the cultures, behaviour and opinions of the East. This argument does not, however, suppose that the real issue is about representation or the persistence of stereotypes. Stereotypes establish themselves and persist as a rough platform for various species of imagery about any given subject. There is, nevertheless, a world of difference between active stereotypes, that is, stereotypes which are subject to being affected by current experiences and debates, as opposed to static stereotypes which are essentially a recycling of archaic mythologies. Characteristically, the difference between the imagery emerging from Eastern Europe and the imageries of British fiction is the difference between active and static. Take the fictional narratives emerging from the East European cinema. Its concerns can largely be summed up in a narrative about the effects of the past on contemporary life. In one Romanian movie, for instance, a retired military officer is waiting to celebrate an annual military ceremonial. As the day approaches, however, we begin to understand the officer’s conflict with his neighbour, a cheerfully blasé entrepreneur who respects nothing about the country, flaunts his contacts with the USA and its go-getting culture, and repeatedly humiliates the military man with the reminder that he is clinging to a vanished and discredited past. In another story a train carrying American soldiers and NATO supplies is stranded in a remote village, setting off an orgy of greed, exploitation and resentment, which ends in a miniature civil war. All of these stories are fundamentally concerned, not so much with the

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past itself, but with its effects on individual psyches, as well as its effects on the social structures of present day communities. There is a dramatic contrast between this and the vacuum with which British fiction explores East European life that amounts to a cultural deficit, where the lack of useful imagery about the region and its people, practically condemns us (in Britain) to silence and indifference. TV and the newspaper headlines tell us repeatedly about the consequences of this cultural deficit, because fiction is not an activity somehow isolated from the world in which it exists. The stories we tell about each other are powerful tools which allow us to communicate and to understand. In every moment of crisis fiction asks questions about identity and we might be asking such questions now in Europe, in the moment after the accession of the Eastern countries. What is Europe? What should it be? What would it mean to live together in a different way? At a party in Prague one night I spoke to a Minister of Culture who was also an actor, and eventually asked him at least one of these questions. He looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘That is a job for you’, he said, ‘the poets and writers. You must write the stories which will help us to create it.’ Ironically, one of the first questions I was always asked in Britain when I published my novel A Shadow of Myself (2001) was: ‘Why are you interested in Eastern Europe?’ The issue, of course, was partly that, as a black writer, I was expected to limit myself to thinking about the former colonies. On the other hand, statements of this kind were in some sense a measure of our collective cultural failure. Fiction is a crucial instrument in the construction of identity. It is fiction’s flexibility and mobility which enables it to reflect current movements in such a way as to change landscapes while in the process of describing them. In that sense, fiction and the imagery fiction can provide is essential for reconfiguring identity in Europe. It is only through the agency of fiction that we can begin to imagine a future in which identity becomes fluid, a negotiated process which may allow us to come together effectively.

Christiane Bimberg

‘A glimpse behind the scenes’, ‘trying to capture the very soul of things Russian’: Literary Representations of Intercultural EastWest Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes Conrad’s representation of the Cosas de Russia in his fictional and non-fictional works has been variously interpreted as Russophobia or Russophilia. In particular, the meaning and significance of the Russian subject in Under Western Eyes has caused some misunderstandings and misreadings of the novel. Though the subsequent political events of world history have slightly impacted its reception history for the better, it may be true to say that its real relevance and artistry have not been fully recognised to date. The focus is on the juxtaposition of the Eastern and the Western settings, the intercultural East-West encounters and the different Western and Eastern modes of perception.

1. Introduction The first significant migration flows from Eastern Europe to Western Europe took place at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper investigates a literary work from that era: Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) – the story of an old professor of languages in Geneva who becomes a witness to the tragedy of a Russian family during the period of autocracy and revolution in Russia.1 As the novel retains a problematic status in literary history and criticism, this paper offers a critical re-reading.2 Conrad employs a number of highly effective narrative strategies and techniques. In portraying citizens of St. Petersburg, the English-speaking narrator, Genevans and members of Geneva’s “Russian colony”, Conrad uses very subtle methods of characteri

1

2

The first quotation is taken from Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: Doubleday, 1924), p.330, the second from Conrad’s letter to Galsworthy of January 6, 1908: ‘I think that I am trying to capture the very soul of things Russian, – Cosas de Russia.’ Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, ed. by G. Jean-Aubry, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1927), II (1927), p.64. Cf. on the value and significance of Conrad’s novel as political fiction: Morten D. Zabel, ‘Introduction to Under Western Eyes’, in Conrad: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Marvin Mudrick, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp.111-144 (pp.114-118, 122, 128f., 135f., 142-144). Cf. on the novel’s changeful reception history and problematic status in literary history: Zabel, pp.111-144 (pp.115-119, 129); Cedric Watts, A Preface to Conrad (London and New York: Longman, 1982), pp.44f. and 171-174; Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad, Writers and Their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), pp.146-153; Kingsley Widmer, ‘Joseph Conrad’, in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 8 vols (Detroit and London: Gale Research Inc., 1991), V (1991), pp.83-122 (pp.84, 112, 109); John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.119-135.

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sation and interlinks two perspectives: the Western and the Eastern. He enhances the intercultural issue by juxtaposing an Eastern and a Western setting, St. Petersburg and Geneva, and by locating the true political and human conflict right at the heart of democratic Europe. Furthermore, direct intercultural encounters between “occidentals” and “orientals” dramatically heighten the contrast between Western and Eastern mentalities, attitudes, modes of perception and communication and lifestyles. The narrator becomes an instrumental component of all encounters and perceptions. In what follows it will be argued that in order to address and cope with the difficult and complex issues of Western and Eastern cultural identity, Conrad employs what may be termed a “truly intercultural perspective and psychology”, not avoiding discussion or confrontation, but literally “facing the East in the West”.

2. The Setting In addition to the plot, structure and characterisation, the setting – the contrasting locations of St. Petersburg and Geneva – is also inextricably linked with the narrator. Through the juxtaposition of the two settings, an important dimension of the intercultural East-West encounters is realised. In spite of the fact that the narrator frequently points out his difficulties in comprehending Russian problems, he simultaneously takes considerable pride in his knowledge of Russian circumstances. In this context, the familiarity with St. Petersburg is also conspicuous; it may, to some extent, be attributed to the narrator’s use of Razumov’s diary, but perhaps more to the fact that he grew up there. If we read space here in a semiotic manner, employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s term “chronotope” (a concept describing the interaction of time and space in the literary representation of human experience), we see that place is semanticised and becomes space, a bearer of meaning. Space is filled with concrete socio-cultural meaning (people, events, action, time of the day, season, weather, mood and atmosphere). Place functions as a marker of identity; the spatial grounding of identity is a distinctive characteristic of the narrative. For instance, Razumov’s meandering walk through the streets of snowy St. Petersburg, in a state of utmost frustration about his moral dilemma, is described through powerful images and the stream-of-consciousness technique. We see how he is driven forward by ‘a tumult of thoughts’3 and how, at the same time, this flow of thoughts is influenced by the accompanying external circumstances, locations, people and events. Like Virginia Woolf, Conrad practises a fusion of material and mental landscapes, superimposing a mental 3

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: Doubleday, 1924), p.24. All further page references are given in parentheses in the text.

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image over a physical map.4 In addition, the aspects of desertedness, shabbiness and gloom evoke associations with Dostoyevsky. St. Petersburg is furnished with special connotations: snowy, cold, black, with ghost- or phantom-like sledges and people, and full of huge social contrasts, which are exemplified by the different residential quarters and their respective populations with their characteristic professions, i.e. the homes of autocrats and revolutionaries, informants and spies, but also ordinary and “innocent” people. The place where Ziemianitch, ‘a man of the people’ (p.278), is eking out a miserable existence, is described in phrases that have a Dickensian resonance: ‘The house was an enormous slum, a hive of human vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on the verge of starvation and despair’ (p.28). Conrad demonstrates the way in which the social and the political are linked, the fact that people inhabiting certain (poor) social quarters are particularly susceptible to Utopian ideas and revolutionary promises, adoring the ideals and their proponents in quasi-religious ways because of their own poverty, extreme social misery and human wretchedness. At the same time, Conrad reveals the illusionary character of these assumptions – these people and their homes will be destroyed, consumed and swept away by revolution, as Razumov asserts: ‘the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying flame of social revolution’ (p.280). Generally speaking, St. Petersburg is a place rife with connotations of social and political danger, secret and criminal activities, and anarchy. In short, it is a city difficult to inhabit and best to vacate, providing the necessary resources and connections are available. The juxtaposition of St. Petersburg and Geneva is characterised by contrasts as well as parallels. If St. Petersburg is the site of Razumov’s moral conflict, betrayal, self-betrayal and defeat (he agrees to work as a spy for the Councillor of State Mikulin), Geneva is the location of all the consequences, of confession, expiation and guilt. However, as in St. Petersburg, there is a clear physical and social sense of place, in addition to substantial material mapping in the descriptions (for instance references to public places such as gardens, streets, places, bridges, cultural facilities, offices, hotels etc.). The cityscape of Geneva is also presented in all its social contrasts, which, however, pale in comparison to the Russian ones, as Sophia Antonovna has noted (p.245, 273). Furthermore, the walks of Razumov and the narrator are likewise described through the stream-of-consciousness technique. Material and mental landscapes become fused once more. Thus Geneva is fashioned, by contrast, not as a place of escape, but of refuge, of exile in the heart of Western Europe. Geneva figures as a site of 4

Cf. Christiane Bimberg, ‘Urban Space, City Life and Identity Construction in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day: The Fusion of Material and Mental Landscapes’ (forthcoming).

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democracy and freedom (‘the free, independent and democratic city of Geneva’, 107). Frequent references to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Rousseau and Voltaire serve to underpin this view. Conrad uses Geneva to emphasise the contrast between East and West, despotism vs. democracy. In his rendition, both cities become cultural metaphors. However, the connotations of Geneva undergo significant changes, as the reader cannot help but notice after some time: The positive democratic virtues of Geneva are increasingly commented on with scathing and belittling irony. Conrad produces ever more oxymorons and antitheses to modify the originally positive connotations. The Boulevard des Philosophes is ‘the very desolation of slumbering respectability’ (p.335); the lake displays a ‘brimful placidity’ (p.270). Prettiness and dullness stand side by side. ‘To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he [Razumov] saw the green slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin’ (p.288). The ‘emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible dreariness’ (p.332). As a consequence, the city’s current merits look rather dubious and diminutive by comparison with its great past. From a place which was historically important in European terms, Geneva has turned into a city of decline, ‘the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture’ (p.203). In the eighteenth century important personalities (including Rousseau, Voltaire, Madame de Staël) had made the city famous all over Europe. In the present, dubious political figures, Russian aristocratsrevolutionaries and clergymen who have fled their home country for various reasons such as Madame de S–, Peter Ivanovitch and Father Zosim, have made Geneva their place of exile. They are operating from Geneva, trying to proselytise people with their confused and questionable ideas. The ironic implication is that Russia may have been conquered by the Tartars once, but Geneva has been conquered by figures like Madame de S–: The Château Borel, embowered in the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our day, like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame de Staël, in the Napoleonic era. Only the Napoleonic despotism, the booted heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for an enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy in mystic vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest. And Madame de S– was very far from resembling the gifted author of Corinne. She made a great noise about being persecuted. I don’t know if she were regarded in certain circles as dangerous. (p.142)

Such descriptions resemble a cautionary tale both about revolution and democracy to the West – no wonder then that the narrator admits that he wants to trouble his readers (cf. p.162, my emphasis) with the histories of such corrupt aristocratic revolutionaries like Madame de S–.

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The narrative thus addresses the shadiness of the exiles and of the places they occupy, the mysterious space and mental climate they create, their unnatural relationship with natives and tourists, and their role as aliens. The revolutionary aristocrats, Madame de S– and Peter Ivanovitch, serve as overt examples of the mocking treatment of current Geneva: ‘Her [Madame de S–’s] loud pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of modern sentiment, she sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme de Staël) on the republican territory of Geneva’ (p.125). In truth, she is nothing more than a ‘witch in Parisian clothes’ (p.215), her life ‘more fit for the eighteenth century than for the conditions of our own time’ (p.163). Peter Ivanovitch is ironically termed ‘great feminist’ (pp.212, 326) and ‘heroic fugitive’ (p.125). He resides in aristocratic retreat on the top floor of his luxury hotel, which in telling contrast is called ‘The Cosmopolitan’. In other words, the Russian revolutionary aristocrats are perverted, diminutive mock-heroic versions of their great counterparts of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution.5 Château Borel, headquarters of the Russian revolutionary exiles, half a mile from the town, is constantly presented in negative terms. It is described as a neglected place, dilapidated and degraded over the course of time. It is dusty, damp, gloomy, desolate, deserted, empty, almost uninhabited, exuding solitude and quietness and exhibiting ‘cold, placid glimpses of the lake’ (p.168). It has become a ‘nest of aristocratic conspiracies’ (p.142), inhabited by ghosts. Conrad moulds Château Borel on Gothic fiction so that even the great Gothic model of the past, the literary paradigm, is made counterproductive by its present inhabitants. Just like the town, the château also looks diminutive by comparison with its grand past: It might very well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning, futile ghost of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly rumour had it, by Madame de S– to meet statesmen, diplomatists, deputies of various European Parliaments, must have been of another sort. (p.211)

In other words, the château is the site and symbol of empty revolutionary promises, degradation, false pretence, a fake. This is underlined by Peter Ivanovitch’s warning to Razumov that no one is perfect and that ‘the possessor of a rare jewel might, before opening the casket, warn the profane that no gem perhaps is flawless’ (pp.212f.). However, to procure the desired effect, he assures Razumov that he will find in this room ‘the quintessence of femi5

Another ironical contrast emerges if one considers the historical fact that another Russian aristocrat, Emperor Alexander I, enjoyed the advantages of an education conducted in the spirit of the French Enlightenment in Switzerland. Cf. Christiane Bimberg, ‘Deutsche und Russen – ihre Beziehungen und gegenseitigen Wahrnehmungen’, in Reise nach Moskowien: Russlandbilder aus dem Kalten Krieg (Bochum: Dr. Winkler Verlag, 2006), pp.183-225 (p.209). During his reign he opened Russia to the West.

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nine intuition’ (p.213). Razumov, in turn, senses that the château is a strange and haunted place and Madame de S– its ghost. His only desire is to leave the place at once and board the electric tram: ‘He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were actually a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary plots, of this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime’ (pp.248f.). The narrator, too, ‘had an unpleasant mental vision of the dark road, of the sombre grounds, and the desolately suspicious aspect of that home of necromancy and intrigue and feminist adoration’ (p.324). Not surprisingly, the relationship between the Russian revolutionary exiles, the citizens of Geneva and the tourists is unnatural and characterised by arrogance, distance, alienation and indifference. Driving through the streets in her big landau she [Madame de S–] exhibited to the indifference of the natives and the stares of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure of hieratic stiffness, with a pair of big gleaming eyes, rolling restlessly behind a short veil of black lace, which, coming down no further than her vividly red lips, resembled a mask. (p.125)

Razumov had actually never seen Madame de S– before except in the carriage (cf. p.211). And the narrator, when he accompanies Nathalie Haldin to the top floor of Peter Ivanovitch’s hotel, feels reminded ‘of the perfect order of some severely luxurious model penitentiary on the solitary confinement principle’ (p.326). Razumov, though only recently arrived, feels nothing but contempt for the château, the aristocratic revolutionaries’ arrogant lifestyle, for Geneva and Switzerland, whose offer of exile he does not seem to appreciate at all because he sees the perversion of democratic ideals and values everywhere. He feels weary of the ‘visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists’ at the château (p.248). The side entrance of the building, which is not even closed, triggers Razumov’s vehement critique of Swiss democracy, represented for him by the provocative sight of an idle worker, a labour aristocrat as it were, who enjoys the freedom of the franchise but looks far from being truly ‘enlightened’. The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms hung over the low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in lordly repose, as if everything in sight belonged to him. ‘Elector! Eligible! Enlightened!’ Razumov muttered to himself. ‘A brute, all the same.’ (p.203f.)

The perversion of democratic rights and Protestant-Calvinist work ethics, the neglect of the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution is simply disgusting to Razumov. With contempt he turns his back on the view of Geneva’s harbour jetties whose ‘uninspiring, glittering quality of a very fresh oleograph’ (p.203) appals him. His full contempt is also expressed in

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his talk to Peter Ivanovitch at the château, though at the same time he has to admit that he is no better than those aristocratic revolutionary exiles: If I were really an extraordinary person, I would not be here, walking with you in a garden in Switzerland, Canton of Geneva, Commune of – what’s the name of the Commune this place belongs to? … Never mind – the heart of democracy, anyhow. A fit heart for it; no bigger than a parched pea and about as much value. I am no more extraordinary than the rest of us Russians, wandering abroad. (pp.205f.)

The sense of (geographical, political, social, cultural, ideological, emotional, and psychological) alienation, antagonism and dislocation is prominent in the narrative. The Russian (and other) exiles carry out their conspiratorial activities in public, ‘under the eyes’ of the Genevans and the tourists,6 who do not pay attention and whose lives unfold indifferently, parallel to the planning and realisation of various political plots. Whereas the fate of the Swiss citizens has been made ‘secure from the cradle to the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a republic that could almost be held in the palm of one’s hand’ (p.175), the shadow of Russian autocracy extends even to Geneva in the middle of Europe, where the Russian exiles enjoy an indifferent hospitality but still cultivate their domestic political problems exterritorially – to the ignorance and indifference of the Genevans and the tourists. In the parting scene between Nathalie Haldin and Razumov, the narrator fully understands that autocracy is not an exclusive affair of public world politics but cynically cuts most deeply into people’s private lives: The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great stage of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this other glimpse behind the scenes, something more profound than the words and gestures of the public play. (pp.338f., my emphasis)

The narrative comments describe the town as ‘indifferent and hospitable in its cold, almost scornful, toleration – a respectable town of refuge to which all these sorrows and hopes were nothing’ (p.338). It is a ‘sleeping town of prosaic virtues and universal hospitality’ (p.336). When Geneva and the Rhone valley are visited by a thunderstorm and Razumov is driven to his rooms, the same stance is accentuated: […] but the main forces of the thunderstorm remained massed down the Rhone valley as if loath to attack the respectable and passionless abode of democratic liberty, the serious-minded town of dreary hotels, tendering the same indifferent hospitality to tourists of all nations and to international conspirators of every shade. (p.357, my emphasis)

Razumov is unable to enjoy his exile in a democratic community precisely because he misses the Russian passion in all those sights of outward trivial perfection. Geneva holds no real attraction for him. Conrad uses a famous 6

Cf. Zabel, pp.111-144 (p.121).

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motif of Russian literature here, Oblomovshchina. Ivan Goncharov, in his novel Oblomov (1859), had made alleged Russian character deficits such as a lack of energy, disinterestedness, indifference and lethargy appear more human, sympathetic and acceptable than German discipline, efficiency, stubbornness and dullness.7 Throughout, the narrative emphasises the contrast between semblance and reality, the past and a present in which Geneva is not living up to its former standards and its once famous inhabitants have been forgotten. Rousseau’s island serves as a synecdoche here. The shores faced with dressed stone are ‘a perfection of puerile neatness’: ‘There was something of naïve, odious and inane simplicity about that unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau. Something pretentious and shabby, too’ (p.290). When Razumov is writing his secret diary there, he watches passers-by on the bridge cautiously. This is needless, however, because ‘the people crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the Social Contract sat enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of bronze’ (p.291). These statements refer to Rousseau’s historical and symbolical exile: He fled to Switzerland after his Emile (1762) had been condemned in Paris, and he renounced his Genevan citizenship and finally sought refuge in England after the Council of Geneva had likewise condemned the book.8 In Conrad’s rendition, in current Geneva, the philosopher has become an exile in his own birthplace, left alone, isolated and betrayed. The significance of his work is lost upon the Genevans. Rousseau’s island is ‘absurd’ (p.290) and Geneva has become an ‘odious town of liberty’ (p.226). In St. Petersburg the people are subdued, exploited, sacrificed, subject to an inhuman rule. It is a place of social contrast, of immense luxury but also poverty and human misery, which are described through impressive physicalpoetic images. The novel’s politically connoted renditions of winter landscapes express much sympathy for the fate of the country and the common Russian people. By contrast, Geneva is a place of well-being, luxury, democracy and liberty, but also self-complacency and indifference. It has sunk into mediocrity, insignificance and stagnation, a pale shadow of its former political and socio-cultural significance. Both cities are shown to be haunted by their respective ghosts. However, compared to the real cold and snow of St. Petersburg, Geneva is a disappointment even in spring – orderly, but ‘comely 7

8

Cf. Christiane Bimberg, pp.183-225 (pp.195f.). For Conrad’s appreciation of Russian literature, especially Ivan Turgenev, cf. his essay ‘Turgenev’, in Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1924), Part I: Letters, pp.45-48. Cf. Peter R. Hobson and James Bowen, Theories of Education: Studies of Significant Innovations in Western Educational Thought (Sydney: John Wiley, 1987), p.123.

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without grace, and hospitable without sympathy’ (p.141). Its sky is that ‘of a land without horizons’ (p.141) – emotionally cold, miserable and uninspiring. Geneva connotes a lack of charm, grace, attraction, inspiration and passion. It has the quality of a mental prison, in contrast to the real prisons of autocratic Russia. St. Petersburg, which is riddled with human misery, is simultaneously vibrant and exciting due to the burgeoning social unrest. Geneva, in contrast, has become mired in sobriety, pragmatism and sterility. Whereas St. Petersburg is authentic, Geneva appears inauthentic, immature, banal. It has become static and dead, cheap and provincial instead of great and cosmopolitan. Perhaps this is meant as another cautionary tale for Westerners, ‘the staid lovers calmed by the possession of a conquered liberty’ (p.164), about the degradation of democracy. The idea of a democracy dearly bought, but at too high a price, qualifies the Russian notion of a bargain that Western nations have successfully made with their fate (‘so much liberty for so much hard cash’, 134) but which was never offered to Russia. The narrator self-critically admits that maybe ‘our bargain was not a very lofty one’ (p.114). However, Conrad undermines the validity of the narrator’s claim that ‘the terms men and nations obtain from Fate are hallowed by the price’ (p.114). Perhaps they are not after all. All in all, Razumov is simply amazed at the unjust disproportion: the smallness and insignificance of the democratic Swiss republic compared to the absurdly frightening immensity of autocratic Russia.

3. Modes of Perception and Awareness All means of Conrad’s literary representation point the reader to the differences in Western and Eastern modes of perception and awareness. The perceptions and reactions of the narrator are of special importance here because it is his explicit task to provide the perspective of the Western observer. However, he is better informed and more educated than the average Westerner and this is why his positions and the whole narrative are able to expand, differentiate and enrich the Western discourse about Russia. The narrator is constructed in such a way that he plays a central role in the intercultural encounters and confrontations of Westerners and Easterners. His friendship with Nathalie Haldin is of central importance here. In spite of his gestures of modesty with regard to his ability to comprehend Russian problems, the narrator takes considerable pride in the confidence shown him by Nathalie Haldin and his ability to act out his special part in that relationship: ‘I felt profoundly my European remoteness, and said nothing, but I made up my mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end’ (p.336, my emphasis). Their friendship is in fact a very special one; for a Western, more reserved person it holds difficult emotional moments indeed. They reveal the enormous differences between Western and Eastern

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mentalities, and particularly, in an almost painful way, the Western helplessness toward Russian suffering. Yet both sides allow for this and bear it. Conrad integrates into his narrative quite a number of unique and touching scenes – the most valuable moments in the difficult process of intercultural approximation. His narrator starts to adopt psychological and ethical categories whose value he did not appreciate at first, for instance sensitivity, apprehension, emotionality, friendship, loyalty, responsibility and care, which are associated in the narrative with Easterners rather than Westerners. Throughout the novel the narrator is testing the ground for a mutual understanding between Western and Eastern Europeans. The result is not always satisfactory. The narrator is not always able to adequately cope with all this; the clash between reason and emotion is all too obvious. The narrator has to undertake several attempts to explain certain reactions, phenomena and differences. He tries to diminish the West-East contrast, lower the limits for understanding the East and bring Russians closer to the Western reader. Yet the narrator is also shown to be exhausted and at his wit’s end, quickly reaching the limits of his own comprehension, (due to intercultural and linguistic misunderstandings) as well as the limits of rationality, impartiality and distance. He recognises that he overestimated himself and underestimated the cultural contrast.9 The parting scene of Razumov and Nathalie Haldin to which the narrator becomes an involuntarily witness, is utterly misjudged by him and wrongly interpreted as the beginning of a potential love relationship. This ‘discovery’ (p.347) is simultaneously the moment of greatest disillusionment and deepest insight into the limited possibilities of the narrator to master the situation and tackle the Russian dilemma – at least at the extradiegetic level which offers this insight to the reader. The narrator himself, as a person, does not even grasp the full tragic implication of what is happening before his eyes: To me, the silent spectator, they looked like two people becoming conscious of a spell which had been lying on them ever since they first set eyes on each other. […] I remained, every fear of indiscretion lost in the sense of my enormous remoteness from their captivity within the sombre horizon of Russian problems, the boundary of their eyes, of their feelings – the prison of their souls. (pp.344f.)

9

The narrator is sure, for instance, that he will easily befriend Victor Haldin. Nathalie warns him not to expect to understand her brother since the latter is not Western. The narrator regards this as an ‘unnecessary warning’ (p.107). Besides, the circumstance that he feels it his duty to inform the Haldin ladies of the English newspaper article on Victor Haldin’s death leaves him in a state of nervous worry, nightmarish anxiety, absolute anguish and helplessness already (p.110). The question of Mrs. Haldin whether the narrator knew her son appears strange to him (p.114). The talk with Miss Haldin about her mother’s concern that her son had maybe not tried to save himself plunges the narrator into ‘sympathetic consternation’ (p.115).

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Thus the narrator becomes a helpless spectator of the last act of the Russian drama‚ ‘a mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my Western eyes’ (p.381). All his insider knowledge about Russia and the Russians is of no (real) use to him in the end. He becomes emotionally entangled in Russian problems, reaches the limits of Western superiority, gives in to various misjudgements and loses his distance.10 Moreover, helping is simply beyond his means. The differences between the worlds and experiences of Eastern and Western Europeans and between their reactions to certain events and circumstances are enhanced by the fact that Conrad integrates explicit intercultural encounters and confrontations11 that provoke different emotional and rational reactions and assessments. Russians are shown, for instance, to suffer from fears and anxieties that appear irrational to Westerners, but which seem natural or convincing once the Western reader is made aware of the particular circumstances (for instance Razumov’s desperate walk in the Streets of St. Petersburg, the Haldin ladies’ uncertainty and worry about Victor Haldin, Mrs. Haldin’s reaction to the news of her son’s death etc.). The narrator uses the latter occasion to comment on the different reactions of Westerners and Russians to politics and liberalism in particular: It is strange to think that, I won’t say liberty, but the mere liberalism of outlook which for us is a matter of words, of ambitions, of votes (and if of feeling at all, then of the sort of feeling which leaves our deepest affections untouched) may be for other beings very much like ourselves and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of fortitude, a matter of tears and anguish and blood. (p.318)

All in all, Russian concerns are associated with the unrealistic, unpragmatic, childish, cynical, irrational, melodramatic, theatrical, sensational or amusing – and are thus made to look unimportant to Westerners. Furthermore, the differences in perception relate to political ideals,12 the perception and as10

11

12

This does not mean, however, that narrative control breaks down, as Zabel and Widmer imply. Cf. Zabel, pp.111-144 (p.131); Widmer, pp.83-122 (p.109). Cf. for instance the mutual perception of foreignness in the narrator and Razumov when they accidentally meet in the garden of the Bastions (cf. pp.179 and 185); the narrator’s perception of Razumov’s ‘moody brusqueness’(p.193); Razumov’s impression of the narrator’s talk about the English newspaper article as an extraordinary rigmarole, a sort of sport, ‘a game to look at from the height of his superiority’ (p.199); the narrator’s reaction to Razumov’s outward appearance in their chance meeting in the Rue Mont Blanc (without Razumov recognising him): ‘The Westerner in me was discomposed. There was something shocking in the expression of that face. Had I been myself a conspirator, a Russian political refugee, I could have perhaps been able to draw some practical conclusion from this chance glimpse. As it was, it only discomposed me strongly, even to the extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in regard to Natalia Haldin’ (p.317). Conrad even uses the outward appearance of the Cyrillic script to suggest the incomprehensibility of Russian political ideals to Westerners. ‘I glanced down at the flimsy blackened

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sessment of political reality, and of the social structures, of history and democracy, notions of the function and reliability of the English and Russian press, questions of historical consciousness as well as societal solutions for socio-political contrasts and conflicts. This is demonstrated by the contrasting stances of the narrator and Nathalie Haldin, which at the same time reveal the limits of the understanding between Western and Eastern Europe. In a talk about Russia’s future, for example, Nathalie is convinced that the occidentals do not understand the situation. She reproaches the narrator for the fact that the West sees Russia’s conflicts as a mere class conflict and a social contest. The narrator admits that he may not understand, yet the ensuing comment reveals his true attitude, which is both condescending to Nathalie and self-denying: He classifies Nathalie’s position as marked by Russian linguistic imprecision, a lack of political pragmatism, an underestimation of the Western notion of political liberty, political simplicity13 and cynicism, even a negation of life. Furthermore, he denies his own Russian origin, completely repressing the fact that he is Russian by birth: That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naïve and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. (p.104, my emphasis)

The Western and the Eastern positions are indeed irreconcilable. When the narrator takes up the topic again in a later meeting, he confirms his view of Russian problems as a conflict (even if according to Nathalie this is not a conflict of classes or interests but just antagonistic ideas), trusting in the force of democratic institutions after the Western model to solve them. He is astonished to learn of Nathalie’s idealistic conviction that those antagonisms could be dissolved into concord in the very near future: ‘Are antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more easily – can they be cemented with blood and violence into that concord which you proclaim to be so near?’ (p.105). In her answer, Nathalie idealistically defends Russia’s right to national liberty and political self-determination. She regards the conflict of parties as artificial and con-

13

pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic, incomprehensible to the experience of Western Europe’ (p.133). The narrator’s judgments upon ‘Russian simplicity’ are his greatest misjudgements about Russians (cf. pp.104, 116, 117, 125, 126, 141).

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temptible and expresses her firm belief in a special Russian way to, and a better form of, national freedom (cf. p.106).14 Generally speaking, the positions of the narrator as a Western observer are associated with realism, common sense, the obvious, logical and comprehensible; they seem well-established and tested in the West. The Eastern positions represented by Nathalie signify a naïve idealism and individualism. The narrator has understood all of Nathalie’s words but not grasped at all the real problem underlying the symbolic representation of the Russian problems through language. This is just one of many examples where, in a poststructuralist way, the text critically addresses the general capacity of language to represent reality. At times, however, the narrator expresses his particular doubt in the capacity of the Russian language and of Russian speakers to express themselves and reflect upon reality adequately: Yet I confess that I have no comprehension of the Russian character. The illogicality of their attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional, should present no difficulty to a student of many grammars; but there must be something else in the way, some special human trait – one of those subtle differences that are beyond the ken of mere professors. What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the Russians’ extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they cherish them, but they don’t hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary, they are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with an enthusiasm, a sweeping abundance, with such an aptness of application sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can’t defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they say. There is a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity; and it is ever too disconnected to be classed as eloquence. (p.4, my emphasis)15

Characteristically he relates problems of reality to the level of their inadequate linguistic representation. The extradiegetic level of narration reveals the limitations of such a “Western” approach and Conrad’s attempt at im-

14

15

Nathalie also expresses Russian political self-confidence in the discussion about ‘the bargain that nations have made with their fate’, making a plea for Eastern political independence from Western societal models. The contract of nations is presented as a success story of the West, whereas the Easterners were never offered such a deal. In spite of this, Nathalie does not subscribe to envy. Rather, the reader witnesses a proud insistence on the fact that Russia is different, not bent on making a deal, always visited by hard strokes of fortune, whereas other (Western) nations have already obtained their convenient modern control over fate (cf. pp.114 and 134). Cf. also the narrator’s comment on Nathalie’s reaction when she talks to him about her brother’s praise of Razumov in his letter to her: ‘I reflected on the character of the words which I perceived very well must tip the scale of the girl’s feeling in that young man’s favour. They had not the sound of a casual utterance. Vague they were to my Western mind and to my Western sentiment, but I could not forget that, standing by Miss Haldin’s side, I was like a traveller in a strange country’ (p.169).

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proving the mutual understanding between West and East by sorting out linguistic and intercultural misunderstandings first. It is clear that Conrad is actually facing two things: First, the narrator’s personal identity problems (hybridity, ambiguity, in-betweenness); the “Englishman” about whose identity formation between Russia and Switzerland the reader does not learn anything, is actually a former Russian living (in exile?) in Switzerland for whatever reason, with an Anglophone identity gained somewhere else. This background evokes a parallel to Conrad’s own Anglicisation of his former Polish identity (under Russian occupation) and the problems of identity associated with that. Second, Conrad tries to reveal the reasons for the strained relationship and misunderstandings between East and West that arise from their respective cultural identities as lying in Russian sensibility versus Western incomprehension and ignorance. He offers a true intercultural psychology16 and perspective which paves the way for a deepened intercultural understanding. The task of the narrator, as Conrad conceives it, is thus to translate Russian problems and peculiarities for the Western reader so that he or she is able to grasp them in their larger European significance, before the shaping of European history can be tackled together by Westerners and Easterners. This political task is grasped by the narrator in the moment when he understands that his true narrative mission goes beyond just conveying to the reader a faithful version of Razumov’s secret diary and life story. Conrad once more addresses the representational quality of language. Once the problem of language is solved, reality can be tackled: The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a précis of a strange human document, but the rendering – I perceive it now clearly – of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this earth’s surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages, a word which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale. (p.67, my emphasis)17

The narrator therefore functions as a linguist, poststructuralist, narratologist, translator, mediator and communicator of the “moral discovery” of the narrative, the comprehension of the “moral conditions” of Russia, i.e. the terrible implications of autocracy. Conrad discloses the encoding and decoding of a text as a political task. Narratives refer us back to realities in spite, or even because of, their tricky textures. The supposed failure of the narrator is just a 16 17

As he writes in his ‘Author’s Note’: ‘the psychology of Russia itself’ (p.vii). Cf. a similar statement: ‘in addition to my primary conviction that truth alone is the justification of any fiction which makes the least claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture of men and women of its time.’ (p.viii).

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narrative trick. Nevertheless, his personal failure is not interpreted in the narrative in the Western, achievement-oriented way as a human error or a disgrace, but rather in the Eastern way, as a moral victory – Conrad’s appropriation of another famous theme in classical Russian literature.

4. Conclusion The result of all those observations is paradoxical and ambivalent, simultaneously exemplifying the complexity of the mode of presentation. Conrad rarely misses a chance of juxtaposing (supposed) negative Eastern qualities to (supposed) positive Western ones: Eastern simplicity and inferiority vs. Western know-all manner, subtlety, refinement, wisdom, complexity and superiority; Russian idealism, irrational and childish fears, a fatalistic subjection under the prevailing conditions vs. Western realism, pragmatism, agency, mastership and control of the political-historical reality. Surprisingly enough, in spite of all this, at the end of the novel Western Europeans (above all the narrator, but also the Genevans) do not emerge as really superior, but as rather unimaginative, insensitive, ignorant, naïve, narrow-minded and superficial. Eastern and Western Europeans are separated by worlds of historical consciousness, morality and ethics, sensitivity and sensibility. Conrad corrects the discourse of the time, differentiating between nation/state and people/citizens: In spite of the existence of “moral negation” and “moral distress” in the Russian state, the Russian people have command over emotional, psychological and moral-ethical categories that the West has already lost or abandoned by the beginning of the twentieth century, or whose significance it fails to comprehend.18 The latter is shown at the extradiegetic level to be a dangerous assessment. Conrad decodes and corrects this Orientalism (the construction of a false image of the “other”, the East, for the sake of enhancing one’s own supposed superiority).19 As a result, though he has always played down his expertise about Russian affairs,20 Under Western Eyes has to be assigned the status of 18

19

20

Cf. the statement: ‘this narrative where the aspects of honour and shame are remote from the ideas of the Western world’ (p.293). Cf. also the following quote on Western cultural ignorance and arrogance from Conrad’s essay ‘Autocracy and War’: ‘The West having managed to lodge its hasty foot on the neck of the East is prone to forget that it is from the East that the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who set the value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of meditation.’ Joseph Conrad, ‘Autocracy and War’, in Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1924), Part II: Life, pp.83-114 (p.88). Cf. the author’s remarks in his ‘Author’s Note’ which have to be seen as a considerable understatement: ‘The course of action need not be explained. It has suggested itself more as a matter of feeling than a matter of thinking. It is the result not of a special experience but of general knowledge, fortified by earnest meditation’ (p.viii). ‘The various figures playing

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one of the earliest and most intelligent contributions within British literature to the Western discourse on Russia – not only at the beginning of the twentieth century, but even today. It integrates stereotypes, but it questions and corrects them at the same time. The narrative therefore displays qualities of both discourse and counter-discourse.

Works Cited Bimberg, Christiane, ‘Dialog mit Hindernissen: Verständnisschwierigkeiten zwischen West- und Osteuropa in Joseph Conrads Under Western Eyes’ (forthcoming) —, ‘Who are Those “Western Eyes”? On the Identity, Role and Functions of the Narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes’ (forthcoming) —, ‘Urban Space, City Life and Identity Construction in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day: The Fusion of Material and Mental Landscapes’ (forthcoming) — and Igor Volkov, eds., Textual Intricacies: Essays on Structure and Intertextuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Fiction in English (Trier: WVT, 2009) —, ‘Deutsche und Russen – ihre Beziehungen und gegenseitigen Wahrnehmungen’, in Reise nach Moskowien: Russlandbilder aus dem Kalten Krieg, Christiane Bimberg (Bochum: Dr. Winkler Verlag, 2006) pp.183225 Conrad, Joseph, ‘Letter to John Galsworthy of January 6, 1908’, in Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, ed. by G. Jean-Aubry, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1927), II, pp.64-65 —, Under Western Eyes (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company 1924) —, ‘Turgenev’, in Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1924), Part I: Letters, pp.45-48 —, ‘Autocracy and War’, in Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1924), Part II: Life, pp.83-114 Hobson, Peter R. and James Bowen, Theories of Education: Studies of Significant Innovations in Western Political Thought (Sydney: John Wiley and Sons, 1987)

their part in the story also owe their existence to no special experience but to the general knowledge of the condition of Russia and of the moral and emotional reactions of the Russian temperament to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness’ (ibid.).

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Howe, Irving, Politics and the Novel, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) Peters, John G., The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Watt, Ian, Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Watts, Cedric, Joseph Conrad, Writers and Their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994) —, A Preface to Conrad (London and New York: Longman, 1982) Widmer, Kingsley, ‘Joseph Conrad’, in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, ed. by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, 8 vols (Detroit and London: Gale, 1991), V (1991), pp.83-122 Zabel, Morton Dauwen, ‘Introduction to Under Western Eyes’, in Conrad: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth Century Views, ed. by Marvin Mudrick (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp.111-144

Kapka Kassabova

From Bulgaria with Love and Hate: The Anxiety of the Distorting Mirror (A Writer’s Perspective) When I first arrived in Britain as a teenager in 1990, my English consisted of whatever words I had picked up from listening to The Beatles and the German rock band The Scorpions. But even my rudimentary English was enough to make sense of the quiz I found in an English tabloid newspaper. One of the quiz questions was: Bulgaria is a) a character in a children’s story; b) a Soviet republic; c) a country in south-east Europe, and d) a wild river in Mexico. 1

An older man I met at a party said ‘Oh, but you’re pretty. I thought all Bulgarian women were squat, hairy and wore head-scarves.’ And because I was sensitive about where I came from, the personal compliment was cancelled out by the national insult. And why was I sensitive about where I came from? Because I sensed that I came from a second-rate country – our generation had grown up dreaming of the West as an Eldorado, and thinking of ourselves as a second-rate country in a second-rate part of Europe. This feeling of inferiority was confirmed by a bully at my English school who remarked on my Bulgarian-made canvas shoes I wore in the Physical Education class, saying ‘Are these made in Russia? They look like shit.’ To which I said, the tears already welling up in my eyes, ‘I’m not from Russia, I’m from Bulgaria.’ ‘Same thing’, he said. (cf. p.125f.) This was in 1990. Some British perceptions have changed since then, others have remained surprisingly the same. And the same can be said about Bulgaria itself, as the totalitarian gerontocracy fell and their children took over with the money their fathers and grandfathers had been stealing from the country for half a century. From the Wild East, countries like Bulgaria turned overnight into the Wild West. So, here I’d like to talk about cliché, national identity and national neurosis – not necessarily in this order – but necessarily through the prism of postcommunist Bulgaria in general and my personal experience in particular as an ex-pat travel writer grappling with these prickly issues. And while we’re on clichés, I’d like to mention an example of the cultural cliché taken to a virtuosic extreme. This is the Australian-published Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry (2003), from the Jetlag 1

Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello Books, 2008), p.124. All page references in parentheses refer to this edition.

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Travel Guide series. It’s a tongue-in-cheek guide to an imaginary ex-Soviet republic, a monstrous hybrid of East bloc countries. It’s a highly inventive masterpiece of the travel genre cliché and an instance of meta-travel writing where travel guide meets faction. Like Sasha Baron Cohen’s film Borat (2006), 2 it makes mincemeat of several things at once: the former Eastern bloc itself, Western stereotypes of the Eastern bloc, the travel-guide genre itself where the truth is sterilised and bland niceties abound often at the expense of cultural insight or imagination. Here is a basic facts summary of Molvanîa: Capital: Lutenblag Government: Democracy – a military coup held every 3 years Major exports: beetroot, spittoons, and low-grade heroin The people: whilst culturally diverse, the Molvanian population is made up of three major ethnic groups: the Bulgs (68%) who live predominantly in the centre and south, the Hungars (29%) who inhabit the northern cities, and the Molvs (3%) who can be found mainly in prison. 3

Molvanîa is an imaginative compendium of clichés, but the thing about ordinary, banal cultural clichés is that there are no real people in them, and rarely are there any emotions or experiences that the reader can identify with. In that sense, we could say that a national stereotype is the extent to which the collective imagination has ran out of ideas. As far as British stereotypes of others are concerned, I may as well introduce myself as someone who moved from a country that is a character in a children’s story (‘Great Uncle Bulgaria’) to a country populated by hobbits and wizards (The Lord of the Rings) before I returned to civilisation (Britain). In Britain, there still prevails an image of Bulgaria as a cheap and nasty place, mostly associated with cheap beer, cheap skiing, cheap sea-side resorts, cheap property and cheap sex. Skiing in Bulgaria has been described by the Guardian as ‘[c]razily, undeniably, ridiculously cheap’, 4 and travel articles about the country still bear headings like ‘I’m starting to love this dirty town’. 5 A good example of taking national stereotypes to a rock bottom low was the art installation celebrating the Czech Republic’s presidency of the EU. It was called Entropa, a play on words on Europa and entropy, which in physics means a measure of the lack of energy. Remember the finer points of En2 3

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For a discussion of Borat cf. the article by S. Schmid in the present volume. Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry, Jetlag Travel Guide (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2004), p.20. Flip Byrnes, ‘Off piste’, The Guardian (25 January 2005) [accessed 27 October 2009]. Tanya Gold, ‘“I Am Starting to Love This Dirty Town”: Bulgaria Has Been Named the World’s Best-Value Tourist Destination’, The Guardian (21 April 2008) [accessed 27 October 2009].

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tropa? Neither do I. That’s because it didn’t have any finer points. It depicted every European country as its most banal or most offensive stereotype: Italy as a football pitch, Romania as a Dracula theme park, Germany as swastikashaped autobahns, and Bulgaria as a bunch of Turkish squat toilets. The installation did make a splash when it went up in Brussels, in a lavatory humour sort of way, because it managed to simultaneously amuse and offend – though not simultaneously the same people. Bulgarians for instance were not amused. In fact, the nation had a collective mini-nervous breakdown. Here was a fellow Slav representing us as the sewage outlet, as it were, of the Ottomans – the most painful kind of cultural and historic throwback for a nation that always longed to be seen as part of Europe and was always prevented by one thing or another – five centuries of Ottoman occupation, for example, of forty-five years of communist dictatorship. It touched a national nerve and so the Bulgarian government, backed by the mainstream media, requested for the squat toilets to be covered up by black cloth. And so, at the official unveiling of the installation, Bulgaria appeared on the artistically rendered map of Europe as a blank, anonymous, faceless space. The fact that the whole installation was a hoax created by one single Czech artist instead of the supposed 27 artists from EU member states, with the alleged jolly purpose of finding out whether ‘Europe could laugh at itself’, didn’t make the toilets any funnier for the Bulgarians. The reactions of the average Bulgarian fell into two main camps, and both are revealing of the nation’s painfully insecure self-perception as a European country. Reaction number one was hateful, childish defiance along the lines of: ‘How would the Czechs feel if a Bulgarian artist depicted them as a Soviet tank?’, or ‘It’s Denmark that’s toilet, not Bulgaria. Even Shakespeare said it – something is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark’, or, ‘Czech art has gone down the toilet.’ The far right party Ataka threatened to remove the offensive installation single-handedly, if it came to that. It was implied by the government that this was the latest instalment in the all-European antiBulgarian project, thus stoking an unhealthy patriotic fervour and indignation in the average disgruntled Bulgarian. This sort of hysterical political stridency has echoes of the Muslim reaction to the infamous Danish cartoons of Mohammed, and reveals a culture so fragile that it’s incapable of laughing at itself. As the Bulgarian thinker Desislava Gavrilova put it in a commentary about the Entropa scandal: ‘And so we enter 2009 without gas, and without a sense of humour. And art has the last laugh.’ Another commentator, Ivailo Dichev, pointed out that the establishment had reacted as the Taleban. Reaction number two was shame and self-flagellation along the lines of: ‘Well, it’s true, this country is a toilet’, ‘What do you expect when the first thing a foreigner sees when he arrives in Bulgaria is a dirty toilet.’ Or, ‘Well,

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truth hurts, but we have to look at ourselves critically.’ Or, ‘The Czech artist has been kind. The toilet could have been filthy and bloodied, just like our darling fatherland.’ There was a third, minority reaction among the more educated and among ex-pats: an attempt to refuse to be bullied and laugh at ourselves, to be good sports about it, in the spirit of a new, ironic, post-post-modern, postnationalistic twenty-first-century Europe. ‘It’s fine about the Turkish toilets’, some said in the spirit of the joke, ‘but why are they so clean?’ The mayor of a small Black Sea town extended a sincere invitation to the Czech artist, who admitted that he knew nothing about most European countries, to come and visit his beautiful ancient sea-side town and see for himself that Bulgaria has more to offer than squat toilets. But behind that good-naturedness, and behind the self-satirising laughter I felt the tears, because they are my laughter, and my tears, and they have been there since the beginning. It was with a smile, three years ago, that I found myself backpacking around Bulgaria for two months, in an attempt to write a new travel guide for the Globetrotter Travel Guide series. 6 At times, I felt as if I was travelling inside Molvanîa, especially when I found myself staying in dated, brown communist-era hotels and eating reheated food in forlorn restaurants where the waitress seemed to have popped out of the mid-80s, with her blue eye make-up and bored expression. I discovered, at my own peril, that travelling simply in the present tense is impossible in Bulgaria. Travel in some places implies time-travel. This is how the tears came about – as I found myself inside the scenes, streets and smells of my childhood. The journey began with a factual travel guide, and ended with a bittersweet memoir which I called Street Without a Name. It is an attempt to tell the universal story of the last East European communist childhood – that of my entire generation. We came of age just as the Berlin Wall came down. And just as the side-effect of cultural stereotypes is to dehumanise places and people, so the ultimate aim of a book like mine is – I hope – to humanise a place and a people, by telling the story of a very particular collective experience in a universal way. My Globetrotter travel guide to Bulgaria, incidentally, did end up looking very good with all the colour photos, and if you don’t know anything about the country, you might not even notice that some of the photo captions are rather creatively written, due to the fact that my publishers, who are in Capetown, lost the file with my 120 photo captions the day before they went to the printer. As they couldn’t get hold of me, they decided to get creative and compose their own photo captions to a culture they know as much about as I know about the Zulus. As a result, in my guide 6

Kapka Kassabova, Bulgaria, Globetrotter Travel Pack (London: New Holland Publishers, 2008).

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you will find an illustration of Byzantines and Bulgars chopping off each other’s heads around about the eleventh century. The caption reads: ‘Russians rout the Bulgarian cavalry in a skirmish.’ Had we been in America, I would have sued my publisher. Move over Molvanîa. [I]n the West there hangs about a vague idea of collective life behind the Iron Curtain, and life after it, but there are surprisingly few personal stories to go with the idea. There ought to be more. After all, half of Europe lived on ‘the other side’ for half a century. And perhaps half of that half (by my own rough estimate) still feels as if it’s living on the other side of something in the shape of a wall. The ghost of the Wall won’t go away until it is laid to rest. This book is, among other things, my own act of exorcism. In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I left Sofia for Britain, New Zealand, and again Britain, occasionally stopping in France and Germany for a year or so. In the process, I acquired lots of visas, two passports, some half-wasted lives, and an impressive collection of delusions. My chief delusion was that by becoming deeply absorbed by every other country on the planet except Bulgaria (which I carefully tiptoed around as if it was a ticking bomb in the shape of a country ready to detonate at the slightest touch of memory) I could get rid of two things. One, my Bulgarian past which was not of the miserable variety, but bothered me nevertheless, like an infirm relative calling out from a darkened room at the back of the house. Two, the need to answer directly the question nice people ask when they meet you: so, where are you from? Bulgaria. Capital: Bucharest. Uncle Bulgaria. A yogurt bacillus called bulgaricus. A republic of the former Soviet Union. The Bulgarian umbrella murder. Wrestlers – or was it weight-lifters. Men – and women – with moustaches. And lately, the place from where swarthy folk will come beating the doors of the EU down with their plumbers’ tools. A cheap place-in-the-sun property paradise – or was it skiing – about which we know that …well, it’s cheap. In the Western mind Bulgaria is a country without a face. It appears in English language literature as a chapter – the shortest one – which begins with an edifying sentence about the unjust obscurity of Bulgaria in the Western mind. Or as an appendix, a kind of afterthought. In the last century, several clever and experienced travellers have had a go at Bulgaria, but the country proved only partially penetrable for them. It remained the shortest chapter in their books. The last person who truly wrote and drew Bulgaria into existence was the Austro-Hungarian ethnographer Felix Kanitz. That was in 1860. So it’s probably time for a modern take. I know that Bulgaria has many faces – I have seen them – so I decided to write my own Bulgaria into being, as a preventative antidote to future appendixes. Have I got it dead right? I’m sure I have got it dead wrong, in places. But what I really wanted to do was write an interesting story about the drama of the place and its people. That’s the most any travel writer or memoirist can wish for. And the only authentic, three-dimensional way to do this was to tell the story of growing up and coming of age in the not altogether sane last decade and a half of the Cold War, about scurrying to the coveted West in the chipped shadow of the Berlin Wall, and about returning sixteen years later, a changed person to a changed country. The portrait I sketch of modern Bulgaria, then and now, is almost always personal and almost never flattering. It had to be this way if I wanted to be truthful to the times in which I was growing up, and the times in which Bulgaria is growing up today. And I

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wanted to be. Beauty might be more important to the ego of countries, but truth is more important to me. Travelling around the country where you grew up, lost some of your virginity and a few of your illusions, acquired some lasting neuroses, and then left in a hateful mood, is a slightly schizoid experience. You are at once an outsider to the present and an insider of the past. Or perhaps the other way around. As I said, it’s a schizoid experience. Which is a way of saying that I grew up, went back into the woods, shuffled the leaves with my walking stick, and here are the pictures I found. (pp.2-4)

Street Without a Name was published in Britain, New Zealand and the US. I wrote it for a British audience, and as I wrote it, I was only vaguely aware that I was performing what Vedrana Veliþkoviü in this present volume calls ‘self-othering’. I was revisiting my Bulgarian childhood in English. I was presenting in a way accessible to a Western audience the grotesque everyday realities of ordinary family life under ‘Socialism with a human face’, as the regime called it. I was then travelling across modern Bulgaria as a returning ex-pat, to take the feverish, sick pulse of times present and perform a pitiless autopsy of times past, all in the tradition of English travel literature. There is no travel writing tradition in Bulgaria. I was writing about a homeland that isn’t my home anymore, and I was doing it in a second language. The perversity of this didn’t escape me, just as another perversity – or shall we say paradox – didn’t escape my Bulgarian translator’s attention. That paradox is simply referred to in Bulgaria as ‘immigrant literature’ – books by Bulgarianborn, sometimes Bulgarian-raised authors who now write in German, French or English. This phenomenon has only really taken off in the last few years, with German-language authors like Iliya Troyanow and Dimitre Dinev being translated into Bulgarian. A few months after my book came out in Bulgaria, the film based on Ilyia Troyanow’s novel Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall [The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner] (1996) was screened at the Sofia International Film Festival and received the audience prize and a twenty-minute standing, tearful ovation from the packed hall. 7 This is the story of Alex, a small-town Bulgarian boy whose parents cross the border illegally in the 1970s and end up in Germany. Twenty years later, his parents die in a car accident, driving back to Bulgaria for the first time, and Alex becomes amnesic, losing all memory and therefore all identity. The film is really a road-movie following the sentimental journey home on a tandem bicycle of Alex and his Bulgarian grandfather who is trying to bring him home and thus give him back his identity and his true self, everything that was lost in the fog of time and trauma. Dimitre Dinev’s epic German-language novel Engelszungen [Angel Tongues] (2003) was similarly an 7

Svetat e golyam i spasenie debne otvsyakade (The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner), dir. by Stephan Komandarev (Bulgaria/Germany/Slovenia/Hungary 2008).

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attempt to tell the Bulgarian story of the twentieth century. Why is it, my translator Mariana Melnishka asked, why is it that it takes a whole lost generation (this is my generation which emigrated in droves) twenty years, and a foreign language, to begin to tell the Bulgarian experience? I didn’t have a clear answer to that question, which is why I always read carefully all the letters I get from readers, especially Bulgarian readers. The book, Street Without a Name, is read by both Bulgarians and ex-pats in both languages, and it is from these readers’ hundreds of emails and Facebook postings that my biggest surprise came. I realised that my love-and-hate relationship with my homecountry, with my communist childhood, and with what has become of Bulgaria since then is commonplace. Many readers of my generation said that this is the book they hadn’t written, or would have written, or always wanted to read. That this was their life, and reading about it for the first time has made them less fragmented, less neurotic, less anxious about the exhausting and difficult love-and-hate way in which they relate to Bulgaria. Some said that reading Street was an act of healing between their past and their homeland’s present, which made me realise that it is exactly what the writing of the book had been for me – an act of healing, largely unsuccessful of course, because Bulgaria is a country that hasn’t healed from the rupture between past and present, the strange Bulgaria of the bad old days, and the even stranger Bulgaria of the bad new days; between what it wants to be and what it is; and between how it longs to be seen by Europe and how it is seen, still. One woman wrote from the US to say that seeing in print her own fears, disillusionments and her own divided heart made her realise that since emigrating twelve years ago, she had remained stuck somewhere across the ocean, somewhere between Sofia’s concrete residential complex Mladost 3, where both she and I grew up, and America. A guy wrote from Germany with his story: His mother emigrated from Bulgaria in 1990 when he was ten. Since then, he wrote, I have carried this pain inside me, the pain of not being understood, and of having nothing but good childhood memories of a place that I’m not sure still exists. A woman wrote to say that she couldn’t stop crying when she read Street – because she had lost both her mother, her homeland, and her language to America. It’s no good trying to forget, is it, another Bulgarian reader wrote from New Zealand, those experiences will always be with us. A scientist in Germany told me that for years, her colleagues at the research institute where she works have been asking her why she doesn’t go back to Bulgaria since she is so homesick all the time. She couldn’t explain, it was too complicated, and now, she said, I can just give them the book to read and discover my beloved, my unliveable Bulgaria for themselves. Another girl wrote with her story: Having grown up in Bulgaria and South Africa, she returned to Europe, Italy in particular. ‘I am

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very surprised’, she wrote, ‘about the ignorance of the people towards Eastern Europe. ‘It is so close, and yet they will never visit Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovakia. They prefer to visit Greece and Turkey, bypassing Bulgaria every time. It always amazed my family and I how little was known about Bulgaria in South Africa, and yet it is understandable, a country at the tip of Africa. But what explanation is there for Western Europeans, except their ignorance?’ Perhaps the most moving email I’ve had was from a woman called Mariella: Every time I go to Bulgaria I kid myself into thinking that I am going as a tourist, that my sense of myself is safe in an anglo-phone, europeanized construction, and every time to my surprise I find this eroded, imperceptibly, so that after a few weeks there my mother’s stories and fantasies start to seem reasonable and hopeful; that in itself should ring the warning bells. I bought your book and then spent two weeks eyeing it from a safe distance, not quite sure if I was ready for it. Then I decided that I needed to read it before I went to Bulgaria, needed to read it in the safety of my English bedroom, surrounded by familiar things, Radio 4 only an arm’s length away, so that I could anchor myself and not float away. Certainly I knew that I could not possibly read it while in Bulgaria, that would be too much. Even here, though, in the grey drizzle and surrounded by brick terraces, I cried and swelled, threatening to float away. Reading your book was the first time I found something approaching my own experience of rootlessness and internal division, though my story is at one remove from yours. I was born in Sofia in 1969 and by 1975 my mother had already defected to Germany with me and my father in tow. My older brother had to be left behind, as you know passports where never given to entire families. He stayed with my grandparents in Sofia and was traded in a few years later for a Mercedes Benz, used, if I remember correctly, but enough to appease the socialist state. I grew up in Germany, speaking German outside the twobedroom council flat in which we lived, first three of us, then four, then nine, then eleven, then just six, then five, and so on. Now it is only my mother that still lives there, with her cat. The rest of us are either dead or spread around the globe. Although I was to all intents and purposes German outside the walls of our flat, when I came home I was in little Bulgaria, a 70-square-meter outpost of the mother country in cold and indifferent Germany. I spoke Bulgarian at home, ate Bulgarian food, listened to the stories and reminiscences of the small band of survivors who emerged in occasional bursts from the great unknown that was to me the country of my birth. Although my parents lived in Germany they had never left Bulgaria. I absorbed their experiences, drank up their stories of a country that I would never be allowed to visit (defectors, you know) like mother’s milk, inherited their burden and memories, at one remove, a life I had never lived myself but that came to colour my interior world. How I wanted to go to the park and play on the stone turtle you could climb on, spend summer evenings at my grandfather’s allotment outside Sofia that some party member had appropriated. Who knew then how things would change and that now a visit to Bulgaria is just a matter of finding a cheap flight. Here I am approaching forty, trying to make sense of who I am. I have dismissed my Bulgarian roots, tried to embrace them, neither works. I have lived all over Europe and America but I am neither Bulgarian, nor German, I am not American, French or English. I have no mother tongue. Many of the experiences in your book I have not lived myself, but they are all so familiar as if I had been there as well. I always knew what Bulgaria was like, I had heard it from the people I grew up with, I

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never heard anything else. What you write resonates greatly with me. Living amongst nationalities, being a cultural mongrel, all the different suits, neither of which quite fits. I am in the process of exploring these different identities, trying to construct one that can be a home to me. It means much to me to find someone who understands what it means to come from Bulgaria, but to be no longer quite from there.

The pain of a lost homeland which is not well understood in the new homeland, is the recurrent theme in all the expat letters I get. It is what we might call the pain of obscure suffering – when your story, your experience, your loss, and the place you come from, are not known elsewhere, not validated or recorded in films or books. And for those who stayed behind and didn’t emigrate, the sufferings of the past are overridden by the difficulties of the present. There is no space, in most Bulgarians’ lives, to safely explore the recent past, because the recent past has seeped, like nuclear waste, into the very fabric of the present. So it remains, festering, underneath the surface of daily life. Among the readers who read the book in Bulgarian translation and write to me from Bulgaria, there are three age groups: youngsters in their teens and early twenties, those of my generation, and those of my parents’ generation. The youngsters say, ‘So, that’s how it was for you, amazing. All I knew was from history books but this is much better because it’s funny.’ Those of my generation say pretty much what the ex-pats said. Those of my parents’ generation are the most tormented in their response, because they were the most tormented by the totalitarian system and its dissolution. Some said to me, ‘Your book has given me a glimpse into what it was like for the kids.’ Others, like the intimidating veteran radio journalist who had lived a privileged life because she’d married into the Party elite, said: ‘At first I was angry and threw the book at the wall, because I couldn’t bear to think that that’s how some people lived while we had a great life. But then I forced myself to read it and it has transformed my view of what the system meant to the ordinary person. It’s a book that will have opponents’, she said very generously, ‘but it has created a new genre in Bulgarian literature and it will become a classic.’ So despite being commonplace, these are lonely kinds of pain that can only begin to be cured, I think, by some sort of personal or collective catharsis, and art in my view is the only place where this can happen gradually, safely and lastingly, and if I can have a small part in that process, that would give me back a sense of meaning and indeed healing. That’s all very well about coming to terms with the past, but what about the present? A few months ago, I wrote a light-hearted compare-and-contrast article for the Sunday Times about Bulgaria and Britain titled ‘Britain Is Scarier than Bulgaria’, on the subject of street safety and social drinking. It was a critique of British drunkenness and anti-social behaviour in otherwise civi-

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lised neighbourhoods of world-heritage cities like Edinburgh, where I live. The critique was offset by a comparison with the EU’s poorest and most corrupt member state, where despite mammoth social and political problems, I still feel safer walking on the streets of a good Sofia neighbourhood at night, except for the odd homeless dog rummaging in overflowing rubbish containers. This article was very possibly the only piece of English-language journalism anywhere in the world with something positive to say about Bulgaria, and this includes travel journalism. We could even say that my article was the antidote to the Turkish squat toilets of the Entropa installation. You’d think that Bulgarian readers would be delighted, or at least wouldn’t mind. Well, you’d be wrong. They minded very much indeed. The reaction of the Bulgarian yellow press and public opinion was one of hysterical, aggressive, foul-mouthed indignation. How dare an ex-pat pass an opinion – any opinion – on life in Bulgaria. How dare she suggest that life there is anything but hellish, and furthermore suggest that Britain is in any way worse than Bulgaria! I was accused of being mentally ill, of being in the pay of the ‘Socialists’ (referring to the left-wing Bulgarian government in power at the time), of being in the pay of the British government (it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that I was in the pay of the KGB as well), of being a traitor, of needing to see a doctor, needing to be shot in the head, and also – though clearly not in this order – needing to visit a Gypsy slum outside Sofia as a realitycheck, to see if I felt safe there, with the filthy Gypsies. So it was a shock for me, and a salutary insight into the state of the national self-image, which was not only rock-bottom miserably low, but also wallowed in its own misery. Bulgarians, traditionally Europe’s greatest sceptics and pessimists – with the possible suicidal exception of the Hungarians – still feel that they must hold the monopoly over the unhappiness sweepstakes. Nobody, least of all one of them living abroad, is allowed to accuse them of having safe streets, a lesser drinking problem than another country, or less ugly anti-social behaviour. Nobody. The joke here is that I hadn’t even said anything particularly positive about Bulgaria – I had simply said something relatively more negative about Britain. So when one’s sense of national self is contradictory and fraught, strange things happen. This incident was yet another instance of the difficulty of making opinion and documentary travel writing from West to East. Whatever image of the country appears in the Western media, it is sharply disputed. The unhappy reactions to Street Without a Name have all come from Bulgarians of my parents’ generation. They objected to the fact that I hadn’t portrayed life under communism in an exclusively positive light. What are people going to think, was the subtext of their anxiety? And another subtext was, ‘If my country is so dysfunctional, that makes me dysfunctional too.’

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One man at a reading in Edinburgh said, ‘You are ungrateful for everything that the State has given you.’ Another man said, ‘You write about your father serving in the army for a year and a half as if it was torture. But I’m sure that he was proud to serve his country and that the privations were worth it in the name of a bigger cause.’ The truth is, my father’s compulsory army service traumatised him, my mother, and me because he was absent for the first two years of my life. There is a two-fold conflict at play in the national psyche when it comes to cultural representations abroad. One, the broad Balkan inability to separate the individual from the national tribe and the need to identify oneself with one’s family and nation. Two, the tortured relationship all Bulgarians over the age of thirty have with the recent communist past. The result is a painful mirroring effect of pride and shame, love and hate, self-denial and selfobsession. And so, for Bulgarians of certain generations – the generations who spent longer under communism than on top of it – the boundary between national self-perception and individual self-image is blurred like the reflection in a distorted, foggy mirror. That mirror is our collective unconscious, and in that reflection I glimpse anxiety, anger and apocalyptic thinking. But I’d like to end on a cheerful note. In the British media, a new, funky kind of image of Bulgaria is slowly beginning to appear out of the fog of impersonal cliché. In the last few months, travel articles have come out about eco-tourism in the Bulgarian mountains and unspoilt spots along the Black Sea coast. A BBC radio producer contacted me recently to say that they’d like to focus more on Bulgaria and Romania in their cultural despatches, and did I have any ideas for programmes, other than the standard Bulgarian fare – crime and corruption. And to my surprise and delight, a Bulgarian short-story writer, Deyan Enev, has been picked up by a top London publisher. They asked me to translate his stories and I took to it with such enthusiasm that I translated 50,000 words in two weeks. This new, open-minded interest in Britain is echoed in Bulgaria by a kind of cultural renaissance, where in the last few years a dynamic new wave of writers, film-makers, publishers and commentators have managed, with sheer enthusiasm and bloody-mindedness, to carve out a space for home-grown literature and film. Until a couple of years ago, the best-selling book list was entirely made up of translated pulp fiction writers like John Grisham and Dan Brown. Now, there are Bulgarian authors among them. And I’d like to finish with a few words about another instance of this cultural renewal in Bulgaria, the English-language magazine for current affairs and culture, Vagabond. 8 It prides itself as Bulgaria’s first and only English8

Cf. the magazines website .

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language monthly. It is run by a team of young Bulgarian journalists and inspired by the vision of its editor Anthony Georgieff, a photojournalist and reporter who defected in 1989 and for many years worked for Radio Free Europe and the BCC. He returned to Bulgaria in 2004 to edit the new local edition of Playboy. The magazine has a unique place in the Bulgarian media and does several things like no other publication in the country. It is one of the very few totally independent outlets, it has an irreverent and highly critical voice, it publishes long investigative pieces on topics ranging from the latest on the black-umbrella-murder investigation and discarded Soviet and Nazi German tanks along the border with Turkey, to the rise of the far right and the nationalistic role of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It caters for a very mixed readership: international expats living in Bulgaria, Bulgarians and Bulgaria-watchers abroad, and Bulgarian readers of English. I can’t help but notice that however we look at Bulgaria, much of the fascination on the outside and the richness of experience on the inside of the mirror comes from the communist experience. It wasn’t a happy one, but it made us who we are, and along with the sorrow, it gave those of us who care a touch of humanity and compassion.

Works Cited Byrnes, Flip, ‘Off piste’, The Guardian (25 January 2005) [accessed 27 October 2009] Cilauro, Santo, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry, Jetlag Travel Guide (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2004) Gold, Tanya, ‘“I Am Starting to Love This Dirty Town”: Bulgaria Has Been Named the World’s Best-Value Tourist Destination’, The Guardian (21 April 2008) [accessed 27 October 2009] Kassabova, Kapka, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello Books, 2008)

TWO POEMS

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Our Names Long and Foreign They squint in the September sun of nineteen thirty nine, of nineteen forty eight, of nineteen sixty two. Here, one of them is born, a piece of dark flesh in a dark time. Class-room, ribbons in the hair. Here, one of them goes across the border to get married, and be lonely and homesick, and eat from despair. Her brother gets divorced, the second cousin’s crowned the town’s beauty and has twins, the other brother comes back from the war and almost drowns in the lake, then comes the other war, or wasn’t that the war before? Here, the twins without a mother. The beautiful go first, and then the good. And then the other way. It’s hard to say, the ink of years is smudged by tears from nineteen thirty nine. Here, borders lift, the family meets after seven years. Nervous smiles. Their shadows stretch across the pier, beach, veranda, cypress, pine. The lake has no reflections, the babies are anonymous, the children mute as graves, the adults in a slow decline.

81 They wave, they smile, they’re happy, but they feel there’s something on the other side behind the camera that’s pitiless and wild. No matter how much flesh and hope they throw at it, it gets them in the end, they and their children who smile in black and white, then colour. Hello! they call out from the shadow of September, and trip into unmarked containers stacked in silent rooms, our names long and foreign in the mouths of the unborn.

The Travel Guide to the Country of Your Birth which has over 300 natural lakes is one of the oldest countries in Europe has something for everyone, in every season occupies the northeast part of the Balkan Peninsula sits on the Black Sea to the East and the Danube to the North offers white-sand beaches, mystic mountains, and ancient towns has the Balkan range, which is part of the Alpine-Himalayan chain has 378 kilometres of Black Sea coast. The Black Sea is closed and non-tidal, and has 90% anoxic water. has a moderate continental climate: winters (November to February) are cold and dry, temperatures reach -10 is the place where in dark, empty apartments the people you love live inside mirrors

JOURNEYS ENCOUNTERS CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS

Elmar Schenkel

To Russia with Love: Maurice Baring (1874-1945) This article looks at texts by the writer and journalist Maurice Baring, an “interloper” between East and West whose insights into East-Western relations and into Russian culture have often been neglected in favour of other accounts on the subject published in the first half of the twentieth century. After providing general information about Baring’s activities as a journalist, political and cultural commentator and translator, his collection of news reports What I Saw in Russia is considered more closely. These reports reveal his continuing effort of questioning and sapping British and Western stereotypes about Russia; in addition, they provide invaluable reflections of Russian images of Britain.

1. Introduction: A Cultural Translator Maurice Baring tends to be noted merely in passing when scholars or biographers discuss the works of G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells and Hilaire Belloc, or when the Cambridge Apostles – a group of intellectuals related to the Bloomsbury Circle – or Catholic authors are under scrutiny. It is rarely seen that, in a context of intercultural dialogue, and especially one targeted on the relationship between Russia and the West, or more particularly Britain, Baring is indispensable. His publications include nine books on Russian culture and his travels,1 and he can be seen as one of the decisive influences leading to an appreciation, if not cult, of things Russian before the First World War. He translated and edited Russian poetry and introduced Chekhov to the West. Russia was his second homeland before the war, and it has been said that there was no other writer ‘who could write with greater or more profound intuitive comprehension of the Russian peasant, soldier, or worker than Maurice Baring.’2 And yet little has been written about him in this respect. Baring was a man of letters, dramatist, poet, essayist, translator, critic, novelist, 1

2

With the Russians in Manchuria (1905); A Year in Russia (1907); Russian Essays and Stories (1908); The Russian People (1911); The Mainsprings of Russia (1914); What I Saw in Russia (1914); An Outline of Russian Literature (1914); Tinker’s Leave, a Novel (1927); The Oxford Book of Russian Verse (1927). Altogether, he wrote some 50 books, among them biographies and books about music. He travelled in Germany, Italy and Scandinavia and was a friend of Sarah Bernhardt’s. In 1909 he converted, as his friend Chesterton would later do, to Roman Catholicism: ‘The only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted.’ Maurice Baring, The Puppet Show of Memory (London: Cassell, 1987), p.396. Sir Bernard Pares, quoted in Maurice Baring Restored, ed. by Paul Horgan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p.218.

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travel writer and war correspondent and his very versatility may have led to this neglect. He was the eighth child of the first Baron of Revelstoke, educated at Eton and Cambridge and proved to have a great gift for languages. After a first attempt in diplomacy, he became a correspondent and writer. In 1901 he undertook a journey through Russia accompanying Count Benckendorff as a diplomatic assistant. This first encounter kindled his interest in the country: ‘I resolved firstly to learn Russian, and, secondly, to go back there as soon as I could.’3 Which he did, extensively. He spent many days at Benckendorff’s country estate near Tambov in southern Russia, but also in St. Petersburg, where, for one thing, he spent some time with H.G. Wells. It was to Wells that he dedicated his study of Russian politics and culture, The Mainsprings of Russia (1914).4 This dedication is interesting not only for its significance as a token of a literary friendship, but also for Baring’s attempt to locate his own place within Russian-British relations. He relates an evening at the theatre where he overheard a discussion of books by Stephen Grahame, a then well-known travel writer who walked on foot from Moscow to Archangel and joined Russian pilgrims en route to Jerusalem. Baring is furious about the way these books are misread by his neighbours in the theatre and emphasises the need to redress ideas and concepts about Russia. In a sense, Grahame is a kind of model for Baring, since he ‘came into close contact with the Russian people, and […] his knowledge was at first hand and derived from direct experience.’ (p.iv) In order to be understood, one has to drive the message home as often as possible and this is why Baring wrote Mainsprings, fully knowing that he himself might be misunderstood: I have often had similar experiences myself since I began to write about Russian things. I have at various times been accused of being a revolutionary, a conservative, a liberal, a fanatical reactionary. But these accusations have left me indifferent, since, as they contradict themselves, they cancel out into nothingness. (p.v)

He then tries to articulate his own motivation for writing so much and so often about Russia. It is devoid of any moralising tendency and he does not point to any political agenda or necessity. Rather, it is the human side, something experienced by himself and, as he extrapolates, may be found in an elective affinity between the British and the Russians: As far as the subject of Russia is concerned, I have always, and only, had one object in view: to stimulate in others an interest which I have myself experienced. I know – I 3

4

Quoted in Joseph Epstein, ‘Maurice Baring and the Good Highbrow’, in Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life, ed. by Joseph Epstein (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993), pp.349-367 (p.355). Cf. Maurice Baring, The Mainsprings of Russia (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1914), pp.iii-vi. For all subsequent quotations referring to this edition page numbers are provided in parentheses in the text.

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cannot explain why it is – but I know that between the Russian and the English peoples there are curious analogies, and still more curious differences which complement one another. (ibid)

In other words, his book and all of his work about Russia derives from a certain sympathy between himself and the Russians, but also between the British and Russia. The dedication to Wells takes a personal note at the end, highlighting an important moment in history: ‘I hope, even if you do not read it, that it will remind you of the strenuous days and the Attic nights which we spent together in St. Petersburg.’ (p.vi) As is well-known, Wells was to become another famous traveller in Russia, interviewing both Lenin and Stalin, though he never reached such a great understanding of the country and its people as Baring had.5 In 1905 Baring became a war correspondent on the Russo-Japanese front for the London Morning Post, a highly conservative paper that was also the first in Britain to publish reviews of theatrical events and cultural highlights. This is why Baring’s articles often focus on literature and the arts. Some of his reports were later collected in his book What I Saw in Russia (1914), which also covers the 1905 Revolution and reactions to it, including discussions with members of the early Duma. What I find striking in these articles is his sensitive role of a sympathetic observer who has an acute awareness of national images and stereotypes and who constantly questions cultural values. He is also interested in seeing how the others perceive him or rather his culture, dialogue not being a one-way street for him. In what follows, I will introduce Baring’s intercultural contribution by concentrating on What I Saw in Russia, since it provides invaluable insights into both pre-war Russia and Baring’s attitudes and may thus be seen as the experiential basis of his other works on Russian culture and literature.

2. What I Saw in Russia Baring’s work at the frontline of the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria (Harbin, Mukden, Liaoyang, Ta-Shi-Chiao, Hatchen, Shaho) brought him to a theatre of war where he witnessed the collision of old types of warfare with modern technology, an anticipation of what was to happen on a larger scale in the First World War.6 Furthermore, he found himself at the intersection of different cultures: Russian, Chinese, Japanese and English. The book begins with events in May 1904, takes him to the front and in 1905 to Moscow and 5

6

Some of Wells’s experiences in and impressions of Russia are reflected in the collection Russia in the Shadows (1920), a compilation of journalistic pieces and his famous conversation with Lenin. Cf. Maurice Baring, What I Saw in Russia (London: Thomas Nelson, 1914), p.146. All further page references in parentheses in the text.

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St Petersburg, where he experiences the first Revolution. In 1907 we find him travelling on the Volga, then in the north at Vologda, near Moscow and on the Golden Ring with Yaroslavl, in the south at Tambov, and finally back to the Volga in the Tatar capital of Kazan and the famous trading-place of Nishni Novgorod. He thus had a fair view of much of the vast Russian landscape, its major cities and rivers. It was his maxim to travel third class on trains so that he could encounter as many and as diverse people as possible. 7 Obviously, this would have been useless without his grasp of the language. His conversations with peasants, politicians and soldiers range from literary discussions to politics, the revolution, cultural differences and religion. His first despatch for the Morning Post came from the Trans-Siberian Railway under the headline, ‘On the Way to the War / Across Siberia / British Notions of Russia / The Muscovite Drama / Written by the Hon. Maurice Baring / Our War Correspondent’. The ‘Muscovite Drama’ in fact was his account of the first performance of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1904, as directed by Stanislavski. From then on, Baring tried to introduce the English to great Russian writers like Chekhov, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, but the time was not yet ripe and it would take some more years to open Russian literature to the Western world.8 By the 1920s Constance Garnett had published most of her altogether seventy-one translations of works by Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Turgenev and something like a Russian cult began to permeate the cultural atmosphere of the 1920s. Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring (1913) and the Russian-inspired Expressionism of Kandinsky and others were to shape a cultural environment in which The Brothers Karamazov (transl. 1912) and Dead Souls (first transl. 1886, transl. by C. Garnett in 1922) could thrive. Compared to this, Baring was in advance of his time, writing his early books when Britain and the West were not yet ready to embrace this part of Eastern European culture. Let us first see how Baring copes with one of the greatest epistemological problems a traveller has to face: How does he describe the new and unfamiliar? What kind of translation and symbolical transference is taking place when he dives into the midst of the Russian world? The alien landscape is a case in point: It is always exciting to see how travellers encountering new types of landscape for the first time try to translate them back into their own environmental idioms. Like the European landscape painters who went to the Pacific and brought back strangely European islands, Baring at first somewhat helplessly produces a very familiar picture of the unfamiliar. In trying to come to terms with the breathtaking beauty of Lake Baikal seen from an 7 8

Cf. Epstein, pp.349-367 (p.356). Cf. W.G. Simpson, ‘Collecting Baring’, The Chesterton Review, 25.4 (Nov. 1999), 493-503 (p.497).

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icebreaker, he simply resorts to the sublime of English Romanticism. It is in fact Coleridge who gives him the clue to the alien territory: As we moved, the steamer ploughed the ice into flakes, which leapt and scattered themselves in innumerable spiral shapes, fantastic flowers of ice and snow. As the sun sank lower, the strangeness and beauty increased, for a faint pink halo pervaded the sky round the sun, which grew more and more fiery and metallic. I knew that I had never seen anything like this before, and yet I felt at the same time that I was looking on something which I had already seen. (10f.)

This description is followed by a famous stanza from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798): ‘And now there came both mist and snow, / And it grew wondrous cold; / And ice, mast-high, came floating by / As green as emerald.’ (p.10f.) Later on, Baring will see the Volga in the light of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (cf. p.337). And yet, it is part of his contradictory mission that he must be able to discard these adaptations and visual-cultural conventions. His first reaction may be going back to familiar cultural modes, but we see him analyse his own reactions on second thought. Thus he keeps asking himself: How do I perceive the foreign culture? And how am I perceived by the others? Like many Westerners (and Russians), Baring is confronted with the question of the “Russian soul”. Is it a myth, a stereotype, a concoction? First of all, he tries to cleanse his image of Russia from earlier and more primitive connotations. Rather, it is perceived to be more complex, while conventional ascriptions have to be denied. For Baring, Russia ceases to be the barbarian, almost savage culture, an image inherited from the stage and melodramatic novels in the West, at times close to the English view of the Irish. At one point, near Tambov, he reflects about his earlier preconceptions: ‘I find it extremely difficult to recall exactly what I thought Russia was before I had been there; and I find Russia difficult to describe to those who have never been there.’ (p.243) Translations of novels about Russia had left no precise image with him – they had produced an imaginary country with feudal castles, ‘a kind of Rhineland covered with snow, inhabited by mute, inglorious Bismarcks, and Princesses who carried about dynamite in their cigarettecases and wore bombs in their tiaras.’ (p.244) The background to the Western images of Russia is decorated with Tartars and gorgeous landscapes and wolves. Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff (1876) has contributed its share to this picture of tsars and bears. Baring felt he had lived with characters from books who soon became close friends or acquaintances, like Anna Karenina or Basarov from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). Of course, drinking tea from a samovar was compulsory, a heritage later to be cultivated by David Lean’s film version of Doctor Zhivago (1965) and its ilk. But then ‘I saw the real thing and it was utterly and totally different from my imagination and

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expectations.’ (p.245) The process of discovering reality is then associated with a process of negation; past images have to be eroded and deconstructed: ‘The first thing one can safely say is this: eliminate all notions of castles, Rhine country, feudal keeps and stone houses in general. Think of an endless plain […].’ (p.245). But when he tries to summarise his impressions, Baring is again tempted by other notions: ‘If I had to describe Russia in three words I should say a plain, a windmill, and a church.’ (p.246) This is no longer the landscape as evoked in English Romanticism, but a world that requires acknowledgement in its own right. And yet, although Baring’s new notions are bound to be subjective they also indicate certain aspects of Russian landscape promulgated in a number of nineteenth-century paintings and remind today’s reader of a Dutch rather than Russian landscape. Baring then meditates on the impact of landscape on mentality and claims that it is the plain which has made Russians more patient and less hurried. Could one even say that it is the plain that has prevented the quick modernisation of Russia? Obviously, this model of explanation was quite common in the first decades of the twentieth century. Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West (1918 and 1923) was to apply such physiognomic readings to landscape and culture. It was the heyday of cultural geography (as initiated by Friedrich Ratzel in the late nineteenth century) and Völkerpsychologie (Wilhelm Wundt), which helped people to see more or less simple patterns in foreign or one’s own culture. Natural symbols such as the sea or the forest could be seen to represent a whole people. A late offshoot might be Masse und Macht (1960, Crowds and Power, transl. 1962), in which Elias Canetti ruminates about the Germans as a people of the trees and the English as a people of the sea. This type of explanation may go some way, but is obviously also a dangerous oversimplification. As opposed to cultural critics à la Spengler, Baring was different in that he actually immersed himself in the foreign culture, eschewing easy academic classification. He certainly did not try to construct a great cultural synthesis including predictions and prophecies for the future of the West. For one thing, he knew that all his observations were useless without a good knowledge of the language helping him to communicate with all kinds of people: ‘Those who wish to study this country and do not know the language are wasting their time, and might with greater profit study the suburbs of London or the Isle of Man.’ (p.248) He also felt that the Western media were misrepresenting the country when they kept featuring articles solely on massacres, pogroms and executions. He had met with quite a different and mostly friendly Russia, although he had to concede that ‘Russia at this moment is like an intoxicated man’, a country in a state of revolution (p.249). Baring found plenty of ‘humaneness’ (p.248), especially among the soldiers he mingled with in Manchuria. He was quite impressed by the fairness

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with which they treated the Japanese prisoners. With soldiers and peasants, he found an ‘infinite capacity for pity and remorse’ (p.249). Of course, he himself does and must generalise, this being his task as a correspondent; he has to reduce information and mould it so it can be understood and possibly enjoyed or emotionally grasped by his readers. But there are also more general definitions to which a British reader might all too easily subscribe, such as Baring’s description of the Russian attitude toward order: ‘There is a Teutonic mass of rules and regulations, but the Slav temperament is not equal to the task of insisting on their literal execution. It is as if an elaborate bureaucratic system were introduced into the internal administration of Ireland. One can imagine the result.’ (p.12) This identification of the Slav’s character with the Irish evokes the stage Irishman in British theatre and Matthew Arnold’s construction of the ‘Celt’.9 But maybe there is a grain of truth in what Baring says. At least Russians who heard or read the following quotation told me it was still valid today: The authorities print a hundred rules in the hope that one of them may meet with attention. [...] The whole secret of avoiding bothers in Russia is not to bother people who do not wish to be bothered. If you do what you wish to do quietly nobody interferes with you. If you ask you will probably be told it is impossible – it is in theory, but not in practice. (p.280)

Other qualities Baring stresses are Russian hospitality, the lack of racism, and the joys of drinking and singing. At one point he is afraid that Russian song culture might give way to the music hall (cf. p.340). (If we translate music hall into ipod and mp3 players, he is not wide off the mark.) Baring is especially impressed by Russian religious fervour, but so is he by the antireligious sentiment, by passionate belief and equally passionate atheism. He recounts the following story: Trying to convert the inhabitants of a village to socialism, a socialist wanted to disprove the existence of God. So he took a holy image, and said, ‘There is no God, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit upon this image and break it to bits, and if there is a God He will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will happen to me at all.’ Then he took the image and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and he said to the peasants, ‘You see God has not killed me.’ ‘No,’ said the peasants, ‘God has not killed you, but we will,’ and they killed him. (p.357)

Baring also has his moments of vision when he thinks he has grasped the essence of Russia. On Palm Sunday, for instance, he sees a praying policeman: ‘When I saw this policeman saying his prayers I experienced that peculiar twinge of recognition which made me say, “This is Russia.”’ (p.261) 9

In his influential work On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Arnold ascribes ‘passion’, ‘emotion’, and ‘genius’ to ‘the Celt’ but clearly outlines an inherent lack of ‘reason, measure, sanity’. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1867), p.104.

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Religion becomes a major theme towards the end of the book. Again, it is striking to see how Baring tries to remove stereotypes. The foreigner’s idea of Russia is that of religious passion and we tend to forget the anti-religious impulse. But Baring also highlights Russian atheism and the complete destruction of religion. A number of people he encounters on his travels tell him that faith is a deception and priests are simply charlatans (cf. p.334). Even the idea of folk religion is undercut. Rather, it seems to him, peasants treat religion with a lot of common sense and make use of it very pragmatically. Indeed, they use religion like a machine: ‘[T]he outward expression of their religion may be as mechanical because their religious feeling is true and right, and not because it is insincere and false.’ (p.356) A priest is regarded by soldiers as an ‘instrument to say Mass and partly as a man.’ (p.356) Baring quotes his friend Chesterton to explain this attitude: ‘Mysticism is only a transcendent form of common sense.’ (p.354) Baring’s major access to people’s feelings about themselves and others is literature. This shows his literary education, which cannot be dissociated from his upper-class background. For him, literature is a way of seeing others and of being seen by others at the same time. In his book, authors and titles of books abound and they involve him in discussions about what is Russian or not. Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy loom large. A member of the new Duma tells him, for example, that Tolstoy’s books are great, but his philosophy is weak (cf. p.287). Dostoyevsky, however, knows all about the human soul, as his interlocutor puts it: ‘When I see a man going down hill I know exactly how it will happen and what he is going through, and I could stop him because I have read Dostoyevsky.’ (p.288) The politician dislikes Zola and is not keen on Maupassant, but with Shakespeare everything is different: ‘There is nobody like him. […] He understands everybody. But I want to read Spencer – Herbert Spencer.’ (p.288) Literature often serves as a bridge to understanding foreignness. In Manchuria, Baring discusses Russian literature with a colonel. Both have a passion for Dostoyevsky. When Baring says he likes Gogol as much, the colonel agrees but wonders how a foreigner can appreciate the humour of Gogol. Baring suggests that Englishmen find it hard to believe that foreigners can appreciate the humour of Dickens. And yet it works. Baring also finds out that the most popular English writers in Russia are Jerome, Doyle, Wells, Kipling, Marie Corelli and Mrs Ward. But the Russians seem to love Milton best, the peasants most of all. He is ‘to the Russian peasantry what Shakespeare is to the German nation.’ (p.18) Paradise Lost (1667) has the same popularity as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) once used to have in Britain (p.254). When Baring expresses surprise, people do not understand him. Asked why they like Milton so much, the peasants point to their hearts and say: ‘[I]t is near to the heart; it speaks;

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you read and a sweetness comes to you’ (p.256). Gogol they do not seem to like, possibly he is too fantastic and extravagant for them. They also like the adventures of a certain count. Is it Münchhausen, Baring wants to know. No, it is the Count of Monte Cristo. There are also interesting glimpses into what Russians thought about Britain and the West in those days. One of the peasant members of the Duma expresses his surprise at seeing a foreigner: ‘“Who would have thought two years ago” said one of them, “that we should see an Englishman here in the flesh?”’(p.289) In Manchuria, the Cossacks ask questions such as these: Are there wolves in England? How do you bake your bread? What does your country look like, do you burn coal? After hearing Baring’s answers, the Cossack sums it up: ‘In fact the English are white people, just like we are.’ (p.145) An electro-technician who has been abroad is impressed with the English sense of superiority: He had lived in an English family. He admired the neatness and the cleanliness of everything. He thought the hospitality of the English was great. He said the point of view of moral superiority was extraordinary. The way an Englishwoman he had known had spoken of Indians and Chinese as something so infinitely inferior, too, had surprised and amused him.’ (p.291)

Thus English colonial attitudes become exotic in the eyes of others. Near Moscow Baring has a curious experience with a peasant: [H]e asked abruptly, ‘Is Marie Alexandrovna in your place?’ I said my hostess’s name was Marie Karlovna. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean here, but in your place, in your country.’ I didn’t understand. Then he said it again very loud, and asked if I was deaf. I said I wasn’t deaf and that I understood what he said, but I did not know to whom he was alluding. ‘Talking to you,’ he said, ‘is like talking to a Tartar,’ says the man. ‘You look at one and don’t understand what one says.’ Then it suddenly flashed on me that he was alluding to the Queen of England. ‘You mean Queen Alexandra,’ I said, ‘the sister of the Empress Marie Feodorovna.’ ‘That’s what I mean,’ he said. It afterwards appeared that he considered that England had been semi-Russianised owing to this relationship; he thought of course that both the Queen and the Empress were Russians. (pp.297f.)

3. Conclusion Baring’s What I Saw in Russia offers observations which give us a peculiar insight into people’s beliefs and the prevailing cultural modes in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. They also convey in parts how the West was conceived in those days in Russia. Baring is always open to what Russians tell him, he is an observer with a lot of sympathy for what and whom he observes. Perhaps he is particularly able to make these observations because he does not impose himself or his culture too much. Above all, he brings a lot

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of good will into his encounter with the East. As Joseph Epstein writes: ‘Baring was oddly without ego, never requiring much in the way of glory or praise generally – oddly for a writer, that is.’10 For all his knowledge and education, Baring maintained ‘until the hour of his death, the mind of a child who walked through life’s joys and sorrows with a deep conviction that he was always holding God’s hand.’11 It is this unique quality that helped him appreciate and love the Russians. Baring’s final comment on them is this: ‘The Russian soul is filled with a human Christian charity which is warmer in kind and intenser in degree, and expressed with great simplicity and sincerity, than is to be met with in any other people.’12

Works Cited Arnold, Matthew, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1867) Baring, Maurice, The Puppet Show of Memory (London: Cassell, 1987) —, The Mainsprings of Russia (London: Thomas Nelson, 1914) —, What I Saw in Russia (London: Thomas Nelson, 1914) Epstein, Joseph, ‘Maurice Baring and the Good Highbrow’, in Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life, ed. by Joseph Epstein (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993), pp.349-367 Horgan, Paul, ed., Maurice Baring Restored (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970) Letley, Emma, Maurice Baring: A Citizen of Europe (London: Constable, 1991) Simpson, W.G., ‘Collecting Baring’, The Chesterton Review, 25.4 (Nov. 1999), 493-503

10 11 12

Epstein, pp.349-367 (p.361). Laura Lovat, quoted in Epstein, pp.349-367 (p.362). Baring, The Puppet Show of Memory, p.437. The last chapter in Baring’s autobiography is entitled ‘The Fascination of Russia’: on his Russian travels cf. also Emma Letley, Maurice Baring: A Citizen of Europe (London: Constable, 1991), pp.89-137.

Dirk Wiemann

A Russian Romance: 1930s British Writers as Wishful Participants in the Soviet Revolution Looking at a sample of exemplary 1930s representations of the USSR from Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation to Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism and John Lehmann’s Prometheus and the Bolsheviks, this paper suggests a reading of these texts primarily of documents of a particular structure of feeling that, with recourse to Kant, can be reconstructed as ‘wishful participation’. Close scrutiny uncovers a dual strategy at work in these writings: While on the one hand deploying the Manichean and apocalyptic subtext of romance as a metahistorical matrix, these writers simultaneously tried to make communism appear familiar in “English” terms by translating the Soviet experiment into the tradition of English discourse, and by reconciling Marxism with the most conspicuously characteristic features of that discourse: empiricism, liberalism and individualism.

1. Introduction It should be expected that, after the dust of the Berlin Wall has settled, the brief flirtation of 1930s British intellectuals with communism could be assessed and resituated from a safer distance than in the ideologically overcharged decades of the Cold War or its immediate aftermath. Certainly this “safer distance” allows for a relaxation of many of the biases and limitations that mark the peculiarly heated critical debates over the “red decade” ever since F.R. Leavis insinuated a nexus between ‘Marxism’ and ‘literary barrenness’,1 and Arnold Rattenbury in response charged him with promulgating a ‘flat, unlifelike orthodoxy about Thirties literature’.2 Even if such controversies may by now appear as hopelessly entangled in the ideological thickets of their own day, the vantage point of the present is by no means neutral but is necessarily part of its own historical situation and is shaped, informed, or deformed by the codes of the day. To historicise, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, therefore involves a dual operation: not only the reconstruction of the historical moment of emergence of a text with all its linguistic possibilities and situation-specific functions of its aesthetics, but just as much the making transparent, as far as possible, of ‘the interpretive categories or codes through 1

2

F.R. Leavis, ‘Retrospect of a Decade’, in A Selection from Scrutiny, ed. by F.R. Leavis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp.175-176 (p.175). Arnold Rattenbury, ‘Total Attainder and the Helots’, in The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy, ed. by John Marcus (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978), pp.138-160 (p.138).

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which we read and receive the text in question’ here and now.3 In order to safeguard itself against pure antiquarianism as well as sheer presentism, historicisation is obliged ‘implicitly to produce two historical situations’:4 both the moment of the text at hand and the moment of its reading. This paper aims to revisit some sympathetic representations of the Soviet Union by British writers of the 1930s from a moment of reading that no longer partakes of the geopolitical conjuncture that gave rise to these texts and their reception (including much of their diachronic reception) but that is instead very much informed by a preference for the virtual in cultural and political theory.

2. Wishful Participation More than anything, this moment of reading enables a reassessment of the position from which the left-leaning British intellectuals of the 1930s approached the Soviet Union. Principally, they did so as bystanders and observers who passionately supported, textually and from a distance, what was enacted and suffered elsewhere and by others. Both contemporary and postfact critics from George Orwell to Valentine Cunningham have repeatedly derided this involvement as the ‘parlour Bolshevism’5 of comfortable ‘fellow-travellers […] who preferred to love the Soviet Union at a distance’6 for some facile ‘wish-fulfilment’.7 While such invectives are unanswerably justified as long as they target an uncritical enthusiasm, they nonetheless rely on the problematic assumption, that it is generally illegitimate to position oneself towards, and wishfully participate in, historical struggles in which one is not immediately and materially involved. At least in theory an entirely different evaluation of political spectatorship as wishful participation can be gleaned from Immanuel Kant’s reflections on the position of the bystander and his/her enthusiasm for the French Revolution: The revolution which we have seen taking place in our own times in a nation of gifted people may succeed, or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocity that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price, even if he could hope to carry it out successfully at the second attempt. But I 3

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Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p.9. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p.37. George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol 1: An Age Like This. 1920-1940, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), I, pp.540-578 (p.565). David Caute, Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p.153. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.29.

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maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race.8

Given that the German original has ‘wishful participation’ (‘Theilnehmung dem Wunsche nach’)9 instead of ‘sympathy’, it should be obvious that Kant is not simply applying his theory of disinterested judgment from the realm of art to the field of the political, but that his spectator gets effectively “aroused” from mere appreciation to a more active stance. Yet it is distance – the fact of not being ‘caught up’ in the event itself – which ensures that the spectator’s enthusiasm is not ‘coupled with selfish interests’ but instead ‘directed exclusively towards the ideal’.10 As bearer of this ideal enthusiasm and the concomitant wishful participation, the bystander figures for Kant as the indicator that a general moral improvement of humanity is possible. Most notably, Kant expressly delinks this enthusiasm from the actual event as such: Unlike in Hegel, it is not the French Revolution that evidences the envisaged human progress; rather to the opposite, within the contingency of its historical development, the revolution itself may turn into an atrocious historical disaster. None of this, however, would for Kant diminish the importance and productivity of its reception on the side of the enthusiastic spectator whose wishful participation is aligned with the ideal that the revolution originally and fundamentally stands for, however it may violate this ideal in practice. The object of Kantian enthusiasm is therefore not so much the historical event as such but, in more contemporary terminology, the virtuality inherent to it: that which almost invariably gets betrayed in the actualisation but which may be experienced by the spectator as a life-changing ‘TruthEvent’ that demands conversion and fidelity.11 Under the name of ‘the virtual’, this Kantian ideal seems to have resurfaced in post-dialectical radical theory, via the writings of Gilles Deleuze in particular, as that which is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’.12 In political terms, the virtual has been circumscribed as ‘the infinite question of liberty and equality […], which has emerged again and again throughout history (and therefore

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10 11

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Immanuel Kant, ‘The Contest of Faculties’, in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. by Hans S. Reiss, trans. by Hugh B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.176-190 (p.182). Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, ed. by Horst D. Brandt and Piero Giordanetto (Hamburg: Meiner, 2005), p.97. Kant, pp.176-190 (p.183). Cf. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay in the Understanding of Evil (London and New York: Verso, 2001), pp.45-51. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.208.

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seems to be irrepressible)’13 without ever having been actualised. In this theoretical scenario, it is no longer abstract mechanic forces (“capital”) or even unified collective agents like “the proletariat” or “the people” that “move” history according to some kind of inherent “necessity” towards a teleological end; instead, ‘the passage from the virtual through the possible to the real’ is driven, without guarantees, by a well-nigh libidinal energy and ‘consolidated in desire’14 for the as yet unrealised and potentially unrealisable object of égaliberté.15 To some extent, it could be argued, the British enthusiasts for the Soviet Union prefigure this disposition inasmuch as they enact a wishful participation in a historical process that they resolutely decipher, against all factual shortcomings and atrocities, in terms of the ideal. And yet is theirs not a politics of the virtual: As any reading of 1930s Soviet Union writing from Britain makes clear, the approach is relentlessly referential. For enthusiasts from Stephen Spender to Charles Madge and Tom Wintringham, from Sidney and Beatrice Webb to John Lehmann and Edward Upward, the Soviet Union served not as a virtual reference point but as full-fledged reality. It is not, as in the Kantian bystander and his postmodern heirs, the potentiality inherent to the situation but the perceived real of the situation that allures these intellectuals. To represent Stalin’s Soviet Union in such idealising terms requires, of course, heavy distortions, and as far as these are concerned, not much can be argued in defence of the pro-Soviet apologists against their detractors. The point of my enquiry is, however, a slightly different one. I take my cue from a vexed George Orwell who asks à propos the 1930s radicals: ‘Why did these young men turn towards anything so alien as Russian Communism?’16 What strange desire indeed is it that chooses the USSR as its object? For Orwell, this movement regressively endows Britain’s cultural scene with ‘a sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and community singing’,17 and generally figures as a symptom of middle-class irresponsibility, extended adolescence and immaturity.18 More than that, however, it is a turn to that which is 13 14

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16 17 18

Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London and New York: Verso, 1987), p.173. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p.357. While the term is derived from the work of Étienne Balibar, the preference for the virtual is dominant in the works of such disparate thinkers as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Brian Massumi, Steven Attridge, Gayatri Spivak and Fredric Jameson, to name the most prominent proponents of various political theories of the virtual. Orwell, pp.540-578 (p.564), my emphasis. Ibid., p.559. For a refreshing discussion of Orwell’s normative stance of maturity, cf. Martin Green, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of ‘Decadence’ in England After 1918 (New York: Basic

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alien and un-English, beyond the pale of those dominant autostereotypes which Orwell himself so effectively propagated,19 and that critics left or right – from Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn to Peter Ackroyd and Roger Scruton – have kept reiterating to this day: that ‘the tradition of English discourse’20 is matter-of-fact empiricist, sober, moderate and deeply averse to radical extremes and metaphysical speculation.21 The opposite of this tradition, then, is romance: the application, as ordering subtext, of a particular ‘pre-generic plot structure’22 that posits history not as a gradualist Whiggish medium of evolutionary progress, but as the site of an apocalyptic ‘struggle of essential virtue against a virulent, but ultimately transitory, vice’.23 What ensues is the Manichean outlook of a strangely pulsating world in which not only the moral radicals of good and evil engage in constant battle but in which the world is suffused with a latency (virtuality?) of the ‘earthly paradise to emerge from daily life’24 in epiphanic revelations.25 The world of romance is therefore excessively loaded with (hidden) significance that is always on the verge of becoming manifest, and at the same time largely governed by superior forces from which human agency is merely derived. To figure history in terms of romance is thus more than anything the expression of a historical desire on the side of the disempowered, as Tania Modleski suggests in her feminist reading of ‘mass-produced fantasies for women’.26 Already Northrop Frye emphasises the underdog allure of romance due to its genuinely ‘proletarian’ element […] which is never satisfied with its various incarnations, and in fact the incarnations themselves indicate that no matter how great a change

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Books, 1980), pp. 237-242. The locus classicus for Orwell’s affirmation of “Englishness” is of course his 1941 essay, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, with its apotheosis of the ‘gentleness of the English civilization’; cf. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) p.41. Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), p.57. Cf. Perry Anderson, English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), esp. pp.48-65; Tom Nairn, ‘The English Working Class’, New Left Review, 24.1 (1964), 43-57; Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Vintage, 2004), esp. pp.383-408; Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Pimlico, 2001), esp. pp.43-67. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p.7. Ibid., p.150. Jameson, p.111. This, for Northrop Frye, is ‘the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment’; cf. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (London: Penguin, 1991), p.203. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London: Routledge, 2007).

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may take place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking for new hopes and desires to feed on.27

It is in this logic of romance that the young (and in part, not-so-young) British leftists of the 1930s employed their insatiable ‘rhetoric of “more and more”’ and simultaneously embraced the Soviet Union as an alleged actualisation of the virtual in a constant feat of wishful participation in which they ‘tended to slip easily from what was, to what they wished were the case’.28 However “alien” and “un-English” such romantic radicalism may appear, much of the ideological effort of leftists during the “red decade” itself can also be reconstructed as one vast concerted attempt to shift the terms of Englishness into a direction in which communism would figure, not as anathema but rather as an organic outgrowth of the national culture. In that rhetoric, the Soviet Union served as both a linchpin and role model for Britain itself: as a political formation that had achieved ‘in ten years what it had taken Britain a century to accomplish’,29 and that was moreover speedily advancing towards the full realisation of all those values that, in Britain, had remained abstract. Looking at a sample of exemplary representations of the USSR from Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation to Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism and John Lehmann’s Prometheus and the Bolsheviks, this paper tries to delineate how British writers all through the 1930s tried to make communism appear familiar in “English” terms by translating the Soviet experiment into the tradition of English discourse, and by reconciling Marxism with the most conspicuously characteristic features of that discourse: empiricism, liberalism and individualism.

3. Empiricism and Romance in Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism Despite its forbidding length of more than a thousand pages, Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation (1935) went through numerous editions, including one by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in 1937, which ‘sold more than 10,000 copies’.30 Arguably, the Webbs’ monumental whopper is the most influential of all 1930s British reference text about the Soviet Union. Much of its appeal must have derived from its stout no-nonsense rhetoric of facticity that lends it a reassuring aura of sober positivism. Replete with statistics and tables about wage quota, regional housing schemes, health care provisions or the ‘distribution of members of 27 28 29 30

Frye, p.186. Cunningham, p.29. Caute, p.83. Gordon Barrick Neavill, ‘Victor Gollancz and the Left Book Club’, The Library Quaterly, 41.3 (1971), 197-215 (p.206).

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the 1931 Leningrad rayon soviets according to their social standing’,31 Soviet Communism appears as a strictly objective survey of matter-of-fact data. Even though the book is overtly partisan in favour of the developments it purports to document, it is Marxist neither in its terminology nor in its outlook. As Fabian socialists and gradualists, the Webbs were ‘heirs to Benthamite Utilitarianism’ and accordingly ‘distrustful of Marxian theories of history’32 that, to them, appeared as irresponsibly speculative and dubiously pro-revolutionary. In this light it may not be too surprising that, as Philip Grierson observed in 1943, ‘[d]espite its strong pro-Soviet sympathies, the work is criticised by Communists for its empiricism’33 – an empiricism that tends to simply affirm that which it constructs as given. Stalin’s Russia according to the Webbs’ blueprint is a planning utopia of social engineering, a technocrat’s dream come true, a model embodiment of governmentality in which the State rather than the proletariat figures as the subject of history. In this vein, C.L.R. James, in his 1943 obituary to Beatrice, attacked the Webbs’ hostility towards the idea of popular agency and self-determination, and derided them as ‘friends and advocates of anything which would help the workers, as long as they remained in their place; and enemies of everything which would help them to realize that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.’34 The gradualism and empiricism of Soviet Communism helps to inscribe the bulky tome into the English tradition of ‘empiricist epistemology with a fairly untroubled confidence’ to account for ‘the “actual” of what “actually” happened or the “real” of what occurred’.35 This compatibility gets enhanced by the Webbs’ general preference to draw their vocabulary from Bentham rather than Marx; moreover, the authors repeatedly address their readers as English (and in later editions, American, too), hence as “naturally” unequipped to decode, let alone appreciate, the intricacies and abstractions of Marxian phraseology: the fact cannot be ignored that the common summaries of ‘Marxism’ fail to penetrate to the mind of the ordinary reader of English. He does not understand what is meant by such un-English phrases as ‘dialectical materialism’ and ‘the materialist conception of history’ […]. We prefer to content ourselves with examining the methods of thinking, and the aim and purpose, of Soviet Communism as these are exhibited, not so much in the words of the philosophic writers as in the policy and actions of the Soviet Govern-

31

32 33 34

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Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (London and New York: Longmann, 1944), p.43; page references for all subsequent quotations from this edition are in the text. Caute, p.86. Philip Grierson, Books on Soviet Russia 1917-1942 (London: Methuen, 1943), p.80. A.A.B. (i.e., C.L.R. James), ‘Beatrice Webb, Reformist’, The New International, 9.5 (May 1943), 133-134 (p.134). Easthope, p.140.

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ment; as in those of the Central Committee of the Communist Party as directed successively by Lenin and Stalin. (pp.761f.)

It is interesting to see how this reflexive passage justifies the omission of “philosophy” in favour of governmental “action” by recourse to the national characteristics of the readership which, allegedly, requires theoretical abstemiousness. This kind of benevolent didacticism purports to refrain from demanding too much from its patronised addressee and simultaneously confirms this aversion to speculation and reflexivity as English. Conservative culturalists like Peter Ackroyd blow this autostereotype up to the dimensions of a transhistorical truth about the English “race”: The English have always been a practical and pragmatic race; the history of English philosophy, for example, has been the history of empiricism and scientific experiment. There are no works of speculative theology, but there are many manuals of religious instruction. The native aptitude has in turn led to disaffection from, or dissatisfaction with, abstract speculation.36

Meanwhile the readers of Soviet Communism get their full dose of such abstract speculation as the book, all its dire empiricism notwithstanding, ultimately translates the historical processes it ostensibly only records into fullfledged romance. Undoubtedly the narrative voice retains its apparent objecttivity throughout, but what it conveys – often by way of quotation – is the gospel of a secularised religion. Thus the concluding sections of the lengthy survey bear such suggestive titles as ‘The Remaking of Man’ and ‘Science as the Salvation of Mankind’ and unfold a grand narrative of Soviet development as the creation of a new world. Increasingly, the boundary between report and assertion becomes fuzzy as in the following section, which almost imperceptibly shifts from the summary of official Soviet rhetoric to the adoption of that very same rhetoric by the narrative voice itself: ‘For the worship of God Soviet Communism substitutes the service of man. Man, after centuries of oppression a poor image of what he might be, has accordingly to be remade, and a new civilization established.’ (p.654) Two pages further down, the Webbs include a lengthy quotation from Emile Joseph Dillon’s account of his 1928 tour through the USSR; it is obvious that this embedded narrative is primarily taken on board in order to bring that to the text which the main narrative in its stolid empiricism is not allowed to utter – a euphoric celebration of the well-nigh eschatological dimensions of the Bolshevik moment as a political Pentecost: Revolutionary endeavour is melting colossal obstacles and fusing heterogeneous elements into one great people; not indeed a nation in the old-world meaning but a strong people cemented by quasi-religious enthusiasm. […] They [the Bolsheviks] have mobi-

36

Ackroyd, p.448.

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lised well over 150,000,000 of listless dead-and-alive human beings, and infused into them a new spirit. […] In all these and many other enterprises they are moved by a force which is irresistible, almost thaumaturgical. Bolshevism is no ordinary historical event. It is one of the vast world-cathartic agencies to which we sometimes give the name Fate, which appear at long intervals to consume the human tares and clear the ground for a new order of men and things. […] Bolshevism takes its origin in the unplumbed depths of human being. (pp.657f.)

Even if it is not the Webbs themselves who deploy such pompous Prometheanist rhetoric, they strategically insert it into their matter-of-fact account of Soviet Russia to achieve a synergy. Curiously it does not subvert the dry positivism of their reportage but enhances it with the energies of romance – while, vice versa, those energies, precisely by virtue of their insertion into the framework of the utilitarian text of Soviet Communism, find their unexpected admission to the mainstream of the traditional English discourse of empiricism. Like in Walter Benjamin’s image of the chess automaton, where the ugly dwarf theology is the invisible hand that moves the puppet called historical materialism,37 it is impossible to determine which textual stratum is subservient to, and which is dominant over the other.

4. Communism as Liberalism: Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism In his 1937 treatise, Forward from Liberalism, Stephen Spender expressly acknowledges his reliance on the Webbs’ authoritative survey that, to him, ‘presents a mass of knowledge as a coherent whole’ and provides an invaluable ‘diagram of the classless society’.38 Similarities between his own text and the Webbs’ approach should therefore not come as a surprise, and one of the most interesting of these similarities is the attempt, shared by both texts, to “translate” the Soviet Union, to make it continuous and intelligible to “the English”. In this endeavour the Webbs, we have seen, draw heavily on the rhetoric of empiricist discourse which they candidly hybridise with romance proper; Spender, by way of contrast, relies on the employment and appropriative redefinition of commonsensical “English” terms like liberalism, personal integrity and idealism. His is a project to reconstruct a whole speculative tradition of avowedly anti-empiricist English radical thought from Quakerism onwards, whose logical articulation ‘in the present moment of history’ would be communism: ‘I am trying to do a portrait of the mind of 37

38

Cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp.253-264 (p.253). Stephen Spender, Forward from Liberalism (London: Gollancz, 1937), p.264; page references for all subsequent quotations from this edition are in the text.

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a person whose sympathies are idealist and liberal in the present moment of history. In my opinion the mind of that person should be directed towards communism.’ (p.169) Spender writes in the persona of the ‘liberal idealist’ which he introduces as the legitimate heir to a marginalised yet genuinely English tradition of radical thought as expressed in the writings of Blake, Paine, Shelley and, above all, Godwin: ‘The liberal idealist is in the first instance the rational being of Godwin’s Political Justice’ (p.41). In Spender’s textual strategy, then, Godwin figures as a literary and literal precursor inasmuch as both Spender and Godwin write as Kantian enthusiastic spectators of a revolution abroad which they endorse. More than any of the other antecedents in Spender’s genealogy of English ‘liberal communism’, it is Godwin who strives to delineate how individual self-realisation depends on a democratically egalitarian redistribution of social wealth. Not only does Spender’s Godwin ‘insist with the communists that there is no justice and freedom without equality’ (p.46); he moreover demonstrates that egalitarian administration of wealth is utterly rational: The spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud, these are the immediate growth of the established administration of property. They are alike hostile to intellectual and moral improvement. […] In a state of society where men lived in the midst of plenty, and where all shared alike the bounties of nature, these sentiments would inevitably expire.39

It is in this spirit of updating Godwin’s thought that Spender oxymoronically testifies: ‘I am a communist because I am a liberal. […] I do not doubt but that in the modern world communism – the classless, internationalist society – is the final goal of liberalism’ (pp.202f.). What sets Spender apart from his antecedent kindred spirits, including Godwin, is that they – in the absence of a fully egalitarian society – could only refer to the virtual. In the Jacobin period of the late-eighteenth century, égaliberté remained a literally utopian reference point: ‘Godwin, Thomas Paine and Shelley, inspired as they were by the French Revolution, were never able to measure the wealth of their hopes and plans against the achievement of a classless society’ (p.263). The historical difference between the 1790s and the 1930s consists precisely of the fact that, for Spender, the erstwhile virtuality of the just society had become the ‘real of the situation’ thanks to the Bolshevik revolution: ‘we are fortunate in having the example of a classless society in Russia’ (p.263). The Soviet Union, therefore, figures first of all as the realisation of the utopian dreams of Spender’s precedents. Standing on the shoulders of the Webbs and their nitty-gritty ground work ‘as the basis for this discussion’ (p.264), Spender pursues an unabashedly non-empiricist, purely textual approach to 39

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p.732.

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the USSR that he discusses entirely in terms of sweeping historical generalisations and Hegelian mechanicism. Historical necessity stalks the concluding sections of Forward from Liberalism under the strain of reconciling Stalinist dictatorship with Spender’s English radical heritage of ‘liberal communism’. For this, Spender invokes the notion of a ‘transitional period’ before the full achievement of the classless society and the concomitant waning of the State as envisaged by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.’40 Spender, in full accordance with official Comintern rhetoric, deploys this Marxian scenario as a justification of the developments in the Soviet Union in the 1930s: ‘For the purposes of communism, dictatorship is a necessary but unpleasant phase, which is abandoned as soon as the new society is firmly established’ (p.287). Without denying the “unpleasant” aspect of this political formation, Spender ultimately subordinates all possible critique of Stalinism to the rather mechanistic assertion that ‘on the whole its measures have sprung from an unavoidable necessity’ (p.294). If the Webbs compose a synergetic juxtaposition of empiricist data with romance rhetoric, Spender situates himself within a metahistorical paradigm that is fundamentally informed and driven by the subtext of romance: History moves ‘with necessity’ towards the eudemonic telos of the postpolitical age in which, as in Godwin’s rational regime of just redistribution, ‘No one / Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally; / Our goal which we compel: Man shall be Man’.41

5. Imaginary Conversations: John Lehmann’s Prometheus and the Bolsheviks John Lehmann’s Georgian travelogue, Prometheus and the Bolsheviks (1937), is a semi-documentary text that blends ‘ancient history and modern statistics’ with lengthy dialogue sequences in which the author converses with a host of ‘imaginary characters’42 from all walks of life, especially artists, writers and students. While these fictional interlocutors can hardly provide evidential testimony, ‘they are recreated from observation, and I claim that nothing they say or do is improbable in its setting’ (n.p.). In all these 40

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Karl Marx, ‘Kritik des Gothaer Programms’, in Marx Engels Werke, 43 vols (Berlin, GDR: Dietz, 1962) XIX, pp.11-32 (p.28); my translation. Stephen Spender, ‘Not Palaces’, in Collected Poems 1928-1985 (London: Faber, 1985), p.50. Cf. John Lehmann, ‘Foreword’, in Prometheus and the Bolsheviks (New York: Knopf, 1937), n.p.; page references for all subsequent quotations from this edition are in the text.

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manifold travel encounters, one Georgian citizen after the other proudly explains the improvements and advantages of the USSR, and all this praise of the revolution boils down to one vast idyllic picture of Soviet Georgia in the mid-thirties, when ‘the years of sacrifice and struggle were beginning richly to bear their fruit for the masses’ (p.73). Fully in line with both Spender and the Webbs, Lehmann emphasises in particular the centrality of ‘culture’ and the attendant importance ascribed to writers and artists in the USSR. Thus, the Webbs had observed that [i]t is clear that they [the inhabitants of the USSR] are steadily becoming a reading people. Every boy and girl, every factory operative, every office employee – we may almost say every peasant under thirty years of age – seems to be an omnivorous reader. Not altogether without reason has it been claimed that, in the USSR, it is the state publishing house […] that is, in the service of general culture, the most potent agency.43

For Lehmann, this general ‘literarisation’ of the masses attains in itself the aesthetic quality of a signature of ‘the beauty of the socialist system’: ‘The demand for books and papers among the masses, now they have money and education, has gone up so enormously that the writers can hardly keep pace with it’ (p.91). This wishful fascination with the structural transformation of the Soviet public sphere is certainly symptomatic of a deep sense of discontent with the cultural logic of an increasingly capitalised and deregulated public domain at home; in this vein, Lehmann acknowledges ‘grounds for envy of the Soviet poet’s lot’ (p.92). It has indeed been argued that ‘the new Soviet state and its romantic promise of equality and prosperity – and its celebration, rather than merely toleration, of intellectuals – struck many young intellectuals [in Britain] as a cultural paradise’.44 In Lehmann’s case, the ‘cultural paradise’ of Georgia is always already pre-mediated through ‘classical memories’ (p.244): a literary chronotope from Greek mythology and utopian travel writing rather than a material landscape. Thus, Transcaucasia gets repeatedly conceived as ‘the Land of the Golden Fleece’ (p.161) which Lehmann, playfully posing as a latter-day Jason, imagines as his own discovery. By this device, the whole text gets putatively transformed into a first-contact account in the style of literary utopias from More and Bacon through Cavendish to Butler and Morris: I began to play with the idea: suppose […] one landed without knowing anything about the country beforehand, or how its people lived, […] wouldn’t one be amazed at all that was being done there, wouldn’t one immediately be writing long letters home about the extraordinary civilisation one had discovered where everyone had work, and the natural

43 44

Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, pp.743f. John Rodden, ‘On the Political Sociology of Intellectuals: George Orwell and the London Left of the 1930s’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 15.3 (1990), 251-273 (p.255).

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riches of the land were scientifically exploited without any hindrance or quarrel of interests for the good of the whole people? (p.243)

The point of this mind game is, of course, the extrapolation of the difference between a utopia proper, whose referent is by definition fictitious, and the alleged facticity of Lehmann’s Georgia, whose reality status gets all the more emphasised in this comparison. In other words, Lehmann “documents” a social formation so harmonious and convivial that it qualifies for a utopiacome-real. It is, however, none of the canonical English utopias that Lehmann intertextually harks back to in order to establish this rhetorical effect; his key reference text is, rather, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820). Indeed, the figure of the Titan frames the entire travelogue. In the foreword, Lehmann introduces Prometheus as ‘the oldest symbol of the Caucasus, [which] can at the same time be considered as the oldest symbol of what the Bolsheviks have had as their aim: the deliverance of man from tyranny and barbarism by the seizure of material power’ (n.p.). Throughout the book, no mention is made of that dual symbol until the concluding chapter opens on the assertion that ‘Prometheus […] appeared to me in a dream’ (p.243). On board a steamer across the Black Sea, the traveller falls into a visionary dream in which Prometheus is seated in the deckchair next to his. The ensuing dialogue differs in no way from all the other conversations with ‘imaginary characters’, thus strangely overcoding all these encounters, in retrospect, with the quality of the sheer fictionality of wishful participation. In the final chapter, the dreaming traveller encounters a Prometheus who relates how he was released from his Caucasian pinnacle by a delegation ‘in the name of the Soviet Government of Georgia’ whose spokesman declares solemnly: We bring you the revolutionary greetings of the toiling masses, who see in you the great ancestor of all fighters against oppression for the benefit of humanity. What you dared we have now achieved: the forces of production are now in the hands of the people, who alone can use them justly and fully. (p.248)

Prometheus, obviously not fully immune to vanity, admits that he ‘began to feel rather a hero’ (p.249) at such exalted treatment, just as he confesses to have been ‘very much flattered by Bysshe’s attitude. I regarded the poem [Prometheus Unbound] as a great compliment’ (p.245). Of course, Shelley’s closet drama about the overthrow of Jove’s tyranny and the liberation of Prometheus and the universe at large does not, according to Lehmann’s Prometheus, accurately foresee the actual course of events: ‘it didn’t happen in that extravagant manner really, you know. Not that I blame Bysshe: after all he wrote a hundred years before the event’ (pp.245f.). Furthermore, however, it functions as a prophetic outline that already contains and proleptically announces all the fundamental tendencies at work in the Titanic struggle for human emancipation: ‘I had always known that liberation was bound to

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come, of course; as Bysshe made very clear in his poem, mighty as Jove was, he was not mightier than history’ (p.246). Though unintentionally comic, Lehmann’s concluding chapter is very serious about the pro-Bolshevik message of the Titan who sums up his survey of Soviet Georgia with the fervent statement that, ‘I find myself passionately on the side of the Bolsheviks. […] I have taken a momentous decision […]: I have decided to join the Party!’ (p.254) Nor is there anything ironic about the proleptic potential ascribed to literature as exemplified in Prometheus Unbound: In Lehmann’s version, Shelley’s text appears not as ‘a corrective reimagining of the [French] Revolution’,45 not as an attempt to recuperate ‘the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization’.46 Instead – very much against Shelley’s own contempt for all ‘presumptions to predict an inevitable future’47 – Lehmann enlists Prometheus Unbound as a clairvoyant prophecy fulfilled by the October Revolution: a text, then, that attains the status of secular scripture, and that ensures that the communist transformation has always already been prefigured in the English Romantic text.

6. Concluding Remark The structure of feeling articulated by texts like Lehmann’s, Spender’s or the Webbs’ may characterise the 1930s, as Richard Johnstone puts it, as ‘an age of belief’.48 However, while it is certainly true (and probably for better rather than worse) that the particular object of that particular belief has failed long ago, it would be precocious to declare the demise of the underlying structure of feeling itself: the will to romance. It might be more accurate to side with Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that, as an expression of a possibly irrepressible and insatiable political desire, romance now again seems to offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of a real now unshakably set in place; and Frye is surely not wrong to assimilate the salvational perspective of romance to a reexpression of Utopian longings, a renewed meditation on the Utopian community, a reconquest (but at what price?) of some feeling for a salvational future.49 45

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Michael O’Neill, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era 1760-1835, ed. by Christopher John Murray, 2 vols (London and New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), II, pp.913-914 (p.913). Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.12. Quoted in H.M Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p.343. Richard Johnstone, The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.135. Jameson, p.104.

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Works Cited A.A.B. (i.e., C.L.R. James), ‘Beatrice Webb, Reformist’, The New International, 9.5 (May 1943), 133-134 Abrams, H.M., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971) Ackroyd, Peter, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Vintage, 2004) Anderson, Perry, English Questions (London and New York: Verso, 1992) Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay in the Understanding of Evil (London and New York: Verso, 2001) Balibar, Étienne, Politics and the Other Scene (London and New York: Verso, 1987) Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp.253-264 Caute, David, Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988) Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Cunningham, Valentine, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) Easthope, Antony, Englishness and National Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (London: Penguin, 1991) Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) Green, Martin, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of ‘Decadence’ in England After 1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1980) Grierson, Philip, Books on Soviet Russia 1917-1942 (London: Methuen, 1943) Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981) Johnstone, Richard, The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) Kant, Immanuel, Der Streit der Fakultäten, ed. by Horst D. Brandt and Piero Giordanetto (Hamburg: Meiner, 2005)

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—, ‘The Contest of Faculties’, in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. by Hans S. Reiss, trans. by Hugh B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.176-190 Leavis, F. R., ‘Retrospect of a Decade’, in A Selection from Scrutiny, ed. by F. R. Leavis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp.175-176 Lehmann, John, Prometheus and the Bolsheviks (New York: Knopf, 1937) Marx, Karl, ‘Kritik des Gothaer Programms’, in Marx Engels Werke, 43 vols (Berlin, GDR: Dietz, 1962), XIX, pp.11-32 Modleski, Tania, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) Nairn, Tom, ‘The English Working Class’, New Left Review, 24.1 (1964), 4357 Neavill, Gordon Barrick, ‘Victor Gollancz and the Left Book Club’, The Library Quarterly, 41.3 (1971), 197-215 O’Neill, Michael, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era 1760-1835, ed. by Christopher John Murray, 2 vols (London and New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), II, pp.913-914 Orwell, George, The Lion and the Unicorn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) —, ‘Inside the Whale’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), I, pp.540-578 Rattenbury, Arnold, ‘Total Attainder and the Helots’, in The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy, ed. by John Marcus (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978), pp.138-160 Rodden, John, ‘On the Political Sociology of Intellectuals: George Orwell and the London Left of the 1930s’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 15.3 (1990), 251-273 Scruton, Roger, England: An Elegy (London: Pimlico, 2001) Spender, Stephen, ‘Not Palaces’, in Collected Poems 1928-1985 (London: Faber, 1985), p.50 —, Forward from Liberalism (London: Gollancz, 1937) Webb, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (London and New York: Longmann, 1944) White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) Žižek, Slavoj, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London and New York: Routledge, 2004)

Sissy Helff

From Euphoria to Disillusionment: Representations of Communism and the Soviet Union in Arthur Koestler’s The Invisible Writing This essay focuses on Arthur Koestler’s autobiography The Invisible Writing, in which Koestler writes about his journey through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia in 1932 and 1933. While it was actually the Communist Party that had sent Koestler on this journey, it was the many haunting experiences of witnessing starving children and dying people which eventually shattered Koestler’s belief in communism. Against the backdrop of Koestler’s representation of the Soviet Union and its citizens, a main concern of this article is to reveal the young man’s conflict between his actual longing for a utopian society rooted in communist ideals and the increasingly felt ambivalence towards the promises of the Party. It will be argued that by looking back to the past as a much older author, Koestler strategically narrates his past and his journey which helps him to explain his former euphoric blindness and eventually establish him as a major British intellectual.

1. Introduction In his travel memoir The Invisible Writing (1954), the Hungarian-born British author Arthur Koestler recalls a decisive period in his life spanning seven years, from 1931 to 1938. During that time Koestler experienced the final days of the Weimar Republic, a disturbing journey through Russia and his later illegal emigration to England. Thus it can be said that Koestler’s memoir not only provides vivid insight into the extraordinary life of a famous European journalist-cum-intellectual but also serves as an indispensable document or case history portraying the increasing disillusionment of a generation of left-leaning European intellectuals.1 Such a portrayal of the past and the intellectual climate gets close to the image of how Koestler wanted to be remembered by future generations, as he states in an influential collection of his essays, The God That Failed (1950): I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thirsting for faith. But the day when I was given my Party card was merely the climax of a development which had started long before I had read about the drowned pigs or heard the names of Marx and Lenin. Its roots reach back into childhood; and though each of us, comrades of the Pink Decade, had individual roots with different twists in them, we

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For an analysis of the British writing scene in the 1930s, cf. Dirk Wiemann’s essay in the present volume.

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are products of, by and large, the same generation and cultural climate. It is this unity underlying diversity which makes me hope that my story is worth telling.2

In The Invisible Writing the motif of the journey and the hetero-images of the Soviet Union are striking; the book presents a fine representation of the author’s physical journey and the places of memory he visited;3 the reader is able to follow Koestler’s inner journey, a transformation from a devoted communist into a disenchanted humanist. Koestler displays his inner development through a vivid arrangement of many diverse narrative and stylistic devices, comprising modes of travel and novelistic writing, political report and memoir. In his almost poetic assemblage, meaning is produced through words alongside silence, ellipsis and unreliable narration.4 In short, Koestler’s “true” story emerges not so much in the centres of his memoir but rather at “the edges” of his narrative.

2. Travelling East, Turning West By the end of July 1932, I was at last ready to turn my back on the bourgeois world and head for the Promised Land [the Soviet Union]. It was six months before the Germany of Weimar became Naziland. It was also six years and six months after I had emigrated to the first Land of Promise, Palestine. I felt the same exhilaration at having burnt my bridges, the same hectic expectation of a journey into Utopia. It took me many years to discover that the restless traveller has only one goal: to escape from himself.5

Like a great deal of twentieth-century travel writing, The Invisible Writing tends to focus on a writer’s increased self-awareness, on Koestler’s inner development, his idea of and commitment to communism and his relationship

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Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed, ed. by Richard H. Crossman (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), p.17. The phrase ‘I had read about the drowned pigs’ alludes to the first book of the New Testament, the gospel of Matthew and here in particular to the verse ‘The Demons and the Pigs’ (Matthew 8.28-34). Matthew is the canonical gospel most closely aligned with first-century Judaism. ‘The Demons and the Pigs’ tells the story of two spiritually misguided shepherds who are eventually redeemed by Jesus. This passage, therefore, could be read as a reflection on Koestler’s own spiritual journey. For a discussion of ‘les lieux de mémoire’, cf. Pierre Nora’s essay ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-24. Reflecting on narrative style in travel writing, Susan Bassnett writes: ‘In the twentieth century, evidence of a change in the construction of travel narratives can clearly be seen in stylistic terms. Though the I-narrator still occupies a dominant position, the increasing use of dialogue in travel writing has further closed the gap between travel account and fiction, making the travel text resemble the novel much more closely’. Susan Bassnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.225-241 (p.234). Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (London: Vintage, 2005), pp.56f. All page references in parentheses refer to this edition.

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to society. All this culminated in his narrative retrospect of his journey to Russia and the Transcaucasian Republics: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1932 and 1933. His travel account spans the first two parts of The Invisible Writing, altogether 14 chapters, and is tellingly entitled ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Utopia.’ In a moment of euphoria the young Koestler sees in Russia a special sort of wonderland: My idea of Russia had been formed entirely by the Soviet propaganda. It was the image of a super-America, engaged in the most gigantic enterprise in history, buzzing with activity, efficiency, enthusiasm. The ‘motto’ of the first Five Year Plan had been to ‘reach and surpass’ the Occident; this task had been completed in four years instead of five. At the frontier I would ‘change trains for the twenty first century’, as another slogan had promised. (p.62)

To Koestler, his journey to Russia was far more than a simple journey; above all, it was an escape from himself and from Germany, which had become increasingly alien to him. The Soviet Empire, by contrast, seemed to offer an alternative, not only to him but also to many who felt somewhat betrayed by their former countries. In “Mother Russia” young intellectuals believed in finding an alternative to dictatorship and the liberty to fight fascism both intellectually and politically. Koestler takes up this particular myth only to subsequently deconstruct it. Nevertheless, throughout the memoir and especially in the opening chapters, Koestler seeks to comprehend his previous strong faith in communism and his troublesome blindness. All in all, it can be said that for Koestler the thirties were formative years in many ways. It was then, for instance, that he joined the Party to become a secret member: I was waiting for my visa to Russia. When I lost my job I had asked the Party for permission to emigrate. This was regarded as a rare privilege, for the duty of every Communist was to work for the Revolution in his own country. However, I still enjoyed a certain reputation as a liberal journalist (the reasons why I had to leave the Ullsteins were not known in public), and the Party was willing to exploit this advantage. It was agreed that I should go to Russia and write a series of articles on the first Five Year Plan, maintaining the fiction that I was still a bourgeois reporter. I accordingly entered into an agreement with a literary agency, the Karl Duncker Verlag, who undertook to syndicate the series on some twenty newspapers in various European countries. (p.54)

It was during this journey through the Soviet Union that Koestler first experienced an ‘unconscious fear of losing faith in Russia and the Communist ideal’ (p.94). When in 1939 the Hitler-Stalin Pact turned all communists into ‘passive allies of the Nazis’ (p.510), Koestler could not surmount his disgust

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and disappointment and left the Party for good as a disenchanted person.6 Recalling that time and in a spirit of bitter disillusionment but still longing for a ‘salvational future’,7 Koestler takes us on a journey into Eastern solitude: Crossing the Caucasus has retained a curious significance in my life. The name itself has a magic ring in my memory, as if a bell were tolling with heavy reverberations. On the farther side of the white mountain range which divides Europe from Asia I was to run into my first emotional conflict with the Party and to meet some exceptional human beings who, many years later, appeared as characters in Darkness at Noon. It was, of all places, between Tiflis and Baku that I lost my political innocence. (p.92)

While his writing confronts the reader with increasing doubt about fighting for the right cause, we also learn about Koestler’s deep wish to find a genuine location, a physical and intellectual home in the world. His longing for a better world alludes to Ernst Bloch’s utopian idea with which he ends his magnus opus The Principle of Hope: Once man has comprehended himself and has established his own domain in real democracy, without depersonalization and alienation, something arises in the world which all men have glimpsed in childhood: a place and a state in which no one has yet been. And the name of this something is home (Heimat).8

Koestler’s true locus was not to be found on a map but rather in obtaining a veritable, spiritual truth. His journey might be described as a quest to find a genuine god. Comparing Koestler’s travel to a spiritual journey is not farfetched at all; George Orwell, one of his friends, rightly observed in his famous essay about Koestler that his friend ‘believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and religious heretics for hundreds of years’.9 Yet it took Koestler quite some time to understand that for him the Sun State was neither to be found in Russia nor any other earthly territory. What we are left with, then, is a text torn between two poles: on the one hand an author’s attempt to conjure up a communist empire and on the other hand

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Cf. David Cesarini, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: Heinemann, 1998), p.145. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1982), p.105. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, 3 vols (1959; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), III, p.1376. George Orwell, ‘Arthur Koestler’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 3 As I Please, 1943-1945, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London: Penguin, 1994), III, pp.268-277 (p.276).

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an older, disillusioned humanist’s effort to dismiss his early beliefs by turning them into invisible writings. This narrative tug-of-war is particularly demonstrated in the parts in which Koestler recapitulates the meaning of his journey. To the older narrator, his former attitude towards his earlier journey to Russia, the places he had visited, and the people he had met increasingly become beyond his own comprehension: It was a unique opportunity to explore a little-known, exotic part of the world; my itinerary led through some of its most striking landscapes and towns – the Caucasus, Mount Ararat, the Karakum desert, Tiflis, Baku, Samarkand. In a foolish and unpardonable way I spoiled it all, for, encased as I was in my closed universe, my eyes and mind were focused on statistics, factories, tractor stations and power plants; to landscape and architecture, to flower and bird, I paid little attention. It had been hammered into my head, and into the heads of two hundred million Russians, that to pay undue attention to relics and monuments of the past was a sign of a morbid, sentimental, romantic and escapist attitude [...] The Communist’s duty was not to observe the world but to change it; his eyes were to focus on the present and the future, not on the past. The history of mankind would start with the World Revolution; all that went before was merely a chaotic, barbaric overture. (p.79)

Here as elsewhere in the text, the tension between commitment and wrongdoing, conviction and heretic belief is almost tearing Koestler’s narrative apart. Consequently, the narrative suggests that the narrator did not forgive himself for not having recognised the beauty of the Caucasian countryside on the one hand and the meaning of places of memory on the other. This critique seeks to explain how Koestler was able to travel through a ‘bleeding’ country without paying attention to starving people and all further signs of the great Ukrainian famine, also known as Holodomor, to which historians commonly refer as a strategic genocide inflicted by Soviet policies in order to stop the rise of Ukrainian nationalism.10 While most of Koestler’s comments concerning this peacetime catastrophe are mentioned by the older narrator, there are side stories which shed some light on the famine. One of these episodes happens to occur on his journey from Moscow to Orchonikidse in the Caucasus. During the first leg of his journey he shares his train compartment with a Russian woman called Vera Maximovna. Throughout their eighty-hour trip Maximovna tells Koestler about unspeakable misery and cases of cannibalism during the first famine in 1920. It was back then, as Maximovna points out, that some peasants had transformed into a ‘kind of semi-savagery’ out of sheer hunger and desperation. At one point Maximovna was targeted when

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George Robert Ackworth Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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men tried to throw a lasso over her head, since she seemed to make up for a good Sunday roast (cf. p.89). While she survived the death-trap, the comically gruesome episode stays with us, and readers might wonder whether or not to believe Koestler’s astonishing account. If we decide to take Maximovna’s “Wild East-story” at face value, then we might wonder how to evaluate Koestler’s confessions about his ‘treason’ and ‘wrong-doing’ against the backdrop of such gruesome time.11 In this context, might Koestler’s life and his deeds appear in a different light altogether? Such reconsiderations are important since they address universal and highly complex questions of guilt, reconciliation, amnesty and forgiveness. A re-evaluation, therefore, might lead to a re-writing of an individual case history which initiates moral reverberations outside a text. In my opinion, there can be no doubt that whilst Koestler was certainly thoroughly blinded by his own commitment to communism and consequently went about his duties unscrupulously, his intellectual and emotional blindness and individual guilt cannot be excused.

3. Strategic Narratives and Used-Up Words In an essay on memory and imagination the American writer Patricia Hampl observes: Memoir seeks a permanent home for feeling and image, a habitation where they can live together in harmony [...] It was only in reviewing the piece after writing it that I saw my inaccuracy. In pondering this ‘lie,’ I came to see what I was up to: I was getting what I wanted. At last [...] For meaning is not ‘attached’ to the detail by the memoirist, meaning is revealed. Here memory impulsively reaches out its arms and embraces imagination. That is the resort of invention. It isn’t a lie but an act of necessity, as the innate urge to locate personal truth always is.12

In The Invisible Writing, as in most of his autobiographic works, Koestler traces the past through the lens of a detached observer. Thus he takes a critical distance to this earlier self by employing a ‘camera eye aesthetics’, as

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For a reflexive portrayal of Koestler and his feeling of guilt see, for instance, chapter IX entitled ‘Nadeshda’. ‘I was not conscious of a choice. I was pushed into it. I made it unthinkingly and automatically. But that excuse applies to most betrayals. One does not decide at a given moment: “I am going to be a traitor.” One slides into treason by degrees.’ (p.125) Patricia Hampl, ‘Memory and Imagination’, in The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, ed. by Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg (New York: Longman, 2002), pp.259-268 (p.261).

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termed by Zoe Trodd.13 By means of this narrative technique he emphasises a loss of expression while increasing the distance between his past and present self. Hence he skilfully draws our attention to the paradox that ‘stories are told and not lived; [while] life is lived and not told’.14 This detachment translates into a paradoxically alienated self-image, an image which displays a rugged terrain of a past that cannot be easily integrated in the author’s present: I learnt to classify automatically everything that shocked me as the ‘heritage of the past’ and everything I liked as the ‘seeds of the future’. By setting up this automatic sorting machine in his mind, it was still possible in 1932 for a European to live in Russia and yet to remain a Communist. All foreign comrades I knew, and also the more mentally alert among the Russians, had that automatic sorting machine in their heads. (p.66)

Given that Koestler was already living in England while producing The Invisible Writing one could assume that leaving behind continental Europe and the painful memories had put a distance between Koestler’s older and younger self. Most probably, he was ashamed of his former attitudes and actions. Such feeling of guilt might also explain why he developed these ambivalences towards his own past. It is this phase, and the years between 1932 and 1933 in particular, which Koestler would later approach with greatest trepidation: ‘As I look back on the past, I see myself as a blind man painfully groping with his stick along the crowded pavement, while his absentminded dog trots along on a loose leash and might as well not exist.’ (p.24) In anticipation of possible criticism concerning the narrative coherence and overall reliability of his text, Koestler mentions his doubt, uncertainty and alienation while writing the book: It often happens to me in writing these pages that I am unable to visualise my past self. Then I take a photograph from a drawer and say – well, here he is. But even that isn’t quite reassuring for I know that that face, with the plastered-down hair and the fatuous smirk is phoney, the product of growing a false personality. (p.358)

Koestler’s description and evaluation of the chasm between narrative and life is a strategic narrative manoeuvre which generates a safety-net for the public dramatis personae Arthur Koestler. From this perspective, then, it only seems convincing that to the mature narrator his former younger self appears

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Zoe Trodd, ‘Hemingway’s Camera Eye: The Problem of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form’, The Hemingway Review, 26.2 (2007), pp.7-21 (p.7). Paul Ricoeur, ‘Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator’, in Reflection & Imagination: A Ricoeur Reader, ed. by Mario J. Valdé (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp.425437 (p.425).

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strangely alien. Consequently, Koestler can no longer relate to his behavioural patterns without criticising his former actions. In this respect Koestler’s opening sentence to Invisible Writing comes without great surprise and succinctly describes Koestler’s rapid transformation: ‘I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strew with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.’ (p.19) Already in this one sentence the reader realises that Koestler’s personal truth lies somewhere between the author’s already earlier life and the story he eventually sets out to tell at length. Owing to such considerations, the narrated past as such becomes a kind of fake; a detached author’s story-telling of a remote moment in time. Timothy Dow Adams describes the connection between recollection and autobiographic narration as follows: ‘[I]f memory is the self’s autobiography, an unwritten narrative with an unreliable narrator, then the actual autobiographer trying to record the story of self faces a virtually impossible task’.15 Life can only be turned into narrative if the narrator engages in an act of memory. No doubt, Koestler was engaging in an act of memory, in a strategic narrativisation of his life. Yet, Koestler like many of his famous colleagues such as George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and James Agee harboured doubts about language’s on-going ability for expression. He wondered whether or not words had been used up in former languages of glory, sacrifice, patriotism and war.16 This scepticism emerges in Koestler’s writing of fictional and nonfictional pieces alike17 as well as in his general approach to language. Looking back he could not simply recount his life in chronological order. From the early 1940s onwards Koestler started openly criticising ‘the benign presentation of the USSR in the Western Press and presented the carefully researched evidence of famine, inequality and illegality’.18 By looking back, a chasm between the younger and older Koestler started opening up, a fissure which seemed almost unbridgeable to the narrator. Thus Koestler’s quest to narrate his life story confronts the narrator as well as the author with the problem of how to relate a past which has not been reconciled with:

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Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp.169f. For an analysis of Hemingway’s politics of form, cf. Zoe Trodd’s article ‘Hemingway’s Camera Eye: The Problem of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form’. Cf., for instance, Arthur Koestler’s novel Arrival and Departure (1943) and his essay collection The Yogi and the Commissar (1945). Cesarini, p.230.

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Facts can be complemented by files and newspaper records, emotions not. This point will become painfully apparent to the reader through the first five or six chapters of this book, which deal with my early Communist days in Berlin and Russia. I found it impossible to revive the naive enthusiasm of that period: I could analyse the ashes, but not resurrect the flame. I disliked rewriting these chapters, but felt the chronicler’s compulsion to record material which appears to him trivial and boring, in the hope that at some future date it will appear less so. The reader is advised to get through these opening chapters as best and as quickly as he can. (p.xiii)

In the quotation, which as a paratext precedes the main body of his memoir, a peculiar, stylistic repugnance underlines the difficulty of Koestler’s narrative enterprise. In fact, it seems as if the narrator would like to tell a decisively different story to the reader. Consequently, the included reading instruction and the reader’s address appear almost as though they were written by someone else, an invisible, unknown author. Against the socio-historical background of The Invisible Writing, it can be said that this book was indeed a delicate project. Any inconsiderate narrativisation of Koestler’s past could have had unforeseeable repercussions outside of the text, which could easily have resulted in possible professional consequences. It was important that the contemporary reader understood Koestler’s political and ideological transformation not simply as a mood swing, naivety or simple-mindedness, but rather as a turn to humanness and humanity. The reader had to be convinced that while Koestler embarked on a journey into the East he was transforming into a European cosmopolitan.

4. Conclusion As a witness to the turmoil of the interwar period as well as the humanitarian catastrophes at the time, Koestler developed his own politics of form in order to master his tricky past and the many “mood swings” of history. This might well explain why the unreliable nature of memory and remembrance became major themes and important stylistic patterns in his travel memoir. By making extensive use of these stylistic patterns Koestler opts for presenting not only his deep critical reflections on the period but also his insisting condemnation of his former euphoric blindness. His strategic utilisation of the Soviet Union comprises not only wonderland imagery, but also the metaphor of a gigantic almshouse which is unable to feed its citizens. Moreover, we come across such ambivalent characters like the audacious ‘citizen Vera Maximovna’ (p.87), who, with her outrageous stories, does not fit into any readymade category. All these representations pave the ground for a narrative process of critical self-reflection in which Koestler’s earlier set of beliefs and behaviours are negotiated and challenged. Having eventually found a new home in England caused Arthur Koestler to apparently reinvent a past by utilising his journey into the Soviet Union as

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a central motif which ultimately helped him to dramatise his own life story.19 In line with philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur, Koestler demonstrates in his writing that life, as it comes alive in all autobiographical writings, can only be turned into memory if a narrator sets out to interpret the past. This interpretation then transforms and mediates the narrator’s past life from a biological phenomenon into a story.20 In Koestler’s case, the reader finds himself confronted with an honest, but at the same time cleverly constructed, life story which certainly did not damage the by then already famous public personae of Arthur Koestler.



Works Cited Adams, Timothy Dow, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) Bassnett, Susan, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.225-241 Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, trans. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) Cesarini, David, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: Heinemann, 1998) Conquest, George Robert Ackworth, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) Hampl, Patricia, ‘Memory and Imagination’, in The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, ed. by Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg (New York: Longman, 2002), pp.259-268

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20

At the end of his memoir, Koestler writes about his newly gained home: ‘The reason why all the places where I have lived long before England have now become “abroad” – which is the ultimate test for belonging to a country – are difficult for me to analyse. There is for instance, language. Since 1940 I have been writing in English, thinking in English, and reading mostly English literature. Language serves not only to express thought, but to mould it; the adoption of a new language, particularly by a writer, means a gradual and unconscious transformation of his pattern of thinking, his style and his tastes, his attitudes and reactions. In short, he acquires not only a new medium of communication but a new cultural background. For several years, while I thought in English, I continued to talk French, German, and Hungarian in my sleep. Now even this occurs only rarely; the layers are becoming integrated.’ (p.518) Cf. Ricoeur, pp.425-437 (p.432).

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Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1982) Koestler, Arthur, The Invisible Writing (London: Vintage, 2005) —, The God That Failed, ed. Richard H. Crossman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-24 Orwell, George, ‘Arthur Koestler,’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 3 As I Please, 1943-1945, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London: Penguin, 1994), III, pp.268-277 Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,’ in Reflection & Imagination: A Ricoeur Reader, ed. by Mario J.Valdé (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp.425-437 Trodd, Zoe, ‘Hemingway’s Camera Eye: The Problem of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form’, The Hemingway Review, 26.2 (2007), 7-21

Eva Ulrike Pirker

The Unfinished Revolution: Black Perceptions of Eastern Europe This article examines the ways in which black British writers relate to Eastern European spaces, especially during and after the communist era. After offering insights into the history of black writing about the East during the twentieth century, some works from the more recent past are considered, in particular Caryl Phillips’s travelogue The European Tribe, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea and Mike Phillips’s thriller A Shadow of Myself. They are read with a focus on the way in which they use the Eastern space in order to assess discourses about blackness and race.

1. Preliminaries When studying in what is today, again, St. Petersburg, the British journalist Gary Younge had the following experience: I was arranging to meet someone in a market in Leningrad in 1991. I was studying Russian there at the Philological institute as part of an exchange programme with my Scottish university, Heriot Watt. I called this woman and when we’d finished making arrangements she asked how she would recognise me. I said, ‘well I’m black’ – ‘Chyorni’, I said, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. ‘Will you be wearing a hat?’, she asked. ‘I don’t know. But I’ll still be black anyway’, I said. ‘What colour hat will you be wearing?’ ‘If I’m wearing one it will be brown. But I might not.’ ‘So how will I recognise you then?’ ‘Well I’ll be black.’ It went on like that with us both missing each other for quite some time before she told me what she would be wearing and we finalised arrangements. Then I told the woman I was staying with how weird it was, and she said I should call her back and tell her I was a Negro. ‘Nyegr’. It turns out that ‘black’ can mean black-haired – as in blonde or ginger. And since she hadn’t supposed I would be be black-skinned she assumed it meant that. There are a heap of other words in Russian that can mean black like black-skinned, dark-skinned or just dark/coloured. ‘Nyegr’ can be derogatory. Anyhow, I called her back and told her I was a Negro and she said, ‘Why didn’t you say that before’, and I said, ‘I did.’1

The number of black Britons who, like Gary Younge, have ventured out to Eastern Europe is small, and so is the body of black British writing on the subject. Nevertheless, the few texts that have been written should not be omitted in a volume that looks at British perspectives on Eastern Europe. 1

Used with kind permission by Gary Younge.

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Firstly, black identities have become an integral part of recent conceptions of “Britishness”. Secondly, the practice of using Eastern Europe as a space for Western projections has never been an exclusively “white” one. This article looks at what happens to these projections if the projector is a black Westerner. Due to the lack of black minority communities in Eastern Europe and the lack of a discourse about racial identity, race and the language surrounding it are charged differently with meaning when compared to Western contexts, as Younge’s anecdote shows. Diverging perceptions of black people in Eastern Europe and in the West appear to be rooted in the contrastive political cultures dominating these spheres. Arguably it is this particular difference that made Eastern European spaces worth assessing for many black thinkers in the West, including some black British intellectuals and writers. Black individuals and groups, whose presence in Britain serves as a reminder of the fact that British history ‘is indeed a history that encompasses the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the African Diaspora’ or the so-called Black Atlantic,2 add a further reflective surface in the process of ‘endless mirrorings’ between East and West.3 In what follows, a black intellectual tradition of viewing, and writing (about), the East is outlined before texts written by black authors in Britain during and after the Soviet era are taken into consideration.4

2. Glimpses into the “Archive” of Black-Soviet Relations The clearly separated political geographies of an Eastern and Western “bloc” during the Cold War blur an entire history of contact and exchange of ideas in the first half of the twentieth century. Socialist thought in Britain between the world wars, for instance, saw a wide scope ranging from workers’ movements in the industrial centres to a more detached “Fabian” version in the metropolis.5 In the opening lines of his Survey of International Affairs of 1931, the then Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and British comparative historian Arnold Toynbee diagnosed a widely-felt need for systemic change, holding that everywhere ‘[m]en and women [...] were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of society might break down and cease to work’.6 These ‘discus2

3 4 5 6

Kennetta Hammond Perry, ‘Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. By Carole Boyce Davies’, Twentieth Century British History, 20.2 (2009), 277-279 (p.279). Cf. Elisabeth Cheauré’s article in the present volume. The focus will be on the presentation of an overview rather than in-depth analysis. Cf. the article of Dirk Wiemann in the present volume. Arnold J. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs 1931 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p.1.

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sions’ as well as the events surrounding them were instrumental in the formation of a number of black intellectuals who left their marks on Britain and who are being re-claimed in an increasingly diversified British historical culture. The long-term black engagement with communist thought took off in the late 1910s and early 1920s. At a time when British and American cities saw unprecedented eruptions of violence against blacks and the large-scale implementation of segregationist practices,7 the equality of races was proclaimed vociferously in the manifesto of the Comintern and, what is more, implemented in the young Soviet Union ad hoc. The discrepancy between the societal transformations in the wake of the revolutions in Russia and the continuing racial discrimination and economic inequality in the United States made the black intelligentsia in the Americas look upon the Soviet Union as a beacon of hope. W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance, was not an uncompromising socialist at first, but was deeply intrigued by the events and consequences of the Russian Revolution. He travelled to the Soviet Union several times, and each of his visits to Russia as well as other Eastern European countries helped to consolidate his critical attitude towards world capitalism, Western imperialism and racist politics. His critique was made all the more poignant by his observation that ‘of all countries, Russia alone has made race prejudice a crime; of all great imperialisms, Russia alone owns no colonies of dark serfs or white […] and is lifting no blood-soaked profits from cheap labor in Asia or Africa.’8 A few years before Du Bois, the Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay had travelled to Russia in 1922 and 1923. McKay’s engagement with the Soviets served to direct attention to the cause of blacks in American society and manifested itself in a number of texts written for a Russian audience (‘Negroes in America’, 1923 and the short story collection Trial By Lynching, 1925). For his Western readers, McKay assessed the possibilities of internationalism in art and societal organisation and even speculated on the potential of the Russian example for the American South: [I]f the exploited poor whites of the South could ever transform themselves into making common cause with the persecuted and plundered Negroes […] and deprive [the op7

8

In Britain, black migrants from the Caribbean settled in noticeable numbers in the industrial centres and seaports during the First World War. They were met with hostility by parts of the white population: In the years ensuing the end of the war the first race riots occurred, resulting in acts of forced repatriation, and in 1925, a colour bar was introduced among seamen. Across the Atlantic a similar development took place; race riots in the urban centres of the Northern States were accompanied by an increased number of lynchings in the South after World War I. W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Paul Robeson’, in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. by Eric Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.282-285 (p.283).

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pressive oligarchy] of all political privileges, the situation would be very similar to that of Soviet Russia to-day.9

The strong association of McKay with the Harlem Renaissance blurs his international influence. He refined his socialist schooling in London where he became what some describe as the ‘first black British journalist’,10 writing for the Workers’ Dreadnought and meeting figureheads of social movements such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Shapurji Saklatvala. London was to be McKay’s final station before his visit to the Soviet Union. He famously took part in the Fourth International during his extended stay in Russia and was elated by the kind treatment he received everywhere he moved. Nevertheless, he eventually also tired of being received as a “token American Negro” as well as of the rigid implementation of communist principles. Other than in Du Bois’s case, McKay’s visit of Eastern Europe served to loosen his ties to socialism rather than strengthen them in the end. When McKay’s contemporary Langston Hughes visited the USSR in 1932, it was abundantly clear that the black delegation he travelled with was instrumentalised for Stalinist anti-American propaganda. However, the poet took the opportunity to explore the Union and its people, meeting other travellers such as the Hungarian-British writer Arthur Koestler, and the account of his experience fills three voluminous chapters of his autobiography. In summary of his experience he writes: I think most idealists expected too much of Russia in too short a time. […] Maybe the fact that I was colored […] made a difference. All the tourists I saw in the Soviet Union except John Hope were white. […] Some things irritated these people much more than they did me. Just as the dirt in Central Asia upset Koestler, so it upset me. Dirt without Jim Crow was bad – but dirt with Jim Crow, for me, would have been infinitely worse. […] After all, I suppose, how anything is seen depends on whose eyes look at it. 11

Taking a keen interest in the everyday lives of people, Hughes does not comment on politics and Stalin’s leadership. By contrast, Stalin’s agenda of socialism in one nation was to become a source of deeply felt disappointment 9

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Claude McKay, ‘Soviet Russia and the Negro’, Crisis (December 1923), pp.61-65 (p.64). McKay also saw parallels between the function of Russian literature in a European context and black literature in the American one, both in terms of their marginality and their capacity to function as ‘social engineering’. Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p.27. William Davidson, ‘From the French Revolution to Gate Gourmet’, Solidarity & Workers’ Liberty 3.141 (30 October 2008), 15. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander. The Collected Works, vol. 14, ed. by Joseph McLaren (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp.218-219, emphasis in the original. For an analysis of Koestler’s views of the East, cf. Sissy Helff’s article in the present volume.

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for the Trinidadian George Padmore, an iconic figure in both the international communist and the Panafrican movements. Educated in the United States Padmore was active in the black student movement and the Comintern before he settled in the Soviet Union to lead the “Negro Bureau” of the Profintern. When Stalin drew a line of distinction between “democratic” and “fascist imperialist” countries (with Britain, France and Belgium representing the former), Padmore was asked to explain the new policy to African opponents of British and French colonial rule. As a consequence, he turned his back on his post and Russia and founded the International African Service Bureau in London, for which his former Trinidadian schoolmate C.L.R. James edited a journal.12 Reading backward through the works of Stalin, Lenin and finally Marx, the Trotzkyist James had arrived at the conclusion that Stalin’s take-over was the ‘cruellest tragedy of the post-war world’ and Stalin himself unoriginal, ignorant, and a threat to the possibilities that socialism had to offer.13 James found new fields of applying Marxist revolutionary thought, not by travelling to, or residing in, the “land of socialism”, but by embarking on a historical research of the Haitian revolution and its protagonist, Toussaint L’Ouverture. However, Haiti was only one of the many arenas of world revolution as James saw it, and it was always the movement of the “underdogs” that caught his attention, be it the cause of Yorkshire’s workers, the opposition on Paris’s streets to French fascism, or the eventual formation of a Trotzkyist movement in London against the backdrop of Oswald Mosley’s rise. Therefore, the staging of James’s Toussaint-play Black Majesty in a West End theatre with Paul Robeson in the lead was not a highlight, but one of many sidelines of his political engagement. In contrast to James, the actor and activist Robeson was so persuaded by the existing model of a non-racist, socialist state, but also by Stalin personally, that he settled in the Soviet Union temporarily and enrolled his son in a Moscow public school in the late 1930s. Previously to this, the law graduate from Columbia had become a famous actor and baritone singer, in Britain even more than in his native USA. It was in Britain where Robeson’s political consciousness was formed sustainably and where he developed a sensibility for the cause of the “common people”. Increasingly dissatisfied with the sometimes degrading roles he was offered (some of which were contrary to the convictions underlying his activism), Robeson eventually turned his back on commercial film productions, and joined a left theatre group, performing 12

13

Cf. C.L.R. James, ‘Notes on the Life of George Padmore’, in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp.288-295. C.L.R. James, ‘Stalin and Socialism’, in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp.112-124 (p.113).

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in free shows and at labour rallies. Suspicious to governments on either side of the Atlantic because of his openly displayed sympathies for the Soviet Union, he was subject to long-term heavy surveillance from the late 1940s onwards in Britain and the USA alike. Robeson was reproached by critics in the West for what many considered a blind adherence to Stalin; as a matter of fact, “Papa Stalin’s” unscrupulous practice of getting rid of adversaries, increasingly directed against Jews, and among them some of Robeson’s closest friends, must have been a bitter experience for the artist on his 1949 tour of the Soviet Union. Despite this, Robeson’s view was that the overall outcome of Soviet politics was beneficial to the people; this became clear in repeated public acts such as his acceptance of the Stalin Peace Price in 1953, his continuing refusal to denounce communism, and his eulogy to Stalin in which he attributed the latter a ‘decisive role’ in the societal advancement of all people under the Soviet banner: [I]n the Soviet Union, Yakuts, Nenetses, Kirgiz, Tadzhiks […] were helped to advance with unbelievable rapidity in this socialist land. – no empty promises, such as colored folk continuously hear in the United States.14

Women were equally interested in, if not attracted to, the Soviet Eastern space for its promise of a society that was free of inequality not only with respect to race but also gender. Socialist women’s groups from the West were regularly invited to the Soviet Union in order to see for themselves the functioning of gender politics in the Soviet system. Claudia Jones, the TrinidadianAmerican activist who had been expelled from the United States because of her activities in the American Communist Party and permanently settled in the UK, was one such visitor. Carole Boyce Davies makes a case for Claudia Jones’s individual approach to communism, characterised by a ‘lifelong practice of learning’ rather than a blind reverence of leading figures. Nevertheless, Jones’s visits to the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s marked late stages in that development before an untimely death interrupted further engagement. Invited and guided by a Soviet women’s association she was

14

Paul Robeson, ‘To you beloved comrade’, in Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974, ed. by Philip S. Foner (New York: Brunner and Mazel, 1978), pp.347-349 (p.348). Not all ‘colored folk’ were prepared to wait for ‘promises’ to materialise and not only sections of a black intelligentsia were drawn towards the alternative societal model of the East, but also ‘common people’ and workers. Many thousands of skilled foreign workers had begun to move to the Soviet Union from the 1920s onwards, among them numerous black workers, as Barbara Keys outlines in her study of the case of Robert Robinson. She holds that there was a concept of race in the Soviet Union, but that this concept was of no importance in the organisation of society. Cf. Barbara Keys, ‘An African-American Worker in Stalin’s Soviet Union: Race and the Soviet Experiment in International Perspective’, The Historian, 71.1 (2009), 31-54 (p.37).

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clearly impressed by the achievements of women there, and with the history and strength of the Soviet Union that she witnessed there, as well as the excitement, as a communist, of having finally made it to Russia. She reported back with satisfaction that she had been able to see structures of management and talk with people who were participating in continuing socialist transformation. 15

While in the realm of gender equality the Eastern model continued to receive attention, the notion that the Soviet Union was a paradise for black people became more contested. With the rise of an increasingly rigid Soviet reality, with the preoccupation of blacks with Western situations that had changed due to new flows of migration and political independence in the former colonies, but also with the increasing retreat of East and West behind their respective sides of the Curtain, it seems that the black Western interest in the Soviet Union faded from the 1960s onwards. In contrast to what might be called an archive of black writing on the East for the period between the 1920s and 1950s16 the period that follows is marked by a relative silence. This has only gradually begun to change around the collapse of communism in the East.

3. Re-Assessments Before and After the Fall of the Wall While during the years leading up to the fall of the Wall the East had become increasingly inaccessible, a fixed “bloc” and stable “other” in the Western imagination, the sudden opening of this space and its quick disintegration into many separate spheres as well as the violence that began to accompany this process left Westerners gasping for breath. To them, images of the East in the final decade of the twentieth century oscillated between the notion of a “Wild East” that had to be explored and controlled and a blank space that had to be filled with meaning, not dissimilar to older Western fantasies of the “colonial other”.17 Only a few years prior to Gary Younge’s experience cited above, the writer Caryl Phillips embarked on a journey to Eastern Europe as part of a larger project which found its manifestation in a volume entitled The European Tribe (1987), a travelogue, or, as is stated in the short preface, ‘a narrative in the form of a notebook in which I have jotted various thoughts about a Europe I feel both of and not of. Its impetus was provided by nearly a year’s 15

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Carole Boyce-Davies, Left of Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp.225f. Kate Baldwin’s notion of a ‘Soviet archive of black America’ is profitably expandable beyond the US-American context, cf. Baldwin, p.4. Importantly, similar to the way in which colonial fantasies accompanied “real” economic interests, these new projections of the East have arguably often functioned as fertilizers in the spread of an aggressive (corporate) capitalist enterprise culture in this space.

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wandering from Europe’s closest neighbour, Morocco, to her furthest flung capital, Moscow.’18 The impetus for the ‘wandering’ was provided by the traveller’s ambivalent relation towards the specific European space in which he had grown up: A depressed Britain in the 1970s, the decade in which the social exclusion of blacks and other minority groups gathered momentum, but ‘also the years of Bob Marley and Pressure, and the emergence of black footballers and sportsmen into the mainstream of British cultural life.’ (p.3) Phillips grew up uncomfortably stuck between the first and the second generation of the post-war migrant community, between those who adapted to Britain’s societal structures and those who raged against these. Ambivalence, dividedness, in-between-ness are the catalyst for a quest that manifests itself as theme in Phillips’s oeuvre to this day. The fact that Britain is considered both at the beginning and at the end of The European Tribe, place of departure and return, gives the narrative an argumentative structure with an opening thesis and conclusion rather than a collection of jotted-down notes. Throughout, Phillips sticks to his script, whose agenda is outlined as presenting his personal impression of Europe as it presents itself to a black British traveller. His assessment of blackness in Europe in turn is designed to shed more light on his complex relationship to Britain. In this process of seeking Britain in Europe, blackness in Europe, and Europe in Britishness and blackness, another instance of ‘endless mirroring’, Phillips also assesses Eastern European spaces. These retain an influential position in the narrative as the final project before his return and thus serve as a significant final foil against which Britain is set in scrutiny, bringing out the competitiveness, but also the surprisingly little contrastive potential between East and West.19 Britain, as Phillips writes in conclusion, appeared to me now, even more so than before my departure, indivisible from the rest of Europe and exclusive in its attitude toward me. Britain’s and Western Europe’s days of imperialistic glory are history. The former slaves wander freely among the rubble of Europe’s formerly all-powerful cities, while Eastern Europe appears already to have entered the new phase of Soviet imperialism. Eager to avoid the still hungry Soviet bear, the rest of Western Europe has joined Britain in cowering under the shadow of Washington’s eagle. (p.120)

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Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (London: Faber, 1987), p.xiii. Further page references are given parenthetically in the text. If we follow Dorothy Lazard who reads The European Tribe as a coming-of-age narrative, the traveller’s having to come to terms with his ‘dual identity of the privileged Brit and the subjugated black’ transpires most clearly in the East. Dorothy Lazard, ‘Reading Caryl Phillips’ The European Tribe as a Coming-of-Age Narrative’, B.Ma: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, 9.1 (Fall 2003), pp.179-190 (p.181). Compared to the otherwise considerable output of academic work devoted to Phillips’s texts, The European Tribe, and in particular the passages on Eastern Europe, have received little (if any) attention.

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When it comes to the close observations of Eastern European spaces in the single chapters, however, the picture rendered is more differentiated. The first of these spaces is East Germany, which is represented as a gloomy place peopled with saluting officials; a place where life seems to be worthwhile only in spaces in which there is access to Western television or the press. One of the characteristic impressions caught by the traveller is the ‘scene at Dresden-Neustadt station platform’ which reminds him ‘of a bygone age I had only seen in films or imagined in novels. It must have been in a place like this that Anna Karenina threw herself under the train.’ (p.90) From observing East Berlin’s nightly pilgrims on their stroll to the Wall where they ‘would simply stop and gaze’ (p.89), the traveller concludes that the artificial division of Germany ‘had yet to penetrate through to the German soul.’ (p.90)20 Phillips’s Western Germany appears as a contrastive space to the East, a space of desire with its almost blinding ‘bright colours’ (p.85), suggestive of ‘a circus that East Germans are not allowed to attend’ (p.89). However, West Germany appears bearable to the traveller only in a few international spaces whose existence is explained as having resulted either from the presence of occupational forces or from the societal reliance on an army of second-class citizens, Gastarbeiter. In the gloomier Eastern part, it is unclear to the traveller whether he should read hostile glances as ‘racial antagonism’ or ‘envy’ at his ‘being from the West’ (p.88). Angered by the sight of ‘impossibly long queues’ and some of the GDR system’s hypocritical aspects, he nevertheless ends his observations on an ambivalent note, describing the scene of departure from Dresden-Neustadt as ‘bleak, haunting’ but also as ‘strangely beautiful.’ (p.91) In Warsaw and Katowice the traveller is surprised by a barely concealed enthusiasm for all things American. When he tells people that he is from Grenada in order to avoid the ‘looks of disbelief that accompany “Britain”’ (p.96) he learns that they see the 1983 American invasion of the island as a ‘“liberation” we Grenadians should be grateful for.’ (p.92) This proAmerican attitude is explained by Peter, a writer, who ‘felt that there were benefits in being a victim of American imperialism that those in the Eastern bloc could only dream about. The mind is free.’ (p.94) From his conversations with Peter and passing acquaintances Phillips comes to perceive and present Poland as an oppositional space in the geography of communist East20

Ingredients of the ‘German soul’ are, for instance, an obsession with organisation, underlined by a quotation of a passage from Claude McKay’s European novel Banjo, and a certain xenopbobia observed by the traveller. The latter stands in contrast to the observations by McKay’s Ray who describes Germany as a ‘country too highly organised for [his] temperament’, but also as a place where he never encountered hostility or discourtesy. Claude McKay, Banjo (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957) pp.146f.

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ern Europe: ‘I began to focus on a picture of a country that for the last 300 years had been manhandled by both Russia and Germany, but had somehow managed to retain a sense of national pride’ (p.95). Poland to him is a particular society in the Eastern bloc, with such aspects as Catholicism, an unbearable collective memory, and a resistance culture in which literature assumes a vital role: I had learnt that in a situation where history is distorted, the literature of a people often becomes its history, its writers the keepers of the past, present and future. In this situation a writer can infuse a people with a sense of their own unique identity and spiritually kindle the fire of resistance. […] Colonized Poland lies between the heart of the Empire (Moscow) and the front line of East Germany. The Soviet Union cannot afford to lose Poland. Poland cannot to afford to lose her writers. (p.99)21

Moscow, according to Phillips, openly displays its role as the centre of power of the Eastern bloc, the ‘hub of the Empire’ (p.108). Allusions to Soviet gigantomania are frequent: ‘All across the city one sees construction sites, but it is seldom apartments that are being built. Memorials, memorial parks, busts, triumphal arches, these are the popular edifices.’ (p.108) When he visits the Soviet palace of culture, impressions range from that of ‘forced leisure camps’ to an exhibition of ‘Soviet Economic Achievement’ displaying in eighty halls on ‘over 600 acres […] sacks of wheat’ and the like; eventually, he is ‘repulsed’ by the ‘massive exhibition of Soviet Realism’ (p.117). Phillips’s Moscow is a bleak, bloodless space from the very first moment, reminding him of Manhattan ‘in scale’ but lacking the ‘glamour’ of New York (pp.107f.). Comparisons to the Western world power are frequent, once more serving to outline the alterity of the Eastern space to this Westerner, but never covering up his critical attitude towards the Western space that made him. As in Poland, he establishes connections to people who function as cultural translators of the strange space; again, rather than taking away his scepticism they add to it; learning about the experience of a Jewish family that has been denied permission to emigrate to Israel and is marked as ‘refuseniks’ makes the traveller realise that he is in ‘danger of becoming the 21

If Phillips alludes to the black experience of colonialism, and post-colonial suppression, the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson makes an outspoken connection between the black British struggle against an oppressive political culture and the Polish resistance in his short poem ‘Wat about di Working Claas’ (1982): ‘From Inglan to Poland / every step across di ocean / the ruling class is dem in a mess, oh yes / di capitalist system are regress / but di soviet nah progress / so wich one of dem yuh think is best / when di two of dem work as a contest / when crisis is di order of di day / when so much people is cryin’ out to change nowadays’. Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Wat about di Working Claas’, Making History, read by L.K. Johnson (London: Island Records, 1983), track no.2. Cf. also Johnson in: Burt Caesar, ‘Interview: Linton Kwesi Johnson talks to Burt Caesar’, Critical Quarterly, 38.4 (June 1996), 64-77 (p.76).

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sneering’ Westerner. Their story makes Phillips perceive the country ‘in a different light’, although he ‘tries hard to persuade’ himself ‘that it would be a mistake to assume that the Soviet Union was peopled by […] those who were critical of the system’ and ‘that only Westerners have a bright future to look forward to.’ (p.115) Officially, the Soviet Union still presents itself in the mid-1980s as the positive “other” of the West: Questions such as ‘Do you have slums in England?’ (p.110), thrown in the face of the Westerner, appear unmotivated and repetitive. The iconography surrounding blackness as experienced by the likes of McKay, Hughes and Robeson in the first half of the twentieth century has worn off and been replaced by the matter-of-factness of an institutionalised black presence of African and Caribbean students, for instance at Patrice Lumumba University. In The European Tribe, African students repeatedly catch the traveller’s eye, but he can only speculate about their experience: I pondered how it was that they could have become so dependent on such a system. […] But few poor countries really care where help springs from initially, East or West, as long as they get hospitals, schools, roads and bridges. The Soviets know this, and they know that to give a man knowledge (especially in the Russian tongue) places that man in their debt for ever. Politics comes after aid, but by then it is often too late. The provider may well have become the colonizer. (pp.117f.)

It might be argued that aid and stipends from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Treaty members were not necessarily received by Africans in humble acceptance and devoutness; particularly from the 1970s onwards, alliances were less closely-knit, and, as one Ghanaian informs the traveller Phillips, ‘the language and weather [posed] far bigger problems’ than the ‘little propaganda accompanying each graduation certificate’ (p.113). The historian Allison Blakely notes that overall African intellectuals had their own, flexible understanding of socialism and did not, at any time, fashion their projects according to the example of communist practice in Europe.22 Nevertheless, their experience has rarely been considered in research and even less in literary texts. Two notable exceptions are provided by black writers in Britain who have taken up the subject as strands in their fiction, Abdulrazak Gurnah in his novel By the Sea (2001) and Mike Phillips in his thriller A Shadow of Myself (2001). If The European Tribe is interesting as a mid-1980s impression of the contemporary situation(s), published 22

Cf. Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1986), p.143. In a recent overview, Maxim Matusevich confirms that most Africans went to the Soviet Union for ‘practical reasons’ rather than ‘ideological considerations’. Maxim Matusevich, ‘An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans, and the Soviet Everyday’, Race & Class, 49.4 (2008), 57-81 (p.69).

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virtually only moments before the ultimate implosion of the Eastern model of a controlled economy and society, Gurnah’s and Mike Phillips’s novels are instances of looking back, generated out of an impetus of providing a fuller understanding of the past and its impact on the present and of setting some historical records straight on the way. Abdulrazak Gurnah achieves this primarily through a juxtaposition of the narrative voices of two East African figures who meet in Britain: the prototypical subaltern figure Saleh Omar, an old asylum seeker, and the figure of the younger Latif Mahmud who has made it in British society, but has an unusual migratory background via East Germany. It is this second strand which is of interest here. As a matter of fact Latif’s East German experience is not isolated in history, but suggestive of thousands of untold stories of African students in Eastern European institutions, ‘beggar pawns in someone else’s plans, captured and delivered there. Held there’, as the protagonist observes (p.115). Latif embarks on a journey for which he has been selected, among others, by representatives of his newly independent country,23 not because of excellence or political conviction, but because of his mother’s ‘resourcefulness’24 – the latter had become the mistress of the minister in charge of selection. Eager to escape his close family, he is happy to leave, but initially overwhelmed by his new environment Neustadt, remembering only ‘odd things’ of his arrival such as rain, the speed and noise of the train, and, similar to the traveller Caryl Phillips, a ‘gloomy feeling’ (p.112). Other than Phillips who only perceives the East German space from the outside, Gurnah’s Latif almost exclusively remembers the inside of buildings, cities, situations and people, but these intimate spaces are first and foremost presented as suffocating: The hostel was a modern rectangular block, concrete and glass and asbestos, with tiny unheated rooms that were shared between two students. The corridors were narrow and sharply angled, so that although the building gave a monumental impression on the outside, inside it was cramped and suffocating. Until I got used to it, it felt as if I had to struggle to breathe, lying in bed in a silent panic, heaving to take the bad air with its taste of vegetable decay. (p.113)

Latif’s dorm exclusively hosts students ‘from foreign places – that is, from dark foreign places’ (p.113), which is indicative of the seclusion in which invited students and ‘guestworkers’ in the GDR were encouraged to 23

24

The events described in the novel coincide with those in the recent history of Gurnah’s native Zanzibar, but significantly, locations in Africa are not named. Cf. Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p.120. Further references appear parenthetically in the text. By the Sea has enjoyed a widespread critical reception that cannot be considered here. Importantly, the portrayal of the GDR in the novel has not provoked any attention worthy of note.

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live. Latif’s room-mate, Ali from Guinea, initiates the newcomer into the general discontent felt among the international students; Did you bring any chocolate? Or dollars? This is Eastern Europe. They don’t have anything here. It’s just as bad as Africa. […] It’s freezing here all the time. […] It’s stew for dinner every evening here. They make it with pellets of dried meat, and no one knows any more what the meat was originally or if it is meat at all or whether some of it is goat pellets or asbestos. (p.114)

Ali claims that ‘all the students here would prefer to be somewhere else’, and Latif admits that they all ‘wanted to be in the land of Coca-Cola and blue jeans’ (p.119) and assumes that this desire, generated in their colonial world in which glimpses of the affluent West had been available, made them act ‘superior to the teachers, as if we knew about things which the teachers had no inkling of’ (p.115). Ali introduces Latif to the cultural treasures of Dresden such as the Zwinger Palace, the Sistine Madonna, the State Opera and Schiller, ‘our Schiller of the GDR Cultural institute!’ (p.122, p.126), taking him ‘round the Altstadt, naming buildings and describing the bombing in May 1945 as if he had been there.’ (p.122) Apart from a few notable exceptions, both Europeans East and West are cast as ignorant and limited in their views. Two such exceptional cases are Jan and his mother Elleke, who introduce Latif to occidental world literature, and more precisely Homer’s Odyssey, the prototypical instance of literary wandering. In a symbolic act that conjures up the scene of Euryclea’s recognition of Odysseus, they wash his frozen, bleeding foot when he arrives at their house. Their friendship is both old and new, thus reflecting back on Gurnah’s agenda of challenging his readers to question the familiar and adopt new perspectives: Jan had been Latif’s pen-friend for years, as part of a scheme of getting German youths involved with ‘fraternal’ Africans (p.124). Not taking the campaign seriously and not expecting a reply, he presented himself as a girl, using his mother’s name and a cousin’s photograph. After years of correspondence between the fake ‘Elleke’ and Latif, the former is surprised when Latif suddenly turns up near him. Through the real Elleke, Latif learns more about the past and present realities of life in the GDR and before. Elleke, it turns out, has spent part of her young years in Kenya where her parents had been coffee farmers between the wars. Ashamed of her parents’ and other Europeans’ demeanour in the colonies, she remarks, we lived at a time when it seemed we had a right to do all that, a right to places that were only occupied by people with dark skins and frizzy hair. That was the meaning of colonialism, and everything was done to persuade us not to notice the methods that made it possible for us to go where we wanted. […] My parents didn’t ask how that state of affairs had been achieved, and no one encouraged them to, although it was easy enough to see how when we lived there. (p.131)

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Apart from the insights gained by herself, Elleke’s understanding of the evils of Western colonialism was granted by the East-German political reeducation which set in immediately after the war. As transpires through Latif and Saleh’s stories, the benevolence half-heartedly imposed on their newly independent East African country by the non-imperialist, “other” Europe resulted in havoc and tumult rather than in the creation of a viable society. All in all, By the Sea sketches instances of political restructuring in both Europe and Africa as a farcical game of alliances and disalliances that follows coincidence rather than planning. However, it also outlines the very tangible impact of these “games” on the lives of individuals peopling the play-boards. The notion that individuals are pawns in a bigger game is also evoked in Mike Phillips’s novel A Shadow of Myself (2001). That this notion is a recurring characteristic of the political thriller may have induced Phillips to engage once more with this sub-genre of crime fiction which ‘gave me a platform from which I could exploit my roots in the experience of being black in Britain, while linking my writing to themes which extended beyond race and location’, as he states in his autobiographical book London Crossings.25 In an interview, he describes his sense of belonging ‘in a wider world’ as the impetus for writing A Shadow of Myself.26 The world conjured up in the settings of the novel is above all a European one, with a particular focus on Eastern spaces: Other than Gurnah, Phillips does not only send one of his characters East – large parts of the novel’s action are set in Moscow, East Berlin and Prague and the majority of its protagonists live there. Overall, the novel presents the story of a family in Europe during and after the Cold War. Like Europe, the family is split in two parts that resemble each other, with two half-brothers representing either half. The pater familias is the African Kofi Coker who makes his way from his native Ghana to England as a young boy in 1945 and ends up in Manchester in the midst of preparations for the Fifth Pan-African congress. He quickly becomes not only a conference-hand, but also the personal protégé of Ras Makonnen who is able to secure a stipend for him in the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Kofi falls in love with his language teacher, Katya. When their relationship becomes known he is expelled and she is transferred to Berlin. There she raises their son George of whose existence Kofi remains ignorant. Kofi resettles in London, leading a quiet, withdrawn life after his marriage with an Englishwoman has ended in divorce. His relationship to their son, 25 26

Mike Phillips, London Crossings (London: Continuum, 2001), p.155. Claudia Sternberg, ‘Mike Phillips on Migration, Inventing Europe, and his Novel A Shadow of Myself: An Interview’, ZAA, 49 (2001), 385-393 (p.389). By the time he published A Shadow Phillips was well established in crime fiction.

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Joseph, remains distanced. However, Joseph is designed as an indispensable vehicle guiding the reader through the novel’s main plot: At a film festival in Prague in the 1990s, the young filmmaker stumbles across his elder brother George who has become involved in an international art robbery scheme that conveniently makes use of former structures of secret intelligence. Sucked into the proverbial criminal underworld of what is cast as the ‘Wild’ East,27 the brothers, and eventually the entire family become tied up in the plot. Although it does not have an immediate impact on the crime plot, Kofi’s story is the only one related at length and first-hand, in several chapters that contain passages from his memoirs, the ‘Diary of Desire’. Like Gurnah’s Latif in Neustadt, or the African encountered by Caryl Phillips on Moscow’s streets, Kofi experiences the seclusion in which African students were encouraged to live in the institutions of “friendship”: We students lived in a kind of bubble outlined by our colour, our strangeness and our awkwardness with the language. The officials, teachers and other colleagues who were routinely encountered all had a position in the Party and a responsibility for our indoctrination, or for keeping us isolated from everything they considered undesirable – a concept which covered a lot of ground. The people of the city, we also discovered, were discouraged from contact with foreigners. (p.154)

When Kofi learns that his stipend and his visa had been annulled by Soviet authorities he is told by the official in charge at the Ghanaian embassy in Paris: ‘You’re not the first [...] to get in trouble over these women. But we expected more discipline from you.’ (p.283) Earlier, Kofi was beaten up by a racist gang when he walked the streets with Katya. The incident causes a stir among the students and officials, with the latter playing the event down because they fear that it might ‘lower the morale’ of his ‘comrades’ and ‘give ammunition to the enemies of the Soviet Union’s forward-looking policy of aiding the oppressed colonies.’ (p.277) Kofi attempts to keep his head down, but it soon becomes clear that the beating was only one manifestation of the lingering low perception of interracial relationships in the “Red Mecca”.28 27

28

Mike Phillips, A Shadow of Myself (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p.357. Further references appear parenthetically in the text. For in-depth analyses of the novel, cf. Ingrid von Rosenberg and Gerd Stratmann, ‘New Thrills: John le Carré and Mike Phillips Discover the Wild East of Post-Cold War Europe’, in Literary Views of Post-Wall Europe, ed. by Christoph Houswitschka and others (Trier: WVT, 2005), pp.65-82 and Eva Ulrike Pirker, ‘Keine weiße Geschichte: Mike Phillips’ Thriller über ein geteiltes and vereintes Europa A Shadow of Myself’, in Geschichte im Krimi: Beiträge aus den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. by Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek (Köln: Böhlau, 2009), pp.241-254. Blakely analyses similar instances such as the case of the Ghanaian student Edmond AsareAddao, ‘found dead near a train track on the outskirts of Moscow in sub-zero weather. African students […] claimed that he had been murdered by Russians who objected to his proposed marriage to a Russian woman. Soviet authorities conjectured that he had been

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Other than Kofi’s Eastern European experience of an outsider-becomeinsider, his son George, born and raised as a mixed-race East German, develops a tough attitude when it comes to defending his rightful place in the GDR. As a matter of course, the way others perceive him is not entirely free of racist connotations. For instance ‘he hadn’t set out to be a boxer’, but realises that the colour of his skin had more to do with his recruitment to the boxing squad than the power of his punching. The only blacks [his teacher] had ever encountered were the American and African boxers he had faced in the ring. Sooner or later he would have thought of recruiting the school’s solitary black pupil. (pp.10f.)

When doors close on the sporting career after an accident, George is picked out by the Stasi for a ‘job’ of allegedly reporting on a professor whose husband had defected to the West. ‘These intellectuals’, he is told, ‘imagine they are closer to the people than the people’s own representatives. When she hears this from a black man who has served his time in the army and works in the canteens she’ll embrace you with open arms.’ (p.206) The relationship that develops between George and the professor is being documented meticulously by the cameras of the intelligence in order to be used against the academic, and George realises that he has been used – as many others – as a ‘pawn in someone else’s plan’.29 Shortly before the fall of the wall George meets Radka, who is to become his wife, at a ‘recital of African poets in Berlin. […] I don’t know why George attended. […] He is bored by poetry. Of course he says he loves Pushkin, but that is because he’s Russian. A special Russian, he says, like Pushkin.’ (pp.92f.) The reference to Pushkin, which is further explained by a remark on the latter’s ‘African origins’ (p.93), is only one of many instances in the novel in which readers are reminded of black presences in Europe’s past. With his thriller, Phillips opens up the discursive spaces of both Europe and blackness: Both East and West, their histories of separation and contrastive relationship are cast as spaces that need to be reconsidered in contexts beyond the European one. At the same time, Phillips also opens up a new space for the negotiation of “black” history, beyond the scope of what is

29

drinking and that he had collapsed and frozen to death.’ While Phillips’s Kofi does not die, but is expelled before his experience can create further attention, the Asare-Addao case led to the staging of ‘the first mass protest [of five hundred students] in Red Square since the late 1920s’. In order to dissuade attention from the incident the students were received by the minister of higher education. A 1970s case in which ‘the Czech government withdrew a scholarship from a Czech woman when she married a Nigerian’, and which led to an upheaval of black students in Kiew illustrates how official policy sometimes yielded to an obviously widespread racial antagonism (Blakely, pp.135, 140). Gurnah, p.115, see above.

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traditionally dealt as a “Black Atlantic” context by addressing the communist experiment, the implications of the Cold War, and the difficult formation of a new Europe after 1989. Phillips’s black figures are carriers of, and contributors to, this European history. The choice of the political thriller, a genre with particularly close ties to the topos of the Cold War, opens the possibility of targeting a wider circle of readers and setting them on the traces of a black European history. Furthermore, he effectively challenges the ‘conventional assumption that any contact between black people and the countries of Eastern Europe is strictly limited and specific.’30 If Phillips mentions Pushkin only in passing, albeit matter-of-factly, the novelist Bernadine Evaristo has accorded the black icon of Russian literature a central position in one of her novels.31 Soul Tourism (2005) is not only worth mentioning in the context of this article because it features the ghosts of both Pushkin and his great-grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal, but because it is a fictional travelogue across Europe set in the year 1989. Pushkin is encountered by the protagonist Stanley, who after his Jamaican parents’ death has acquired the capacity to see, and communicate with, the ghosts of famous figures from European history such as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges in Paris, Hannibal in the Alps and Mary Seacole on a bus to Istanbul. Istanbul, or Constantinople, is also the place where he encounters Ibrahim Gannibal first as a handsome, dark-skinned Abyssinian boy in the scenery of a ‘real live slave market’ and then mysteriously transformed into the grown majorgeneral of Tsar Peter the Great. Moments later, Ibrahim’s great-grandson Alexander Pushkin turns up, a ‘soul tourist’ in a more literal sense than Stanley: Alongside his impromptu performance of ‘Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud!’ and the funky chicken dance he announces that he goes to all of James Brown’s concerts and, as a ghost, ‘ah pay no dollar, Brother-Stan.’ Ibrahim tutted and raised his eyes with amused tolerance at his great-grandson. ‘He has been hanging around those Negro Americans too much, or whatever they call themselves these days. It is, quite frankly, absurd to hear you trying to “get with it” when you are dead.’32

Dutifully mentioning Pushkin’s own awareness of his African heritage, its impact on his life and its manifestation in several of his works, Evaristo adds to a long history of iconography surrounding Pushkin’s blackness. Already the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva monumentalises this feature in many of her works. In ‘My Pushkin’, she describes the childhood portrait drawn by E.I. Geitman as ‘the best of the portraits of Pushkin, a portrait of his distant 30 31

32

Phillips, London Crossings, p.198. Evaristo has approached black history in all her longer works to date, from different angles and in different subgenres respectively. Bernadine Evaristo, Soul Tourists (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), p.237.

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African soul and the still sleeping poetic soul.’33 In the context of Soviet fraternising with the “oppressed peoples of the world”, the African heritage of the national icon came in handy, and the black Western “pilgrims” of the first half of the twentieth century were encouraged to visit performances of Pushkin’s plays in Moscow. Black interest in Pushkin reached a first high during the Harlem Renaissance, and in 1925 an annual Pushkin Prize was created to recognise outstanding poetry written by black people.34 The continually growing “black” interest in Pushkin is currently beginning to be mainstreamed into a Western cultural historiography. Evaristo’s novel is a good example and fits the general interest in black history that has recently emerged in Britain. As much as this development may be seen as a cause for acclaim, the way in which Evaristo goes about sketching her fictional Europe of 1989 is more than reductive. Pushkin, the Russian icon, is not encountered in Moscow, Petersburg, or even Odessa, but transmitted to Constantinople to fit the traveller’s route. The novel that is praised as dusting down the ‘history of old and new Europe’ on the back cover leaves out the entire geographical space of the “Eastern bloc” that other writers such as those presented above took pains to explore. Written as a historical novel that is set in the very year that changed the face of Europe, its omission is a significant one. It goes to show that what used to be the “Eastern bloc” still seems to be a no-go area in the imagination of many Western creatives black and white.

4. Outlook Today, the East is no longer perceived as an unproblematic contact zone as regards race relations. The East Germany experienced by Gurnah’s Latif, for instance, has become remote, because it ‘has been transformed so furiously fast into a fantasy badland of the imagination, a TV-land of obstinate crooked government and now disgruntled unemployed neo-fascists, their shaved heads silhouetted in the flames of the burning homes of migrants.’35 Similar images can be retrieved from Russia, Poland, Ukraine and the rest of the East. The collapse of socialism in practice has not resulted in a cut of the international reliance on Eastern European institutions of learning: Today, about 15,000 African students are enrolled in Russian universities, but the 33

34

35

Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘My Pushkin’, in A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, ed. and trans. by J. Marin King (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), pp.319-362 (p.339). Cf. Anne Lounsberry, ‘“Bound by Blood to the Race”: Pushkin in African American Context’, in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. by Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and others (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp.248-278 (pp.248f.). Gurnah, p.104.

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biggest problem they encounter apart from difficulties of weather and language is the massive upsurge of racism.36 Reasons for the new race hate might be seen in the increasingly popular argument that Soviet aid and stipends had led to a ‘“sponging” off the USSR’37 and in the cultural stereotypes surrounding blacks that were allowed to linger and even develop under the guise of official Soviet politics. The paternalistic indoctrination of racial equality from above and the ensuing suppression of an open debate have only fuelled the violent outbreaks in the shadow of a newly-gained “freedom”. The proclaimed equality of races under socialism was bound to be perceived as a beacon of hope in the racially segregated world of the early twentieth century. Efforts in this direction, however, appear half-hearted in hindsight. Contrary to its promises, Soviet society has never been ‘a panacea for the Negro’,38 as Allison Blakely outlined in the 1980s, although he concludes: ‘What has most impressed Negroes about Russian society is the absence of institutionalized racism. There may be racist individuals; but if detected these persons are subject to crushing public opprobrium.’39 By contrast, the assumption that racism may have permeated communist Europe on a societally subconscious level is one that seeps through some of the fictional and documentary accounts presented in this paper. Today, with the lack of an anti-racist doctrine from above and an anti-racist struggle from “below”, Eastern societies and their institutions (which are, after all, run by individuals) seem to be at a loss as regards the new wave of racism. No society has managed to ‘bil di new jerusalem yet’, as Linton Kwesi Johnson reminds his audience East and West in ‘Di Anfinished Revolueshan’ on his album Tings an Times, released in the year when Gary Younge was studying in the East,40 but since then race relations in many Eastern European spaces have been allowed to turn these spaces into scenarios that hold little appeal to writers and other cultural translators from the black West at a time when their engagement might be most direly needed.

36

37 38 39 40

Cf. Patrick Jackson, ‘Living with Race Hate in Russia’, BBC News: Moscow (24 February 2009) [accessed 16 December 2009]. Apart from foreign students, there is a small native black or mixed-race presence in some urban centres facing similar problems. Matusevich, pp.57-81 (p.76). Blakely, p.164. Ibid., p.166. Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Di Anfinished Revolueshan’, Tings an’ Times, read by L.K. Johnson (London: LKJ Records, 1991), track no.6.

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Works Cited Baldwin, Kate, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) Blakely, Allison, Russia and the Negro (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1986) Boyce-Davies, Carole, Left of Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) Caesar, Burt, ‘Interview: Linton Kwesi Johnson talks to Burt Caesar’, Critical Quarterly, 38.4 (June 1996), 64-77 Davidson, William, ‘From the French Revolution to Gate Gourmet’, Solidarity & Workers’ Liberty, 3.141 (October 2008), 15 Du Bois, W.E.B., ‘Paul Robeson’, in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. by Eric Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.282-285 Evaristo, Bernadine, Soul Tourists (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005) Gurnah, Abdulrazak, By the Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2001) Hammond Perry, Kennetta, ‘Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. By Carole Boyce Davies’, Twentieth Century British History, 20.2 (2009), 277-279 Hughes, Langston. I Wonder as I Wander. The Collected Works, vol.14, ed. by Joseph McLaren (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003) Jackson, Patrick. ‘Living with Race Hate in Russia’, BBC News: Moscow (24 February 2009) [accessed 16 December 2009] James, C.L.R., ‘Notes on the Life of George Padmore’, in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp.288-295 —, ‘Stalin and Socialism’, in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp.112-124 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, ‘Di Anfinished Revolueshan’, Tings an’ Times, read by L.K. Johnson (London: LKJ Records, 1991), track no.6 —, ‘Wat about di Working Claas’, Making History, read by L.K. Johnson (London: Island Records, 1983), track no.2 Keys, Barbara, ‘An African-American Worker in Stalin’s Soviet Union: Race and the Soviet Experiment in International Perspective’, The Historian, 71.1 (2009), 31-54 Lazard, Dorothy, ‘Reading Caryl Phillips’ The European Tribe as a Comingof-Age Narrative’, B.Ma: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, 9.1 (Fall 2003), 179-190 Lounsberry, Anne, ‘“Bound by Blood to the Race”: Pushkin in African American Context’, in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. by Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and others

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(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp.248-278 Matusevich, Maxim, ‘An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans, and the Soviet Everyday’, Race & Class, 49.4 (2008), 57-81 McKay, Claude, ‘Soviet Russia and the Negro’, Crisis (December 1923), 6165 —, Banjo (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957) Phillips, Caryl, The European Tribe (London: Faber, 1987) Phillips, Mike, A Shadow of Myself (London: HarperCollins, 2001) —, London Crossings (London: Continuum, 2001) Pirker, Eva Ulrike, ‘Keine weiße Geschichte: Mike Phillips’ Thriller über ein geteiltes and vereintes Europa A Shadow of Myself’, in Geschichte im Krimi: Beiträge aus den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. by Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek (Köln: Böhlau, 2009), pp.241-254 Robeson, Paul, ‘To you beloved comrade’, in Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974, ed. by Philip S. Foner (New York: Brunner and Mazel, 1978), pp.347-349 von Rosenberg, Ingrid and Gerd Stratmann, ‘New Thrills: John le Carré and Mike Phillips Discover the Wild East of Post-Cold War Europe’, in Literary Views of Post-Wall Europe, ed. by Christoph Houswitschka and others (Trier: WVT, 2005), pp.65-82 Sternberg, Claudia, ‘Mike Phillips on Migration, Inventing Europe, and his Novel A Shadow of Myself: An Interview’, ZAA, 49 (2001), 385-3S93 Toynbee, Arnold J., Survey of International Affairs 1931 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932) Tsvetaeva, Marina, ‘My Pushkin’, in A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, ed. and trans. by J. Marin King (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), pp.319-362

Cinzia Mozzato

Looking Eastwards: Borders and Border-Crossing in the Work of Ken Smith Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate, that is the history of conquerers. The people of Central Europe are not conquerers. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history, they are its victims and outsiders.1

My essay investigates Ken Smith’s remapping of Central and Eastern European countries between the late eighties and the early noughts, when the turmoil of the 1989 “revolution” and its aftermath affected the mood and broadened the geo-political scope of his collections The Heart, the Border (1990), Wild Root (1998) and Shed (2002). This reading focuses on the antihistoricist and “disenchanted” mood which pervades Smith’s depiction of the transition to the post-1989 world. Smith’s life-long commitment to the culturally and politically subversive historical consciousness typical of border regions informs his representation of Central and Eastern Europe from both a thematic and stylistic point of view. The potentially anomic tendencies at work in former Yugoslavia at the height of the civil war, and the multi-layered memory of peoples who witnessed the disastrous outcome and interchange of right- and left-wing totalitarian regimes across Slovakia or the Trans-Carpathian areas, variously converge in Smith’s work. Smith firmly rejects the representation of the former East as totally “other” and its obvious ideological underpinnings. More significantly, he rejects those narratives of Western “progress” which permeate latent notions of the East-West cleavage by foregrounding episodes and memories that cannot be truly separated by the (former) Western side of the Wall. At the core of his work lies a questioning re-vision of twentieth-century history, where the experience of the “defeated” is rescued from marginality and acquires a central relevance to the understanding of post-Wall Europe as a whole.

1. Introduction Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, widespread patterns of European self-recognition as well as current geopolitical configurations testify to the resistance of dychotomic representations of Western and Eastern Europe. Though entailing a partial renegotiation of “Eastern” alterity, the erosion of the cold-war framework might hardly be described as radical: Former constructions of Central-Eastern Europe and Russia as inchoate, backward territories dominated by communist regimes have leaked into new forms of repre1

Milan Kundera, ‘A Kidnapped West, or Culture Bows Out’, Granta, 11 (1984), 95-118 (p.111).

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sentation, which often betray the overlap between contemporary images (controversial post-1989 reconstruction, impact of wars in former Yugoslavia and on the new Russian borders, resistance of pre-1989 political élites in the age of economic Westernisation) and entrenched visions of the Eastern regions as pre-modern societies. The convergence of post-Wall studies,2 memory studies and a burgeoning strain of migrant writing raises, however, a host of compelling questions as to the assumed “essence” of Eastern alterity. These questions might fruitfully undermine any miscognition inherent in the legacy of the cold-war years, when a highly misleading Russo-centric imagination of the East ensured bipolar worldviews. In particular, the well-assessed status of Central-Eastern Europe, a region formerly included in the Eastern bloc but historically close to Western Europe, has proved instrumental to the explosion of Manichean worldviews which still threaten to surface in the West. This is especially true of Britain, whose diminished role as a world power and whose peculiar, insular elaboration of the East-West confrontation paved the way for stimulating, non-aligned worldviews long before the Wall came tumbling down. It is actually on the British Isles that, from the late 1970s onwards, a whole strain of historians, intellectuals and writers have responded extensively to the Eastern European intelligentsia who strategically posited the buffer region between Western Europe and Russia as a crucial area for the political self-comprehension of Europe as a whole. Voices as various as Milan Kundera, Czesáaw Miáosz, or Miroslav Holub, in fact, found their way even into the heated discourse about “West and East” supported by the British far-right government in the mid-1980s. They actually helped British intellectuals turn their gaze eastwards, to those regions which, during the high cold-war age, had somehow been wiped off the geo-political maps, and whose re-emergence was to become a landmark of the post-Wall age. Milan Kundera’s seminal essay on Central and Eastern Europe as a ‘kidnapped’ West3 and Czesáaw Miáosz’s revision of post-1945 “reconstruction” provided insights into the post-modern reconfiguration of history which British intellectuals have endorsed ever since: Miáosz’s objection to the ‘fascination of historicity’4 – of the teleological, progressive framework which but2

3 4

The term ‘post-Wall’ – as opposed to ‘post-communist’ or other variants – fits the reciprocal and relational dynamics of identification covered by current studies on the East-West confrontation, and implies a broader range of political-cultural discourses than any definition giving prominence to the communist legacy in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia. For an in-depth analysis of the term ‘post-Wall’, cf. Literary Views on Post-Wall Europe, ed. by Christoph Houswitschka and Edith Hallberg (Trier: WVT, 2005), pp.51-63. Kundera, p.113. Ewa Czarneka and Aleksander Fiut, Conversations with Czesáaw Miáosz (Jovanovich: Harcourt Brace, 1987), p.147.

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tressed both the Nazi-Fascist and the communist experiments – has proved crucial to the development of de-polarised post-1989 perspectives on Europe. Miáosz’s claim is palpable in the writings of “dissident” journalists such as Timothy Garton Ash and of historians such as Norman Davies or Tony Judt;5 it also keys into the work of writers, such as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who have tried to shake Britain free from ‘its insular, off-centre European position’,6 thus supporting a more thorough European self-comprehension which might include the maze of “Eastern” narratives. In Britain, the transition to the post-Wall scenario has consequently proved extremely destabilizing for the upholders of old and new representations of Eastern Europe as “absolute other”. Not only did a new vision of things European, purged of any teleological tale about Western progress having the upper hand over “Eastern backwardness”, gain momentum in the writings of the oppositional British intelligentsia around 1989, but a few writers actually set out to explore what was once called “the other Europe”. Amongst them, Ken Smith was the poet who most contributed to the development of a post-Wall discourse, both by shedding light on the entangled question of Central-Eastern Europe and by regarding it as, in fact, inseparable from the, as W.G. Sebald put it, ‘episodes of congestion’7 that affected Western historical consciousness and memory. In the following essay, I will thus try to chart Ken Smith’s poetic remapping of Central and Eastern European countries, particularly former Yugoslavia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Transcarpathian areas, from the late 1980s to his sudden death in 2002. The first part investigates the relevance of Ken Smith’s political work to the antagonistic, left-wing engagement which flourished during Thatcherism, when Smith’s interest in the ‘other side of Europe’ was first aroused. In the second part, I will discuss Smith’s involvement in Central-Eastern Europe as it surfaces in his collections The Heart, the Border (1990) and Wild Root (1998), both of which betray his urge for an unbiased historical assessment of recent European history. 5

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Timothy Garton Ash has crucially contributed to the development of post-Wall discourse since the late 1980s and 1990s, when he published his first, seminal essays on Germany and on the Central-Eastern European countries in In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993) and History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the Nineties (New York: Random House, 1999); Norman Davies has implicitly recognised the emergent role played by Central-Eastern European countries through his historiographical research; finally, Tony Judt has recently provided a stimulating account of twentieth-century history in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005). Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber, 1988), p.51. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (New York: Random House, 2001), p.101.

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2. The Subversion of Borders Born in Rudston, West Riding (Yorkshire) in 1938, Smith belongs to that generation of writers who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, and which includes personalities such as Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney.8 As happens with his fellow poets, Smith’s worldview is informed by the memory of mid-century events and, more specifically, of the Orwellian reconfiguration of power-relations which took place after 1945; it is therefore quite unencumbered by the extremism inherent in the cold-war age, which adds to this generation’s propensity for cultural affiliations with both Western and Eastern literature.9 Again, like Harrison’s, Smith’s selfrecognition as a “Northerner” accounts for an instinctive claim for deinsularisation, a questioning political vision shaped by his two-fold experience of borders and of non-dominant social classes. As Francis Doerr argues, ‘Smith’s territory is the border: he was himself a product of border regions – a native of Yorkshire and a member of the working class’.10 Indeed, Smith retrieved the legacy of those Northern regions of England which have been culturally and linguistically dominated by the Southern and Eastern regions. He was also deeply aware that this tension became harsher and harsher as the industrial age drew to its close and the transition towards the post-industrial age provoked the dissolution of working-class communities, silenced by the language of history and of market-imposed rules. Born into a working-class family, Smith grew extremely sensitive to the silence imposed on marginal cultures and marginal classes, and part of his first poetic output – since at least the Eli Poems (1976) – is informed by genuine rage at this situation. At the same time, Smith’s rage at inequality resulted in an attempt to salvage those margins from silence: What his early work conveys is, then, a recuperation of indi8

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An insightful outlook on Ken Smith’s work in the context of late twentieth-century British poetry is provided by David Chrystal and Tim Cunning in ‘“Tough Shit Plato”: The Ken Smith Interviews’, in You Again: Last Poems and Words, Ken Smith (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004), pp.146-156. Complementary to Heaney’s theoretical essays on the “European” dimension of present historical consciousness, Harrison’s poetry and verse drama has been deploying a whole array of characters and themes which radically subvert entrenched cold-war scenarios: from the cold-war metaphors in the Oresteia (1981), where autocratic power is ambiguously connoted as “Eastern” despotism and “Western” Nazi-Fascism, to the long poem The Mother of the Muses (1987; published 1991) which addresses the retaliatory destruction of Dresden accomplished by the Allies in 1945, to the film/poem Prometheus (1998), where the decline of communist Eastern Europe is impressively juxtaposed to the decline of Northern English communities in the post-industrial age. Francis Doerr, ‘Likely Through the Stones: Running in the Border Lands with Ken Smith’, Stand, 6.1 (2005), 30-34 (p.33).

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vidual stories otherwise excluded by the grand narrative of cultural and economic progress.11 In Smith, the trope of border-crossing gradually became the focus of a structured and sceptical historical vision, which he condenses in a series of essays included in the posthumous volume You Again: Last Poems and Words (2004). Significantly, one of Smith’s essays revolves on the wanderer, a figure drawn from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Smith uses it to highlight the potentially subversive historical consciousness that belongs to borders, nations, or states which are oppressed by dominant regimes, and are thus excluded from the flow of history. There, Smith infers, any notion of moral, historical and cultural identity becomes necessarily fragile: In all ages and at all times in so far as I can tell in most places there’s the wanderer ... he is an exile in one sense or another, he is a critic [...] he knows, as those who have never been outside their cultural space do not, that there are no absolute standards. He knows that time and place and context change the rules [...] and that there are no circumstances when any rule may not merely be violated, but dropped.12

It is not only the fragility, then, but the fluidity inherent in border-crossing and border cultures that Smith regards as a challenge to received, mediated, and imposed patterns of cultural and political reading, and which his poetry turns into a form of resistance. In the 1980s, Smith actually kept a steady focus on the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of English and Western society, which he considered as besieged by the new Right’s propaganda and its attempts to cloak a radical, wide socio-political disaggregation with comfortable dichotomies. The dissolution of the working class, the oblique emergence of a multi-layered underclass, and the imperatives of neo-liberal capitalism are Smith’s focus in his collection Fox Running (1982) and later on in Terra (1986). Wormwood (1987), inspired by his experience of jails and jail-life as a writer in residence, set the tone for what was soon to follow. Written after spending two years at Wormwood Scrubs Prison (London), Wormwood sheds light on the neutralisation of moral consciousness operated by the repression of, and social discourse on, criminality in a Western, liberal country: ‘Can say I was responsible, / can’t say I killed her’, 13 says the uxoricide in one of the poems, a man estranged from his own life and actions and unable to re-tell his ex11

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Starting from the concept of ‘salvaging’, Stan Smith offers a Benjaminian reading of Ken Smith’s work in ‘Salvaged from the Ruins’, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, ed. by Gary Day and Brian Docherty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp.63-86 (p.72). Ken Smith, ‘Some Notes on the Uncertainty Principle: The Wanderer Yacob’, in Smith, You Again, pp.75-78 (p.78), my emphasis. Ken Smith, ‘For the boys on the wing’, in Wormwood (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987), p.124.

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perience. The jailed man’s descent into alienation and into the loss of his own story, encouraged rather than prevented by the language he is legally allowed to speak, vehicles reflections about freedom which Smith would develop in the following collections. In a short introductory essay to The Heart, the Border, also included in You Again, Smith sums up his experience at Wormwood Scrubs by highlighting its impact on his social views and indicating how it triggered his interest in visiting what had long stood for the opposite of the liberal-democratic West, that is to say the world behind the Curtain on the edge of revolution: After Wormwood, I decided to get away from [England] and travelled, sometimes in Eastern Europe, where the borders were beginning to open. And as I crossed them I began to think about borders, the frontiers of political states, the magic lines where the writ of one régime runs out and another begins, where definitions of right and wrong can interchange.14

Smith observed a relativity of ethics and worldviews both at geographical borders and in the space of the jail, and argues that much the same could be detected in areas where all struggles for democracy and independence had been crushed by the advent of radically different regimes. In those areas, survival, self-recognition and memory had long depended on the ability to resist and adapt to conflicting ‘writs’, and reconquered freedom was then a question of embracing this history, of naming it on both the individual and the collective levels.

3. ‘A long, long war we all lost’: The Heart, The Border Eastern Germany was Smith’s first step into the “other Europe”, and by far the most emblematic experience of colliding “writs”. In 1989, Smith was in Berlin to document the everyday life of Easterners and Westerners for a sort of reportage à la Timothy Garton Ash. While travelling, Smith found himself in the midst of events which eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reportage soon turned into a series of real-life chronicles, which were published by Penguin the following year, as Berlin: Coming in from the Cold (1990). The giddy events and the uncertainties concerning how the reunification of Germany and the connection between two socio-political systems (two histories) should be accomplished thus form the backdrop of Smith’s documentary work. This is permeated by his extreme sensitivity to the claims for liberation, and freedom, of East Germans as well as of peoples in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, his assessment of what would soon become the Westernisation of the East sounds disparaging and far-sighted:

14

Ken Smith, ‘[Introduction to The Heart, the Border]’, You Again, pp.88-89 (pp.88f).

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[T]he opening of the Wall [was] a watershed, a moment before which and after which human time can be measured [...] trade, custom, culture, ancient trackways of connection re-emerge across the borders, populations are on the move West: East Germans to West Germany, Poles to both Germanies, Russians to Poland, Romanians to wherever they can get to. A great slice of history is over. Even so, in the East it’s still cold, windier, greyer just as ever [...]. The old cold is replaced by the new cold of the social market. The border’s open, but it’s still grim here. The fact is [...] what they were afraid of was their own world, but they were taught to be afraid of ours. And they were right about that.15

While writing his final considerations in Berlin, Smith was already working on a poetry book which consistently turned his observations into verse: The Heart, The Border. A peculiar intertwining of Smith’s concern with the West and with the East he was starting to know permeates the collection, which might be read as complementary to his prose writing. In the “Western” section of The Heart, the Border, Smith resumes and develops his views on Western economic-political dynamics by concentrating on the depression brought about by neo-liberalism. He even voices an elegiac ‘tribute’ to Britain in ‘The London Poems’: ‘These are the Silvertown Blues, / Fight the Rich ghosting out / in concrete, by the flyover. / No one ever gets straight here. The ego’s self tale is miserable, nothing much happens but murder. / Yet that these wastes be repeopled / and the rich inherit, everyone’s / moving downriver.’16 Smith’s preoccupation with the demise of responsibility in Western civil society implies his recognition that even individual lives can be sacrificed in the name of progress, and that no real progress might ever account for the loss: ‘Someone must number them, name each one / by the fingerprints, the rings, by the teeth, / someone must stare at the remnants of the dead’,17 says one of the speakers while witnessing the human and ecological disasters provoked by Western economies. Significantly enough, Smith’s poems in the “Eastern” section do not foreground the “communist” identity of Eastern countries, although occasional references to post-communist poverty and despoliation – such as a fleeting depiction of Nova Huta, the Polish utopistic town built from scratch under communism18– are scattered throughout the collection. At the core of The Heart, the Border are rather poems which convey, to borrow from Kundera, a deep distrust of history which seems prompted by Smith’s consideration of both worlds, West and East, as equally corrupt. In the poem ‘After Brecht’, 15 16

17 18

Ken Smith, Berlin: Coming in from the Cold (London: Penguin, 1990), p.306. Ken Smith, ‘The London Poems’, in The Heart, the Border (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990), p.21. Ken Smith, ‘After the grain’, in The Heart, the Border, p.20. Cf. The Heart, the Border, p.51.

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the “Eastern” sense of exhaustion mixed with expectation may well surface in the words of a German man in 1989: In the end it is Joachim with his maps, Thora in her garden: roses, lilies, the scents she desires so she grows them. It is the sunlight, high through the tall evergreens, the birdsong, the afternoon wind in this place, and our voices. Telling our tales. We grew upon the other side of a long long war we all lost. 19

But it soon extends to a condition shared by either side of the former Curtain, as less localised poems or prose poems reveal. Interestingly, Smith revives the image of the Wall, making it no longer a symbol of stagnation and oppression “over there”, in former communist East, but a larger symbol of irresponsible progress worldwide. For the anonymous labourer of Smith’s “parable” on post-1989 reality, for example, a wall represents the future built by similar, faceless and disposable workers: [M]y thoughts could be either of theirs. When one of them dies he is replaced, when I die the line will move up in my place, and the stones go on climbing the mountain, assembling into the wall. Only the wall grows, but we will never see it [...]. When at dark we sleep, exhausted, our sleep is the hard sleep of the same heavy stones moving up in the mountains[.]20

What Smith conveys is, ultimately, not just a postmodern disenchantment with progressive narratives but a wilful deflation of the momentous revolution by which former “Eastern” Europe turned westwards, leaving behind a collapsed socio-political system to embrace democracy and a different kind of progress. Informed by a mirror-gazing and meta-historical perspective, The Heart, the Border preludes thus to the empathetic gaze Smith was to turn eastwards in the following decade, when he travelled across regions of Central and Eastern Europe and gradually grew more and more aware of the specific situations which affected these regions in the transition towards the post-Wall age.

4. The Threat of Apocryphal History: Wild Root While Smith’s biting socio-economic critique is considerably blunted by his journey across post-communist countries, his literary output in the 1990s is infused by his concern with the equally problematic issue of Eastern cultural 19 20

Ken Smith, ‘After Brecht’, in The Heart, the Border, p.62. Ken Smith, ‘Chinese Whisper’, in The Heart, the Border, p.61.

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and historical self-recognition. Although touching on well-known “centres” of Central-Eastern Europe, such as Krakow or Sarajevo, Smith chose to travel across areas which undoubtedly correspond to problematic borderlands: not only areas such as former Yugoslavia, where the crumbling of communism resulted in the dramatic disaggregation of hitherto mixed ethnic and religious communities, but also regions which Garton Ash defines as ‘the new borders’ of the former Russian orbit, like southern Slovakia or the Transcarpathian region, where the struggle for freedom entailed a most difficult recuperation of recent history.21 Conflicting histories and divided memories of these vulnerable lands consequently fuel Smith’s poetic remapping, and their interleaving might be said to directly affect his writing. In his depiction of the “East”, losses of yesteryear intertwine with present losses, borderlands are spaces where the interlayering of histories may result in their reciprocal silencing, and individuals fight to defuse the danger of history ‘end[ing] with a whimper’.22 Therefore, the poems devoted to Eastern Europe form a highly composite journal, which includes a wide range of voices, registers and genres; Smith actually displays a variety of modalities which merge narrative with photographic reportage, the ‘chronicle’ with the journal and the dramatic monologue.23 Considering Smith’s formally and thematically wide-ranging treatment of European history in the 1990s and early 2000s, I will concentrate on two recurring leitmotifs: in the first place, Smith’s focus on war and the memory of war experienced by peoples silenced by political turmoil; in the second place, his concern with existences and lives led on those borders which somehow escape the dynamics of recent historical anamnesis in the “West”. The two questions are, of course, intimately connected. If, as Tony Judt suggests, ‘the first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory’ whereas ‘since 1989 reunited Europe has been constructed [...] upon a compensatory surplus of memory’,24 this process has proved extremely problematic in the former “East”. A need for memory and for forgetting has been voiced by peoples living in areas untouched by post-1989 conflict and anomy, such as the ‘Visegrad region’ (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary); yet in border areas and in war zones, the process of memory and the 21 22

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Cf. Garton Ash, History of the Present, pp.133-157. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, in Collected Poems 1909-1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), pp.21-25 (p.25). On Smith’s use of genres and intergeneric forms and on the possible influence of English poets (Jon Silkin), American poets (Robert Bly and James Wright) and Spanish poets (Antonio Machado and Garcia Lorca) on his work, cf. Jeffrey Wainwright, ‘“With a Dewdrop on his Nose”: A Piece on the Poetry of Ken Smith’, Stand, 6.1 (2005), 18-26 and Colin Raw, ‘Best, Ken: Letters and an Interview’, in Smith, You Again, pp.96-121 (pp.101-110). Judt, p.829.

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related urge for re-cognition have been alternatively exasperated, thwarted and distorted. It is therefore by deliberately touching on unresolved nuclei of Central-European self-identification that Smith brings to the foreground a geography largely uncovered by common representations of the post-1989 East. Emblematic of Smith’s first focus, war and the memory of war, is his concern with former Yugoslavia, a region which was reasonably included within “European civilisation” until civil war broke out, leading the West to put it aside because of its assumed pre-modern reality, or of its “atavisms”. Without indulging in either post-Yugoslavian picturesque depiction or in a vicarious account of war, Smith tries to register voices rising out of silence, such as the survivor from Vojvodina in ‘Misi’s Song’, a poem published in his 1998 collection Wild Root. In this poem, written while Smith crossed the border between Serbia and Hungary, the atmosphere edged with menace is made pungent by the bitter, solitary and non-identified voice of a man from Novi Sad: I will sing one song from Novi Sad. But this is not a song. Two words: difficult, different. I can’t remember: la la la. Oh my love. My beloved landscape and the landscape of my beloved. I was born to it. I should die there. Each night the phone rang. Sometimes silence, breathing. Or a man cursing in Serbian: why don’t you go? You have a wife, children, we can kill them. You we will impale. Land I was born to. This is not a song.25

Elliptic though it is, Smith’s perspective betrays his in-depth acquaintance with the collateral damage triggered by the wars of 1991-1998 in Vojvodina, a former autonomous province of Yugoslavia which witnessed massacres and 25

Ken Smith, ‘Misi’s Song’, in Wild Root (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p.266.

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forced migrations, mostly of Hungarian-speaking minorities. Smith’s attitude towards the Balkan “tinderbox” betrays no complacent understanding, thus retrieving the groundtone and mood of his ‘Serbian Letters’, an earlier sequence written shortly before the explosion of conflict and reprinted in his retrospective collection Shed: On the seventh day of singing, on the sixth day of laughing, a man fell from the fifth floor dead at my feet in a sheet but his last breath blew through me with all the bad air of the city. This was his last day. He jumped down the air with our voices last to next door in his skull, now I bear him a little way on. The rest was parts put together, drinking toasts, declaring stop hunger stop war stop bomb stop to the actors without shadows, the smooth-suited, the well-fed. Miodrag or Pedrag, he jumped down the world’s well. Share him.26

A totally different perspective is embraced as Smith shifts to eastern regions which have been historically characterised by migrations, bordershifting and cultural stratification. The dramatic edge to Smith’s depiction of former Yugoslavia is here blunted by an ironic stance, as if the poet exposed the mutual relativisation of narratives by playing on the interleaving of stories. At times, this reminds readers of Claudio Magris’s well-acclaimed depiction of the Danubian basin soon before 1989 in Danube: A Sentimental Journey. Magris describes these borderlands as a mosaic of peoples, a stratification and a superimposition of races, powers, jurisdictions [...], a land which has seen the encounter and the clash of the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg authorities and the stubborn will to independence, and later the dominion, of the Hungarians, and the rebirth of the Serbs and the Rumanians.27

In a section of Wild Root inspired by his experience of the Transcarpathian Rus or Ruthenia, Smith similarly allows his speaker to reach back to myth, to communal memories, but also to official and unofficial history, in order to bring to the surface half-submerged episodes. This is the history of “nonconquerers”, of mining and farming villages ravaged by wars and invasions, a “raw material” which Smith – intermittently taking on and dropping the 26 27

Ken Smith, ‘Serbian Letters’, in Shed: Poems 1980-2002 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2002), p.100. Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey (London: The Harvill Press, 1989), p.294.

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first-person-plural pronoun – nonetheless distances by means of witty patterning, of rhythm and unsparing sarcasm. Irony is, however, directed more at our need to believe in one linear version of history than at peoples’ and individuals’ real experience of its complexity, as the imbrication of temporal and spatial levels in the poem ‘In any case’ reveals: The lives we live, always taking us over some border, we spend our years trying to get there, in the tracks of old migrations through the passes, west and out from the land between the rivers down the broken roads of the armies. Fleeting: the fast river full of rain, plank bridges hung over the flood, wires and watchtowers over in Romania, halfway a steep impossible hill a man in a blue shirt climbing to the sky, the villages shifting into other tongues. To the Tatar Pass of savage raiders with no place to go back to. To the Verecke Pass, where the seven tribes of the people of the ten arrows came, long ago though in any case the date is debatable [...]. What of the 18.000 driven through here in August 1941 to be shot on the other side just for being Jews? What of the thousands dead at Szolyva of cold and hunger, typhus and TB and dysentery for being Hungarian? For half a century no one could speak of them, put chisel to stone. Here it says on the boulder over the mass graves Here one day will be a monument. The materials in any case have been stolen.28

While effectively drawing from large historical canvasses, Smith easily shifts to less predictable, more individualised narratives where the speaker lends his voice to those who might hardly be called protagonists of history, mostly labourers and farmers – a section of society which even after 1989 could not easily claim the right to move forward, which did not migrate or move and which found itself trapped between new borders and multiple layers of memory. This insight into local and undoubtedly under-represented geographical 28

Ken Smith, ‘In any case’, in Wild Root, pp.280-2.

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and social areas of Eastern Europe is probably best epitomised by the last poem of Wild Root, and the last poem presented in my short introduction to Smith’s travel journal. It is called ‘Malenki Robot’ and as Smith said, it was inspired by his travelling across the border between Slovakia and Hungary in the mid-1990s, where the relative (especially in the case of Hungary) reemerging of the memory of Nazism was coupled with silence about the horrors of communism. As Smith explains in the recording of the poem, ‘Malenki Robot’ is ‘“a little light work”. The Red Army rounded up about a tenth of the men and put them in camps [...]. Many of them never came back.’29 ‘Malenki Robot’ addresses in fact the forced labour of ethnic minorities in the postwar Soviet Union, an issue which was obscured during the Cold War and never fully brought to light again: It was the priest told me to go, three days he said, a little light work, malenki robot, two years building roofs, and that because I had a trade. I survived wearing the clothes of those who died, after a while I survived because I had survived, and then came home and here the border.’ The wire runs through the heart, dammit, therefore we will drink cheap Russian vodka in János’ kitchen, and later take a walk down to the border and look back into the other world, the village in the mirror that is the other half of us, here, where the street stops at the wire and goes on again on the other side, and maybe the Gypsies will come to serenade us.30

In ‘Malenki Robot’, as well as throughout his poetic journey across Central and Eastern Europe, Ken Smith manages to relate his life-long experience of borders to the highly fractured, fissured and sedimentary memory in Central and Eastern Europe. His topical insistence on borders is highly indicative of the historical “congestion” which has marked the process of anamnesis on the former other side of Europe. Images of entrapment and of suffocation are set against a historical background which alerts the writer to the pitfalls of twentieth-century ‘anthropometry’, as Zbigniew Herbert calls the inhumane experimentation carried out under totalitarian regimes.31 The “wire” which runs 29 30 31

Ken Smith, ‘Introduction’ to The Poetry Quartets 3, Tape 2, Side B, Selection 7. Ken Smith, ‘Malenki Robot’, in Wild Root, p.63. Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Damastes (Also Known as Procrustes) Speaks’, in Selected Poems, trans. by Czesáaw Miáosz and Peter Dale Scott, repr. (New York: Ecco Press, 1986), pp.158-159 (pp.158f.)

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through these poems is the fear, which Smith captured so well, of history falling into amnesia, of a duty to memory turning into the nightmare of apocrypha and anomy. Smith’s poems have been said to tune in to a peculiar ‘Eastern European feeling’.32 While this partially owes to the poet’s choice of historical scenarios, his concern with Central and Eastern Europe and the challenging, palimpsestic structure of Eastern borders insightfully responds to the Eastern intellectuals’ claim for a fruitful, non-teleological reading of history and of its multiple threads. The mirror-gazing sketches included in Berlin and The Heart, the Border as well as the chronicles and monologues in Wild Root originate in a stimulating dialectic between geographical margins and sociopolitical centres of current European self-recognition. Not only does Smith’s poetry look well beyond the otherwise enduring West-East cleavage, fulfilling one of the promises of 1989. By returning European history to the “defeated”, it ultimately reminds us that there are no circumstances when any kind of memory ‘may not merely be violated, but dropped’33 and that the persistence of divisions might still depend on this kind of mis-memory.

Works Cited Brannigan, John, Literature, Culture and Society in Post-War England (Llambed: Mellen, 2002) Chrystal, David and Tim Cunning, ‘“Tough Shit Plato”: The Ken Smith Interviews’, in Smith, You Again, pp.146-156 Czarneka, Ewa and Aleksander Fiut, Conversations with Czesáaw Miáosz (Jovanovich: Harcourt Brace, 1987) Doerr, Francis, ‘Likely Through the Stones: Running in the Border Lands with Ken Smith’, Stand, 6.1 (2005), 30-34 Eliot, T.S., ‘The Hollow Men’, in Collected Poems 1909-1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), pp.21-25 Garton Ash, Timothy, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the Nineties (New York: Random House, 1999) —, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993) Heaney, Seamus, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber, 1988) Herbert, Zbigniew, ‘Damastes (Also Know as Procrustes) Speaks’, in Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by (London: Penguin, 1986), pp.158-159 32 33

Anna Wigley, ‘Suleyman in Europe’, Poetry Review, 91.2 (2001), pp.35-36 (p.36). Ken Smith, pp.75-78 (p.78).

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Houswitschka, Christoph and Edith Hallberg, eds., Literary Views on PostWall Europe (Trier: WVT, 2005) Judt, Tony, Post-War: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005) Kundera, Milan, ‘A Kidnapped West, or Culture Bows Out’, Granta, 11 (1984), 95-118 Magris, Claudio, Danube: A Sentimental Journey (London: The Harvill Press, 1989) Raw, Colin, ‘Best, Ken: Letters and an Interview’, in Smith, You Again, pp.96-121 Sebald, W.G., Austerlitz (New York: Random House, 2001) Smith, Ken, ‘Some Notes on the Uncertainty Principle: The Wanderer Yacob’, in You Again, pp.75-78 —, ‘[Introduction to The Heart, the Border]’, in You Again, pp.88-89 —, You Again: Last Poems and Words (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004) —, Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2002) —, Wild Root (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998) —, ‘Introduction’ to The Poetry Quartets (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), Tape 2, Side B —, Berlin: Coming in from the Cold (London: Penguin, 1990) —, The Heart, the Border (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990) —, Wormwood (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987) Smith, Stan, ‘Salvaged from the Ruins’, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, ed. by Gary Day and Brian Docherty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp.63-86 Wainwright, Jeffrey, ‘“With a Dewdrop on his Nose”: A Piece on the Poetry of Ken Smith’, Stand, 6.1 (2005), 18-26 Wigley, Anna, ‘Suleyman in Europe’, Poetry Review, 91.2 (2001), 35-36

A PLAY IN ONE ACT

Eva Ulrike Pirker

You Think You Know Me But You Don’t – An Introduction Mike Phillips wrote the one-man, one-act play You Think You Know Me But You Don’t for the Romanian actor Constantin Chiriac. Chiriac is also known as a director and cultural manager who has brought into being such institutions as the Sibiu International Theatre Festival and raised the profile of the ‘Radu Stanca’ National Theatre of Sibiu. He and Phillips collaborated on several projects, for instance Romanian Connections, a series of events designed for the Capital of Culture Festivities in Liverpool in 2008 and aimed at conveying an idea of the many facets of contemporary Romanian culture by featuring plays, films, music and art as well as talks and discussions. In the announcement leaflet, Phillips maintains that current Western discussions about the status of the A8 countries, as well as migration from these countries, are predominantly framed in a political and economic rhetoric. By contrast, ‘the cultures on both sides of the continent continue to be misunderstood and misrepresented, as if the closer the two parties approach, the more obscure and difficult their true natures become.’ 1 His own short play concerns itself with the example of Romanian-British, or more generally, Romanian-Western relations by focusing on the specific experience of Victor, migrant figure from post-communist Romania. However, it also asks universal questions about the conditions of migrant subjectivity: How does moving to a strange place affect the individual? What is a strange place and how do individuals position themselves in relation to it? Victor’s pondering on the reality of as well as the ‘fictions’ arising from borders and contact zones, aspects of belonging and of foreignness challenges facile antagonisms created through a recently fashionable rhetorics of ‘clashing cultures’. Matters of culture and their impact on ‘reality’ are complex formations, and, ‘realities’ themselves are flexible and adapt to those who behold them: Borders, as Victor muses, are not understood by animals: The birds fly through the blue skies Drifting like clouds With absolutely no thought For the ownership of airspace Like those impudent fishes Invading our waters whenever they like Not to mention the insects Spiders, flies, bugs of every kind They crawl past the checkpoints And customs officials – they have no respect[.] 1

Phillips’s text is contained in the programme flyer, cf. fig. 1.

164 You Think You Know Me But You Don’t had its premiere in 2005, during the International Theatre Festival in Sibiu and was later performed at several Romanian and British venues and in two languages. 2 Phillips’s interest in Eastern European spaces and identities first became tangible in his thriller A Shadow of Myself (2001). 3 With collaborations such as Romanian Connections, translation projects 4 and the play reprinted here, it has moved on to a level of mutual cultural exchange. This is reflected in the fact that the actor for whom the play was written adapts the text to new situations, thus making it “his” play in a literal sense. This process of appropriation is an important act of going beyond the contents of the script written by a Western European author not only for but also about an Eastern subject. The game of giving and receiving, of inventing/performing an “other” and of appropriating this other as one’s own creates a suggestive subtext to the main level of action.

Fig. 1: Romanian Connections season in Liverpool 2008 – brochure cover 5

2

3 4

5

The piece was translated into Romanian by Ramona Mitrica in 2005 and was performed under the title CredeĠi că stiĠi cine sunt, dar de fapt. Some aspects of the novel are discussed in the present volume by Eva Ulrike Pirker. In a collaboration with Ramona Mitrica, Phillips is engaged in translating and editing literary texts by Romanian writers and making them accessible to an Anglophone readership. Image courtesy of the Romanian Cultural Centre in London.

165 Mike Phillips

You Think You Know Me But You Don’t (MUSIC: Francis Poulenc – Improvisation for piano in D: Hommage à Edith Piaf) (LIGHTS GO UP – VICTOR IS ON AN EMPTY STAGE CARRYING A BIG SUITCASE LOOKING AROUND CURIOUSLY – HE STARES AT THE AUDIENCE AND PUTS DOWN THE SUITCASE – MUSIC FADES)

VICTOR: You think you know me but you don’t – I am not sure that I know myself – you can call me a migrant worker Or you can call me Victor – My name is Constantine but Victor is easier – It only has two syllables – This is the kind of compromise I made when I started moving between different countries and different languages – But you speak my language or I speak yours – That’s more important – I speak – four, five, six – I don’t know I forget – Bon Soir Mesdames et monsieurs Wilkommen – Good evening ladies and gentlemen – (MUSIC: Erik Satie – Gnossiene for piano No 4) (MUSIC STARTS AND OVER THE MUSIC 4 RECORDED VOICES SPEAK THE NEXT 6 LINES – ONE AT A TIME EACH ONE STARTING THE FIRST LINE AFTER THE PRECEDING SPEAKER) FOUR VOICES: Four boys from the North In a house in West London

© The Romanian Cultural Centre in London. The editors would like to thank the Romanian Cultural Centre for the permission to reprint the play in this volume.

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Mike Phillips

Everyday we go to work Before the sun rises And come back in the darkness Of night (MUSIC FADES) VICTOR: On Sunday we go to the park Where we find grass and trees And a lake full of sweet little ducks I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking that a man like me – speaks with no understanding of the grammar – no elegance, no lyrical fluency – ah what an expression – lyrical fluency – this does not apply to the language I hear – I love you baby – kommen ze hir fraulein – What vulgarity – This is not lyrical fluency – Lyrical fluency is the language of Shakespeare and Goethe and Voltaire But they are all dead – And I don’t need lyrical fluency – This was the problem with my education – Everything I learnt had to be correct – Like mathematics – one two three – two and two are four – that’s correct it’s the same for languages – subject verb object – correct? – No – not OK – – OK – what’s that? – Who can understand the construction of the syntax? – Cliché, unformulated, careless, stupid, untranslatable – But everyone knows what it means – OK? (POINTS TO HIS SUITCASE)

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Take a look at this – what do you call it? A suitcase – here’s a real mystery – When I left my mother – I say when I left my mother – Do you notice that? I left Iaúi, I left my father, my two brothers and three sisters I left my bicycle I left two beautiful girls and my five dogs Only my mother cried – in the suitcase she put a package – so beautifully tightly wrapped – several slices of pork which I ate in a station in Berlin – after a while I remembered something – I went to see my grandfather before I left – On the farm – And when we said goodbye he had just separated one of the pigs from the rest – This was the meat I was eating and I started thinking about that pig – which I had known for more than three years – when I said goodbye I didn’t know that I would see him again so soon – but I was glad to take him with me (PATS HIS STOMACH) Imagine this – four boys from the North, One short step removed from the peasant. We didn’t grow up in the embrace of a buffalo Or a sheep Not even the pretty sheep Ah – ah – ah – I have to tell you the truth I had a friend who kept a picture of a very nice sheep by his bed But this was innocent – I swear to you And after three months he replaced the picture with a big poster Of some girls with cheeky arses – I don’t know which was better (HE BLEATS LIKE A SHEEP TO THE TUNE OF ‘we are the cheeky girls’) Baa baa ba ba ba baa (HE SLAPS HIS BOTTOM CHEEKILY) But a sheep can’t do that – it doesn’t matter how pretty she is

Mike Phillips

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(MUSIC: Erik Satie – Ogives for piano – Nose Cones) (4 RECORDED VOICES SPEAK THE NEXT 3 LINES IN TURN) FOUR VOICES: Four boys from the North We lived together in a small house in the West of London Every day we went to work and came back

Fig. 2: You Think You Know Me But You Don’t – Constantin Chiriac and Mike Phillips in conversation (Freiburg 2009)

VICTOR: Let me show you something (HE KNEELS DOWN AND SNAPS OPEN THE LOCKS ON THE SUITCASE, THEN HE LOOKS UP) First you must understand the condition of a migrant (HE GETS UP AND MOVES TOWARDS THE AUDIENCE) One day in England they discovered a man on a beach somewhere He is dressed in a neat black suit, a white shirt and a tie

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So well dressed, except for the fact that he is wet, completely soaking wet, Dripping with water, his hair, his shoes If he is wearing underwear, which is a small detail the public are not told, But if he is wearing boxer shorts, they too are wet This man has no memory So complete is his loss that he cannot speak Officials interrogate him but they can get no information And they try every language at their command French, German, Polish, Romanian – nothing Italian, Portuguese, Spanish – nada Serbo Croat, Georgian, Russian – nyet This is a white man, indisputably European, So they skip the languages of Asia and Africa, but they try everything else, And eventually They decide that he is NOT faking it, And they send him to hospital where he sits in a room Crouched and fearful A doctor speaks to him And gives him a pencil and a piece of paper He begins to draw and what does he draw? (MUSIC: Debussy – Suite Bergamesque for piano – L.75 III – Clair de Lune) (THE MUSIC FADES IN SOFTLY GETTING LOUDER AND LOUDER AS HE SPEAKS) VICTOR: He draws pianos – pianos and such pianos Not only the representation of a piano But also the inner workings of the piano, the strings, The board inside, everything. So they take him to a piano and he sits down and begins to play He plays without stopping for four hours The most beautiful music in the world Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Debussy The man is transformed In his room he crouches, terrified like an animal The arms covering his head, wincing as if frightened to be touched, At the piano he is confident, unafraid, master of the beauty that his hands sprinkle like unending showers of flowering blossoms Filling the air with soft caresses and sweet scents

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Mike Phillips

After two hours the doctors and nurses surround him Their work forgotten One woman, a young radiographer, comes closer and closer transported by the beauty of the scene and the fascination of his darting fingers she too is beautiful, her breasts are heaving, her big blue eyes are fixed, wide open, she takes deep breaths her feet straying gradually inch by inch as if beyond her control and when she stands so close that she can go no further she reaches out and tenderly begins to stroke his shoulders Any other man – I know this – believe me Any other man would have turned or smiled or allowed his hands At least one hand to touch this treasure But the pianist pays her no attention Instead he continues – lost in his own dreams Hours later he stops abruptly (THE MUSIC STOPS ABRUPTLY) VICTOR: And he looks around and sees for the first time The crowd surrounding him their faces glowing with admiration, delight And he shrinks – smaller and smaller Then turns his back and covers his face with his beautiful hands (HE STOPS TURNS AWAY FROM THE AUDIENCE AND KNEELS BY THE SUITCASE HE LOOKS UP AGAIN) I made up that part about the beautiful young radiographer It was really a security guard, seventy years old Who wanted the pianist to stop So he could clear the crowd out of the room before he went home. (HE OPENS THE SUITCASE A LITTLE THEN CLOSES IT AGAIN STANDS UP AND FACES THE AUDIENCE) I forgot The officials put the story in the newspapers, radio and TV But no one knew the pianist Hundreds of people from all the world sent messages and tried to claim him

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But the truth was that no one knew him And he .... He had forgotten who he was – (TURNS AND BRISKLY KNEELS, OPENS THE SUITCASE, LOOKS OVER THE TOP OF THE LID AT THE AUDIENCE) Aúa! – (MUSIC: Erik Satie – Gnossiene for piano No 4) (MUSIC STARTS AND OVER THE MUSIC 4 RECORDED VOICES SPEAK THE NEXT 2 LINES – ONE AT A TIME EACH ONE STARTING THE FIRST LINE AFTER THE PRECEDING SPEAKER) FOUR VOICES: Four boys from the North in a house in West London Going to work and coming home every day In a city beyond your imagination (HE STANDS UP AND COMES FORWARD – MUSIC FADES) VICTOR: In the beginning I was not exactly – Innocent If a foreigner asked me who I was I knew the answer – Victor – Romanian But of course if a foreigner asked me this question I would have made no reply Unless it was absolutely necessary I have had this conversation too often Romania, Romania, the foreigner says I have heard of that country somewhere Yes, I tell this person We are the inheritors Of the oldest civilisation in Europe Romania, you’ve heard of the Roman Empire Our language is a refinement Of Latin wisdom and our rulers Carved their names in shining gold And our church breathed the sweet air of the spirit While our sculptors and poets and painters Nurtured in immortal mountains

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Mike Phillips

And sacred villages Kept alive the pure flame of art Despatching the fruits of our intellect To Paris and Rome and everywhere else That human beings vibrated With sympathy for love and beauty Listen to these names Tzara, and Brancuúi, and Eminescu And Georghiu Oh yes, the foreigner says I remember now Romania You are very cruel to children there. But I knew the answer To this question of who I was – Victor – Romanian This was a long time ago When I became a student My dream was to return Here – with this suitcase Full of the magic Which a man might clutch from the air In the world outside But I was not exactly – simple Or innocent of danger (MUSIC: Saint Saens – Carnaval des animaux – Le cygne) (THE MUSIC FADES IN SLOWLY – VICTOR SPEAKS OVER Le cygne) VICTOR: On Sunday we went to the park Where we found grass and trees And a lake full of sweet little ducks And little birds who have paused Halfway in their flight From the distant shores of Africa And the geese, The geese are taking a vacation From their homes in Canada And these Rom of the skies

You Think You Know Me But You Don’t

Surveying the spinning globe below them Focus on this tiny patch of water In the middle of the most polluted spot You can find on the earth Because believe me this is no Danube Delta But this is what they find Along the edges of these lakes In the centre of London There are flowers, lilies, daffodils And snowdrops Gently swaying and dancing In the soft breeze which ripples the surface of the water And among the flowers There are children, little toddlers Barely able to walk and old ladies And big soft girls from Zurich and Perpignan And Krakow pushing babies in perambulators And office workers dressed in smart suits And who knows what else? And all of these people are holding Little paper bags full of bread With which to feed the ducks Who advance out of the water Across the grass, some a little shy Awkward Others as bold as Cossacks With boots on their feet Reaching up to snatch the food out of the children’s hands With angry squawks Aúa – if you’re a duck this is a land of plenty And easy living. (THE MUSIC FADES AND ENDS) VICTOR: But the truth is that animals don’t understand Our man-made boundaries Their ignorance is complete and completely (PAUSE) – ultimate The birds fly through the blue skies Drifting like clouds

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Mike Phillips

With absolutely no thought For the ownership of airspace Like those impudent fishes Invading our waters whenever they like Not to mention the insects Spiders, flies, bugs of every kind They crawl past the checkpoints And customs officials – they have no respect Frogs – take the case of these INSOLENT batrachians Monsieur Le Crapaud – (HE SALUTES) If you ever have the necessity Of addressing a French frog in polite terms This is how you do it – (HE GIVES A DEEP COURTLY BOW) – Monsieur Le Crapaud – These frogs are extremely territorial Each species of frog has been hopping Over the very same patch of ground For the space of several millennia (MUSIC: Satie – Descriptions automatiques for piano No 1) (VICTOR SPEAKS OVER THE MUSIC) VICTOR: In that pool over there They are born (HE POINTS TO THE RIGHT OF THE STAGE) They hop out of it and across a patch of ground To that pool over there (HE WALKS BETWEEN THE POOLS TRACING THE PATH AS HE DOES SO HE MAKES SOUNDS LIKE FROG) Croak Riddip Croak Riddip Then they grow up they mate and they return To the pool of their birth (MUSIC: Satie – Descriptions automatiques for piano No 2) (No 1 ENDS AND No 2 BEGINS – CRASHING IN – AND VICTOR WAITS TILL IT ENDS BEFORE SPEAKING – LOOKING AT THE FLOOR AS IF FOLLOWING THE PROGRESS OF THE FROGS – THEN HE TURNS TO THE AUDIENCE)

You Think You Know Me But You Don’t

VICTOR: And if by some foolish mistake you build your house Right there in the middle of their migration They crawl right through the pipes They climb up out of your toilet They emerge from the taps They hop slowly across the floor of your house And out of the door Without even looking at you What could be more territorial than this But they never never never Ask to see your passport There was a man, an Italian Who arrived in London one day About five years ago He knew no one He spoke only two words of English He had nowhere to live He slept on the streets And he slept in hostels For the homeless Consider this – In many places in the world A mysterious stranger of this kind Would arouse curiosity Old ladies and men who had once been soldiers Or agents of state intelligence Would ask questions about who he was Dogs would sniff round his legs and at night They would bite him in the arse Hospitals would turn him away And the police – ah the police Your papers – your papers And if he had no money Let us not talk about that But in this city No one noticed Because the city is full of strangers Who are even more strange than this But this stranger lived in the way that he lived

175

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Mike Phillips

And after some time He became an entrepreneur He started his own business Collecting abandoned newspapers Or magazines which he stole From outside of shops And he folded these papers carefully Stroking them with his trembling hands To make them look smooth and almost new Because he had a method you understand And he did not want to cheat his customers – With the money he made He purchased heroin And made the journey to his own Version of heaven And no one noticed Because the city is full of strangers Who are even more strange than this And who cares? In this case one person cared His mother cared And the Italian police were also concerned Because this man was a Mafia gangster who had escaped In the moment before they came to arrest him So the police watched his mother And as they expected The gangster contacted his mother And – not content with knowing her gangster boy was alive She began to send him packages of food Pasta, salami, panettone – No chicken – The carbinieri followed the packages And one day as the gangster sat down To enjoy his Sicilian salami The British police burst into his little room Arrested him and sent him back to Italy In this case he was betrayed by love And by the stupidity of his mother (MUSIC: Francis Poulenc – Improvisation for piano in D: Hommage à Edith Piaf)

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(THE MUSIC FADES IN AND VICTOR SPEAKS OVER IT) VICTOR: My mother wept When I said goodbye So many years ago I’m not going to the moon I told her – but she said Yes you are Then I thought she didn’t know How easy it would be To travel through thousands of miles In a few hours Because if a foreigner had asked me Who I was I knew the answer But that was a long time ago My mother already knew That you can go and come and come and go But you can’t step into the same river Twice Life is improvisation Every today will be yesterday Tomorrow (MUSIC FADES OUT – HE KNEELS DOWN AND THROWS OPEN THE SUITCASE – HE TAKES OUT A CLOCK WHICH HE PUTS BESIDE HIM – THE TICKING OF A CLOCK FADES – SOFT GRADUALLY GROWING VERY LOUD – HE STANDS UP LISTENING TO THE SOUND OF THE CLOCK) FOUR VOICES: Four boys from the North In a house in West London Everyday we go to work Before the sun rises And come back in the darkness Of night

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Mike Phillips

VICTOR: Time passes like this Tick tock tick tock You know time is passing But it means nothing Until one day I am standing by the perfume counter Of the most expensive store in the city Dressed in a black suit A tie with a pattern of beautiful stripes And a white shirt whose perfection is – Dazzling Tick tock Time passes but do not let me deceive you I am not a customer in this most expensive store I work there My tools are Dior, Armani, Schiaparelli, Chanel, Dolce e Gabbana, Hermés, Jimmy Choo And my elegance is fabulous But during the time between Tick and tock I have been a cleaner – A porter, impeccable In my uniform of servility May I take your bag, sir, madame? And receptionist Your keys madame This is not to mention The other things I did I became a small part Of the army of labour Which makes those parts of Europe Rich and happy For some reason my friends expected Gratitude Would you be grateful? I asked them Such questions are obstacles in the mind

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I got what I expected My mornings and afternoons Of study Books and papers Books and lectures And interminable discussions I failed to understand And as tick turned to tock Destiny Brought me to this most expensive store (THE CLOCK STOPS) Where I began to dispense Perfume with a lot of style And a soupcon of Central European Seduction And this brings me to women Did you imagine that I was a member Of the opposing team? Just because I love my mother No – no – no – no – no Oh no (HE KNEELS AND TAKES A PILLOW OUT OF THE SUITCASE WHICH PUTS DOWN ON THE STAGE AND THEN PUTS THE CLOCK ON TOP OF IT) I was poor and I was young And secretly Remember I say secretly I was not deprived of experience You know what I mean But secretly I was frightened Of these creatures Who were not my mother But so much like her in many ways The first time with a woman It would not have surprised me If she had suddenly got up and screeched

180

Mike Phillips

(HE SCREAMS THE NEXT LINE IN A FALSETTO VOICE) What are you doing with that thing? Well she didn’t I have to tell you she did not But I was not in love (MUSIC: Satie – Gymnopedie for piano No1) (MUSIC FADES IN AS VICTOR SPEAKS) VICTOR: One day I saw a girl With a small tight body Long brown hair and a pretty smile Working in the corner where they sold underwear A fact which – Naturally – Attracted my attention That same night I looked in the mirror And recognised myself A handsome young man Even impressive Next day she was wearing a skirt so short that I could make a reliable estimate of her advantages Which were considerable. I had abandoned my childhood But it could a woman to make me Understand (MUSIC FADES) Now the boys from the North Have disappeared Not from the earth But from my life Now it is as if I never knew Who they were And the Victor I see now

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In the mirror when I look Is only one of many reflections Two, three, four, five Too many Victors to count (MUSIC: Satie – Gymnopedie for piano No2) (THE MUSIC FADES IN AS VICTOR SPEAKS – HE PICKS UP THE SUITCASE TURNS IT ROUND SO THE AUDIENCE CAN SEE THAT IT IS EMPTY) VICTOR: In my suitcase No magic to give you There is nothing here Only memories Only memories (HE PUTS THE CLOCK AND THE PILLOW BACK IN THE SUITCASE, CLOSES IT AND WALKS OFF – MUSIC FADES) END

STEREOTYPES

STAYING POWER AND

SUBVERSION

Vedrana Veliþkoviü

Balkanisms Old and New: The Discourse of Balkanism and Self-Othering in Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries and Inventing Ruritania This paper explores the discourse and counter-discourse of Balkanism. After an overview of theoretical debates around the concept of Balkanism, Vesna Goldsworthy’s recent memoir Chernobyl Strawberries is considered and placed in a dialogue with her academic study Inventing Ruritania. A final section examines how the idea of Balkanism has been modified in the decade ensuing Inventing Ruritania, in light of recent migration flows from Eastern Europe to Britain and in light of discourses around the “Eastern European body” as represented in British media and literature. The final section also looks briefly at the representations of Eastern Europe in one of Bernadine Evaristo’s blog and Dubravka Ugrešiü’s essays.

1. Introduction ‘Am I Balkan?’, Vesna Goldsworthy asks in the preface to Inventing Ruritania (1998), one of the key studies of post-1989 Eastern Europe that explores the ways in which the West “looks” at the Balkans. In the last decades, the question of who designates someone or something as “Balkan”, as a question of power and knowledge, has inspired scholars from many disciplines to examine the construction of the Balkans in the Western imagination. Because the Balkans have been imagined as an undifferentiated collective entity, the new study of the area first developed as an external critique of the ways in which ‘the West looks East’ 1 and of the processes in which the Western image of the Balkans becomes an identity and a constructed social reality in order to expose the effects of Balkanist discourse. A brief look into the etymology and history of the word reveals that the Balkans, and its peoples, have been burdened with negative connotations and have been most often perceived as an uncivilised region of constant conflict and instability. Furthermore, the verb ‘to balkanise’, now acquiring a performative function,

1

Parts of this paper are based on ‘Against Balkanism: Women’s Academic Life-Writing and Personal and Collective History in Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries’, which will be published in Women: A Cultural Review in 2010 (see http://tandf.co.uk/journals/ rwcr). I would like to thank Women and Taylor&Francis for permission to use sections on Balkanism and Goldsworthy from my forthcoming Women article in this volume. Vesna Goldsworthy, ‘Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization’, in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. by Dušan I. Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp.25-38 (p.35).

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signals something even more menacing – a fragmentation and division into small antagonistic states or units, which during the 1990s became epitomised in the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. Indeed, Goldsworthy’s opening question evokes these performative and enunciative dimensions of “Balkan” not only as an ambiguous self-designation but also as a designation by others. From Former Yugoslavia herself, Goldsworthy witnessed Yugoslavia’s disintegration from London, which has been painfully recorded in her internationally bestselling memoir Chernobyl Strawberries (2005). In what follows, I explore this complicated (un)belonging to the Balkans in Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries by placing it in a dialogue with her academic work Inventing Ruritania. I will first offer a brief overview of the critical influences and developments of the study of Balkanism 2 and locate Inventing Ruritania as an example of external critique of Balkanism – that is, as facing the Balkans from the “West”. I will then engage with Goldsworthy’s memoir and discuss the construction of self-image, the image of the Balkans and Yugoslavia, as well as Goldsworthy’s strategies of self-othering. A close reading of Chernobyl Strawberries shows how Goldsworthy’s particular speaking position and material location is one of the factors that determine the development of her external critique of Balkanism. The complicated positioning that the dialectic of (un)belonging to the Balkans may entail is negotiated and mobilised in Goldsworthy’s memoir for the purposes of speaking back to the “West” and countering the discourse of Balkanism. Throughout the memoir, Goldsworthy actively engages with competing notions of personal and collective history, but rather than hunting down the big ghosts of post-Yugoslav history, her memoir is underlined with a creative destabilisation of the workings of the Balkanist discourse. The idea of Balkanism has been modified a decade after Inventing Ruritania. Discussing the emergence of what I call “New Balkanisms” in the context of recent migration flows from Eastern Europe to Britain and analysing several discourses of “Eastern European” body in the British media and recent literary representations, I point to some potential new developments in the study of Balkanism.

2. Balkanism: “Second World” Academic Meets Postcolonial Theory Since the late 1990s several important studies have emerged with the common purpose of looking at why the Balkans have been perceived by the West as backward, as not quite European, or as interstitially existing between the 2

As coined by Maria Todorova in her book Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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West and the “Orient”. 3 A proliferation of interest in the Balkans by East European scholars resident in the West, and by Western scholars of the Balkans, has produced a highly contested and interesting debate during a relatively short period of time. With contributions from history and art history, media, cultural and literary studies, this interdisciplinary body of work comprises a large number of books, journal articles, conferences and art exhibitions. 4 Starting from an epistemological question of how “we” come to know about the Balkans, the first stage of this scholarly debate began with a revisionist history of Western representations of the Balkans, reaching as far back as the Western European Enlightenment. This provided a contextual background as to when, how and why the subsequent body of knowledge about the Balkans emerged and examines how Western perceptions have consolidated the image of the Balkans in such persistently negative terms. What became a critical study of Balkanism was, in many ways, indebted to Said’s Orientalism and informed by the concepts of alterity and such postcolonial concepts as in-betweenness, hybridity and the contact zone. The construction of the monolithic West in the initial analyses of Balkanism, recalling the postcolonial strategy of speaking back to the West, was therefore a necessary first step to deconstruct the Balkans, destabilise the workings of binary logic and so secure a new field of study. At the same time, the very ambiguity of the Balkans’ (un)belonging to Europe (expressed through the conflicting metaphors of a bridge between East and West, but also of a gatekeeper against “oriental” others, and a concern with the Balkans’ positioning vis-à-vis colonialism) has led scholars to question the usefulness of postcolonial methodology for the Balkan culturalhistorical context. Distinguishing Balkanism as ‘a discourse about an imputed ambiguity’ 5 from Orientalism’s imputed opposition, Maria Todorova, a Bulgarian historian who is resident in the US, has argued that due to this ambiguity Balkanism should not be considered as a variant of Orientalism. She acknowledges the asymmetrical relation of power and knowledge, and domination and subordination between the West and the Balkans, but it is the Balkans’ liminal status which often blurs this seemingly clear-cut dichotomy and enables Todorova to develop a more nuanced analysis moving beyond 3

4

5

Cf. Todorova; Goldsworthy, pp.25-38 and Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. by Dušan I. Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Cf. the works by Allcock (1991); Bakiü-Hayden and Hayden (1992); Bakiü-Hayden (1995); Wolff (1994); Goldsworthy (1998); Bracewell and Drace-Francis (1999); Žižek (1997); Kiossev (1999, 2002); Iordanova (2001); Hammond (2004); Longinoviü (2005); and the Balkans issue of Third Text (2007) listed in the bibliography to this article. Todorova, p.17.

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the Orientalist model. Grounding her analysis further in the historical context and pointing to the absence of direct Western colonial involvement in the Balkans, but also examining the effects of the Ottoman legacy, she argues that Balkan identities have often been constructed on the basis of repudiation and opposition to the Ottoman, “oriental”, or other cultural elements of their neighbours perceived as negative; in other words, by using the same othering procedures or ‘nesting orientalisms’. 6 Along these same lines, Goldsworthy also writes in her preface to Inventing Ruritania that ‘Balkan always refers to someone other than ourselves’. 7 However, while both scholars point to the problem of overlapping of the Balkans’ marginality and centrality, Goldsworthy, unlike Todorova, does not insist on a clear distinction between Balkanist and Orientalist discourse. In her exploration of the literary images, journalistic and political discourse of the Balkans, she suggests that the Balkans are, in fact, an instance of Orientalism. As is becoming evident from recent work, 8 potential alliances and an exchange of critical vocabularies between postcolonial, post-communist and Eastern European studies are still largely unexplored and deserve further critical attention and revision. However, it remains to be seen whether further explorations of common areas of enquiry will bring postcolonial scholars into the debate or whether these interventions will continue to be made only by Eastern European scholars or scholars of Eastern Europe with an interest in postcolonial studies. Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania is an exploration of the textual colonisation of the Balkans in English literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By looking at the literary images of the Balkan “other” constructed in the works of the English Romantics, as well as the travel writing and fiction produced during the two World Wars, her study has opened up a possibility of writing a new literary history through such processes of revision and, more importantly, it has offered an abundant and informed analysis of the ways in which “we” come to know about the “Wild Balkans”. Goldsworthy argues that the representations produced and reproduced through English writing, ranging from Byron to Dracula (1897) and Rebecca West’s monumental travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) – to name just a few of many literary works discussed in her study – provide an insight into the subtle workings of the logic of imperialism and reveal a similar pattern used by the West in the construction of non-European others. In these literary 6

7

8

Cf. Milica Bakiü-Hayden’s seminal essay, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 54.4 (1995), 917-931. Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p.ix. Cf. the works by Kovaþeviü (2008); Ivekoviü (2005); Imre (2005) and Murawska-Muthesius (2004) listed in the bibliography.

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images, the Balkans become a place of constant violence and threat, populated by vampires and spies: ‘the mysterious and unhomelike (unheimlich) Eastern location for the unfolding of Western adventure’.9 Goldsworthy develops a new “hybrid” concept – the imperialism of the imagination – that emerges out of her productive intertwining of the paradigms of postcolonial literary studies and another critical tradition that she brings to academic study of the area: image studies or imagology. Although some scholars would disagree with the notion of metaphoric and imaginary colonialism of the Balkans, Goldsworthy’s literary-cultural study has shown that, even if the Balkans did not experience direct Western colonial rule, imaginative colonisation and textual practices are performative in that they have produced similar pernicious effects over the last two hundred years. The Balkans as such came into being precisely as an effect of the history of Western invention and imagination. And as I show in the final section of this article, these effects still operate on some bodies more than others and continue to mark and stick to some countries, places, or ways of doing things. The negative images of the Balkans, although subsumed in the “new” dichotomy of communist Eastern Europe and capitalist Western Europe, persisted in the Western imagination during the cold-war period and intensified again at times of crisis in the region, especially during the 1990s wars in Former Yugoslavia (usually referred to as the Balkan wars in the Western media). Many Western historians, political commentators and journalists, as Goldsworthy notes, have focused on ‘the exciting narrative of “ancient hatreds” rather than analysing the more mundane but just as devastating failure of Yugoslavia’s economic and constitutional experiments after 1945’. 10 Indeed, as she concludes in Inventing Ruritania, the new media image of the Balkans in the 1990s grew out of their literary image created in the nineteenth century and was largely informed by this very image thus repeating and reinforcing the same stereotypes. 11 An explosion of “expert” knowledge of the Balkans in the West following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the media image that was created, has rendered Yugoslavia synonymous with the Balkans – a connection which Todorova rightly protests. 12 It has, however, also presented scholars from the Former Yugoslavia (especially those in the West) with some difficult ethical questions concerning the reconciliation of academic interests (their exploration of Balkanist discourse in order to look back at the West) with the events of the wars of the 1990s (when similar features of Balkanist discourse were mobilised in the name of violent nation9 10 11 12

Goldsworthy, pp.25-38 (p.33). Ibid., p.31. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, pp.250-253. Cf. Todorova, p.55.

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alism, genocide and rape). These questions are not easily resolved, especially in the context of external critique. With the ending of the conflicts on the territory of Former Yugoslavia, the Balkans are no longer violent, but the question of which position one faces the Balkans from remains a choice between the “West”, “Central Europe” or from the Balkans. And it is through the performative and enunciative functions of these facings that the Balkans continue to assume their shifting existence. As Nataša Kovaþeviü usefully reminds us in her book Narrating Post/communism, the very idea of Central Europe as ‘a redeemable Eastern Europe’ has been imagined on the basis of excluding the Balkans as ‘an irredeemable, extreme and problematic Eastern Europe’. 13 Today, the Balkans are undergoing a kind of re-naming and re-branding, and the attempts have been both local and “Western”. 14 So for example, as “the Balkans” wait at the doors of the EU to finally become integrated and “westernised”, in the EU political jargon, we have witnessed the use of a new construction called “the Western Balkans” (however, which countries are seen as part of the Western Balkans is also problematic). British-Muslim cultural-critic Ziauddin Sardar has also recently suggested that ‘it would help free “the Balkans” from their Orientalist baggage if we replaced the name with “south-east Europe”’. 15 But, as I show in the last section, in the contemporary “Western” imagination, the Balkans are again subsumed under monolithic “Eastern Europe”, so this renaming of the Balkans into south-east Europe would not help solve the baggage of “the East”. Let me now explore how Goldsworthy faced the Balkans from “the West” during the 1990s wars in Former Yugoslavia.

3. Speaking Back to the West: Chernobyl Strawberries When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, Goldsworthy started writing for her young son, who was only two at the time. As she feared the outcome of the illness, the story of her life was a necessary gift to him. She 13

14

15

Nataša Kovaþeviü, Narrating Post/communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008), p.10. Cf. also Tomislav Longinoviü’s book Vampires Like Us: Writing Down “the Serbs” (Belgrade: Belgrade Circle, 2005). Obviously, my analysis also faces the Balkans from the “West” and I have not had space to explore the other aspect here. For a discussion of local Balkanisms see for example the work of Belgrade anthropologist Ivan ýoloviü, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays on Political Anthropology, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth (London: Hurst, 2002), ‘Balkan Tower’ and his recent articles available in English at [accessed 03 August 2008]. For a re-branding of the Balkans in recent art exhibitions see Louisa Avgita’s ‘The Balkans Does Not Exist’, Third Text, 21.2 (2007), 215-222. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Ziauddin Sardar wants to rename the Balkans’, New Statesman (22 May 2006) [accessed 02 December 2009].

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felt that the part of the world she came from could seem to him exotic, distant and not much more than a stereotypical media representation if he was to grow up without her. Fortunately, Goldsworthy recovered and the memoir was published in 2005. Written in English, it encompasses an account of forty years of her life and reconstructs several maternal and paternal generational stories in a non-linear manner: memories of Goldsworthy’s childhood, student days in Belgrade and her life in London. Born in Belgrade in 1961, Goldsworthy left then-Yugoslavia in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster, to marry her English husband and has lived in London ever since. Hence the title, with the irradiated strawberries she tasted back then; however, this is not to insinuate a possible cause of her cancer. Goldsworthy’s image of Chernobyl strawberries rather carries a deeper metaphorical meaning. It is useful to her exploration not only of her (un)belonging to Eastern Europeanness, but also of the decay and violent disintegration related to the break-up of her country, which she witnessed from London. Ironically, Goldsworthy witnesses the war from another part of the continent, but nevertheless in medias res of the media machine, working as a broadcaster for the BBC World Service. She had joined the company in order to keep her mother tongue alive, but then ended up knowing ‘more words for dying than the Inuit know for snow’. 16 Although Western media representation of the war is mentioned in the memoir only briefly through the haunting headlines, ‘Balkan, war, dead’ (p.211), which she sees appearing daily in the British newspapers – this representation is nevertheless one of the critical factors that determine the development of her external critique of Balkanism. In other words, her very locatedness in the West enables her to see how much “the Balkans” have been balkanised from the outside. This is illustrated by an episode when the Serbo-Croat news service split up during the war and there was no Bosnian programming and no Bosnian Muslims, as it happened, were employed (cf. p.205). Goldsworthy’s colleagues become divided according to their accents, but also by a dividing wall: In an echo of the world of Balkan politics, the BBC had given the Serbs and the Croats adjoining rooms, with no connecting doors but with a large window in the dividing wall, so that we could always see what the others were up to [...]. Was the management trying to send some kind of message? (p.213)

This can be read as an ironic comment on Western media balkanisation of space, as everyone, Goldsworthy observes, continued reporting on their own “side”: ‘[U]nder the caring eyes of our British bosses, we went forth and 16

Vesna Goldsworthy, Chernobyl Strawberries (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), p.214. All further references to this edition are cited in the text.

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multiplied our programmes, as long as the wars went on’ (p.205). But although Goldsworthy is trying to question the idea of Western media objectivity in news reporting, and its role as an “educator”, she perhaps misses an opportunity to put herself in an imaginary window of other “sides”, which one may feel is a missing story in the memoir. A glimpse into those other windows could have further questioned the stereotype of “sides”. Such difficult negotiations are evident in the shaping of Goldsworthy’s memories through the overlapping of personal and collective history and seem to be resolved by deciding to speak back to “the West” rather than hunting down the big ghosts of recent Yugoslav history. The location from where one speaks/lives/works has necessarily affected the ways in which the critique of Balkanism has developed and Goldsworthy thus echoes Maria Todorova’s concerns that ‘as it happens, I live here and now, and for the moment it is to this [Western] audience that I wish to [...] explain and to oppose something that is being produced here.’ 17 During her night shifts at the BBC, Goldsworthy attempts to get close to the pain of innocent people in her homeland, but when she becomes ‘a hostage to the stories of death about which she could do nothing but transmit’ (p.208), she decides to move away. Having realised that the stereotypes of ‘ancient Balkan hatreds’ go back much further, she keeps ‘escaping to the British Library to work on a book about the Balkan past with much more enthusiasm than I ever had for the Balkan present’ (p.215), thus announcing Inventing Ruritania. Goldsworthy distances herself from traditional expectations of Eastern European memoir-as-testimony and the witnessing of “big” historical events, writing early on that one will rarely find there the images from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory or Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (cf. p.3). She rather uses the genre for exploring oppositional forms that may contest another kind of history of perceptions. Throughout the memoir, Goldsworthy announces herself as Yugoslav, Serbian, “exotic” Montenegrin, but also English and continental European, and often switches points of view for particular purpose and audience. She often inverts the perspective and uses the same stereotyping the West uses towards the “Wild Balkans” and ‘prejudices other than those Occidentals then commonly harboured towards East Europeans’ (p.268) in order to debunk cultural assumptions through humour and irony. Describing, for example, her paternal grandmother’s view of what the Serbs think of the English, the laughter that is invoked is both bittersweet and healing. The English were perfidious and treacherous […] on the whole, ugly [...]. England had, quite possibly, the worst climate in the world […] perhaps the strangest cuisine […]. They were reputed to

17

Todorova, p.x.

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have developed a special jam for every kind of meat, and they smothered their lamb with mint and vinegar. (This made Granny laugh, for Montenegrins are connoisseurs of fine lamb). (pp.268-270)

Having self-consciously announced that she is ‘a bookish girl, a London university teacher’, but also ‘a great-granddaughter of shepherds from the Montenegrin and Herzegovinian limestone uplands, part of a cousinage of bishops and reluctant throat-biters’(p.20), Goldsworthy, as an academic lifewriter, creatively uses the strategies of self-construction and self-othering in the imagological sense in order to counter Western Balkanisms. This is particularly evident in her turning of the Dracula metaphor on its head. At the same time, her recreation of “happy” images of Yugoslav soft socialism in comically rendered episodes filled with references to Titoist ideology may be also read as alternative memories of the communist past. 18 In other words, Goldsworthy disturbs the image of communism in the Western imagination as generalised images of torture and hard dictatorships. As she admits, the only conflict she ever had with the communist power machine was an argument with Yugoslav customs officers over trying to ‘smuggle’ some Western records she had bought in Paris (p.4). Throughout the memoir, Goldsworthy also reconstructs her maternal and paternal family history, whose stories reach back as far as the nineteenthcentury Ottoman Balkans, to a time when negative images of the Balkans were cemented in the Western imagination. Writing from the centre of power (from the “West” and the institutional space of Western academia), her revisiting of the Ottoman Balkans (through the personal fortunes and misfortunes of her ancestors) may be read as a creative contestation of the generalised perceptions of the Balkans in the “Western” imagination. Goldsworthy particularly uses these “negative” Ottoman elements, which were most often responsible for the perception of the Yugoslav crisis as a revival of ancient hatreds and primordial violent passions, as a deliberate strategy of selfexoticisation and stereotyping. She also does so to offer a positive account of the hybrid Balkan cultural space. In an episode when her grandmother (who is an avid storyteller of the beheading of the Ottoman feudal lord Smail-Aga) meets her English husband, Goldsworthy writes that ‘Granny had no experience of headhunting [but] she sensed what my husband, a recent English graduate in Balkan history, wanted to hear’ (p.34, my emphasis). Though in subtle terms, the point of address here is clearly intended to reach the Western audience. 18

She refers to its optimism and belief in a brighter tomorrow, her performing at one of Tito’s posthumous birthdays and her own brief joining of the Communist Party which, Goldsworthy reveals, was more a product of her Hollywood fantasy in which tall men and slim bookish women argued passionately (p.68).

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Interestingly, rather than looking at Goldsworthy’s Balkanologie, most Western reviews of Chernobyl Strawberries have shown preference for the narrative of Yugo-nostalgia focusing mainly on the memories of her vanished country. The titles of these reviews – ‘Elegy for Yugoslavia’ and ‘Balkan Eulogy’ – yet again pose the question of what kind of work the memoir is invited to perform. 19 Is personal memory in such readings collectivised, and is the mourning of Yugoslavia – the reverse of balkanisation 20 – only possible in the West after the country is no more? It would seem that the discourse of Balkanism still lingers in such readings. As an academic life-writer, Goldsworthy has tried to challenge such collective representation of the Balkans in her memoir, even though from the reviews of Chernobyl Strawberries it can be seen how difficult it may be to de-balkanise the West. As for the external critique of Balkanism, looking at recent enlargements of the European Union, it may seem that the Balkans as a term may be dying out and that it is at the same time shrinking as an imagined geo-political region. But looking more closely at how the Western media, particularly in the UK, has referred to these new “Eastern Europeans”, it seems that a new generation of Balkanisms following EU enlargement has now been emerging in the West.

4. New Balkanisms Indeed, new “strange” bodies have recently arrived in “Western” metropolises. In May 2004, the European Union was enlarged with eight new countries, most of them ex-communist and “Eastern European”. 21 However, the atmosphere following their admission was not fully welcoming. While becoming a part of the EU has now guaranteed freedom of movement and travel for these new EU nationals, a majority of old European Union states introduced work restrictions fearing they might be flooded with workers form these poor countries. Although the UK was one of the few states which allowed a free movement of “new” European workers (however introducing the restrictions for Romanian and Bulgarian nationals when they joined in 2007), their presence in Britain was soon seen as problematic thus reawakening old anxieties. The government and the media became preoccupied with allegedly overwhelming numbers of “Eastern Europeans” and began 19

20 21

Victor Sebestyen, ‘An Elegy for Yugoslavia’, The Spectator (26 March 2005) [accessed 02 December 2009] and Tim Judah, ‘Balkan Eulogy’, The Observer (17 April 2005) [accessed 02 December 2009]. Cf. Todorova, p.33. These were the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania were admitted 3 years later.

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speculating on how many of them had exactly arrived and how many of them would, if at all, eventually go back. It appeared that suddenly these “Eastern Europeans” could be found everywhere, even in the remotest parts of Britain, swamping and taking over British labour markets with their cheap, illegal labour and burdening social services. This rhetoric of flooding and swamping has had a long history in the British media and politics, particularly in nationalist circles (variously used from Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher to David Blunkett) and is part of a familiar discourse on migration in Britain. So, a similar language previously used on post-1945 Black and Asian immigrants, and later during the 1970s and 1980s on Black and Asian British citizens, has now been resurfacing and following the new “Eastern European” figure. As Imogen Tyler argues in her analysis of the chav 22 figure, the term ‘figure’ can usefully describe ‘the ways in which at different historical and cultural moments, specific [bodies] become over determined and are publicly imagined [and represented] in excessive, distorted and caricatured ways’ which is actually the expression of ‘an underlying social crisis or anxiety’. 23 One only needs to go randomly through newspaper and media headlines to notice how these titles contain much deeper anxieties: ‘Deluge: Around 700 Eastern Europeans arrive daily, latest figures show’ (The Daily Mail, November 2007), ‘Eastern Europeans targeted by angry Asians’ (Yorkshire Post, January 2008), ‘More Eastern Europeans leaving UK’ (BBC, May 2009), ‘Romanians hit by racist attacks in Northern Ireland want to go home’ (The Times, June 2009). Indeed, who is seen as taking whose jobs and by whom? Which politics of forgetting is at work here? 24 With the current economic crisis, these tensions are surely going to be emphasised even more. While further study of such media representations and of the “Eastern European” figure are urgently needed, I want to try and define some of its contours here. Indeed, how is this figure imagined and how do we come to know him/her? What are the points of recognition? Looking at the images of “Eastern Europeans” that have been circulating in the British media, the most frequent one is perhaps that of a male ‘Polish plumber’ or a construction worker. To be sure, this is a gendered figure which corresponds to its alignment with cheap physical labour often assumed to be male. Interestingly, the 22 23

24

Chav is a derogatory term for white and usually working-class Britons. Imogen Tyler, ‘“Chav Mum, Chav Scum”: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain’, Feminist Media Studies, 8.2 (2008), 17-34 (p.18). The Daily Mail has been heating up this issue particularly with sensationalist stories of assimilated “old” migrants who now turn towards ‘new’ migrants. Cf., for example, the story of a SriLankan postman by Paul Harris, ‘ I’m Standing Up for Britain, Says Sri Lankan Postmaster Who Won’t Serve Migrants Who Won’t Learn English’, Daily Mail (19 March 2009) [accessed 20 March 2009].

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images of female migrants have been less visible, or when they have been, they are usually represented as victimised trafficked women and in highly problematic terms. This only reinforces the perception of male mobility and female stasis. And one may also argue that this makes female cheap labour – as cleaners, domestic workers, waitresses, au pairs or, in the most extreme scenario, as victims of sex trafficking – even more invisible. 25 Therefore including gender in the analyses of this figure “on the move” is much needed as well as a consideration of other forms of positioning, such as class or education, and how they intersect with the generalising category “Eastern European”. It is also often assumed that “Eastern European” bodies are recognised only when they start speaking their own language, by their accents or by their “unpronounceable” names, i.e. that they are perceived as unmarked by visible and marked only by audible differences. However, the discourses around this figure now show that the “Eastern European” body can not only be heard, but also “seen”. An article on a recent teenage shooting in London, for example, describes the victims as ‘looking Eastern European’.26 Indeed, what does it mean to look “Eastern European” and what are the mechanisms for its differentiation? In order to consider this, I will briefly look at several recent examples – a blog essay by the British writer Bernardine Evaristo, a book cover of the UK edition of Nobody’s Home – a collection of essays by the Former Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešiü, and recent literary and media representations. In 2000, Evaristo travelled through Europe on a literary train called ‘Literature Express Europa 2000’ with some hundred “European” writers from each European country (both Western and Eastern). Organised by Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, this cultural project started in Lisbon and took the writers through nineteen European cities such as Paris, Brussels, Talinn, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw and finally finishing in Berlin. 27 Evaristo’s impressions from this journey were originally published in 2000 for The Independent, but she has recently reproduced this piece on her blog website enriching the essay with numerous photographs from the journey. 28 Evaristo’s encounter with Eastern Europe is carefully captured in several 25

26

27

28

Cf., for example, Tena Štiviþiü’s play Fragile! (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007), which takes place in London and tackles some of these issues. John Twomey, ‘Teenage Boys Shot for their iPods’, Daily Express (17 February 2009) [accessed 20 February 2009]. The full train route can be seen at: [accessed 12 June 2009]. Cf. Bernardine Evaristo, ‘105 Writers Tour Europe’ (4 December 2008) [accessed 01 December 2009].

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photographs and there are two photographs that particularly stand out. 29 The first pictures two women folk singers - an older and a younger woman. However, the photographer’s eye seems to be more directed towards an older woman who has slightly stronger facial lines, dark eyebrows and a frowned facial expression. The second photograph captures another older woman at a train station in Minsk who is wearing sandals with socks on and what appears to be a cheap floral patterned dress. The images of these two old women may first bring to mind a familiar “Western” media representation of “Eastern European” body when any news coverage of/about this area would usually be accompanied by footages of old, poor people and decrepit bodies as if they were from a different time. However, the photographs are also followed by additional comments that further reveal the problematic and stereotypical representations of the “Eastern European” body. The comment below the photograph that shows an older woman folk singer reads as ‘Male or female? You decide’, while the photograph that captures a woman in a floral dress is followed by ‘Peasant-chic. Minsk, Belarus’. Should one simply brush off these comments as being humorous and join in laughing at this “strange” face with an equally “suspicious” gender and at this “peasant” woman with a “bad” fashion taste? While Evaristo writes about her anxieties of travelling through Eastern Europe as a black woman, what to make of the photographer’s eye? What to make of this encounter of two different types of unbelonging? The two bodies are further aligned with “ugly” “Eastern European” places one may never wish to visit again. Kaliningrad, Evaristo writes, is ‘surely one of the ugliest cities in the world, unless Soviet-style tenementchic becomes the next big thing’, while Western European places are described as ‘nice’ and ‘lovely’. 30 I would suggest that Imogen Tyler’s discussion of class disgust which operates on poor white working-class bodies (‘chavs’) similarly operates on “Eastern European” bodies. Marked with a “terrible” communist heritage, they are usually perceived as unrefined with an outdated taste in fashion and usually wearing distasteful make-up. In a recent Guardian article, Tim Dowling points out some of these images, particularly being reproduced and circulating in the Daily Mail headlines, and reveals that “Eastern Europeans” are also ‘eating our swans, stealing our unwanted clothes and offering bad service in “our” restaurants’. 31 I would thus supplement Tyler’s argument that ‘class disgust is intimately tied to issues of racial difference and chav29 30 31

Cf. ibid. Ibid. Tim Dowling, ‘They Come Over Here…’, The Guardian (22 November 2007) [accessed 23 March 2008].

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disgust [or, Eastern European-disgust] is racialising: “[chavs and Eastern Europeans] are almost always white”’. 32 The “Eastern European” body is even described as very white (recalling a distant Dracula imagery), but at the same time it occupies dirty whiteness (by being poor or dressing badly). However, the focus on this exaggerated whiteness may be a recent trend in the perceptions of “Eastern Europeans”. Numerous scholars of Eastern Europe have shown how racial designations of Eastern Europeans have historically shifted and oscillated between ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘gypsy’ and attendant characterisations such as half-civilised, ‘not quite’ European, or barbarian and finally, how these people have been aligned with the landscapes ranging from black impenetrable woods to generally depressing sights. 33

Fig. 1: cover of Ugrešiü’s UK edition of Nobody’s Home 34 32 33

34

Tyler, pp.17-34 (p.25). Cf., for example, Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), esp. pp.337339, Goldsworthy (1998) and Kovaþeviü. Dubravka Ugrešiü, Nobody’s Home (London: Telegram Books, 2007). I would like to thank Telegram Books for their kind permission to reproduce the cover. Dubravka Ugrešiü is one

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Contemporary post-communist Eastern Europeans may have lost Dracula’s aristocratic charm, but they nevertheless remain deathly pallid. Take a look at the book cover of Dubravka Ugrešiü’s UK edition of Nobody’s Home (cf. fig. 1). While there is no space here to discuss the marketing strategies of “Eastern European” visibility and how this image can evoke various emotional responses in different readers, the book cover with its “representative” Eastern European faces speaks directly to the reader as if to say - here “you” will find their “authentic” stories. At the same time, it imposes on the writer what was famously called within the black British cultural studies as the burden of representation. 35 The young man’s pale and deeply sunken face (which uncanilly bears traces of the Dracula imagery), his shabby coat, the woman’s “ethnic scarf” and her head scarf (a contentious object in the “West” and usually seen as a sign of oppression and backwardness) all give away an image of decay, suffering and displacement and accentuate the contrast with Western modernity. In her essay ‘Refugee’, Dubravka Ugrešiü writes about similar representations of Eastern Europe as Western Europe’s poor and ‘primitive’ other: In the Bodega Kayzer café I drink coffee and write down pairs of opposites. Right-left; organized-disorganized; […]; civilized-primitive; […]; citizen-nationality. I fill the lefthand column under the heading Western Europe, the right under Eastern Europe. And suddenly I see that same Eastern Europe. It’s sitting at my table, we look at each other as in a mirror. I see a neglected complexion, cheap make up, an expression of condescension and defiance on its face. It wipes its lips with its hands, talks too loudly, gesticulates, raises its eyebrows. I see in its eyes a glint of simultaneous despair and cunning, I see a panic-stricken need to stop being a second-class citizen and become someone. My sister, my sad Eastern Europe. 36

In order to counter such representations of Eastern Europe in the Western imagination, the Sarajevan writer Nenad Veliþkoviü uses the very same image and describes France (“Western” Europe) as having ‘a wrinkled face of a frightened miserly old lady [who] hides behind the expensive make-up’. 37 But her smile also reveals vampire teeth and as Vesna Goldsworthy notes, ‘the idea of Europe as a vampire, which sucks the (young) lifeblood of the

35

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of the most renowned writers from Former Yugoslavia. She now lives in Amsterdam. Cf. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp.233-258 and Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.16372 (p.165). Dubravka Ugrešiü, ‘Refugee’, in Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), pp.19-26 (pp.22f.). Veliþkoviü quoted in Goldsworthy, pp.25-38 (p.33).

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Balkans’ is a ‘rare reversal of this kind of imagery’. 38 This imagery certainly reveals its potency when translated into the conditions of cheap labour as well as when considering the fact that Western Europe’s population is getting older and that it needs these bodies to be reinvigorated. However, what interests me more is the fact that Evaristo, Ugrešiü and Veliþkoviü all use the same female imagery in their discussion of Eastern and Western Europe and particularly that of an old woman in Evaristo’s and Veliþkoviü’s case. While Ugrešiü anthropomorphises Eastern Europe as her sister without references to age, Veliþkoviü’s descriptions and Evaristo’s photographs are rather grotesque – the reading of the old woman’s face as gender-ambiguous as well as Veliþkoviü’s emphasis on the physical features of a ‘miserly old lady’. As feminist scholars have taught us, the old female body occupies a different symbolic terrain than the old male body. An old woman is an abject figure that arouses revulsion and discomfort (think also of the archetypal image of the witch). 39 Surely all these writers are privileged travellers in their observations, but while Ugrešiü faces Eastern Europe at the table through a reciprocal gaze (they sit together and look at each other) and through gestures of imagined sisterhood, Evaristo’s gaze and Veliþkoviü’s counter-gaze remain one-directional. That is, it becomes acceptable to “look back” at Western Europe through a devalued image of an old woman or to evoke laughter and mockery at these “strange” Eastern European women. Even though Veliþkoviü is aware of the stereotypical images of Eastern Europe, I would argue that his mirror image loses its subversive potential precisely by couching it in the image of an old woman. Evaristo’s gaze, on the other hand, borders with that of a Western traveller. The workings of this gaze lock the two photographed bodies into what can be termed, following Gayatri Spivak, a subaltern Eastern European otherness. These two subaltern Eastern European women do not speak and are turned into a “surface”. We must find more ethical ways to read the ‘Eastern European’ woman’s distorted face beyond assigning her to a static role of the exotic local. On the other hand, in the Serbian edition of the collected Literature Express Europe 2000 essays, Evaristo has been referred to as a ‘mulatto from England’ by a Latvian writer, 40 which opens up a difficult and rarely discussed issue of 38 39

40

Ibid., p.33. As for example Susan Sontag famously noted in her seminal essay ‘The Double Standard of Ageing’, in The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Ageing, ed. by Marilyn Pearsall (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1972), pp.19-24. Cf. also The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging, ed. by Marilyn Pearsall (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1997). Interestingly, Dubravka Ugrešiü also explores these issues in her her most recent novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009). Maris ýaklais, ‘Veþita Vatra’ (Eternal Flame), in Književni Voz Evropa 2000 (Literary Train Europe 2000), ed. by Vladislav Bajac and others (Belgrade: Geopoetika, 2002), pp.55-70 (p.57).

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“race” in Eastern Europe. The rise of racism and neo fascism in post-1989 Eastern Europe in particular calls for a sustained and urgent socio-historical analysis. Evaristo may at times approach Eastern Europe with Western eyes, but at the same time, Eastern Europe meets Evaristo with racist eyes. We must therefore find new ways not only to theorise the marked whiteness of the Eastern European body, but also to counter the recurring effects of “race” as a regime of looking and the ways in which it realigns some bodies more than others. A much needed consideration of the neglect of gender in the analyses of Eastern Europe, new Balkanisms and their interrelated issues of race, class and other forms of classification might be one such productive intervention and could also avoid reverting to fruitless discussions of the “East” and the “West” as overarching and often too generalising categories. Although it may seem that both the study of Balkanism and postcolonial studies have already metastased in their discussions of the ways “the West looks East”, an exchange of critical vocabularies at this moment could potentially reinvigorate and direct their new developments. Thus critical scholarship would benefit from “looking back” at “the West” once more, not only in order to help save Balkanisms from their “premature death” and to explore a new image of the “Eastern European” body, but also to open up a rigorous and urgently needed discussion on other forms of othering, new racisms and recurring cycles of hatred and violence towards various other “strange” bodies that are today seen as unbelonging both throughout “Eastern Europe” and the “West”.

Works Cited Allcock, John, ‘Constructing the Balkans’, in Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans, ed. by John Allcock and Antonia Young (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1991) Avgita, Louisa, ‘The Balkans Does Not Exist’, Third Text (The Balkans Issue), 21.2 (2007), 215-221 Avgita, Louisa and Juliet Steyn, ‘Introduction’, Third Text (The Balkans Issue), 21.2 (2007), 113-116 Bakiü-Hayden, Milica, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 54.4 (1995), 917-931 Bakiü-Hayden, Milica and Robert Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics’, Slavic Review, 51.1 (1992), 1-15 Bjeliü, Dušan I. and Obrad Saviü, Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002)

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Bracewell, Wendy and Alex Drace-Francis, ‘South-Eastern Europe: History, Concept, Boundaries’, Balkanologie, 3.2 (1999), 54-6 Caklais, Maris, ‘Vecita Vatra’, in Knjizevni Voz Europa 2000, ed. by Vladislav Bajac and others (Belgrade: Geopoetika, 2002), pp.55-70 ýoloviü, Ivan, ‘Balkan Tower’, Pedžþanik.net (2 August 2008) [accessed 02 December 2009] —, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays on Political Anthropology, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth (London: Hurst, 2002) Dowling, Tim, ‘They Come Over Here…’, The Guardian (22 November 2007) [accessed 23 March 2008] Fleming, Katherine Elisabeth, ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography’, The American Historical Review, 105.4 (2000), 1218–1233 Evaristo, Bernardine, ‘105 Writers Tour Europe’ (4 December 2008) [accessed 01 December 2009] Goldsworthy, Vesna, Chernobyl Strawberries (London: Atlantic Books, 2005) —, ‘Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanisation’, in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. by Dušan I. Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp.25-38 —, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) Hammond, Andrew, The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003 (Hampshire: Aldershot, 2004) Harris, Paul, ‘I’m Standing Up for Britain, Says Sri Lankan Postmaster Who Won’t Serve Migrants Who Won’t Learn English’, Daily Mail (19 March 2009) [accessed 20 March 2009] Imre, Aniko, ‘Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies. The End of Race’, in ed. by Alfred J. López, Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), pp.79-102 Iordanova, Dina, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: British Film Institute, 2001) Ivekoviü, Rada, ‘The Split of Reason and the Postcolonial Backlash’, Goethezeitoortal (2005) [accessed 09 October 2008]

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Judah, Tim, ‘Balkan Eulogy’, The Observer (17 April 2005) [accessed 02 December 2009] Kiossev, Alexander, ‘The Dark Intimacy: Maps, Identities, Acts of Identifications’, in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. by Dušan I. Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp.165-190 —, ‘Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures’, in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. by Bojana Pejiü and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), pp.114-117 Kovaþeviü, Nataša, Narrating Post/communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008) Longinoviü, Tomislav, Vampires Like Us: Writing Down “the Serbs” (Belgrade: Belgrade Circle, 2005) Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna, ‘Welcome to Slaka’, Third Text, 18.1 (2004), 25-40 Pearsall, Marilyn, ed., The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997) Sardar, Ziauddin, ‘Ziauddin Sardar Wants to Rename the Balkans’, New Statesman (22 May 2006) [accessed 02 December 2009] Sebestyen, Victor, ‘An Elegy for Yugoslavia’, The Spectator (26 March 2005) [accessed 02 December 2009] Sontag, Susan, ‘The Double Standard of Ageing’, in The Other within Us, ed. by Marilyn Pearsall (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp.19-24 Štiviþiü, Tena, Fragile! (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007) Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Twomey, John, ‘Teenage Boys Shot for their iPods’, Daily Express (17 February 2009) [accessed 20 February 2009] Tyler, Imogen, ‘“Chav Mum, Chav Scum”: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain’, Feminist Media Studies, 8.2 (2008), 17-34 Ugrešiü, Dubravka, ‘Refugee’, in Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), pp.19-26 Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’, New Left Review, 225 (1997), 28-51

Michael McAteer

A Troubled Union: Representations of Eastern Europe in Nineteenth-Century Irish Protestant Literature Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the political ascendancy of Ireland’s Protestant communities became deeply precarious, generating widespread feelings of insecurity as both constitutional and militant nationalism grew in strength, and as the British Liberal Government sought to grant Ireland a Home Rule parliament. This paper considers how writers from Irish Protestant backgrounds represented Eastern Europe in the light of these circumstances, examining Sheridan Le Fanu’s story ‘Carmilla’, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. In different ways, these representations were shaped by an ideology of progress through which Eastern Europe was imagined as primitive. Yet the knowledge these writers carried of Ireland’s fraught circumstances within the Union enabled them to interrogate this ideology in important ways. The paper examines how Eastern Europe is represented as a territory in which tradition sits alongside ethnic multiplicity, considering notions of hybridity, purity and contamination in the process.

1. Introduction As Great Britain expanded and consolidated her colonies in Africa and South Asia from the 1850s to the end of the nineteenth century, circumstances in her oldest and most proximate settlement proved a constant irritation. The vexing ‘Irish Question’ became more impossible to ignore at the social and political levels. The devastating famine of 1845-1848 not only led to the deaths of one million people and the bankruptcy of several of the great Anglo-Irish estates, it also instigated a pattern of continual emigration from Ireland that would persist to the end of the twentieth century before the socalled miracle economy of the Celtic Tiger took hold. In England the consequences of this were felt socially and politically. Hordes of destitute Irish peasants came to the country in search of work, swelling the ranks of the urban working classes. Added to this was the political campaign for an Irish Home Rule parliament that had gathered force at Westminster through the Irish Parliamentary Party under the leadership of Charles Stuart Parnell. Sporadic bomb attacks carried out in England by the militant Fenian movement that emerged in the 1850s – most notably the Clerkenwell prison incident of 1867 – added greatly to hostilities directed towards Irish migrants in London and elsewhere. They also made pressing the need for the British Government to find a constitutional settlement for Ireland. Within these circumstances, the various strands of Ireland’s Protestant community were confronted with farreaching economic, political and cultural challenges. Most of the arable land

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was legally owned by members of the Church of Ireland, affiliates of the Anglican communion and the Established Church of the island until 1866.1 As economic pressures grew through the course of the century, many chose to absent themselves from the country, leaving the running of their estates to land agents recruited largely from the growing ranks of an Irish Catholic petty bourgeoisie. Other landlords became bankrupt in the aftermath of the Great Famine. Political opinion among the Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord class became divided between those who supported the campaign for constitutional reform in the form of a Home Rule Parliament for Ireland, and those who resisted this, fearing it would act as a catalyst for the radicalisation of Irish nationalism. The situation was further complicated by the different trajectory of historical development in the North Eastern part of the island, the only area to fully participate in the British Industrial Revolution. Here, Presbyterianism was the most dominant Protestant denomination, wherein resistance to the notion of an Irish Home Rule parliament was pervasive and intense. Set against this backdrop, it is striking that some of the most influential literature written by authors from an Anglo-Irish Protestant background looked to Eastern Europe for their locations and subjects. I consider here three notable examples, and what meaning we might attribute to the Eastern European theme. The first is a story by the Dublin author Sheridan Le Fanu from his 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly. ‘Carmilla’ takes up the theme of the vampire set in the region of Styria within the pre-World War I Hungarian borders. It was evidently a strong influence on Bram Stoker, another Dublinborn Protestant who had established his reputation as director of the Theatre Royal in London, home to the most celebrated English actor of his day, Henry Irving. Stoker’s Dracula (1897) of course established his fame throughout the world and proved a huge influence on Western European cultural perceptions of Eastern Europe. The third piece considered here is George Bernard Shaw’s first play to receive public performance, Arms and the Man (1894), set in Bulgaria. Another Dublin native from a Protestant background, Shaw would become the pre-eminent figure in British theatre following the huge success of this play at the Avenue Theatre in 1894. Looking at these works, it is evident that certain associations with Eastern Europe 1

The constitutional power of the Church of Ireland had been eroded since the 1830s, with the Catholic Emancipation Bill becoming law in 1829 and the Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833 reducing the numbers and revenues of Church of Ireland Bishops. Cf. F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 2nd edn (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), pp.22-24. R.F. Foster observes the Temporalities Act as a specifically Whig policy, and the defence of the Church of Ireland becoming ‘the key cause for English Tories’ in consequence. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), p.305.

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are formulated that would have a lasting effect, fortifying an ethos of progress central to British imperial advancement during the course of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the preponderant ambivalence of ‘Carmilla’ and Dracula point in one direction to an internal questioning of that ideology, while the assured criticisms of Shaw’s play open up a fissure between the traditionalism of aristocracy and the modernity of technological advance within the British Imperial project. My contention is that this over-determined aspect of ideology as demonstrated in the representations of Eastern Europe in these works relates directly to the circumstances of Protestantism within Ireland towards the end of the nineteenth century. As such, it points to the imagining of Eastern Europe in late-nineteenth century British literature as a projection of anxieties deriving in part from the Irish Question within the Union.

2. Aristo-Exotic East: ‘Carmilla’ Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ opens with the following account of the narrator’s family circumstances: In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvellously cheap, I really don’t see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.2

The image we are given here approximates to something of a medieval fiefdom. The contrast drawn between English affluence and the moderation of this part of Hungary participates in a general discourse of civilisation versus barbarity that was accentuated during the course of the nineteenth century in England. The emphasis here is upon marginality, an emphasis sustained through the course of the narrative in several ways, most notably in its cryptic elements. But the passage also indicates how the story will not simply reiterate that general discourse. There is the subtle intimation that this family would count for little among the wealthy of England, perhaps suggesting a general decline of aristocratic culture as pecuniary values came to exercise a pervasive influence. But what is more striking is the fact that the value of money itself is called into question. Beyond a certain point, money proves of no value in adding to the wealth and luxury of this family. Notable is the relative ease with which the setting can be transposed to rural Ireland in the 2

Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’, in In a Glass Darkly, ed. by Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.243-319 (p.244).

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nineteenth century. The narrator, who will go on to describe her encounters with Carmilla, has an English name but has never been to England. Her circumstances are immediately identifiable with those of many among the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, of English ancestry but living in an environment entirely removed from contemporary English society. That image of ‘this lonely and primitive place’ is typical of representations of rural Ireland in literature of early-nineteenth century Romanticism, most notably the novels of Maria Edgeworth. Furthermore, the dubious value of money in a remote landscape is as relevant to the Ireland Le Fanu knew as the Hungary he imagined.

3. Map-Making: Dracula Next is the famous opening entry of Jonathan Harker’s journal at the beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: 3 May Bistriz – Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is hear of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule. [. . .] Having some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a noble of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place.3

By contrast to ‘Carmilla’, the dominant perspective here is that of the traveller from the ‘advanced’ metropolitan West. Unlike the medieval setting opening Le Fanu’s tale, metropolitan modernity frames the narrative. Harker’s sense of punctuality points to a systematic organisation of temporal experience at odds with the esoteric disruption of time in ‘Carmilla’, a measure of the impact the standardisation of time was to have upon modern consciousness, following the official recognition of Greenwich Mean Time as the international standard at the International Meridian Conference of 1884. The value placed upon systematically organised information, the basis of knowledge within the Enlightenment discourse of science, is also strikingly in 3

Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. by Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.1f.

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evidence. Harker visits the British Museum to check maps and information on the region to which he has been invited. The presumption of the superiority, but also the limits, of Enlightenment discursive forms is evident in his reference to the Ordnance Survey maps, considered a sure guide by virtue of the rigorous scientific methods of measurement upon which they are based. Nevertheless, the parallels between ‘Carmilla’ and Dracula are striking. Harker is struck by the fact that the room in which he dines is furnished in the most expensive manner conceivable, yet there are no servants and no reading materials.4 Like the schloss the Karnsteins inhabit in ‘Carmilla’, a disjunction of privilege and moderation is evident here that brings to mind the distinctive circumstances of many Protestant landowners in Ireland from the period of the Land Wars and Home Rule campaign from the 1870s. It is clear that Stoker’s novel endorses an ideology of social progress pervasive in British society during the course of the nineteenth century, even as it manifests anxieties latent within this ideology. Nonetheless, Harker’s allusion to the Ordnance Survey is telling in an Irish context; the Survey was first undertaken in Ireland supervised by officers of the Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery, Col. Thomas Colby and Thomas Larcom, working in coordination with noted antiquarian scholars of the Royal Irish Academy, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry and George Petrie.5 The project was one of the most ambitious undertakings of its kind, involving not just the systematic mapping of Ireland through the triangulation method, but also the collation of copious amounts of folklore materials related to localities and town lands throughout the island. Committing himself to a journey into territory as yet unmapped according to the scientific method of the Ordnance Survey, Harker is not simply replicating the model of imperial adventurer pervasive in nineteenth-century English fiction. He is also reflecting the impact of the cartographic project and collation of folklore materials carried out in Ireland during the course of the century. The Ordnance Survey experiment was essentially a process of translation by which unfamiliar Irish territory and customs might be made amenable to British administrative structures in Ireland. Set as it is in “unmapped” territory and concerned with the acquisition of archaic knowledge, Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ also displays the influence of the Ordnance Survey project on Anglo-Irish authors in the nineteenth century. In the figure of Baron Vordenburg, whose studies of archaic documents lead to the discovery of the grave Countess Millarca, Le Fanu’s tale calls to mind leading antiquarian scholars like John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry asso4 5

Stoker, p.19. For a comprehensive overview of the Survey’s history, cf. J.H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

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ciated with the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, men whose duty it was to gather and systematise the folklore attached to the Gaelic names of townlands and villages throughout the country.6 At the end of the story the narrator relates that Vordenburg had retired to Gratz where, surviving on the paltry sum that was the remainder of the once great estates of his family in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the study of the archaic traditions around vampirism.7 In many respects this fits with the description R.F. Foster gives of W.B. Yeats as a representative figure of a particular strand of Irish Protestantism: ‘an insecure middle class, with a race memory of elitism and a predisposition towards seeking a refuge in the occult’.8

4. Balkanising Romance: Arms and the Man Thirdly we turn to Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man of 1894, which opens with the following scene: Night. A lady’s bedchamber in Bulgaria, in a small town near the Dragoman Pass, late in November in the year 1885. Through an open window with a little balcony a peak of the Balkans, wonderfully white and beautiful in the starlit snow, seems quite close at hand, though is really miles away. The interior of the room is not like anything to be seen in the West of Europe. It is half rich Bulgarian, half cheap Viennese. [. . .] On the balcony a young lady, intensely conscious of the romantic beauty of the night, and of the fact that her own youth and beauty are part of it, is gazing at the snowy Balkans. She is in her nightgown, well covered by a long mantle of furs, worth, on a moderate estimate, about three times the furniture of her room.9

In the attention the scene gives to the economic disparity of East and West, and in the discourse of Romanticism upon which it draws in representing the East, this recalls Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ in significant respects. As the narrator in ‘Carmilla’ descends from an old Hungarian family whose wealth would 6

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George Petrie oversaw the topographical section of the Survey, engaging O’Donovan and O’Curry in the process. Gearóid Denvir describes these figures as two of ‘the giants of Irish scholarship in the nineteenth century’. O’Donovan travelled the country between 1834 and 1842, compiling detailed material concerning the history and folklore of the twenty-nine counties he visited. Like Le Fanu’s Baron Vordenburg, both O’Donovan and O’Curry collected old manuscripts, later compiled in publications such as O’Curry’s Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History. Cf. Gearóid Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish, 1800-1890’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, pp.544-598 (p.558f). Le Fanu, pp.243-319 (p.316). R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1993), p.232. Foster points out that Yeats knew Bram Stoker and planned a visit to Dracula’s original castle, a plan abandoned because of the outbreak of world war in 1914 (ibid., p.220). George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (London: Constable and Co., 1898), p.3.

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not be considered significant in England, so the Petkoff family of Shaw’s play enjoy a status in Bulgaria their wealth would not afford them in Vienna. Apart from this, however, Le Fanu’s story and Shaw’s play develop in different directions. Moving into an exoticised interior landscape, western European values of industry, progress and commercial power prove irrelevant and useless in the landscape of ‘Carmilla’. The narrator is brought into a hidden world of cryptic meaning, artistic mystery and illicit desire – any cognisance of a society on the march of social advance fades on the horizon. By contrast, Shaw employs some of the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama to dramatise the clash of West and East as one of democratic republicanism at odds with a frivolous aristocratic medievalism. The opening scene sets this up beautifully – the stage design would have fitted perfectly in the melodramas of Dion Boucicault for example. Placing the beautiful Raina against the snowy balkan mountain backdrop, Shaw recognised the visual impact of romantic settings like the ruin of an ancient castle on a bold headland against the wild atlantic that provides the opening for Bouciault’s The Shaughraun of 1874.10 Shaw knew that London audiences would never buy the intellectual theatre of social criticism Ibsen had cultivated, except where the conventions of melodrama were adopted, if only to be subverted in the end. This melodramatic aspect shows through especially in the almost hysterical romanticising of the young Raina Petkoff who self-consciously performs the role of the beautiful young Princess at every moment. Raina falls in love not so much with the mercenary Swiss soldier Captain Bluntschli as with the hackneyed image of romance set against the Balkan backdrop that their acquaintance suggests in her mind. Through the course of the play, Shaw sets these romantic situations up only to deflate them through the medium of Bluntschli, thereby giving his audiences in London satisfyingly romantic, comic, melodramatic moments while prompting them to a degree of critical reflection. Shaw’s political beliefs complicated his relationship to Ireland as the country came under the influence of a literary nationalist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Over the course of that century, Irish Republicanism – founded in the 1790s as a radical political movement – was absorbed into nationalist ideology, making it difficult to articulate republicanism as an internationalist discourse within the country. Indeed, Arms and the Man sets up a conflict that would have seemed curious in an Irish context at the end of the century – Bluntschli’s Swiss civic republicanism in direct conflict with the Balkan romantic nationalism of the Petkoff family and Major Sergius Saranoff returning from battle with the Serbian army. Turning to Bulgaria and the fraught landscape of the Balkans, Shaw was able to articulate a 10

Dion Boucicault, Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987), p.259.

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set of political perspectives that would have appeared paradoxical within Ireland, also expressing republican attitudes sufficiently removed from the Irish context so as not to appear a tacit endorsement of Fenian activities.

5. The Ethnic East In different ways, then, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw displaced onto Eastern European settings issues deriving from the circumstances of Anglo-Irish Protestantism within the shifting Irish political landscape of the late nineteenth century. This raises the question as to the nature of the relation these works bear to the geographical territories in which they are set, whether or not they extend beyond the projection of anxieties internal to Irish-British relations at the end of the nineteenth century. Part of what interested these authors was the existence of various ethnicities within Eastern Europe and their claims to nationhood. Count Dracula proudly asserts his identity as a member of an ancient race, the Szekelys, a Hungarianspeaking people distinct from the Magyars.11 Dracula is a novel about the purity and contamination of blood-line. Dracula claims a pure line of descent from the Szekelys, but seeks to renew this race by releasing vampires into English society, literally raising the spectre of a populace contaminated with the undead. Thus the theme of race itself is central to Dracula and Eastern Europe, the territory from which it takes its power. In the opening scene of Arms and the Man, Catherine Petkoff idolises the image of Major Sergius Saranoff defying the orders of his Russian commanders and leading a cavalry charge; ‘our gallant splendid Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like an avalanche and scattering the wretched Serbs and their dandified Austrian officers like chaff’.12 Shaw is ridiculing Catherine here through hyperbole, and the object of her romantic imagining, Sergius, proves what he disparagingly terms the Byronic type.13 Yet the scene imagined is historically significant, directing attention to the instabilities of the Hapsburg Empire consequent upon the strengthening of nationalist identity within Eastern Europe. These might be traced to 1848, the year of the Hungarian revolution and also the year in which a Slavic congress was held in Prague. Joep Leerrsen points out that the Czech historian and activist František Palacký withdrew from the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 because he felt that the interests of Bohemian Slavs could not be adequately represented in a German assembly.14 Against the backdrop of 11 12 13 14

Stoker, p.29. Shaw, p.20. Ibid., p.44. Joep Leerrsen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), pp.155f.

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the Pan-Slavic movement as it developed during the course of the century, Shaw’s image of the Bulgarian Saranoff, charging against a Serb-Austrian combination, proves, however unintentionally, more than a punctuation of romantic nationalist aspiration through sardonic hyperbole. It captures a division among slavic peoples of the nineteenth century, which Leerssen describes as ‘the rift between the Austro-Slavic and the Russophile wing’ within Pan-slavism.15 In Arms and the Man, Major Petkoff tells his daughter that all the officers in the Serb army are Austrian, just as all the officers in their own Bulgarian army are Russian. Ostensibly a comic deflation of Raina’s adolescent fantasies of chivalry, Petkoff’s off-hand statement names precisely this tension within the Pan-slavic movement.16

6. Antique Hybridity The representation of Eastern European ethnicity in these works is a telling interplay of tradition and hybridity. ‘Carmilla’, Dracula and Arms and the Man each look eastwards for origins and images of antiquity. Discovering these, they also present landscapes of diverse, multifarious ethnicities and ethnic movement. The layered, circular narrative movement of ‘Carmilla’ conveys the discordant effect this generates. Entering a deserted village in which the Karnstein family had once resided, General Spieldsdorf encounters a woodman who relays to him the story of how the village came to be deserted over fifty years previously. It was reputedly plagued by vampires, who were tracked to their graves and destroyed according to “proceedings” laid down in law, but only after the deaths of many villagers. It is only when a Moravian nobleman arrived at the village, however, that it was finally relieved of this torment, granting him the right to remove the tomb of Countess Mircalla.17 The narrator’s father relates the woodman’s story to Baron Vordenburg, asking him how he came to locate the position of this tomb. The Baron reveals that he had many journals and papers written by that Moravian nobleman on the subject of vampires that guided him, and that in his youth this man had been in love with the Countess before her early death. Significantly, the Baron also reveals that, though known as a Moravian nobleman, this man was, in fact, a native of Upper Styria, the area in Hungary in which the narrator’s castle dwelling is located.18 The deeper the narrative probes into a past through which its sense of tradition is conveyed, the more unstable it becomes. The constant shiftings from one narrative to another has its ethnic 15 16 17 18

Ibid., p.156. Shaw, p.47. Le Fanu, pp.243-319 (pp.307f). Ibid., pp.317f.

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corollary in the figure of the Moravian nobleman who turns out to be a native Hungarian. Arguing against the postcolonial view of the Ordnance Survey Project in Ireland as one of conquest and assimilation, Edith Shillue regards it instead as the outcome of ‘a series of perpetual adjustments born of continual linguistic negotation’.19 If we accept Vordenburg as a type of antiquarian scholar with which the Survey was associated, then it is credible to see these adjustments borne out in the intra- and inter-narrative diversions through which the history of the region is uncovered. If Dracula’s speech to Harker on the noble achievements of the Szekely race demonstrates steadfast power in a continuous line of descent over many centuries, it also exhibits a turbulent past marked by a host of ethnic conflicts. He boasts of the Szekelys repelling the Magyars, the Lombards, the Avars and the Turks at different points in history. He speaks of the admiration Arpad held for the Szekelys, the warrior leader whose entry into the Carpathian basin is still commemorated as the foundation of the Magyar nation. He claims that the Szekelys succeeded in repelling the Turks when the Magyars and the Wallachs fell to the Ottoman forces; of how they ‘threw off the Hungarian yoke’ when the Magyars were defeated by the Turks at the battle of Mohacs in 1526.20 Intending to intimidate Harker with a sense of the power and durability of his tribe, the speech is actually a confusion of sentiments that suggest cunning as much as bravery. The Szekelys are praised for winning the admiration of the Magyar leader Arpad, for repelling the Turks when the Magyars were defeated and yet also for liberating themselves from the Magyars through Turkish victory. Thus Ottoman defeat and Ottoman victory are equally taken as signs of Szekely greatness, indicating how expedient the Count’s speech is with historical events. Much of the dialogue in Arms and the Man is spent precisely in ridiculing the kind of hubris on display in Dracula’s speech to Harker. When Raina discovers the Swiss mercenary soldier Bluntschli hiding in the family drawing-room, she warns him that she is a noble, ‘a Petkoff’; to which he replies ‘a Pet what?’ Forced to explain that she belongs to the wealthiest and most respected family in Bulgaria, Raina’s sense of importance has been fatally compromised by the cheap joke. Bluntschli’s attempt to recover a due sense of deference to her self-declared aristocratic credentials fails to disguise his indifference: ‘I beg your pardon. The Petkoffs, to be sure. How stupid of me!’21 When Sergius challenges Bluntschli to a duel because of what he 19

20 21

Edith Shillue, ‘Eluding Containment – Orality and the Ordnance Survey Memoir in Ireland’, Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. by Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp.187-200 (p.188). Stoker, p.19. Shaw, p.34.

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perceives to be a rivalry over Raina, the Swiss turns the proposal into a farce, declaring that, as he had a choice of weapons, he would choose a machine gun.22 Through the medium of Bluntschli, Shaw belittles the heroic pretensions of small-nation ethnic nationalism as it had developed through the course of the century in Europe. In so doing, the play suffers from a degree of ideological myopia to characterise British perceptions of Eastern Europe as backward. Yet there is also a sense in which Bluntschli’s mercenary indifference to nations whose army he serves proves a curiously accurate mirror of the variety and mutability of Eastern European ethnicities, a striking constrast to the more rigidly settled state boundaries of Western European nations as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Shaw’s choice of Switzerland rather than France as a model civic republic is telling here, given its recognition of French, German and Italian as official languages and its relatively peaceful history since 1815. The idea of Eastern Europe as a region characterised by demonstrations of national pride and folklore inheritance in Shaw’s play sits in tension with that of a landscape shaped by an array of different ethnicities with long histories of movement and intersection. The sense of unease this ethnic mutability generates comes across strikingly in the figure of the wanderer the narrator describes in Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’: It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that generally accompany deformity. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic-lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to make my father laugh. They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots, squirrels, fish, and hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great neatness and startling effect.23

A figure from a medieval past, the wanderer counters the stabilising element of continuity Herder identified in European folk cultures through his collections of German folk songs, Volkslieder (1778-79), and his Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772). As with the rest of ‘Carmilla’ the past disturbs rather than assures. The image plays out the tension between purity and contamination to characterise the vampire theme in both ‘Carmilla’ and Dracula. The hunchback’s deformity corresponds to the monster creatures he carries, literally compounds of different species. This hints at the influence of Darwinism on Le Fanu and the idea of entropy as consequent upon the hybridisation of species, an idea put forward in terms of race in Arthur Gobineau’s The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, which was published in English in 22 23

Ibid., p.76. Le Fanu, pp.243-319, (pp.267f.).

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1856.24 Hybridity in this instance proves a source of fascination and anxiety. The malevolant, uncanny figure of the wanderer-magician encapsulates Le Fanu’s exoticised representation of Eastern Europe. Here, multi-ethnic society – the measure of a cosmopolitan modernity – is found within feudal and folkloric settings. Robert Young points out that the positive emphasis laid upon hybridity as a counter to essentialism in contemporary postcolonial theory underplays the fact that the term is of the nineteenth century, used originally in the description of physiology: ‘While cultural factors determined its physiological status, the use of hybridity today prompts questions about the ways in which contemporary thinking has broken absolutely with the racialized formulations of the past’.25 The labyrinthine narrative form through which the folkoric, the aristocratic, and the multi-ethnic intersect in Le Fanu’s gothic tale testifies to the pertinence of Young’s observation.

7. Conclusion In distinctive ways, all three writers are treating a myth of European origins in which the idea of Europe itself is up for discussion. In this regard, it is interesting that the Budapest of Stoker’s Dracula and the Bulgaria of Shaw’s Arms and the Man are seen to trail off into a Turkish Ottoman antiquity. If ‘Carmilla’ turns to Hungary as the seat of an arcane aristocratic culture within which time itself appears suspended, Shaw’s play presents Bluntschli as the Swiss clock of democratic modernity that will strike a stark contrast with those facile pretences of grandeur to characterise the Petkoff estate in Bulgaria. Furthermore, if this imagining of Europe formulates an idea of Eastern Europe in the process, it also casts in doubt the frame of civility and barbarity as the normative discourse through which the non-European is imagined. The process of orientalising through which the non-European is created, in other words, is a process at work within the European itself. In his description of Major Sergius Saranoff, Shaw has given us one striking instance: [H]is assertive chin, would not be out of place in a Parisian salon, shewing that the clever imaginative barbarian has an acute critical faculty which has been thrown into intense activity by the arrival of western civilisation in the Balkans.26

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Arthur de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races: With Particular Reference to their Respective Influence on the Civil and Political History of Mankind (London: J.P. Lippincott, 1856). Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p.6. Shaw, p.27.

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Even as it conforms to a sterotypical Western view of the Balkans, the image also tacitly concedes how cosmopolitanism – the Paris salon – must draw on figures from traditional societies to lend it sophisticiation and energy. The complex, layered nature of the representations of Eastern Europe in these Anglo-Irish writers suggests a striking cognisance of the similarities in cultural and ethnic circumstances of Eastern European territories and their own inherited backgrounds.27

Works Cited Andrews, J.H., A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in NineteenthCentury Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) Boucicault, Dion, Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987) Butler, Hubert, In the Land of Nod (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1996) Denvir, Gearóid, ‘Literature in Irish, 1800-1890’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, pp.544-598 Foster, R.F., Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1988) —, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1993) Gobineau, Arthur de, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races: With Particular Reference to their Respective Influence on the Civil and Political History of Mankind (London: J.P. Lippincott, 1856) Leerrsen, Joep, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008) Le Fanu, Sheridan, ‘Carmilla’, in In a Glass Darkly, ed. by Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.243-319 Lyons, F.S.L., Ireland since the Famine, 2nd edn (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973) Shaw, George Bernard, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (London: Constable and Co., 1898) Shillue, Edith, ‘Eluding Containment – Orality and the Ordnance Survey Memoir in Ireland’, in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. by Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helf (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp.187-200

27

This Anglo-Irish identification with Eastern Europe would be sustained most directly in the figure of Hubert Butler, essayist and commentator from County Kilkenny, who taught in Zagreb and St. Petersburg before the Second World War, cf. In the Land of Nod (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1996).

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Stoker, Bram, Dracula, ed. by Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge Press, 1995)

Jonas Takors

‘The Russians could no longer be the heavies’: From Russia with Love and the Cold War in the Bond Series Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love reflects themes of the early Cold War. 1950s Britain was deeply concerned with communist defectors, and cases like the Burgess Maclean affair made it to the headlines. Not only are two of the novel’s central characters defectors, but their vitae and actions are used to contrast the political systems of Britain and the Soviet Union. The USSR functions as a distorting mirror to highlight the advantages of British society over the enemy. Yet only six years later, changes in the Cold War’s political climate led to significant alterations in the adaptation of From Russia with Love for film. Anti-communist sentiments are toned down, and international terrorism poses a bigger threat than Anglo-Soviet antagonism. Thus two variations of the same plot illustrate the Bond series’ versatility in mirroring and anticipating societal concerns.

1. Introduction: Spy Scares in 1950’s Britain Ian Fleming was obsessed with spy stories in real life. As an officer at the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), he had gained insight into the workings of the British intelligence machinery during the Second World War. Furthermore, he had initiated many new projects himself. Some of them, such as the 30 Assault Unit, were a success, while other rather eccentric ones were never implemented.1 After the war, as a civilian writer and journalist, Fleming consumed all news from the world of espionage with an acute interest. He frequently drew the inspiration for his Bond novels from real incidents.2 In his preface to the first edition of From Russia with Love (1952) Fleming wrote: 1

2

Cf. John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp.101-161 and Ben Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), pp.14, 18f. The head of SMERSH in From Russia with Love is based on a Soviet official and Rosa Klebb’s fictional vita is connected to that of the Spanish Revolutionary Andrés Nin as well as other historical personae, cf. Macintyre pp.99 and 104f. The murder on the Orient Express was not copied from Agatha Christie’s story of the same name but mirrored the incident of a defecting Romanian attaché called Eugene Karp, who was killed by Soviet counterintelligence in 1950, cf. Charlie Higson, ‘Introduction’, in From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming (London: Penguin, 2006), pp.v-viii (p.vii), also cf. Macintyre, p.106. At the very time of the publication of From Russia with Love, the Soviets broke into and publicly exposed the American tunnel built to intercept their cable traffic in Berlin, cf. Jeremy Black, The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p.28. This might be reflected in the tunnel which Ali Kerim Bey, in the novel, uses to observe the Russian consulate in Istanbul.

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Not that it matters, but a great deal of the background to this story is accurate. SMERSH, a contraction of Smiert Spionam – Death to Spies – exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet3 government. At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikob was its chief. My description of his appearance is correct. Today the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them at No 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow. The Conference Room is faithfully described and the Intelligence chiefs who meet round the table are real officials who are frequently summoned to that room for purposes similar to those I have recounted.4

Unfortunately, these claims are wrong and have to be dismissed since the SMERSH agency had been disbanded as early as 1946. While Fleming’s misconception may in fact be attributed to the obscurity of Stalin’s secret state, this preface points at a larger issue:5 In the 1950s, both Great Britain and the United States were fascinated and shocked by the threat of Soviet moles spying on British society and the dangerous secrets which defecting individuals might carry to the other side of the Iron Curtain. The years between 1951 and 1956 when Fleming wrote the early Bond novels shook Britain’s self-confidence. The fear of a communist ‘fifth column’ was on the rise.6 Most notably, the defection of the government officials Burgess and Maclean from Great Britain to the Soviet Union, which became known as the story of the Cambridge Five, shocked the British intelligence apparatus and ruined its reputation especially in the US. After the scandal, the US were even more reluctant than before to share atomic secrets, and any hopes to repeal the restrictive McMahon act of 1946 were abandoned.7 The case of Burgess and Maclean resurfaced in September 1955 when a White Paper was published.8 The ensuing parliamentary debate made it to the 3

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Most contemporary British newspapers and Fleming himself kept referring to all citizens of the Soviet Union as “Russians”. While the term Soviets or Soviet people is a political conception, I will stick to this more inclusive denomination for the sake of coherence. Tony Bennett and Janet Woolacott, ‘The Moments of Bond’, in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, ed. by Christoph Lindner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp.13-31 (pp.18f.; cf. p.37). Cf. Macintyre, p.112 and n.n. ‘Russia Unveils Stalin Spy Service’, BBC (19 April 2003) [accessed 22 August 2009]. Cf. Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), p.425. Cf. Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain 17901988 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p.183. Cf. Macintyre, pp.104f. and Thomas J. Price, ‘The Changing Image of the Soviets in the Bond Saga: From Bond-Villains to “Acceptable Role Partners”’, Journal of Popular Culture, 26.1 (1996), 17-37 (pp.27f.). For the general impact of the case on the British public cf. also Sheila Kerr, ‘British Cold War Defectors: The Versatile, Durable Toys of Propagandists’, in British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-1951, ed. by Richard J. Al-

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headlines. The Times, reporting on 26 October, titled its article ‘Service Sullied’ and wondered about ‘third man activities’. It quoted MP Lipton suspecting Harold Philby, who was indeed responsible and defected in 1961. Many considered the White Paper unsatisfactory and regarded it as a cover-up.9 All parties agreed that there were ‘wider issues involved’.10 The converse defections of KGB officers Nikholai Khokhlov to the US and Valdimir Petrov to Australia in 1954, as well as three other prominent cases shed further light on Soviet influence in the Western hemisphere since those Soviet officials were able to name many communist agents in the West.11 All these cases took place before or during the writing of From Russia with Love and are reflected in Fleming’s novel. Public interest certainly contributed to the success of Fleming’s fictional negotiation of such topics in his spy stories. And while defection is a central motif of the novel, the film of 1963 takes yet another approach towards the Cold War.

2. From Russia with Love – The Novel Communist villains corroding Western society from within, like Le Chiffre, Mr. Big and Hugo Drax, already appeared in earlier Bond novels such as Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954) and Moonraker (1955) respectively.12 Yet the presence of defectors introduces a new element to the Bond plots. In From Russia with Love, they are used to contrast the supposed values of the Western world, as exemplified by Britain, and the political system of the USSR. On the one hand, Red Grant deserts the British army to become SMERSH’s top henchman. On the other hand, Tatiana Romanova, a beautiful cipher clerk used as a lure in SMERSH’s plan to assassinate Bond, is finally convinced that going over to Britain is her only chance to lead a self-determined, happy life.

9

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drich (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.111-142. Fleming himself, too, was ‘fascinated by the subject’ as his biographers observe, e.g. Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), pp.213, 221, 230, 283. N.N., ‘Parliament’, The Times, 26 October 1955, p.4; cf. n.n., ‘Offer of Debate on Burgess and Maclean’, The Times, 26 October 1955, p.8; Aldrich, p.436. ‘Offer of Debate’, p.8. Khoklov is mentioned frequently in From Russia with Love, which reflects the common interest in this case, e.g. pp.309, 312, 316. The same holds for Burgess and Maclean, e.g. pp.46, 53, 130. Cf. Black, p.8. Burgess and Maclean are also mentioned in many other Bond novels of the 1950s. Cf. Deborah Banner, ‘Why Don’t They Just Shoot Him? The Bond Villains and Cold War Heroism’, in The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, ed. by Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp.121-134 (p.126). In the novels, Hugo Drax is probably the most prototypical mole since he disguises as a government contracted weapons manufacturer while he plans to destroy London with a nuclear missile.

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The two defectors and their decisions for going over to the enemy provide vivid contrasts within the novel. Fleming thus conveys an insider’s view of both political systems and uses the characters’ decisions to comment on the societies in which they choose to live. As the following discussion will show, correspondences and contrasts established within the novel can be read as a comment on the battle of ideas which the British – unsettled by recent defections – were afraid to loose. The image of the Soviet Union is built up to function as a contrastive foil for an overly positive image of British society. From the beginning, From Russia with Love presents communism as a serious threat when Colonel General Grozaboyschikov, the head of SMERSH, boasts of the USSR’s victories: ‘[R]evolution in Morocco, arms to Egypt, friendship with Yugoslavia, trouble in Cyprus, riots in Turkey, strikes in England, great political gains in France – there is no front in the world on which we are not quietly advancing’.13 The power of the Soviet apparatus is further emphasised by the fact that more than the first third of the book deals exclusively with SMERSH’s departmental heads drawing their schemes for 007’s assassination (cf. pp.1-122). They muse on a potential aim for their ‘act of terrorism in the intelligence field’ (p.50), and General Vozdvishensky, head of the Intelligence Department, grudgingly acknowledges Great Britain’s – or rather, in the novel’s noteworthy terms, England’s – power: Their Security Service is excellent. England, being an island, has great security advantages and their so-called MI5 employs men with good education and good brains. Their Secret Service is still better. They have notable successes. In certain types of operations we are constantly finding that they have been there before us. Their agents are good. They pay them little money [...] but they serve with devotion. Yet these agents have no special privileges in England, no relief from taxation and no special shops such as we have, from which they can buy cheap goods [...]. It is perhaps the Public School and University tradition. The love of adventure. But still it is odd that they play their game so well, for they are not natural conspirators. (p.55, my emphasis)

It is interesting how the very traditions which Fleming himself had enjoyed – public schools and universities – are here lauded as a key to the country’s success. Furthermore, a high-ranking Soviet official denounces the supposedly egalitarian USSR and has to admit that their civil servants have access to privileges which the truly democratic British do not enjoy.14 James Bond, 13

14

Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love (London: Penguin, 2006), p.45. All further page numbers given in parentheses refer to this edition. This theme is further strengthened when shortly thereafter SMERSH’s Head of Planning, Kronsteen, criticises Romanova’s reliability since her name connects her to the Tsarist family. He is rebuked by Klebb: ‘Her grandparents were distantly related to the Imperial Family. But she does not frequent buivshi [former] circles. Anyway, all our grandparents were former people. There is nothing one can do about it.’ (p.117) Fleming frequently uses Soviet officials to voice such disconcerting confessions about the hidden continuity of the Soviet/Russian state’s elites.

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who arrives in Turkey where SMERSH has set up the trap for him, arrives at a similar conclusion after having spent some time in Istanbul: He reflected briefly on the way the Russians ran their centres – with all the money and equipment in the world, while the [British] Secret Service put against them a handful of adventurous, underpaid men, like this one [Ali Kerim Bey], with his second-hand Rolls Royce and his children to help him. Yet Kerim had the run of Turkey. Perhaps, after all, the right man was better than the right machine. (p.198)

Using conventional cold-war stereotypes, the two ‘bloc actors’15 are contrasted with one another, and this contrast is set in black and white. It is further intensified by parallel events in the plot which take place both in the USSR and Britain. Concerning government, the Soviet state establishes rigid hierarchies which leave the subordinates of SMERSH in fear of their superiors: The moujiks had received the knout. General G gave them a few minutes to lick their wounds and recover from the shock of the official lashing that had been meted out. No one said a word for the defence […]. And no one questioned the right of the Head of SMERSH, who shared the guilt with them, to deliver this terrible denunciation. The Word had gone out from the Throne, and General G had been chosen as the mouthpiece of the Word. It was a great compliment to General G that he had been thus chosen, a sign of grace, a sign of coming preferment, and everyone present made a careful note of the fact that, in the Intelligence hierarchy, General G, with SMERSH behind him, had come to the top of the pile. (p.48)

In contrast, Great Britain turns out to be a society of almost equals both in its administration as well as in domestic life. For example, Bond endorses his housekeeper’s disregard for social hierarchy: ‘To Bond, one of May’s endearing qualities was that she would call no man “sir” except – Bond had teased her about it years before – English kings and Winston Churchill’ (p.124). In quite the same way, MI6 seems to have a flat hierarchy which rests on mutual respect: ‘“Can you come up?” It was the Chief-of-Staff. […] M gestured to the chair opposite him across the red leather desk. Bond sat down and looked across into the tranquil, lined sailor's face that he loved, honoured and obeyed’ (pp.133f.). Yet more importantly, the two characters which travel both worlds, the USSR and Great Britain, direct the audience’s sympathies and provide a telling contrast. Tatiana Romanova faces a predictable and party-controlled life before she becomes a part of SMERSH’s plotting: Of course, you had to pay for being in the MGB [Ministry for State Security]. The uniform put you apart from the world. People were afraid, which didn’t suit the nature of most girls, and you were confined to the society of other MGB girls and men, one of whom, when the time came, you would have to marry in order to stay with the ministry. And they worked like the devil – eight to six, five and a half days a week, and only

15

Price, pp.17-37 (p.17).

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forty minutes off for lunch in the canteen. But it was a good lunch, a real meal, and you could do with little supper and save up for the sable coat that would one day take the place of the well worn Siberian fox. (p.89)

Romanova has resigned herself to these prospects and is even quite happy with them. However, this changes after she has met 007 for the first time: ‘The Romanov blood might well have given a yearning for men other than that type of modern Russian officer she would meet – stern, cold, mechanical, basically hysterical and, because of their Party education, infernally dull’ (p.196).16 And while initially Tatiana is grateful for a chance to advance in the MGB’s apparatus, her confrontation with a Western lifestyle leads her to abandon the Party’s values. Bond comes to symbolise all advantages of the Western World to her, and her choice is also one of sexual liberation: ‘There was a wonderful sense of freedom being alone with a man like this and knowing that she would not be punished for it. It was terribly exciting’ (p.233).17 Thus she experiences something common to all Bond girls, which Umberto Eco came to consider as one of the structural functions of all Bond narratives: ‘through meeting Bond she appreciates her positive human chances’ (p.154).18 In just the opposite way, Red Grant opts to defect to the Soviet side. However, his choice is not based on the desire to live a fulfilled life, but caused by his insane urge to kill. He is described as ‘an advanced manic depressive, whose periods coincided with the full moon’ (p.30). His lunacy leads him to kill animals at first, but then also humans on a regular basis (p.20). Growing up in Northern Ireland, he joins the National Service towards the end of the Second World War and, like Tatiana Romanova, briefly benefits from English influence: ‘The training period in England sobered him, or at least made him more careful when he had “The Feelings”’ (p.21). 16

17

18

This comparison is carried forth even into matters of hygiene when Romanova enters Rosa Klebb’s apartment: ‘It was the smell of the Metro on a hot evening – cheap scent concealing animal odours. People in Russia soak themselves in scent, whether they have had a bath or not, but mostly when they have not and healthy clean girls like Tatiana always walk home’ (p.98). Later she remarks to Bond: ‘“But it is odd that you in the West do not use perfume. All our men do it.” “We wash,” said Bond drily’ (p.265). Cf. also p.237. This again contrasts Tatiana Romanova with the prototypical Russian officer Rosa Klebb, who is described as having a ‘toad like figure’ (p.71) and is characterised by Kronsteen as a ‘neuter’, i.e. (in the novel’s terms) a bisexual incapable of enjoying sex (p.82). This again is one of Fleming’s typical textual strategies, since all villains in his novels are marked as either psychologically, sexually or physically deviant. Cf. Cord Krüger, ‘“Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!“ 007s Widersacher und die Transnationalisierung des Bösen’, in Mythos 007: Die James-Bond-Filme im Fokus der Popkultur, ed. by Andreas Rauscher and others (Mainz: Ventil Verlag, 2007), pp.122-149 (p.128). Cf. Christine Bold, ‘“Under the Very Skirts of Britannia”: Re-reading Women in the James Bond Novels’, in Lindner, pp.169-183 (p.174).

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Yet since his army superiors try to discipline him and punish his brutal fighting methods in army boxing matches, he decides to defect to the Soviet side for clearly stated reasons: ‘He liked all he heard about the Russians, their brutality, their carelessness of human life, and their guile, and he decided to go over to them’ (p.22). He uses a motorcycle to do so and applies at a military post: ‘I am an expert at killing people. I do it very well. I like it’ (p.26). After initial doubts by a lower-ranking officer, Grant receives a post for reasons of policy: A great deal of killing has to be done in the USSR, not because the average Russian is a cruel man, although some of their race are among the cruellest in the world, but as an instrument of policy. People who act against the state are enemies of the state, and the state has no room for enemies […]. In a country with a population of 200,000,000 you can kill many thousands a year without missing them. If, as happened in the two biggest purges, a million people have to be killed in one year, that is also not a grave loss. The serious problem is the shortage of executioners. Executioners have a short ‘life’. They get tired of the work. The soul sickens of it. (pp.30f.)

The message of this is straightforward: Grant’s mental illness links him directly to the Soviet political system since his individual desire to kill corresponds to administrative needs of the communist state apparatus as described in Fleming’s novel. Grant quickly becomes SMERSH’s top executioner and is rewarded with mass executions: ‘with a black hood over his head, he was allowed to carry out executions with various weapons – the rope, the axe, the sub-machine gun’ (p.34). The novel makes it clear that such defectors are highly dangerous to their former mother countries: Grant becomes a key actor in SMERSH’s plot to assassinate Bond when the agency ‘require[s] an assassin with a perfect command of the English tongue’ (p.86). Due to his resentment towards British discipline as he experienced it in his National Service days, Grant takes up the task eagerly: ‘“The target is an English spy. You would like to kill an English spy?” – “Very much indeed Comrade Colonel.” Grant’s enthusiasm was genuine. He asked nothing better than to kill an Englishman. He had accounts to settle with the bastards’ (p.115). However, while Grant poses a serious threat to Bond and MI6, it is highly relevant that Bond is able to overcome his enemy in the end.19 At first, Grant fools Bond and 007 believes him to be a British fellow agent sent to board the Orient Express as reinforcement. Glad to meet with a colleague, Bond rationalises away all oddities in the henchman’s behaviour:

19

Thomas J. Price considered this kind of ending which ultimately consoles and assures its readers one important characteristic of formula fiction, pp.17-37 (p.19).

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It crossed Bond’s mind that he was an Englishman. Perhaps it was the familiar shape of the dark green Kangol cap, or the beige rather well-used mackintosh, that badge of the English tourist, or it may have been the grey-flannelled legs, or the scuffed brown shoes. (p.287) Curious accent. What was it? A hint of brogue – cheap brogue. And something else Bond couldn’t define. Probably came from living too long abroad and talking foreign languages all the time. And that dreadful ‘old man’ all the time. Shyness. (p.291) There was a quick red glare in them. It was as if the safety door of a furnace had been swung open […] Shell shock perhaps or schizophrenia. (pp.291f.)

After he has deceived and stunned Bond in a compartment, Grant triumphs and annoys Bond by constantly ‘old-manning’ him: ‘“For God’s sake, stop calling me ‘old man’.” [...] “Sorry, old man, it’s got to be a habit. Part of trying to be a bloody gentleman. Like these clothes. All from the wardrobe department. They said I’d get by like this. And I did, didn’t I, old man?”’ (p.306) Grant even tells Bond how his and Tatiana Romanova’s deaths are to be staged as a sex scandal: ‘Filthy pictures. Secret cipher machine. Handsome British spy with career ruined murders her and commits suicide. Sex, spies, luxury train, Mr and Mrs Somerset … ! Old man, it’ll run for months! Talk of the Khokhlov case! This’ll knock spots of it. And what a poke in the eye of the famous intelligence service’ (p.312). At the climax of the novel, Bond’s imminent assassination is thus linked to another defector’s case from which 007’s death is meant to detract. It is closely connected to the (original) readership’s lifeworld and recent political events. SMERSH’s plot even takes the media’s role into account. An allegedly left-wing French press under Soviet influence is supposed to spread the news (cf. pp.85 and 312f.). And Grant alludes to one of Britain’s anxieties when he outlines the consequences of the newspaper coverage: ‘No more atom secrets from the Yanks’ (p.313). This is precisely one of the consequences of the 1950s scandals which Britain had to deal with at that time. In conclusion, British anxieties of treasonous moles and defectors are heavily played on in the novel. Grant’s posing as an MI6 agent seems to confirm the fear of communists being able to disguise themselves as British citizens and endangering national security. Yet the defectors’ decisions reflect on both societies and assure the reader that Western values are superior to the Soviet terror state: Tatiana Romanova comes to realise that her life in the West will be better than within the Soviet party apparatus, despite her privileges there. Conversely, Grant assimilates into a society of ‘masochists’ (p.227) which – the novel suggests – best befits his perverse nature. One might argue that this portrayal uses the USSR as distorting mirror rather than as a looking glass, providing stereotypes more than anything else.

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3. Inventing New Enemies: The Film Adaptation The six years that passed between the novel’s publication and its film adaptation led to distinct changes in the climate of the Cold War. When the production of the film began in April 1963, the Cuban Missile Crisis had just been resolved. The immediate threat of nuclear war led many to believe that closer communication and cooperation with the USSR on certain fields was desirable. As the producer of the early Bond films, Albert R. Broccoli, put it: ‘[T]he Russians could no longer be the heavies.’20 Ian Fleming, too, felt the winds of change when he said in retrospect: ‘I have always liked the Russians as a people, and I enjoyed myself when I worked in Moscow, [...] I could not see any point in going on digging at them, especially when the coexistence thing seems to be bearing some fruit. So I closed down Smersh and thought up Spectre instead.’21 As early as in the 1960 short story collection For Your Eyes Only and the 1961 novel Thunderball, Fleming had stopped using the USSR as the main villain, and SPECTRE made its first appearance. More importantly, the eponymous hero of the first Bond film, Dr. No, had been turned into a member of SPECTRE.22 The producer stuck to this pattern of rewritings in order to build up a worthy arch-enemy for 007. The title was probably kept for the film because John F. Kennedy had listed From Russia with Love as one of his favourite books in a Life magazine article in 1961, which ensured its lasting success in Great Britain and the US.23

20 21

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23

Steven Jay Rubin, The James Bond Films (New York, NY: Arlington House, 1981), p.25. Lars Ole Sauerberg, Secret Agents in Fiction: Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Len Deighton (London: Macmillan, 1984), p.160. Interestingly, this decision is still stressed by today’s critics and considered as part of the key to From Russia with Love’s success, e.g. by Michael Brooke: ‘It also had advantages not enjoyed by many later Bond films, notably an intelligent script that retained the substance of Ian Fleming's novel while toning down the overt Cold War politics (the Cuban Missile Crisis had only occurred the previous year).’ Michael Brooke, ‘From Russia With [sic!] Love (1963)’, BFI Screenonline [accessed 23 August 2009]. Cf. Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London: Tauris, 2001), pp.59-60. Umberto Eco, on the other hand, saw such adaptations to the political climate as a makeshift tendency in Fleming’s conservative if not openly fascist writing, cf. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp.161-162. For critics who hold that all post-Fleming Bond films and novels are pure fictions and detached from their cultural context see Sauerberg, p.33. Cf. the novel where the German-Chinese Dr. No is both a criminal and cooperates with the Russians in order to sabotage American missile tests. Sales jumped to 112,000 a week in the US, Macintyre, p.208; cf. Black, p.27. Furthermore, the novel had already been serialised as a comic strip by the Daily Express. Cf. Michael Denning, ‘Licensed to Look: James Bond and the Heroism of Consumption’, in Lindner, pp.56-75 (p.57).

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The film adaptation required a complete reworking of the main characters, and dominant tropes disappeared from the script. The outline of SPECTRE’s plot which, as already mentioned, takes up the novel’s first 122 pages, had to be shortened (about 13 of 110 minutes). The Cold War trope was reduced to just one of many elements in SPECTRE’s scheme to assassinate Bond. Instead, Blofeld’s ‘head of the Planning Department’ Kronsteen decides to play off Great Britain against the Soviets. Significantly, the plan works out precisely because all factions are so obsessed with the day-to-day activities of cold-war espionage that they do not even realise the threat posed by SPECTRE, who are waiting to use the conflict to their advantage. Paranoia and conspiracy enable SPECTRE’s agents to carry out their plans, since the Soviet High Presidium kept Rosa Klebb’s defection to the terrorist organisation a secret and she can still use some of the USSR’s resources. Thus in the whole film the villains Bond encounters have the characteristic of all conspiracy plots, being ‘but the surface challenger of a deeper and more mysterious conspiracy.’24 When henchman Red Grant kills a Soviet agent in Istanbul, Rosa Klebb approves: ‘Good work. Who can the Russians suspect but the British. The Cold War in Istanbul will not remain cold very much longer’.25 Indeed, Ali Kerim Bey, the head of the British station in Istanbul, cannot understand why the Russians suddenly break the truce and try to assassinate him twice (00:47:43). As Cord Krüger remarks, incensing superpowers like Great Britain and the Soviet Union might be one of the maddest things a Bond villain could do in the 1960s.26 There are certainly some parallels to the novel since Tatiana Romanova is told to act as a bait and defects to London together with Bond. And yet again, like in the novel, the Russian cipher clerk suddenly becomes aware of her 24

25

26

This, of course, is also true of the novel and indeed many fictions belonging to the same genre, cf. Price, pp.17-37 (p.21). Yet the film’s plot is more complex since Bond realises that he has been fighting the wrong enemy only at the end. Fredric Jameson considers such revelations in conspirational thrillers the ultimate non-surprise because an overwhelming enemy pulling the strings such as the CIA reflects the audience’s deeper assumptions about the political world system. Cf. Fredric Jameson, ‘Totality as Conspiracy’, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press and BFI Publishing, 1992), pp.9-86 (p.16). From Russia with Love, dir. by Terence Young (UK 1963), 00:30:49. All further time references are given in parentheses in the text. Cf. Krüger, p.126. In fact, the rising tension between the different factions appears as a serious threat: ‘Although the film is at great pains to stress that SPECTRE is playing Britain and the Soviet Union off against each other for its own gain, nevertheless it is not as completely detached from the ideological context of the Cold War as Dr No has been. For the first two thirds of the film Bond believes that he is up against the Russians, and the film draws explicitly on Cold War tensions’. James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007 [1999]), pp.74-75.

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longing for a life with 007 in the West, which is played out in sexual as well as consumerist liberation, for example when Bond presents her with Western clothes. Tatiana’s defection is even more significant since at the end of the film, Klebb – still posing as her SMERSH superior – puts her to a test of loyalty, while keeping Bond at bay with her gun. In a final act of disobedience Romanova saves Bond by shooting her former superior Klebb.27 As in the novel, Grant is portrayed as a lunatic. Rosa Klebb reads out a file on him: ‘Donald Grand. Convicted murderer. Escaped Dartmoor prison in 1960, recruited in Tangier in 1962’ (00:11:50). His leading officer comments: ‘This Grant is one of the best men we’ve ever had. Homicidal paranoiac. Superb material’ (00:12:08). Grant’s defection is thus bereft of all political significance since the script turns him into a criminal working for a terrorist organisation rather than a soldier who went over to the Soviet side. One might even wonder whether Grant is a defector in the ordinary sense since his political convictions are never stated and his biography is reduced to the few sentences quoted above.28 On the Orient Express, Grant is able to disguise himself as a British MI6 agent but fails to imitate the more subtle aspects of British upper-middle class culture. For example, at dinner he orders red wine to go with fish, which seems to indicate his social background (01:21:44).29 Grant is able to capture Bond nevertheless and relishes 007’s surprise at the discovery that his presuppositions about the Soviet enemy have dulled his instincts: ‘Of course, SPECTRE. And it wasn’t a Russian show at all? And you have been playing us off against each other, haven’t you?’ Grant replies: ‘I get a kick out of watching the famous James Bond find out what a bloody fool he has been making of himself’ (01:26:11). In the film, too, Bond’s assassination is to be staged as a sex scandal involving matters of espionage, but the focus of the film has shifted significantly: The defectors’ going over to the enemy is not as central or elaborated as in the novel. The antagonists are not from the Soviet camp but use the warring factions’ obsessive behaviour to their advantage. This might be read as a caveat against an antagonism which had led the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation at the time of the film’s production. Certainly, the film does not yet suggest that British and Soviet forces should cooperate in order 27

28

29

This individual decision which frustrates SPECTRE’s plans seems to show how improvisational skills ultimately triumph over both Soviet apparatchiks and a globalised terror machine’s schemes as embodied by Kronsteen, who is killed by Blofeld for his failure, cf. Krüger, p.129). Defectors were a common topic in British cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s, cf. Shaw, pp.36-62. Cf. Black, p.116. Grant also betrays his criminal nature through his desire for money.

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to face this new kind of global terrorist threat. They are merely co-victims in a conspiracy directed against the existing world order per se.30 It took more than a decade until The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) unravelled a plot in which M and General Gogol from the KGB decide that their agents have to team up to prevent a third World War and nuclear annihilation.31

4. Conclusion It seems to be one of the Bond series’s qualities to expand on Fleming’s ideas and adapt each new Bond novel, film or video game to the dominant issues of its time.32 Cold War antagonism, international terrorism or environmental issues (as in the latest Bond to date, A Quantum of Solace (2008)) provide a changing background for the – as Umberto Eco claims – all too familiar narratives. In the novel, the threat of defectors and moles for British security still served as an exciting plot even if ‘moles and defectors were probably more important in the public realm of propaganda and public perception than in the secret world of intelligence’.33 Only six years later, communism no longer made for a thrilling foe and the film turned the blind antagonism of the Cold War’s factions into the greatest threat to 007’s life. New Bond stories will certainly provide new foils which reflect both Britain’s and an increasingly international audience’s fears in pop culture, as James Chapman claims: ‘While the novels remain rooted in the social and political contexts of the 1950s, the films have responded to changing industrial and cultural circumstances in order to maintain the position at the forefront of popular film culture.’34 30 31

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Cf. Price, pp.17-37 (p.29). Of course, it is Bond who finally wins the day and has to save his female co-agent Amasova, who by that time has fallen in love with him despite having earlier vowed to kill him. The first novel in which Bond is forced to work together with the enemy was Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun (1968). A discussion of the 2005 videogame of From Russia with Love in this article seemed tempting. However, the inclusion of a product which is separated by more than 40 years from the 1963 film into this comparison would hardly have been illuminating. Due to the gameplay of a third person shooter and the plot, the Cold War becomes a background ornament for the game’s action. The producer Glen Schofield voices the priority of setting and background: ‘We chose From Russia with Love for a number of reasons. That one just seemed to have a really great story. It’s kind of a complicated story. Had some wonderful locations here in Russia, here in Turkey and here on the Orient Express and so you had some great places that would, you know, make for a great video game.’ N.N., EA Games [accessed 16 June 2009]. Aldrich, p.435. Chapman, p.48. For a more sceptical, nostalgic voice cf. Price: ‘While perhaps now [in a post-Berlin-Wall world] Bond should be retired to the family estates in Glencoe, Scotland, it is doubtful the Bond industry will allow it. And so as new societal fears emerge, new stories

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Works Cited Aldrich, Richard J., The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001). Banner, Deborah, ‘Why Don’t They Just Shoot Him? The Bond Villains and Cold War Heroism’, in The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, ed. by Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp.121-134 Bennett, Tony and Janet Woolacott, ‘The Moments of Bond’, in Christoph Lindner, pp.13-31 Black, Jeremy, The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) Bold, Christine, ‘“Under the Very Skirts of Britannia”: Re-Reading Women in the James Bond Novels’, in Christoph Lindner, pp.169-183 Brooke, Michael, ‘From Russia With [sic!] Love (1963)’, BFI Screenonline [accessed 23 August 2009] Chapman, James, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007 [1999]) Denning, Michael. ‘Licensed to Look: James Bond and the Heroism of Consumption’, in Christoph Lindner, pp.56-75 Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) Fleming, Ian, From Russia with Love (London: Penguin, 2006) From Russia with Love, dir. by Terence Young (UK 1963) Higson, Charlie, ‘Introduction’, in From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming (London: Penguin, 2006), v-viii Jameson, Fredric, ‘Totality as Conspiracy’, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana UP and BFI Publishing, 1992), pp.9-86 Kerr, Sheila, ‘British Cold War Defectors: The Versatile, Durable Toys of Propagandists’, in British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 19451951, ed. by Richard J. Aldrich (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.111-142 Krüger, Cord, ‘“Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”: 007s Widersacher und die Transnationalisierung des Bösen’, in Mythos 007: Die James-Bond-Filme im Fokus der Popkultur, ed. by Andreas Rauscher and others (Mainz: Ventil Verlag, 2007), pp.122-149

will likely be added to the Bond saga with different villains to be confronted and defeated.’ Price, pp.17-37 (p.35) also cf. Macintyre, p.99.

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Lindner, Christoph, ed. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) Lycett, Andrew, Ian Fleming (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995) Macintyre, Ben, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond (London: Bloomsbury, 2008) Markham, Robert (= Kingsley Amis), Colonel Sun (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968) N.N., ‘Russia Unveils Stalin Spy Service’, BBC (19 April 2003) [accessed 22 August 2009] N.N., ‘Parliament’, The Times, 26 October 1955, p.4 N.N., ‘Offer of Debate on Burgess and Maclean’, The Times, 26 October 1955, p.8 Pearson, John, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966) Porter, Bernard, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790-1988 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) Price, Thomas J., ‘The Changing Image of the Soviets in the Bond Saga: From Bond-Villains to “Acceptable Role Partners”’, Journal of Popular Culture, 26.1 (1996), 17-37 Rubin, Steven Jay, The James Bond Films (New York: Arlington House, 1981) Sauerberg, Lars Ole, Secret Agents in Fiction: Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Len Deighton (London: Macmillan, 1984) Shaw, Tony, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London: Tauris, 2001)

Wolfgang Hochbruck, Elmo Feiten and Anja Tiedemann

‘Vulchanov! Volkov! Aaaaaaand Krum!’: Joanne K. Rowling’s “Eastern” Europe While Joanne K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels make a convincing plea for tolerance and understanding, the range of that understanding is mostly limited to the British Isles. There are several sets of images of “Easts” that spell difference and danger to the community – from the Norman Conquest via the anarchists of the late-nineteenth century to the cold-war period. Characters coming from these “Easts” or associated with them are mostly “othered” out of the peaceable kingdom.

1. Introduction Within the course of her seven Harry Potter novels, J.K. Rowling conjures up an ingenious set of places and characters which become elements of her “wizarding world”. The most remarkable fact about this world is that it seems to integrate the positive with the negative – where there is a Gryffindor House, there is also a Slytherin; Diagon and Knockturn Alley lie in close proximity to each other, and a lot of the pervasive interest in the stories derives from the fact that several of the major characters, most notably Harry himself and Severus Snape, quite literally incorporate both good and bad character traits. Nobody is perfect in Rowling’s magic world, though the overall aim is that of a peaceable kingdom where no one is hurting. This peacefulness is eventually attained in the last volume of the series. The author herself has proclaimed the ‘Potter books in general […] a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry.’1 However, it should be noted that the ultimate peace comes as the result of the defeat of the forces of evil, not as the restoration of a balance between light and darkness. Evil has a name, after all: Lord Voldemort, formerly also known as Tom Riddle. As a dark wizard who has shed most human features, he can be treated – and ultimately disposed of – as an “other” whose evident non-humanity, like that of some of his followers, places him beyond the range of tolerance. A closer look at Voldemort and his associates, and even more so at the regions from which they originate, where they flee and hide, also reveals a curiously ambivalent image: Hogwarts, ‘rife with disagreements, mistrust and intrigue’ is balanced within on the basis of the antagon1

Edward, ‘J.K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbot, and Much More’, The Leaky Cauldron (20 October 2007) [accessed 3 July 2009].

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ism and opposition between its respective houses.2 As a corporate whole, that oppositional balance is projected beyond England to regions abroad. As a result, Eastern Europeans might find reasons to complain about Rowling’s choice of locations and of the images she conveys of their inhabitants. References to Eastern European countries and to a number of figures identifiable as “Eastern” can be found in all seven volumes. The qualities attributed to these places and characters leave the impression that at least in this respect the archaic Hogwarts Express pulls the reader back into a world of mid-twentieth and even nineteenth-century stereotypes. As we will try to show, there are several “Easts” in the Harry Potter series, ranging geographically from anything east of the English Channel to “deep Easts” inhabited by giants and dragons, and covered by impenetrable forests, and ranging ideologically backwards through several layers of alterity. We will investigate descriptions and metaphors of Eastern characters, places and conditions, and try to figure out whether, given Rowling’s superb organisation and the interlocking structure of her novels, there is a systematic and meaningful order to these images of the East.

2. Eastern Locations There are only a handful of references to places and regions to the east of England in the first three novels of the series. Professor Quirrell, the unlucky teacher of Defence against the Dark Arts in volume one, is said to have encountered a vampire in Romania,3 and Gilderoy Lockhart, the even more ridiculous teacher of the same subject in volume two, is supposed to have saved a village in Armenia from werewolves, which one therefore has to imagine as apparently rampant in the area.4 From the start, “East” thus becomes a habitat for the unwanted, the dangerous and the non-British – and of course both werewolves and vampires have a tradition of being used as metaphors of invasive forces on British territory, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to John Landis’s American college student turned werewolf in London.5 Most encounters between this “East” and Britain occur in volume four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where the regions and the systems they represent clash twice: at the beginning during the Quidditch World Cup finals 2

3

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John Kornfeld and Laurie Prothro, ‘Comedy, Conflict, and Community: Home and Family in Harry Potter’, in Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Elizabeth E. Heilman (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), pp.187-202 (p.194). Cf. Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p.100. Cf. Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p.320. An American Werewolf in London, dir. by John Landis (UK/USA 1981).

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between Bulgaria and Ireland and subsequently during the so-called Triwizard Tournament, where the school champions of Hogwarts meet those of the obviously French school of Beauxbatons and of the less obviously located but decidedly more sinister Durmstrang. It is this sinister quality that links Durmstrang to both earlier and later appearances of Eastern places in the novels. As Elmo Feiten has stated, seating the Beauxbatons students with Ravenclaw and the Durmstrangs at the Slytherin table is a denotation of systemic proportions, categorising the French school within the world of acceptable alterity while leaving Durmstrang outside as a potentially evil other.6 Durmstrang’s location on the continent is uncertain. It is remarkable that whereas Britain and France have their own schools, the rest of Europe apparently share one. It has been noted that ‘Durmstrang’ is a metathesis for German ‘Sturm [und] Drang’. The headmaster, however, Igor Karkaroff, is a former Death Eater and probably Russian, and the location of the school brings in a third component: ‘“I think Durmstrang must be somewhere in the far north,” said Hermione thoughtfully. “Somewhere very cold, because they’ve got fur capes as part of their uniforms”’.7 The Durmstrang champion in the Triwizard Tournament, Viktor Krum, confirms Hermione’s hypothesis when he says (in a supposedly Bulgarian accent): Ve have just four floors, and the fires are lit only for magical purposes. But ve have grounds larger than these – though in vinter, ve have very little daylight, so ve are not enjoying them. But in summer ve are flying every day, over the lakes and the mountains [...].8

The description makes it appear as if Durmstrang might be located anywhere between Scandinavia, the Baltic, Russia and Northern Germany – though not Bulgaria. The uncertain geography of Potter’s “East” links it to Roman and medieval maps which often stated at their borders, beyond the relevant territories, hic sunt leones. The similarity becomes apparent when the half-giants Hagrid and Madam Maxime are sent “east” by Hogwarts’s headmaster Dumbledore 6

7 8

Elmo Feiten, ‘Eastern Europe in the Harry Potter Novels’ (unpublished BA-thesis, University of Freiburg, 2009), p.9. It might also be noted that the respective means of arrival at Hogwarts, a flying coach drawn by horses for Beauxbatons and a ghostly ship for Durmstrang, link them to Walt Disney’s fairy-tale Cinderella and to Richard Wagner’s decidedly less sympathetic Flying Dutchman. Not in tune with this transnational “Eastern” quality, the fourth movie overidentifies the Durmstrang students as a – quite literally – uniform and “Russian” all-male marching group. Cf. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, dir. by Mike Newell, (UK/USA 2005). This is invited by the fact that in the book, only one other Durmstrang student’s name is given directly, and this name is also “Eastern”: a Poliakoff is reproached for his eating manners. Cf. Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p.227. Rowling, Goblet, p.147. Ibid., p.363.

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to try to reach an agreement against the dark forces of Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters with the surviving giants living there. First travelling to Dijon in France, they move on to an encounter with ‘a couple o’ mad trolls’, and Hagrid has ‘a disagreement with a vampire in a pub in Minsk’ in Belarus.9 East – or North – of there, no clear indications of locality are given apart from the description of the giants’ mountainous habitat between four high mountains and a mountain lake.10 This place is off the map of charted territories, and it is certainly “east” of Britain. On other occasions, the leones of the Harry Potter world as well as their habitats are spelled out more plainly. Besides werewolves and vampires, the “East” also houses an assortment of dragons, the most dangerous of which is the Hungarian Horntail; it also accommodates Swedish Short-Snouts and Chinese Fireballs11 as well as Norwegian Ridgebacks.12 There are also dragons native to the British Isles: the Common Welsh Green and the Hebridian Black13 whose existence on the Western and Northern fringes reduces the space of safety to old England, where werewolves are an individual and unpleasant aberration (like Remus Lupin, who at least comes with a Latinate cultural bonus), and keeping dragons is illegal: Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709. Everyone knows that. It’s hard to stop Muggles noticing us if we’re keeping dragons in the back garden – anyway, you can’t tame dragons, it’s dangerous. You should see the burns Charlie’s got off the wild ones in Romania.14

So wild dragons are located in Romania, and, as might be expected, the most traditional of the Eastern European regions to be connected to the world of dark forces is Transylvania.15 In Rowling’s wizarding world, it constitutes a national unit of its own, like real European countries such as Poland and inventions of the banking system like Liechtenstein, all of which come with their own Quidditch national team. Poland, however, only gets one brief mention for an individual, famous Quidditch player.16 Of course Transylvania is also the home of vampires; in so far the stereotype of the East inherited from the Gothic novel and notably Bram Stoker is perpetuated – vampires, however, can also be found as far West as the Black Forest.17 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p.377. Ibid., p.378. Cf. Rowling, Goblet, p.384. Cf. Rowling, Stone, p.179. Cf. Rowling, Goblet, p.360 and Stone, p.170, respectively. Rowling, Stone, p.169. Cf. Rowling, Chamber, p.176. Cf. Rowling, Order, p.355. Cf. Rowling, Stone, p.55. As Martin Hermann informed us, Sax Rohmer’s 1929 novel The

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The overall picture generated by Rowling’s geosocial and geobotanical ascriptions is in keeping with Romantic and later Gothic conventions and stereotypes depicting the East as remote, uncivilised, wild and altogether uncontrollable. Besides the traditional, giant- and vampire-infested and dragon-breeding “East” which starts just across the Rhine and ranges all the way to the Black Sea and the North Cape, however, there is also a sort of sociogeographical “deep East”, and its most sinister and dangerous place is Albania. The deeper one gets into this East, the more likely one is to disappear, like Bertha Jorkins, an employee of the Ministry of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who went on an ill-advised holiday to Albania, was captured by Voldemort’s associates and tortured out of her secrets.18 A dark forest in Albania is also the place where Lord Voldemort hides after the assassination attempt on Harry Potter has backfired on him. There he is found and nurtured by Peter ‘Wormtail’ Pettigrew, and this is also the place where one of the Horcruxes is hidden that Harry and his friends are searching for in volumes six and seven, because they contain pieces of Lord Voldemort’s soul: The tiara of Rowena Ravenclaw, one of the four founders of Hogwarts, was hidden in a tree in a forest in out-of-reach Albania to make sure that nobody could ever find it.19 Professor Quirrell also met Lord Voldemort in Albania and became his servant there20 – a restaging of Jonathan Harker’s responsibility for bringing Count Dracula to Britain, but shifting geographical culpability from the older, romantic East to the more recent stereotype of the Cold War. Whereas the older, largely Romantic convention is simply one in which wilderness and lack of civilisation increase exponentially with distance from the British Isles, the more recent imagery Rowling uses is based on geopolitical experiences of the 1970s and 1980s, when Enver Hodxa’s Albania was to Europe what present-day North Korea is to the rest of the world: a dark and inaccessible place, haunted by its own as well as heterostereotypical paranoia. This East has nothing of the exotic Orient Edward Said described in his seminal study.21 It does not even hold any of the charm retained by the Eastern parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire even under Soviet rule. Instead, there is that interwovenness of opposing elements, a hybrid with a latent presence of “Asian” elements that make Russia – and by extension the

18 19

20 21

Day the World Ended (New York: P.F. Collier and Sons) introduced German vampires from the Black Forest striving for world power. It is uncertain, however, if Rowling knew this novel. Cf. Rowling, Goblet, p.15. Cf. Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p.496. Cf. Rowling, Goblet, p.708. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), originally published in 1978.

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whole “East” – a negative foil for the community that needs to be protected against it, whatever its own shortcomings may be.22 This creation of the East as a ‘project of demi-Orientalization’23 can be traced to the Enlightenment, which constructed a backward and barbaric counterpart to the new image of Western Europe. However, with its Hodxa-Albanian forests, its sinister characters, and especially also with its confrontation of systems performed as sports games, Rowling’s “East” is, arguably, more closely related to the coldwar East of John Le Carré – a place where it is difficult to identify the ulterior motives of characters, and where the categories of friend and enemy do not apply.

3. “Eastern” Figures A typically Le Carré-like figure in this respect is the Durmstrang headmaster, Igor Karkaroff. He is known as a former Death Eater who had his penalty reduced for informing on his associates – possibly an allusion to the fact that legions of old Nazis got back into positions of power in Germany after 1945, including and notably in the school and university systems. Yet Karkaroff is not German but most probably Russian, thus combining Nazi and Stalinist, World War II and Cold War associations. The surprise that his turn away from Lord Voldemort appears to have been genuine – he is murdered by his former associates after all – is a typical Le Carré device.24 Karkaroff is also anything but an impartial judge,25 which brings up the topic of Cold War sports. Whereas Bulgaria as a place remains nondescript in the Harry Potter novels, its team – in a quasi-Cold War confrontation between “East” and “West” – shows all the nastiness usually associated with the Slytherins in their Quidditch contests with Gryffindor. To an uninformed and unsuspecting reader, Rowling’s game is off on an inconspicuously playful start when she has the announcer in the World Championship stadium call out the names of the Bulgarian team: ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, kindly welcome – the Bulgarian National Quidditch Team! I give you – Dimitrov!’ A scarlet-clad figure on an broomstick, moving so fast it was blurred, shot out onto the 22 23

24

25

Cf. Elisabeth Cheauré’s article in the present volume. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p.7. Cf. the roles of Mundt and Fiedler in John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (London: Pan Books, 1963), p.226. Larry Wolff also notes that the confrontation between good and evil in the Harry Potter novels traces patterns established in the cultural reception of the Cold War. Cf. ‘Die Erfindung Osteuropas: Von Voltaire zu Voldemort’, in Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf, ed. by Karl Kaser, Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl, and Robert Pichler (Graz: Wieser, 2003), pp.21-34 (p.23). Cf. Rowling, Goblet, p.395.

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pitch from an entrance far below, to wild applause from the Bulgarian supporters. ‘Ivanova!’ A second scarlet-rober player zoomed out. ‘Zograf! Levski! Vulchanov! Volkov! Aaaaaaand – Krum!’26

All of these names, like many characters’ names throughout the seven volumes, can be read as constituting a series of intertextual references. There is, however, as on other occasions, a moment of seemingly spontaneous bricolage behind the construction, a playful element that seems irreducible to a political ideology or culturally inherited positions. As a consequence, some of the references point in different directions, but already the first one, Dimitrov, takes up the system of Cold War metonymics: Georgi Dimitrov was the leading figure in the Bulgarian Stalinist party, 1934-1949. Ivanova might refer to Mirela Ivanova, one of the best-known Bulgarian poets. Levski bears the name of Levski Sofia, the best-known Bulgarian football team in the 1970s and 1980s, and the two beaters have potential correspondences in contemporary Bulgarian filmmaker Rangel Vulchanov and in Alexander Melentyevich Volkov, a Russian author of children’s books loosely based on L. Frank Baum’s famous American The Wizard of Oz (1900). Volkov’s The Wizard of the Emerald City, first published in 1939, was highly popular in the Eastern bloc.27 Closer to sports, and possibly more likely in that the name might have come up in the media at the time Rowling finished the novel, would be Alexander ‘Sasha’ Volkov, a former Soviet Union national basketball team forward, and in 1999-2000 the Ukrainian minister of sports. Perhaps Joanne Rowling never invested this much research into the issue of naming. Dimitrov and Ivanova are frequent Bulgarian names after all, and Vulchanov and Volkov, the latter meaning wolf, might also point more in the direction of the barbarous and animalic “East” than to potential namesakes. However, the name of the keeper, Zograf, undercuts any argument claiming an accidental or merely playful nature of the naming here (or elsewhere), since this player evidently did get his wizarding name from St. George the Zograf, the Bulgarian Orthodox Monastery on Mount Athos. ‘The monastery’s name is derived from a 13th or 14th century icon of Saint George that is believed to have not been painted by a human hand and to possess wonderworking powers.’28 And finally, there is the celebrated seeker, Viktor Krum. Krum was the founder of the Bulgarian dynasty of kings, and ruler of Bulgaria during the time of Charlemagne.29 His name and heritage make [Viktor] 26 27

28

29

Ibid., p.119. Cf. ‘Alexander Melentyevich Volkov’, Wikipedia (2009) [accessed 4 September 2009]. ‘Zograf Monastery’, Wikipedia (2009) [accessed 4 September 2009]. Cf. ‘Krum’, Wikipedia (2009) [accessed 4 September 2009].

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Krum at least temporarily eligible as a would-be partner for Hermione Granger. Krum’s evident, if somewhat comical manliness, brings out the female beauty in her, which, however, turns the constellation into Beauty and the Beast, and Krum is relegated to the sidelines again – possibly linked to his use of tricks that are made to sound sinister in their association with Rowling’s East, like the ‘Porshkoff Ploy’ and the ‘Wronski Feint’,30 which makes other players crash into the ground. Needless to say that throughout the Quidditch finals, the Bulgarians use a lot of dirty tricks and fouls, and they get beaten, which again links Rowling’s East to impressions and images dating back to her socialisation during the years of Reaganomics, Thatcherism and the Cold War. The early 1980s were also the period in which the Soviet Russian ice hockey team seemed all but indefatigable – to sports enthusiasts, Krutov, Larionov and Makarov, the famous K-L-M line of ‘chasers’, might appear veiled behind the Bulgarian Quidditch team, Quidditch being closely related to (ice) hockey. Another cold-war analogy might be found in the historical ‘Miracle on Ice’ during the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a U.S. team consisting of amateurs and college students defeated a Soviet team of full-time (though technically non-’professional’) players including Krutov and Makarov against all odds. The general thrust, however, seems to be more to address a general cultural memory of the Cold War, and of Western victories over an enemy that did not play fair. This lack of fairness also justifies Ron’s outburst against Hermione’s ‘fraternising with the enemy’31 – something that British troops were warned against during and after the war to defeat Nazi Germany. Moving backwards in referential time, Rowling’s cold-war “East” is superscribed with fascist images and allusions. Analogies between the Führer Voldemort, his Death Eaters, their dark marks and the skull cult of SS units are fairly obvious. Other analogies are more intricate. For instance, the most potent (though non-nuclear) weapon in a wizard’s hands is the Elder Wand, made by the Eastern wandmaker Gregorovitch. Its possession in hands other than Dumbledore’s signals extreme danger. The dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, who attended Durmstrang school, was Voldemort’s predecessor in harbouring world power fantasies and a sometime possessor of the Elder Wand (which he stole from Gregorovitch). He was defeated by his former friend, lover and associate Dumbledore in 1945 – a rather obvious reference to the defeat of Nazi rule in Europe.32 With 30

31 32

Rowling, Goblet, pp.121 and 123. It might also be noted that neither Krum nor anyone else from Durmstrang participates in the final battle for Hogwarts when the Death Eaters are defeated. Ibid., p.460. The name may well be of Rowling’s indulgences of word-play: Christian Fürchtegott Gel-

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Durmstrang associated with Nazism, the fact that this school’s students are most directly linked to Slytherin House in Hogwarts provides a breach through which the “Evil East of England” invades the British Isles. In this context, it might be pointed out that many of the Death Eaters aiding and abetting Lord Voldemort have conspicuously Norman-French names: Mulciber, Rosier, Lestrange and Malfoy, signalling a historically “Eastern” force from across the Channel that took over Anglo-Saxon Britain in a bloody conquest. The other medieval invading force, that of the Norsemen, is also present in the extremely hateful figures of Fenrir Greyback and Thorfinn Rowle: the one a particularly unappetising and apparently voluntary werewolf, the other possibly another half-giant, they add to the mythical proportions of the danger facing Hogwarts and England. It is with these figures and at these times that the perimeter of Rowling’s universe of goodness and valor is retracted even further and limited not only geographically to the British Isles but historically as well. “Non-East” becomes, in this construction, Anglo-Saxon and even Arthurian – and of course both Harry and Neville Longbottom experience their personal Excalibur moments, drawing the sword of Godric Gryffindor from the Sorting Hat in volumes two and seven respectively.33 Between the Norman Conquest and Nazi-plus-cold-war-“Easts”, there are only a few scattered references to Eastern Europe or Europeans. For the malicious figure of Antonin Dolohov there seems to be no immediate intertextual reference but Dolohov is interesting in our context because the how and when of his arrival in Britain remain open: He is simply there, already present when Tom Riddle / Voldemort asks Albus Dumbledore for a teaching job at Hogwarts,34 turning Britain into an invaded space with his presence.

33

34

lert, a German writer of the nineteenth century, is most well-known today for his catholic, anti-liberal gothicism, and in what looks too conspicuous to be a coincidence, a popular 1995 cartoon-comic called Pinky and the Brain contained a reference to a (fictional) German submarine commander named Grindelwald. Cf. ‘Das Mouse’ in Pinky and the Brain, dir. Barry Caldwell and Mike Milo (USA 1995), Seas.1, Ep.1, 10:43min. Of course Grindelwald is primarily known as a Swiss ski-resort, but the name might also have been chosen for its assonance to the monster Grendel from Beowulf – another Beauty and the Beastassociation that is supported by the description of Dumbledore’s wizard-friend as physically beautiful in his youth. Cf. Rowling, Chamber, p.235; Hallows, p.587. This leaves a minor problem with names of French origin such as ‘Gryffindor’. However, as has been pointed out, the French association also places Beauxbatons alongside Ravenclaw – there are moments where and when England is suffered to extend its range, and Gryffindor’s possible association with the Plantagenets and Richard Coeur de Lion does the trick in this case. In a similar extension of England to France, beautiful Fleur Delacourt, formerly of Beauxbatons, is allowed to pretty up the Weasley family by marrying Bill Weasley. Cf. Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (London: Bloomsbury,

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On the one hand this perpetuates the fifth-column imagery of the Cold War that feared spies and enemy infiltration from all directions; on the other hand the association may reach behind the post-World War II period. There is something Rasputinian about Dolohov who is extremely dangerous and cruel, which seems to associate him with a character stereotype dating further back in British literature, to around 1900, when the “East” was linked with the sinister and dangerous European immigrant anarchists thematised by H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.35 Dolohov’s fanatical nature as a follower of Voldemort in pursuit of a new world order and his ‘long, pale, twisted face’36 put him squarely into this tradition of depicting anarchists.

4. Conclusion As stated above, Joanne Rowling called her novels ‘a prolonged argument for tolerance’. If that is the case, then there is a discrepancy between the fact that Rowling seems to research minute details in her books rather thoroughly and the fact that what she serves up as images of the East are stereotypes. And not just mild stereotypes, or funny ones, but clichés served raw, with the bone, so to speak. Her treatment of Albania, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary and Romania shows that the civilised frontier of Rowling’s magic empire lies just beyond the English Channel, and at best east of France. A hazy wide blue yonder starts geographically with the Black Forest and houses vicious and oversized but underbrained giants. The ultimate English answer to the dangers originating from this “East” lie in the Arthurian roots of British heroism as exemplified by Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom and Hermione Granger. For all intents and purposes, and for all their apparent multiculturalism and polyvocal message of tolerance, the Harry Potter novels insist on an East still closely related to Gothic parameters, the Cold War of spy fiction and the late 1970s / early 1980s, a period apparently formative for Rowling’s – or perhaps her researchers’ – idea of what the “East” means and entails. In that, the depiction of the “East” is less ambiguous and informed by the ‘ideological doubleness’ that Elaine Ostry has found in Rowling’s curious mixture of radical and traditional images in the depiction of social status and wealth.37

35

36 37

2005), p.416. Cf. Haia Shpaier-Makov, ‘Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880-1914’, Victorian Studies, 31 (1987-8), 487-516 (pp.500, 505). Rowling, Phoenix, pp.480 and 699; cf. Hallows, p.138. Elaine Ostry, ‘Accepting Mudbloods: The Ambivalent Social Vision of J. K. Rowling’s Fairy Tales’, in Reading Harry Potter, ed. by Giselle Liza Anatol (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp.89-101 (p.90).

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Of course Joanne K. Rowling is no propagandist of cold-war ideologies in the twenty-first century. It is the fairy-tale element of her wizarding world which suggests an inner and outer world, a place of safety vs. those places where the wild things are. Rowling’s metaphoric construction of the “East”, then, is highly traditional, and English, both as an inherited Romantic and as an experienced cold-war stereotype of alterity. However, even concerning the set of motifs and metaphors surrounding the “East”, there are some redeeming moments, and unsurprisingly, they have to do with love. It has already been noted that Viktor Krum is at least allowed a short-time relationship with Hermione in volume four and that Fleur Delacourt marries Bill Weasley. In her case, it does not even seem to matter that she is part Veela – a race of beautiful humanoids that will turn into the harpies of Greek mythology if prodded, as can be observed during the IrelandBulgaria Quidditch game: At this, the Veela lost control. […] Harry saw that they didn’t look remotely beautiful now. On the contrary, their faces were elongating into sharp, cruel-beaked bird heads, and long, scaly wings were bursting from their shoulders.38

Veela are Southeastern Slavonic – read: “Eastern”-fairies39 whose description matches that in Rowling’s Goblet of Fire only to some extent, but nevertheless introduces an “Eastern” element into an English family. Fleur’s and Bill’s daughter, born the year after the final battle of Hogwarts, is accordingly named Victoire, and she is last seen snogging Teddy Lupin, son of a werewolf.40 This seems to indicate that there is, after all, one power of integration that even extends to the “East” – amor does vincit omnia.

Works Cited ‘Alexander Melentyevich Volkov’, Wikipedia (2009) [access-ed 4 September 2009] ‘Das Mouse’, in Pinky and the Brain, dir. by Barry Caldwell and Mike Milo, Seas. 1, Ep. 1 (USA 1995) Edward, ‘J. K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbot, and Much More’, The Leaky Cauldron (2007) [accessed 3 July 2009] 38 39

40

Rowling, Goblet, p.126. ‘Slavic fairies’, Wikipedia (2009) [accessed 4 September 2009]. Cf. Rowling, Hallows, p.605.

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Feiten, Elmo, Eastern Europe in the Harry Potter Novels (unpublished BAthesis, University of Freiburg, 2009) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, dir. by Mike Newell (UK/USA 2005) Kornfeld, John and Laurie Prothro, ‘Comedy, Conflict, and Community: Home and Family in Harry Potter’, in Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Elizabeth E. Heilman (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), pp.187-202 ‘Krum’, Wikipedia (2009) [accessed 4 September 2009] Le Carré, John, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (London: Pan Books, 1963) Ostry, Elaine, ‘Accepting Mudbloods: The Ambivalent Social Vision of J. K. Rowling’s Fairy Tales’, in Reading Harry Potter, ed. by Giselle Liza Anatol (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp.89-101 Rohmer, Sax, The Day the World Ended (New York: P.F. Collier and Sons, 1929) Rowling, Joanne K., Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) —, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (London: Bloomsbury, 2005) —, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) —, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2000) —, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) —, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003) Shpaier-Makov, Haia, ‘Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880-1914’, Victorian Studies, 31 (1987-8), 487-516 ‘Slavic fairies’, Wikipedia (2009) [accessed 4 September 2009] Stoker, Bram, Dracula (London: Constable, 1897) Wolff, Larry, ‘Die Erfindung Osteuropas: Von Voltaire zu Voldemort’, in Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf, ed. by Karl Kaser, Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl, and Robert Pichler (Graz: Wieser, 2003), pp.21-34 —, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) ‘Zograf Monastery’, Wikipedia (2009) [accessed 4 September 2009]

Nadia Butt

Between Dream and Nightmare: Representation of Eastern Diaspora in Eastern Promises This essay focuses on the representation of a recent Eastern diaspora in the thriller film Eastern Promises (2007) with reference to gender conflicts, transformation of the body, struggle for power and the plight of the female protagonist, whose diary entries act as the subplot in the film. My aim is to demonstrate not only the struggle of the Eastern characters, especially the women, with challenges of emigration and exile, but more importantly how Britain as a place of ‘promised’ fortunes turns into a living nightmare as these characters stand at the crossroads of hope and disappointment. The essay thus sheds light on the paradox of Britain as a multicultural society in the wake of migration from the Eastern bloc, a society where some immigrants are reduced to non-entities due to the dominance of violence and crime imported from their home countries to the adopted one. In conclusion, it is argued that Cronenberg’s multicultural Britain rejects transcultural realities since his version of multicultural Britain remains tied to the ideas of ethnic and national loyalty and of culture as a secluded sphere.

1. Introduction This essay sets out to discuss Britain as a land of dreams, as an “imaginary homeland” for immigrants from Eastern Europe in the thriller film Eastern Promises (2007), which was directed and produced by Canadian David Cronenberg from a screenplay written by Steven Knight. By focusing on Eastern diaspora in London,1 my aim is to analyse not only the struggle of the immigrant characters, especially of the young women, with challenges of emigration and exile, but more importantly how Britain as a place of ‘promised’ fortunes turns into a living nightmare as these immigrants from privileged as well as unprivileged backgrounds get caught in a vicious circle of violence and terror. In the development of my argument, I highlight the fact that all migrant characters from the East, whether they belong to the “underworld” or not, have dreams of ‘a better life’,2 which serves as the refrain in the film, articulated by the female protagonist Tatiana. Set in London’s expatriate Russian underworld at Christmas time and New Year’s Eve, the film is based on interactions of a British midwife of Russian descent, Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), with the Russian mafia or vory v zakone (thieves in law). At work in a London hospital, Anna finds a 1

2

Eastern diaspora in this essay alludes to the communities of Russian, Chechen, Siberian, Rumanian and Ukrainian immigrants in London. Eastern Promises, dir. by David Cronenberg (UK/Canada/USA), 0:07:05. All further time references are given in parentheses in the text.

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diary on the body of Tatiana (Sarah Jeanne Labrosse), a fourteen-year-old girl who dies in childbirth. She brings the diary, whose entries are written in Russian, home and asks her Ukrainian uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski) to translate the document. Despite the encouragement of Anna’s British mother Helen (Sinead Cusack), Stepan refuses, but Anna finds a card of a restaurant owned by the Russian Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) inside the diary and visits the old man in an attempt to find a lead to contact Tatiana’s family. When she mentions the existence of the diary, Semyon immediately offers to translate the document. Meanwhile, out of curiosity, Stepan translates part of the diary. Anna thus discovers that Semyon, a leader in the Russian mafia, and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) forced Tatiana into drugs and prostitution in their brothel, that Semyon raped her and is the father of her child. With the help of Russian-born Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), who works as Kirill’s driver but is actually a member of the Russian Security Services (FSB), Anna gains custody of Tatiana’s baby.

2. “Darkness Visible” – The Sinister Landscape of London As Semyon tightens his grip on Nikolai with the help of his gang, a harrowing chain of murder, deceit and retribution reverberates through the darkest corners of London. According to the film critic A.O. Scott, Cronenberg is capable of shooting ‘the dark, rain-slicked London streets in tones that turn the city into a sinister, palpitating presence.’3 As the action progresses, London appears to be a dungeon of cross-border crime – a place of murderous barbers, scary gangsters, hardened criminals and ruthless killers, where bloated dead bodies are found floating in the Thames and cold-blooded murders are carried out in broad daylight. Darkness pervades throughout the film, rain is constantly falling on dark pavements, and all the streets and interiors seem grimy and damp, in short, unwelcoming. The grey and rainy atmosphere of inner-city London is further intensified with cold and inhospitable cafeterias, deserted river banks and back alleys that make up most of the locations in the film. Semyon is convinced that London is a corrupt place, ‘a city of whores and queers’ (0:51:10) which has even corrupted his only son Kirill despite his efforts to raise him in a harmonious family environment. London is presented as a hub of dazzling riches and crime as well as haves and have-nots and hence is far from being a haven for happy migrants or transcultural connections. It is a place where Eastern immigrants are locked in their isolated spheres without cultural exchange, and where cultural and racial clash surfaces as characters like Stepan go about their everyday life. 3

A.O. Scott, ‘On London’s Underside, Where Slavery Survives’, The New York Times (14 September 2007) [accessed 14 September 2009].

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While discussing the representation of the Eastern diaspora in London in the film,4 I focus particularly on the plight of Tatiana and her entries in the diary to emphasise that her story, like those of many minor characters in the film such as the Russian prostitutes in Semyon’s brothel, unfolds an unfinished life lived in the underworld, ravaged by unbridled violence and killings. The diary motif, which runs throughout the film as a conduit between past and present as well as home and exile, is vital to get an inner view of a migrant woman’s expectations of Britain, and more importantly her trauma at the hands of her own kinsmen as she lives in her host country as a complete outsider. Furthermore, the diary motif draws our attention to broader questions of cultural (un)translation and (un)assimilation as well as heterogeneous cultural and national identities. The contrast between what Tatiana has dreamed and what meets reality accentuates the awe and anxiety of the audience, rendering the thriller film a realistic portrait of immigrants on the peripheries of an ostensibly multicultural England, a society with Turkish, Chechnyan, Ukrainian, Siberian, Rumanian and Indian immigrants as shown in the film. Hence, ‘“Eastern Promises” […] pulls back the scrim on invisible Londoners’5 – Londoners who are the subject of seminal British fiction such as Sam Salvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), or Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003). William Beard is justified in saying that ‘[t]he world of Cronenberg’s film is one in which the boundaries of so many culturally determined categories are routinely transgressed and shattered: sexuality, social identity, accepted behaviour, finally subjectivity itself.’6 With the release of Eastern Promises, however, Cronenberg’s cinema demonstrates a new phase in which violence is inextricably twined with the larger issues of desperate diaspora, immigration, exploitation and drug and human trafficking. In one of his interviews with Amy Taubin, Cronenberg reveals that he got involved with the script of Eastern Promises because of its focus on ‘strangely enclosed little worlds where rules are made up and become like the laws of nature.’7 The film highlights how class and gender wars still play a crucial role in determining the destiny of immigrants from the East in contemporary British cul4

5

6

7

To have a deeper view of the term diaspora cf. James Clifford, ‘Diaspora’, Cultural Anthropology, 9.2 (1994), 203-338. Katrina Onstad, ‘Exploring Humanity, Violence and All’, The New York Times (16 September 2007) [accessed 16 September 2009]. William Beard, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006), p.vii. Amy Taubin, ‘Foreign Affairs: David Cronenberg Talks About his Strangely Intimate New Russian Mafia Movie Eastern Promises and Snuff Films on the Internet’, Film Comment (Sept/Oct 2007) [accessed 12 November 2009].

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ture. Tatiana and the Russian prostitutes, however briefly they may appear on the screen, show us that the Russian underworld is a man’s world in which women are objects either of pleasure or abuse. They are virtually cut off from British society as well as their families back home. There is no middle way for them since they are dependent on men to survive meagrely in a foreign society. Men actually turn out to be either their saviours or destroyers; The Ukrainian prostitute, for example, is rescued at the hands of Nikolai, whereas Tatiana is wasted at the hands of Semyon.

3. Perception of the “East” in the Cinema of Body Dynamics From Bram Stocker’s Dracula (1897) to Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) or Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911), to name but a few, “the East” has been associated with the dark and ambivalent as well as the murky and mysterious in British literary imagination. Individuals from the “East” are represented and perceived not only as “typical” intruders and trespassers, but more significantly as beings who seek to disturb the more “humane and civilised” infrastructure of British society. In Eastern Promises, the “East” is associated with corruption and violence mainly committed by a highly imaginative mafia. The sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky writes in his treatise on violence, terror and genocide: ‘One course of violence is the power of imagination. The imagination can always invent new fronts of violence. It lifts human beings out of the sphere of their own experience, removes them from their environment and liberates them from established habit.’8 Such a penchant for violence is vividly illustrated in the film as it presents violence against women, other members of the Russian mafia, and their enemies as the order of the day. Furthermore, the film emphasises an unbreakable pattern of violence which no power is able to curtail. Cronenberg highlights the isolation of the Russian mafia from the outside world to dramatise their gruesome undercover practices. The portrayal of the Russian mafia in the film is based on an existing mafia in Britain whose members are known for proving their loyalty through tattoos on their bodies. According to the New York Daily News, actor Viggo Mortensen studied Russian gangsters and their tattoos before taking on the role of Nikolai: ‘I talked to them about what they meant and where they were on the body, what that said about where they’d been, what their specialties were, what their ethnic and geographical affiliations were.’ Mortensen adds: ‘Basically their history, their calling card, is their body.’9 Cronenberg is one of the principal ori8

9

Wolfgang Sofsky, Violence: Terrorism, Genocide, War, trans. by Anthea Bell (London: Granta, 2003), p.21. John Clark, ‘Viggo Mortensen Digs into Naked Emotional Turf’, New York Daily News (09 September 2007) [accessed 12 November 2009]. For details cf. Jonathan Crane, ‘A Body Apart: Cronenberg and Genre’, in The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg, ed. by Michael Grant (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000), pp.50-68. For more insight into the idea of body transformation in the cinema of David Cronenberg cf. Bettina Papenburg, Transformationen des grotesken Körpers im Kino David Cronenbergs (Berlin: PhD Dissertation, 2007) or Manfred Riepe, Bildgeschwüre: Körper und Fremdkörper im Kino David Cronenbergs: Psychoanalytische Filmlektüren nach Freud und Lacan (Bielefeld: Verlag für Kommunikation, Kultur und soziale Praxis, 2002).

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Tatiana’s death. In fact, Tatiana comes back to life as Anna discovers the various phases of her stormy existence in the cells of the Russian mafia. Tatiana almost becomes Anna’s other, her alter ego, as Anna begins to read the emptiness of her life as a single woman in London as a parallel to Tatiana’s ruined expectations of life in the city of her dreams. This not only makes the film more realistic and thrilling, but also intensifies the agony and trauma of Tatiana, lingering on even more palpably after her death. Hence the borders between life and death and dream and nightmare seem as porous as those between violence and empathy in the film. While emphasising the importance of the diary motif as an illustration of Tatiana’s memories, dreams and nightmares, it is also important to analyse the levels of cultural, linguistic and individual translations. The diary as an artefact of an inner journey that has to be translated from Russian into English is an interesting symbol of translated histories and societies as well as personal lives and identities. Tatiana’s baby growing up in London with Anna as her foster mother is already an indication of translated identities and also of a society being translated by immigrants themselves. However, the question remains unanswered as to whether Tatiana’s life could have been translated into a better life in a city like London as she had dreamed despite having no social standing. The development of the plot reveals that cultural translation is indeed an ambivalent terrain rather than being a smooth transition from one culture to another. Walter Benjamin addresses the paradox of text and translation, therefore, by proclaiming that translation is always coupled by its other, the untranslatable.11 This very paradox of translation between cultures, in fact, is vital to the representation of cultural contact and conflict in the film. Through her diary, we come to know that Tatiana’s father died in a mine in her village. ‘So he was already buried when he died. We were all buried there, buried under this soil of Russia. This is why I left – to find a better life.’ (1:31:30) Tatiana’s diary further reveals that London has always been the most alluring places on the world map for her: ‘When I was little, London was like a place in the Bible. I wasn’t even sure if it was real.’ (0:34:06) She was told by one of her friends, whose uncle worked at a Russian restaurant in London, that they paid girls who sang in restaurants. ‘I have been practising my singing and I have rejoined the church choir. I’m also practising my English.’ (0:36:45) Tatiana is not victimised by the British or in any way a target of British racism, but rather is abused by the criminals from her own country in London. She could never have imagined that the Russian gang would push her into a dangerous underworld from where return might be impossible and 11

Cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp.69-82.

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where hope for a normal existence might be an eternal impossibilty. Cronenberg gradually unveils the life of a woman from the East who is compelled to be a victim because of her linguistic, cultural and economic barriers. It is Cronenberg’s view that: [w]hen you have a culture that’s embedded in another, there’s a constant tension between the two […]. In the U.S. the melting pot was supposed to mean you come and you absorb American values. But in Canada and England the idea of multiculturalism was something else. At its worst it’s you come and you live there, but you live in a little ghetto of your own culture that you brought with you. I suppose that’s happening in the States with the Spanish language. Can multiculturalism really work? I don’t know, but it’s an interesting study.12

While watching different forms of violence, the questions of cultural translation and isolation hence remain fundamental for the audience, especially so when it is not settled as to how far immigrants as cultural outsiders manage to find a footing in the so-called culturally mixed society. Cronenberg reminds us that some immigrants are bound to perish in apathy as they are hampered by stronger forces to assimilate. According to Bart Beaty, Cronenberg ‘made his name crafting a cinema of outsiders, visionaries, lunatics and criminals’,13 and by thematising lost characters on the peripheries of a rapidly changing culture, Eastern Promises renders voice to the socially isolated Londoners.14

5. The New Image of the “East” and the Ambivalence of Nikolai Although the relationship between Anna and Nikolai is based on mutual affection, Nikolai remains a mystery for the audience. He serves as the mafia family’s “undertaker”, dumping dead bodies into the Thames, but at the same time he is ready to bring Semyon to justice by collaborating with Anna; he lends support to a prostitute from the Ukraine at Kirill’s brothel, and he even sends Stepan to a five-star hotel in Edinburgh instead of killing him at Semyon’s command. However, it is never clear what he really aims to achieve. In a pivotal scene where Nikolai stands naked before a group of senior members of the vory v zakone and renounces his birth family for this new one, his tattooed body maps his mysterious life: his crimes, his time behind bars, even his sexual history. ‘The tattoos became the main metaphor because it’s the body in transformation done in a realistic way as opposed to 12 13

14

Cronenberg quoted in Onstad, ‘Exploring Humanity, Violence and All’. Bart Beaty, Canadian Cinema: David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), p.4. For details on multicultural identities in Britain cf. Debating Cultural Hybridity: MultiCultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Madood (London: Zed Books, 1997).

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a sci-fi or a fantasy way,’ Cronenberg said.15 Like Tatiana, who declares in her diary that her entire family is buried in the soil of Russia, Nikolai reminds us of ghost and vampire figures in British fiction as he declares to the mafia senior members when he commits his mind and body to them: ‘I’m dead already. I died when I was 15. I live in the zone of all the time’ (0:01:10). Issues of sexuality and gender tend to overlap in this film as in many other Cronenberg productions. While Tatiana’s femininity is jeopardised in a violent outburst of bleeding between her legs at the chemist’s shop, Nikolai’s masculinity is celebrated during the knife attack on him by the Chechnyan brothers at Finsbury steam baths. There is a virtual play upon sexuality and violence in the scene. The audience witnesses the powerful tattooed body of Nikolai, which is ripped open from different sides by the blood-thirsty Chechnyans. However, despite lying in a pool of his blood among his adversaries, Nikolai comes out as victor. Cronenberg nonetheless keeps us in doubt about Nikolai’s masculinity as well as sexuality because he seems to have a homoerotic relationship with Kirill who is quite obviously homosexual. In the last scene of the film when Anna and Nikolai go to the Thames and Nikolai talks Kirill into giving Anna Tatiana’s baby and into allying with him against Semyon, Nikolai appears to be Kirill’s lover. Because he has a soft spot for him, he eventually makes Kirill the most powerful member of the London branch of the vory mob, but with Nikolai himself as the power behind the throne. Perhaps because of Nikolai’s ambivalence about good and evil, no true relationship develops between Anna and Nikolai despite a bond of trust. Nikolai seems to end up as a “vampire” who is only a new aspect of the same rotten mafia. However, it is unclear how he can be a member of Scotland Yard and so actively cooperate with the vory gang as an “impeccable” gangster and murderer. Instead of solving this mystery, Cronenberg prefers to keep it intact until the end of the film, making the boundaries between good and evil all the more hazy. Despite its happy ending, the film implies that the pattern of violence continues when Nikolai and Kirill finally replace the older generation of the mafia. Film critic Rich Heldenfelds, therefore, concludes that the film is a meditation on perception and self-realization. Written by Steve Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), the movie is full of characters who seem to be defined by their work, their backgrounds or their family. But as the movie proceeds, we see that their identities cannot be easily summed up. And even if they achieve some measure of self-awareness, they can remain puzzles to the audience.16

15 16

Cronenberg quoted in Onstad, ‘Exploring Humanity, Violence and All’. Rich Heldenfels, ‘Eastern Promises – Russian Intrigue’, The Akron Beacon Journal (21 September 2007) [accessed 10 October 2009].

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Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle, however, is of the view that ‘what […] the film [is] really about, more than sensitivity for displaced people or social analyses, is violence – hideous, gruesome, over-the-top violence.’17 To Westbrook, the film ‘isn’t about Russian gangs so much as Cronenberg’s own dark passions not just for violence but excruciating carnage, which he brandishes mercilessly’ and watching it was ‘a stifling descent into grim shock and disturbing awe.’18 By showing excessive violence, sex and crime, I contend that Cronenberg is not just indulging in some kind of melodrama or sensationalism as Westbrook claims, but rather invites the audience to develop insight into an invisible world of Londoners, which is as much a product of migration as cultural mixing and interaction. Cronenberg is thus preoccupied with showing a darker aspect of the experience of migration, with a focus on outsiders as both oppressors and oppressed as well as victims and victimisers.19 Therefore, the whole process of cultural translation remains as ambivalent as the film’s Russian characters. More importantly, Cronenberg addresses the “other” side of cultural contact by telling the story of a desperate Eastern diaspora in Britain, hence tearing down the veneer of popular myths of cultural melange. As Serge Grünberg has rightly remarked, ‘David Cronenberg is one of these adventurers who have torn the veil from appearances, who disturb and destabilise us.’20

6. Eastern Promises or Deathly Promises? The German title of the film, Tödliche Versprechen (literally translated as ‘Deathly Promises’), appealed to Cronenberg more than its English one, probably because the death motif in relation to violence is vital to the plot and action. The German title thus may encourage us to question the validity of the word “Eastern” in the English title as well as the representation of the Eastern bloc in the film itself. Amid unbridled violence, the audience is made conscious of different kinds of ‘promises’ which the Russian immigrants have made to themselves by arriving in a homeland of their imagination. In fact, the phenomena of arrival and departure not only act as part of the migrant condition but also serve as an image of a bloody struggle, a struggle defined by gender war and hunger for power. In this way, violence is instrumental in seeking a ‘promising’ life for gangsters like Semyon and Kirill. 17

18 19

20

Bruce Westbrook, ‘Hideous, Gruesome, Over-the-Top Violence’, Houston Chronicle (14 September 2007) [accessed 14 September 2009]. Ibid. For details on the art of Cronenberg’s filmmaking and his perception of cinema cf. Mark Browning, David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2007), pp.7-56. Serge Grünberg, Interviews with David Cronenberg (London: Cromwell Press, 2000), p.9.

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As mentioned before, Cronenberg portrays a man’s world in which the role of women is reduced to prostitute or mute attendant. In other words, women’s dreams are dependent on men. If men choose to be their wellwishers, they are redeemed. Otherwise, they are crushed. Herein lies the paradox of Eastern Promises since the Western world does not fulfil a woman’s dream of a better life when she wants to rely on fair means. Instead, she is left to the dream of evil and corrupt gangsters. The members of the Russian mafia, like Semyon, have achieved ultimate wealth by spreading a network of criminals. Semyon as the chief of vory mob does not dip his hands in blood; instead he makes his subordinates do the dirty work so that he can focus on celebrating family warmth and affection. He chooses to spend his evenings entertaining rich Russians in London along with his own family. Hence family bonds are portrayed as the dream of corrupt mafia gangsters like Semyon as well as innocent teenagers like Tatiana – with the difference that the latter seeks to count on her natural talents, whereas the former depends on a corrupt system. By emphasising the politics of gender and cultural representation, Cronenberg actually gives us a complex view into the theme of organised crime and its repercussions on the people from the “East”. The dream of a family is echoed in almost every character’s life, in particular Semyon’s and Anna’s. In the midst of violence and cruelty, the warmth of Semyon’s family at dinnertime leaves a lasting impression on our imagination as audience, but we have to meet shocking brutality in the following scenes. It is important to keep in mind that the film dramatises the realisation of the Russian immigrants’ dreams as vividly as their nightmares. There is no road in-between. Either it is the realisation of a perfect life such as the one Semyon creates for his family and guests, or it is a nightmare in which human existence is chained to an unlimited pattern of murder, deceit and cunning. The role of religion and loyalty to one’s home country is also indisputably prominent, no matter how well-settled the Eastern characters are in London. The film abounds with religious references. Even the influence of the Russian Christian Orthodox Church, whose ornamental symbols adorn much of Semyon’s restaurant and whose views on patriarchy are reflected in Semyon’s and Kirill’s actions, is hard to ignore. To choose Christmas time and New Year’s Eve as the time of the plot, to choose the name Christine for Tatiana’ baby girl, and to choose London as a ‘place in the Bible’ (0:34:06) as mentioned in Tatiana’s diary, the film also seeks connections with the Russian Orthodox Church. Ernest Mathijs opines: ‘With its multitude of communities – religious, linguistic, ethnic and class-based – the London of Eastern Promises becomes an

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example for the Babel that contemporary society and families are facing.’21 Anna’s uncle Stepan, ex-KGB bureaucrat who emigrated from Russia, is a man visibly disappointed by the fake promises of life in the “Free West” and expresses loyalty to his home culture through a staunch devotion to ceremonial culinary habits. His disappointment also leads him to curtly dismiss “modern” values – it’s not natural to ‘mix race and race’ (0:14:05) comments Stepan when Anna and Helen briefly discuss her miscarriage and failed relationship with her previous, black boyfriend Oliver; he claims that ‘black men always run away.’ (0:13:50) In fact, Cronenberg invites us to think about what actually happens when members of some “cultures” (as part of a more orthodox religion) refuse to mix within a largely multicultural society. This is a phenomenon ignored by supporters of transnational and transcultural changes on the global level such as Arjun Appadurai, Ulf Hannerz and Frank Schulze-Engler,22 who claim that globalisation has created an ultimate space of cultural transformation without paying sufficient heed to the pitfalls of cultural clash and antagonism,23 which is an inevitable outcome of diverse cultural and religious encounters.

7. Conclusion The journey of a single woman from Russia to Britain and her untimely death in Eastern Promises shed light on issues of assimilation and non-assimilation in British society, a society in which a mafia breeds to exploit and annihilate hapless female migrants as they fight hidden battles on various fronts trying to turn their dreams of a better life into reality. How these hidden battles can be won remains a conflict in the film, especially when the mafia remains intact as does the vicious circle of exploitation. In fact, this conflict also raises the query as to whether cultural identities of migrants like Tatiana (for whom language and economic barriers are too strong to surpass) can be translated into the so-called culturally heterogeneous society, a phenomenon emphasised by postcolonial theorist Robert Young in his latest book The Idea 21

22

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Ernest Mathijs, The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero (London and New York: Wall Flower Press, 2008), p.244. Cf. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (London and Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1996); Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and Frank Schulze-Engler, ‘Von “Inter” zu “Trans”: Gesellschaftliche, kulturelle und literarische Übergänge’, in Inter- und Transkulturelle Studien, ed. by Heinz Antor (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006) pp.55-61. For insight into the thesis of a clash of cultures cf. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

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of English Ethnicity.24 At the same time the film also makes us question whether these migrant women are compelled to be victims of their unfavourable circumstances abroad just as they felt they were victims at home. In other words, it makes us wonder how far it is possible for victims in any culture to escape their condition by undergoing the experience of migration, for the experience of migration brings its own challenges of cultural and social adjustment as well as linguistic and economic frustrations. Keeping such a dilemma in mind, Hanif Kureishi ruminates on the immigrant experience by declaring: ‘The “West” was a dream that didn’t come true. But one cannot go home again. One is stuck.’25 And Cronenberg addresses precisely the predicament of those who are ‘stuck’. Eastern Promises is a narrative that strives to identify the heart of violence, corruption and exploitation in British migrant society without actually offering any easy solutions because Cronenberg’s cinema aims to shake us in our seats rather than comfort us with the illusion of cultures in the contact zone. Thereby, it not only offers a strong critique of translocations in tandem with cultural (un)translation, but also makes us rethink multicultural London from a new perspective so that we are able to critically analyse the utopian thinking of the supporters of multicultural societies before placidly embracing them.

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (London and Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1996) Beard, William, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006) Beaty, Bart, Canadian Cinema: David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008) Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp.69-82 Browning, Mark, David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2007) Clark, John, ‘Viggo Mortensen Digs into Naked Emotional Turf’, New York Daily News (09 September 2007) [accessed 12 November 2009] 24 25

Cf. Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (London: Blackwell, 2007). Hanif Kureishi, ‘Introduction: The Road Exactly’, in My Son the Fanatic: A Screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, ed. by Andreas Gaile (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007), pp.3-16 (p.13).

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Clifford, James, ‘Diaspora’, Cultural Anthropology, 9.2 (1994), 203-338 Crane, Jonathan, ‘A Body Apart: Cronenberg and Genre’, in The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg, ed. by Michael Grant (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000), pp.50-68 Eastern Promises, dir. by David Cronenberg (UK/Canada/USA 2007) Grünberg, Serge, Interviews with David Cronenberg (London: Cromwell Press, 2000) Hannerz, Ulf, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) Heldenfels, Rich, ‘Eastern Promises – Russian Intrigue’, The Akron Beacon Journal (21 September 2007) [accessed 10 October 2009] Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) Kureishi, Hanif, ‘Introduction: The Road Exactly’, in My Son the Fanatic: A Screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, ed. by Andreas Gaile (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007), pp.3-16 Mathijs, Ernest, The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero (London and New York: Wall Flower Press, 2008) Onstad, Katrina, ‘Exploring Humanity, Violence and All’, The New York Times (16 September 2007) [accessed 16 September 2009] Papenburg, Bettina, Transformationen des grotesken Körpers im Kino David Cronenbergs (Berlin: PhD Dissertation, 2007) Riepe, Manfred, Bildgeschwüre: Körper und Fremdkörper im Kino David Cronenbergs: Psychoanalytische Filmlektüren nach Freud und Lacan (Bielefeld: Verlag für Kommunikation, Kultur und soziale Praxis, 2002) Schulze-Engler, Frank, ‘Von “Inter” zu “Trans”: Gesellschaftliche, kulturelle und literarische Übergänge’, in Inter- und Transkulturelle Studien, ed. by Heinz Antor (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006) pp.55-61. Scott, A.O., ‘On London’s Underside, Where Slavery Survives’, The New York Times (14 September 2007) [accessed 14 September 2009] Sofsky, Wolfgang, Violence: Terrorism, Genocide, War, trans. by Anthea Bell (London: Granta, 2003) Taubin, Amy, ‘Foreign Affairs: David Cronenberg Talks About his Strangely Intimate New Russian Mafia Movie Eastern Promises and Snuff Films on the Internet’, Film Comment (Sept/Oct 2007) [accessed 12 November 2009]

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Werbner, Pnina and Tariq Madood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity: MultiCultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London: Zed Books, 1997) Westbrook, Bruce, ‘Hideous, Gruesome, Over-the-Top Violence’, Houston Chronicle (14 September 2007) [accessed 14 September 2009] Young, Robert J.C., The Idea of English Ethnicity (London: Blackwell, 2007)

Susanne Schmid

Taking Embarrassment to Its Extremes: Borat and Cultural Anxiety The mock-documentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan presents the fictitious Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev on an educational trip through the United States of America. If the actor, Sacha Baron Cohen, is Jewish, the character Borat is anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic, racist and besides rather ignorant of the country he calls the ‘U.S. and A’. Through taking stereotypes about Eastern countries to their extreme, Baron Cohen holds up a mirror to unmask seemingly civilised Westerners. Among the aesthetic means employed by him is a concentration on the grotesque and the embarrassing body that does not conform to norms (incest, homosexuality, faeces etc.). The film led to a number of complaints by individuals who felt that they had been tricked into participating and aroused the anger of Kazakh officials, who saw their country misrepresented.

1. Introduction The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has achieved global fame through appearing in the guise of a number of fictitious and exaggerated personae, three of whom have achieved notoriety: the ignorant suburban chav Ali G from Staines, a rapper with Caribbean pronunciation; Brüno, a gay Austrian fashion designer; and the homophobic, racist and misogynist Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev. These characters underwent some changes in the course of time; Borat for example was first conceived as the reporter Kristo from Albania 1 and re-emerged in Da Ali G Show in the year 2000 under his current name. Born in Hammersmith to an Orthodox Jewish family in 1971, the Cambridgeeducated Baron Cohen conducts interviews during which he elicits racist, homophobic, misogynist and other unacceptable statements, often from well-known public figures, and broadcasts selections from these. In The 11 O’Clock Show, a satirical programme, he first appeared as Ali G, whose Jamaican accent and inane questions perfectly misled his interviewees. As Ali G he questioned, for example, Sir Rhodes Boyson, former UnderSecretary of Education, about the reintroduction of corporal punishment in schools and got him to praise the advantages of caning. 2 Baron Cohen ex1

2

Cf. Tim Cornwell, ‘Rise of the Comic Kazach Who Used to Be Albanian’, The Scotsman (20 October 2006) [accessed 2 September 2009]. Cf. Robert A. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle Over Borat (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), p.37. Another recent introduction is Kathleen Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen: The Unauthorised Biography (London: JR Books, 2008). A thorough analysis of Ali G is provided in Richard Howells, ‘“Is it Because I is

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poses his unwitting victims, and, on a larger scale, the societal mechanism that produces racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and violence. Here is a brief chronology of Baron Cohen’s rise to fame: 3 In 1998, he began to appear with his fake interviews on The 11 O’Clock Show. In 2000, Da Ali G Show followed, again a series of interviews which exposed their victims. In 2002, a film with the meanwhile extremely popular Ali G appeared, Ali G Indahouse (dir. by Mark Mylod), and in 2003, Da Ali G Show was exported to America and shown on HBO. The films Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, according to Newsweek a ‘watershed comic event’, 4 and the hitherto less acclaimed Brüno followed in 2006 and 2009 respectively. The comic personae had to change because Ali G and Borat eventually became so well-known that Baron Cohen was recognised before he was able to trick anyone. Surrounded by controversies, Borat quickly grew into a cult figure. As, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, Western Europeans began to have far more contact with Eastern Europe than before, Borat, who conjures up the image of the uncultured Eastern “other”, epitomises the fear of the intrusion of the unknown, like Valentina, the grotesque Ukrainian immigrant in Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005). 5 The ‘manchild’ 6 Borat also embodies the audience’s infantile pleasure in rulebreaking. When, in 2005, Baron Cohen flew to the MTV European Music Awards ceremony in Lisbon as Borat with a one-eyed, drunken pilot and in a propeller plane supposedly run by a Kazakh airline, he incited Kazakh politicians to threaten legal action, yet found a large audience full of admiration for his pranks. 7 With the release of the award-winning film Borat, the controversies and court cases reached an all-time high, and so did Boratmania. In

3 4

5

6

7

Black?” Race, Humour and the Polysemiology of Ali G’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26 (2006), 155-77. For the dates cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, pp.33-55. David Ansen, ‘Cinematic Fantastic’, Newsweek (15 December 2006) [accessed 2 September 2009]. If the recent immigrant Valentina is characterised by her surgically enlarged breast and the sexual attraction she deliberately uses to ensnare the octogenarian ‘Pappa’, Borat is associated with embarrassing sexuality, too, and is even shown masturbating in public. For a discussion of Lewycka’s novel cf. Doris Lechner’s article in the present volume. Dickie Wallace, ‘Hyperrealizing “Borat” with the Map of the European “Other”’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 35-49 (p.39). This issue of Slavic Review (67.1) contains eight articles and commentaries about Borat. Cf. Steven Morris, ‘Kazakhstan Up in Arms over Ali G Spoof’, The Guardian (15 November 2005) [accessed 2 September 2009]; Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, pp.102f. A summary of the controversy is available in Robert A. Saunders, ‘In Defence of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan’s War on Sacha Baron Cohen’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 14 (2007), 225-55.

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order to explore Borat’s impact, this paper will consider questions of genre, Borat’s nationalities, the grotesque body, and finally some of the controversial reactions to the film.

2. Questions of Genre Borat the movie, like Borat the man, is a hybrid and cannot easily be assigned to one category of entertainment; it combines elements of the documentary, mockumentary, comedy, satire, feature film and road movie. 8 The 82-minute film presents the fictitious Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, who departs from the poverty-stricken village of Kuzçek in order to make an educational trip through what he calls the ‘U.S. and A.’ with the aim of producing a documentary about America for the Kazakh Ministry of Information. This journey, which he undertakes together with the producer Azamat Bagatov, a chicken and a bear, leads him from New York City to California, where he plans to meet actress Pamela Anderson, with whom he has fallen in love while watching an episode of the TV series Baywatch. The structure of this fictitious and mythical three-week journey to the West is episodic; Borat encounters and interviews “real” individuals and groups, for example a humour coach, a driving instructor, East Coast feminists, a former Congress Man; he attends a gay pride parade and a rodeo, stays in a B&B, visits a gun store, a dinner of the Magnolia Mansion Dining Society, a dance hall, a Pentecostal Church and finally a Virgin Megastore, where he embarks on a failed attempt to abduct Pamela Anderson. Finally, he returns to his Kazakh village. Much of his journey, which borrows from the genre of the road movie, takes him through the politically conservative South. 9 The individuals he encounters and films, like the frat boys from the University of South Carolina who regret the end of slavery, are not actors but people who, gulled into participating in what they believed to be a genuine documentary, give voice to their views. Apparently, in a number of cases, Baron Cohen’s team pretended that they were producing a documentary for some obscure Asian or Eastern European TV station. The etiquette consultant shown in the dinner episode for example was told that she was participating in an educational documentary for Belarus television. 10 8

9

10

On the generic issues concerning Borat cf. Leshu Torchin, ‘Cultural Learnings of Borat Make for Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary’, Film & History, 38.1 (2008), 53-63; a taxonomy of contemporary fiction dealing with migration can be found in Roy Sommer, Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien (Trier: WVT, 2000). Cf. David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Cf. Ewan Fletcher, ‘Stung by Sacha Baron Cohen: Borat's Etiquette Consultant’, The Daily

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Other plot elements are fictitious, such as Borat’s encounter with the African American prostitute Luenell, who, after the debacle with Pamela Anderson, turns out to be his true love and whom he takes back to Kazakhstan as his wife. Another example is the friendship with his buddy Azamat, with whom he argues, breaks up and is reunited in a companionship reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. 11 The film is structured as an individual mythical journey, from Borat’s origins, his native village, to a foreign country where he has to prove himself. His search for Pamela Anderson, his individual quest, eventually fails, yet he experiences spiritual renewal through his apparent conversion at the Pentecostal Church. Baron Cohen uses and challenges the documentary form. If the interviews and some of the encounters are elements of the documentary, a genre aiming to convey authenticity, the overall project is that of a mockumentary, situated on the borderline between real life and fiction, such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a fake American news programme satirising the media. Therefore, the question that needs to be asked is: Who or what is mocked in Borat, what is documented? Borat is a veritable comedy of manners, 12 which unmasks the “real” America as opposed to the medialised America we are continuously confronted with. When Borat, for example, walks into a gunstore and asks for a weapon suitable for hunting Jews, he is not criticised for his views, although the owner refuses to sell him any firerarms. When he appears as a guest at the Imperial Rodeo in Virginia and sings the national anthem, he rouses the audience, inducing them to cheer by declaring Kazakhstan’s solidarity with the United States and by stating ‘We support your war of terror’. 13 If Borat continuously appears as anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic and racist, it is surprising how many Americans who are unaware of his mask seem to believe that this is the way Easterners act. Occasionally, Borat/Baron Cohen even elicits nationalist, racist and misogynist statements. Yet Borat is a satire. By taking stereotypes about Eastern countries to their extreme, Baron Cohen holds up a mirror to seemingly civilised Westerners and eventually to the audience, too, since laughter about Borat is only possible for those who are aware of the stereotypes. Borat’s uninformed anti-Semitism, produced after all by a Jewish comedian, shows the deeper roots of racism, thus also

11

12 13

Telegraph (25 June 2009) [accessed 4 September 2009]. Cf. Nancy Condee, ‘Putting the Id Back in Identity Politics’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 8487 (p.86). Cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, p.137. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, dir. by Larry Charles (USA 2006), 0:32:10, my emphasis. All further time references are given in parentheses in the text.

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functioning as a mirror. If Baron Cohen’s mad ravings appear crude, they are in the tradition of the very best satirical writing in English: Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729), for example, bluntly recommends the use of Irish babies as food, as Saunders points out. 14 The opening sequence of the movie is a good example of the method Baron Cohen employs: As in a documentary about foreign locations, the audience is introduced to a village, the fictitious Kuzçek, 15 to which Borat acts as a guide. Furthermore, just like in a documentary, the self-appointed local commentator, Borat, talks about kinship, presenting his sister, a prostitute, with whom he seems to have an incestuous relationship, and his wife, whom he asks to dig a grave for his mother; the retarded brother, who is incestuously lusting after his sister, is introduced later. The villagers’ functions within the community are explained; we become acquainted not only with the town rapist but also the town mechanic, who happens to be the town abortionist as well: This my town of Kuzçek. This Urkin, the town rapist. Naughty, naughty. Over here, our town kindergarten. And here live Mukhtar Sakanov, town mechanic and abortionist. This is my house. Entry please. [...] This is Natalya. She is my sister. She is number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan. Nice. (0:01:33)

Grossly exaggerated tales of incest and misogyny are continuously at the centre of Borat’s commentary. The local tour is rounded off by a folkloristic ritual, albeit a rather disturbing one, since it is called ‘The Running of the Jew’ and shows the supposedly traditional celebration of an anti-Semitism that even endows Jews with horns. 16 The actual filming was done in the Romanian village of Glod, with unwitting Roma as participants, who did not understand Borat’s English and who assumed that they would appear in a documentary about rural poverty. 17 Also they received very little money for their appearance in the film. The movie closes on an episode in this village, which, despite Borat’s reforms, continues to appear as if it had been taken out 14 15 16

17

This parallel is pointed out in Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, p.23. Cf. Torchin, 53-63 (p.55). The stereotypes, especially racist stereotypes, are intensified in an accompanying mock travel guide: Borat, Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan / Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A. (London: Boxtree, 2007). Cf. Bojan Pancevski and Carmiola Ionescu, ‘Borat Film “Tricked” Poor Village Actors’, The Mail on Sunday (11 November 2006) [accessed 4 September 2009]; Eliot Borenstein, ‘Our Borats, Our Selves: Yokels and Cosmopolitans on the Global Stage’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 1-7 (p.5); Wallace, pp.35-49 (pp.40f).

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of a “real” documentary on rural poverty. Glod is authentic as a poor Eastern European village; the inhabitants’ personae as shown in the movie, however, are fictitious, and they are certainly in no way genuine Kazakh. The film also plays with authenticity through its use of language. At times, Borat speaks awkward English, while his conversations with Azamat are conducted in what appears to be “genuine” Kazakh with English subtitles, but is not. Their conversations as well as Borat’s mutterings to himself are a mixture of English, Hebrew, Polish, Russian and Armenian. 18 The supposedly Kazakh writings are fake and nonsensical, sometimes merely the transcriptions of English words with Cyrillic letters. Baron Cohen produces supposedly realistic details, from seemingly authentic sound to folklore, which are in fact fake. And fake in particular are some of the national identities he presents.

3. Borat’s Nationalities: Kazakhs, Gypsies, Jews and Americans As Benedict Anderson has influentially claimed, all local, regional and national communities are ‘imagined communities’: ‘In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.’ 19 At a time of globalised media culture, Borat plays with national and ethnic stereotypes, while imagining and constructing his very own East. He contrasts increased global mobility with the supposed particularisms of Kazakh culture. 20 If many of the stereotypes he employs are associated with Balkan countries, Kazakhstan, the seeming target of Baron Cohen’s biting satire, in fact lies in central Asia and not in Eastern Europe, being the world’s ninth-largest country and among its largest exporters of oil. A recent, well-informed study by the political scientist Robert A. Saunders corrects the rather turbulent impression conveyed through Borat: Kazakhstan has a population of 15 million, an ethnic mixture including Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians as well as dozens of other minorities, churches and mosques as well as synagogues, so that since the country’s independence in 1991, its political leaders have faced the task of forging a national identity, which is not based on any one dominating

18

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20

The critics’ explanations vary, cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, p.73; Wallace, pp.35-49 (pp.45f). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p.15. For the aesthetic tension between the global and the particular cf. Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. by Grazia Marchianò and Raffaele Milani (Turin: Trauben, 2001).

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ethnic group and for which culture is an important integrating factor. 21 Kazakhstan is a prosperous country, rich in resources, with strikingly beautiful landscapes, which are interesting both for tourists and foreign investors. The official website of the capital city Astana shows photo galleries with daring, modern architecture. 22 Another technical achievement is Baikonur Cosmodrome, now the world’s largest space-launching facility (the end of Borat shows a monkey in a spacesuit). Economically, Kazakhstan aims to be a global player and is looking to China, India, Europe and the United States. 23 While working hard to maintain and expand a positive image, through Borat, Kazakhstan found itself faced with the negative stereotypes one might associate with other ‘-stan’ countries such as Afghanistan or Uzbekistan. Borat’s Kazakhstan constantly appears as underdeveloped, uneducated, unhygienic, deficient in human rights, extremely poor and backward. For example, during an interview in Washington D.C., Borat presents Kazakh cheese to former Congressman Bob Barr, and only after his unwitting victim has eaten from it, explains its origin: Borat: Bob Barr: Borat: Bob Barr: Borat:

It is a custom have cheese at the start. Thank you. My wife, she make this cheese. Very nice. She make it from milk from her tit. (0:23:40)

As a self-appointed representative of Kazakhstan, Borat mocks the politician’s open-mindedness, which induces him to try an unknown item of food, while confronting him with the worst fears one might have about the lack of hygiene and the inability to distinguish between suitable and unsuitable food in a supposedly primitive country. When Borat had his debut on Da Ali G Show in 2000, Kazakh officials initially demanded that the show be banned, 24 but with the release of the film in 2006 they realised that Borat, now an immensely popular figure, could not be contained and began to embrace the character in the course of an image campaign. On a more subtle level, Borat also links stereotypes about “gypsies” to his version of Eastern Europe. The Roma, who have found themselves excluded for centuries, have frequently been stereotyped as beggars and thieves (stealing goods and children), as undermining societal structures and as possessing supernatural powers. The burlesque opening sequence of Borat resembles the 21

22 23 24

Cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, pp. 89-98. For a survey of folklore in Kazakhstan cf. Gulnar Kendirbaeva, ‘Folklore and Folklorism in Kazakhstan’, Asian Folklore Studies, 53 (1994), 97-123. Cf. Astana City Homepage [accessed 4 September 2009]. Cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, p.95. Cf. ibid., p.98.

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work of director Emir Kusturica, and some of the music played in Borat are the internationally acclaimed Balkan rhythms by Goran Bregoviü, who wrote the scores for several of Kusturica’s films, for example Time of the Gypsies (1988). 25 Thus the visual and acoustic representations of the “East” in Borat run counter to one another. If the images of the village make Kazakhstan appear as a place to be avoided, the music is electrifying, inspiring and signals the successful blending of old and new, of folklore and technology. The reference to “gypsy” music alongside Borat’s fake Kazakh identity, the choice of a Romanian village for the filming as well as the mixture of languages show that Baron Cohen builds up an “Eastern” identity which consists of rather heterogeneous elements, that he mixes cultural stereotypes associated with the Balkans and endows them with the name of a central Asian state. This can be read as an implied criticism of many Westerners’ poor geographical knowledge of Eastern European and Asian countries. Another extremely ambivalent aspect of the film is the constant display of anti-Semitism by actor Baron Cohen. If, from the initial episode onwards, Borat leaves no doubt about the supposed Kazakh viewpoint, he in fact demonstrates how anti-Semitism works. Borat represents the uninformed antiSemite, who delights in the ‘Running of the Jew’ ritual, substitutes knowledge by prejudice, and turns the Jews into scapegoats per se. When he and Azamat discuss their journey and their means of transport in a New York café, Borat remarks to the audience: ‘He insist we not fly in case the Jews repeated their attack of 9/11’. His anti-Semitism climaxes in the B&B episode when he is shocked to discover that his kind hosts, whom the movie presents in a very positive light, are Jewish. Therefore, to Borat, their acts of kindness, for example the offering of food, can have only one possible explanation: They are lusting after his life and possessions. Near-hysterical, he has his panic filmed as another “authentic” document of his American experience. When he and Azamat discover two cockroaches in their otherwise immaculately clean room, they are convinced that their hosts have come to attack them, try to bribe the insects with dollar notes, and flee the house in the middle of the night without paying for their stay. In a comic inversion, Borat, who insists that the Jewish couple is intent on robbing him of his money, actually steals from the Jews. As Borat and Azamat hurriedly leave in their van, Azamat drops a remark in his language, which is subtitled as ‘Let’s go back to New York, at least there’s no Jews there’. Again, a supposed Kazakh proves that his clichéd thinking is not based on factual know25

Cf. Borenstein, pp.1-7 (pp.4f). Bregoviü contributed to several Kusturica films: Time of the Gypsies (1988), Arizona Dream (1993) and Underground (1995). On the wider context of the fashion of “gypsy” music and the concurrent marekting of stereotypes, cf. Ioana Szeman, ‘“Gypsy Music” and Deejays’, The Drama Review, 53 (2009), 98-116.

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ledge; he is entirely unaware of New York City’s Jewish population. 26 It is hardly surprising that critic John Podhoretz called Borat ‘a satire of antiSemitism’. 27 Borat’s stereotypical and artificial Easternness exposes racism, seeming indifference towards violence (for example when he inquires after a firearm to hunt down Jews), or misogyny in the fraternity brothers’ drunken brawling. Another example is the dinner party in Alabama, where Borat visits the toilet and returns with a plastic bag full of faeces, which, however, is minded far less by his hosts than the subsequent introduction of Luenell, an African American prostitute. 28 The Alabama host and his other guests, who believed that they were taking part in an educational documentary for Belarus television, are presented as racially intolerant. If some critics argue that Borat exposes racism, others state that most Americans who meet him keep surprisingly calm in the face of his violations of cultural norms, for example the etiquette coach, to whom Borat shows a photograph of his naked son’s sexual organ and who tells him patiently that he should keep the picture to himself. Baron Cohen’s vision of racist America ends with Luenell finding a safe haven from American prejudice. When she returns to Kazakhstan as his wife, she follows in the footsteps of African-American writers who travelled to the Soviet Union, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Claude McKay, in order to discover alternative types of political communities. The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes visited Kazakhstan in 1932 and wrote a book about Central Asia. 29 What about Borat’s own nationality? The character stands for the backwardness a globalised person wishes to leave behind: 30 He is continuously occupied with sex and his misogynist, childish, uninformed and folkloristic beliefs. Borat misunderstands the very nature of technology when, for exam26

27

28

29

30

For reviews of Borat and his satire on anti-Semitism cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, pp.142-148. A further in-depth exploration is William Closson James, ‘Borat and Anti-Semitism’, Journal of Religion and Film, 12 (2008) [accessed 8 September 2009]. John Podhoretz, ‘The Borat Show: The Man Who Would Be Kazakhstan’s Man of the Moment’, The Weekly Standard, 12 (10 October 2006) [accessed 4 September 2009]. Cf. Steven S. Lee, ‘Borat, Multiculturalism, Mnogonatsional“nost”’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 19-34 (p.23). Cf. ibid., p.25; Langston Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Moscow: CoOperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934); David Chioni Moore, ‘Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’s Relevance, 19332002’, Callaloo, 25 (2002), pp.1115-1135. Cf. also Eva Ulrike Pirker’s article in this volume. Cf. Borenstein, pp.1-7 (p.6).

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ple, he insists in his conversation with a car salesman that a device called ‘pussy magnet’ actually exists and that he wishes to buy it. His naiveté and his sexist attitude towards women keep him from comprehending the metaphorical nature of the term. Borat’s planned educational documentary turns into an educational trip for himself. He learns about the nature of love but is not really taught to discard his prejudice. At the end of the film, Borat seems to have dropped his racism when we see him explaining that the persecution of Jews in his village has been replaced by a fierce expression of Christian sentiment. However, he has not dropped the more violent aspects of his fictitious Kazakh culture that seem to be in constant need of “othering” someone. Borat does not belong to the global elite, which Slavoj Žižek sees favoured by capitalism. 31 On the contrary, in the guise of Borat, Baron Cohen is the nightmare of multiculturalism; he is the ultimate reply to our harmonising ‘multiculturalist gaze’, 32 which Žižek criticises as deficient because it endows us with feelings of superiority. If we, as Žižek writes, envision ‘the folklorist Other deprived of its substance’, 33 here, through Borat, we get the substance back and are forced to realise that it is not what we expected at all. If many of the American interviewees merely do not know how to react in the face of the blatant stereotypes they are confronted with when encountering Borat, it is ultimately the cinema audience which is asked to question its concept of a peaceful, multicultural coexistence. Borat is a transnational trickster figure, 34 the archetypal “other”, who conducts an “othering” of Eastern Europeans. As the academic discipline of Cultural Studies aims at unmasking such cultural practices, Borat, who reinscribes them, may be justly termed ‘post-cultural studies’. 35 Since Baron Cohen (who is British) focuses on a critique of American stereotypes about the East, his film also transports anti-American stereotypes from a British perspective, thus re-inscribing the processes he aims to unmask. If Jean Baudrillard’s America explains to what extent our perception of America has been shaped by the media, so that we are barely capable of seeing an unmedialised America, Borat plays with stereotypical spaces like the gun-store, the rodeo, the Pentecostal Church, the road and others. 36 Thus Borat’s America is the hyperreal copy world described by Baudrillard. 37 In 31

32 33 34

35 36 37

Cf. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism?’, New Left Review, I.225 (Sept./Oct. 1997), 28-51, (p.37). Ibid., p.37. Ibid. Cf. Natalie Kononenko and Svitlana Kukharenko, ‘Borat the Trickster: Folklore and the Media, Folklore in the Media’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 1-7. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, p.63. Cf. Wallace, pp.35-49 (pp.38f.); Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988). Cf. Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Mark Poster, 2nd

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‘Simulacra and Simulations’, the French philosopher uses a story by Jorge Luis Borges to explain how we come to believe that not a place but its map, the copy world, is the real thing. Borat believes in the copy world of America, the mental map drawn by the media, and his real tragedy is that it continuously fails him because he cannot find this America, which is embodied by Pamela Anderson. It constantly eludes him, whereas the America he helplessly experiences is far from being a dream country. Reading reviews about Borat, I was surprised how many critics focussed on the film’s anti-Semitism and how few of them recognised its blatant anti-Americanism. With Borat, Baron Cohen holds up a mirror to multi-ethnic Britain by showing that multicultural co-existence can be far removed from the multiculturalist’s all-encompassing feel-good factor, and ultimately also redefines the very concept of multi-ethnicity.

4. The Grotesque Body Among the aesthetic means employed by Baron Cohen is a concentration on the embarrassing body, which breaks taboos and fails to conform to norms. Borat is brimming with references to incest, rape, homophobia or faeces, confronting the audience with the grotesque aspects of the Bakhtinian body. 38 This body is constantly and implicitly contrasted with the ideal body or rather bodies, which (like Pamela Anderson’s) are elusive, medialised images that tease Borat and then pass him by. Borat himself is always occupied with sex, even talks about his family relationships in terms of sexuality: his sister’s vagina, his brother’s longing for incest, his son’s penis. The aggressive male sexuality he presents is mirrored in the authoritarian structure of the imagined Kazakhstan, and so it is only fitting that the mock national anthem, which concludes the film, ends on the head of state’s member: Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan you very nice place. From Plains of Tarashek to Northern fence of Jewtown. Come grasp the mighty penis of our leader. From junction with the testes to tip of his face! (1:17:14)

Borat himself, famous through his absurd swimsuit, is male up to both of his ears. When he explains that Kazakh women are kept in cages and that gatherings of more than five women are only acceptable as long as these happen either in a brothel or in a grave, he plays with the stereotypes associated with

38

edn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp.169-187. Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), p.26. On Borat and the grotesque see Vasiliki P. Neofotistos, ‘The Muslim, the Jew and the African American: America and the Production of Alterity in Borat’, Anthropology Today, 24 (2008), 13-17.

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barbarian and authoritarian Eastern powers, who rob women of their basic liberties. His meeting with three activists from the Veteran Feminists of America in New York City shows that he is unable to comprehend any of their ideas. 39 It is this exaggerated masculinity which renders him socially incompetent and unsuccessful. 40 Therefore it is hardly surprising that he falls in love with an image, with actress Pamela Anderson, who embodies his ideal of a woman. Through her, he eventually learns that the medialised America and the “real” America are worlds apart. Despite his own misogynist views, however, Borat also embodies some feminine aspects, which let his performance of masculinity appear even more questionable. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler claims that the body that is permeable (and thus, for example, leaks fluid) is a threat to the social and heterosexual order. 41 Borat, impersonated by Baron Cohen’s own slim and feminine body, lacks masculinity when he is shown as producing faeces, or when, in an early episode, Azamat uses a hairdryer to blow-dry his moist genitals, thus also feminising him. Moreover, Borat is fascinated with excrement and toilets. After his arrival in a New York hotel, he washes his face with water from the toilet, failing to recognise its cultural function. The fake national anthem at the very end contains this stanza: Kazakhstan home of Tinshein swimming pool. Its length thirty meter and width six meter. Filtration system a marvel to behold. It remove eighty percent of human solid waste. (1:16:15)

If Borat struggles to find the medialised, the hyperreal America, he himself breaks through the illusion: Excrement is not part of this medialised America, it is real, physical, grotesque and elicits Bakhtinian laughter from the cinema audience. The film’s vision of the grotesque body forces itself onto the cine-ma audience while Borat, in an act of ‘mimicry’, 42 desperately tries to be faithful to what he regards (or seems to regard) as American civilisation. Homi Bhabha’s juxtaposition of the terms ‘mimicry’ and ‘mockery’ takes account of the displacement that comes with imitation and that can be a comic one. 43 39

40

41

42

43

One of them is the sculptor Linda Stein, whose most recent work incorporates Borat/Baron Cohen, cf. Jann Matlock, ‘Vestiges of New Battles: Linda Stein's Sculpture after 9/11’, Feminist Studies, 33 (2007), 569-590 (pp.573-576, p.585). Cf. David Buchbinder, ‘Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate or Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television’, Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'études américaines, 38 (2008), 227-45. Cf. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.166. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.85-92. Ibid., p.86.

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5. Who Should Be Embarrassed? Because of its guerilla-style production methods, Borat induced a lot of controversy, was banned in most Arab countries, and led to a number of legal complaints by those who had unwittingly participated in it, such as the Roma villagers shown at the beginning, who were given a mere handful of dollars each and were appalled to discover what they had been used for. 44 Since Baron Cohen’s team had made sure that the mock documentation as well as the interviews were legally watertight, there was little the unwitting victims could do, as two of the three frat boys realised, who tried to sue. 45 Likewise, Kazakh officials found that it was legally impossible to proceed against what they regarded as a distastrous image campaign. Kazakhstan was particularly worried about foreign investors, but also about the development of tourism, since officials feared that Borat’s mad ravings would attract sex tourism to the region. One of Baron Cohen’s cheekiest provocations occurred in September 2006, when he appeared in the guise of Borat outside the Kazakh Embassy in Washington D.C. and gave a press conference. 46 With the release of the film, Kazakhstan seems to have learnt to love Borat and to integrate him into their image campaign. Baron Cohen, who stands in the context of the contemporary culture of ‘Cool Britannia’ may well have contributed to the image of a ‘Cool Kazakhstan’. 47

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) Ansen, David, ‘Cinematic Fantastic’, Newsweek (15 December 2006) [accessed 2 September 2009] 44

Cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, p.153; Wallace, pp.35-49 (p.41). Apparently, the man shown with a sex toy on his arm did not even know what this item had been produced for. 45 Cf. Lawrence Van Gelder, ‘Arts, Briefly’, The New York Times (13 December 2006) [accessed 6 September 2009]. 46 Cf. n.n., ‘Kazakhstan Isn’t Laughing at “Reporter Borat”’, The Washington Times (1 October 2006) [accessed 6 September 2009]. 47 In The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen Saunders claims that ‘Borat has endowed “Brand Kazakhstan” with an elusive trait that cannot be bought at any price: the “cool” factor’ (p.128).

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Astana City Homepage [accessed 4 September 2009] ‘Baikonur Cosmodrome’, in A Dictionary of Space Exploration, ed. by E. Julius Dasch (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005) (Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Freie Universität Berlin) [accessed 4 September 2009] Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Mark Poster, 2nd edn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp.169-187 —, America (London: Verso, 1988) Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.85-92 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, dir. by Larry Charles (USA 2006) Borat, Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan / Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A. (London: Boxtree, 2007) Borenstein, Eliot, ‘Our Borats, Our Selves: Yokels and Cosmopolitans on the Global Stage’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 1-7 Buchbinder, David, ‘Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate or Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television’, Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'études américaines, 38 (2008), 227-245 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) Closson James, William, ‘Borat and Anti-Semitism’, Journal of Religion and Film, 12 (2008) [accessed 8 September 2009] Condee, Nancy, ‘Putting the Id Back in Identity Politics’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 84-87 Cornwell, Tim, ‘Rise of the Comic Kazach Who Used to Be Albanian’, The Scotsman (20 October 2006) [accessed 2 September 2009] Fletcher, Ewan, ‘Stung by Sacha Baron Cohen: Borat’s Etiquette Consultant’, The Daily Telegraph (25 June 2009) [accessed 4 September 2009]

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Howells, Richard, ‘“Is it Because I is Black?” Race, Humour and the Polysemiology of Ali G’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26 (2006), 155-77 Hughes, Langston, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Moscow: CoOperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934) Kendirbaeva, Gulnar, ‘Folklore and Folklorism in Kazakhstan’, Asian Folklore Studies, 53 (1994), 97-123 Kononenko, Natalie and Svitlana Kukharenko, ‘Borat the Trickster: Folklore and the Media, Folklore in the Media’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 1-7 Laderman, David, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002) Lee, Steven S., ‘Borat, Multiculturalism, Mnogonatsional“nost”’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 19-34 Marchianò, Grazia and Raffaele Milani, eds., Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics (Turin: Trauben, 2001) Matlock, Jann, ‘Vestiges of New Battles: Linda Stein's Sculpture after 9/11’, Feminist Studies, 33 (2007), 569-590 Moore, David Chioni, ‘Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’s Relevance, 1933-2002’, Callaloo, 25 (2002), 1115-1135 Morris, Steven, ‘Kazakhstan up in arms over Ali G spoof’, The Guardian (15 November 2005) [accessed 2 September 2009] Neofotistos, Vasiliki P., ‘The Muslim, the Jew and the African American: America and the Production of Alterity in Borat’, Anthropology Today, 24 (2008), 13-17 N.N., ‘Kazakhstan Isn’t Laughing at “Reporter Borat”’, The Washington Times (1 October 2006) [accessed 6 September 2009] Pancevski, Bojan and Carmiola Ionescu, ‘Borat Film “Tricked” Poor Village Actors’, The Mail on Sunday (11 November 2006) [accessed 4 September 2009] Podhoretz, John, ‘The Borat Show: The Man Who Would Be Kazakhstan’s Man of the Moment’, The Weekly Standard, 12 (10 October 2006) [accessed 4 September 2009] Saunders, Robert A., The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle Over Borat (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008) —, ‘In Defence of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan’s War on Sacha Baron Cohen’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 14 (2007), 225-255

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Sommer, Roy, Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien (Trier: WVT, 2000) Szeman, Ioana, ‘“Gypsy Music” and Deejays’, The Drama Review, 53 (2009), 98-116 Torchin, Leshu, ‘Cultural Learnings of Borat Make for Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary’, Film & History, 38.1 (2008), 53-63 Tracy, Kathleen, Sacha Baron Cohen: The Unauthorised Biography (London: JR Books, 2008) Van Gelder, Lawrence, ‘Arts, Briefly’, The New York Times (13 December 2006) [accessed 6 September 2009] Wallace, Dickie, ‘Hyperrealizing “Borat” with the Map of the European “Other”’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 35-49 Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism?’, New Left Review, I.225 (Sept/Oct 1997), 28-51

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Immigrants, Stereotypes and the New Ireland: Czech Identity in and in Response to the Film Once This article investigates the portrayal of Czech immigrants to Celtic Tiger Ireland in the film Once and the response of Czech viewers to that representation. It is argued that both representation and response are linked to the question of what it means to be Czech in post-communist Europe. The analysis shows that, despite the film’s positive approach towards bridging differences between native and immigrant, the main Czech character’s depiction in Once remains problematic and relies on stereotypes typically associated with the poor immigrant from the East. As a result, Czech identity disappears behind a uniform conception of Eastern Europe. In their response to the film, Czech viewers disapprove of this notion because the West’s ignorance and its subsequent clichéd representations of Czech people in Western cultural products places the Czech Republic within a haze of communist states. Films such as Once, therefore, impede the Czech Republic’s return to the centre of Europe, the country’s self-proclaimed ancestral home at the heart of the continent. A section on the situation after the Celtic Tiger boom emphasises the cultural significance of the film and its reception. For the discussion on Czech viewer response, comments on two websites, the video portal YouTube and the Czech film website csfd.cz, were evaluated.

1. Immigrant Stories for a Changing Society Since the potato famine in the 1840s, and for much of the subsequent century and a half, Ireland was regarded as a country from which people traditionally emigrated. However, towards the end of the twentieth century, the situation in Ireland changed dramatically as a result of the economic miracle known as The Celtic Tiger. Commercially prospering, Ireland quickly became an attractive destination for migrants and, in fact, has become a country of immigration. This is especially true for immigrants from the former communist Central and Eastern European states which became part of the European Union in 2004. The dramatic changes in Irish society as a result of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon have also left their mark on Irish popular culture. Films like Adam and Paul (2004) and The Tiger’s Tail (2006) show Dublin after the economic boom. The issue of Eastern European immigrants in Ireland, more specifically in Dublin, features prominently in the low-budget Irish film musical Once (2006). Once tells the story of an Irish busker, credited as ‘Guy’ (Glen Hansard), and a young immigrant woman from the Czech Republic, ‘Girl’ (Markéta Irglová). Girl immigrated to Ireland with her mother and daughter, while her husband stayed in the Czech Republic after their relationship faltered. Guy was betrayed by his ex-girlfriend who, then, moved to London.

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He is unable to get his music career started; Girl cannot afford a piano and instead has to go to a musical instrument store during her lunch break in order to be able to play the piano. In the course of the film, the two main characters support each other and actively seek to help one another improve their lives. Girl helps Guy to get his career as musician started and to reconcile with his ex-girlfriend. Guy, on the other hand, involves her in his songwriting and gives her a piano, the one object she is longing for, as a farewell gift. Once was received enthusiastically by reviewers and audiences around the world.1 It received audience awards at both the Dublin Film Festival and the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. Even more extraordinarily, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová were given the Oscar for Best Song at the 80th Academy Awards. Furthermore, with a production budget of only $150,000, it ended up grossing over $20,000,000 worldwide.2 The film was often praised for giving a genuine portrayal of modern Irish society and its immigrants from Eastern Europe.3 It gains an atmosphere of perceived authenticity through cinematography, the non-professional actors’ style of performance and their experience as musicians and/or migrants. The entire film was shot with “consumer” digital cameras. This and the fact that most shots are handheld conveys a documentary cinéma verité quality. By way of inexpensive digital filming, the actors were able to improvise scenes, adapting the script to their own words and do scenes again. All this contributed to the realistic mood of the film which was further strengthened by the fact that Guy and Girl are in some ways similar to the real-life stories of Hansard and Irglová. Hansard started busking in Dublin when he was thirteen and has been known as the lead singer of the Irish band The Frames, Irglová is an accomplished musician in her native Czech Republic and immigrated to Ireland during her teens. As Once is considered to represent a multi-cultural Ireland and its new residents as they “really” are, a number of questions arise. The answers to 1

2

3

Once appears in various film critics’s top ten lists for the year 2007 over thirty times. Cf. Metacritic, ‘Film Critic Top Ten Lists: 2007 Critics’ Picks’ [accessed 14 September 2009]; and Awards Watch, ‘The 2007 Top Tens’, Movie City News [accessed 14 September 2009]. Cf. n.n., ‘Once (2007)’, Box Office Mojo [accessed 14 September 2009]. Cf. John Beifuss, ‘Inexpensive, Bittersweet, “Once” Finds Its Groove’, Commercialappeal (24 May 2007) [accessed 14 September 2009]; Claudia Puig, ‘For “Once”, Songs Fuel the Musical’, USA Today (17 May 2007) [accessed 14 September 2009].

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these questions gain additional significance in view of the fact that mass media, in this case popular cinema, has the power to shape public opinion of and attitudes towards immigrants and their countries of origin: ‘The mass media’s construction of immigrants, often as an exotic or threatening “other”, has been the focus of the social sciences for many decades.’4 Therefore, an analysis of the film’s take on immigrants from the east of Europe is warranted. Subsequently, the following questions will be investigated: what is the relationship between the native Irish population, represented through Guy, and the Czech migrants, represented through Girl? In which ways does the film characterise and portray these migrants? Moreover, how do Czech people respond to the popular representation of Czeck nationals in a cultural product of the West? The discussion will show that the cultural encounter between the West and the East in Once and in response to it raises issues of Czech identity from a Western and Eastern perspective.

2. Economy and Migration in Celtic Tiger Ireland Contemporary Irish society is the result of a rapid economic and social transformation which ended its reputation as a poor nation for which emigration was the only escape. In less than two decades, Ireland has changed from a traditionally poor, agricultural country into a rich, industrialised society. It has developed from ‘a country of emigration’5 to ‘a country of destination’.6 The fact that ‘Ireland became one of the fastest-growing economies in the world’7 is due to two factors. Firstly, the Irish government ‘embraced a neoliberal project’8 by cutting down the corporate taxation rate which attracted foreign companies, especially from the US, to choose Ireland over other countries when investing in the European Union.9 Furthermore, Ireland still received subsidies from the European Union to jumpstart their economy. As a consequence, ‘[u]nder virtually every indicator, greater economic progress was made since 1987 than in any comparable period over the previous sixty4

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Paul Spoonly and Andrew Butcher, ‘Reporting Superdiversity: The Mass Media and Immigration in New Zealand’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 30.4 (2009), 355-372 (p.356). Cf. also Paul Hartmann and Charles Husband, Racism and the Mass Media: A Study of the Role of the Mass Media in the Formation of White Beliefs and Attitudes in Britain (London: Davis-Poynter, 1974); John Downing and Charles Husband, Representing ‘Race’: Racisms, Ethnicities and Media (London: SAGE, 2005). Steven Loyal, ‘Immigration’, in Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map, ed. by Sara O’Sullivan (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), pp.30-47 (p.30). Tony Fahey, ‘Population’, in O’Sullivan, pp.13-29 (p.27). Kieren Allen, ‘Globalisation, the State and Ireland’s Miracle Economy’, in Sara O’Sullivan, pp.231-247 (p.231). Ibid., p.243. Sara O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction: Ireland 1995-2005’, in O’Sullivan, pp.1-12 (p.1).

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four years’.10 The Irish Celtic Tiger phenomenon, seemingly, was a total success story. However, the new wealth was not distributed equally to all strata of society. On the contrary, the government’s economic policy has created more inequality in Irish society. According to Fintan O’Toole, a columnist and assistant editor of The Irish Times, Ireland is one of the most globalised and most unequal societies in Europe, where the poor, the ill and the migrants meet ‘the stern face of State authority’ while ‘their betters were to get off scot-free’ in terms of tax avoidance and a generally benign view of the free market system.11

From this it becomes clear that the working classes in Ireland did not greatly benefit from the money generated by the Celtic Tiger but, on top of that, faced ‘rising prices and rents’ as an effect of the flourishing economy.12 Despite these objectionable developments, Ireland has attracted substantial numbers of immigrants countering its traditional role as an emigrant country. The impact of the Celtic Tiger ‘made itself felt in sheer numbers: From having a net emigration of 70,000 people as recently as between 1988 and 1999, Ireland had a net immigration of 70,000 in 2005’.13 Initially, the majority of immigrants were former Irish emigrants who returned to their homeland and UK citizens who also wanted to profit from the vastly improved conditions in Ireland. Immigrants to Ireland were welcome as the economic expansion created new jobs and quickly a shortage of labour. Accordingly, Ireland needed an additional labour force of 50,000 people per year during the 1990s, the high tide of the Celtic Tiger.14 This applies not exclusively but particularly to the unskilled employment sector where a ‘large source of labour demand during the 1990s up to now’ has existed.15 It is conceivable that the scarcity of labour during a phase of economic growth prompted the Irish government’s decision to adopt immigration-friendly policies. Thus, ‘when ten new, mostly former Communist central and eastern European states were admitted’ into the EU in 2004, Ireland ‘was one of a small number of states (along with Sweden and the UK) that opted to permit

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13 14

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Ray MacSharry and Padraic A. White, The Making of the Celtic Tiger: The Inside Story to Ireland’s Boom Economy, ed. by Kieran A. Kennedy (Cork: Mercier, 2001), p.376. Ronaldo Munck, ‘Social Class and Inequality’, in O’Sullivan, pp.301-317 (p.314). Michael Punch, ‘Commodity or Home? Critical Perspectives on Irish Housing’, in O’Sullivan, pp.333-350 (p.346). Loyal, pp.30-47 (p.30). Cf. William J. Smyth, ‘Irland und Nordirland’, in Enzyklopädie Migration in Europa: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, and Jochen Oltmer (München: Fink, 2008), pp.85-94 (p.93). Loyal, pp.30-47 (p.40).

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full access’16 to the domestic labour market. Most other EU members had decided against this possibility and reached an agreement on long transition periods to prevent mass migration from Eastern Europe. The decision to admit the new EU members to the domestic labour market affected immigration to Ireland tremendously and also Irish society in general. A great number of citizens of the former Eastern bloc countries decided to go to Ireland: 26,000 migrants in the first 12 months after EU enlargement.17 Consequently, by 2006, ‘migrants from the new member states of the EU […] had taken over as the dominant source of immigrants, accounting for 43 per cent of the total’.18 In 2006, Poles, Lithuanians and Latvian citizens were among the five strongest immigrant groups in Ireland. As a result, the number of non-Irish people increased by 88 per cent in the time span from 2002 to 2006, with non-Irish people thus making up about 10 per cent of the general population.19 Naturally, this development has changed the country dramatically: ‘A generation ago, people were still flooding out of Ireland to find jobs, now people are flocking into the country. Ireland is rapidly becoming a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society’.20

3. Connecting East and West The presence of immigrants from Eastern Europe in Ireland is embraced in Once. After initial misunderstandings, the relationship between Girl and Guy is marked as friendship and the film establishes a number of parallels and similarities between the two characters to bridge the differences between native and migrant. Both of them have lost one of their parents and still live with the other. It is apparent during the course of the film that they love and respect their parents very much. Guy, despite his affection for Girl, does not allow her to ride his father’s motorcycle. Moreover, he obviously longs for his father’s appreciation, which is shown when asking him to listen to his demo CD. Furthermore, Guy offers to postpone his departure to London in case his father would not be comfortable with being alone. Girl even feels responsible for her mother whom she brought along in the first place and is not able to leave behind in a foreign country. She declines to go to London with Guy on the basis that she would not be able to bring her mother along. On other occasions, she ends her time with Guy because of her ‘responsibili-

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17 18 19 20

Seán Ó’Riain and Peter Murray, ‘Work Transformed: Two Faces of the New Irish Workplace’, in O’Sullivan, p.248-264 (p.257). Cf. Smyth, pp.85-94 (p.93). Fahey, pp.13-29 (p.28). Cf. Loyal, pp.30-47 (p.36). O’Sullivan, pp.1-12 (p.1).

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ties’,21 i.e. taking care of her mother and daughter. Lastly, both are separated from their former partners and are struggling to cope with that situation. In the end, Guy and Girl make attempts to start over with girlfriend and husband, respectively. Moreover, Guy and Girl share an identity as social outsiders in Dublin and, at the end of the film, as migrants. Girl, the immigrant to Ireland, takes whatever job she can grasp, and Guy leads an unconventional life as a street musician. Unable to support himself financially by making music, he unenthusiastically works in his father’s run-down hoover repair shop for a regular job. At the end of the film, Guy emigrates from Ireland to head for London, hoping to make it in the music business there and also making up with his former girlfriend. He thus follows Girl’s example. She apparently left her native country in search of a better life, possibly running away from a disappointing marriage. Above all, it is the characters’ passion for making music that unites them. Here, the film tries to employ the topos of music as a means of “universal” communication that crosses cultural gaps. This bond between the two is actually emphasised in the advertisement of the film. The poster shows them walking together on the fingerboard of a guitar. Throughout the film, they express their feelings, to themselves and to each other, through the songs they sing. This is how they get to know and understand each other. Furthermore, it is because of their love for music that they initially meet and then become friends. Girl first approaches Guy when he plays one of his songs on Grafton Street. The next day, they enjoy a session in the musical instrument store. In addition, after Guy offends Girl by asking her to stay the night, he regains her trust by offering her the chance to write the lyrics for one of his songs. The film’s cordial attitude towards the immigrants is evident in the positive characterisation of Girl. First, she is depicted as a good friend for Guy. She encourages him in his plans to go to London. She helps him make the recording of their song possible when she bargains for a good deal at the recording studio. She also assists Guy in buying a suit and securing a bank loan in order to finance the recording. Second, she is portrayed as a talented musician. When playing along with Guy in the store, she can easily pick up on the song’s key and sing the harmony to his lead vocals. She also accompanies Guy during the recording session of the demo CD, and composes a song herself. Additionally, she is shown to be a responsible person. Many times, she tells Guy that ‘you have to go now’ (0:30:40) because she needs to 21

Once, dir by John Carney (Ireland 2006), 0:24:49. All time references given in parentheses in the text refer to the Once Special Edition DVD set published by Kinowelt Home Entertainment in 2008.

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take care of her mother and daughter. In the end, she tries ‘to make it work’ (1:11:19) with her husband because she does not ‘want Ivana to grow up without a father’ (0:51:04). Thus, even though she loves Guy,22 she gives priority to her family. By characterising Girl positively, Once resists several degrading stereotypes commonly associated with immigrants and Eastern European women specifically. Despite financial woes, Girl works several jobs to support her family and thus does not correspond to the stereotype of immigrants as beggars. She insists on paying Guy’s father for repairing her broken vacuum cleaner because she knows that his business relies on paying costumers. Girl’s demure clothes and plain looks certainly are not consistent with the stereotype of the Eastern European woman as sexual object, and, when Guy asks her to spend the night with him, she is offended by his implication that she might be interested in sleeping with him. Later, when he wants her to go to London with him, she resists a short-lived sexual adventure or romance despite the great chemistry between the two.

4. Stereotypical Representation of the East(ern) in the West Despite the positive characterisation of Girl, the film’s representation of Eastern European immigrants in Dublin is nevertheless problematic. The film does not avoid using some unfavourable stereotypes. In portraying Girl as poor, Once follows the ‘popular stereotypes of most immigrants being peasants or laborers in big cities’.23 Girl has three different jobs, all of them in the low-paid unskilled employment sector. At the beginning of the story, she sells magazines and flowers on the street. Selling flowers in particular places Girl with a classical lower-class female character in a musical film, Eliza Dolittle from My Fair Lady (1964). Later, she also works as a cleaning woman, a stereotypical occupation for a migrant woman from Eastern Europe. Hence, she does not find employment outside the low-wage job market which would, in fact, suit her good education and English language skills much better. Girl shares a shabby flat with her mother and daughter. The place is rather gloomy in that it lacks light and is furnished sparsely. Girl and her family share their TV with their Polish neighbours24 because there is ‘only one telly 22

23

24

When Guy asks her if she loves her husband, she answers in Czech, incomprehensible for him: ‘Miluju tebe’ (‘I love you’). Even though this line is not subtitled, the look on Girl’s face betrays her feelings. Katherine B. Payant, ‘Introduction: Stories of the Uprooted’, in The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, ed. by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp.xiii-xxvii (p.xxi). Whereas this is not stated in the film, director John Carney reveals in the audio commentary

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in the building’ (0:28:28), indicating that they live in a poor quarter. Moreover, they do not even have a telephone connection in their home, and Girl has to take money from her daughter’s piggy bank in order to pay for a set of batteries to make the CD player work again. Girl’s difficulties with high cost of living in twenty-first century-Ireland are also suggested in her comment on why she does not have a piano at home: ‘I can’t get one in Ireland. It’s so much money. I can’t afford it’ (0:10:50). This considered, it is hardly understandable, and never explained in the film, why Girl came with her mother and daughter to Ireland in the first place. In her case, neither the standard push nor the traditional pull factors seem to apply. The rate of unemployment in the Czech Republic was low with merely 5.3 per cent at the time the film was produced and is presumably set in.25 This is probably one major reason why it is difficult to find any Czech people in the countries which opened their labour markets to the new EU members on 1 May 2004.26 On the contrary, since independence, the Czech Republic has in fact become a country of immigration.27 Girl and her family are not represented in the film as having a Czech identity but serve as indistinctive, generalised representatives of the Eastern European migrant phenomenon in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Director John Carney states that, while preparing his project, he was looking for any kind of Eastern European actress or singer: ‘And I was thinking I’d get some famous Czech Republic actor or Polish actress to play the lead female role’.28 This idea of an undifferentiated perspective on Eastern Europe also comes across in the costume of Girl’s mother. Marketa Irglová remarks in the DVD audio commentary: [W]e both were basically dressed in these clothes that are really not very Czech. I mean we don’t dress like that in [the] Czech Republic and I tried to put that across to the costume girl. But she had this idea of us looking that way […]. She [the Czech woman portraying the mother,] came on set dressed in these clothes being really upset about the fact that she was dressed [in this way]. It was very funny. She was wearing all this fake gold. And it was almost like they dressed her up as a gypsy or something.29

In light of Irglová’s comment and explanation, the costume girl aimed for an exotic look when selecting clothes for the Czech characters, which marks

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that Girl’s neighbours are in fact Polish. Cf. Hans-Jörg Schmidt, Tschechien: Eine Nachbarschaftskunde für Deutsche (Berlin: Links, 2008), p.9. Cf. ibid., p.149. Cf. Hermann Zeitlhofer, ‘Tschechien und Slowakei’, in Enzyklopädie Migration in Europa: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Klaus J. Bade and others (München: Fink, 2008), pp.272-287 (p.284). Once, Audiocommentary, 0:16:02. Once, Audiocommentary, 0:27:27.

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these characters as different and as outsiders to Irish/Western society. The observation that she might have been influenced in her choice of costume by representations of gypsies, a group of people traditionally associated with countries in Eastern Europe and themselves stereotypically conceived as “the other” for centuries,30 once again illustrates that Western ideas of Eastern European countries are uniform and clichéd. The stereotypes used in Once, mainly that of the poor immigrant, are potentially detrimental for the acceptance of immigrants in Irish society. Marco Cinnirella describes the social impact of stereotypes as follows: Via the mass media, [...] individuals experience representations of members of social categories and groups that they rarely, or sometimes never, meet in their everyday encounters. This means that individuals are likely to hold stereotypes of ethnic and national groups whose members they might never have actually experienced in person.31

In the particular case of Once, the stereotypes might stoke xenophobic resentment towards immigrants from Eastern Europe, particularly in view of the current public debate in Ireland about whether the increasing number of immigrants makes employment and working conditions in the low-wage sector more difficult for the indigenous population.32 The potential for hostility is even greater since a successful integration of the immigrants into Irish society has not taken place so far. According to a number of surveys, the Irish people hardly come into contact with immigrants: ‘[S]ocial contact between migrants and ‘natives’ tends to be limited, with many Irish people saying they do not know any migrants personally’.33

5. Reception in the Czech Republic: Separated from the East, Relocated in the West Despite the fact that the portrayal of Czech immigrants in Once draws on stereotypes towards Eastern Europeans, the film was received exceptionally well by Czech audiences. It grossed over $600,000 at the Czech box office.34 30

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34

Cf. Ines Busch, ‘Das Spektakel vom “Zigeuner”: Visuelle Repräsentation und Antiziganismus’, in Antiziganistische Zustände: Zur Kritik eines allgegenwärtigen Ressentiments, ed. by Markus End, Kathrin Herold, and Yvonne Robel (Münster: Unrast, 2009), pp.158-176 (p.176). Marco Cinnirella, ‘Ethnic and National Stereotypes: A Social Identity Perspective’, in Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. by C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp.37-52 (pp.39f). Cf. Loyal, pp.30-47 (p.45). Ciarán McCullagh, ‘Modern Ireland, Modern Media, Same Old Story?’, in O’Sullivan, pp.136-151 (p.147). Cf. n.n. ‘Once (2007) – International Box Office Results’, Box Office Mojo [accessed 14 September 2009].

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To put this in perspective, it made more money domestically than Hollywood blockbusters such as The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) or Transformers (2007),35 both of which were in the top 12 of highest grossing films worldwide in 2007. Once, in contrast, only holds the 153rd place in the same statistics.36 This contrast underlines the film’s extraordinary success in the Czech Republic. However, an analysis of two websites’ comment boards draws a more complex picture of how Czech people responded to Once. For that analysis, user comments on the video platform YouTube and the Czech-Slovakian film database website csfd.cz were examined. All comments in Czech were regarded, comments in English were only considered if the user made it explicit that s/he is from the Czech Republic. As there is no obvious reason why people should lie about their identity when commenting on a video or film website, statements on national identity were taken as fact even though there is no guarantee that these people expressed their true opinions. Unfortunately, it was for the most part impossible to find further information regarding the users who commented on Once. However, it can be assumed, and official statistics on users from YouTube confirm that assumption, that the great majority of comments were written by people aged under 50.37 On YouTube, there were 6,653 comments for the most prominent video related to Once.38 This video works very much like a film trailer, showing a montage of the best scenes of the film with the Oscar-winning song ‘Falling Slowly’ on the soundtrack. 77 comments by Czech users for this particular video were noteworthy as they referred to the portrayal of the Czech immigrants or expressed the user’s reaction to the film in being Czech. On csfd.cz, there were 541 comments for the film, 14 of which were relevant for the present discussion.39 35

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Cf. n.n., ‘Transformers (2007) – International Box Office Results’, Box Office Mojo [accessed 14 September 2009]; n.n., ‘The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) – International Box Office Results’, boxofficemojo.com [accessed 14 September 2009]. Cf. n.n., ‘2007 Yearly Box Office Results’, Box Office Mojo [accessed 14 September 2009]. According to You Tube statistics, merely 18% of You Tube users in the UK are over 50 years old (cf. n.n., ‘Essential Facts’, You Tube [accessed 14 September 2009] and it stands to reason that the user profile in other countries, including the Czech Republic, is similar. Cf. FoxSearchlight, ‘ONCE: Falling Slowly’, youtube.com [accessed 14 September 2009]. Cf. ýesko-Slovenská filmová database, ‘Once’, [accessed 30 July 2009].

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Generally, the users’ reactions mirror the critique of the stereotypical portrayal of Czech immigrants. The film is more often disapproved of than praised when the representation of Girl and her mother is discussed. The depiction of Czechs as poor migrants who are not able to speak proper English is most strongly criticised. User “Lynnet” condemns ‘the depiction of Czech people living in Dublin like beggars and homeless, who don’t know even very basic English words’.40 Similarly, “Jarvis” complains: ‘Was it intentional to portray Czechs like total destitutes? […] And the mother hasn’t learned any English whatsoever, even though she lives there? Not even MY mom has such a poor knowledge of English’.41 Naturally, these users are worried about a generalisation of Czechs as poor people which Once might create for an international audience. “Zik2” states that ‘the dingy-looking apartment where she lived – […] it didn’t cast a positive light on Czechs’.42 A major reason why Czech people are sensitive when being portrayed as poor and uneducated is their prevalent self-perception as an educated and civilised nation. Hurt and insulted responses to the film have to be seen in the context of a Czech identification process that was intensified when the Czech Republic became independent in 1993. There is a widespread perception among Czech people that their country is situated in Central Europe. Thus they set themselves apart from their Eastern European neighbours and rather align themselves with Western culture. Ladislav Holy explains: The image which the Czechs have of themselves as a highly cultured and well-educated nation motivates what they call their “return to Europe” and view as the ultimate goal of their revolution [in 1989]. Czechs have always detested being classified as Eastern Europeans and are quick to point out that Prague is west of Vienna and west of the line between Vienna and Berlin. For Czechs, Eastern Europe is Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, and possibly Poland, but their country is part of Central Europe and it is commonly described as lying in “the heart of Europe” or even as being “the heart of Europe”. Czechs use the concept of kulturnost [highly cultured] to construct a boundary between themselves and the uncultured East into which they were lumped after the communist coup d’état in 1948, and they see their proper place as alongside the civilised, cultured and educated nations of Western Europe.43

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‘je vykreslení þechĤ žijících v Dublinu jako poloviþních žebrákĤ a bezdomovcĤ, kteĜí neznají ani základní anglická slovíþka’ (“Lynnet” in ýesko-Slovenská filmová database). I am greatly indebted to Alena Novakova who read through the Czech comments and did all the translations for me. Spelling and grammatical mistakes in the original quotes were retained, but for reasons of presentation these mistakes were not marked with [sic]. ‘a to se ta matka ještČ nenauþila ani trochu anglicky, když tam žije? takhle zoufale anglicky nemluví ani MOJE máma’ (“Jarvis” in ýesko-Slovenská filmová database). ‘v holobytČ, kde ona byla bydlela – [...] nevrhá moc dobré svČtlo na ýechy’ (“Zik2” in ýesko-Slovenská filmová database). Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: National Identity and the

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Therefore, the portrayal of Czechs in Once as poor and uneducated people groups them, counter to their self-conception, with their Eastern neighbours. The indignation against this classification becomes apparent in two user comments. Here, the users draw on a comparison to poor minorities in the east of the Czech Republic in order to show their disapproval of Once. User “voita666” comments: ‘There’s no need to brag, she [Irglová] said it herself, because it looked as if the character was a Chechnian emigrant/refugee (to her it was an unfavorable understanding of the Czech people)…’.44 Furthermore, “lehkoživka” compares Girl’s appearance to that of a ‘Rumanian beggar’.45 Such comparisons indicate that Czech people do not want to be confused with what is generally perceived as poor Eastern European countries or minorities. The applause that the film receives in the comments by Czechs can also be interpreted in terms of a Czech longing to move towards Western Europe and Czechs wanting to be a part of Western European culture. This interpretation is based not so much on the actual portrayal of Czechs in the film but has rather to do with the great success of the film and its music. There the singer-actress Markéta Irglová, not the character Girl, becomes a representative of her country. The users identify with her and her success with the film, especially after winning the Oscar for Best Song: ‘Marketa. You are winner for us! Your Czech Republic’.46 With the film being/becoming a great success and thus, through Irglová, positively representing the Czech Republic, the great majority of the comments from Czech people – in either Czech or English – praised the film and used it to celebrate their country: ‘Czech Republic is The Best! =P’.47 For many users, Irglová’s and the film’s success underline the Czech Republic’s self-percecption of being a cultured nation, positioned in the centre of Europe. This helps the users to be self-confident about themselves as citizens of the Czech Republic: ‘Marketa has become something like a cultural hockey player from the Olympic games in Nagano’.48 This refers to the Czech hockey team winning the Olympic Gold Medal in 1998, an event which boosted national pride at the time. Irglová’s success can be seen as evidence that Czech people can also get recognition in the cultural field. In

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Post-Communist Transformation of Communist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.151. ‘No, netĜeba se vychloubat, ona to sama ve Once Ĝekla, aþkoliv to vypadalo, jako kdyby to byla emigrantka z ýeþny (jí samé to bylo nesympatické chápání ýechĤ)...’ (“voita666” in FoxSearchlight). ‘rumunská žebraþka’ (“lehkoživka” in ýesko-Slovenská filmová database). “Bjorken8” in FoxSearchlight (comment in English). “Shirrogane” in FoxSearchlight (comment in English). ‘marketa je ted takovej kulturni hokejista z nagana’ (“spab87” in FoxSearchlight).

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fact, their country seems to receive the acknowledgment it deserves: ‘Finally once again the small country in the heart of Europe managed to write some history. Hang in there’.49 A number of users praise the fact that we can hear the immigrants talk in Czech in the film.50 Interestingly, this is the case even though some users find the quality of Czech rather ‘awkward’ (divnČ); “Mbali” says that it sounds ‘creaky’ (skĜípala).51 Nevertheless, it seems that there is a sense of pride in the fact that a film made in English features their native Czech, making the Czech language in this case a part of Western culture: ‘But the best thing is when the girl comes home and speaks Czech with her family – that was excellent’.52 User “Malarkey”, too, finds it ‘quite pleasant to hear Czech in an English-speaking film’.53 As all Czech passages remain without subtitles, Czech users might even feel superior because of their ability to understand what hardly anybody else is able to comprehend. The knowledge of Czech is especially important and valuable in one crucial scene. The fact that Girl answers Guy in Czech on his question relating to her love for her husband shows that an understanding of Czech is thus potentially crucial to grasp the full extent of their bittersweet relationship. The Czech users’ desire to see their home country noticed and recognised is even further emphasised by their dissatisfaction about the current status of the Czech Republic in the world. Several users state explicitly that they think that the Czech Republic, undeservedly, is hardly known in the (Western) world: ‘Nice popularization of the Czech Republic in a foreign film’.54 Correspondingly, user “SiminkaXXX” writes that ‘Marketa deserves to become a star, as the CR is too small and needs a few people who manage that the rest of the world knows about us’.55 Even Marketa Irglová herself remarks on the audio commentary on the lack of knowledge about her native country: ‘[M]ost of the times when I say ‘I’m from [the] Czech Republic’, people don’t even know

49

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51 52

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‘KoneþnČ se zase jednou malá zemČ v srdci Evropy zapsala do dČjin, jen tak dál’ (“FcSlovanLiberec” in FoxSearchlight). Note the description of the Czech Republic lying in the ‘heart of Europe’, which is exactly the expression quoted from Holy. On the use of East European language in British film cf. the contribution of Rosteck/Uffelmann in this volume. “Mbali” in ýesko-Slovenská filmová database. ‘kamaráda uspal natolik že málem zaþal chrápat... Nej je hlavnČ když ta holka pĜíjde domĤ a mluví tam s rodinou þesky... tohle bylo super’ (“bflmps77” in FoxSearchlight). ‘docela pĜíjemné slyšet þeštinu v anglicky mluvícím filmu’ (“Malarkey” in ýesko-Slovenská filmová database). ‘Hezké zpopularizování þeské republiky v zahraniþním filmu’ (“Politik” in ýesko-Slovenská filmová database). ‘Markéta si zaslouží proslavit se, ýeská Republika je totiš tak malá, že potĜebuje pár lidí kteĜí se postarají o to aby nác znali ve svČtČ...’ (“SiminkaXXX” in FoxSearchlight).

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where it is’.56 User “bellajer” is aware of this fact but is sceptical about the positive impact of Irglová’s fame for the Czech Republic: ‘Unfortunately not even Marketa can manage to change the fact that everyone still thinks that the CR is somewhere in what used to be Yugoslavia...;)’.57 Once again, the discontent of being associated with European countries further east is apparent here. The addition of the smiley to the last comment, which seems to denote that it is not meant completely seriously, cannot thwart the conclusion that this user, like the one mentioned before, is unhappy about the missing recognition and knowledge about the Czech Republic in the world.

6. What is the East? Once is remarkably different from other recent depictions in Western popular culture in that it attempts to cast a positive light on the immigrants from the East. The relationship between Guy and Girl is marked by similarities and not differences, thereby awarding the immigrant an equal position to the native Irish. However, this positive attitude is significantly undermined by the use of Western stereotypes. Even twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Once still predominantly defines the East as a uniform other. In so doing, the various nations formerly comprising the bloc of Eastern European communist countries are denied of their individual identity. Moreover, their existing political achievement, to be integrated into Europe, has not been culturally recognised. The question of identity also dominates the Czech viewers’ reaction to Once as found on the internet. Both negative and positive responses are based on the idea of the Czech Republic belonging to Western Europe. The comments illustrate that, for many Czechs, Western Europe stands for education and high culture whereas they do not associate these terms with the East. The users who attack the film for its depiction of Girl as a poor immigrant girl want to see their country recognised as separate and different from other parts of Eastern Europe. By separating the Czech Republic from these nations, these users try to move their native country closer to the West. In that way, their reaction can be related to those users who are proud of the Czech involvement in Once. They appreciate that the Czech Republic and its culture, mainly in the figure of Irglová, are represented in the Western world, and that to critical and public acclaim. This implies to them that the Czech nation is becoming a part of Western culture, which suggests that the East still defines itself through the “West”. 56 57

Once, Audiocommentary, 0:28:00. ‘Bohuzel ani Marketka moc nezmuze, stejne si budou vsichni dal myslet, ze CR je nekde v Jugoslavii...;)’ (“bellajar” in FoxSearchlight).

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Works Cited Allen, Kieran, ‘Globalisation, the State and Ireland’s Miracle Economy’, in Sara O’Sullivan, pp.231-247 Awards Watch, ‘The 2007 Top Tens’, Movie City News [accessed 14 September 2009] Beifuss, John, ‘Inexpensive, Bittersweet, ‘Once’ Finds its Groove’, The Commercial Appeal (24 May 2007) [accessed 14 September 2009] Busch, Ines, ‘Das Spektakel vom ‘Zigeuner’: Visuelle Repräsentation und Antiziganismus’, in Antiziganistische Zustände: Zur Kritik eines allgegenwärtigen Ressentiments, ed. by Markus End, Kathrin Herold, and Yvonne Robel (Münster: Unrast, 2009), pp.158-176 Cinnirella, Marco, ‘Ethnic and National Stereotypes: A Social Identity Perspective’, in Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. by C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp.37-52 ýesko-Slovenská filmová database, ‘Once’, [accessed 30 July 2009] Downing, John and Charles Husband, Representing ‘Race’: Racisms, Ethnicities and Media (London: SAGE, 2005) Fahey, Tony, ‘Population’, in Sara O’Sullivan, pp.13-29 FoxSearchlight ‘ONCE: Falling Slowly’, You Tube [accessed 14 September 2009] Hartman, Paul and Charles Husband, Racism and the Mass Media: A Study of the Role of the Mass Media in the Formation of White Beliefs and Attitudes in Britain (London: Davis-Poynter, 1974) Holy, Ladislav, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: National Identity and the Post-Communist Transformation of Communist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Loyal, Steven, ‘Immigration’, in Sara O’Sullivan, pp.30-47 MacSharry, Ray and Padraic A. White, The Making of the Celtic Tiger: The Inside Story to Ireland’s Boom Economy, ed. by Kieran A. Kennedy (Cork: Mercier, 2001) McCullagh, Ciarán, ‘Modern Ireland, Modern Media, Same Old Story?’, in Sara O’Sullivan, pp.136-151 Metacritic, ‘Film Critic Top Ten Lists: 2007 Critics’ Picks’, [accessed 21 December 2009] —, ‘News Release: Over 500 a Day Gained Through Migration to the UK’ (02 November 2007) <www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intmigrat1106.pdf > [accessed 21 December 2009] Polish Culture, ‘How to advertise with Polish Culture?’ [accessed 22 July 2009] Prazmowska, Anita J., Britain and Poland, 1939-1943: The Betrayed Ally (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Rabikowska, Marta and Kathy Burrell, ‘The Material Worlds of Recent Polish Migrants: Transnationalism, Food, Shops and Home’, in Polish Migration to the UK in the ‘New’ European Union: After 2004, ed. by Kathy Burrell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp.211-32 Temple, Bogusta, ‘Diaspora, Diaspora Space and Polish Women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 22.1 (1999), 17-24

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Winder, Robert, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Migration to Britain (London: Abacus, 2005) Zubrzycki, Jerzy, Polish Immigrants to Britain: A Study of Adjustment (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956)

(RE-)VISITING EASTERN SPACES IN

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION

Corina Criúu

British Geographies in the Eastern European Mind: Rose Tremain’s The Road Home By insisting on the significance of border crossing, cross-cultural exchange and centre/margin dynamics, this paper discusses how the ever-shifting nature of transnational identity is continuously (de)constructed in relationship to a constantly changing notion of space. Rose Tremain’s The Road Home offers a new perspective on both Eastern and Western Europe – two spheres which, in spite of their differences, no longer occupy antagonistic positions. While London is depicted as a dynamic city accepting diversity, the East of Europe does not appear as a monolithic place, frozen in time, but as a changing reality, incorporating and transforming Western elements, and simultaneously affirming its own specificity.

1. Introduction British geographies in the Eastern European mind or Eastern European geographies in the British mind. Both these views point out the essential role played by the spatial dimension in the process of identity construction, revealing that abandoning a circumscribed horizon, stepping across thresholds and entering another space can imply not only physical movement, but also mental mobility – prompted by ‘the instinct of migrating towards another status of one’s being’. 1 Since ‘travels are translations’, 2 the bi-directional voyage between the East of Europe and Britain presupposes a cultural translation, in which the protagonists present their culture to foreigners while also transferring elements of the other culture to their own people. Ontological redefinitions take place via the contact with the other world that offers new challenging ways of self-perception. As Kathleen Stark cogently notes, ‘Eastern and Western histories are intertwined in many ways and fictitious and real life Westerners seek “Eastern encounters” in order to find answers to their own questions of identity’. 3 To reverse Stark’s remark, Eastern Europeans also redefine themselves through “Western encounters”, in a reciprocal relationship between East and West.

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Gabriel Liiceanu, Despre Limit΁ [About the Limit] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007), p.195, my translation. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.11. Kathleen Starck, ‘Introduction’, in When the World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. by Kathleen Starck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp.1-10 (p.7).

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In recent British fiction, a significant number of novels are focused on British characters travelling to Eastern Europe, whereas very few are concerned with Eastern Europeans coming to Britain. The world outside the West – the unknown, marginalised and quite threatening terra incognita of Eastern Europe – is often reconsidered through a British lens, while the UK is rarely rediscovered by Eastern Europeans. Filling a gap in the contemporary literary landscape, Rose Tremain’s much acclaimed The Road Home (winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, 2008) places the life story of an Eastern European male character in a transnational context. As the author affirms in an interview, the novel ‘aims to chart the journey of one (broken-hearted) man from Eastern Europe through our society, and to explore what he makes of us and what we make of him – in such a way that, by the end, he is fully human and knowable to us and we are more knowable to ourselves.’ 4 By telling the story of Lev, an immigrant coming from an unspecified Eastern European country (that has just entered the EU), Tremain makes it her duty to remind us what happens when Us and Them intermingle, opening up new possibilities for interpreting the Eastern European self and for “translating” it to a Western audience. It is this complicated relationship between the immigrant’s identity and the old/new place that represents the main interest of this paper. How does an Eastern European reinvent himself via interaction with the Western world? What imprint does he leave on others and how is he changed by them? How does his exilic experience teach him to think through comparisons, to become a homo duplex, someone who filters the present by rethinking his past? Drawing on critical and philosophical writing on displacement and migration, the subsequent sections analyse Tremain’s reconsideration of transnational identity, arguing that being in transit, crossing borders, regrowing roots and transplanting them are essential stages in the endless process of bridging East and West.

2. Being in Transit In a comprehensive article on Tremain’s fiction, Sarah Sceats identifies three important factors that continue to resonate throughout the writer’s work: Firstly, ‘the focus on a marginal or outsider figure,’ secondly, ‘the possibility of obsession, of being driven by desire or appetite, whether for food, sex, a person, a landscape, a thing,’ and thirdly ‘the feeling of belonging, the desire to locate oneself in relation to whatever it is that confers a fulfilling self4

N.N., ‘Winner – Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008: Rose Tremain for The Road Home’, Orangeprize (2008) [accessed 17 November 2009].

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identity, that allows the feeling of being “right in one’s skin”’. 5 These three factors can also be found in The Road Home, – a novel about an immigrant’s quest from a state of marginality and dependence to self-assertion and independence. The book’s epigraph – ‘How can we live, without our lives?’ – taken from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), that great work about economic migration, sets the realistic tone of the novel, as well as its thematic patterns that deal with loss and deprivation, poverty and hardship. Moreover, the manifold meanings reverberating in the title point to the fact that Lev’s migration follows a circular route, that his existential movement has a teleological sense, being directed – as in the Odyssey – towards returning home. Steeped in metaphors of journeying, Lev’s story of selfimprovement takes the form of a Bildungsroman, conveying a profound educational message, not devoid of ethical implications. An atypical character, Lev is not simply an immigrant looking for work, but a homo viator in search for human values. Possessing a rich imagination, Lev learns how an idea can be stirred into being, how the experience accumulated abroad can be tested in his country in order to make a life-long dream come true. Crucially, Tremain chooses to write about a character passing through a crisis, describing ‘moments of fracture, […] of syncope, […] of sufferance,’ moments that are ‘the real epiphanies of our destiny, defining our hidden structure’. 6 At the beginning, Lev’s voyage towards London on the TransEuro bus is mainly a self-centred experience, a way of (re)membering the shattered parts of his life. His whole existence seems suspended in time, his whole being in transit, oscillating between a retrospective state of mind preoccupied with the past and a prospective state envisaging the future. This alternation of temporal levels is reflected in the narrative texture, whose chronological design is interrupted by flashbacks, by recurrent images of the past. At age forty-two, Lev mourns the death of his wife, Marina, who has died of leukaemia. His conscience is ridden with guilt at the thought of still being alive after Marina’s death, which ‘was with him always, like a shadow on the X-ray of his spirit’. 7 Even the lively presence of his five-year-old daughter, the loving care of his mother, or the cheerfulness of his best friend cannot make Lev stop his grieving, his surrender to inactivity and his longing for 5

6 7

Sarah Sceats, ‘Appetite, Desire and Belonging in the Novels of Rose Tremain’, in The Contemporary British Novel, ed. by James Acheson and Sarah C.E. Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp.165-176 (p.167). Andrei Plesu, Minima Moralia (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006), p.112, my translation. Rose Tremain, The Road Home (London: Vintage, 2007), p.6. All subsequent page references in parentheses refer to this edition.

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rest and oblivion. His existential inertia is also generated by the fact that he is unemployed since the Baryn sawmill closed and financially dependent on his mother, living ‘off the money [she] made selling jewellery manufactured from tin’ (p.4). Lev’s aimless tedium vitae and his mental postponing of any possibility to act come to an abrupt end when he has to pass through an unexpected event. The role of the helper is played here by his friend, Rudi, a vigorous, spirited man, who decides to take Lev on a trip to the Kalinin Mountains, in order ‘to embrace something’ (p.112). The steady ascent following no path, the wilderness of the place situated away from human habitation, and the ethereal atmosphere make ‘Lev become aware of a feeling of poise within himself that he hadn’t known for a long time’ (p.112). His act of climbing a rusty ladder that is on the point of breaking at any time and his direct confrontation with death can be seen as epiphanic moments that trigger inner change and renewal. The revelation of his own possible death activates in him the desire to move on with his life, to put an end to this dangerous apathy. In this light, Lev’s decision to learn English and emigrate to the UK provides a life-saving solution designed to solve both his personal and familial problems: He was sure his ‘self’ needed improving, too. For a long time now, he’d been moody, melancholy and short-tempered. Even with Maya. For days on end, he’d sat on Ina’s porch without moving, or lain in an old gray hammock, smoking and staring at the sky […]. But at last he’d been able to tell his mother he was going to make amends. By learning English and then by migrating to England, he was going to save them. Two years from now, he would be a man-of-the-world. He would own an expensive watch. He would put Ina and Maya aboard a tourist boat and show them the famous buildings. They would have no need of a tourist guide because he, Lev, would know the names of everything in London by heart (p.25).

In Lev’s view, the relationship between self-improvement and emigrating to a Western country is vital. In his imaginary travel, he pictures a prosperous future, ignoring the stages of his future travail and visualising only the end of the road – financial prosperity. As he assumes the role of a ‘tourist guide’ showing his family around London, he does not take into account the more difficult roles he might have to play as a homeless person or a menial worker.

3. London as a “Western” Space The spatial trope remains central in Tremain’s novel. Both the Eastern European and the British geographies are (re)shaped by the immigrant’s point of view and reconsidered in a new light, so that the strange is rendered familiar and the familiar strange. The polarisation of space into East and West presupposes several dichotomies: marginal vs. central, rural vs. urban, tradition-

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nal vs. modern and communist vs. capitalist. At the temporal level, it also entails a polarisation of time: past vs. present. However, the polarisation becomes relative and the novel reveals the Westernness of Eastern Europe as well as the Easternness of Britain. The Road Home can therefore be analysed as a ‘multiple frontier quest, where the borders between the East and the West become porous in a never-ending, cross-cultural exchange’. 8 If Western models are implemented in the East of Europe and, in their turn, Eastern ideas are transplanted to Western soil, then centre and margin, in spite of their differences, no longer occupy antagonistic positions. In a postcolonial reading, centre and margin are no longer in opposition, but in ‘fated affinity’, being part of a continuous process of cultural translation; 9 if Britain is a model to be emulated, then Eastern Europe tells Britain what ‘it does not know’. 10 Mapping London as a multicultural city, Tremain depicts it as a national symbol and cultural centre. She does not represent London as a melting pot in which immigrant identity dissolves and disappears, but as an interactive space where Eastern European, Asian, Irish and English characters preserve their individuality. London becomes a site of heterogeneity, a city accepting diversity. To use Iris Marion Young’s terminology, Tremain offers here ‘a vision of social relations affirming group difference’, ‘in an openness of unassimilable otherness’. 11 For the newcomer, London is neither a fully written text waiting to be deciphered, nor is it a blank page ready to be inscribed, but a catalogue of cultural references, a space incessantly (de)composed in accordance with one’s horizon of expectations. The city appears as a mental construct that undergoes mutations, shaped by real and imaginary events – in Edward Soja’s words, London is a “real-and-imagined” space, which eludes the real vs. imagined dichotomy. 12 Lev sees London as the Promised Land, a cornucopia, a symbolic space of abundance and wealth, offering the prospect of a new life: ‘England is my 8

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10 11

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Corina Criúu, ‘Bosnian Ways of Being American: Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man’, in When the World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. by Kathleen Starck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp.24-35 (p.25). Irina Pana, The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), p.15. David Malouf quoted in Pana, p.15. Iris Marison Young quoted in Dorothea Löbbermann, ‘The Transnational in American Studies’, in How Far Is America from Here?, ed. by Theo D’Haen, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp.583-585 (p.584). Cf. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

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hope,’ he says at the beginning of the book (p.5). Before going to London, he imagines and discovers it via cultural associations, his mental projections of the city being mostly shaped by mass media. Arriving in London, he feels the discrepancy between how he has imagined the English and how they really appear to him: they ‘look grotesque to him, fat and mocking and sick,’ while his imaginary English(wo)man was modelled after ‘Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai, thin and quizzical, with startled eyes’ or after ‘Margaret Thatcher, hurrying along with purpose, like an indigo bird’ (p.35). Not only does Lev’s perception of the English gradually change, but also his understanding of the other immigrants. On his way to England, his imaginary projection of them is still ridden with clichés: Someone had told him that in England vodka was too expensive to drink. Immigrants made their own alcohol from potatoes and tap water, and when Lev thought about these industrious immigrants, he imagined them sitting by a coal fire in a tall house, talking and laughing, with rain falling outside the window and red buses going past and a television flickering in a corner of the room (pp.4f.).

By meeting other immigrant characters and establishing ‘contact zones’, 13 Lev changes his first impression. Thus he encounters Sulima, who runs the Champions Bed and Breakfast Hotel (where he finds compassion and a good bed to sleep for the night); he meets Ahmed, the owner of a Kebab place (where he is given food and his first job); he is invited to the house of Larissa, an Eastern European married to an Englishman (where he has a tantalizing glimpse of a comfortable middle-class existence); and later he makes the acquaintance of two Chinese vegetable pickers (whose sympathy for him involves homosexual feelings). In his turn, Lev is perceived by the others in a variety of ways, ranging from friendly feelings to indifference, and even xenophobic attitudes. Arriving in London, he becomes keenly aware of his invisibility, of the others’ refusal to see him, due to his Eastern European accent and appearance. Disorientated, he experiences a sense of “thrownness” into a boundless space, in a world whose linguistic codes and social rules he does not master. 14 The simplest thing, such as inserting a coin in a slot at a station toilet, becomes a difficult task. His repeated question uttered in incorrect English – ‘May you help me?’ – serves as a leitmotif and encodes a whole state of mind, expressing his confusion and perplexity as well as his need for care and assistance. In the big city, Lev feels alienated from himself, losing his self-assurance and beginning ‘to stagger’ (p.35). An outcast, miles away from his family 13

14

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.6f. Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. by Lawrence Cahoone (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), pp.274-308 (p.282).

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and home, without a job and lacking financial means, he is seen by the others as a terrifying stranger. Lev’s encounter with a policeman, for instance, represents one of the most disturbing scenes in the novel: from the beginning he is placed in the position of an illegal Eastern European immigrant, an unwanted outsider whose body is searched, whose intimacy is tread upon. In order to stay in the UK, Lev needs to have a legal passport and a permanent address. Mostly, he needs to conform to public norms and become integrated, as the policeman summarises in a few words: ‘No sleeping in streets. This is anti-social behaviour and liable to a heavy fine. So get yourself sorted. Clean your fucking shoes. Get a haircut, and you may just have a chance’ (p.24). To grab that chance, Lev has to work his way up, from being homeless (sleeping for a couple of nights on cardboard boxes in a lair under the road), to his first job (distributing leaflets for the Muslim kebab-shop), to the lowest job in a kitchen (washing dishes at a high-end restaurant), to working the fields (joining a gang of vegetable pickers in rural Suffolk), to being a chef (at Ferndale Heights, a care home, and later at Panno’s taverna), to owning a restaurant (in Baryn, in his home country). Each new job offers Lev the possibility to step across another threshold, to push another boundary. With hard work and with the help of three characters, Lydia, Sophie and Christy, Lev is able to go beyond unsurpassable obstacles and climb the professional and social ladder. Each of these characters plays a major role in his understanding of the new world, in making the British geography more comprehensible to his Eastern European mind. Coming from the same country as Lev, Lydia is a former teacher of English and a translator. ‘A plump, contained person with moles like splashes of mud on her face’ (p.1), she represents the moral voice in the novel. She is Lev’s most useful translator, assisting him in finding accommodation and a job, encouraging him to keep going on the right track, paying the necessary fine to get him out of prison. Like a dea ex machina she helps Lev in every difficulty. In spite of this, their relationship does not evolve, as Lev is unable to respond to her sexual innuendoes and offer her more than friendship. Their relationship comes to an abrupt end when Lydia refuses Lev the financial support to start a restaurant, showing a limited understanding of his dreams and ability to put them into practice. A sous-chef at the GK Ashe restaurant, driven by the ambition to start her own establishment, Sophie, the English woman, is as another character that plays an important role in Lev’s life. If ‘love is like a foreign land,’ to echo Judith Wright’s famous line, 15 then the erotic relationship between Lev and Sophie can be visualised in spatial terms. Sophie’s “otherness” and “newness 15

From Judith Wright’s poem, ‘The Man Beneath the Tree’, in The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. by Jennifer Strauss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.108.

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of form” make her ‘exotic like some far-away, sun-soaked place that smelled of sugar’ (p.106). Her complete novelty fascinates Lev, who cannot identify her with any familiar female figure. However, Tremain does not allow her male character to step into the stereotypical role of the conqueror (of this feminine new territory); Lev is the conquered one, rather, seduced and later abandoned by Sophie. For him, the relationship with Sophie comes to weigh hard on his existential scales. To be sure, Sophie’s lovemaking has therapeutic effects and Lev is able to move beyond the traumatic memory of Marina’s death. Sophie heals Lev with her love, but also hurts him profoundly when she leaves him and starts a new relationship. Lev’s final act of raping Sophie, which abruptly terminates their relationship and puts an end to any possibility of friendship, sheds an ambivalent light on his character, disclosing the impulsive aspect of his personality. Christy Slane, an alcoholic Irish plumber, who is divorcing his wife and suffering from not being allowed to see his daughter, is not only Lev’s friend, but also a kindred spirit. Both characters long to recuperate a past of happiness, when they were not separated from the persons they loved: ‘Lev was transfixed for a moment, recognising something of himself in the other man, some willingness to surrender and not fight, some dangerous longing for everything to be over’ (p.69). A special relationship is established between the two men who are both foreigners, non-Brits, each of them coming from a “minor” culture and being forced into a marginalised role. Listening to each other’s stories, ‘studying the other’s periphery,’ they become conscious that interesting parallels can be drawn between apparently unrelated spaces.16

4. Auror as an “Eastern” Space When Lev’s attention turns inward, his mind wanders nostalgically to his native village, Auror – the micro-space that he is carrying in his heart. Tenderly envisaged in the peaceful, crepuscular light of evening, Auror is also a “real-and-imagined” place that is endlessly (re)shaped by Lev’s memories, a presentia in absentia never stabilised in his mind: [He] imagined the night falling on Auror, falling as it always fell on the fir-covered hills and the cluster of chimneys and the wooden steeple of the school house. And there in this soft night lay Maya, under the goose-down quilt, with one arm thrown out sideways, as if showing some invisible visitor the small room she shared with her grandmother: its two beds, its rag rug, its chest of drawers painted green and yellow, its paraffin stove, and its square window, open to the cool air and the night dews and the cry of owls […].

16

Pia Brinzeu, Corridors of Mirrors: The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British and Romantic Fiction (Timisoara: Amarcord, 1997), p.99.

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It was a nice picture, but Lev couldn’t get it to stabilise in his mind. The knowledge that when the Baryn sawmill closed Auror and half a dozen other villages like it were doomed kept obliterating the room and the sleeping girl and even the image of Ina, shuffling about in the dark before kneeling to say her prayers (pp.15f.).

Tremain confesses in an interview that she did research for her novel and looked at twenty-first century life in Poland and Russia, scrutinizing the layers of their recent histories in order to build a veridical image of this under-represented part of Europe. In a paradoxical way, she makes Westerners understand Eastern Europe by creating a space that in fact does not exist. Pertaining to nowhere and everywhere, this ubiquitous place can be associated with any Slavic country. Charting its history, geography, language and customs, Tremain presents the reader with a culturally selected topography, a (de)composed space carefully made up of a set of places. The chosen toponyms, real or imaginary – the city of Baryn, the Yarbl market and the Kalinin range – have a Slavic resonance. In the same line, some of the onomastic choices – Lev, Pyotor Greszler, Kowalski and Vitas – are also Slavic. In her configuration of this Slavic country, Tremain avoids stereotypical representations by (de)constructing it as an imagological cliché. Taking into account that Westerners often see Eastern Europe as an exotic place schematically defined in contrastive terms – either as an idealised land depicted in picturesque colours, or as a backward place outlined in negative tones – Tremain’s focus on the East of Europe and her re-centering of this “margin” is suggestive of postcolonial strategies. Tremain’s writing subverts an Orientalist (or rather: Occidentalist) discourse that defines the East as an (ex)centric, feminised world of mysticism and passivity. 17 Tremain’s main strategy in The Road Home is to depict the East of Europe through the eyes of a native Eastern European who is nonetheless a dislocated character, an immigrant who goes to work abroad and later returns – an insider outsider. In this way, two visions of the same place are juxtaposed so that Lev’s perception of his native land when he departs, staring out 17

In a recent article, Josep Armengol-Carrera redefines Said’s Orientalism in relationship to the East of Europe: ‘While Edward W. Said originally defined Orientalism as the cultural, political, and economic control of three successive empires – British, French, American – over the Middle East, I argue that the concepts and relations of “East” and “West” have been radically redefined since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the downfall of Communism, suggesting that the introduction of Western/American capitalism and culture into Eastern Europe may also have become influenced by Orientalist discourses and views’. Josep M. Armengol-Carrera, ‘An-Other East: Re-Visions of Orientalism and Masculinity in Arthur Phillips’s Prague’, in When the World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. by Kathleen Starck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp.111122 (p.112). To illustrate his idea, Armengol-Carrera reads Arthur Phillips’s novel Prague (2006) as a contemporary literary re-vision of Orientalism.

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‘at the fields of sunflowers scorched by the dry wind, at the pig farms, at the quarries and rivers and at the wild garlic growing green at the edge of the road’ (p.1), no longer corresponds with his impression when he comes back, staring at the abandoned farms and silent factories, at the deserted coal depots and lumber yards, at the new high-rise flats and the bright, flickering heartbeats of American franchises, at a world slipping and sliding on a precipice between the dark rockface of Communism and the seductive, light-filled void of the liberal market (p.337).

It is as if his initial understanding of the beauty of his own country is put into perspective and constantly reframed by his acquisition of Western viewpoint. This enables him to become aware of the problems that his homeland has to face in the aftermath of communism, at a time of transition when economic changes transform the country’s infrastructure. Coming back to Auror, Lev sees it in a new light and discovers its remoteness and isolation from the rest of the modern world: ‘all the years he’s lived here, he’d never seen clearly how lonely, how far from all thriving worldly habitation Auror actually was’ (p.338). While abroad, Lev leads the double life of an exile, thinks through comparisons, and makes associations between the new place and the old one. Conjuring up memories, ‘pricking up his ears in order to hear the pianissimo of inner voices’, 18 Lev envisages the recurrent images of his beloved ones: the luminous, reassuring presence of his daughter; the unrelenting, disapproving character of his mother; the haunting presence of his dead father, an existential model hard to challenge; mostly, Lev thinks of his dead wife, whose obsessive image persistently appears, bringing along dramatic moments, such as the birth of their daughter or Marina’s agony on a hospital bed. Lev remembers these past events, keeping them alive, re-imagining them, (re)placing them in an endless depository of meanings. They come to represent – as the Romanian philosopher Alexandru Dragomir would say – the intimacy of his being, ‘the most remote place from the public eye, what does not show itself, what exists by hiding itself’. 19 With a Proustian flavour, Lev’s memories are prompted by the smoke of a longed-for cigarette, by the smell of cherished food, or by the unusual colour of a flower. 20 18

19

20

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ireversibilul úi nostalgia, trans. by Vasile Tonoiu (Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic, 1998), p.253, my translation. Alexandru Dragomir, Crase banalitati metafizice [Gross Metaphysical Banalities] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2008), p.166, my translation Otherwise, his memories belong to the ineffable – to the frailty of dreams or the density of silence. For example, remembering the episode of buying poinsettias, as a gift for his mother’s birthday, Lev’s “vibrant imagination” recreates the ambience of his village and its surroundings. Each moment of the trip – the early, hurried ride to the open-air market in

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Significantly, Lev does not only remember his life story, but also narrates some biographical episodes to his foreign friends. This becomes part of Tremain’s strategy of making the Eastern European Weltanschauung accessible to the Western mind. Maintaining the specificity of the place, tilting the balance between its physical reality and its symbolic value, Lev’s stories introduce the Westerners to an unknown topos, aiming to create a (re)cognisable geography. From a topographic zero and an unreadable map of meaning, this elsewhere gains a life of its own. Thus, in one of the most suggestive stories told by Lev, the Eastern European space is (de)constructed by introducing an element of familiarity to the Western reader. The trip to buy an American car, a Chevrolet Phoenix for sale in the distant town of Glic, is just a pretext for juxtaposing two realities. In a post-communist country, the appearance of such a car is rare, and for Rudi, Lev’s best friend, possessing it becomes his greatest ambition, a dream that would solve all current problems. The whole trip in an overheated train – the arrival in Glic in a snow blizzard, the guest house where they eat goulash and dumplings, the high cost of the car, and finally their return to Auror driving a car whose door breaks down and has to be fixed with ‘hinges from a baby’s pram’ (p.14) – conversely reveals the mirage of the West, the seductive power of a Western lifestyle.

5. Un-/Re-Mapping Space Lev’s story implicitly suggests that crossing borders may lead to a reconsideration of existential limits, pushing them to the extreme. If at the beginning of the novel, he has a feeling of apprehension in front of the unknown and senses that his journey in England is ‘infinite, with no known ending or destination’ (p.25), later on, he starts defining this seemingly amorphous space; he stretches his mind to understand and delimitate what initially seemed Yarbl, the catastrophic feeling of not finding the desired flowers, the desolation of returning home empty-handed and finally the redemptive encounter, ‘like a vision, in some lost village along the road,’ with an old woman selling poinsettias – can be seen as a phase in a quest for a symbolic flower whose ‘seeming permanence in a world of perpetually fading and dying things’ suggests perfection (p.7). As if to keep the balance of an imaginary scale, the positive outcome of the poinsettias episode can be read in comparison with another significant scene in the novel: the night-fishing at Lake Essel, when Lev and Rudi ‘had made one of the strangest discoveries of their lives’ (p.50). Their excitement at the thought of catching buckets of fish for sale, by directing the flash of the headlights onto the water, their youthful jokes and sense of easiness are set in contrast with the solemn atmosphere of the moonlit lake, the uncanny feeling of witnessing something alien embodied by the blue fish. The impossibility of catching the shimmering fish – like numinous creatures from another world – comes to represent a failed encounter with the supernatural, leaving its dangerous imprint on the human world.

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endless, so that what was incomprehensible becomes reachable. Gradually, he gets acclimatised to the new Western space, where he acquires a new social and professional identity and earns the trust and respect of his peers. In spite of his success in England, Lev’s heart remains tuned to the seasons of his native land. In the most intimate core of his being, Lev remains an exile, someone ‘who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another’. 21 This continuous mental relatedness and repeated return to a past kept alive transform his stay abroad into a short-term, meaningful effort. Invoking Paul Tabori’s insightful characterisation of the exilic mind, Lev can be seen as ‘someone who conceives his […] displacement as temporary’. 22 In the same way as Odysseus, Lev can only consider his wanderings abroad as provisional. And again, like Odysseus, our character has to pass through another excruciating experience: estrangement from his loved ones. As the cyclic structure of the novel brings Lev home, he has to overcome the most difficult obstacle, the distrust of those left behind: His dream, his heart’s desire, his Great Idea was sailing closer, ever closer to him now, but there was one terrifying, insurmountable problem: far off in Baryn, where it would have its existence, no one waited for it. In his own country, where he longed to return, it wasn’t even the empty piano shop of his sentimental reveries; it was nothing. It was nothing because no one trusted him any more (p.336).

Going back, Lev travels incognito, preferring ‘to arrive like this, a stranger in a world newly strange to him’ (p.337). A stranger to the others, he becomes a stranger to himself. To quote Julia Kristeva, Lev realises that a foreigner ‘lives within [himself],’ being ‘the hidden face of [his] identity’. 23 As the local space is defamiliarised, Lev is surprised to find an unfamiliar element hidden in himself – a disquieting presence with the potential to destroy his inner “home” and annihilate any feeling of belonging. While Lev’s introspective gaze rediscovers things in a new light, his own image is permanently reshaped by the thoughts of the others. He feels unprotected when Rudi stares at him with awe or when his mother maintains her anger and suspicion. Mobilising his inner resources, he has to demonstrate to the others the validity of his plan, the possibility of having a prosperous future.

21

22

23

Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p.ix. Cf. Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study (London: Harrap, 1972), p.27. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1991), p.1.

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If ‘any answer does not come as the result of creative work, but as an operation of distilling existential facts’, 24 then Lev’s idea of opening his own restaurant in his country is triggered by the accumulation of professional experience. While at the beginning of the novel Lev feels disorientated and ‘devoid of a plan’ (p.21), he gradually acquires the theoretical and practical knowledge that will enable him to take control of his life and will offer a prospect for social improvement. Lev’s restaurant comes to signify an intersecting site, a common ground between two cultures. Starting a new restaurant represents ‘a transcultural procedure’ and it can be regarded as ‘a two-way, multi-level cultural interchange based on borrowings, displacements, and recreations’. 25 Through Lev’s entrepreneurial idea, a process of cultural transference takes place: using his experience accumulated in the West, he can embark on the difficult task of transforming the negative aspects of Eastern European cuisine. In the past, in communist restaurants, ‘waiters and waitresses had behaved like labour-camp guards, slamming down dishes of sinewy meat, sloshing out wine from dirty carafes, snatching their plates away before their meal was finished’ (p.39). Adopting the impeccable manners learnt in the West, adapting the local savoury recipes, Lev brings an element of newness and freshness, to his native country – a contribution to the economic change it has to undergo in the period of post-communist transition. The symbolic postlude to the novel puts things into a comparative perspective: Christy Slane and his wife, Jasmina, come to visit Lev’s country. Their appreciation for Lev’s hospitality – the warm ambience of the restaurant, the meal cooked to perfection, the feeling of being part of a community – reveals how Eastern Europe can appear to the Western mind. Their trip to see the reservoir under which Lev’s native village lies hidden is initiated by their desire to locate an imaginary topos, to see in reality the setting of Lev’s stories. Through the creation of the dam on the river (to provide electricity for the entire area), this village has been flooded, wiped out from the face of the earth, and transformed into a space of memory. The village becomes a tomb, a spatial suspension within the country’s geography. For Lev, the creation of the dam represents both a catastrophic and a cathartic event, as it points to the irrevocable disappearance of his familiar universe, while also implying his liberation from an unbearable past. Seen 24

25

Mihai Sora, Despre Dialogul Interior [About the Inner Dialogue] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006), p.31, my translation. Roland Walter, ‘Notes on Border(land)s and Transculturation in the “Damp and Hungry Interstices” of the Americas’, in How Far is America from Here?, ed. by Theo D’Haen, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp.143-157 (pp.149f.).

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from a broader perspective, this un-/re-mapping of space might draw attention to the East of Europe as a world that is slowly changing, parts of it disappearing to make room for technological improvement. Crucially, it is the testamentary function of the book to remind the reader of the traumatic implications produced by such changes, of the endless suffering of relocated lives.

Works Cited Armengol-Carrera, Josep M., ‘An-Other East: Re-Visions of Orientalism and Masculinity in Arthur Phillips’s Prague’, in When the World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. by Kathleen Starck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp.111-122 Brinzeu, Pia, Corridors of Mirrors: The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British and Romanian Fiction (Timisoara: Amarcord, 1997) Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) Criúu, Corina, ‘Bosnian Ways of Being American: Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man’, in When the World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. by Kathleen Starck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp.24-35 Dragomir, Alexandru, Crase banalitati metafizice (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2008) Heidegger, Martin, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. by Lawrence Cahoone (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), pp.274-308 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, Ireversibilul úi nostalgia, trans. by Vasile Tonoiu (Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic, 1998) Kristeva, Julia, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1991) Liiceanu, Gabriel, Despre Limit΁ (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007) Löbbermann, Dorothea, ‘The Transnational in American Studies’, in How Far Is America from Here?, ed. by Theo D’Haen, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 583-585 N.N., ‘Winner – Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008: Rose Tremain for The Road Home’, Orangeprize (2008) [accessed 17 November 2009] Pana, Irina, The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996)

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Plesu, Andrei, Minima Moralia (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006) Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) Sceats, Sarah, ‘Appetite, Desire and Belonging in the Novels of Rose Tremain’, in The Contemporary British Novel, ed. by James Acheson and Sarah C. E. Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp.165176 Seidel, Michael, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986) Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) Sora, Mihai, Despre Dialogul Interior (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006) Starck, Kathleen, ‘Introduction’, in When the World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. by Kathleen Starck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp.1-10 Tabori, Paul, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study (London: Harrap, 1972) Tremain, Rose, The Road Home (London: Vintage, 2007) Walter, Roland, ‘Notes on Border(land)s and Transculturation in the “Damp and Hungry Interstices” of the Americas’, in How Far Is America from Here?, ed. by Theo D’Haen, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp.143-157 Wright, Judith, ‘The Man Beneath the Tree’, in The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. by Jennifer Strauss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.108

Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz

West Faces East: Images of Eastern Europe in Recent Short Fiction The article analyses a selection of five British short stories. They reveal heterogeneous images of countries as diverse as Russia, Poland, Romania, Estonia and East Germany. Through protagonists that include an illiterate Jewish merchant, a gypsy grandmother, a university teacher who is a single mother, and a soldier of the National People’s Army of the collapsing GDR, they reflect the highly different lives, thoughts and preoccupations of their inhabitants. The point of view in all of the stories is from the perspective of the Easterner. Narrative methods vary from the oral chronicle to magic realism, from satire to a sophisticated example of intertextual metafiction. Serious, gloomy or humorous, the moods of these narratives display a variegated and colourful world; their themes and motifs range from political and socio-economic to fairytale, from depressing to delightful. Through surprising glimpses into a world formerly hardly accessible, some texts uncover an amazing variety of cultural traditions, while others show oppression or ignorance thereof. This paper will focus on aspects such as the position of the narrator, the contrast of past and present and of the realist vs. the fantastic, images of self and other and their relation to an ethnic or national origin.

1. East Faces West This article addresses post-1989 representations of Central and Eastern European countries and their citizens in short stories, created by authors who live in Britain, both by a new generation of writers and “established” ones. They were brought out in the anthology New Writing, an annual publication of the British Council. Diverse in genre, setting, protagonists and point of view, they illustrate the fact that there is a ‘vital culture of traditional short story writing apart from all postmodernising ambition’,1 as well as exceptions to this practice, which will be dealt with towards the end. Kathy Page’s ‘It is July, Now’, like Rose Tremain’s story which will be discussed subsequently, was written under the immediate impact of the years 1989-90 and expresses the psychological repercussions of those who lived in the East or, as one used to say in the West, behind the Iron Curtain. Both are 1

Rudolf Freiburg, ‘Die postmoderne Kurzgeschichte’, in Geschichte der englischen Kurzgeschichte, ed. by Arno Löffler and Eberhard Späth (Tübingen: Francke, 2005), pp.331-357 (p.354), my translation. For the 1990s Barbara Korte also states that formal experiments in the British short story are rare. Cf. Barbara Korte, The Short Story in Britain. A Historical Sketch and Anthology (Tübingen: Francke, 2003), p.172. As early as 1993 Ulrich Broich gave the opinion that the British short story has been ‘more conservative than the novel’. Ulrich Broich, ‘Muted Postmodernism: The Contemporary British Short Story’, ZAA, 41 (1993), 31-39 (p.38).

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told from the point of view of a person living in the East, and they both fulfil the short story’s often-defined characteristic of an exceptional occurrence. The extraordinary, historic event of the opening of the frontiers of Eastern European countries to their inhabitants and Western travellers motivated the events in these short stories. This unique moment – the promise of freedom and political liberty – is reflected in the circumscribed lives of a few individuals and assumes a more or less grotesque form, and even bordering on satire. Page’s protagonist and first-person narrator can be identified as a university teacher and single mother in a country which must be Estonia. This can be deduced from the description of the city, which is depicted as extremely cold, located close to the sea and to Finland, and as a place where Russian is spoken. Specification is avoided in the text.2 The woman Piret, living in an unnamed city of a nameless country, has to host a nameless woman who is a visiting lecturer from the West. Piret feels nothing but anger at this unexpected challenge: They all say that they are very interested in us, [...] but it is my view that some of them come here because there is unemployment in their own countries and they are inadequate to secure positions: so I am against it.3

The visiting lecturer disturbs Piret’s routine, causes unnecessary expenses, makes her talk about things she does not want to talk about, and is mindlessly demanding in several ways, although she surprisingly adapts without complaint to the rather miserable housing conditions during her three weeks’ stay. The Western visitor is also exacting in quite a different way: ‘Tell me about yourself’ (p.175), she frankly asks her host, who is more compelled than delighted to meet her and to somehow make the stranger feel comfortable. Piret is preoccupied with her own troubles: the prospect of a heavier workload in order to compete with Western universities, her rebellious daughter, her enforced self-reliance, and a sick cat needing expensive medical treatment. That life is hard and everybody has to fend for him- or herself seems to be her gospel, and as a consequence she prefers to neglect and even 2

3

With Ian McEwan we might call this kind of fiction an ‘existential story’. Cf. Ramona Koval, ‘An Interview with Ian McEwan’, in Erudition Online, 4.4 (April 2004) [accessed 14 August 2009] and the often-quoted interview with Bryan Appleyard, ‘The Ghost in my Family’, The Sunday Times (25 March 2007) [accessed 16 December 2009]. Kathy Page, ‘It is July, Now’, in New Writing 5, ed. by Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (London, Picador, 1996), pp.172-183 (p.172). Further references following this edition are included in the text.

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rebuff the visitor in every way. This continues until a moment arrives in which she meets her in the street the day before her departure, a lonely stranger unable to understand or speak a word of the foreign language, and finally ignites a spark of empathy with her. At last Piret becomes aware of the difficulty in communication, a problem they share. The foreign lecturer, nevertheless, does not seem to worry too much about Piret’s resilience and continues in her attempt to speak to her in spite of the other’s resistance. The ice is somewhat broken when Piret gives in to her grief and takes the other woman, whose character and life do not interest her in any way, home to bury her beloved cat. The pathetic, almost absurd nature of this miniature climax exposes the lack of excitement which ironically accompanies the meeting of East and West; it debunks the grandeur of this momentous, historic occasion by depicting everyday life, but in so doing it also emphasises the exemplary character of this experience. The universality of the problems in the lives of the two women creates the semblance of a bond of sisterhood – more clearly visible to the reader than the protagonist. The stranger serves as a catalyst and causes the first-person narrator to reexamine her own life, present and past – while unable to revise her opinionated view of the Western visitor. The “flatness” of the strange character, her lack of depth and development, reveals itself as a projection caused by the limitations of the homodiegetic narrator, who focuses on her own self to bring out the complexity which we expect to find in the (modernist) fictionalisation of individuals. This projected superficiality of the stranger may very well offer (Western) readers the chance to reflect on their own prejudiced views – the stereotypes and restrictions which predominate the conventional way of perceiving and appraising an Eastern foreigner. Such a reversal of the common perspective, with its unfamiliar central positioning of a protagonist from the East opposed by a colourless antagonist from the West, can lead to a revaluation of the Western reader’s egocentric focalisation. In particular, by not inviting identification with the narrator, whom we may not even sympathise with because of irritableness, brittleness and her reduced awareness, the reader’s attention may be directed towards the situation of the “neglected” Westerner and heightened in regard to his or her own stereotyped thinking.4 The “plot” of this story, if we can call it “plot”, is a conflict rather than action. The event of the Westerner’s visit only serves to bring conflicts to the 4

Renate Brosch calls this part of the reading process, where the recipient tries to escape a too dominant perspective by complementing it, ‘projective supplementary strategies’ thereby continuing Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory that includes the reader’s active participation. Renate Brosch, Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung (Trier: WVT, 2007), p.166, my translation.

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fore – a conflict between several characters – some present, some remembered – and a conflict inside the protagonist, nourished by hardships, isolation, lack of trust and of communication. This renders it a tale about the human condition; nevertheless it also captures a specific socio-political situation at a precise point in time. The relationship imagined in the story when East meets West is one of indifference, criticism and near-hostility on the narrator’s side; one of misunderstanding, curiosity and failed communication on the Western visitor’s side. The university teachers in the Baltic country have raised hopes for an improvement of their situation after the opening to the West, but there is merely a chilly acceptance of the person who arrives for temporary employment and to get to know some colleagues in what she expects to be the “liberated” East. After the end of the Cold War a thaw has not yet set in; – eventually there is talk about spring towards the end of the story. Only after the foreigner’s departure which Piret has impatiently looked forward to, does she feel that she would like to hear from her again. However, although it is summer already, there has still not been word from her.5 On the surface, that is to say if we let ourselves be dominated by the narrator’s perspective, the gap is still too wide, habits are too different, life has been too distressing, the individuals have too little in common. Only a faint expectation remains with the narrator that “the West” is not just another system, where perhaps new professional perspectives lie, that perhaps it houses individuals who, in the long run might become colleagues, partners, perhaps even friends? The lack of closure lends this text a note of frustration. The motif of the journey here does not lead to an end; to the narrator the effort seems pointless most of the time. The fact that the protagonist is not the traveller, but the one who stays and for whom the new experience (therefore) proves disappointing, even if it may be unfinished, could inspire the reader to embark on an introspective journey, exploring his or her own awareness of East and West.

2. Go East, Young Man! An “Eastern” viewpoint without any counterpoint is the angle from which Rose Tremain’s short story ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’ reflects the opening of the East to the West. The initial setting is a flat in the district of Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin; it is presented as an average and rather shabby place at the time immediately following the opening of the frontier. Tre5

Brosch names Kathy Page’s text as an example of giving a story a ‘situation title’ (ibid., p.64, my translation), i.e. a title with a definition of time and/or place and its relation to the narrative, thus assigning it an exemplary nature.

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main’s story repeats the motif of the journey, though not a temporary one in this case, and the destination is the East as well. It starts on 9 December 1989, ‘one month exactly after the Wall had started to come down’.6 This journey is undertaken by a young man, Hector, who grew up in the GDR convinced of its ideals and doctrines, moreover a member of the NVA (National People’s Army). He is travelling on his bicycle from Prenzlauer Berg to Russia in winter, because there, for him, lies the Promised Land. It is not to be found in his home country where the banalities of Western lifestyle are spreading: for example what his neighbours, in fulfilment of their ‘infantile [needs]’ (p.153), bring home from their spending sprees in West Berlin, or the cynicisms which passing ‘Wessies’ (p.154) in pink and green shell-suits – people who make him feel sick – observe to him about the ‘closing-down sale’ (ibid.) of his country. Like Kathy Page’s story, Rose Tremain’s does not offer a celebration of freedom or human rights. These two stories present the problem of facing the other, the unfamiliar and incomprehensible, and also, for their protagonists, the more or less despicable. In Tremain’s story, however, the omniscient narrator, whose perspective alters with the protagonist’s limited point of view, makes the main character, who thinks of himself as a hero endowed with the courage and vision to go East in opposition to the general trend, appear absurd and pitiful. The depiction of a cyclist in NVA uniform going to Russia in mid-winter, equipped with rifle and knapsack, increases in absurdity through the situations in which he is represented. On the first day Hector almost shoots a thief who is critical of socialism; referring to himself anachronistically as ‘Border Police’ (p.156); Hector feels alienated by a religious ceremony at a funeral after entering rural Poland, and when he falls ill while crossing the former fraternal state he is nursed by an elderly Polish train driver, who addresses him in broken German as ‘Sir’ (p.163) and whose wife does not want a German in whatever uniform he is wearing in her house. He does not know ‘which to worry more about – the past or the future’ (p.160), since neither Western nor Eastern neighbours are welcoming. When Hector becomes ill, his own past is deliriously remembered as ‘the beauty of the dawn shift’ – the time when he was guarding the German border to the West from his watch-tower, through whose ‘windows will be falling [...] the extraordinary beauty of the dawn light, arriving from the East’ (p.163) – ex oriente lux – all hope, all revelation coming from the East, as in ancient times.

6

Rose Tremain, ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’, in New Writing 5, ed. by Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (London: Picador, 1996), pp.151-171 (p.153). Further references to this edition are included in the text.

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Space emerges as a highly significant parameter in this story. It builds up visual contrasts through which the reader conceives the situation of the characters of whom only Hector comes into focus, while the other figures remain flat and sketchy. Hector quite confidently responds to his father’s cautioning, ‘remember, when you walk away from one place, you are inevitably walking towards another’ by talking back: ‘That’s why I’m going east.’ (p.152) The visualised opposition of places is in fact one between illusion and reality. Hector’s ideal of beauty epitomises the travesty of a dream in a series of representations of misery: He admires the beauty of the early morning – from the watch-tower, after all, of a state that imprisoned its population. He adores the beauty of his sister Ute, to whom he is linked by an incestuous relationship, as well as that of her pet swan, Karl, who lives with them in the apartment and is equally meant to go to Russia later. To Hector Russia is an imaginary country of unspoiled natural beauty, visualised in his fantasy by tokens such as ‘a wilderness, a birch grove, a lake’ (p.166). He describes it in his unwritten letter to his sister while he is freezing to death (pp.168f.). The binary structure of East versus West is to him first of all one of nature versus corrupt civilisation, implying the contrast between individualism and collectivism (in the West), of ‘absolute needs’ (p.153) which are to Hector’s serious mind the benefits of communism, opposed to the childish pleasures of a consumer society which causes ‘[m]ost people in East Germany [to look] as if they were kids in a cinema queue and the West were the last show on earth.’ (p.160) The often-used term ‘cultural landscape’, where place also signifies a community’s environment and persuasions, is quite palpably effective in this tale. The journey in Tremain’s story leads from a point in experienced reality to another place in an imaginary country. The subject matter of a journey requires a certain expanse of the narrative and thus seems basically opposed to the textual limitations of the short story. With its narrative economy, however, this literary form is able to make use of tokens in visualisation instead of extensive description, and reduction therefore becomes the prime feature of its rendering of space and place. In Tremain’s story singular, fleeting impressions represent the whole in the extremely limited perspective of this protagonist. This is demonstrated in the scene taking place in the café in Marzahn, which to Hector means ease and comfort – especially after he has entered the strangeness of the Polish countryside where he finds himself ‘in a landscape of striped hills, strip-farmed plough and fescue grass.’ (p.162) This transmits a mood of bleakness and dreariness, just like the tribulation of the continued journey in a box car in deepest winter later in the text, which signifies to the historically aware recipient its previous use as the vehicle of a miserable

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human freight for deportation to the East and flight to the West. The protagonist’s imminent death is foreshadowed from the beginning in a number of metaphors and images. Hector’s enterprise inevitably leads to death by freezing on a freight train going East, only finally to be dismissed as ‘a Russian problem’, as the train driver remarks (p.171).7 The story’s implied author remains deeply ironical, pointing out the ambivalence of a historic event. He uses subversion twice: first, by undermining the enthusiastic celebration of a great moment in history, and second, by delegating the story’s focalisation to a character who is experiencing this moment as a defeat of his ideals. Political history, the story insinuates, afflicts the lives of most individuals in a way that exceeds their comprehension. The consequences of what happens – shown in a travesty of great history – condemn some of them to fail with the collapse of Soviet communism. The stories by Page and Tremain are examples of historiographic fiction that, regardless of their irony, show the unorthodox attempt to curb a widespread exultation about the political and social “turnaround”. The capacity of short fiction to ‘articulate what dominant cultural discourses at a given time have tried to exclude’,8 even though it strikes us as bizarre, reveals itself as effective in these texts. They foreground voices that may otherwise have remained mute and that, strange as they may appear, also contribute a heightened awareness of the historical period in which East and West first faced each other after the Fall of the Wall. Fraught with symbolic meaning, defamiliarising established commonplaces, their creativity inspires in the reader a thoughtful revision or a greater subtlety of interest.9

3. A Bird’s-Eye View Place and space are also aspects under which James Hopkin’s story ‘Even the Crows say Kraków’ can be examined. The title already points to the fantastic and fairytale element prevailing in this story: talking animals, wishfulthinking armchairs and a sweet goblin-like female protagonist who explores the city of Kraków in a flying chair from a bird’s-eye view. A thirty-year-old 7

8 9

The fact that there is closure in this story – the destination of the journey is finally reached in spite of all improbabilities – adds to the travesty: the purpose fulfilled, the efforts completed, the protagonist dead, the reader’s suspense resolved (if indeed he or she still felt any). The implied author satirises theme as well as form and genre. Korte, p.177. To Martin Amis, ‘the highest expression of independent minds in western enlightened culture is [...] its literary fiction (‘reason at play’)’. Tim Adams, ‘Amis’s War on Terror by other Means’, The Observer (13 January 2008) [accessed 18 August 2009].

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woman becomes the dreamer Alinka who, invisible to others, filled with the curiosity of a child, flees from an inner-city café full of sad memories. She glides bird-like over the town, observing the spires of the cathedral, squares, streets, orchards, poor people’s homes, the majestic cloth hall, ‘a great symbol of her city, the city she’d been born in and destined to leave’ – ‘[…] the city where she had lived all her life’.10 When she meets three crows who speak of ‘Kraków’ or ‘Krakuff’, she notices that they too talk of the city, while passers-by ‘did look up at the great flapping exodus’ (ibid.) of black birds. Everybody is speaking of the town, it is on the mind of all those who live there. In the gathering dusk on a street corner a woman in black, playing the violin, seems to be a transfigured crow. Accompanied by the doleful music, Alinka’s trembling, delicate soul remains hovering, not really ready to leave. Finally, when it is getting dark and cold, she reaches the Jewish district Kazimierz, which she had been constantly at the back of her mind, and where she again encounters the three crows speaking of the city. Her last stop is the Jewish cemetery where she performs the appropriate ritual of putting pebbles on the gravestones in promise of return ‘as is the tradition’ (p.231). With a little croak – like the black birds – she then decides to go back to human company. This story appears as a miniature picture, the true protagonist being the city, fraught with a collective memory of “great” history and personal destinies while retaining the dignity and significance of former centuries. This flight across Kraków is a reading of the cityscape, of a very ancient cultural landscape, by a dreamer who is so young that only the city with all its preserved past can transmit history to her. Regardless of the dreamer’s deeper understanding, the city continues to communicate all its mysteries. The fantastic nature of the story exposes the reader to various readings and indeterminate messages. A charming, even romantic melancholy overlaps with the defamiliarising plot of a fabulous metamorphosis, and words like “exodus” and gestures of mourning from the Jewish tradition evoke faint associations of the historic “exodus” of the Jewish population. The youthful, childlike reflector character puzzles over the significance of living in this town, which has preserved everything and yet remained breathing and spirited in comprising all history and all divergence. The nature of the floating, pondering dream with a touch of the grotesque creates a mood rather than a definite meaning in this text. It is strange, sorrowful and also beautiful – the dreamer smiling through tears, yet eventually deciding ‘that it would be nice 10

James Hopkin, ‘Even the Crows Say Kraków’, in New Writing 13, ed. by Toby Litt and Ali Smith (London: Picador, 2005), pp.223-231 (p.228). Further references to this edition are included in the text.

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to be back in the warm’ (p.231).11 An impressionist frame of mind is created, which makes a reading directed by historical awareness possible, while a recipient as ingenuous as little Alinka might read it differently.

4. The Presence of the Past While the three previous stories feature young people as main characters, the two following ones focus on old, and quite literally, wise people. They represent the fringes of the East, geographically, socially and ethnically, and they are concerned with distant pasts foreign to contemporary readers. Doikitsa, the protagonist of Louise Doughty’s short story of the same title, is an ancient gypsy lady, born in 1850 and over a hundred years old. As she lies in her wagon expecting death she tells her grandson Jozéf the secret of her life: that their family were slaves.12 ‘I’m going to tell you a story’,13 the old woman announces, continuing the tradition of her people’s oral history.14 It is also the means of passing on the legacy of her nation’s fate to a member of the young generation. Jozéf is her favourite, who, although he is crippled, is free and may carry on the mythological lore of the Roma. Doikitsa’s narration proves to be an example of personalised history and is linked to the quest for female identity. Doikitsa’s twin sister Eva was lost during their family’s journey to the slave market where they were to be sold at the last minute but came too late – slavery had just been abolished before their arrival. Eva was never found, so that for her twin sister, liberty was insolubly linked to loss and unspeakable pain. The 11

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It strikes me that the final sentence allows the story to end succinctly on a determined note, like Rose Tremain’s. The explanation for this attribute is best expressed by Frank Kermode: ‘that ending in fiction replicates the way in which we need to impose a closed structure on experience in order to make sense of it’. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, qtd. from Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.195. Slavery, which for gypsies lasted many centuries, was not abolished in Wallachia, later part of Romania, until the middle of the nineteenth century. Mostly Roma were slaves; in the principal of Moldavia, in contrast, many slaves were offspring of the Tatars. Cf. Viorel Achim, The Roma in Romanian History, trans. by Richard Davies (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), p.27 and David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p.xii. Louise Doughty, ‘Doikitsa’, in New Writing 13, ed. by Toby Litt and Ali Smith (London: Picador, 2005), pp.274-282 (p.276). Further references to this edition are included in the text. For the relevance of orality in short narratives see Laurent Lepaludier, ‘What is This Voice I Read? Problematics of Orality in the Short Story’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 47 (2006) [accessed 1 September 2009], which stresses especially Walter J. Ong’s theories.

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past and what was literally left behind remained part of Doikitsa and, as she summarises, ‘Nothing changed’ (p.281).15 Yet the ideals of freedom and autonomy became a sacred good to her, and it is precisely this consciousness that she wants to pass on to her grandson. Every single day she thanks their god ‘for the fact that I own things the way I was once owned’ (p.276). From an object she has turned into a subject and author, who by her narrative governs the awareness of the past. While this remains implicit, to govern space without restriction has to her become a ritual of celebrating freedom: ‘Sometimes, I walk to the end of the camp and all the way back again, for no reason, just to remind myself that I can’ (p.276), Doikitsa tells Jozéf. This ritual will become his own, and thus transcends the death of the individual. Despite his grief and maiming physical pain the young man accepts the torch passed on to him to take a stand against oblivion. The concluding sentence reads: ‘On the return journey he would walk to the end of the settlement, and back again, because he could.’ (p.282) The circular ending of the story stresses oral tradition as the life-giving force of the people who, in the present and the future, will continue to live as an ethnic minority ‘visited by all the woes of the world’ (p.278). The story underlines the unique strength of the female character in surviving and carrying on: While Doikitsa continued to live even when she lost her alter ego, the twin boys whom her mother gave birth to next died within hours; Jozéf, her much-loved grandson, became a cripple after a near-fatal accident.16 The myth of the ‘Chosen Ones’ (p.278), as she calls her nation, includes “visitations” like the bearing of cruelty and the survival of suffering, but preserves the unity of those who share a cultural identity distinct from the majority. This self-image is passed on by someone who speaks with authority in an obviously matriarchal social structure. The East presents its diversity in this story in its mysterious face, archaic and strange. However, as a piece of defamiliarised autobiographical historiography it is not alienated by the eccentricity of a fantasy story as in Hopkin’s text. While ‘Doikitsa’ speaks of people living in an alien, but largely homogeneous culture, the next story, while also representing a bygone world of the East, establishes a culture clash in a very peculiar way.The last example to be 15 16

Here, the narrated past is symbolic of the present and not a chronicle of history. Out of the five stories dealt with in this article three have a female protagonist, however diverse the individual characters and their respective environments. This affirms the ongoing concern of fiction with ‘conceptions of women and women’s roles. It is a rare writer whose fiction remains unaffected by the women’s movement’, even though the latter is becoming history already. Cf. Dennis Vannatta, The English Short Story 1945-1980 (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1985), p.124.

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discussed in this article is entitled ‘A Translation of The Leviathan by Joseph Roth’. Roth, an Austrian journalist and writer, was born in Lemberg (Lvov), Galicia, which until the end of the First World War was part of the Habsburg monarchy and today is a city in Ukraine. Roth died in exile in Paris in 1939, and his tale Der Leviathan was posthumously published in 1940 as a book, although it had first been serialised in full in October and November 1938 in the Pariser Tageszeitung, a newspaper for German exiles. The text in hand was included in the British Council’s New Writing series since it is the work of Michael Hofmann, who was born in Freiburg, Germany but received his academic degrees in Oxford and Cambridge and lives in London. Hofmann is the translator of numerous works by Kafka and Brecht as well as of six novels and tales by Joseph Roth. Despite its title and the distinctions of its author-translator it has been published under New Writing, an anthology of recent fiction and poetry. Hofmann’s text is, in fact, the translation of a non-mimetic narrative. It has pertained the plot, characters and setting of Roth’s original text. But by introducing an analytical “metatext” in the notes,17 Hofmann definitely turns it into a new story in the manner of a montage. He re-writes Roth’s story by uniting the intertextual and metafictional postmodern with the mythologicalarchaic. As a critic of contemporary experiments in short story writing argues: This combination [of recourse to fairytales and tendency to metafiction] is typical of many contemporary and especially postmodern texts. As mentioned before, the postmodern tendency to metafiction is also connected to the turning away from the Aristotelian principle of mimesis. This turning away is in itself rooted in the postmodern world view […].18

In the text and metatext of Hofmann’s translation, the West’s rationality thus contrasts with the mysterious East, fulfilling a cliché, which is thus signalled to the reader. The original title of Roth’s text evokes the Babylonian idea of a dragonlike monster, which is repeated in the Old Testament and thereby connected to Judaism. Through the New Testament it became part of the history of the people of Israel. Scholars of English Studies are also reminded of Thomas 17

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One year later Hofmann published his translation of the short story once more without his footnotes. The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, trans. by Michael Hofmann (New York: Norton, 2002), pp.248-276. The text in this collection is a non-metafictional one, rendering the reading experience clearly different. Birgit Moosmüller, Die experimentelle englische Kurzgeschichte der Gegenwart (München: Fink, 1993), p.303, my translation.

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Hobbes’s early-modern philosophy of state in which he propagates the concept of absolute power. The narrative of the legendary creature in this story of the twenty-first century therefore has an extremely long history of intertextuality, from beginnings dating back to a period almost four thousand years ago, through the Old Testament and the philosophical writing of the early Enlightenment to the 1930s. In Hofmann’s work the Leviathan is no demon, but a kind of giant fish-snake, identified with the sea. On Jehovah’s behalf he guards and supervises all plants and living creatures of the sea, especially the corals. This being is also linked to Judaism in the story, as the final sentence no doubt confirms in concluding the fate of the human protagonist: ‘May he rest in peace beside the Leviathan until the coming of the Messiah.’19 The story’s protagonist, the Jewish merchant Nissen Piczenik, feels connected with the outside world through his corals, which to him are living creatures he adores and whose origin, the ocean, he longs to see. Magic realism, superstition, folklore, humour and religion mingle in the text and create a fascinating and spiritual other. A narrator, who stands outside the world of the story but sympathises with it, and its characters, mythologises the small-town Galician setting. The narrative fictionalises a cultural sphere which has since ceased to exist: that of the Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jews. The multiethnic and multinational Danube monarchy, in whose part of Galicia Joseph Roth was born, is not the geographical centre of the story; instead, it is set in the formerly Russian part of Galicia ruled by the Tsar in Petersburg. Nevertheless, the multicultural community of the narrative includes Russian peasants, Jewish merchants trading with Germany, and occasionally Hungarians. Moreover, the protagonist’s final destination on earth is supposed to be the far West, Canada, where he hopes to emigrate in order to survive his moral and social downfall but in fact never arrives. In the course of his first journey from the continental small town of Progrody to Odessa on the Black Sea, the protagonist gradually breaks away from his religious and cultural origin in orthodox Judaism (cf. pp.198f.), because now his religion is the sea. His last journey ends at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the place of his yearning and home of his beloved creatures, the corals – a place of rest which is not yet permanent but signifies a return to his spiritual roots in expectation of the Messiah, whose arrival will then bring redemption. Opposed to and subverting the mystification are the footnotes added by the translator-rewriter of the narrative. Roth’s parable of a man’s temptation 19

Michael Hofmann, ‘A Translation of The Leviathan by Joseph Roth’, in New Writing 10, ed. by Penelope Lively and George Szirtes (London: Picador, 2001), pp.177-209 (p.209). Further references to this edition are included in the text.

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and fall through greed by a devilish seducer, who cheats by selling cheap imitations of corals, his subsequent punishment, contrition and final homecoming to the depth of the sea discloses the fabulous East. The notes form a subtext to ‘[Roth’s] fairy story of a thalattatropic death-wish’ (p.179, n.3). As an educated Western sceptic’s comment on Roth’s idiosyncracies and his protagonist’s irrationality they also present the analytical disruption of the mythology. A critic explains the purposes of re-telling myths, fairytales and legends in the era of postmodernism: ‘[H]ere, metafiction’s propensity for literary criticism comes to the fore’.20 The “translator” plays the devil’s advocate in regard to the mysticism and the effect of the main text on the reader, who, as the author of the footnotes reluctantly admits, ‘might like to read Joseph Roth in these relativizing, multi-perspectival, mealy-mouthed times!’ (p.203, n.19) His notes amount to an attempt to destroy the effect of illusion-building and submergence in the magic of the other writer’s monoperspectival narrative of the legend of Good and Evil, punishment and salvation. The extradiegetic author of the footnotes is juxtaposed to the story’s rarely intruding narrator, who himself firmly believes in the mysteries of the world represented in the story. Thus, the notes establish a bipolar structure. The prerogative is given to the focus on the illiterate Jew and the drama of his life. Nissen Piczenik epitomises the Wanderer, who has made himself an outcast, because ‘he was altogether different’ (p.184) even to his cultural community. Nobody else knows what is going on in his soul (ibid.), which longs for the boundless depth of the ocean, home of the corals.

5. (Time)Travel In Hofmann’s translation, the spirit of postmodernism does not interfere as dramatically with the coherent story of The Leviathan, as for instance in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962).21 A fairytale or myth, however, itself calls the reader’s attention to its artificiality and non-mimetic nature, and for this reason contemporary writers experiment frequently with these genres since the mere imitation of reality often appears to them an inadequate, impossible or redundant endeavour.22 In Hofmann’s text, there is a twinge of 20

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Rüdiger Imhof, ‘The Use of Myth and Familiar Stories’, in Contemporary Metafiction: A Poetological Study of Metafiction in English since 1939 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986), pp.139176 (p.146). For Pale Fire cf. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Science Fiction and Postmodern Fiction: A Genre Study (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), p.88. More recently, Peter Ackroyd provided an example of this structural technique in his novel The Clerkenwell Tales (2003). Cf. Moosmüller, p.303.

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irony only for those readers who engage in the reading of the small-print footnotes of the disbeliever facing the outlandish world of the protagonist for whom the supernatural is to be taken for granted. As in other contemporary experiments with fairytale and myth a “double subversion” of the principle of mimesis takes place here: folktale and legend already renounce the imitation of reality, and in addition the notes embody the self-reflexivity of metafiction. Among the unselfconscious narratives about the East this tale represents an exemption. What all five stories discussed here have in common, however, is the motif of the travelling experience, which becomes a quest and sometimes an ordeal in the attempt to seize the ideals that give meaning to life and assess personal or cultural identity. ‘Travelling to shed light on a part of oneself which is already present somewhere, deep buried in the silent mind,’23 unites the diverse protagonists of these short stories.

Works Cited Achim, Viorel, The Roma in Romanian History, trans. by Richard Davies (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004) Adams, Tim, ‘Amis’s War on Terror by other Means’, The Observer (13 January 2008) [accessed 25 August 2009] Appleyard, Bryan, ‘The Ghost in My Family. Interview with Ian McEwan’, The Sunday Times (25 March 2007) [accessed 29 November 2009] Broich, Ulrich, ‘Muted Postmodernism: The Contemporary British Short Story’, ZAA, 41 (1993), 31-39 Brosch, Renate, Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung (Trier: WVT, 2007) Crowe, David, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) Doughty, Louise, ‘Doikitsa’, in New Writing 13, ed. by Toby Litt and Ali Smith (London: Picador, 2005), pp.274-282 Freiburg, Rudolf, ‘Die postmoderne Kurzgeschichte’, in Geschichte der englischen Kurzgeschichte, ed. by Arno Löffler and Eberhard Späth (Tübingen: Francke, 2005), pp.331-357 23

Georges Letissier, ‘Away: The Sense of Place and the Voices of the Self’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 29 (1997) [accessed 1 September 2009].

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Head, Dominic, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Hofmann, Michael, ‘A Translation of The Leviathan by Joseph Roth’, in New Writing 10, ed. by Penelope Lively and George Szirtes (London: Picador, 2001), pp.177-209 Hopkin, James, ‘Even the Crows Say Kraków’, in New Writing 13, ed. by Toby Litt and Ali Smith (London: Picador, 2005), pp.223-231 Imhof, Rüdiger, Contemporary Metafiction: A Poetological Study of Metafiction in English since 1939 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980) Korte, Barbara, The Short Story in Britain: A Historical Sketch and Anthology (Tübingen: Francke, 2003) Koval, Ramona, ‘An Interview with Ian McEwan’, Erudition Online, 4.4 (April 2004) http://www.eruditiononline.com/04.04/ian_mcewan.htm [accessed 14 August 2009] Lepaludier, Laurent, ‘What is this Voice I Read? Problems of Orality in the Short Story’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 47 (2006) [accessed 1 September 2009] Letissier, Georges, ‘Away: The Sense of Place and the Voices of the Self’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 29 (1997) [accessed 1 September 2009] Löffler, Arno and Eberhard Späth, Geschichte der englischen Kurzgeschichte (Tübingen: Francke, 2005) Moosmüller, Birgit, Die experimentelle englische Kurzgeschichte der Gegenwart (München: Fink, 1993) Page, Kathy, ‘It is July, Now’, in New Writing 5, ed. by Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (London: Picador, 1996), pp.172-183 Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara, Science Fiction and Postmodern Fiction: A Genre Study (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) Roth, Joseph, ‘The Leviathan’, in The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, transl. by Michael Hofmann (New York: Norton, 2002), pp.248-276 Tremain, Rose, ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’, in New Writing 5, ed. by Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (London: Picador, 1996), pp.151-171 Vannatta, Dennis, The English Short Story 1945-1980 (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1985)

Michael Szczekalla

‘Under Western Eyes’: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare and Carl Tighe The implosion of the Soviet Union and its aftermath has attracted a number of British writers of fiction, among them Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare and Carl Tighe. This article tries to assess their contribution to the transformation of cultural memory by focussing on the dialectics of blindness and insight that results from a foreign perspective. It is a perspective that has been shaped through travelling and/or (reliance on) scholarly research, sometimes in combination with long-standing political commitments. Martin Amis’s House of Meetings is to be given pride of place as it is a good example of all three. Enmeshed in his past, its guilt-ridden octogenarian narrator describes himself as a ‘Stakhanovite’ shock writer, who paid dearly for his complicity in the crimes of the Stalin era. At the end of his life, the former Gulag inmate is left with the selfimposed task of bequeathing what he calls the ‘festering memoirs of an elderly relative’ to his unsuspecting American stepdaughter. Though it may be difficult to compare this fictional autobiography to the authentic survivors’ literature produced by Russian authors, it deserves our attention as an attempt to transform the Gulag into a trans-national lieu de mémoire.

1. The Dialectics of Blindness in Insight ‘My eyes, in the Conradian sense, have stopped being Western and started being Eastern’, the narrator of Martin Amis’s House of Meetings (2006) comments on his final return to Russia where he intends to die.1 The sombre fictional autobiography, which unites a prison with a love plot, was inspired by Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History (2003). It was preceded by the author’s Koba the Dread (2002) a politico-historical essay on Stalinism and the delusions of Western intellectuals, which concludes with a letter addressed to his father’s ghost. Like Julian Barnes’s The Porcupine (1992), Tibor Fischer’s Under The Frog (1992), Nicholas Shakespeare’s Snowleg (2004), Carl Tighe’s Burning Worm (2001) and even Ian McEwan’s somewhat earlier The Innocent (1990). House of Meetings allows us to study what happens when cultural memory crosses national boundaries, when it is appropriated by authors who have been reared in a different culture and who write with audiences in mind that cannot be assumed to share their interest, in this case, in the recent past of Eastern Europe and Russia. These authors have been audacious in more than one respect. How can Martin Amis, one may ask, hope to be able to cope with the ‘incredibly rich 1

Martin Amis, House of Meetings (New York: Vintage International, 2008), p.15.

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body of Russian survivors’ literature’?2 The answer depends not only on the intrinsic merit of these literary documents but also on the relevance accorded to them in Russia and elsewhere. In her epilogue to Gulag, Applebaum writes of present-day Russia that its secret police as well as its judges, politicians, and business elite do not appear to be haunted by memories of the past.3 It is probably safe to say that the survivors’ literature produced by Russian authors does not get the attention it deserves. And although the conservative backlash under Putin has not remained without reactions among the cultural elite, witness Vladimir Sorokin’s remarkable Den’ Oprichnika [A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik] (2006) – a dystopian novel about Russia in the year 2026, whose title echoes Solzhenitsyn’s famous account of a day in the life of a Gulag prisoner – the cultural memory of Russia is far too important to be considered a matter of purely national concern. Its appropriation by nonRussians writing in a European context should therefore hardly come as a surprise. Any attempt to assess the contribution of British authors to the production and transformation of the cultural memory of Russia is bound to focus on the dialectics of blindness and insight that results from a foreign perspective. It is a perspective that has been shaped through travelling and/or (reliance on) scholarly research, sometimes in combination with long-standing political commitments. House of Meetings is to be given pride of place because, of the English novels written in the aftermath of the Soviet Empire’s breakdown, it is not only completely uninhibited and fearlessly analytical, but also the bleakest and most disturbing fictional account of the havoc wrought by totalitarianism.What these historical novels have in common, however, is the fact that they exhibit particularly intriguing forms of genre crossing. Their generic affiliations range from tragedy (Amis, Barnes) via comedy (Fischer) and romance (Shakespeare) to spy fiction (McEwan) and fictional memoirs (Amis, Tighe). And though thematically as well as geographically they could hardly be more diverse, covering not only the Soviet Union but most of its former satellite states, these novelistic experiments seem to be linked in a common endeavour, whose success depends on the extent to which the dialectics of blindness and insight is an enabling one. For reasons of space, this article concentrates on Tighe, Shakespeare and, above all, Amis.

2. Burning Worm Carl Tighe’s Burning Worm comes across as authentic on the deprivations and the squalor caused by the planned economies of Eastern Europe, in this 2 3

Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004), p.511. Cf. ibid., p.512.

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case of Poland in the early 1980s. It pretends to be the diary of Eugene Hinks, a teacher of English, which, after an interval of 20 years, has been edited by a professor at the University of Cracow, a generous man mildly puzzled by some of Hinks’s crankier judgments. Its title derives from an “offbeat” little poem4 written by the diarist himself: Another kink in the rope, It strains to stay straight But another kink in the rope And it turns it twists It writhes like a Burning worm. (p.153)

The subject undergoing these contortions might either be Cracow or Poland or, alternatively, the speaker of the poem himself, as Hinks unhelpfully explains. Perhaps he is merely being evasive here because his girlfriend has told him that a Polish reader would automatically think of the central metaphor of this poem as a term of abuse. Such criticism notwithstanding, the vermicular image is used throughout the diary, apart from having provided the novel with its title.5 If we follow the editor, who comments on the image in a postscript, it has indeed a double function: It refers to ‘the stress of being caught up’ as a foreigner in the events of the 1980 strike at the Lenin Shipyard at Gdánsk and it ‘capture[s] the agony of unresolved personal issues’ (p.224). This, however, still leaves us with the question of how far the narrator’s private tribulations mirror the political crisis of his host nation. Or do they distort his judgment on the latter? If we can trust his self-description, he is a man warped by loneliness who had been unable to find a job at home (cf. p.59). He may have felt drawn to Poland because he is Irish, or so he says.6 His application for membership in the new illegal workers’ union, however, was turned down. Do we have to accept such a man’s attempt at deflating the heroism of SolidarnoĞü? Admittedly, Hinks is not the only one to speak of ‘worms’. Some of his Polish acquaintances do the same. And it is one of Hinks’s mature students who denounces the Polish priesthood as ‘a bunch of rural mental midgets’ (p.206), who would not survive in an open society. There is nothing in the entire novel which allows us to challenge this verdict on the clergy. Thus the figure of the disenchanted diarist poses a problem. ‘East or West, nowhere’s best’ (p.19), Hinks tells us early on. At the end of his stay, his attempt to get his Polish girlfriend out of the country is foiled by the Brit4

5 6

Carl Tighe, Burning Worm (Manchester: Impress, 2001), p.224. Further page references in the text. Cf. pp.43, 73, 97, 151, 153, 198, 217 and 224 The editor casts doubts on this claim of an identity, cf. ibid., p.15.

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ish embassy. Hinks remains enigmatic throughout – perhaps sufficiently honest to give the reader a fairly accurate picture of Poland in the early 1980s, as someone who spoke Polish well enough, who felt drawn to the ‘lay left’ of the Polish opposition of those years, and who may have reacted with dismay upon learning that leading representatives of SolidarnoĞü admired Thatcher and Reagan. There are nice little vignettes about political discussions, clandestine gatherings, and the inevitable Christmas carp, which prevents everyone from taking a bath for a whole week: ‘Carp are bottom feeders; they dredge up all the muck. When you get them home they spend a week in the bath tub, swimming around without any food, just to clean out their system ready to be eaten’ (p.46). Victims of illegal homemade vodka remind Hinks of what Marx said about the idiocy of rural life (cf. p.62). Readers may prefer the diarist’s acute observations, which clearly constitute the strength of his narrative, to his judgments and ascribe the (usually mild) aspersions cast on his host country to the frustrations of an unsuccessful academic who teaches conditionals to unpromising students. Yet Hinks cannot be said to be ignorant of the limitations of his perspective. He quotes Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ on the inescapable myopia of those who are very close, too close in fact, to what from hindsight appear to have been key events in history: We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a house burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned. (p.56)

Some allowance has to be made for the stress caused by the uncertainty that belongs to times of upheaval. Though Hinks’s vision may be bleak, it is tempered by wry humour. The same might be said about his Polish acquaintances. Thus his girlfriend reassures him about informers in his language classes. No language teacher has to worry about them: ‘[I]f your student is so bad he needs the milicja to help him, they are probably too poor in English to inform accurately anyway’ (p.200). However, it may be easier to cast doubts on Hinks’s academic credentials than to make adverse comments on some of his students, though it would not be in the spirit of his generous editor to do so.7 There is nothing intrinsically wrong with Hinks seeing SolidarnoĞü and Poland through his ‘own frustrations, depression, loneliness and hunger’ if the subjective perspective also functions as a means of conveying ‘the imme7

Poland under martial law is shrouded in darkness. ‘There is husbandry in heaven’, someone interrupts a nocturnal discussion on world politics, ibid., p.38. It is impossible to decide whether it is Hinks or his creator who believes that this line occurs in Hamlet.

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diacy, the sense of how it was to live in that place, in that time, in that way’ (p.126), as he himself puts it. Tighe, a scholar of Polish literature who has taught in Poland and who is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Derby, can be said to have achieved just that. Moreover, it has always been the privilege of fiction to treat of political issues primarily as they affect the individual’s consciousness and impact on their daily lives. A fictional diary can hardly be expected to transcend the biases of the diarist, whose partial blindness – this point once again needs stressing – does not prevent him from describing his immediate surroundings with a clarity and precision not available to distant observers.

3. Snowleg In Snowleg, Nicholas Shakespeare also presents history mediated through the personal experience of a young Briton. The plot of this rather conventional narrative unfolds in Germany. Peter Hithersay, a British medical student from the University of Hamburg, meets Marla Berking at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1983. She afterwards introduces herself as Snjólaug, an Icelandic nickname given to her by her grandmother. To Peter it sounds like Snowleg. This chance encounter at an unlikely place forms the real beginning of Shakespeare’s story, and the explanation of her name is not the only bit of arcane philology the reader is offered in the course of this narrative. Snowleg’s grandfather was a furrier, who, on a hunting tour to Alaska, had met a Canadian woman bearing that name. He later plied his trade in ‘the Brühl’, a street name derived from the Slav for ‘swamp’, as Snowleg tells Peter, and not from Count Brühl, as the Germanophile medical student has surmised.8 Peter, who has come to Leipzig with a mime group, has got a particular reason for his visit. On his sixteenth birthday his mother told him that his father is ‘not the affable and diffident Englishman’ (p.19) who had married her but a political prisoner she had met in Leipzig while taking part in a vocal competition in the early 1960s. This inspires a search for his identity and makes him – almost literally – relive the life of his mother. The public-school boy with a keen interest in history and a penchant for a chivalric code of honour – his school once owned a Malory manuscript, which, alas, has been sold in these “venal times” – soon embarks on a quest. Having chosen the territory of a totalitarian regime as his field of action, he does not remain unscathed for long. Like Burning Worm, this novel is particularly strong on the material as well as spiritual deformations of everyday life under communist rule. Peter’s 8

Nicholas Shakespeare, Snowleg (London: Vintage, 2005), pp.73f. Further page references in the text.

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first impressions of Leipzig consist of ‘potholes, fumes, and rigid faces’ (p.64). It is impossible not to notice the omnipresent soot. He has entered a country where people ‘eavesdrop on each other from dawn to dusk’ (p.50) and where most of the ‘lady shot-putters have penises’ (p.106). On his second day, Peter sees a man who has been caught painting political graffiti on a wall being dragged away to a van while the bystanders are deliberately looking away. Snowleg is denied a career because her brother wants to leave the country. (Twenty years later Peter will discover the true identity of his father, who was shot as a prisoner.) It is the time of the annual book fair and Snowleg steals a volume from a popular-science series by a West German publisher telling Peter that this is what you have to do ‘unless you want to read crap’ (p.71). Auerbach’s Cellar is closed because of an event connected with the fair, and they have to choose an adjacent wine bar. They want to meet again, but during a formal dinner arranged for the students’ mime group at the Hotel Astoria, the knight errant is suddenly seized with fear. When Snowleg pleads to be admitted, Peter denies her. Seconded by the widely travelled Permanent Representative’s wife (‘In Africa we always had these people’ (p.124)), a gibe at the West German political elite which equated détente with cowardice, he is rudely awakened from his dreams realising that he has lived up to his saintly name: ‘I know thee not’ (p.127). He begins by trying to refine this experience into ‘a version he [can] live with’ (p.129). Peter’s unchivalrous betrayal makes him desire atonement. Yet the damage to his self-conception has been far too strong. The gifted and conscientious student turns into a drug addict. After a failed exam and a breakdown he confesses to his registrar. Instead of becoming a paediatrician, he takes up geriatric medicine, a decision that can only be read as an expiatory gesture. Incapable of a real attachment, he chooses the wrong partners. He moves to Berlin, there is a son and the inevitable divorce. Finally Peter meets a terminally ill 103-year-old patient from Leipzig of all places, who ‘permeates the permafrost’ (p.227) that has enclosed him since the incident at the Astoria Hotel. When the over-conscientious doctor takes her ashes to Leipzig, as he had promised to the old lady, he discovers that it was Snowleg’s grandmother who ended her days in his care. One could have wished Shakespeare to dispense with the trappings of chivalry, which made such a contrived ending necessary, in favour of a mode of emplotment more congenial to his subject matter. Yet his description of the multiple paralysis caused by the denial of freedom can only be called authentic. The hero’s Malorian knight errantry, which, like the corruption of Snjólaug to Snowleg, has been generated by a British perspective on the former GDR, may seem a trifling matter, if it were not for the fact that it endows this beautiful tale with narrative cohesion.

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4. House of Meetings There is not a single entry in the fictional diary of Burning Worm or an episode in Snowleg that affords more than a mere glimpse at horrors of the kind evoked and described in House of Meetings – horrors which range from manslaughter on an unprecedented scale to acts of anthropophagism occurring in the wake of the wilfully induced famines during the collectivisation campaigns of the 1930s, horrors which have created the moral abyss of Stalinism. The unnamed narrator, a veteran of the Second World War who has survived the Gulag system, combines a passion for truth with a highly developed literary consciousness. He seems to be equally at home in Russian and English literature. There are references to Dostoyevsky and Mandelshtam, and, apart from Coleridge and Conrad, we get Shakespeare, Marvell, Owen, Graves, Orwell and Auden. In the course of his eventful life, the narrator has suffered many ordeals. Yet neither his accomplishments nor his experiences are calculated to dispose the reader in his favour. He is in fact supremely unlikeable. At least this is what he tries to make us believe, and most critics have followed his repeated self-condemnations.9 Equally unsparing about his country and his own person, he describes himself as a ‘disgusting Anglophile’10 and assumes the pose of ‘a very much rowdier version of the Ancient Mariner’ (p.141), who is acting under the compulsion to tell the gruesome tale of a man whose life has been marred by totalitarianism and who has been both a victim and an aggressor. Thus, in his high eighties, he sets out on a Gulag tour along the Yenisei River, whose hydroelectric dams on its upper reaches were built by forced labour. He is in search of his younger self as he was an inmate of a camp somewhere above the Arctic Circle from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, a desolate place where he was reunited with his half-brother Lev. The staff on board of the ‘Georgi Zhukov’ regard him as a ‘vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man’ (p.11), whom they tolerate because they can expect excessive gratuities. That he has spent some time in the United States where he has a wife and a stepdaughter called Venus, to whom these ‘festering memoirs of an elderly relative’ (p.3) are addressed, appears to be nothing out of the ordinary, given the vagaries of many twentieth-century lives. Yet the former communist, who – after his time in Norlag – earned his living as a privileged specialist in robotics, is really also someone we want to listen to – even when he pontificates on the great writers. 9

10

For the reviews, cf. n.n. ‘House of Meetings by Martin Amis’, The Complete Review [accessed 18 November 2009]. Amis, House of Meetings, p.106. All further page references in the text.

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Dostoyevsky’s characters, he lets us know, ‘devote themselves to the invention of pain’. This is what Conrad ‘couldn’t stand about old Dusty and his holy fools’ (p.71). The Polish émigré appears to be an uncontested authority on the mentality of the East. And yet, his admiration for major English and Russian novelists notwithstanding, the narrator prefers poetry to prose. It was Mandelshtam who considered a man’s or a woman’s response to poetry as their true measure, says Lev, a poet himself, and the narrator seems to concur with his younger half-brother. Auden, the self-reflexive poet and critic, is good on the process of creation. The English war poets help to reinforce the theme of grief, though they could never have anticipated what it meant to be a Russian soldier in the Second World War. Having survived trench warfare, Robert Graves spent a whole decade of convalescence on Majorca whereas the narrator, like so many of his compatriots, was sentenced to penal servitude in a labour camp soon after he had returned home. Some forty years later, the death of his nephew in the Salang Tunnel in Afghanistan evokes Wilfred Owen’s ‘drawing down of blinds’ in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (cf. p.174). The narrator even accuses an Englishwoman he had met while still in Russia of a taste for Georgian fatuities that remind him of the immature pre-war Owen. He has some use for the older poets as well. Marvell’s technique of itemisation – ‘An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes… / Two hundred to adore each breast’ – is maliciously brought into close proximity to the fantasies of a rapist. The narrator should know. ‘In the first three months of 1945, [he] raped [his] way across what would soon become East Germany’ (p.35).11 Well chosen quotations help to make a point, usually a grim one, elucidating the narrator’s or Russia’s predicament or guilt. Unfortunately, he sounds like the mouthpiece of his creator. This may be seen as one of the novel’s two major shortcomings. The other concerns the plot, which has two strands that are more or less intricately interwoven – the prison and the love plot. The former is full of graphic depictions of the Gulag system, the latter centres on a Jewish woman called Zoya who was loved by the narrator as well as his half-brother, whom she eventually married. This provides the novel with a love story that forms a triangle, not ‘equilateral’ but ‘brutally scalene’ (pp.9f.), the narrator tells his stepdaughter. He appears to have been madly jealous of his half-brother, a mild-mannered pacifist and not a sexual predator. Nevertheless the narrator helps him to survive the camp. Lev calls him his ‘righter of wrongs’ (p.235) – a well-earned epithet though Lev dies not long after his release.

11

Cf. ibid., pp. 71, 15, 169, 9f., 174, 107, 174, 39 and 35.

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The whole story is meant to culminate in a revelation about something that happened at a so-called House of Meetings, a secret contained in the letter which the dying Lev has bequeathed to his brother (cf. pp.220-235). Yet what this revelation consists of never becomes entirely clear. Amis explained the rationale underlying the institution called House of Meetings in a radio interview with Tom Ashbrook.12 According to Anne Applebaum, there were log cabins in the Gulag system for conjugal visits. These places were necessarily also houses of departures, the leave-taking proving, as a rule, much more dramatic than the prisoner’s committal to detention.13 When, in 1956, Lev met Zoya in such circumstances he could not help realising that he had become, in what should have been a moment of bliss, a mere impersonator of his former self. The enforced transformation of the prisoner’s priorities – food, sleep and oblivion soon came first – meant the disappearance of love and the concomitant realisation that he had become a lesser man. Lev stopped writing poetry. Though Applebaum devotes only three pages to such Houses of Meetings, she provided Amis with the idea for his Gulag novel. And yet the device of the protracted revelation does not quite work. The story somehow fizzles out, thereby confirming the view that Amis has always found it difficult to devise a captivating plot. He can, however, be defended by urging that there simply is no plot that could make sense of the short twentieth-century, the ‘Age of Extremes’ in Hobsbawm’s term, a negative point Amis already made in his novel Time’s Arrow (1991). ‘Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union after the war against fascism: fascism’ (p.55), the narrator states. A comparison of the two countries that gave birth to the twentieth century’s most malicious regimes yields the following observation: Those who were ‘[m]uch more disgusting’ (p.211) recovered better. A guilty person though he certainly is, the narrator is never at a loss when it comes to lending forceful expressions to his sharp insights. Twice, at the beginning as well as near the end, he makes a judgment which his autobiography is meant to bear out: ‘The conscience, I suspect, is a vital organ. And when it goes, you go’ (p.211, cf. p.3). In the interview with Tom Ashbrook, Amis explores the cliché of ‘empathy-free writing’, the shibboleth of much Amis criticism. The Gulag, he explains, and he is talking about the West here, is ‘under-remembered’ – all the more important to have ‘tender thoughts’ about its victims. Moreover, according to Amis, the Gulag must be referred to when it comes to explaining the present malaise of Russia. Official policies notwithstanding, its memory 12

13

Tom Ashbrook, ‘Martin Amis’s House of Meetings’, On Point (31 January 2007) [accessed 20 December 2009] Cf. Applebaum, pp.237-240.

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can no longer be suppressed. House of Meetings is full of descriptions that linger on in the reader’s mind. Soon after Lev’s arrival, the two brothers witness a scene reminiscent of a medieval pandemonium: In the space of three minutes we saw a bitch sprinting flat-out after a brute with a bloody mattock in his hand, a pig methodically clubbing a fascist to the ground, a workshy snake slicing off the remaining fingers of his left hand, a team of locusts twirling an old shiteater into the compost heap, and finally a leech, who with his teeth sticking out from his gums at right angles (scurvy), was none the less making a serious attempt at eating his shoe. (pp.32f.)

The ‘bestial nomenclature’ alludes to the pecking order that obtained in the camps: At the top were the pigs – the janitoriat of administrators and guards. Next came the urkas designated as ‘socially friendly elements,’ they had the status of trusties who, moreover, did not work. Beneath the urkas were the snakes […] and beneath the snakes were the leeches […] (pp.27f.)

Close to the bottom of this animal kingdom were the fascists – not the real variety but those denounced as fascists because, for the authorities, there were quotas to fulfil. Soviet state terror implied complete randomness. Ten years of forced labour in the Artic Zone meant a chance of survival close to zero. There is no way of coming to terms with the outrageous brutality of this system of slave labour. Neither is it possible to understand its rationale, and that is why the system was dismantled after Stalin’s death. It was never completely abolished, however. Now, as the state has given up on nationalisation, there is ‘capitalism with a Russian face, a statist face’ (p.210) as ‘[a]ll the money has been divided up between the felons and the state’ (p.15), the narrator tells us. On his Gulag tour, he comes across a news stall at Predposylov, a dying town whose population is terrorised by wild dogs reminiscent of McEwan’s canines in Black Dogs (1992), another novel about the bitter legacy of totalitarianism. A woman at a news stall is selling cheap spirits that are as poisonous as the literature she also has on sale: The Myth of the Six Million, Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This elicits the comment that ‘there must have been a developmental requirement that Russia simply failed to meet’ (p.219). The narrator and his compatriots have paid dearly for their complicity so that a moral retributionist might be happy with the outcome, he tells his stepdaughter (cf. p.5). Is this the voice of a survivor of the Gulag system who has become a moral bankrupt or the author’s alter ego? The narrator describes himself as a ‘Stakhanovite’ shock writer who leaves behind ‘a shapeless little heap of degradation and horror’ (p.4) – his memoirs. There is some consolation to be had, however, by adopting a wider perspective that makes the individual disappear. Thus it may be true that

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character is destiny or vice versa. Yet even this belief is rendered meaningless on a larger scale where the laws of demographics obtain: ‘I was there when my country started to die: the night of July 31, 1956, in the House of Meetings, just above the sixty-ninth parallel’ (p.17). This attempt at making sense is doomed to fail although the 31st of July is the very day on which his half-brother Lev ceased to be a poet. Amis has been criticised for the novel’s pessimism about Russia, which may not merely be unwarranted but also constitute a bad case of national stereotyping. It does have a distinguished literary ancestry, however, as it reminds us of Conrad’s dislike of what the latter saw as Russia’s penchant for cynicism and self-sacrifice. Amis’s unnamed narrator may even betray some of the haughtiness as well as the need for spiritual cleansing shown by Conrad’s Rasumov or Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. Yet things may not be as simple as that. In Koba the Dread, Amis, in good postmodern fashion, muses on the ‘genre of Russia’, 1917-1953, and comes up with the suggestion that it is a ‘black farce, like Titus Andronicus’.14 Who would dare to contradict him – although Shakespeareans might object that this Roman play constitutes a ‘Senecan exercise’ full of classical and therefore unfelt horrors? Hayden White has taught us that such metahistorical reflections on the choice of a narrative structure or mode of emplotment may elucidate the deep structure of the historical imagination.15 In House of Meetings, Amis has used historical research as a springboard to fiction, something he had already attempted before in Time’s Arrow, his book on the ‘more disgusting’ tyranny. This short experimental novel, which belongs to the genre of Holocaust fiction, could not have been written without Robert Jay Lifton’s monograph The Nazi Doctors (1986). Time’s Arrow tells the story of a war criminal by employing an ingenious literary device: reverse chronology. In Time’s Arrow, the arrow of time points into the opposite direction. By this daringly counterfactual assumption about the world we live in, the Nazi doctor becomes a healer. Reverse chronology, the most outrageous defiance of realism a novelist can imagine, may well be the only hypothesis that yields such a result and allows us to ‘make sense’ of the world after Auschwitz.16 It is the very absurdity of the hypothesis that reveals the monstrosity of the crime. So much for the moral point Amis tried to make in the earlier novel. Yet it goes without saying that the impeccable logic of the philosophical argument which underlies this piece of fiction does not of itself guarantee the success of the 14 15

16

Amis, Koba the Dread, Laughter and the Twenty Million (London: Vintage, 2003), p.258. Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Cf. Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow (London: Vintage, 2003), pp.116 and 123f.

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literary experiment. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were some really hostile reviews of a kind House of Meetings has not met with.17 Instead of further comparing the two novels, it seems more worthwhile to expand on what is arguably the most important epistemological as well as narratological assumption that underlies the experiment of Time’s Arrow: realism. Realism, the young Amis once said, is ‘a footling consideration’, so unimportant that it even becomes annoying. However, critics have become aware of subtle changes in his more recent fiction, of the attempt to resolve those very ‘epistemological crises’ we associate with the advent of postmodernism.18 Thus Gavin Keulks sees Amis as aspiring to a ‘sanitized postmodernism’.19 Catherine Bernard, in her analysis of meta-fictional novels by Amis and Graham Swift, has discovered a tendency towards reaffirming ‘the necessity for fiction to shoulder reality’.20 In contemporary fiction, it may be argued, such a tendency is most clearly revealed in works that deal with twentieth-century totalitarianism. This is no mere coincidence, although we have to reckon with a certain unwillingness, not only among critics, to accept a return to the realist paradigm, however modified. In his recently published ‘theory of post-war periods’, Peter Sloterdijk divides twentieth-century Europe into victors and losers, stressing the need for the latter to acknowledge defeat in order to be able to revise their self-concept. The refusal to do so, Sloterdijk claims, terminates in fascism. So far, so good. But then Sloterdijk almost reluctantly admits that this ‘metanoietic stance’, as he chooses to call it, presupposes an ‘old-fashioned correspondence theory of truth’.21 The following may be submitted for consideration: What if writing about Stalinism is primarily a matter of confronting or refusing to confront unpleasant facts? And not, as Richard Rorty suggested twenty years ago in an attempt to explain what Orwell had done in his dystopian novels, a matter of imaginative ‘redescription’, of constantly revising our ‘final vocabularies’, of assuming an ironic attitude towards them?22

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18 19

20

21 22

Cf. Brian Finney, Martin Amis (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp.22f. For the reviews of House of Meetings, cf. footnote 9. Ibid., pp.49 and 123. Gavin Keulks, ‘W(h)ither Postmodernism: Late Amis’, in Martin Amis, Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. by Gavin Keulks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.158-179 (p.160). Catherine Bernard, ‘Dismembering/Remembering Mimesis: Martin Amis, Graham Swift’, in British Postmodern Fiction, ed. by Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp.121-144 (p.122). Peter Sloterdijk, Theorie der Nachkriegszeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), p.34. Cf. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.169-188.

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In his more recent fiction, in particular in House of Meetings, Amis has created seriously flawed but essentially trustworthy narrators who do not undermine their own credibility.23 They are a far cry from Richard Tull, the failed writer in Amis’s The Information (1995), with his aversion to realism. Having chosen totalitarianism for his subject, Amis seems to be moving towards a new poetics. And yet it may not be so easy to avoid the alienations of postmodernism. If we compare the narrator of House of Meetings with the hero of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), the former may indeed appear as an ‘audacious fake’, to quote Stephanie Merritt in The New Statesman.24 In order to make his point about the ‘genre of Russia’, Amis had to endow his narrator with his own perceptions and feelings, make him partake of his own eloquence as well as share his easy familiarity with English literature. Thus even the most “Eastern” of the three novels discussed here boasts an English hero. Neither Tighe nor Shakespeare nor Amis have been able to avoid the dialectics of blindness and insight. But only in House of Meetings has it been productive. Only Amis dared to face the full-scale horror of what had begun in 1917 and did not end in 1953. That there is no parallel to House of Meetings in the extant survivors’ literature may even count as an advantage. Amis was able to endow his narrator with such self-incriminating honesty precisely because the latter is no Ivan Denisovitch but a “fake”, half Brit, half Russian, the author’s alter ego projected onto a veteran of the Second World War and Gulag victim. This hybrid narrator, almost equally at home in the jargon of the prison camp and of the litcrit seminar, may therefore be given the final word. It is near the end of the novel that the old curmudgeon confides an important truth to his stepdaughter Venus: ‘Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody ever gets over anything’ (p.236). If we want to salvage cultural memory as a project worth pursuing, we have to read this as a plea for realism, not defeatism. Only then will the dialectics of blindness and insight inherent in this fictional autobiography be an enabling one.

23 24

Cf. Finney, p.132. Stephanie Merrit, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, New Statesman (02 October 2006) [accessed 18 November 2009].

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Works Cited Amis, Martin, House of Meetings (New York: Vintage International, 2008) —, Koba the Dread, Laughter and the Twenty Million (London: Vintage, 2003) —, Time’s Arrow (London: Vintage, 2003) Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004) Ashbrook, Tom, ‘Martin Amis’s House of Meetings’, On Point (31 January 2007) [accessed 20 December 2009] Bernard, Catherine, ‘Dismembering/Remembering Mimesis: Martin Amis, Graham Swift’, in British Postmodern Fiction, ed. by Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), pp.121-144 Finney, Brian, Martin Amis (London and New York: Routledge, 2008) Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes (London: Abacus, 2007) Keulks, Gavin, ed., Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Merrit, Stephanie, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, New Statesman (02 October 2006) [accessed 18 November 2009] N.N. ‘House of Meetings by Martin Amis’, The Complete Review [accessed 18 November 2009] Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Shakespeare, Nicholas, Snowleg (London: Vintage, 2005) Sloterdijk, Peter, Theorie der Nachkriegszeiten (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008) Tighe, Carl, Burning Worm (Manchester: Impress, 2001) White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)

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Images of Lithuania in Stephan Collishaw’s Novels The article surveys the representation of space in Stephan Collishaw’s novels and discusses the importance of the Lithuanian setting from the aspect of widened margins of European literary tradition and culture. Fictional space becomes an important factor in describing new directions of European contemporary fiction, encompassing the social and cultural backgrounds of different nations. In his two novels, The Last Girl and Amber, Stephan Collishaw uses his personal experience of living in Lithuania during the period of 1995–1996. Focusing on the historical aspects of the twentieth century in Europe, Stephan Collishaw describes the events during the time frame from the Second World War to the 1990s. The author’s viewpoint on historical events, Lithuanian culture and admiration for this particular setting demonstrates new directions of European literary traditions.

1. Introduction Space has become an important factor in discussing new directions of European contemporary fiction, encompassing social and cultural backgrounds of different nations. This article discusses the role of the setting in two novels, The Last Girl (2003) and Amber (2004), by the contemporary British writer Stephan Collishaw (born in Nottingham in 1968), who uses his personal experience of living in Lithuania during the period of 1995-1996. It is possible to state that the writer expands the boundaries of British literature: In having chosen the setting of Lithuania, he discusses social, historical and political processes in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century, and considers the importance of old values within the paradigm of the (post)modern tradition. Alongside a story about individuals and their place in the world, Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, becomes one of the central characters in The Last Girl: The main character of the novel, a university teacher and a poet, wanders around the city, searching for something or somebody that would remind him of a woman whom he had betrayed during the turmoil of the World War II and the Nazi occupation. However, the image of the city becomes just the same as the one of the “last girl” in the man’s life – the city with many wounds, yet with glistering surface, suffering and alive, both experienced and naive, arrogant with the newly refurbished surface. Collishaw describes Vilnius as a cosmopolitan city: Lithuanian, Polish, Latvian, Russian, Byelorussian and Jewish people share their problems, interests and the city. Although the author’s personal experience results in a romanticised picture, the multicultural athmosphere of the place becomes the central issue. Collishaw’s

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description of Vilnius, or rather his finding/meeting Vilnius, becomes symbolic: In the same manner as the main character tries to find the “last” or the “lost” girl, the Western European readers of Collishaw’s novels have a possibility to reencounter Vilnius as a modern European city.

2. Lithuania in The Last Girl and Amber Vilnius is portrayed as a cosmopolitan city, where people have long talks about Kristijonas Donelaitis (a Lithuanian writer, 1714-1780), William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad and Adam Mickiewicz, or where people of different nationalities come to pray at the Gates of Dawn [Ausros vartai]: ‘Prayers in Polish. In Lithuanian. Latvian. Russian. Byelorussian.’1 Often the story of Vilnius transfers from one time period to another, as though building the bridges from one century to another: Wilno. Its church spires rose above the winding streets. Gediminas’ tower stood on the ancient hill, the birth-site of the ancient city. On this hill the greatest of the Grand Dukes had fallen asleep one night, on a hunting trip in the deep old forests. As he slept he dreamt of an iron wolf howling at the moon from the hilltop. In the morning he summoned a wise old man to him and told him the dream. The bearded pagan priest interpreted it. On this hill the Grand Duke was to found a city. It would be a powerful city. The howling of the iron wolf signified how the fame of the city would spread out around the world. (p.200)

Thus the city hovers above the main theme of the novel, pointing to its own ‘life’ through centuries of, often paradoxical, joy and grief. As Julija Sukys observes, ‘the theme of Vilnius’s continual reinvention runs steadily through the book.’2 Collishaw’s impressions of living in Lithuania in the mid-1990s are recorded in his first novel, The Last Girl, while Amber focuses on the Soviet era and a Lithuanian who gets conscripted into the Russian Army to fight in Afghanistan. In both novels, the present intermingles with the past; however, the author seems to suggest that ‘it is ironic and terrible how little we learn from the past.’3 Thus the author sets himself a difficult task – to discuss certain aspects of European history within the broadened areas of European culture. One of his main issues is the idea that even where people or cities have been lost, they always exist in the thoughts, and a possibility to find them or make them known always remains. Both novels are urban narratives, 1

2

3

Stephan Collishaw, The Last Girl (London: Sceptre, 2003), p.166. All further references are given in parentheses in the text. Julija Sukys, ‘Book Review. Stephan Collishaw, The Last Girl’, LITUANUS, 50.3 (Fall 2004) [accessed 09 November 2009]. Stephan Collishaw, ‘E-Mail Interview’ (25 July 2004). Extracts from this interview are provided in the appendix.

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a genre described by Murray Baumgarten as ‘encoded landscapes of self and place’,4 in which the influence of the outside urban environment on the private space becomes an important factor. In both novels, ‘the city of Vilnius and the people there are evoked with tenderness’5 and the city acquires the features of a character rather than those of a setting. Collishaw explained that ‘the place is most important in the first novel [which] was born from long reflections and walks around the Old Town in Vilnius in the period of the autumn of 1995 and the winter of 1996.’6 Steponas Daumantas, the main character of The Last Girl, is a retired Lithuanian professor and ex-writer, whose hobby of taking photographs or, rather ‘compulsion to photograph’, makes him a classical figure of a wanderer through the labyrinths of Vilnius.7 He wanders its streets with his camera: ‘The women [he] photographed were mothers with small children.’ (p.12) Steponas looks for a resemblance of these women and children to a Jewish mother with a child whom he tragically failed to help fifty years earlier and hopes to make amends if he can capture the right pair on film. As Jean Sered rightly observes, this madness of searching for something you can never find is a blend of realism and surrealism.8 The leading motif of this search becomes a poem by the Lithuanian poet Justinas Marcinkeviþius, a representative of a pre-Christian, pagan Lithuanian tradition.9 However, the main focus of the novel is the space of the city, which, according to Julie Myerson, is ‘tenderly drawn – feels tense, vivid, effortlessly real.’10 The old town has grown out of nature; it bends to the shape of the rivers that run through it, it listens to the shape of the hills. It winds and flows and hugs the earth as though it were lichen, a beautiful moss spread across an ancient log. (p.8)

4

5

6

7

8 9

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Murray Baumgarten, ‘City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel’, Comparative Literature, 51.1 (1999) [accessed 09 November 2009]. Sigitas Parulskis, ‘Svajoniu fabrikas’, Šiaurơs Atơnai, 680 (2003) [accessed 09 November 2009]. Alvydas Jegelevicius, ‘Pokalbiai. Isimylejes Vilniu ir Marija’, Literatnjra ir Menas, 3009 (07 August 2004) [accessed 09 November 2009], my translation. Cf. Sered, Jean, ‘Morality, Survival Come to a Head in Surreal “Last Girl”’, Jewish Weekly (10 October 2003) [accessed 09 November 2009]. Cf. Sered, ‘Morality, Survival Come to a Head in Surreal “Last Girl”’. The poem reads: ‘I love you with hands black from crying. / I love you with darkness and death / forgetfulness and light / with the low grass on a sunken grave / I love.’ Cf. Collishaw, The Last Girl, p.3. Julie Myerson, ‘Pictures of Vilnius’, The Guardian (22 March 2003) [accessed 09 November 2009].

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The old town with its winding streets is likened to a river, or rather a flow of time through centuries. Moreover, in the novel the triangular junction of streets is compared to ‘the confluence of rivers, the veins of a leaf’, as though helping the reader envision the city, which has acquired the features of a living being (p.8). Wandering in the former Jewish part of the city, the professor leads the reader down the road of the history: ‘If you look at the old maps it becomes clear that the spaces are wounds; that once synagogues stood there.’ (p.9) The author introduces readers to the times ‘when the streets of Vilna were busier’, when ‘the streets rang with the noise of horses and the rasp and scrape of metal cartwheels on the stones beneath the dirt.’ (p.10) During these days the narrow streets of the old town resounded to the work of the Germans and the Russians. Now only whispering ghosts linger in the old neglected places. However, many of these neglected places now have been made into nice little and cozy streets where ‘the clasps on the Gucci bags sparkled under the brilliant display lights’ and where ‘leather Italian shoes shone like mirrors’ with ‘neat, petite price tags dangled like decorations’ (p.19). Taking his character through different parts of the city, the author describes the gradual change of the place and the history of Lithuania. As the the main character observes, ‘monuments come and go’ and one period in history is immediately followed by another: The communist heroes we were surrounded with have all gone. Lenin Square, where he stood so proudly, is now Lukiskiu Square. Lenin has gone, lying broken, no doubt, on some waste ground. This city is a master in the art of reinvention. It’s not just the monuments that have gone. The street names too have disappeared. Good Lithuanian heroes have replaced all those good communists. (p.20)

This passage refers to the postwar Soviet era in Lithuania and the process of regaining independence, assuming that Lithuanian people are masters at reinventing themselves, or, in other words, at distancing themselves from what they were in the past. Steponas Daumantas likes walking across Gediminas Street, the central street in Vilnius, which leads into Cathedral Square, always searching for the face of the woman that he constantly keeps in his mind. For this reason, he has even named her Madonna and child. Once he notices a woman who resembles that picture in his mind, and so he starts following her. After some time, they get acquainted and Jolanta reminds Steponas of Rachael, the dark, beautiful girl he met and fell in love with shortly before the Nazi invasion. When he met her, Rachael had been engaged to a Jew; she could not possibly marry a non-Jew. After some time, she was abandoned by her fiancé, who had left to join a resistance movement, leaving Rachael and her child behind.

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Although Steponas Daumantas loved Rachael, their relationship ended and for this reason he has spent his whole life with thoughts of remorse. The novel presents Lithuanian realities of different time periods: details about present life in Lithuania as well as facts about the policy and propaganda of the Communist government, about the Teutonic knights and the times of Vytautas, one of the greatest Grand Dukes of Lithuania, about the Nazi occupation and the Versailles Treaty, or Lithuanian legends. Although Stephan Collishaw has more than once stated that the novel is neither a guide-book nor a historical novel, in a sense it can very well be read as a guide-book through Lithuania’s multi-layered history, culture and traditions. In this aspect, the novel can be partially ascribed to travel literature. The novel ends with a picture of the city changed after long decades and centuries of agonised cries: ‘the city is quiet’; ‘the city is still’; ‘the city is calm.’ (p.310) At last, after long decades of torturing cries, Vilnius has regained the tranquility and safety it used to offer people. In this way, the city becomes an inspiring and, at the same time, soothing and balancing place. The author seems to have been driven by a strong desire to introduce (or rather to reintroduce) Lithuania to the Western European audience and to transfer his positive feelings and impressions of Lithuania to European readers. The idea of tranquility echoes in Collishaw’s second novel, Amber, which, as James Urquhart states, describes ‘the 1980s Soviet military offensives in Afghanistan.’11 This novel is set in Vilnius and Jalalabad, a place east of Kabul, on the border of Pakistan. At the center of attention is an amber bracelet, smuggled out of the war zone. Like The Last Girl, Amber also focuses on ‘regret and the haunting legacy of war.’12 As Stephan Collishaw has explained, Amber was inspired by the life story of his brother-in-law who had been conscripted into the Soviet army as all Lithuanian young men were in the late 1980s.13 In the novel, in postcommunist Vilnius, Antanas, a young Lithuanian, braces himself for the imminent death of his close friend and mentor Vassily, together with whom he had fought in the Soviet war in Afghanistan eight years earlier. What Antanas has not anticipated is Vassily’s confession of a secret that has been gnawing at him since the war. Vassily reveals that he smuggled a priceless 11

12 13

James Urquhart, ‘Stephan Collishaw: How the Brutalized Become Brutal in their Turn.’ The Independent (25 July 2004) [accessed 09 November 2009]. Ibid. Cf. n.n., ‘Stephan Collishaw Interview’, BBC Nottingham Culture (15 June 2004) [accessed 09 November 2009].

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amber bracelet out of Afghanistan and buried it somewhere in Vilnius. However, ultimately he cannot bring himself to recount the full story. Reluctantly, Antanas embarks on a course that forces him to recall the woman he fell in love with and to relive the events of the war, events that almost destroyed him and that he has desperately tried to forget. He finally realises that only reliving the story can he break free of the past. The action of the novel starts in Vilnius in 1997 with Vassily telling the story of the bracelet: Once upon a time there was a bracelet. It was exquisite, with a history as glorious as it was beautiful. Ah, what a jewel that was, Antanas, comrade, more beautiful than anything you have seen. More beautiful than any of the jewels we have worked on through the years. And how did it fall into my hands, this bracelet? Because, after all, it was not something a poor bastard like me could ever have afforded. That is a story!14

Vassily acknowledges that for years he has hidden the story deep in his heart, but ‘it has eaten [him] away from inside.’ (p.8) For this reason he tells the story to Antanas and confesses to burying the bracelet, as though trying to bury the past. Later Vassily tells Antanas to go and find Kolya, their friend from the war, and search for the bracelet. Antanas walks around the city returning in his thoughts to the days of the war, while the description of the city reflects his emotions: It was late October and it was cold. Above the rooftops, the newly risen moon hung despondently. The cathedral was ghostly pale, the streets quiet. For some minutes I stood on the cracked paving […] my mind reeling, memories bubbling up, seeping across the floor of my consciousness, flooding it. (p.1)

Antanas is reluctant to remember those days and seems to be rather angry with Vassily and himself to start remembering the days of his past, the days he wanted to forget in the same way as Vassily buried the bracelet. In fact, Antanas feels that ‘those years in Afghanistan were a dark hole around which [they] stepped with care.’ (p.32) None of them want to remember the horrors of that time. When Antanas comes home, the only picture preventing him from gloomy thoughts is the picture of Vilnius: ‘the late traffic flowed easily down Freedom Boulevard, red lights glittering on the wet surface of the road. The television tower was lost already in the low clouds.’ (p.17) In this way, the particular setting once again acquires the features of characterisation. In this novel, too, Collishaw pays much attention to the explanation of Lithuanian lifestyle, professions and traditional objects. Especially interesting is the description of amber in the novel. Vassily and Antanas used to make ‘cheap pictures from chippings of amber.’ (p.33) Both liked working with amber; they often just watched its glow, while ‘each transparent yellow piece 14

Stephan Collishaw, Amber (London: Sceptre, 2004), p.5f. All further reference in parentheses in the text.

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[was] gathering its own parcel of light.’ (p.33) Vassily calls amber ‘a piece of sunlight solidified’, which is ‘a source of power, of healing, of life’, ‘an elemental force for good, preserved from the very beginnings of time.’ (p.34f.) Here, Collishaw refers to the famous Lithuanian legend about Jurate and Kastytis, (cf. 68f.)15 which intensifies the mysterious origin of amber. The author also supplies detailed information about the places where amber can be excavated (from the Curonian Lagoon) or processed (large factories in Kaliningrad), always returning to romantic aspects of the origin of amber: For many centuries people have collected amber from along the Baltic shore, when the winds have risen and the stormy sea has tossed it up on to the sand. They fished for it with nets, delving into the seaweed. Some, later, would swim out into the sea, or the lagoon, with a wooden paddle, and dive for the amber beneath the water, prising it from the seabed. (p.169)

Paradoxically, it is Vassily, a Russian, and not Antanas, a Lithuanian, who knows many different tales about amber, which, according to Vassily, encompasses nature’s beauty. Moreover, Collishaw introduces ideas of the Lithuanian philosopher Vydunas to explain Lithuanian traditions of dealing with amber and the significance of amber to the Lithuanian nation (cf. p.308). Like The Last Girl, Amber places Vilnius at the centre of attention. Collishaw describes in detail the main character’s wandering around the city, often producing the exact route, providing, according to Walter Nash, ‘a factual orientation, with dimension, compass bearings’ around the particular place.16 For example, when Antanas sets out to meet Kolya in Santariskes Clinic, the author accurately describes his way across Vilnius: ‘To get to Santariskes Clinic required taking a trolley bus into the centre of the Old Town and another back out to the outskirts of the city.’ (p.152) And in the same way as in the first novel the tranquility of the city often helps the main character to calm down and organise his thoughts.

3. Conclusion The setting in Stephan Collishaw’s novels serves different functions: first, it represents two types of environment – the physical and the social; second, the place helps to characterise the main character(s) and has a direct influence on the protagonist(s); third, the place becomes instrumental, or, rather another character, either demonstrating similarity or contrast to other characters within the novel. Different aspects of the cityscape are present in Collishaw’s novels: the natural, the built, the human and the verbal. The influence of the outside urban environment on the individual space becomes significant in 15 16

Collishaw here retells a legend about a mermaid, Jurate and a young fisherman, Kastytis. Walter Nash, Language in Popular Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), p.126.

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these novels: being in close contact with the outside environment, the individual searches for identity and personal freedom. This outside environment helps the individual to trace the past and rebuild the memory links within the person’s heritage of experience. Focusing on historical aspects of the twentieth century, Collishaw subtly describes events during the time frame from World War II to the 1990s, providing numerous insights into Lithuanian history and culture. Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, fulfils a multitude of functions and is described as a cosmopolitan city with its problems and traditions. Collishaw has stated that Lithuania is ‘still more or less invisible’ but also believes that the West demonstrates an evident interest in Lithuania and that this interest is constantly growing.17 Thus, in a sense, he takes up an educator’s task to expand his Western readers’ knowledge of European tradition by including many aspects of life in Lithuania, ranging from the subtleties of language or traditions to legends and historical facts.

Works Cited Baumgarten, Murray, ‘City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel’, Comparative Literature, 51.1 (1999) [accessed 09 November 2009] Collishaw, Stephan, ‘E-mail interview’ (25 July 2004) —, Amber (London: Sceptre, 2004) —, The Last Girl (London: Sceptre, 2003) Jegelevicius, Alvydas, ‘Isimylejes Vilniu ir Marija’, Literatnjra ir menas, 20 (9 July 2004), 5 Jegelevicius, Alvydas, ‘Pokalbiai. Isimylejes Vilniu ir Marija’, Literatnjra ir Menas, 3009 (09 July 2004) [accessed 09 November 2009] Myerson, Julie, ‘Pictures of Vilnius’, The Guardian (22 March 2003) [accessed 09 November 2009] Nash, Walter, Language in Popular Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990) N.N., ‘Stephan Collishaw Interview’, BBC Nottingham Culture (15 June 2004) [accessed 09 November 2009]

17

Collinshaw in ‘Pro stiklą‘, p.2 and in Alvydas Jegelevicius, ‘Isimylejes Vilniu ir Marija’, Literatura ir menas, 20 (9 July 2004), p.5.

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Parulskis, Sigitas, ‘Svajoniu fabrikas’, Šiaurơs Atơnai, 680 (2003) [accessed 09 November 2009] ‘Pro stiklą’, (14 October 2004) [9 September 2009] Sered, Jean, ‘Morality, survival come to a head in surreal “Last Girl”’, Jewish Weekly (10 October 2003) [accessed 09 November 2009] Sukys, Julija, ‘Book Review. Stephan Collishaw, The Last Girl’, LITUANUS, 50.3 (2004) [accessed 09 November 2009] Urquhart, James, ‘Stephan Collishaw: How the Brutalized Become Brutal in their Turn’, The Independent (25 July 2004) [accessed 09 November 2009]

Appendix Interview with Stephan Collishaw The interview was conducted via email on 25 July 2004. Excerpts are reprinted with kind permission of Stephan Collishaw.

IŽ: What or who inspired you to write a novel set in Vilnius? SC: The writing of The Last Girl began in the summer of 1999. I had written three novels before then – one set in an imaginary African state on the verge of civil war, one set in first-century Rome and another set in Mallorca. None of these saw the light of day, as I was not happy with them. The idea for the novel had come much earlier of course, and its real genesis was in the winter of 1995/1996 when I spent many days, weeks wandering around streets of Vilnius. The ghetto area of Vilnius was one of my favourite places, as was Sv. Stepono g. [St Stephan’s street] near the station close to where I worked. I liked its greyness, its dilapidation. There was something very melancholy and mysterious about the run-down streets. The truth is, I fell in love with Vilnius and for the few years afterwards knew that I wanted to write a novel about the city, but I could not see how I could bring together all the different strands – it all seemed too big, too disparate. A historical novel about the Second World War? One that went back much further to look at the foundation of the city? A contemporary novel looking at some of the social problems in the mid-1990s? In the end I decided that I would write a series of loosely linked stories that covered different time periods. In the summer of 1999 I was at my mother-in-law’s house in Taurag1 watching a television programme about the sculptor who made the images that are on the top of Vilnius cathedral2 and suddenly it all came to me in a flash. I sat in the shade beneath one of her apple trees and sketched out the whole structure then and there – literally sketched, for the novel had a pictorial form, it was to be a triptych. A three panelled icon to the city. IŽ: What was the time you had spent in Lithuania like? SC: The year that I lived in Lithuania was extraordinary one for me. I lived in a sense of alertness that I had not felt before. The bitter cold, the evident social problems, the endemic drinking, the lust for life and the energy which characterized the life of the ordinary people of Vilnius fascinated me. I very soon began living with a Lithuanian family and had little contact for the rest 1 2

A town in the West of Lithuania. The three statues on the top of the cathedral were rebuilt by the Lithuanian sculptor Stanislovas Kuzma.

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of the year with the small ex-pat English community. My relationship with my wife-to-be was very much built on hours and hours of conversations about what it had been like growing up in Soviet Lithuania. I wanted to understand, to assimilate as much as I could. Going to Taurage was enormously beneficial – whereas in Vilnius there was a veneer of cosmopolitan style (very thin!), there was little pretence in Taurage. Grigalaviciene [one of the characters in The Last Girl] was inspired by some of the formidable ladies I got to know there (to know and fear!). Svetlana was inspired by somebody who I knew who lived more or less exactly where she does in my novel. The woman I knew was not a prostitute, nor had she ever been as far as I am aware, she did, though, suffer from problems with alcoholism as did her husband. She lived in one room and coped incredibly in very difficult circumstances. And yes, I would take her my shirts to wash. IŽ: How did you decide on the structure of the novel and the characters in it? SC: The novel is underpinned by Christian iconography. Most notably, of course, the Madonna and child that opens the novel and recurs throughout – straying into the art world with the examination of Daddi’s Triptych,3 taking in Vilnius’ own Black Madonna and a series of mothers with their children. [...]. The novel is structured around a Triptych (my original title for the novel was “A Vilnius Triptych”) the novel is a celebration of the city. Originally the three sections were labelled with the sections of the triptych rather than the names of the women – so “Madonna and Child”, “The Crucifixion” and “The Resurrection”. Later I changed this, and I’m glad I did, it’s better than these things lie beneath the surface of the novel. Rasa outlines a loose concept behind all this iconography when she says that the Madonna has always been crucified, and draws a little attention to the fact that women are usually the ones that suffer and how particularly violence against women in Eastern Europe is a problem. Daumantas comes to a brief flash of understanding about this at the conclusion of the novel (the closest he comes to any kind of self-knowledge) in the passage beginning – ‘It struck me that there is something uncomfortable about Daddi’s portrait of Christ on the cross’, which ironically undercuts the whole narrative pointing out Daumantas’ selfabsorption and theatrical posturing. IŽ: In the novel, you discuss the life of Jews in Lithuania during the period before the Second World War. What events or facts had inspired you to touch upon these issues? 3

Bernardo Daddi painted several triptychs; one of them (1328) is in the famous Florence Uffizi.

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SC: To skirt around the Jews when writing a novel about Vilnius would of course have been the whole issue! Jews made up a third of the population of Vilnius after World War I. A third! I think you could go so far as to say it was more Jewish than Lithuanian. Now the community is tiny. And it’s not just the astronomical loss of a population – Jewish Vilnius was renowned across the world for its intelligentsia. When I was walking around the centre of Vilnius it was at the period that World Heritage money was beginning to make a difference and I found that very hard to come to terms with. In some ways those broken down buildings seemed a fitting memorial to what had been lost – and now they were being prettified, replaced with boutiques and exclusive hotels, a tourist site and the Jewish heritage that had once been so important and had been so brutally exterminated was reduced to a few plaques on the walls as much for the tourist trails as anything else. It made me very angry then and still makes me angry now. The whole issue is of course very tortured, very difficult and it seems fitting that here in England I number among my friend quite a few Lithuanian Jews (those who escaped) as well as many Lithuanians (including one who has been accused of war crimes). I struggle to come to terms with these things – to come to a moral conclusion but find it very, very hard. As does Daumantas. [...] There were Lithuanians who were also concerned about my presentation of the seedier side of Vilnius. I think they are misguided on two points. One is that, as a novelist, it isn‘t my job to be producing picture postcards of Vilnius or Lithuania, nor am I employed by the Lithuanian tourist board [...]. The second is that I think they misunderstand what readers in the West find attractive. It was in many ways the seediness of the city in the mid 1990s that made it so attractive. I felt when I was writing The Last Girl that I was writing from the inside – as a Lithuanian – not as an outsider being critical. Should novels be political? Novels should be moral, but they should also tell a good story. They are in the end entertainment. As I’ve said the novel was structured around the concept of a triptych. Svetlana‘s section was the central one. It weaves around the main story, but also hopefully casts a wider light on the main themes. One of the ideas I wanted to develop in the novel was of how the brutalised often brutalise in turn (a theme developed at more length in my new novel Amber), and that there are few innocent victims. The Russians oppress the Lithuanians – the Lithuanians the Jews – Communist Jews turn on Capitalist Jews – Poles struggle with Lithuanians – Lithuanians give post-independence Russians a hard time. [...]. Considering what was happening during World War Two in Vilnius was that our position is not much different today to those who lived then. We are still faced with same moral choices – to stand up and say we will not accept evil happening, or to quietly ignore it.

Claudia Duppé

Tourist in Her Native Country: Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name At first glance, Kapka Kassabova’s biography seems to fit in with the trend of Eastern European immigration to Britain after 1989. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Kassabova, who is currently living in Edinburgh, did indeed try to immigrate with her family to Britain after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, her journey to writing in English and living in Britain began in New Zealand – the country that granted residence permits to the entire family. As a published young Bulgarian poet, fluent in French and Russian, Kassabova initially experienced what she calls the ‘transitional muteness of the immigrant’ in the English language. It was not until she began to write in the newly adopted language that her linguistic (and social) isolation came to an end. Now, she is an established writer-cum-journalist of poetry and fiction and travel reports. In her most recent autobiographical book Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria, Kassabova writes about the visits to her native Bulgaria and thus coming full circle by returning to her Eastern European roots. This paper looks into the historico-cultural dimension of the novel and analyses the various layers of perspective the author assumes in trying to seek out how Street Without a Name engages in the discourse of modern-day Bulgarian identity. In addition, the close reading of the text will investigate the relationship between personal memory and communal history with regard to Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire.

1. Introduction Characterised as memoir, travel diary, a ‘meditation on nationality’ 1 and in one instance a ‘genre bending’ book, 2 Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008) resists quick and easy categorisation. At first glance, it seems to be a two-in-one package. In the first part, Kassabova, an expatriate writer and journalist, relates the memories of her childhood in suburban Sofia and provides grim detail of life under communism. The second part can be read as a travelogue based on the author’s visits to urban and rural Bulgaria over the past decade. Kassabova writes in a rather witty and wry style. In fact, the first part of the book brims with moments of comic relief and renders it a surprisingly entertaining read, which might account for the book’s appeal to a general, mostly Western, readership. In the second part, the voice of the journalist and the traveller take prominence. More often than not the memories of her past stand in stark contrast to her contemporary experience, which is governed by a strong sense 1

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Cathy Galvin, ‘Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. The Sunday Times Review’, The Sunday Times (27 July 2008) [accessed 24 November 2009]. Jan Morris, ‘Critic’s Choice’, Financial Times, 29 November 2008, p.19.

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of unbelonging and not being able to participate in the country’s cultural habitus. The narrator learns that “foreignness” is too deeply ingrained – as best expressed in her inability to spontaneously react to the most common of everyday gestures in Bulgaria: ‘We shake our heads, then nod – yes, no, da, ne – confused by two different body languages.’ (p.147) The cultural habitus is not easily regained by Kassabova, the expatriate, partly because she is not willing to shake off the other skins she feels comfortable in or cultural habits she has adopted. Oftentimes, this results in oppositional and sometimes conflicting viewpoints. Woven into each other, they establish the narrative fabric of Street Without a Name, in which the narrator speaks as an insider and an outsider at the same time.

Fig. 1: Kapka Kassabova (Freiburg 2009)

The book has caused quite a divided response. Amongst expatriate Bulgarians, Street Without a Name has for many struck a chord of recognition in the sense that someone is telling their story. Within Bulgaria, however, far

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from receiving celebratory praise, it has caused a degree of public outrage in which the author was accused of being a traitor to the country of her birth.3 What one group found offensive, the other saw as a truth being told at last, which suggests that Street Without a Name makes an important contribution to Bulgaria’s historico-cultural discourse. Upon first reading, however, Street Without a Name comes across as a very personal and emotional book stating the author’s desire to reconcile the Bulgaria she left as an adolescent with the Bulgaria she encounters as a traveller fifteen years later under completely different socio-political circumstances. This paper analyses the various layers of perspective generated by the polyphony of voice(s) in the book and the various guises the expatriate memoirist-cum-travel-writer assumes; it looks at the way in which Street Without a Name engages in the discourse on Bulgarian identity. In addition, the close reading of the text will investigate the book’s potential of building a bridge between personal memory and communal history of a post-communist nation 4 in relation to Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘lieux de mémoire’. 5

2. Subject(ive) Positions and Guises The first part of Street Without a Name, entitled ‘Childhood’, is an autobiographical text that stands as a complete tale in itself. It provides the basis for the second part called ‘Other Misadventures’. Together, the two segments draw a picture of Bulgaria as a former Eastern bloc country that underwent rapid social and economic change after the fall of communism. After 1989, the past and the present seemed forever incompatible, and this incompatibility opened a historical, political, social and not least cultural chasm that Street Without a Name tries to bridge from a diasporic point of view. One might say that because of the rapid change of the political and economic circumstances, the sense of Bulgaria as a nation was discontinued on a political as much as an emotional level. This strongly reflects Maruška Svašek’s approach to postsocialist sensibility and her perception of an ‘emotionallyevocative situation’ as a result of this rapid change. 6 Street Without a Name 3 4

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6

This is related in greater detail in Kapka Kassabova’s own contribution to this publication. In a Bulgarian context, one usually speaks of postsocialism since “socialism” was the proper term for the political system of Central European states. For reasons of consistency, I will use communism and post-communism throughout this paper unless quoting from secondary sources. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), pp.7-24. Maruška Svašek, ‘Introduction: Postsocialism and the Politics of Emotions’, in Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Maruška Svašek (New York: Berghan Books, 2008), pp.1-33 (p.5).

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can be seen to bear witness to the desire of an expatriate Bulgarian to seek out whether she can locate herself in the new Bulgaria stating that Bulgaria has many faces – I have seen them – so I decided to write my own Bulgaria into being, a preventative antidote to future appendixes. Have I got it dead right? I’m sure I have got it dead wrong, in places. But what I really wanted to do was write an interesting story about the drama of the place and its people. That’s the most any travel writer or memoirist can wish for. 7

With the wish of writing her Bulgaria ‘into being’, Kassabova participates in the discourse Bulgarian post-communist sensibility, albeit from a diasporic point of view. Born and raised in Bulgaria, she emigrated to New Zealand at the age of eighteen and is now listed as a New Zealand writer who is currently living in Edinburgh. 8 Her writing, in particular her poetry, 9 reveals that Kassabova possesses a polyglot sense of cultural affinity that deliberately de-fies – and transcends – geographical boundaries. 10 The writer often refers to herself as a global soul and admits to dipping into various cultures without ever truly belonging to one. Bulgaria, however, is not a country Kassabova can choose to belong to and leave again. As the country of her childhood and adolescence as well as the country where most of her family still live, it conveys a sense of belonging and home. A return to the country of her birth thus challenges Kassabova’s independent and cosmopolitan identity, which is why she admits that she ‘tiptoed around [Bulgaria] as if it was a ticking bomb in the shape of a country ready to detonate at the slightest touch of memory’ (p.2). It might explain why the personal narrative voice retreats into the background in the second part which detracts from the freshness of tone. As a very emotional and autobiographical book, Kassabova is naturally also aware of the personal(ised) character of this genre which comes as an advantage in the book’s favourable Western reviews. 11 With reference to 7

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Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello Books, 2008), p.3. All subsequent page numbers given in the text. In a personal communication, the author herself stressed that she preferred the adjective “currently” rather than “now” to refer to her momentary place of residence. This is in line with transmigrant identities as described by Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Christina Szanton Blanc, ‘From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, in Transnationale Migration, ed. by Ludger Pries, Soziale Welt 12 (Baden-Baden: NomosVerlags-Gesellschaft, 1997), pp.121-140. See, for instance, the two poems by Kassabova in the present volume. Cf. Claudia Duppé, ‘The Question of Cultural Allegiance in New Zealand Women’s Poetry: Renegotiating Colonial Images of Home and Identity’, paper presented at the NZSA Annual Conference in London 2007. The publication of the paper is pending. Cf. Galvin, ‘Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. The Sunday Times Review’ or Misha Glenny, ‘Mum, Why is Everything so Ugly? Misha Glenny is impressed by a Poignant Memoir of Growing Up in Communist Eastern Europe’,

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Svašek’s approach of embedding an emotional discourse in its historical, cultural, political and linguistic context, 12 it has to be said that Street Without a Name does not and cannot follow this predicament. For one, it is written in English. This deliberate disconnection from a linguistic contextualisation of her work (marketing reasons aside) allows Kassabova to take a step down from her original culture while adding a twist to the book’s reception. Writing in English about Bulgaria as a Bulgarian makes clear that Kassabova considers herself an expatriate and that the intended readership is Western. At the same time, it points to the fact that she employs the language in which she feels at home as a cosmopolitan intellectual, which is shielding her from an all too emotional identification with Bulgaria. One might even go as far as to say that it keeps her anxiety of writing about it at bay. I would argue that the sense of unbelonging that pervades much of her poetry ever since she overcame what she herself calls ‘the transitional muteness of the immigrant’ returns poignantly and palpably in Street Without a Name. 13 When stating in the prologue that she might have got it ‘dead wrong in places’ (p.3), Kassabova seems to authenticate her story. At the same time, the narrator in the book is acutely aware of the various subject positions switching from the perspective of the insider to the apparent outsider – from the child, stuck in the mud of suburban Sofia, to the revisiting adult journalist traveller. When relating the description of Youth 3, the block of flats in which she grew up, Kassabova manages to fuse three perspectives into one: the perspective of her immature self, the perspective of her adult self anxious to confront her own emotions and the ironically detached voice of the ‘cosmopolitan as intellectual’. 14 When an outsider comes to a new place, Walter Benjamin wrote, he sees the picturesque and the freakish, whereas the local sees through layers of emotion and memory. In other words, they see completely different things. So while a newcomer would have looked at Youth 3 and seen an uninhabitable dystopia of concrete and mud, I learnt to see it for what it really was: my home. (p.30)

Quoting Walter Benjamin in the opening to this passage, Kassabova inserts a metatextual Westernised layer of perspective with which she is able to magnify the living conditions in such a way that Western readers are inclined to see Youth 3 as the uninhabitable dystopia of concrete and mud. At the same

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The Guardian, 5 July 2008, p.6. Svašek, pp.1-33 (pp.9-21). Kapka Kassabova, ‘Skipping over Invisible Borders’, in Geography for the Lost (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2007), pp.64-71 (p.68). Cf. also Claudia Duppé (forthcoming). Peter van der Veer, ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism’, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.166.

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time, Kassabova conjures up a very authentic atmosphere when she speaks as the child who looks at the mudscape of her neighbourhood, Youth 3. The child narrator takes pride in it being better than Youth 4 while being dismayed at the fact that Youth 1 was ‘practically the garden of the Youths.’ (p.31) It is not least owing to the child’s perspective that the description goes under the skin since most readers can relate to this kind of boasting rivalry amongst children. To expatriate Bulgarians of the same generation, the passage vividly conjures up their own childhood, which might explain why a lot of diasporic readers were moved to tears by Kassabova’s narration. 15 The same mechanisms are at work in snippets of everyday conversation in Street Without a Name when people compare their situation to Western standards of living and try to deal with the feelings of inadequacy this raises. ‘Ashamed? I have nothing to be ashamed of,’ my mother’s cousin said. She was a medical journalist […]. ‘On the contrary, I’m proud. Yes, we live in a shitty one bedroom flat with a cat and an occasional grandmother, and I know exactly when my neighbour has diarrhoea. Even so, I have a medical degree, a journalism degree, a PhD, and three languages. My children are well brought-up and well-dressed despite the empty shops, and I can make a birthday cake without flour, sugar, baking powder, or milk. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s them, not us!’ This struck me as a clever argument. But it didn’t help my mother. In fact, it made it worse. It confirmed that we were living in a banana republic, but minus the bananas. It confirmed that the more languages you spoke, the more cakes without ingredients you made, the more political jokes you told, the more wretched you were. (pp.65f.)

Kassabova relies on comic relief as the governing narrative strategy. One might be inclined to say that on a narrative level, she plays a kind of double act in a West-East antagonism, not least due to the mentioning of the missing bananas, a lack that was a paramount indicator of the shortcomings of the communist state regarding consumers’ needs. More than anything such references indicate that the narrative is never disconnected from cosmopolitan Western values like freedom of thought and individuality. That Kassabova treasures these values is not least expressed in her comment on the proletariat: [W]ho were the proletariat? Not the Mechevs. They were proletariat only under duress. In truth, they came from generations of land-owning peasants. […] The tiny apartments in the residential complexes tried to make ‘citizens’ out of the peasants and gypsies. Citizen, how proud this sounds to paraphrase Gorky. But what they actually made was dispossessed peasants and displaced gypsies. And in a double whammy, the native citizens, like my mother […] were turned into workers with no access to the pleasures of the city. Youth was not a city. It was citizen storage. (p.40)

15

Cf. Kassabova’s contribution to this volume in which she outlines the reception of her book by Bulgarian readers.

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This passage reveals Kassabova’s deep contempt for ‘Socialism with a Human Face’, which the author unmasks as an atrocious contradiction in terms. With her autobiographical narration, Kassabova might be seen to take personal revenge on the political system – albeit in hindsight – a system that denied her and her family the things she most values: individuality, freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Kassabova’s account of her childhood in Street Without a Name thus also suggests that the author tries to cover her very personal bereavement for a childhood that never was with biting sarcasm. Upon the return visit to Youth 3, fifteen years later Kassabova writes Youth 3 has grown up almost beyond recognition. Rows of trees, green fields, pizzerias, shopping malls and children’s playgrounds have covered up the stark childscape of mud and concrete. It’s a leafy neighbourhood now. Our street has a name. It’s now called Transfiguration Street. Just a fraction of all this would have made a difference to us, the Cold War Youths – just one tree, one playground, one full shop, one pizza. But no. (p.328)

Apart from the many infrastructural achievements, the streets have names. To some degree, Bulgaria has embraced Western lifestyles, lifestyles that not only provide children’s playgrounds but room for living as individual human beings rather than citizens of a state apparatus that turned people into dysfunctional beings – as the following passage illustrates. On the morning of my grandmother’s funeral, [my father] had an early flight to Berlin. My mother drove him in the orange Skoda. On the way, there was a crisis: he’d forgotten his passport. We went back for the passport, and my mother was late for the funeral. But there was nothing my mother couldn’t cope with. Not even this. And what choice did she have? After all, nervous breakdowns didn’t exist under Socialism with a Human Face. (p.92)

The prioritisation of getting the passport and making the flight over attending the funeral of a loved one reveals the distorted value system of the communist regime. Kassabova relates that her mother did not even rebel against being late; she did not break down by the fact that she was late for her own mother’s funeral. There was nothing she couldn’t cope with, as her daughter tells the readers. This simple statement alone is meant to reveal how much the communist system hardened its people and did not allow personal emotion to interfere with the citizen role. Thus, it is not surprising that – upon being granted emigration visas to New Zealand – Kassabova writes with a palpable sigh of relief that this was ‘the last act in the 45-year-long theatre of the absurd that had been our lives.’ (p.121) With a strong sense of urgency ‘Childhood’ comes to an end: ‘Goodbye Bulgaria. Goodbye Youth 3. I don’t know where the hell I’m going but I never want to come back.’ (p.137) Yet, come back she did – as a tourist and travel writer.

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In fact, it is this subject position that enables Kassabova to come to terms with being an insider and an outsider at the same time, with being Bulgarian and being a transnational migrant. 16 The language and above all the irony she employs throughout the book enable her to establish a detached position from which she can challenge received notions of Bulgarian history and culture. The very notion of childhood as a misadventure could thus be seen as an ironic stylistic cue meant to underline the comic relief. Yet, it also points at Kassabova’s desire to keep emotions – particularly her own – at bay. When analysing her subject position in the context of her outspoken cosmopolitanism, her ironic – and at times sarcastic – stance discloses what the narrator tries so meticulously to conceal, namely the ‘deep attachment to a culture or homeland’. 17 In any case, it shows how many layers of perception are at work in the author’s tiptoeing around the minefield of her memories. The public outrage after the translation of Street Without a Name to Bulgarian speaks for itself, indicating that her cosmopolitan irony was perceived rather as an expatriate’s interference with internal affairs. 18

3. Between Memory and History As I have stated above, Kassabova tries to fully embrace the subject position of an experienced travel writer in the second part of the book. 19 She openly displays her cosmopolitan identity while wrapping her dual subject position in the traveller’s cloak. 20 This seems the perfect guise to investigate Bulgaria’s present historico-cultural sensibility.

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Transnational migrants or ‘transmigrants’ can arguably be defined as ‘immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured for more than one nation state.’ Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Christina Szanton Blanc, pp.121-40 (p.121). This holds a particular truth for Kassabova who lives and publishes in Britain and New Zealand alike. Without wanting to put too much political emphasis on the term, I see Kassabova’s status as a transnational in cultural terms. It has shaped and influenced her affinities to any culture she participated in. Cf., for instance, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). William Smith, ‘Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Virtue, Irony and Worldliness’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10.1 (2007), 37-52 (p.40). For a further discussion of the ambivalent perception of irony as a cosmopolitan virtue, cf. also Smith’s discussion of Bryan Turner’s work, pp.37-52 (pp.38-42). She is the author of the Globetrotter Guide to Delhi, Jaipur and Agra (2002) and the Globetrotter Guide to Bulgaria (2007), as well as various journalistic articles on travelling in British newspapers and magazines. This relates to the theories of Dean MacCannell as presented in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). For a discussion of MacCannell, cf. Georges van den Abbeele, ‘Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist’, Diacritics, 10 (1980), 2-14.

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In the opening of the book Kassabova calls herself ‘an outsider to the present and an insider of the past. Or perhaps the other way round.’ (p.4) These words strongly reflect the dichotomy between memory and history as delineated by Pierre Nora in his essay dating from 1989, the crucial year of change in European history. He writes that [o]ur interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn. […] There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory. 21

Based on Nora’s concept, I read Street Without a Name as a book that leaves the beaten track of travel writing to engage with the discourse of memory and history. Particularly in the second part, it becomes clear that the ‘smooth passage from the past to the future’ 22 has disappeared. This is clearly evident by the narrator’s constant failure to establish connections to people and places that reach beyond her own memories, insightful literature about Bulgarian history and culture or general ruling clichés. I argue that her travelogue represents an expatriate’s search for viable lieux de mémoire in postcommunist Bulgaria. When revisiting the sites of her own past, Kassabova finds herself caught in the dilemma that memory and history are in ‘fundamental opposition’. 23 In communist countries, like Bulgaria, a specific and linear concept of history was part of the official doctrine. With the fall of communism and the arrival of consumer culture, this collective history, so meticulously established by the regime, collapsed. Kassabova’s diasporic point of view serves as a catalyst for a communal memory in which her individual history can find its place. Thus, Street Without a Name discards static notions of the past to search for as yet undiscovered areas. Her travelogue leaves the track of Bulgaria’s historico-cultural discourse. This can be seen in the visit to Rila Monastery, the ‘officially sanctioned’ (p.179) tourist site under communism. As a monumental national Bulgarian tourist site, it strongly reflects Nora’s thesis of the ‘memory nation as the last incarnation of the unification of memory and history’. 24 True it was a monastery – slightly awkward for an atheist regime – but as the largest monastery complex in the country, it was also ‘a cradle’ of Bulgarian identity. (p.179) We […] find an original document from 1378, the monastery’s charter, written in the hand of Tsar Ivan Shishman, the last king before the Ottomans decapitated the Bulgar21 22 23 24

Nora, pp.7-24 (p.7), my emphasis. Ibid. Ibid., p.8. Ibid., p.11.

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ian state. At the mere mention of Ivan Shishman, I hear the soothing radio voice at 7:15 a.m. ‘Bulgaria: Deeds and Documents’, and I feel a wave of sleepiness wash over me. (p.181)

Kassabova ridicules the grand scheme of streamlining the collective memory and history of the Bulgarian Socialist State as soporific. The constant stream of the radio voice exemplifies the desire for continuous and, to a certain extent, flawless history of the communist state, which had created an artificial milieux de mémoire. Kassabova’s ability to retrieve many of the details of Rila Monastery from memory shows how well the coinage of a national historical currency had worked. It is only due to her and her companion’s rather uncouth language coupled with a bemused irony that she can penetrate the ideological shield around this particular cultural site, which in effect opens a pathway to a novel recognition of this cultural marker. The visit to Rila Monastery reconfirms many of Nora’s theses about the contention between memory and history with history being ‘the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. [..] a representation of the past. […that] calls for analysis and criticism’ and memory being ‘by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural and yet individual.’ 25 The rejection of times past and the desire to do away with the communist legacy, particularly when it comes to politics and history was an important issue in the euphoria that followed the fall of communism. 26 In its tow, there came a profound insecurity of historico-cultural integrity, one symptom of which might be the careless sell-out of properties Kassabova decries repeatedly in Street Without a Name. Due to her diasporic status Kassabova is both the local and the cosmopolitan. Her personal search for memory is thus the search for her own history as well as that of her country. 27 Asked by a friend who emigrated to Canada whether she is Bulgarian, Kassabova muses: [M]y deep suspicion is that it’s possible, perhaps even inevitable, to live between – no, among – nationalities. It’s a bit like wearing different suits, all of them the wrong size, all of them slightly ridiculous, either too baggy or too tight. They don’t make the right size anymore, it’s been discontinued. (p.144)

The metaphor of nationality as the suit that does not fit, being either too small or too large, captures the lack of clear-cut cultural affiliation. To extend the metaphor, one might say that there is no one-size-fits-all option, as Kassabova comes to realise, and indeed there is a ‘differentiated network to which all of these separate identities belong, an unconscious organization of collec25 26 27

Ibid., pp.7f. Svašek, pp.1-33 (pp.9-11). Nora, pp.7-24 (p.13).

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tive memory’, 28 which Street Without a Name brings to a general consciousness. The search for lieux de mémoire can therefore be read as a quest in which the personal and the cultural objective melt into each other and, to employ Kassabova’s metaphor, ‘cross the time wires’ to ‘find out who [she and her friends] have become’. (p.179) Retrospective continuity is discarded as impossible and replaced by discontinuity. The past and the present can no longer communicate. I always shared this huge bed with my sister, cousin or both. It’s a crossing of time wires. Between the small confused person […] and the grown-up person lying here with a ‘foreigner’ and two passports, there is no common language. (p.204)

The lack of a common language in a cultural sense illustrates that the discourse is lacking in common denominators. The past has become ‘a world apart’ 29 as Nora reminds us, the immediate connection to it has been broken. Just as the future […] has come to seem invisible, unpredictable, uncontrollable, so have we gone from the idea of a visible past to an invisible one; from a solid and steady past to our fractured past; from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history. 30

This discontinuity is the linchpin of Street Without a Name. Kassabova embarks on the difficult undertaking of trying to reconcile not only communist Bulgaria with the country she travels but also the present with her own fractured past. In the course of the narration, she comes to realise that even her Bulgarian mother tongue is not the common denominator she had hoped it might be. ‘We share nothing except a language. My Balchik is not their Balchik. I’m a ghost from the past, but it isn’t their past.’ (p.292) Street Without a Name can therefore be read as engaging in ‘distance-memory’, 31 in which the ‘relation to the past […] is something entirely different from what we could expect from a memory: no longer a retrospective continuity but the illumination of discontinuity.’ 32 The strong sense of unbelonging does not leave Kassabova until she meets Mehmet, the Turkish-Bulgarian, a ‘Pomak’ in Dimitrina Mihaylova’s terms, 33 someone who is living in the border region between Bulgaria and Turkey. He is the first person who talks freely about his own experiences 28 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., p.23. Ibid., p.17. Ibid. Ibid., p.16. Ibid. Dimitrina Mihaylova, ‘Social Suffering and Political Protest: Mapping Emotions and Power among Pomaks in Postsocialist Bulgaria’, in Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Maruška Svašek (New York: Berghan Books, 2008), pp.5373 (p.54).

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with the forced name changes induced by the socialist regime in the 1960s and 1970s. The operation called Revival Process was intended to wipe out Turkish names in Bulgaria and slavicise them in order to remove the signs of Muslim identity. 34 Mehmet’s tale reveals how twisted communist Bulgaria’s alleged homogenous ethnic identity was. ‘You know how the Communists said back then: All the Turks who don’t want to change their names, go back to where you came from. But the thing is, we don’t come from Turkey. We come from here. In Turkey, they’re different, they cover up their women. So we came back ten months later. Bulgaria is nicer, life is easier. We haven’t got much money but then nobody’s got much money here, and we have our friends and neighbours, we’ll get a small pension. My daughter is studying. All that stuff is in the past […] I hope it stays there. All in the past.’ All in the past. When I was growing up, the Five Centuries of Turkish Yoke and the ‘three chains of slaves’ felt very recent. They were the holy cow of national folklore. (pp.270f.)

Coming from two different backgrounds and not least viewpoints, the expatriate suburban Sofian and the border ‘Turk’ share a moment of mutual recognition in which they come to realise that there is no such thing as a single loyalty or safe homogenous identity. The questions of origin and belonging so prominent in the history of the ‘border people’ are mirrored in the expatriate Bulgarian’s. Both live translated lives – albeit for different reasons. I am laughing at the Creators of the Bulgarian State with a Turk, and do I care? The nomadic Bulgars and their khans were an Asiatic people anyway, a bunch of talented barbarians who cleverly merged with those other talented barbarians, the Slavs, to form a hardy little nation of survivors. After so many centuries of bad blood and mixed blood, after so many five-year plans and so many tons of cement, after so many tears and so much water under the bridge, it’s good to laugh together. After all, it isn’t the original State we’re laughing at, it’s that State, the one which tried to dissolve the People into cement and built monuments like this with their sweat and blood. That State loved me, the child of ‘poor engineers’, as much – and as little – as it loved Mehmet. (p.276)

As this passage is close to the end of the book, the readers are left with a sense of achievement. To argue with Nora, Kassabova has found a ‘lieu de mémoire’ as ‘practiced in the fragile happiness derived from […] the involvement of the historian in her subject.’ 35 The common territory she shares with Mehmet could thus be seen not only as the closure to Kassabova’s personal search but even more so as reconciling modern day Bulgaria with its past.

34 35

Ibid., p.59. Nora, pp.7-24 (p.24).

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4. Conclusion Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria represents the personal testimony of a re-visiting émigré to the country of her birth in which the author redraws her personal memory map of Bulgaria. As a tourist traveller, Kapka Kassabova establishes a network of personal sites in the hope of bridging the historico-cultural chasm of her own life. The attractions she visits are for the most part strung together by a personal memory, which suggests that the beginning and the end of her travels, their whole purpose, was actually to try and capture Bulgaria as one part of her home. Through her irony she comes to understand – in Turner’s words – what it is to have a deep attachment to a culture or homeland. This comes as a surprise to those who know her poetry well, in which the sense of home and belonging is always transient and never bound to one language, one place, or one culture. 36 Though her persistent efforts to join the loose ends of memory across the historical and ideological chasm, Kassabova opens a window of recognition to many other expatriate Bulgarians, not only of her own generation and their children but also of her parents’ generation, which is mainly due to the vivid recollection of her cold-war childhood. As a memoir-cum-travel diary it satisfies the contemporary desire for personalised literature that revitalises Bulgaria’s historical drama. Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria will therefore not merely remain an ‘antidote to future’ appendices (p.3), as the author stated in the prologue of the book, but gain momentum in its own right as a contribution to the investigation of history and memory of a post-communist state.

Works Cited Duppé, Claudia, ‘The Question of Cultural Allegiance in New Zealand Women’s Poetry: Renegotiating Colonial Images of Home and Identity’, (Conference Paper presented at the NZSA Annual Conference in London 2007, forthcoming) Galvin, Cathy, ‘Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. The Sunday Times Review’, The Sunday Times (27 July 2008) [accessed 28 November 2009]

36

Cf. Duppé (forthcoming). My argument refers to Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p.6.

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Glenny, Misha, ‘Mum, Why is Everything so Ugly? Misha Glenny is Impressed by a Poignant Memoir of Growing Up in Communist Eastern Europe’, The Guardian, 5 July 2008, p.6 Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Christina Szanton Blanc, ‘From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, in Transnationale Migration, ed. by Ludger Pries, Soziale Welt 12 (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1997), pp.121-140. Kassabova, Kapka, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello Books, 2008) —, ‘Skipping over Invisible Borders’, in Geography for the Lost (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2007), 64-71 MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976) Mihaylova, Dimitrina, ‘Social Suffering and Political Protest: Mapping Emotions and Power among Pomaks in Postsocialist Bulgaria’, in Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Maruška Svašek (New York: Berghan Books, 2008), pp.53-73 Morris, Jan, ‘Critic’s Choice’, Financial Times, 29 November 2008, p.19 Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-24 Smith, William, ‘Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Virtue, Irony and Worldliness’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10.1 (2007), 37-52 Svašek, Maruška, ‘Introduction’, in Postsocialism. Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Maruška Svašek (New York: Berghan Books, 2008), pp.1-33 Van den Abbeele, Georges, ‘Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist’, Diacritics, 10 (1980), 2-14 Van der Veer, Peter, ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism’, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.165-79 Vertovec, Steven and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Doris Lechner

Eastern European Memories? The Novels of Marina Lewycka This aricle examines the popularity of Marina Lewycka’s literary work with particular regard to her Ukrainian-British identity. Lewycka’s success mainly stems from her use of literary genres already well established on the British book market such as family history, immigrant and chicklit novel, which she cleverly combines with the new theme of her Eastern European background. A focus on Lewycka’s debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian allows for a brief survey of the history of Ukrainians in Britain through the analysis of the family history as reconstructed from the perspective of a second-generation immigrant and in comparing the portrayal of the two sets of first generation migrants (post-WWII and post-1989). Furthermore, the paper briefly discusses the theoretical concept of ‘postmemory’ – considering Lewycka’s second-generation perspective –, analyses Lewycka’s questioning of stereotypes in her humorous depiction of Eastern Europeans, and builds on the idea of ‘transcultural capital’ – with regard to Lewycka’s appropriation of her Eastern European background in writing for a British readership.

1. Tractors and the Mechanics of the British Book Market When the Penguin Group put Ukrainian-British writer Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian on the British book market in March 2005, the debut novel instantly became a huge success with readers and critics. 1 Shortly after the Orange Revolution in the autum of 2004 and the more recent inauguration of Viktor Yushchenko in January 2005, the novel came at a time when the Ukraine had the full attention of the world press. Moreover, debate on increasing migration to Britain after the collapse of the former Eastern bloc and the EU enlargement of May 2004 sparked further interest in a novel that promised, as announced in Penguin’s catalogue, to look at a ‘voluptuous gold-digger [...] from the Ukraine [...], who stops at nothing in her single-minded pursuit of the luxurious Western lifestyle she dreams of’. 2 1

2

The novel found 100,000 buyers during its first year of publication as hard back and trade paperback, making it one of the most successful debuts of that year. Cf. Penguin Press Office, ‘Press Release: Penguin Group Announces Growth in 2005 Results’, Penguin Group (27 February 2006) [accessed 13 June 2009]. Lewycka’s Tractors even made it into John Sutherland’s Bestsellers and is there listed to have sold 631,898 copies in paperback edition in 2006. Cf. John Sutherland, Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.108. Penguin Catalogue, ‘Penguin General Books, January-June 2005’ (October 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009].

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The huge success of her topic seems to have inspired Lewycka’s further exploration of post-Orange Revolution experiences of Eastern European migrants in Britain in her equally well-received followup Two Caravans (2007). 3 This article examines the popularity of Marina Lewycka’s literary work with particular regard to her Ukrainian-British identity. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Anna Triandafyllidou have introduced the term ‘transcultural capital’. By this they ‘suggest a potential linkage between all three forms of “capital” [i.e. economic, cultural and social capital] by highlighting the strategic use of knowledge, skills and networks acquired by migrants through connections with their country and cultures of origin which are made active at their new places of residence’. 4 Lewycka’s success with Tractors mainly stems from her use of literary genres already well established on the British book market (that of her family’s new place of residence), which she cleverly combines with the new theme of her Eastern European background: her family heritage and her ‘postmemories’ 5 of Ukraine as the country of origin. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian makes use of the popular genre of the family novel. With the significant presence of postcolonial novels in contemporary British fiction, 6 this genre is often already a mixture between a fiction of migration and a fiction of memory as Astrid Erll points out with reference to novels such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) or Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000). 7 Lewycka’s Ukrainian background adds a 3

4

5 6

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Lewycka admits that ‘the Orange Revolution did boost sales a little bit’ (see the interview in this publication). Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Anna Triandafyllidou, ‘Beyond the Diaspora: Transnational Practices as Transcultural Capital’, in Transcultural Europe: Cultural Policy in a Changing Europe, ed. by Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Anna Triandafyllidou (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.200-222 (pp.201f.). Meinhof and Triandafyllidou observe that ‘the context in which migrants move very often includes kinship and ethnic networks which continue to confirm the significance of “homeland” connections’ (p.209). This readily applies to second-generation migrants like Lewycka: Kinship and cultural heritage, i.e. the close contact to her first-generation migrant parents and the family’s history define the network which, following Meinhof and Triandafyllidou, ‘constitute[s] [her] social capital [...] which can be activated for personal, cultural and economic profit’ (p.209). Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29 (2008), 103-128. Cf. for example Nick Bentley, ‘Introduction: Mapping the Millennium’, in British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. by Nick Bentley (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.1-18; James F. English, ‘Introduction: British Fiction in a Global Frame’, in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. by James F. English (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp.1-15; Brian W. Shaffer, Reading the Novel in English, 1950-2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp.17-31. Astrid Erll, ‘Familien- und “Generationenromane”: Zadie Smith’, in Der zeitgenössische englische Roman: Genres – Entwicklungen – Modellinterpretationen, ed. by Vera Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2007), pp.117-132 (pp.119f.). For fictions of migration cf. also Roy Sommer,

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new angle to this genre, although she could also build on the earlier success of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002); both novels balance humorous depictions of Eastern Europeans against the traumatising influence of the Second World War on their characters. Tractors appears to be autobiographical, although Lewycka points out that ‘the characters took on a life of their own, and became distinct from the people in MY life, so they created their own stories’. 8 Thus Tractors is told by the second-generation British-Ukrainian Nadia who, like Lewycka, was born in a refugee camp in Germany, who also has an older sister, and whose father remarries a post-1989 economic migrant from Ukraine and writes a history of tractors in Ukraine. The novel brings together two sets of firstgeneration migrants when Nadia’s father Nikolai, a post-WWII refugee, falls in love with Valentina, a recent economic migrant stereotypically portrayed as a work-permit hunting therefore husband-seeking gold-digger.

2. Familiy History: Ukrainian Postmemories In her reconstruction of the family history, the narrator Nadia – born after the war and having grown up in Britain – cannot rely on her own memories, but depends on what she has been told by her late mother Ludmilla and what her sister Vera, her elder by ten years, or her father are willing to tell her. Thus the process of her reconstruction conforms to what Marianne Hirsch has termed postmemory in reference to the children of Holocaust survivors and which, according to Hirsch, also applies to other second-generation contexts of traumatic experiences in the parent generation such as ‘Soviet and East European communist terror’. 9 Hirsch defines postmemory as ‘describ[ing] the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’.10 And she suggests that

8

9 10

Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien (Trier: WVT, 2001); for fictions of memory cf. Birgit Neumann, Erinnerung – Identität – Narration: Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer ‘Fictions of Memory’ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005); both Sommer’s analysis of fictions of migration and Neumann’s analysis of fictions of memory with regard to Nünning’s concept of perspective structure inform my approach to Lewycka’s novel. A short explanation of Nünning’s concept in English is provided by Carola Surkamp, ‘Perspective’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.423-425. Andrew Lawless, ‘Where Tragedy, Tractors and Comedy Meet: Marina Lewycka in Interview’, Three Monkeys Online (April 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009]. Hirsch, pp.103-128 (p.104). Ibid.

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[p]ostmemorial [fictional] work [...] strives to reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. Thus lessdirectly affected participants [that is, members of the second generation like Lewycka] can become engaged in the generation of postmemory, which can thus persist even after all participants and even their familial descendants are gone. 11

Nadia’s interest is driven by her ‘sens[ing] of something terrible that has happened in [her family’s] past’ before she was born, but about which no one is willing to talk to her. As a child, she hears her parents whisper with ‘urgency in their voices [...] their voices suddenly chang[ing]’ when she comes into the room: 12 Were they talking about that other time, that other country? Were they talking about what happened in between their childhood time and mine – something so fearful that I must never know about it? My sister is ten years older than me, and had one foot in the adult world. She knew things I didn’t know, things that were whispered but never spoken about. She knew grown-up secrets so terrible that just the knowledge of them had scarred her heart. Now that Mother has died, big Sis has become the guardian of the family archive, the spinner of stories, the custodian of the narrative that defines who we are. This role, above all others, is the one I envy and resent. It is time, I think, to find out the whole story, and to tell it in my own way. (pp.48f.)

In dialogue with her sister and through the history of tractors her father Nikolai writes, Nadia eventually finds out about the horrors of the Soviet terror to which her family was subjected in Ukraine. This includes the arrest and execution of Nadia’s grandfather in 1930, her mother Ludmilla’s consequent expulsion from university, the famine induced upon Ukraine by Stalin during which more than 7 million Ukrainians died in 1932-33, the brutal arrest and lucky release of her maternal grandmother in 1936, and the deportation of Nikolai’s work colleagues to Siberia in the same year. And she finally learns of her parents’ and Vera’s deportation to the German forced labour camp Drachensee, where they were confined to the correction block, which they only survived due to the timely rescue through the British. As they luckily found themselves in the British zone of occupied Germany and as Ludmilla’s birthplace was in the Polish part of Ukraine, in 1946 they were allowed to emigrate to Great Britain rather than being sent 11

12

Ibid., p.111; following Hirsch, the present boom in family and historical novels may even be explained by this, as she concludes: ‘[T]he growth of the memory culture may, indeed, be a symptom of a need for inclusion in a collective membrane forged by a shared inheritance of multiple traumatic histories and the individual and social responsibility we feel toward a persistent and traumatic past’ (ibid.). Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (London: Penguin, 2006), p.45. All further references in the text.

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back to Ukraine, from where they would most certainly have been deported to Siberia. 13 Writing for a British audience, Lewycka thus creates an awareness for the Ukrainians who found resettlement from European Displaced Persons camps in Britain and whose number until 1950 amounted to about 21,000 refugees. 14 The narrative situation, with second-generation British-Ukrainian Nadia as an autodiegetic narrator who reconstructs the family history from her postmemory perspective, helps to draw in British readers of a similar level of knowledge by allowing them to follow along Nadia’s discovery.

3. Chick-Lit Comedy: ‘Fluffy Pink Grenade’ Nadia’s agenda to tell the family story in her own way is situated in the present. Her interest in finding out this history is first and foremost triggered by the arrival of the new migrant Valentina. The introduction of this plot line balances the gloomier family history, as it creates the humorous, chick-lit character for which the novel has been praised. 15 This is obvious right at the beginning: 13

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Amounting to about two million, the Ukrainians formed one of the largest ethnic groups of Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria: ‘Among them were former forced labourers, prisoners of war and political prisoners, as well as people who had fled their homes due to the westward advance of the Red Army [...]. An overwhelming majority [...] were quickly returned to the USSR [...]. However, roughly 200,000 persons escaped repatriation, primarily those from the western Ukrainian region of Galicia; these individuals had not been Soviet citizens until 1939 and, hence, were exempted from forcible repatriation by the Western Allies.’ Volodymyr Kulyk, ‘The Role of Discourse in the Construction of an Emigré Community: Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria after the Second World War’, in European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies since 1945, ed. by Rainer Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp.213-237 (pp.214f.). Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, ‘A Brief History’ (2008) [accessed 13 June 2009]. The first large wave of Ukrainian migrants came to Britain as European Volunteer Workers on the ‘Westward Ho!’ scheme introduced by the British government in order to deal with post-war labour shortages in agriculture, coal mining, the textile industries and domestic labour. Holmes notes that ‘it has been estimated that Britain recruited more than 80,000 workers’ from DP camps after the Second World War. Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p.213. Cf. also Colin Holmes, ‘Hostile Images of Immigrants and Refugees in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), pp.317-334; Panikos Panayi, ‘The Historiography of European Immigrants in Britain during the Twentieth Century’, in European Immigrants in Britain 1933-1950, ed. by Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (München: Saur, 2003), pp.29-41; Diana Kay, ‘Westward Ho! The Recruitment of Displaced Persons for British Industry’, in Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth, pp.151-170. The review snippets on the paperback edition covers and preliminary pages of Tractors and Caravans show that the marketing of the novels was pumped for the general appreciation of

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Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside. (p.1)

Valentina – the ‘fluffy pink grenade’ – is presented by Nadia as the comic stereotype of an Eastern European female migrant. She has come to Britain in search of a life-style of expensive cars, cookers and hoovers. Marrying 84year old Nikolai would probably soon leave her free to do what she likes. She already maintains several affairs with British men (most of them married) who – like Nikolai – are instantly attracted to this ‘Botticelli[an] Venus’ with ‘[s]uperior breasts’ (p.1). The novel’s humour stems from Lewycka’s rendering of a snappy ‘mongrel language, half-English half-Ukrainian’ (p.98) and the fight of Nikolai’s daughters against the ‘criminal’ migrant intruder, as Nadia and Vera first try to prevent the wedding and then to effectuate a divorce or annulment by turning to British immigration in order to have Valentina evicted. However, the reception of Lewycka’s use of stereotypes for Valentina has been diverse and ranges from ‘a splendid comic creation’ 16 to ‘an uneasy edge [...] in terms of the constant debate on immigration’, 17 thus questioning the political correctness of the novel. Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov in a review for the Guardian was highly displeased by Lewycka’s Ukrainian ‘caricatures’ which present Valentina ‘more like a rubber doll than a real person’.18 Yet Lewycka maintains: [P]eople are often a bit sniffy about stereotypes, but actually I think it helps the reader if the characters seem familiar – it makes it easier for them to colour in the detail, and saves time, and pages and pages of back story if the characters resemble people they know. Ian 19 McEwan wouldn’t do that, but I’m not Ian McEwan, I’m a writer of comic fiction.

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Tractors’ humour. The preliminary page of Caravans, for instance, is entirely reserved for ‘Praise for A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’, which reaches from ‘Mad and hilarious’ (Daily Telegraph) and ‘Thought-provoking, uproariously funny, a comic feast’ (Economist) to ‘Lewycka is a seriously talented comic writer’ (Time Out). See also the interview with Lewycka in this publication, where Lewycka considers ‘the comedy and the family drama [...] much more important than the Eastern European element in the marketing’. Christina Koning, ‘A Short History of Tractors by Marina Lewycka: “You flesh-eating witch”’, The Times (19 February 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009]. Lawless, ‘Where Tragedy, Tractors and Comedy Meet’. Andrey Kurkov, ‘Human Traffic’, The Guardian (19 March 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009]. Chamberlain observes that ‘[w]ith her long legs, long hair and full figure [Valentina] recalls Varoomshka, John Kent’s Guardian cartoon character of the 1970s, [...] whose virtue was unconscious innocence’. Lesley Chamberlain, ‘Slav Sleaze Teases’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 2005, p.23. Jen Persson, ‘Interview with Marina Lewycka – Part 1 of 2’, The View from Here (29 June

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The knowledge of a nation’s shared stereotypes of others can be seen as a form of cultural knowledge, and Lewycka uses them here both as comic relief and a means to pick up the British reader in the description of her characters. She justifies this decision by her own Eastern European background, while she recently criticised British author Laurie Graham: ‘Whereas I feel perfectly OK lampooning eastern Europeans myself, I don’t much like it when other people do it. It’s like having outsiders criticise your family – they may be crazies, but they’re my crazies’. 20 However, the stereotypes in Tractors also serve narrative functions on several levels by which their pejorativity is redeemed. Marco Cinnirella points out three social key functions served by stereotypes: social causality (identifying a specific group as the cause of a problem or ‘scapegoating’), justification of behaviour towards other groups, and differentiation of the ingroup from other groups. 21 In Lewycka’s novel, Valentina, in her strife for Nikolai’s money and her abuse of the old man, becomes a scapegoat for the two sisters’ own neglect of care for their father and their quarrel about the inheritance. They justify their action against Valentina by decrying her as a criminal intruder. Nadia, through whose subjective narrative we observe the battle unfold, is constantly torn between sympathies for Valentina’s migrant background and strong antipathy. She repeatedly wonders: ‘What has happened to me? I used to be a feminist. Now I seem to be turning into Mrs Daily Mail’ (p.82). And she states that ‘[i]t feels uncomfortable at first to step out of my soft-soled liberal shoes into the stilettos of Mrs Flog-’em-andsend-’em-home of Tunbridge Wells, but after a while the new shoes mould to my feet’ (p.119). Identifying the creation and dissemination of such stereotypes in the media 22 – such as the Daily Mail – the novel reveals their ironic implementation and questions their validity in the first place. Finally, the stereotype of Valentina serves to differentiate the first group of migrants from the Ukraine, the ingroup to which Nadia and Vera by their family heri-

20

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2009) [accessed 18 July 2009]. Marina Lewycka, ‘Spinning the Gorni Grannies’, The Guardian (27 June 2009) [accessed 18 July 2009]. Marco Cinnirella, ‘Ethnic and National Stereotypes: A Social Identity Perspective’, in Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. by Cedric C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp.37-51 (pp.45-47). Cinnirella observes that ‘[w]ith the advent of mass communications technology, stereotypes can now be quickly and widely diffused to vast numbers of people. […] For example, through exposure to numerous television documentaries about the Cold War, fictional portrayals of espionage (James Bond films, for instance) and so on, a viewer could quite easily develop a stereotype of Russians, even if he or she had never actually met a Russian’ (ibid., pp.39f.).

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tage also belong, from the second group of migrants. In contrast to Valentina, Nadia and Vera portray their own group as ‘model citizens’ (p.228) – hardworking, willingly assimilating, never claiming benefits or breaking the law (cf. p.240). Nevertheless, Nadia realises that they might just as well have been considered a threat to the British welfare system had it not been for the British public’s perception of black migrants as the dominant threat in the 1950s:23 ‘When we first came here, Vera, people could have said the same things about us – that we were ripping off the country, gorging ourselves on free orange juice, growing fat on NHS cod-liver oil. But they didn’t. Everyone was kind to us.’ ‘But that was different. We were different.’ (We were white, of course, for one thing, I could say, but I hold my tongue.) (p.240)

The novel thus points towards the mechanisms at work when classifying specific migrant groups as a threat to the host society. On the level of the plot the stylisation of Valentina as a threat to British society serves mainly as a justification for Vera and Nadia to battle Valentina in terms of her migrant background rather than in terms of a family conflict. But Nadia also comes to realise the parallels between Valentina’s and Vera’s behaviour in their upfront sexuality and strife for money precisely because of their similar migrant experiences and struggle for a better life. Valentina is further redeemed by the care for her son: It is mainly for his future well-being that she has divorced her Ukrainian husband in order to be able to come to Britain. At the end of the novel her Ukrainian husband’s return and the birth of her baby counterbalance her negative portrayal. As Lewycka herself points out in an interview: I did worry about [political correctness] a lot [...], but I wanted to be truthful. And the truth is that immigrants are like any other people – some are awful, and some are heroes, and most are somewhere in between. [...] At the end of the day, the story speaks for itself, and there are Valentinas in every culture. I didn’t mean her to be unredeemed – she is redeemed by her beautiful and innocent baby, and by the love and forgiveness 24 of her husband.

Nevertheless, in her second novel, Two Caravans, Lewycka seems to have felt the need to further deflect criticism. Here Irina, a post-Orange Revolution 23

24

As Holmes and Hansen observe, the government preferred European migrants to New Commonwealth migrants as a solution to the labour shortages, as an unwholesome image of the latter dominated the public’s opposition. Cf. Holmes, pp.317-334 (p.334) and Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.5. The focus of tension therefore lay with the New Commonwealth migration, although the numbers of Eastern European migrants at the time ‘exceeded the size of the immigration from the Caribbean’. Holmes, pp.317-334 (p.324). Lawless, ‘Where Tragedy, Tractors and Comedy Meet’.

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migrant, comes across old Nikolai from the first novel in a nursing home. When he instantly proposes to her, the nurse Yateka observes: ‘You would be the perfect wife for him. Maybe you should accept his proposal. It would make him very happy. And in a few years, you will have a British passport and an inheritance.’ ‘Not all Ukrainian women are looking out to marry an old man for his money, you know, Yateka.’ In fact I was thinking these stereotypes of Ukrainian women are not 25 helpful. Where does this idea come from?

With Tractors, Lewycka has established herself as a writer of Eastern Europe-related fiction by combining this theme with a clever genre-mix of family fiction and chick lit. In a similar manner, Two Caravans mixes thriller, chick-lit romance and satire. Its plot introduces a broad set of economic migrants at work in Britain. While Lewycka’s main cast of nine strawberry pickers now also includes two Chinese girls and a young man from Malawi, 26 the other six migrant workers are still of Eastern European origin and the plot centres on the two Ukrainians amongst them. The conflict of their love story is modelled on the split in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution: Andriy is a miner from Donbas (Soviet-oriented Eastern Ukraine), Irina a 19-year-old from Kiev, who looks like Julia Timoshenko and embodies a democratic, Western Ukraine.

4. Marketing and Transcultural Capital With the flood of novels that swamp the bookshops every year, Lewycka’s editor Juliet Annon points out: ‘The most important quality now in books is distinctiveness’. 27 That Lewycka achieved her specific Ukrainian distinctiveness with Tractors can be concluded from the awards she received: The novel was long-listed for the Booker Prize, short-listed for the Orange Prize and won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the Saga Award for Wit. Distinctiveness also means offering something new, and while marketing otherness has been recognised as a success formula with reference to the ‘postcolonial exotic’, 28 Lewycka’s Ukrainian topics and background added a new angle to this concept when the Ukraine occupied a prominent 25 26

27

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Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans (London: Penguin, 2008), p.325. There is also a short episode about Portuguese and Brazilian migrant workers the character Tomasz comes to work with at a chicken farm. Juliet Annan, ‘Under the Covers’, Telegraph (21 February 2006) [accessed 13 June 2009]. Cf. Graham Huggan, ‘The Postcolonial Exotic: Salman Rushdie and the Booker of Bookers’, Transition, 64 (1994), 22-29; Graham Huggan, ‘Prizing “Otherness”: A Short History of the Booker’, Studies in the Novel, 29 (1997), 412-433 and Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001).

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place in the public consciousness. In an interview, Lewycka points out that the books were designed ‘to make them seem like authentic books from the former Soviet Union. There’s a name for that style – it’s called Ostalgia. It’s even done deliberately off-the-straight’. 29 The Ostalgia is created by a fiction of authenticity in the cover designs as crude wood cuts in bright colours on a basic beige cardboard background, which builds on creating an artificial dilettantism (cf. fig. 1). The marketing strategy clearly builds on the image of Eastern Europe’s perception as one of backwardness. 30 Her short story ‘The Importance of Having Warm Feet’ was broadcast in the BBC Radio 4 Second Generation Series in 2005, once more underlining Lewycka’s Ukrainian heritage. 31 Furthermore Lewycka is invited to write reviews on books by or about Eastern Europeans for the Guardian, for instance on Bosnian-British Vesna Maric’s memoir Bluebird (2009). 32 In 2006, Lewycka for the first time travelled to Ukraine and relates this experience of her family reunion in an article in the Observer. 33 Thus while Lewycka as a 58-year-old debutante may not feature the same degree of literary celebrity as Zadie Smith or J.K. Rowling, she has certainly realised her transcultural capital. Her success stems not only from her use of popular genres and humour, but most significantly from an Eastern European variation on a British or postcolonial theme. She appropriates her transcultural capital by activating her family heritage, her Ukrainian memories or postmemories for a British book market. With the focus on the present situation of migrants in Two Caravans, Lewycka already moves away from her personal, secondgeneration migrant background. Her most recent novel, We Are All Made of Glue (2009), features an Eastern European theme only with regard to a Jewish holocaust narrative; its main protagonist and narrator is a Yorkshire 29 30

31

32

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Persson, ‘Interview with Marina Lewycka – Part 1 of 2’. For an analysis of this perception of Eastern Europe cf. for instance Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Nataša Kovaþeviü, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008). ‘The Importance of Having Warm Feet’ was first broadcast on 25 January, two days after Yushchenko’s inauguration. The story has recently been published in Ox-Tales: Earth, ed. by Mark Ellingham and Peter Florence (London: GreenProfile, 2009), pp.105-116. Besides Bluebird and Laurie Graham’s novel, Life According to Lubka (2009), Lewycka also reviewed former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixmith’s I Heard Lenin Laugh (2006). She filled in twice for Michele Hanson on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ column and reported on her visit to the Penguin/Orange readers’ group prize winners in 2006. However, Lewycka points out that she ‘got very cross with the Guardian’ for ‘pigeonhol[ing]’ her as merely Eastern European, cf. the interview in this publication. Marina Lewycka, ‘A Short History of Tracking Down My Family in Ukraine’, The Observer (16 October 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009].

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Fig. 1: cover of the Penguin edition 34

woman. Thus, having established herself as a writer by strongly building on her Ukrainian heritage, Lewycka now can turn to other issues, and it remains to be seen if she will be as successful as with her two earlier, “ethnic” novels. After all, Lewycka abandoned the trademark that made her a household name.

34

I would like to thank Penguin for the permission to include this cover image in my article.

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Works Cited Annan, Juliet, ‘Under the Covers’, Telegraph (21 February 2006) [accessed 31 August 2009] Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, ‘A Brief History’ (2008) [accessed 7 September 2009] Bentley, Nick, ‘Introduction: Mapping the Millennium’, in British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. by Nick Bentley (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.1-18 Chamberlain, Lesley, ‘Slav Sleaze Teases’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 2005, p.23 Cinnirella, Marco, ‘Ethnic and National Stereotypes: A Social Identity Perspective’, in Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. by Cedric C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp.37-51 English, James F., ‘Introduction: British Fiction in a Global Frame’, in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. by James F. English (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp.1-15 Erll, Astrid, ‘Familien- und “Generationenromane”: Zadie Smith’, in Der zeitgenössische englische Roman: Genres – Entwicklungen – Modellinterpretationen, ed. by Vera Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2007), pp.117-132 Hansen, Randall, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Hirsch, Marianne, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29.1 (2008), 103-128 Holmes, Colin, ‘Hostile Images of Immigrants and Refugees in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), pp.317-334 —, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001) —, ‘Prizing “Otherness”: A Short History of the Booker’, Studies in the Novel, 29.3 (1997), 412-433 —, ‘The Postcolonial Exotic: Salman Rushdie and the Booker of Bookers’, Transition, 64 (1994), 22-29 Kay, Diana, ‘Westward Ho! The Recruitment of Displaced Persons for British Industry’, in European Immigrants in Britain 1933-1950, ed by. Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (München: Saur, 2003), pp.151-170

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Koning, Christina, ‘A Short History of Tractors by Marina Lewycka: “You flesheating witch”’, The Times (19 February 2005) [accessed 7 September 2009] Kovaþeviü, Nataša, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008) Kulyk, Volodymyr, ‘The Role of Discourse in the Construction of an Emigré Community: Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria after the Second World War’, in European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies since 1945, ed. by Rainer Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp.213-237 Kurkov, Andrey, ‘Human Traffic’, The Guardian (19 March 2005) [accessed 4 September 2009] Lawless, Andrew, ‘Where Tragedy, Tractors and Comedy Meet: Marina Lewycka in Interview’, Three Monkeys Online (April 2005) [accessed 21 August 2009] Lewycka, Marina, ‘A Short History of Tracking Down My Family in Ukraine’, The Observer (16 October 2005) [accessed 4 September 2009] —, ‘Spinning the Gorni Grannies’, The Guardian (27 June 2009) [accessed 4 September 2009] —, Two Caravans (London: Penguin, 2008) —, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (London: Penguin, 2006) Meinhof, Ulrike Hanna and Anna Triandafyllidou, ‘Beyond the Diaspora: Transnational Practices as Transcultural Capital’, in Transcultural Europe: Cultural Policy in a Changing Europe, ed. by Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Anna Triandafyllidou (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.200-222 Neumann, Birgit, Erinnerung – Identität – Narration: Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer ‘Fictions of Memory’ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005) Panayi, Panikos, ‘The Historiography of European Immigrants in Britain during the Twentieth Century’, in European Immigrants in Britain 19331950, ed by. Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (München: Saur, 2003), pp.29-41

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Penguin Press Office, ‘Press Release: Penguin Group Announces Growth in 2005 Results’, Penguin Group (27 February 2006) [accessed 13 June 2009] Penguin Catalogue, ‘Penguin General Books, January-June 2005’ (October 2005) [accessed 7 September 2009] Persson, Jen, ‘Interview with Marina Lewycka – Part 1 of 2’, The View from Here (29 June 2009) [accessed 18 July 2009] Shaffer, Brian W., Reading the Novel in English, 1950-2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006) Sommer, Roy, Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien (Trier: WVT, 2001) Surkamp, Carola, ‘Perspective’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.423-425 Sutherland, John, Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994)

Doris Lechner

Interview with Marina Lewycka Marina Lewycka was born to Ukrainian parents in a German Displaced Persons camp in 1946, from where the family emigrated to Britain in 1947/48. Lewycka holds a degree in Philosophy and English (joint honours) from the University of Keele, a BPhil in English Literature from the University of York and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from the University of Leeds, and works as a lecturer in Media Studies (Journalism) at the Sheffield Hallam University. She has published three novels to date: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) is told by second-generation Ukrainian-British Nadia and brings together two sets of first-generation Ukrainian migrants when Nadia’s father Nikolai, a post-World War II émigré, falls in love with Valentina, a post-1989 economic migrant. Two Caravans (2007) deals with the current situation of economic migrants at work in Britain. It relates the stories of several migrants, mainly Eastern European, but also Chinese, African and South American, while the plot centres around the romance between the Ukrainian protagonists Irina and Andriy. Lewycka’s latest novel, We Are All Made of Glue (2009), depicts the friendship of Georgie, a Yorkshire woman writing for the magazine Adhesives in the Modern World, and Mrs Shapiro, a German Holocaust refugee. In their encounter with Palestinian migrants, the novel also addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The interview was conducted by telephone on 5 August 2009.

DL: In your short story ‘The Importance of Having Warm Feet’, you tell the story of a British-Ukrainian girl who is bullied by classmates and singled out by teachers while wanting to ‘blend in’1 – possibly a reference to the Government's directive towards DP refugees to Britain at that time.2 How was it for you to grow up as a second-generation Ukrainian in Britain?

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‘The other kids laughed at my sensible shoes and woollen socks. They sniggered at my long plaits, and my funny name, and my brand-new school satchel. I burned with secret shame, but I pretended not to notice. I wanted more than anything to fit in – no, to blend in, to be invisible.’ Marina Lewycka, ‘The Importance of Having Warm Feet’, in Ox-Tales: Earth, ed. by Mark Ellingham and Peter Florence (London: GreenProfile, 2009), pp.105-116 (p.108); the short story was first broadcast as part of the BBC Radio 4 Second Generation Series on 25 January 2005. Colin Holmes notes with regard to the British Government’s recruitment of Displaced Persons and Eastern European refugees in its European Volunteer Workers scheme: ‘Government policy was based on the premise that they would soon have to stand on their own feet. They would have to “blend in”. We can recall here the emphasis in the 1949 Royal Commission on Population on the desirability of newcomers “becoming merged” in to what was called “the host population”’. Colin Holmes, ‘Hostile Images of Immigrants and Refugees in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern: Lang, 1999), pp.317-334 (pp.330f.).

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ML: When you’re a child, you don’t know anything about this. You just know what’s immediately around you. I didn’t have any understanding of what the Government’s regulations were. My parents, I think, had to report to the police regularly. I only know that I had trouble from the children at school. And I think this certainly happens to many children who are immigrants. If you’re the one child who is different, that’s what happens. So if I’d had glasses or been extra fat or had ginger hair, they probably would have picked on me as well. So I don’t think it necessarily had to do with my background and ethnicity. Rather I think if you have a visible difference to the other children, then they will pick on you. DL: So there wasn’t a big Ukrainian community where you grew up? ML: No, we never lived in places which had a large Ukrainian community. There were some places – Bradford is one and Leicester is another – where there are many Ukrainians and where my parents could have spent their whole social lives with other Ukrainians. And then probably I would have had more of the Ukrainian identity. The Ukrainians usually went to work in textiles and therefore lived in the mill towns in the North of England. And a few of them, but more Poles than Ukrainians, went into coal mining. But because my father was an engineer, we ended up living in places where there was an engineering industry with not so many Ukrainians. My parents did know one or two other Ukrainians, they knew a few Poles and they had a German friend, who lived near them. The people they made friends with were often not the most strictly English people. They were people who maybe were foreigners or who had married somebody foreign. Or they were a bit intellectual or a bit peculiar. After I left home, a lot of the Ukrainians I knew were in Bradford. There were quite a lot of Ukrainians in Leeds. And my parents corresponded with a lot of Ukrainians, so we were conscious of them. They had friends who were Ukrainian later on after I’d left home. But we did not live in the Ukrainian community. I think I’d have been a very different sort of writer if I had grown up in the Ukrainian community. DL: Did your parents speak to you in Ukrainian? ML: They’d speak to me in Ukrainian. But I had an older sister who went to school and my father spoke English. I learned English when I went to school, but when we first came to England, we stayed with rather wealthy families in the South of England who employed my mother as a domestic servant. They taught me English and so actually I think I learned English quite early.

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DL: In the 1960s, you were a left-wing activist living in a commune. Did this make you “more British”? ML: I think this preoccupation with identity is a very modern thing. It simply wasn’t the case when I was growing up. It’s not that I wanted to get rid of my roots, I wanted to be like everybody else and have friends and have a good time. I suppose my parents were keen for me to keep some traces of my Ukrainian culture. But not very much: They didn’t encourage me in particular even to speak Ukrainian at home. They were very keen for me to integrate into British society and also to have a good education and to be successful. It’s the dream of all immigrants for their children to do well in the new culture. I think my parents would have wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer like all parents do. I think it’s a very common immigrant thing: We suffered so that our children would have a good life. And that’s what my parents wanted for me. DL: In an interview, you state that with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, you wanted to tell British people about the ‘intense and slightly mad life of the Ukrainian community’ in Britain.3 ML: I suppose what I felt was that the other immigrant communities were much more visible and the Ukrainians had really almost disappeared. They sort of blended in and nobody knew about us. Certainly the story about the new arrivals and the clash between the older generation of Ukrainian immigrants and the new generation of Ukrainian immigrants was something that people talked about. And there were people that we knew who had contacted their families in Ukraine and who talked about how very different Ukraine was to how they’d had imagined it. Yesterday I was talking to a woman who is also second-generation British-Ukrainian. She told me that she had been back to Ukraine with her father and both of them had been shocked to see that it was a third-world country. Her father after this abandoned his dreams of ever going back to Ukraine. DL: You also still have ties to the Ukraine. When you visited your family there, you said that you had an ‘intense sense of homecoming’.4 3

4

Cf. N.N., ‘Author of the Month: Marina Lewycka: Interview with the Author’, Penguin Readers’ Group (21 August 2009) [accessed 13 June 2009]. Marina Lewycka, ‘A Short History of Tracking Down My Family in Ukraine’, Observer (16 October 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009].

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ML: Yes, that was really nice. I have only visited them once, we try to keep in touch by Skype. I did and I do have a sense of homecoming. It doesn’t mean I want to go and live there, heaven forbid. DL: Do you have contact to Ukrainian clubs in Britain? Do the new migrants also go there? ML: The Ukrainian clubs are very much for my parents’ generation and nobody of my generation would be interested in them. So now that my parents have died, I’m not in touch with them and I hardly know a member of that generation. I don’t know about the new Ukrainians, because I don’t meet them. I don’t go out of my way to meet somebody just because they were Ukrainian. It’s a very strange thing, this obsession with identity. I’m much more interested in being a writer, in being a teacher, in being a woman, in being a mother. There are many other things which are more important to me than being Ukrainian. DL: You mentioned other immigrant communities that are more visible. With the celebrations of the Windrush anniversaries in 1998 and 2008 and also the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, there seems to be a large awareness of postcolonial migrants in Britain, also within contemporary fiction. ML: There is, yes. And Andrea Levy had a great success with her book Small Island, which was a very popular and very gentle account of that Windrush generation. DL: Do you think that your A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is doing something similar for Eastern European migrants? ML: Yes, absolutely. Andrea Levy had a big success with Small Island and Monica Ali had a big success with Brick Lane. And I thought, yes okay, but what does anybody know about the Ukrainians? So in a way, I suppose, I knew that I was writing in a receptive atmosphere, but I don’t think there will be any commemorations like for the Windrush generation. In A Short History of Tractors, the older sister Vera says – and she is absolutely right – that the Ukrainians have integrated to the point that they’ve become almost invisible. We do know other Ukrainians, but it’s a curiosity. We’re different to the postcolonial immigrants, because they have always lived in larger communities and socialized with each other. And that has made them more distinct as

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a group and they developed a sort of culture of their own. When I was in Canada a couple of years ago, I spent a lot of time with the Ukrainian community there. And it was completely different. There was a very big community. I went out to dinner with a women’s group, there was a professor at the university who taught Ukrainian studies. It was a completely different atomsphere. It was lovely, I felt very at home and I was very embraced. They were interested in Ukraine, in Ukrainian culture, in Ukrainian history. And they wanted me to write about it. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be an author just about Ukrainians. Nothing could interest me less. I’m actually interested in writing about human beings. DL: Your second novel, Two Caravans is about the new migrants in Britain – I saw that you used the study Gone West: Ukrainians at Work in Britain Today.5 Did you also talk to migrants? ML: I looked at the study, which was done by the Trade Union Congress in Britain, and thought: This is a very interesting story. And it is a story I will have to tell, because nobody else will be able to tell it. And in a way it felt almost like a responsibility. I did speak to the Trade Union’s organisers a lot. The awful thing is that when I spoke to the migrants themselves, they didn’t really understand how much wages they were getting and what was happening. They didn’t really know what was normal and what was not normal. I did speak to them, but often by accident. At that time, I was spending a lot of time in Kent, where they have strawberry farms and orchards. So the people I met were often on the local train or I’d meet them in the supermarket and start talking to them, because it was so unusual to hear somebody talking in Eastern European languages. And that was the other part of the research. DL: You are teaching media studies. Yet you mentioned in an interview that instead of teaching PR what would interest you more is teaching about PR, as we are ‘saturated with promotional messages, the most effective of which are disguised as stories’.6 What is the story behind the promotion of your novels?

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Cf. Stepan Shakhno, Gone West: Ukrainians at Work in the UK (London: TUC, 2004); the study documents experiences of Ukrainians working in Britain based on a series of interviews Shakhno carried out in 2003. Lewycka references the report as one of her two main research sources. Cf. Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans (London: Penguin, 2008), p.407. Andrew Lawless, ‘Where Tragedy, Tractors and Comedy Meet: Marina Lewycka in Interview’, Three Monkeys Online (21 April 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009].

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ML: I have to say it was very well marketed. To be perfectly honest, what people say about my Tractors novel is that it was a word-of-mouth success. And if you ask the people at Penguin, they will say that it was a word-ofmouth success. It’s one of the reasons why it never reached number one on the bestseller list. It sold a million copies, it has been translated into thirtyodd languages and stayed in the bestseller list for 16 weeks, which is phenomenal, but it never reached number one. When it came out it was something very very new and different. It was actually very different in tone to the other postcolonial writers, I guess partly because it was funny, whereas postcolonial literature tends to be about suffering and so on. I think it was my good fortune to be able to write something that was entertaining and funny. DL: How important was the Eastern European or Ukrainian background for the marketing of Tractors? ML: I honestly think that the comedy and the family drama – the old man marrying the younger woman – was much more important than the Eastern European element in the marketing. A lot of it was luck. It was on BBC radio almost simultaneously to publication and thereby did reach a huge audience. And when people contact me, they say: I heard it on the radio and it made me laugh. But the main thing is it went into book groups. It’s the sort of book which book groups like. And in a book group you get ten people buying the same book and if each of these people enjoy it, then they pass it on. They buy it for their mums for Christmas and for birthday presents. So it has a very huge ripple effect. I really do think it was that rather than it was about Eastern Europe. The English readers just want to be entertained. They love comedy, it’s true. And you know, England has such a great comic tradition. I think they want to be cheered up. They have the sense that the world is very gloomy and they like things that are a little more entertaining. In fact, the Orange Revolution did boost sales a little bit. But you see the second book, Two Caravans, had a lot of very contemporary themes. DL: ...but the Orange Revolution and the Ukrainian characters are still at the centre of that novel. ML: That’s true. But the story is about the exploitation of migrants. It comes up regularly in the newspapers. Roughly once a month there’s a scandal out how badly treated or paid migrant workers are. Two Caravans essentially is a novel about globalisation. It’s a different perspective. It hasn’t got the intergenerational drama of A Short History of Tractors in it at all. Certainly enough, when I came to write it, I found it very difficult to write, because all

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the characters were so young. They didn’t have a lot of history. So I had to invent and research and so on. When I conceived it first, it was like the caravan perched from the top of the hill like a little globe. And I liked the thought of having the whole world inside one caravan, inside one globe. But of course it was not possible to do this and so I had to have two caravans. And partly then the comedy of the women and the men and the two caravans really gave it its comic element. But funnily enough with Two Caravans, what left an impression with readers isn’t really about the migrant workers at all: It’s about the chickens. That’s wonderful. It’s so very British. To be cruel to people – it’s not nice. But to be cruel to animals is really the greatest crime. DL: You place Two Caravans within the tradition of English literature with an epigraph from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. ML: ... especially in English comic literature really. Which is, I suppose, the mainstream of English literature. Shakespeare was also a very great comic writer. I studied English at university, but I studied the Renaissance up until the 17th century, and my knowledge reaches to the great novels of the industrial age, but modern literature was quite small. But I knew Chaucer and Shakespeare and their contemporaries very very well. They were my influences. DL: Tolstoy’s War and Peace also features in Two Caravans. The main character Irina constantly refers to the romance between Natasha and Pierre. ML: Tolstoy is there really for characterising Irina, because she needs to be somebody who’s a little bit serious and has very high ideas. This is obviously a very educated girl. And so she refers to literature for her idea of and preoccupation with the great romance. DL: Are there any other Eastern European authors who influenced your work? ML: Well, my next book, which I’m working on at the moment, owes a lot to Gogol’s Dead Souls. It will have no Ukrainian characters in it. DL: You also write reviews for The Guardian on Eastern-Europe-related books.

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ML: But I’ve got very cross with the Guardian. I told them not to do this any more. I’m fed up with being pigeon-holed. Next time please send me some serious books that aren’t about Eastern Europe. It’s true that they have pigeon-holed me in this respect. The wonderful thing is that the New Statesman have got a different pigeon hole for me. I did my PhD about the English Civil War in the seventeenth century7 – and they’ve got that pigeon hole. So I’ve just done a little tiny piece for them on a book called World Turned Upside Down about the seventeenth century.8 It’s nice not only to be pigeon-holed as Ukrainian. I find it terribly irritating, just like being a professional Ukrainian. DL: You’ve just signed up for two further novels with your publisher Fig Tree. Is it a problem for your editor Juliet Annan that you are turning away from the Eastern-European topics? ML: No, absolutely not. She also doesn’t want me to get pigeon-holed as somebody who could only write about one thing. DL: You are a very cosmopolitan person. Born in Germany to Ukrainian parents, lived all your life in Britain, married to a New Zealander and you’re actually thinking about moving to New Zealand at the moment. ML: Yes, I live in-between England and New Zealand. And my daughter works in Africa. She has really taken on the global citizen. I think I’m very lucky to have a family which has migrated, because I have much more sense of the whole world as a place I can inhabit. DL: So home isn’t bound to a specific country for you? ML: Not in particular, no. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing. I certainly like Eastern Europe very much. And I do feel sort of a nostalgia or homecoming. But I’m sure it’s to do with my childhood. My Ukrainian heritage is my childhood, it’s in the past. My childhood was Ukrainian, but as an adult, I’ve never been Ukrainian. So it’s like stepping back into my childhood. And I don’t know what it’s like to be a person who lives all their life in 7

8

Lewycka started researching ‘revolutionary thought in the 17th century’ but abandoned her PhD a few years later. Cf. Marina Lewycka, ‘Another World is Possible’, New Statesman (23 July 2009) [accessed 21 August 2009]. Cf. Marina Lewycka, ‘Red Reads: 37. The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill (1971)’, New Statesman (6 August 2009) [accessed 21 August 2009].

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the same community that they’ve lived in as a child. Because I’ve travelled out of my childhood community into a different kind of community. But that’s also something which has enabled me to grow intellectually.

Works Cited Holmes, Colin, ‘Hostile Images of Immigrants and Refugees in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern: Lang, 1999), pp.317-334 Lawless, Andrew, ‘Where Tragedy, Tractors and Comedy Meet: Marina Lewycka in Interview’, Three Monkeys Online (21 April 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009] Lewycka ‘Red Reads: 37. The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill (1971)’, New Statesman (6 August 2009) [accessed 21 August 2009] —, ‘Another World is Possible’, New Statesman (23 July 2009) [accessed 21 August 2009] —, ‘The Importance of Having Warm Feet’, in Ox-Tales: Earth, ed. by Mark Ellingham and Peter Florence (London: GreenProfile, 2009), pp.105-116 —, Two Caravans (London: Penguin, 2008) —, ‘A Short History of Tracking Down My Family in Ukraine’, Observer (16 October 2005) [accessed 13 June 2009] N.N., ‘Author of the Month: Marina Lewycka: Interview with the Autor’, Penguin Readers’ Group (21 August 2009) [accessed 13 June 2009] Shakno, Stepan, Gone West: Ukrainians at Work in the UK (London: TUC, 2004)

Notes on Contributors

CHRISTIANE BIMBERG studied English, Russian, educational theory and psychology. She taught at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Havana, Cuba before becoming Professor of English Literature at the University of Dortmund in 1994. Her research areas comprise English literature of the Renaissance and the Restoration, Anglo-Irish Studies, modern British and American drama and theatre as well as children’s literature. Her current research projects include transnational, intercultural and interdisciplinary investigations of the Victorian Age, the Edwardian period, Modernism and New English/postcolonial literatures. For some time already she has been engaged in the study of the transnational and intercultural relationships between English, Russian and German literature and culture. Her book Reise nach Moskowien: Russlandbilder aus dem Kalten Krieg, a mix of travelogue, autobiography and cultural history, appeared in 2006. NADIA BUTT completed her studies in Lahore, Pakistan, and gained her PhD with a thesis on “Transcultural Memory and the Indo-English Novel” at the University of Frankfurt in 2009. She has taught twentieth-century British literature, postcolonial literature and academic writing at the Universities of Frankfurt and Münster. She has also published extensively in Pakistani newspapers and magazines as well as in various journals in the areas of postcolonial literature and the theory of transcultural memory. Since October 2009, she is a lecturer of English at the University of Giessen. ELISABETH CHEAURÉ studied in Graz, Moscow and St. Petersburg. She received her PhD from the University of Graz with a thesis on E.T.A. Hoffmann: Inszenierungen seiner Werke auf russischen Bühnen. In the course of her Habilitation she explored the figure of the artist in narratives of Russian Realism (Die Künstlererzählung im russischen Realismus, 1986). She specialises in Slavonic Studies, Area Studies of Russia and Gender Studies. She has been Professor of Slavonic Studies since 1990 at the University of Freiburg where she also holds the position of Dean of the Philological Faculty. She has co-edited a volume on Russian culture and Gender Studies (2002) as well as a volume concerned with discourses on nation and gender in Germany and Russia (2005). CORINA CRIùU, PhD, is a lecturer at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Bucharest. She has authored more than 50 academic articles in the

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field of American Studies and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Rewriting: Polytropic Identies in the Postmodern African American Novel (2006); ‘Bosnian Ways of Being American: Hemon’s Nowhere Man’ (When the World Turned Upside-Down (2009), ‘Transatlantic Connections in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage’ (Comparative American Studies, 2008), ‘“Tell Nannan I Walked”: Reconstructing Manhood in Gaines’s A Lesson before Dying’ (ZAA, 2007) and ‘Reconfiguring Female Characters of the American West’ (Selected Proceedings of the First World Congress of the International American Studies Association, 2005). She is also a poet and has contributed to literary journals and anthologies worldwide; her poems have been collected in a bilingual volume, Triptych (2004). CLAUDIA DUPPÉ is the scientific and academic coordinator of a research programme at the University of Freiburg. Her scholarly background is in Anglophone Literatures as well as geography. Her PhD thesis deals with the (Re) Negotiation of Home in New Zealand Women’s Poetry of the 20th Century (2006). She has subsequently looked at how writers express transmigrant experiences whilst leading cosmopolitan and translocated lives. Her current research focuses on the Antarctic and Arctic regions and aims at bridging the disciplinary gap between literary scholarship and the social and natural sciences. MARIE-LUISE EGBERT is associate professor (Privatdozentin) of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Leipzig and is currently teaching at the University of Freiburg. She received her PhD from Chemnitz University for a dissertation on Lexical Repetition in English-German Literary Translation (1999). In the course of her Habilitation, she completed a study on gardening and gardens in England as a part of a cultural identity (Garten und ‘Englishness’ in der englischen Literatur, 2006). Her publications include articles on the eighteenth-century novel, the history of gardens, postcolonial literatures, literary translation, literature and terrorism, as well as media applications in the teaching of English literature. ELMO FEITEN holds a BA in English and American Studies and is currently pursuing his MA studies in British and North American Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg. SISSY HELFF teaches British literature and cultural studies at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. She is the author of Unreliable Truth (forthcoming) and co-editor of Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2009) and Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities

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(2008). She is currently working on a book about the representation of the stranger in the British novel since the nineteenth century. MARTIN HERMANN studied English and Political Science at the University of Freiburg. His MA-thesis explored parent-child relationships in the films of David Lynch. At present he is a PhD student at the English department of the University of Freiburg. His thesis investigates apocalyptic fiction in British literature and film. Articles on unnatural narratives in American film and photography in postmodern American film are forthcoming. WOLFGANG HOCHBRUCK worked as a sailor before he studied in Freiburg, Dalhousie/Halifax N.S. and Berkeley, holds an MA in German Literature and a Doctorate in American Studies. He has held academic positions at the universities of Braunschweig, Stuttgart and Osnabrück and has been Professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg since 2004. KAPKA KASSABOVA is a poet and writer who was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, but has lived in the UK and New Zealand since the fall of the Iron Curtain. She has published four collections of poetry: All Roads Lead to the Sea (1997, NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry), Dismemberment (1998), Someone Else’s Life (2003) and Geography for the Lost (2007). Her first novel Reconnaissance (1999) won the Best First Book award in the South East Asia and South Pacific section of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It was followed by Love in the Land of Midas (2001). Kassabova regularly writes journalistic contributions for the media (e.g. The Guardian, TLS, Vogue, BBC Radio 3 and 4) and is the author of two travel guides (to Delhi, Jaipur and Agra and to her native Bulgaria). She currently lives in Edinburgh. BARBARA KORTE is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. Recent publications include work on the British short story, English travel writing, Black and Asian British culture and the cultural reception of the First World War in Britain. DORIS LECHNER studied at the University of Freiburg and recently received her MA in European Literatures and Cultures with a thesis on Marina Lewycka’s Popular Novels about Eastern Europe: ‘Tractors’, ‘Caravans’ and the Mechanics of the British Book Market. She is currently beginning a PhD thesis on representations of history in nineteenth-century British family magazines.

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MICHAEL MCATEER has lectured in English at Queen’s University Belfast since 2002 and is currently residing in Budapest, researching Irish-Hungarian literary comparisons. He is the author of Standish O’Grady, AE, Yeats: History, Politics, Culture (2002). His book Yeats and European Drama is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He has published a wide range of essays and book chapters on modern Irish drama, fiction, poetry and criticism. CINZIA MOZZATO was educated at the University of Venice Cà Foscari, where she read English and French. She took her PhD in Anglo-Germanic Philology and Literatures in Padua, writing a thesis on representations of Central and Eastern Europe in contemporary British poetry. Her interests range from British post-war poetry to contemporary Black British and African literature, in particular Ugandan fiction. Since 2006, she has been working with NuBE (Nuova Biblioteca Europea), a Padua-based small press which promotes the translation of contemporary European literature, including poetry and fiction from former Eastern European countries. She has recently edited an Anthology of Contemporary European Poetry (2009) and contributed an essay on post-Wall British poetry to When the World Turned Upside Down, edited by Kathleen Starck (2009). MIKE PHILLIPS, OBE is a writer, journalist, curator and university lecturer who was born in Georgetown, Guyana but followed his parents to London as a child. He was educated at the University of London and the University of Essex, and later at Goldsmiths College where he obtained his Postgraduate Certificate of Education. Phillips worked as a journalist and broadcaster for the BBC on programmes such as The Late Show and Omnibus until becoming a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster. He has written fulltime since 1992 and is well-known for his crime fiction: Blood Rights (1989), The Late Candidate (1990, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction), Point of Darkness (1994), An Image to Die For (1995), The Dancing Face (1997) and his thriller A Shadow of Myself (2000). Phillips co-wrote the documentary book Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998), along with the BBC television series Windrush (1998) and is the author of the autobiographical book London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001). He lives in North London. EVA ULRIKE PIRKER studied English and American Literature and Philosophy at Tübingen University and received her PhD in English Philology at the University of Freiburg with a thesis on representations of black British history in texts, films and the visual arts. She teaches English Literature and British Cul-

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tural Studies with a focus on migration and the (post)colonial condition. Her publications in these fields include analyses of literature, film and photography. BARBARA PUSCHMANN-NALENZ has been a member of the English Department at Ruhr University Bochum since 1970. She teaches English and American literature and Cultural Studies. Her PhD thesis was on the conceptions of love and friendship in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; her book Science Fiction and Postmodern Fiction: A Genre Study (1992) deals with American and British fiction mainly of the 1960s and 1970s. With Wolfgang Karrer she co-edited a collection of essays on The African-American Short Story, 1970 to 1990 (1993). She also wrote numerous articles in the fields of earlymodern literature and contemporary fiction. JOANNA ROSTEK studied International Cultural and Business Studies, focusing on British literature and culture, at the University of Passau, the Université Laval in Québec and Leeds University. She is lecturer at the Chair of English Literature and Culture at Passau University. Her PhD thesis investtigates the interconnectedness of the maritime metaphor and postmodern histories in contemporary anglophone fiction. Her further research interests include women’s studies and Polish migrant culture in Ireland and the UK. ELMAR SCHENKEL holds the Chair of British Literature at Leipzig University. He has written on bicycles and alchemy, on H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad and has also published novels, essays and travel books, among them Das sibirische Pendel (Russian journeys). SUSANNE SCHMID is associate professor (Privatdozentin) at the FU Berlin. She has also taught at the Universities of Salford, FU Berlin, Frankfurt, Princeton, Paderborn, Regensburg, Mainz and Erfurt. She is the author of three books, Jungfrau und Monster (1996), Byron, Shelley, Keats (1999) and Shelley’s German Afterlives 1814-2000 (2007). Additionally, she co-edited The Reception of P.B. Shelley in Europe (2008) and a volume about Solitude and Sociability (2008). She has published numerous articles about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Romanticism, cultural transfer, contemporary literature, culture, film and gender studies. She is currently working on a book-length study about women’s sociability in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a collection of texts about coffee. CHRISTIAN SCHMITT-KILB received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt for a dissertation on the topic of poetics, rhetoric and nation in earlymodern England. His postdoctoral thesis explores the search for father fig-

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ures in contemporary British fiction with a focus on the novels of Graham Swift. He currently teaches English Literature as a substitute professor at the University of Rostock. He has published on contemporary fiction, drama and poetry and on early-modern literature and culture. MICHAEL SZCZEKALLA has published a book on Hume as a conservative ironist, which was also his post-doctoral thesis at the University of Greifswald, where he teaches English Literature as a Privatdozent. He took his doctorate at the University of Münster in 1989, subsequently taught English and History at secondary schools and worked in the Ministry of Education in Düsseldorf. His articles and reviews cover seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury English literature, historiography and philosophy. He has also written on Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, and on the methodology of teaching. JONAS TAKORS studied English, History and Philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg, Basel and Ulster. He is associated with the Freiburg research group History in Popular Cultures of Knowledge and is currently writing his PhD thesis on Henry VIII in Popular Culture. ANJA TIEDEMANN has studied English, Spanish und Geography at the Universities of Freiburg, Southampton and Santiago de Compostela. DIRK UFFELMANN is Chair of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Passau. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Constance and finished his postdoctoral thesis at Bremen University in 2005. His main fields of interest are the theory of literature and the interconnections between literature and religion, philosophy, architecture and economics. He is especially interested in problems of cross-cultural relations and migration. Uffelmann is the author of Die russische Kulturosophie: Logik und Axiologie der Argumentation (1999) and Der erniedrigte Christus: Metaphern und Metonymien in der russischen Kultur und Literatur (2009). He is also the editor and coeditor of several books, and co-editor of Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie. VEDRANA VELIýKOVIû is a PhD candidate and part-time lecturer in English Literature at , London. She is currently writing up her doctoral thesis which explores the idea of (un)belonging in post-1990s black British and Former Yugoslav women’s writing. Her chapter on Dubravka Ugrešiü’s The Ministry of Pain has been recently published in Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe, ed. Agnieszka Gutthy (2009) and her article on Vesna Goldsworthy’s work, on which her paper in the present volume is partly based, is forth-

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coming in Women: A Cultural Review. She is interested in exploring the links between postcolonial studies/literatures and studies/literatures of Eastern Europe. DIRK WIEMANN is Professor of English Literature at the University of Potsdam. His research interests include cultures of republicanism in seventeenthcentury England, Victorian contagion narratives, and (post)secularism in contemporary Britain and India. He has published a monograph on Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English (2008) and is the coeditor of Discourses of Violence – Violence of Discourses (2007). His numerous articles focus on theatre and politics in the English Republic, Indian and British cinema, Indian writing in English, cultures of memory, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes and autobiography as fiction. PRZEMYSàAW WILK is a PhD student at Opole University, Poland, where he teaches linguistics, academic writing and practical English. He received his MA from the Institute of English at Opole University in 2006 having submitted a thesis on Genre and Axiological Contrastive Analysis of a Blurb on the Example of Polish and English Novels of Manners. His research into the modern concept of genre gave rise to his interest in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, with particular focus on media discourse and the press. Currently, he is preparing his PhD thesis which aims at reconstructing images of Poland and the Polish in The Guardian. INGRIDA ŽINDŽIUVIENƠ is an associate professor at the Department of English Philology, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. She teaches contemporary British and American Literature, Theory of Drama, and other courses. She has published more than fifty articles on British and American literature, comparative literary studies and American Studies. She is the coauthor of the following books: English at a Glance (2002), Modern North American Women Writers (2005), Aiming for Pre-Intermediate (2006) and Descriptive Bilingual Glossary of Educational Terms (2006). Her research interests include literary studies, literary theory and cultural studies.

Index

A8, Accession Eight 2, 10f., 30, 47, 163, 194, 275, 278f., 282, 311, 315, 335, 338-345, 349, 352f., 352n15, 359, 437 adaptation 4f., 28, 89, 164, 219, 227-230, 311, 328f. Albania 13, 43f., 237f., 242 Alien Act 1905 9 alterity (see also other(ness)) 8, 17f., 25, 132, 145f., 187, 235, 243 Amis, Martin 4, 387n9, 403-409 House of Meetings 397f., 403409 Koba the Dread 397, 407 anarchism, 8, 51, 114, 233, 242 Anglo-Polish culture 3n5, 10, 62, 330f., 349-359 antiziganism 283, 293-297 anti-Semitism 259f., 262f., 266f., 269, 293, 295 Applebaum, Anne (Gulag: A History) 397f., 405 Armenia 113, 234, 264 asylum 13, 134, 314, 314n13 assimilation 214, 226, 247, 251, 255, 553n18, 357, 421, 444 Austro-Hungarian Empire 16, 71, 212f., 237 autobiography 15, 111, 116, 118, 120, 126, 136, 300, 390, 397, 405, 423, 426, 429, 439 Balkans, the 2, 30, 43, 77, 81, 155, 185-201, 210f., 216f., 264, 266

Balkanism 5, 5n8, 7, 16, 18, 185-201 Baltic States, Baltic 2, 30, 235, 384, 417 Balkan Wars 2, 11, 189-192, 145f., 155f. Baring, Maurice 3, 17, 85-94 The Mainspring of Russia 85f. What I Saw in Russia 85, 8793 Barnes, Julian (The Porcupine) 397f. Baron Cohen, Sacha 7, 68, 259271 Da Ali G. Show 7, 259f., 265 Borat 7, 16, 68, 259-271 BBC 77, 191f., 352, 352-354, 354n21, 446, 446n32, 451n1, 456 Bean, Richard (England People Very Nice) 12f., 12n33 Beautiful People (dir. by Jasmin Diszdar) 11 Berlin Wall (see also Iron Curtain), Fall of the Wall 1, 14, 70f., 95, 129-140, 145-147, 151, 152, 230n34, 385, 387, 423 Benjamin, Walter 103, 250, 427 Black Britain 13, 10f., 12n32, 124f., 125n7, 130, 195, 255, 327, 349, 358, 444, 444n23, 454 black writing 3, 13f., 16, 47, 123-141, 197, 357, 454