History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries

HISTORY OF THE LITERARY CULTURES OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SP...

Author: Marcel Cornis-Pope | John Neubauer

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HISTORY OF THE LITERARY CULTURES OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 2001–2005 President/Président Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Indiana University) Vice-President/Vice-Président Randolph Pope (University of Virginia) Secretary Treasurer/Secrétaire Trésorier Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston) Committee Liaison Eugene Chen Eoyang (Lingnan University) Members/Membres assesseurs Richard Aczel, Jean Bessière, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Eugene Chen Eoyang, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Eduardo de Faria Coutinho, Elrud Ibsch, Margaret Higonnet, Eva Kushner, John Neubauer, Luz Aurora Pimentel, Ann Rigney Past Presidents Mario J. Valdés (Toronto), Jacques Voisine (Paris), Henry H.H. Remak (Indiana), Jean Weisgerber (Bruxelles) Past Secretaries György M. Vajda† (Budapest), Milan V. Dimić (Edmonton) Published on the recommendation of the International Council for Philosophy

Volume XIX (Volume I in the subseries on Literary Cultures) History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer

HISTORY OF THE LITERARY CULTURES OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE JUNCTURES AND DISJUNCTURES IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES VOLUME I

Edited by MARCEL CORNIS-POPE Virginia Commonwealth University

JOHN NEUBAUER University of Amsterdam

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

8

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe : junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries / edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer. p. cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 19) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Europe, Eastern--Literatures--History and criticism. 2. Europe, Eastern--History. 3. Literature and history--Europe, Eastern. I. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, 1946-. II. Neubauer, John, 1933-. III. Comparative history of literatures in European languages ; 19PN849 .E9H577 2004 891.8--dc22 2004041186 ISBN 90 272 3452 3 (Eur.) / 1 58811 493 7 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © 2004 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

My mother was Cumanian, my father half Székler, Half, or perhaps full, Rumanian […] I am the world — everything that existed and exists: The many generations that fought each other. The dead Hungarian settlers are victorious with me And the suffering of the defeated ones gives me pain. Árpád and Zalán, Werbo˝czy and Dózsa — Turks, Tatars, Slovakians, Rumanians stir In this heart, which owes the past A mild future … The Danube, which is past, present, and future, Has soft waves that embrace each other. Memory melts the fights of our forefathers into peace And settling finally our common concerns Is our task; and this is hardly trivial. (Attila József, “By the Danube” 1936) Hand me over a provincial journal and a wooden shed with filthy signboards and within three days all cities will smell of vanilla and open harbors (Mircea Dinescu, “De acord?” 1983)

Table of contents

Editors’ Preface

xi

Preface by the General Editor of the Literary History Project

xiii

Note on Documentation and Translation

xvii

In Preparation

xix

General introduction Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer Geography and borders Paul Robert Magocsi Part I Nodes of political time Introduction to Part I: Literary nodes of political time Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer 1989 – From resistance to reformulation – Marcel Cornis-Pope – 1989 in Poland: Continuity and Caesura – Włodimierz Bolecki − Reversals of the postmodern and the late Soviet simulacrum in the Baltic Countries — with exemplifications from Estonian literature – Epp Annus and Robert Hughes – Models of literary and cultural identity on the margins of (post)modernity: The case of pre-1989 Romania – Monica Spiridon – Quoting instead of living: Postmodern literature before and after the changes in East-Central Europe – Péter Krasztev

1 19

33 39 39 51 54 65 70

1956/1968 – Revolt, suppression, and liberalization in Post-Stalinist East-Central Europe – Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer with Jolanta Jastrze˛bska, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Svetlana Slapšak, and Alfred Thomas

83

1948 – Introduction: The Culture of Revolutionary Terror – Tomislav Z. Longinovic´, Dagmar Roberts, Tomas Venclova, John Neubauer, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Marcel Cornis-Pope – Romanian literature under Stalinism – Letit¸ia Guran and Alexandru S¸tefan – The retraumatization of the 1948 communist purges in Yugoslav literary culture – Renata Jambrešic´ Kirin – Heritage and inheritors: The literary canon in totalitarian Bulgaria – Alexander Kiossev

107

83

107 112 124 132

viii

Table of contents

1945 John Neubauer in collaboration with Marcel Cornis Pope, Mieczysław Døbrowski, George Grabowicz, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Svetlana Slapšak, Guido Snel, Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz˙, and Tomas Venclova

143

1918 – Overview – John Neubauer with Marcel Cornis-Pope, Dagmar Roberts, and Guido Snel – Women writers and the war experience: 1918 as transition – Margaret R. Higonnet – The footsteps of Gavrilo Princip: The 1914 Sarajevo assault in fiction, history, and three monuments – Guido Snel – Beyond Vienna 1900: Habsburg identities in Central Europe – Katherine Arens – The Great War as a monstrous carnival: Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk – Veronika Ambros – Polish literature of World War I: Consciousness of a breakthrough – Dorota Kielak

177

1867/1878/1881 John Neubauer with Vladimir Biti, Nikolai Chernokozhev, Gábor Gángó, Albena Hranova, Nenad Ivic´, Ewa Paczoska, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Tomas Venclova

177 191 202 216 228 236 241

263 1848 John Neubauer with Mircea Anghelescu, Gábor Gángó, Kees Mercks, Dagmar Roberts, and Dinko Župan 1776/1789 – Introduction – John Neubauer – The spirit of 1776: Polish and Dalmatian declarations of philosophical independence – Larry Wolff – The cultural legacy of empires in Eastern Europe – Svetlana Slapšak – The Jacobin Movement in Hungary (1792–95) – Vilmos Voigt – 1776 and 1789 in Slovakia — Dagmar Roberts – 1789 and Bulgarian Culture – Inna Peleva Part II Histories of literary form Introduction John Neubauer Shifting periods and trends – Between Classicism and Romanticism: The year 1820 in Polish literature – Roman Koropeckyj – From modernization to modernist literature – Péter Krasztev – Czech Decadence – Robert B. Pynsent – The Avant-garde in East-Central European literature – Endre Bojtár

293 293 294 307 311 313 315

321 325 325 332 348 364

Table of contents

ix

Shifting genres – Literary reportage: Between and beyond art and fact – Diana Kuprel – Gardens of the mind, places for doubt: Fictionalized autobiography in East-Central Europe – Guido Snel – Subversion and self-assertion: The role of Kotliarevshchyna in Russian-Ukrainian literary relations – George G. Grabowicz – Poeticizing prose in Croatian and Serbian Modernism – Miro Mašek – Stanislav Vinaver: Subversion of, or intervention in literary history? – Svetlana Slapšak – The birth of modern literary theory in East-Central Europe – Galin Tihanov – Polish poetry in the twentieth century – Arent van Nieukerken – Polish-Jewish literature: An outline – Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Antony Polonsky – Shifting perspectives and voices in the Romanian novel – Marcel Cornis-Pope – Forms of the Bulgarian novel – Boyko Penchev

375 375

The – – –

historical novel Introduction – John Neubauer The Hungarian historical novel in regional context – Sándor Hites Recent historical novels and historiographic metafiction in the Balkans – Jasmina Lukic´ The historical novel in Slovenian literature – Igor Grdina The search for a modern, problematizing historical consciousness: Romanian historical fiction and family cycles – Marcel Cornis-Pope The family novel in East-Central Europe: Illustrated with works by Isaac B. Singer and Włodzimierz Odojewski – Zofia Mitosek

463 463 467

Histories of multimedia constructions – Introduction – John Neubauer – National operas in East-Central Europe – John Neubauer – East-Central European cinema and literary history – Dina Iordanova – The silent tale of fury: Stalinism in Yugoslav cinema – Nevena Dakovic´ – Central Europe’s catastrophes on film: The case of István Szabó – Katherine Arens

513 513 514 524 541

Works cited

559

Index of East-Central-European Names: Volume 1

623

List of Contributors

645

– – –

386 401 409 414 416 424 435 441 456

480 493 499 505

548

Editors’ Preface

The publication of this volume on the modern history of East-Central European literatures will roughly coincide with the entry of nine countries from the region into the European Community. This is a momentous historical event, which in all probability will be followed by the joining of the other countries that figure in our History. The lingering economic, political, social, and cultural division of the continent between East and West finally seems to wane and will, we hope, come soon to an end. All contributors to this volume fervently hope so. What can be, however, the general rationale for a project that focuses on the identity of a region that seems eager to assimilate itself to Western Europe? As Editors, we are convinced that our History is not just compatible with the process of European integration but that its ideas provide the very foundations upon which such an integration can successfully progress. For integration can only succeed if the individual nations are willing and able to surrender some of their autonomy in exchange for a recognition of inner diversity as well as of an external commonweal with the neighbors. In other words, the rapprochement between East and West can only progress if there will be rapprochements among the nations within East-Central Europe, based on a recognition of their differences and commonalities. In each of the present countries of the region, literature and literary scholarship have made key contributions to a sense of national identity and to the variegated cultural manifestations that this identity engendered. But myths, legends, and literature in the narrower sense, have also been at work in the construction of various national stories of identity that fomented tensions, strifes, wars, and even ethnic cleansings. We hope that our History will better familiarize each ethnic and national community with the literary culture of its neighbors so that it can perceive itself not in isolation but as part of a family of people. Our History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe has two distinguished affiliations. This volume inaugurates a new subseries on regional histories within the Comparative History of Literatures in European Language, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association; it also is part of the Literary History Project at the University of Toronto, led by professors Mario Valdés and Linda Hutcheon. We have greatly profited from comments and criticisms made by the members of the Coordinating Committee and its two referees. Mario Valdés and Linda Hutcheon gave us invaluable help, advice, and encouragement throughout the long years this volume, and those that will follow, were in process of gestation. We also want to acknowledge our debt to those scholars who took part in the original conceptualization and planning of the project but, for diverse reasons, could not contribute to the writing of this book. Above all we owe a gratitude to all our contributors, who wrote the bulk of this volume and responded promptly and graciously to our many editorial queries and suggestions. Special thanks are due to those who consented to have their contribution integrated into larger essays.

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Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgments Great many organizations generously supported the making of this volume. We are deeply indebted to them and wish to express here our gratitude to: – – – –

–

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto for providing the original grant; The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) for providing five Fellowships during the academic year 1999/2000; The Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) for providing subsidy towards the incidental costs of the project; The Netherlands Research Board (NWO), the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), NIAS, the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Theater Institute, and the Allard Pierson Foundation for contributing to the costs of a Conference that was held in the summer of 2000 in Wassenaar, the Netherlands. Virginia Commonwealth University, its College of Humanities and Sciences and its English Department for granting one of the editors paid study-research leave and for helping with editing and travel costs.

Individual contributors have received grants and support from their home institutions or from various funding agencies. We list here those that have come to our attention: The article of Epp Annus and Robert Hughes was supported with a grant by the Research Support Scheme of the Open Society Support Foundation. Last but not least we would like to express our thanks to Isja Conen at John Benjamins Publishing Company for helping to set up the new sub-series in which this History appears, and for guiding this volume through the editing and printing process in a friendly, patient, and efficient manner.


As General Editor of the Literary History Project, I wish to give an outline of the origin and extraordinary story of the development and realization of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. The Literary History Project began in January 1996, but its roots go back to 1929 when Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, renamed in 1945 as Annales, economies, societés, civilizations. The addition of “civilizations” to the scope of historical research moved social history closer to the concerns of literary history. In the Zaharoff lecture for 1978–79, The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History, Paul Ricoeur described the Annales School in these terms: “Neutral observation, the cult of erudition, empiricism, determinism of the fortuitous, methodological individualism — these form the methodological constellation that the École des Annales set itself the task of dismantling. In contrast to the indifference of the positivist historian who observes the historical past from outside as one would study some mineral, they [historians of the Annales School] stress the continual interference between past and present and do not hesitate to consider current events as shedding light on connections in past history which, up to then, had passed unnoticed” (8–9). The Annales School offered two fundamental lessons for a rethinking of literary history: (1) that history is, not unlike a geologically mature meandering river, a discontinuous process of starts and stops of major ruptures and of constant returns; (2) that historical facts become events when they are contextualized. Empirical facts out of context are historically irrelevant; only in context do they gradually gain in meaning until they constitute historical events. Our concern in the Literary History Project was to move beyond empirical literary history as we have come to know it at the end of the twentieth century. In order to translate the Annales School social history into literary history, we had to devise an efficient way of contextualizing literature within the social world. In 1994 I presented a position paper on rethinking literary history to a meeting in Bellagio under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. The paper proposed a structure that would begin with the empirical framework of the land, the people, and the basic data of their social history; it would continue with an analysis of the institutions and cultural centers which formed the literary culture. The third part of the proposal called for a historical account of the cultural imaginary. Discontinuity would thus be offset by both the empirical framework and the history of cultural institutions that promote and hinder creativity in all literary cultures. And the problem of contextualization would also be addressed since the cultural discourse of the third part would be contained within the two previous historical constructs. Two promising concrete proposals emerged from the meeting, one on the literary cultures of East-Central Europe and the other on the literary cultures of Latin America. My colleague Linda Hutcheon and I applied for funding for the two, and in November 1995 we received word that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto would support the two projects for five years (1996–2001).

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The East-Central Europe project team met at the University of Toronto for the first time in the Spring of 1996, followed by a second meeting in 1997 and a third meeting in 1999. One year later a meeting of contributors tookplace in Wassenaar, the Netherlands under the auspices of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). The greatest challenge facing this project was organizing and editing the work of more than one hundred contributors writing in ten different languages and, above all, bringing the individual contributions in relation to each other. The local and national histories had never yet been regarded as a history of the East-Central European literary cultures. This new history from 1800 to 1989 encompasses the final decline of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of national revivals, world wars, the falling and lifting of the Iron Curtain, and, most recently, the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Suspicions and latent forms of cultural nationalism somehow had to be set aside in the pursuit of an East-Central European cultural history. There is perhaps no other region in the world wherein the political borders have changed more often than in East-Central Europe, a region that encompasses, in our definition, the contested area between Germany and Austria to the West and Russia to the East, the Baltic Sea to the North, and Greece and Turkey in the South. But the political chaos does not begin to address the cultural diversity of the region. In 1900 there were more than forty two million German speakers in the area, fifteen million Poles, thirteen and a half million Ukrainians, almost ten million Romanians, more than eight million Magyars, seven and a half million Jews, six million Byelorussians, four and a half million Serbs, more than four million Greeks, more than three million Bulgarians, almost three million Croats, two and a half million Turks in Europe, two million Slovaks, almost two million Lithuanians, more than a million Slovenes, 850,000 Albanians, 820,000 Gypsies, 742,000 Italians outside of Italy, 693,000 Macedonians, 612,000 Bosnians, 540,000 Carpatho-Rusyns, 500,000 Zekelys, 402,000 Friulians, 294,000 Montenegrins, 249,000 Armenians, 200,000 Pomaks, 156,000 Vlachs, 100,000 Kashubes, 93,000 Lusatian Sorbs, 67,000 Wends, 56,000 Gagauz and 28,000 Ladins. And all of these ethnolinguistic groups had active literary cultures contact with each other. This amounts to the greatest cultural diversity in the world, without a stable dominant power from within, but German pressure from the west, Russian from the east and, historically Turkish from the south. The challenge of mapping the entwined cultural diversity of this area is nothing short of the greatest single challenge to comparative literary history. It was this diversity that led the initial team at Bellagio to search for a working model for cultural transference. The model that was developed was the concept of cultural node. The concept of node is a rich metaphorical alternative to the traditional metaphors of organicism. In our context it is the starting point for multiple derivations; it can also be taken as a point in a network at which the multiple lines of development come together, or, to put it in broader terms, the point that is the hub of the network. Through the creative talents of the East-Central European project editors four key nodes have been discerned: the temporal — these are the watershed dates that separate different periods of development; the institutional — the social structures that become the means of organizing literary culture; topographical nodes — the cultural areas or locations that become the centrifugal disseminators of their imaginary and, at the same time, function as centripetal centers of attraction, drawing writers, poets, publishers, and artists into their orbit of interaction; finally,


xv

there are also figural nodes — historical as well as imaginary subjects, but also stereotypes, texts, and personified objects of great variety that galvanize ideas attracted to a basic image or, in broader terms, to a sociocultural symbol. It should, therefore, be understood that these nodes act as cultural attractors and, working together, create diverse focal points in the history of East-Central Europe, where distinct sources of literary culture have emerged from the overwhelming diversity of the region to create a dynamic cultural imaginary, always changing, and recreating itself, and yet retaining a specificity that we can generalize as the liminal. We must not forget that this is the literary culture of Mickiewicz, Kafka, Kundera, Lukács, Wiesel, Ionesco, Miłosz, Mrozek, Symborska, and Gombrowiz, to name but a few of the many world authors from East-Central Europe. Life on the threshold or liminality can only be assessed within a dynamic system. Our editors understood that in order to engage this ever changing process, we need points of reference, the attractors, or, as the editors and their team have named them, the cultural nodes of East-Central Europe. Demographic, religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity make East-Central Europe one of the most interesting areas of study, and yet, it is precisely because of this diversity in an age of exacerbated nationalism that this region has no collective historical account. There is a multiplicity of national and local literary histories, but there is nothing that begins to account for the enriching interchange of ideas, images, tropes, and figures throughout the region. A close examination of the organization of Volume One, of its introductory essays and of the extensive cross references that are present throughout, assist the reader in keeping a sense of the whole while reading the specific details. One of the most original facets of this history is the inverted order of the nodal dates in the “Nodes of Political Time.” Most major historians over the last fifty years have pointed out the fallacy of the empirical positivist historian who implicitly denies the vantage point of the present in understanding the past. In this history, the present comes first and we then move progressively back in time with each nodal date. Its enormous advantage, besides the obvious intellectual honesty it postulates, is that it has moved each of the authors to write highly complementary essays as they go back in time from the present or, just yesterday, 1989. Of course there will be occasional readers who will not recognize the full significance of this structure, but interested scholars will find that it allows liberation from pretense and affords an intricate temporal network of events over the last two hundred years in East-Central Europe. The phenomena that a history of literary culture brings out of the intersubjective totality of human experience can only be constituted through traces of documents, circumstances surrounding their authors, and past readings. This goes a long way toward explaining why the reading of history is never a dialogue; the basic premise of the dialogue is the other’s response. Reading this history of literary culture is communication without reciprocity; it is a kind of unilateral friendship wherein the individual voices that have spoken are lost and readers are invited to engage in a dialogue with each other. The dialogue is about the past, or, more precisely, it is about the various ways we can (re)construct it and about the various possibilities in recuperating lost voices. This history, specifically, and the history of literary culture in general, must be understood as a series of disconnected appearances by a variety of voices, each of which requires a new and total reading encounter.

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The history of literary culture is both continuous and discontinuous. Continuous in the sense that an internally interconnected collective of people pass through time, and discontinuous in that neither collective nor historical experience is homogeneous. The interpretation the diverse authors give this history can be optimistic insofar as they lean toward the ideal of community consciousness but it can also be (without this appearing as a contradiction) a tragic recounting of the ambiguity of the human creation that is forever beginning and deflecting despair. Such is the history of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe. The justification for this vast enterprise and the countless hours spent in discussion, writing, and editorial adjustment, needs to be articulated in more general terms since it goes beyond the specificities of East-Central Europe. The reason for writing such a history is the discovery of values both writers and readers find and develop in their societies. It is for this reason that the false objectivity of neo-positivism must be rejected. This false objectivity constructs a history where there are no men and women, where there are no human values or aspirations, no human feelings and deceit; there are only structures, forces, and institutions. Lest we lose sight of this historiographic process, let us be reminded that just as universal history does not exist, absolute singularities do not either. The historical process includes social forces, ideas that become a collective will, but we must never forget that great poets in every age create unique and rare works that approach singularity and in this case a fabled but unknown territory of the imaginary — the literary cultures of East-Central Europe. These rare instances of unique creation are part of the life-world. The present history has had the task of contextualizing these rare moments of creativity in order to explain their social dimensions of influence and collective power. How does one read this history? Its unity is not in the voices that narrate, nor in the literary phenomena described since there are many languages, literatures, and cultures involved. The unity of the history is in the reader who reads as an explorer.

Mario J. Valdés University of Toronto


We give in the text the full original title for all works mentioned, followed by an English translation and the date of publication in brackets. Original book titles are italized; articles are given in quotation marks. We follow the MLA Style Manual and use no footnotes. Quotations and references in the text contain only the page number(s) and the minimum amount of information readers will need in order to find the full bibliographical entry in the final consolidated WORKS CITED. This WORKS CITED records all the works mentioned and/or quoted. We have opted for one composite bibliography in lieu of separate ones at the end of chapters or sections, both for reasons of consistency and in order to provide quick and complete information. The entries are listed alphabetically, following the general order of the Latin alphabet. The alphabetization ignores the effect that diacritical marks have on the order of the alphabet in a number of languages.

Books The bibliographical entries start with the author’s name, the title in italics and its English translation in brackets; this is accompanied, wherever necessary, by the original date of publication, followed by the place, the publisher and the year of publication of the edition used in the volume. In a number of cases we list subsequently the standard English edition, though no systematic effort has been made to find all the existing translations. Quotations are documented to the edition listed first.

Articles in collections The name of the author is followed by the original title in quotation marks and the English translation in brackets. This is followed by the name of the editor, unless all of the essays in the volume are by the same author. The place of publication, publisher, and year are followed by the page range of the article in the volume.

Articles in journals The name of the author is followed by the original title in quotation marks and the English translation in brackets. The subsequent title of the Journal is given in italics, followed, where sensible, by the translation of the title and/or the place of publication. The entry concludes with the volume and, where needed, the issue number, preceded by a dot. The year of publication is given in brackets, followed by the page range.

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Collective volumes without an editor Listed alphabetically under the original title. Where no place or publisher could be found we enter n.p. For serialized works that run through a great many issues we indicate only the volume and issues of the journal without the pages. Special issues of journals are occasionally listed under their title (e.g., the “Budapest Roundtable,” published in Cross Currents). Places of publication that have commonly accepted English forms are rendered in English. We have eliminated from the publisher’s name the initials and the first name, as well as words meaning “publisher” or “press.” Unless stated otherwise, translations in this volume are provided by the authors of the individual articles.

Films Listed alphabetically under their English title, followed, in brackets, by the original title. Both titles are italicized. We then specify the country where the film was produced, the director’s name, and the year the film was released.

In Preparation

History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries Volume 2 Part III Shifting topographies of literary cultures 1. 2.

In search of East-Central Europe: Defining boundaries and cultural identities Cities as sites of hybrid identity and polycultural production A. Literary and Cultural Production in Metropols and Marginocentric Cities B. Representations of Multicultural Cities: Monologic vs. Heteroglossic Discourses

3.

Regional sites of cultural hybridization A. Multicultural Corridors and Transnational (Real or Imaginary) Spaces B. Regions as Cultural Interfaces

4.

The reconstruction of imaginary communities: Native to diasporic

Volume 3 Part IV Framing literary institutions Introduction 1.

Literary histories and textbooks

2.

Theater National Awakening and Realism in Theater Modernist Theater Theater under the Communist Regime

3.

Journals: Case studies

4.

Censorship: Case studies

5.

Institutionalizations of folklore

xx

In Preparation

Volume 4 Part V The making of literary figures 1.

The writer as national icon: Case studies and critiques

2.

Heroes (figures of male identity)

3.

Figures of collective self

4.

Figures of trauma

5.

Figures of female identity

6.

Figures of the other

7.

Figures of mediation

Part VI Spatial and temporal coordinates 1.

Epilogue and outlook after 1989

2.

Chronological tables A. Chronological Table of the National Literary Traditions B. Chronological Table of Interchanges

General introduction Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer

Why do we read or write literary histories? The answer seemed obvious through much of the previous centuries. Literature, regarded as a product and expression of a historical moment, a culture, and, above all, of a nation’s spirit, has been traditionally taught as a historical subject in schools and universities. The answer seems less evident today. Our renewed interest in historicity involves a continuous conflict and negotiation between past and present, contemporary and historical perspectives. Do historical contextualizations not lead away from the “pleasure of the text”? Why should we be involved today in writing or reading a massive four-volume History of Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe? Perhaps because the pleasure of reading involves more than what one finds between the book’s covers, more, indeed, than the documentary value that historians readily attributed to it. History’s mirror in literature is ambiguous and unreliable. A second, more urgent reason exists for reconsidering literary history from a regional angle. Literary texts do not merely reflect particular historical and cultural moments; more importantly, they constitute history through reading and rereading, they shape the personal and collective mentality of readers who participate in the social construction of reality. But, until recently, only national literary histories have presented literature as an active historical agent: literature, including national myths, legends, and folklore, has been conceived by these histories as an expression of a people as well as an agent shaping its identity. Today, amidst violent clashes between technological-commercial globalization and ethnocentric xenophobia, we need to rethink literature’s agency in history. In East-Central Europe, a region poised at the crossroads of its history, not only literature, but the political culture itself will benefit from a rethinking that emphasizes transnational interactions. May the present book, the first of a four-volume project, contribute both to a critical rereading of the East-Central European literary cultures and to transnational literary historiography in general.

I. Defining the Region In June 1989, just a few months prior to the great political changes, a round-table discussion on Central Europe was held in Budapest, involving the writers H. C. Artmann, Péter Esterházy, Danilo Kiš, György Konrád, Claudio Magris, Czesław Miłosz, Adam Michnik, and others. When in his opening paper Miłosz defined Central Europe as “all the countries [including the Baltic states] that in August 1939 were the real or hypothetical object of a trade between the Soviet Union and Germany” (Budapest Round-Table 18), Artmann angrily objected that the Baltic countries belonged to Scandinavia, and his country, Austria, was omitted only because it was lucky enough to regain independence in 1955 (22). Artmann’s response shifted the context from 1939 to the post-war period, but its implications were clear: Austria was a Central-European country and Miłosz had no right to identify Central Europe with the Soviet-dominated countries

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Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer

of Eastern Europe. In turn, Claudio Magris remarked that Central Europe was not identical with the German historico-political designation of Mitteleuropa. The latter connoted “the encounter of German culture with the other cultures of the same region, but its predominant implication was that of a German or at best German-Hungarian supremacy in Central Europe” (29). Jacques le Rider’s useful study, Mitteleuropa. Auf den Spuren eines Begriffs (Central Europe: Tracing a Concept), seems to struggle with the same problem, for the original French title, L’Europe Centrale — L’Idée germanique de Mitteleuropa (Central Europe — The German Idea of Mitteleuropa), is rather ambiguous. Does the author mean that L’Europe Centrale is the equivalent of Mitteleuropa, or does he point out a discrepancy between them? The answer depends on the punctuation we insert between main title and subtitle. Discussions on the eastern part of Europe frequently bog down in such terminological and conceptual quagmires. Terms such as Mitteleuropa, “Central Europe,” “Eastern Europe,” and “East-Central Europe” each imply different mappings and political conceptions. We must begin by pondering their differences. Mitteleuropa This term represents a German perspective on both the eastern part of Europe and on German culture itself. Whenever Germans conceived of themselves as Mitteleuropäer, they claimed a middle ground between East and West. The German interest in eastern Europe manifested itself already in the German religious and commercial penetration of north-eastern Europe during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, in the form of a series of individual, unplanned, and often accidental events that nineteenth-century historians have reinterpreted as a systematic imperial Drang nach Osten (a kind of Eastward ho!). In modern times, Le Rider suggests, Mitteleuropa became significant whenever German culture experienced a crisis or underwent a deep transformation of its geopolitical identity, such as after the Thirty-Year War, after Napoleon, and after the creation of a German Reich in 1871 (9–10). The term occasioned a hot debate during World War I, when Friedrich Naumann envisioned a post-war Mitteleuropa that would unite Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and all the nations “that belong neither to the Anglo-French western alliance nor to the Russian Empire” (Central Europe 1). He predicted that two new post-war trenches would emerge, one stretching from the Lower Rhine to the Alps, the other from Courland to either the right or left of Romania. The trench dividing Germany and Austria-Hungary would disappear (8). The book sold more than 100,000 copies within a year. Naumann is regarded today as a father of German liberalism (the cultural foundation of the German liberal party, the FDP, carries his name), yet his ideological vision is troubling, even if (or precisely because) his leading principle — emphasizing large-scale industry and super-national organization — resonates in our age of globalization. Naumann thought that in economics, politics, and the struggle for survival bigger was better, more beautiful and more efficient. “The spirit of large-scale industry and super-national organisation has seized politics,” he writes (Central Europe 4): a Czech army, a Croatian Chief of Staff, an exclusively Hungarian Foreign Ministry, a Slovenian economic policy, or a Galician treasury would be unimaginable to him (Central Europe 26). Today’s globalization tolerates all these formations (except for the Galician treasury), though they are economically inefficient; the current

General introduction

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economic globalization is partly balanced by a principle of political self-determination that tore Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia apart. Naumann thought little of self-determination: since the German Empire was founded on the German national ideal, the Prussian Poles were “neither so numerous nor so powerful as to come into consideration as partners in the Government” (Central Europe 13). He recognized but vastly underestimated the threat that the ethnic minorities of the Monarchy represented to his envisioned Mitteleuropa. The Hungarians, he thought, knew that they had to rely on a major non-Slavic power to remain quasi-independent; the Slavs and the Romanians had less to expect than the Hungarians from a merger of Germany and the Monarchy, but he hoped that their dislike of Russia would drive them into the arms of a Mitteleuropa (Central Europe 20). Naumann insisted to the end of his life that Germany’s capitulation did not kill his vision. And, indeed, Mitteleuropa was captured in the 1930s and 1940s “by the pseudo-science of German geopolitics, and fortified with a strong injection of race theory,” proving right all those who considered it as the slogan of a political force that “sought control of the European continent from its German center” (Meyer 2–3). For the non-German East-Central European peoples, Mitteleuropa became synonymous with German expansionism, suppression, and annexation. From an Austrian perspective Mitteleuropa always looked different. For Metternich, who had no interest in expanding the Habsburg Empire eastward, it meant a European balance of power with a Danubian Habsburg territory in the center. But Prussia’s growing hegemony forced Austria to shift eastward in the compromise of 1867, at the cost of creating a problematic multicultural state. Some Austrians contemplated a different Mitteleuropa. The writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal envisioned an Austrian-centered spiritual Mitteleuropa even before the publication of Naumann’s book, and in his speech of October 31, 1916, Österreich im Spiegel seiner Dichtung (Austria in the Mirror of its Literature), he presented an Austrian alternative to Naumann’s concept. During the 1920s, he supported this idea by initiating the Salzburg Festivals and through a steady stream of speeches and essays. But if his intellectual and artistic Mitteleuropa was preferable to Naumann’s political vision, it was naïve and seriously flawed for turning away from politics altogether. Hofmannsthal innocently considered the Salzburg Festivals as the cultural expression of a “Bavarian-Austrian tribe” (Stamm), and he hoped that the crisis of the twenties would be overcome by a “conservative revolution,” followed by a new Reich. The right-wing historian Heinrich von Srbik used similar notions to resuscitate Metternich’s idea of Mitteleuropa. Hitler’s Anschluß and Austria’s neutralization in 1955 silenced such speculations and dreams for a while, and when Germany’s center of gravity shifted to the East through the reunification, Polish and Czech preoccupations with German hegemony revived and intensified. Finally, Germany’s well-intended but questionable role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia has fed similar fears in the Balkans. Mitteleuropa (and to a lesser degree Zentraleuropa) is a historically loaded term then, which focalizes the eastern part of Europe from a German perspective, with explicit or implicit hegemonic intentions. When Naumann wrote his book, rich German and Yiddish transnational cultures were still alive, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Danube delta, with centers in Prague, Budapest, Lemberg, Vilnius, Czernowitz and elsewhere. That culture, epitomized by the names of Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel, Paul Celan and Rosa Ausländer, Elias Canetti, Joseph

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Roth and Karl Franzos, Sholem Aleichem as well as Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Musil, supported hundreds of newspapers, journals, theaters, and cultural societies. German, and especially German-Jewish, culture acted as a glue, an integrating force, among the various ethnic groups. But these genuinely transnational German cultures of Mitteleuropa went up in smoke in the concentration camps, became uprooted when a great many Germans of Eastern Europe were expelled after the war, and further decimated during the Jewish exodus of the following decades. The concept of Mitteleuropa is useful if we seek to understand the history of German and Yiddish cultures in the region, but their disappearance makes a present- or future-oriented use of the term either vacuous or a euphemism for a new German expansion. The term cannot reconcile the nations and ethnic groups of Eastern Europe. “Eastern Europe” If Mitteleuropa is both linguistically and ideologically oriented towards the German cultures, “Eastern Europe” suggests Russian hegemony. As Larry Wolff has shown, the term was introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when east/west distinctions became more important in Europe than the traditional north/south ones: it was the intellectual work of the Enlightenment to bring about that modern reorientation of the continent which produced Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Poland and Russia would be mentally detached from Sweden and Denmark, and associated instead with Hungary and Bohemia, the Balkan lands of Ottoman Europe, and even the Crimea on the Black Sea. (5)

This Eastern Europe, mainly “invented” by the French philosophes of the Enlightenment, acquired a new meaning during the Cold War (1945–1989), when the region, including the GDR, became associated with the Iron Curtain and often labeled as the “Soviet bloc.” While the Iron Curtain is now finally lifted, the term “Eastern Europe” remains highly problematic because historical usage associated it with the hegemonic aspirations of Russia and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in a purely geographical sense Eastern Europe extends to the Ural Mountains. Taking that border seriously, one would have to include Georgian, Armenian and other literatures that had historically relatively little contact with the European literatures west of Russia. “Central Europe” The idea of a supra-national Central Europe free of German domination has been popular for a long time. In 1848 the Czech František Palacký called for a federalized Habsburg Monarchy, for he was convinced that only such a Central European federation could withstand a PrussianGerman domination and a Russian expansion (see our section on 1848). At the end of World War I, T. G. Masaryk argued in his November 1, 1918 memorandum to Woodrow Wilson (see Henry Cord Meyer, “Mitteleuropa” 340) and in his book The New Europe: The Slav Standpoint (1918) for the political integration of the many small nations located between the Germans and the Russians. In 1942, Stanisław Vincenz, a native of Eastern Galicia, wrote from Budapest: “If Central Europe does not unite its forces into some kind of intellectual and cultural alliance — each one of its parts will by necessity become the dependency of a greater unit” (Kiss 130).


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Central Europe was by that time already dominated, and indeed mostly occupied, by Germany, and the defeat of the Germans in 1945 merely shifted the domination to the Soviet Union. In 1946, István Bibó lucidly analyzed the predicament of the small countries of the region in A kelet-europai kisállamok nyomorusága (The Misery of the East-European Small States). The idea of Central Europe reemerged in the 1980s, first in Czesłav Miłosz’s 1981/82 Harvard lectures (Witness), and then in Milan Kundera’s 1984 article “The Central European Tragedy” in The New York Review of Books. Within a few years a “discourse community” came about that included also Danilo Kiš, (who left Yugoslavia for Paris remarking “I spiritually moved to Central Europe”), György Konrád, and, hesitatingly, Péter Esterházy. The journal Cross Currents provided for a while a forum by organizing the Lisbon (1988) and Budapest (1989) conferences. These and other writers and intellectuals from both sides of the Iron Curtain envisioned Central Europe as an intermediate zone between East and West with a tradition and culture of its own. Central Europe was reinvented in order to define a cultural and political space between Western Europe and the Soviet Union. Miłosz’s remark, “I was born and grew up on the very borderline between Rome and Byzantium” (Witness 4), refers only to the contested religious identity of his childhood environment, but there were similar ethnic strips of liminality. Miłosz admitted that Central Europe was no clearly-defined geographical entity, but claimed that even if one could not easily trace its boundaries on a map, one could draw sufficiently clear “mental lines” that seem more durable than the borders of states (“Attitudes” 116–17). These “mental lines” connect Miłosz’s “baroque Wiłno” with the “differently baroque Prague or the medieval-Renaissance Dubrovnik.” They also foreground certain ways of feeling and thinking, “a tone and a sensibility not to be found elsewhere” (116). Miłosz found this unique tone and sensibility in an “awareness of history,” in the cultivation of “irony” as a response to “self-pity,” in a skepticism towards a Marxist philosophy of history, and in “dark visions of the future” — but also in “civic commitment” and “utopianism” (117–22). Whether these are not just aspects of his personal worldview, or whether this sensibility could not be found beyond Central Europe, were matters that others were soon to raise. For many artists and intellectuals of the region, for instance the Hungarian film director István Szabó (see Arens’s article on him in this volume), “Central Europe” was and remains a kind of spiritual home, but it is also divisive, for several groups came to sense its exclusionary character. Joseph Brodsky (“Dostoyevsky”) and other Russian writers were outraged that they, who suffered so much under Soviet totalitarianism, were now suddenly associated with the oppressing power. Maria Todorova and other Balkan writers and intellectuals protested, in turn, that the idea of “Central Europe” was a means of pushing the Balkans further east. Todorova’s book Imagining the Balkans is an attempt to rehabilitate the Balkans, to cleanse them from the image of savagery that Western observers ascribed to them throughout much of the twentieth century. She does not try to push the wilderness further south, but recognizes instead some of the positive effects of the long Ottoman occupation of the Balkans. Yet, in a defensive move against “Central Europe” she is herself divisive with respect to the North, “pealing off” from it the rehabilitated notion of the Balkans. It remains to be seen if the people of the region will respond positively to the recuperation of the Balkans as an integrating cultural concept, overcoming the ethnic, political, and economic forces that are still pitting them against each other.

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Undeniably, the label “Central Europe” helped many to associate themselves with the West and to disassociate themselves from the more “primitive” or even “barbaric” people to the east and south. Schöpflin defined Central Europe as a “transitional, transmittory and liminal” area between “Latin and Orthodox” lands, a “part of Western Christianity” (20) that he carefully distinguished from lands associated with Eastern Christianity and Islam. As Miłosz put it, the entire region east of Germany and west of Moscow has been until recently perceived as a “white space [that] could have easily borne the inscription Ubi leones (Where the lions are), and that domain of wild beasts included such cities as Prague … Warsaw, Budapest and Belgrade” (Witness 7). Objectors to the idea of “Central Europe” argue that it merely banishes Miłosz’s imaginary lions to the East and the South. Defining East-Central Europe For the more modest aims of this literary history the crucial question is whether we could agree on a less divisive term for the region than either Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, or the Balkans. Hence we have opted, after much deliberation, for the somewhat cumbersome designation “EastCentral Europe,” in which we include the area from the Baltic countries, through Central Europe to the Balkans. This relatively recent and geographically somewhat vague term may be preferable to the others discussed because it has fewer undesirable historical connotations, though we admit that it is not perfect. The most ambitious attempt to define it historically is a little-known article of 1983 by the Hungarian historian Jeno˝ Szu˝cs, which develops ideas from Bibó’s already mentioned study on the small states of Eastern Europe. Both Bibó and Szu˝cs were concerned with the (lack of) democratic traditions in the region. Bibó, writing on the eve of the Cold War, speaks of Eastern Europe, while Szu˝cs, writing on the eve of perestroyka, wants to peel off an East-Central segment from the East, admitting that it fell behind the West in developing its democratic traditions but claiming that it is, nevertheless, more democratic than the Europe east of it. In Szu˝cs’s view, East-Central Europe remains a region of Western Europe, though the inclusion of “East” in its name suggests that “modification of the structure of the Western types of models and norms could be detected in almost everything” (156). Szu˝cs’s subtle and densely argued historical essay was severely attacked in Maria Todorova’s book for promoting a tripartite division of Europe: an occidental Europa, a “truncated” Eastern and South-Eastern Europe under the sphere of influence of Byzantium, and an “East-Central Europe.” But we need not conceive it as a variant of the above-discussed “Central Europe.” Indeed, we adopt the designation without Szu˝cs’s assumptions, as a more comprehensive and less exclusionary term. For our purposes the unifying feature of East-Central Europe is the struggle of its peoples against the German and Russian hegemonic threats. In this sense, the region is a liminal and transitional space between the powers in the west and the east, a long but relatively narrow strip stretching from the Baltic countries in the north to Macedonia in the south. To the west it is clearly bounded by the hegemonic German cultures of Germany and Austria; to the east it is hemmed in by Russia’s political and cultural sphere, but the border is, admittedly, less distinct, for the Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldavia were both part of Russia’s hegemonic power and suppressed by it. Their literatures developed both in tandem with, and in opposition to the dominant Russian one.


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Several additional forces shaped the literatures and cultures of the region, giving rise to internal differentiations. The most important of these is the Ottoman Empire, which occupied the southern part of the region for centuries and decisively contributed to the culture of the Balkans. Its living cultural legacy includes a sizable Muslim population, and a wealth of national myths, legends, and works of literature about fighting the Turkish invaders. This legacy continues to shape the region’s notions of ethnicity and nationhood, as evidenced in the function of the Kosovo myths in recent conflicts. Though our literary history of East-Central Europe covers, for pragmatic reasons, only the last two centuries, it has had to deal with the literary afterlife of the Turkish occupation, because of the revival of folklore and the construction of foundational texts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The northern end of the region, the Baltic countries, are not as differentiated culturally as the Balkans. Struggle against German and Russian political, commercial, and cultural interests has been as crucial here as for the areas lying south of it. While Sweden also played a hegemonic role in the region, its culture was not significantly different from the indigenous ones. Defining East-Central Europe as a region struggling against neighboring hegemonic powers should not divert, of course, attention from the internal differences and internecine conflicts. The region’s remarkable ethnic, linguistic, and religious variety led to emancipatory struggles that were as often directed against powers within as against the external domination. The Hungarian struggle against the Habsburg power was, for instance, paralleled by the struggle of the minorities in Hungary against Hungarian hegemony. When in 1827 Hungarian was proclaimed the language of instruction in schools, this was a victory of the Hungarians against the Habsburgs, but a blow to the Slovak, Croatian, and Romanian struggles to emancipate their language. Similar clashes between hegemonic and minority interests finally doomed Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Marking these internal conflicts complicates but does not invalidate attempts to conceptualize an East-Central Europe. The shaping of ethnic and national identities may have created a variety of ethnic conflicts, but the process was fairly uniform throughout the region and it paradoxically also interrelated these cultures. The national accounts of the region’s history not only ignored or suppressed the intra-regional connections and exchanges, they also disregarded the power of the national awakening in neighboring nations.

II. Conjunctures and Disjunctures in East-Central European Literary History There are striking parallels, indeed, structural interrelations, between the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism and the birth of national literatures and literary studies. Just as the concept of literature emerged in the late eighteenth century as distinct from other forms of writing (history, science, philosophy, etc.), just as literature came to insist that it be judged by aesthetic rather than religious or moral principles, and just as literary studies asked for an institutional space of their own within the universities, so, too, the various ethnic cultures wished to become emancipated members of the community of nations. And it was literature and literary studies that carried the banner of national aspirations. The institutionalization of literature and literary studies went hand in hand with the emergence of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe — a nationalism that was (unlike its twentieth-century variant) less strident and

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conflictual, for it aimed primarily at reforming the country and promoting its specific contribution to the “great family” of European cultures. These interrelated processes encompassed conjunctures as well as disjunctures; the particularist insistence on being different (from other kinds of writings or people) always implied also a desire to participate in a commonwealth (of letters, of scholarly disciplines, of the nations in Europe). But the particularist and universalist forces constantly shifted and were hardly ever in balance. Literary studies were initiated in the years before and after 1800 by the romantics, who formulated pan-European literary histories in the universalist spirit of the Enlightenment (an instance where the period terms overlap). Their idea was articulated in public lectures by the Schlegel brothers and Coleridge, for neither of them had a university appointment. The shift from a cosmopolitan to a particularist approach is evident already in the last of Friedrich Schlegel’s public lecture (Vienna 1812) in which he declared that the foremost business of poetry was “to preserve and to glorify those great national memories that are in the dim past of a national history” (Ausgabe 6: 15). The national emphasis on literature led to its institutionalization. University chairs for modern literatures were gradually established in many European countries during the first half of the nineteenth century, in order to provide literary histories and textbooks for teaching the vernacular languages and literatures in schools. And thus, the institutionalization of literary studies became incorporated into unwritten but powerful national agendas. Literature and literary scholarship acquired a political legitimation, as well as social and academic prestige, by becoming the keepers of the nation’s “soul.” Had the institutionalization of literature gone hand in hand with social and economic development, it would have occurred later in the economically “backward” eastern and southern parts of Europe. Yet the forging of a national identity, which this institutionalization promoted, was not primarily a social-economic matter. The process moved forward relatively slowly in the economically leading countries of England and France, precisely because these countries had already robust self-images. Gustave Lanson’s first great French literary history was published only in 1895, in the aftermath of France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870–71. In Germany, Italy, some Scandinavian, and most East-Central European cultures the institutionalization progressed faster because these societies wanted to further their national identity: constructing a national literature was in these countries a major contribution to the struggle for a national language, culture, and political independence. Studies of vernacular literature were often a prelude to state formation and sometimes even a precondition for it. Gervinus and other German literary historians, for instance, worked towards a unified German state. Germany had in this respect a paradoxical role: key ideas about national literature originated with Herder and the German romantics, but were then used in the national awakenings of Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and other East-Central European countries against the domination of German language and literature. Germany aggravated its identity problem by exporting it eastward. The national awakenings were not directed at the great external powers alone. The Hungarian national awakening and its state-supported projects for a Hungarian national literature soon had to confront the national awakening of the country’s minorities. To complicate matters even further, the “national community” could often be imagined in different configurations. In the Slavic countries, for instance, competing national projects emerged, because the nation could


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be conceived on a pan-Slavic scale, or in terms of federations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, or again in terms of smaller units. In his first literary history, Ferenc Toldy could still conceive of Hungarian literature as everything written in any language within the country’s borders. By the end of the nineteenth century such liberal conceptions of the nation all but disappeared. According to Ernest Gellner, nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist” (Thought 169). The East-Central European poets and philologists contributed in major ways to this invention by constructing texts as well as institutions. We summarize here a complex process that will be discussed in detail in the third volume of our project. Text constructions had taken the form of (1) writing dictionaries; (2) reviving the vernacular poetry; (3) (re)constructing the national literary past, by publishing the oral poetry and the medieval and baroque vernacular literature; (4) writing new national epics and historical fiction; (5) canonizing national poets; and, last but not least, (6) writing national literary histories. The language revival that initiated the national literary project is associated in Hungary with the name of Ferenc Kazinczy, in Bohemia with that of Joseph Dobrovsky, in Romania with Ion Heliade Ra˘dulescu, and in Serbia with Vuk Karadžic´. It was furthered through the construction of dictionaries and grammars, the publication of new journals, and the appearance of young poets writing in the vernacular. The patriotic revival was, however, often divisive, for a cosmopolitan elite continued to regard itself as part of the hegemonic (more “advanced” and “refined”) foreign culture, while the innovators sought to revitalize the local and ethnic vernacular. Although the aristocracy often preferred the hegemonic language and culture, it also supplied the most powerful propagators of the vernacular culture. The concerns of the national awakening cut across the classes. The main movers of the national literary program were often philologists who frequently lagged behind the poets by relying on pre-symbolist and even pre-romantic notions of literature. Thus the first historians of Hungarian and Bulgarian literature, Toldy and Teodorov-Balan, both defined literature in terms of its eighteenth-century meaning as all oral and written texts. They did not differentiate as yet literature from the discourse of ideas; in their eyes, literature had not yet enclosed itself in what Michel Foucault calls “radical intransitivity” (Order 300). The philologists contributed to the national program in three main ways. First, they dug into the national past in order to recover from it forgotten vernacular texts, many of which were heroic songs and ballads about ancient struggles against invaders. The retrieval of the Serb heroic epics in the early nineteenth century, enthusiastically greeted by Goethe, led to a hunt for similar lost poetry in all cultures. But the recovered texts were actually no serendipitous discoveries or rediscoveries: the editing and publishing was shaped by a national demand for foundational texts that would project a proper national self-image. The published texts were therefore rearranged, often even forged, products of the nineteenth century. The famous manuscripts that Václav Hanka published in 1819, claiming that he found them in the castle of Dvu˚r Králové nad Labem two years earlier, were a proud source of artistic inspiration throughout much of the nineteenth century, until Masaryk and his co-workers were able to prove that they were forged by Hanka and his friend, presumably to prove that the Czechs, too, had their own heroic songs. Many other cases of recorded oral poetry are still hotly debated. Almost all nineteenth-century national

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epics and folk songs were manipulated by the philologists, who perceived it as their task to inspire the nation with ancient patriotic texts. Folk tales rarely dealt with ethnic conflicts, but editors injected and dramatized them to help invent a national tradition (Stagl 1235). The philologists also republished medieval and baroque texts to represent glorious chapters in the nation’s history, and, above all, they canonized national poets. They began by reviving older or forgotten poets, but in the later phases of the national revival they canonized nineteenthcentury ones. As we will show in Volume 4, all peoples of East-Central Europe manufactured in this way national icons: the Hungarians glorified Sándor Peto˝fi (whose original family name was Petrovic´), the Poles Adam Miczkiewicz, the Romanians Mihai Eminescu (whose real last name was Eminovici), the Serbs and Montenegrians Petar Njegos, the Czechs Karel Mácha, the Bulgarians Hristo Botev, and the Slovenes France Prešeren. The philologists “sculpted” the national monuments for them. The philological contribution to the national project culminated in the writing of national literary histories that integrated the foundational texts, the revival of medieval texts, the story of the language revival, and the canonization of national poets into single grand narratives. What Benedetto Croce said about De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–71) holds true for most of the East-Central European ones: in “a history, whose protagonist was precisely Italian literature, even Italy; the individual writers were presented only as phases in the general development” (de Sanctis 2: 433). Like de Sanctis, who demanded that the history of Italian literature be also a history of Italy (de Sanctis 2: 421), the East-Central-European literary historians wrote inspiring accounts of the nation’s spiritual fortunes. Piotr Chmielowski remarked in 1899 that, though he could not reconstruct the soul of the nation, he would offer hints as to how Polish literature of the nine last centuries reflected changes in it (Historya 23). Others saw their task in similar terms. National literary histories had archetypal structures, and their stock roles could be filled by various concrete heroes and villains. The nation became thus a collective hero or “logical subject” (Ricoeur 1: 197), whose birth, growth, maturing, and decline were recounted in terms of organic images and stages that followed each other in terms of some higher law. Yet, though the biological metaphor explicitly or implicitly endowed these histories with an element of inevitability, the trajectory was not necessarily linear; it could include jumps, reversals, returns, clean slates, or new beginnings. Indeed, the story could be cast in different generic forms, and assume the shape of a divine comedy, a Bildungsroman, a drama of destiny, or even a national Golgotha. Common to all these scenarios was merely the suppression or exclusion of elements that threatened the integrity of the story. As Ernest Renan remarked, collective amnesia is as important to a nation as shared remembrances (892); forgetting historical errors and other blemishes on the blazonry of the nation are “essential factors in creating a nation” (891). The historians of national literatures, seeking causality, coherence, and destiny, felt compelled to suppress whatever stories threatened their plot construction. Founding and developing literary institutions carried as much importance as constructing texts. National awakenings began with journals and newspapers, often also patriotically oriented publishing houses, theater groups, and societies for the cultivation of the native language and its poetry. The first initiatives were often taken in the provinces, but the primary aim of the later phases became the establishment of nationally representative institutions in the capital city. This


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is how the symbols and vehicles of the national culture, the national academies, the national universities, the national libraries, and the national theaters emerged. Each of these institutions assumed a specific literary function within the national project. The task of the academy was to nurture and guard the language, to generate dictionaries, to further the production of literary histories and textbooks, and to establish guidelines for the instruction of the national language and literature at the secondary and university levels. The universities assumed the task of training the teachers of literature in secondary and higher education and of generating literary histories, textbooks, and other handbooks. The most popular of the national institutions, the national theater, was to stimulate the writing of dramas about the national past, whose production would then become communal celebrations of the nation. Writers could then, in turn, celebrate the opening night of a national theater in fiction, as Mór Jókai did in the first chapter of Kárpáthy Zoltán (1854). The institutionalization of literature enhanced the national character of the capital city, turning it into a symbol. “Every nation has a holy city of which it thinks with piety and pride,” writes Jókai in the same Kárpáthy Zoltán (142). Yet these cities of national pride were also a gathering place for foreign writers and intellectuals, and sites of cosmopolitanism. Every EastCentral European capital city had its German-language newspaper (the venerable Pester Lloyd in Budapest was published until World War II), its German theater, and often its Yiddish one as well. Metropolitan publishers would produce books in a foreign language or in the language of a minority; writers and intellectuals from those minorities and from the neighboring countries would often reside and work abroad (several early texts of Bulgarian national literature, for example, were published in Bucharest). In short, the capitals were not only the fulcrum of the national literary culture but also forces of cultural dispersion and diversification. Reacting to this, all East-Central European countries witnessed populist movements that glorified the countryside and the healthy roots of the national oral culture, vilifying the capital city’s cosmopolitan culture, its industrial gloom, its decadence, and its immigrant Germans, Jews, and other foreigners. Even Béla Bartók, who later championed intercultural understanding, could write on August 15, 1905 to Irmy Jurkovics: “A real Hungarian music can originate only if there is a real Hungarian gentry. This is why the Budapest public is so absolutely hopeless. The place has attracted a haphazardly heterogeneous, rootless group of Germans and Jews; they make up the majority of Budapest’s population. It’s a waste of time trying to educate them in a national spirit. Much better to educate the [Hungarian] provinces” (Letters 50). The national literary projects were themselves Janus-faced and assumed a double function: they sought self-determination and liberation from external hegemonic powers but they suppressed internal ethnic minorities that attempted to construct their own vernacular literatures as expressions of their own “imagined communities.” The German national literature that Friedrich Schlegel championed in the service of Metternich was rejected by the Hungarian national awakening that was, nota bene, inspired by Herder and the German romantics. In turn, the Hungarian project of national literature did not recognize the Croatian, Romanian, Slovak, and other ethnic projects, which developed their own (set of) national poets, texts, and institutions. While the details of how literature was “nationalized” and institutionalized in East-Central Europe will be worked out in vol. 3, it is important to point out here that the general mechanism was the same everywhere, though it was set in motion at different times, ran at different speeds,

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and functioned under different conditions, which prevents us from giving region-wide dates for its different phases. More importantly perhaps, significant segments of the literary culture did not participate in this process or even opposed it openly. As the case of the historical novel shows (see Section 3 of Part II in this volume), patriotic literature often changed its voice and sometimes spoke with a double tongue. With such caveats in mind, we can perceive in the decades around 1900 and in most EastCentral European literary cultures a weakening of the native thrust and a growing desire to open towards the West by initiating literary trends and movements that can broadly be called modernist. As Péter Krasztev argues in his article on modernization and Modernism (Part II, Section 1) the western currents arrived with a time lag, and, more importantly, they formed eclectic mixtures, both with other modernist currents and with the resilient national and populist trends. The East-Central European modernist currents tended to have much stronger national components than their Western progenitors, but they were also more open and ready to enter into hybrid combinations. Several scholars have argued that the peripheral combinations were often more fruitful and interconnective than their metropolitan originators. Unfortunately, World War I brought to an end the first modernist moves to interconnect the “nationalized” literary cultures of the region, and the postwar remaking of the borders tended to aggravate the divisions. While the intra-regional literary contacts stagnated in the interwar decades, the contacts and exchanges with the West reached unprecedented depths and sophistication — until the arrival of Hitler, the outbreak of another war, and the establishment of communist regimes radically brought to an end, at least temporarily, the modernist and avantgarde currents in the region. Our sections on 1945 and 1948 suggest that the various national literary systems underwent quite similar changes, mainly because the national Communist Party leaders followed the same directives from Moscow in matters of literary and cultural policy. But the articles also show that the appearance of uniformity is deceptive: while the Baltic countries, annexed to the Soviet Union, experienced a brutal suppression of their national culture, Tito promulgated a specific brand of Yugoslav nationalism in order to keep his country from falling apart, and forms of nationalism were cultivated also in Ceaus¸escu’s Romania and in Albania. Likewise, while a number of countries experienced a thaw in their literary culture immediately after the death of Stalin, Czechoslovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian literary life continued to be dominated by Stalinist methods at least until the early sixties. Marxist internationalism did not bring the literary cultures of East-Central European countries closer to each other, though the number of inter-regional translations greatly increased — primarily for authors that followed the party line or writers of the past that could be classed as belonging to the progressive patrimony (and that patrimony kept changing, as the article on Bulgaria in the 1948 section shows). We may conclude, then, that all of the literary cultures in the region passed through nationalist, modernist, and communist phases, though these phases were neither homogeneous, nor cohesive, nor fully synchronized. Whatever its limitations, such a division, based on the political events in the region, may provide more useful general guidelines than the traditional periods and movements adopted from Western models. Our historical division does not and cannot disregard the traditional and contemporary orientation towards the West; it merely foregrounds the regional and local determinants of literary life.


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III. Historiographical Issues Not all nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary histories were limited to a single nation. But most histories of genres and literary periods were, and the literature of East-Central Europe was absent even from Mihály Babits’s and Antal Szerb’s comparative histories. Karl Dieterich’s German compilation from 1911 is the only regional history so far. Two main reasons may be cited for this glaring omission. First, Western scholars know too little about East-Central European languages and literatures. Friedrich Schlegel devoted one of his 1812 Vienna lectures to the literatures of Northern and Eastern Europe (229–50), but found no followers. Second, East-Central European comparatists have traditionally focused on the region’s ties with the West, producing numerous studies on Hungarian/German, Polish/French, Romanian/Italian and other East/West relations, but very few that interrelated the Hungarian, Polish, Czech and Romanian literatures. The Soviet-enforced co-operation between the countries after Word War II led to a preparatory conference on such a volume in 1962 but went no further; literary scholarship did not try to emulate the economic co-operation of East-European countries in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Today, intra-regional research is done primarily in Hungary, and research projects on the sub-regions, such as the Balkans, the Baltic area, and Transylvania, etc., are running at the Institutes of Advanced Study in Bucharest and Sofia. And yet intra-regionalism has a certain tradition, going back to the mid-nineteenth century when, for example, the Czech Karel Havlícˇek-Borovský offered his periodical Pražké noviny (Prague News) to his Romanian colleague George Barit¸iu in exchange for the latter’s Gazeta de Transilvania (Transilvanian Gazette), in the hope that their collaboration would strengthen ties between the cultures under Austrian domination. In 1882, the romance scholar Ioan Urban Jarník introduced the study of Romanian language and folklore at the German, Karl-Ferdinand University of Prague. After the signing of the Little Entente (1920–1921), cultural exchanges between the newly emerged countries of East-Central Europe increased. A Czech-Romanian Institute was established in Bucharest in 1927, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga lectured at the Universities of Prague, Brno and Bratislava, and the number of literary translations grew dramatically. Unfortunately, the political and ethnic divisions of the twentieth century undermined these transregional tendencies, often marginalizing them. After 1989, East Central Europe awoke to new globalizing and transnational pressures, but also to defensive nationalist anxieties that reflect a lack of sustained experience in intercultural communication. In this context, transnational publications (comparative histories, dictionaries of regional literature, reciprocal translations) are of major importance, providing the literary cultures of the area with the needed common ground. A history of the literary cultures in East-Central Europe cannot (and should not) take upon itself the task of resolving the region’s profound political and ideological problems. But it cannot ignore them either, for they crop up everywhere, starting with the very choice of the region’s name. Compared to Mitteleuropa, Eastern Europe, or some other term, East-Central Europe is relatively unburdened with historical meanings, and we regard this as an asset rather than a liability. Its “future-directedness” means that the term is not based on any geographical or political given but is rather an invention whose reality must be constructed out of linguistic, religious, and ethnic elements that were differently grouped in the past (and may be grouped

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differently in the future by others). East-Central Europe is, like the nation states that compose it, an imagined community in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the phrase (15). Constructing its literature means reconceptualizing the existing literatures and their national histories. At its best, this reconceptualization may make a significant contribution to the social and political construction of the region: just as the writing of national literary histories participated in the invention of nations, so too the writing of a history of East-Central Europe may participate in the transnational construction of the region. Our hope accords with the claim of contemporary theory that images and texts shape rather than merely reproduce the social world and its institutions, that nations are “imagined communities” (Anderson), that East Europe was invented (Wolff), and the Balkans were imagined (Todorova). Of course, the question whether nations are invented, and, if so to what extent, is a matter of dispute. Leaving aside those essentialists who believe that ethnicity (and hence nationhood) is based on biology, many believe that the unity of modern nations rests on language. But the recent emergence of multilingual nations and the splitting of monolingual ones have negated this widely held Humboldtian view. India has eighteen official languages, South Africa eleven, Belgium and Switzerland three; a great many other countries (among them Sweden, Romania, Italy, and the United States) have significant linguistic minorities. Multilingualism often generates conflicts, yet most of these nations represent viable political entities and historical realities. In turn, language is often insufficient to keep nations together. Witness the distinct national filiations of the Dutch and Flemish communities, or the recent splitting of Croatia and Slovakia from Serbia and the Czech Republic. In short, language is an important but by no means general foundation for modern nationhood. Regarding East-Central Europe and its literature as constructions does raise a host of epistemological questions, however. Seeing a political and cultural entity as a human construct will detach it from nature, but will make its legitimation more difficult. On what grounds is one historical construction preferable to another? Is an East-Central European literary history more trustworthy than the national histories to which it responds? Does it offer a better account of the literatures? Does “better” make sense here? General questions of this kind made David Perkins skeptical about the possibility of writing literary histories today. In his view, literary historians traditionally sought to explain “why literary works acquired the character they have and why the literary series evolved as it did,” but such explanations remain unconvincing if the representation is seriously incomplete or without objectivity (13). How can one hold, as most contemporary scholars do, that literary histories are just “hypothetical representations” and “provisional statements,” if one tacitly assumes “that the past had a being, a reality, was so and not otherwise” (14)? If the latter is true, each new plausible version of the past should be a gain; without this assumption, the latest Columbia Literary History of the United States would not be more reliable than the first one (15–16). According to Perkins, plausible explanations must be based on a social consensus as to what constitutes plausibility. If such a consensus is no longer possible today, literary history becomes impossible. Perkins may well be right that histories based on consensus are no longer possible. But let us remember that every consensual national literary history (if there was one) had to be paid with inter-national confrontations. Did a transnational consensus ever exist? And does the


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impossibility of consensus today mean the end of all literary histories? Our epistemological assumptions differ from those that Perkins regards as a sine qua non for writing literary histories. That the past had a “reality, was so and not otherwise” may be true of facts. But those facts are available to our perception and understanding in a perspectival and selective manner only. To believe that the past had a reality and yet acknowledge that it is available only via “hypothetical representations,” “provisional statements,” and historical constructions is no contradiction. Practical problems arise, of course, if we confront alternative and even conflicting representations. These problems are especially troubling in literary histories, whose raw materials are representations already: for a literary history, “reality” is not the battle of Kosovo but the narrative representations that different people made for different ideological and aesthetic reasons. Since “reality” consists of a boundless sea of relevant material, literary historians (indeed all historians) face the double task of making a selection and interconnecting the selected materials in a history. Perkins may be right that we can no longer agree on universal standards whereby to decide that one historical representation is better than another, because different individuals and groups have different scales of values and different frames of judgment. Yet the need for historical accounts, as Perkins well recognizes, has by no means diminished. How can we reconsider the matter? A move from national to transnational literary histories constitutes a paradigm change rather than progress. An East-Central European literary history represents a perspectival change, a Gestaltswitch analogous to the famous perceptual change that turns a drawing of a duck into that of a rabbit (Kuhn 111 ff.). The rabbit is neither better nor more authentic than the duck, and switching to it cannot be labeled as progress in an absolute sense — even if certain observers in certain situations may prefer one to the other. In what sense can a transnational history represent progress with respect to national histories? Not by increasing its quantity of information. The new perspective will retrieve some lost or suppressed data, but its generalizations and guiding ideas will necessitate principles of selection. Looking at the literature of East-Central Europe from a regional rather than national perspective is a paradigm change related to the real revolution that brought about the collapse of the Soviet block and introduced the ideas of Western liberalism, global capitalism, and George Soros into the region. Some scholars in East-Central Europe refused to participate in our project because they distrust these ideas, but the volume is not another Western conceptualization of an Eastern “Other.” A substantial majority of our contributors come from East-Central Europe, and most of the others have once lived there. Furthermore, place of residence does not by itself define a person’s mindset. The primary inspiration for our project is thus an ethical imperative rather than an epistemological longing. For us, pace Perkins, the crucial question is not whether literary histories based on consensus are possible, but whether a history can be instrumental in moving a transnational public towards morally and politically desirable consensus. Good literary (and other) histories, do not merely present new facts and explanations. More importantly, they recontextualize known information and explanations from the perspective of the present and a vision of the future. Literary histories always incorporate tensions between past, present, and future; they are good if they reconsider the past from a contemporary and future perspective. A literary history of East-Central Europe will make sense if it furthers, on however small a scale,

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the communication between the peoples of that region. The very co-operation of a wide range of scholars in the project has surely been already a step in this direction, for time and again all of us were forced to reconsider our national prejudices.

IV. The Nodal Concept of East-Central European Literary History “Encyclopedic literary history deliberately forfeits coherence, and narrative cannot express its subject with the required complexity” (Perkins 20)

It may help to clarify our ideas in relation to recent innovative literary histories. One of them is Denis Hollier’s A New History of French Literature (1989), which replaced the overarching narrative with a series of essays, each attached to a particular year. By imposing no principles on the individual essays and distributing them unevenly along the temporal axis, Hollier wanted to achieve a “heterogeneity that escapes the linearity of traditional literary histories,” as an alternative to the artificially homogeneous genealogies of historical narration (xix). His approach disassembles the unity of authors and periods but retains a modicum of historicity by offering the essays in a chronological order and allowing each of them to cover more than just the year in question. The volume conceives of French literature “as a complex historical and cultural field” whose study from various angles is made possible by contemporary criticism (xix). We share Hollier’s wish to disperse some of the traditional narrative and authorial unities, and we welcome the attempt at perspectival representation. But is the outcome still a history? The expanded French version (1993) seems to answer our question negatively, for it simply drops “history” from the title, to read: De la littérature française. The punctuated chronology does break up to some extent the massive body of French literature, but the absence of methodological reflections and the emphasis on dates create the impression that this is “how it was.” While individual essays can and do suggest networks of intertext and reception, these have no systematic place and function in the book’s conception, a fact that severely limits the multi-perspectivism Hollier had hoped for. Similarly, the chronological structure allows no systematic differentiation between writers and readers according to class, religion, gender, and — last but not least — migrant minorities and francophone literature. To be sure, Hollier tried to get away from an all too French-centered approach by commissioning many scholars from the United States and Canada (the French version also includes a smattering from Great Britain), but the choice seems determined by pragmatic rather than theoretical considerations. The absence of broad international representation among the contributors further narrows the perspectival choices. In contrast to Hollier’s single-nation history, the volumes of the ICLA series on the history of literatures in European languages — of which this project initiates a sub-series — have an international scope. Still, the problems of national literary histories increase exponentially in transnational undertakings, especially if they tend to take a cultural approach. Such volumes demand selectivity in handling the material, the gathering of a team of experts, and a well conceptualized overall structure. If any of the key elements is missing or weak, the


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project easily becomes a colorful quilt, a random collection of essays on topics that may or may not be historical. The present project has tried to cope with these problems in four major ways. First, we brought together a broad-based international team of contributors from the region, from Western Europe, from the US, and from Canada. Our greatest assets are, undoubtedly, our experts, who ensure that the national literatures are adequately and reliably represented. Since transnational comparatists of the region are scarce, we could not insist that every contribution be transnational or comparative. We have, however, often integrated the national materials and perspectives, and wherever we left national representations side-by-side we provided introductions that function as transnational overviews and frameworks. Second, we tried to limit the scope of the project. Though the final product will be several times larger than originally planned, we have tried to avoid an encyclopedic representation of writers and works. Inclusiveness may be an appropriate aim, if at all, for national histories, and we have made grateful use of what they have amassed, even if we highlight their material differently. We wish to reconceptualize rather than erase national histories: we attempt to bring them into a dialogue with one another, we foreground the minority literatures, the transnational German and Yiddish texts, and we give special attention to multilingual figures, translations, and other modes of cultural mediation. Third, we took “literary culture” as our subject, trying to navigate between the Scylla of internalist (or formalist) history and the Charybdis of a broad cultural approach. Fourth and last, we used a hermeneutic method to revise our conceptual structure in light of the incoming national materials, and, inversely, to apply our (provisional) conceptual structure as a principle of selection and accentuation. In our history, the “realia” (i.e., writers, works, and institutions) are not connected to each other by some sequence of causal logic. We consider these events as overdetermined, allowing for the possibility that literary phenomena may be associated with different alternative antecedents and may be perceived in different contexts. Thus we do not present a single unified history but “scan” the last two centuries of literary production five times, looking at the region’s literary cultures each time from a different angle. We have organized these separate perspectives around the central concept of the nodes, but these too acquire different meaning in each of our History’s five parts. The present volume contains two of the five Parts. Part I focuses on political history. The nodes here are crucial dates or date clusters in political history. As we explain in the introduction to Part I, focusing on nodes allows us to interrupt the flow of narration and to concentrate repeatedly on synchronic-regional perspectives. In Part II (also in this volume) the traditional concepts of literary history — genre, movement, and period — serve as nodes, though we treat them with a degree of skepticism: we regard them as temporary and impure crystallizations of literary life, and focus on the dynamics of their transformations instead of their imagined essences. In Part III (Volume 2) the nodes are topographical: we consider the literary culture of cities, border areas, and (sub-)regions, exploring in particular how shifting ethnic compositions yield different literary maps of geographical space. Part IV (Volume 3) offers institutional histories of literature. They show how theaters, academies, journals, publishers, censorship and other public organizations came about during the period of national awakening and underwent subsequent transformations, emphasizing national as well as transnational aspirations. Though each country of the region has its own institutions, we may

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speak of analogous histories since all of these countries went through a national awakening, a modernist opening, and a period of communist regimentation. Finally, in Part V (Volume 4) the nodes are imaginary or historical figures, conceived not as static entities but as shifting subjects that enter literary history through reading, canonization, or suppression. To summarize, our history consists of a great many microhistories, i.e., of localized, perspectival, and situated stories that cannot be easily read as symbols or synecdoches of an overarching organic system. From a general point of view, our nodes represent alternatives to literary histories that foreground national focal points. By presenting as “indigenous” what national perspectives tended to ignore or label as “contamination” and “corruption,” we are using nodes to disperse and complicate rather than unify. What we mean may be illustrated with another passage from Béla Bartók. The earlier passage quoted in subsection II of this introduction, suggested that an almost xenophobic nationalism inspired Bartók to embark on his project of folk-music collection at the beginning of the twentieth century. By contrast, Bartók’s “Music and Racial Purity” essay, published in 1942 during his American exile, shows that by the end of his life he thought that peasant music participated in “a continuous give and take of melodies, a constant crossing and recrossing” (Essays 30). In contrast to North Africa, where Bartók saw no such exchange and cross-fertilization, he found in East-Central Europe “an immense variety and a wealth of melodies and melodic types,” and he regarded the “finally attained ‘racial impurity’ [ital. by us]” as definitely beneficial (Essays 30–31). Peasant music could remain alive only if people were not separated from each other by Chinese walls: “A complete separation from foreign influences means stagnation: well-assimilated foreign impulses offer possibilities of enrichment” (Essays 31). The Rákoczi march, for instance, generally considered as quintessentially Magyar, contained “elements originating from the Arabic-Persian ‘long melody,’ Eastern European-Hungarian elements, and ornamental motives of Central European art music: quite a collection of the most heterogeneous elements!” (Essays 32) Had Bartók stopped here, we could describe the present project as “Bartókian.” But the composer’s closing remark indicates a difference between his conception and ours, as well as the difficulties that Hungary’s ethnic minorities and neighbors may have experienced when reading his piece: “Nevertheless, the way they [the multi-ethnic elements of the Rákoczi march] are transformed, melted, and unified presents as a final result a masterpiece of music whose spirit and characteristics are incontestably Hungarian” (Essays 32). The remark exalts the spirit of assimilation. Can a history of interchange result in something “incontestably” ethnic and national? Focusing on the history of intercultural exchanges, our volumes attempt to show that the belief in “incontestable” cultures is itself a heritage from the nineteenth century.

Geography and borders Paul Robert Magocsi

East-Central Europe, like any territory, may be defined by several levels of borders. Some, like the international boundaries of states, may expand or contract, depending on changing political conditions. Others, which are defined by geography, may at first glance seem to be more stable, at least from the standpoint of a few millennia of human history. Yet even geographic features do not isolate East-Central Europe. Therefore, in terms of geographic features, economic life, and communicational patterns, the inhabitants living in the lowland plain north of the Carpathians have more in common with areas to the immediate west (Germany) and east (Belarus and Russia) than with other parts of East-Central Europe, such as the Danubian Basin or the Balkan peninsula. Still other borders, which are determined by religious orientation, language, and national identity, may bear little resemblance to those based on political or geographic criteria. For instance, a person of Jewish faith living in East-Central Europe is likely to have more in common, and share in a communitas, with co-religionists in France, Italy, or Russia than with gentile neighbors in his or her immediate physical environment. Analogously, an Eastern Christian Orthodox believer, whose cultural medium in the past was Church Slavonic, had more in common with other users of that liturgical language, wherever they be, than with speakers and writers of the vernacular in the believer’s own locale. What all this suggests is that the borders of East-Central Europe have been and still are multi-dimensional. Depending on what characteristic one looks at, the region’s borders are simultaneously static, shifting, expanding, contracting, and overlapping. The following discussion will focus on three spheres — geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic — and examine how the various kinds of borders noted above function and interact within each sphere.

The geographical spheres East-Central Europe can be said to be divided into three geographical zones: (1) the northern zone; (2) the Alpine-Carpathian zone; and (3) the Balkan zone. The northern zone is bounded by the Baltic Sea in the north and the crests of the Ore, Sudeten, and Carpathian mountains in the south. This zone is characterized primarily by an unbroken plain that is part of the North European Lowlands, stretching in a west-east band across the entire European continent beginning in the Netherlands and including northern Germany, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and on into Russia as far as the Ural Mountains. Along the southern edge of the part of this zone that is in East-Central Europe are plateaus and foothills covering large parts of southeastern Poland, southwestern Ukraine, and northern Moldova. Because of its geographical features, this northern zone has traditionally allowed for easy access from all directions, except perhaps from the mountainous south. The lowland plain is drained by several river systems — the Elbe, Oder, Vistula, and Neman — all of which flow northward into the Baltic Sea or the North Sea.

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Paul Robert Magocsi

The second, or Alpine-Carpathian, zone is characterized by mountain ranges that surround lowland basins and plains. In terms of present-day countries, this zone includes the Czech Republic, Slovakia, far western Ukraine (the Subcarpathian/ Transcarpathian region), Hungary, western Romania (historic Transylvania), northern Yugoslavia (the Vojvodina), Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. This zone is bounded in the northwest by a triangle formed by the Sudeten Mountains, Ore Mountains, and Bohemian Forest, which surround the lowland Bohemia Basin and plateaus of Moravia. Immediately to the south are the Alps, which cover most of Austria and Slovenia. Farther east the zone is bounded by the wide sweeping arc of the Carpathian Mountains, which stretch from Slovakia eastward across Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region and southward into Romania, where the arc turns abruptly westward until it reaches the Danube River at the so-called Iron Gates. The Carpathian arc surrounds the Transylvanian Basin and the large Hungarian plain that covers virtually all of Hungary and stretches southward into Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina and Croatia’s Slavonia as far as the Sava River. Because the main geographic feature is the Danube river and its main tributaries (the Tisza, Drava, and Sava rivers), the zone is also referred to as the Danubian Basin. The mountain crests of the AlpineCarpathian zone traditionally served as natural protective barriers that states hoped to secure and maintain as their political frontiers. Despite the existence of several passes, those crests also restricted communication and trade with regions outside the zone. The third, or Balkan zone, begins at the Sava River and includes the Walachian Plain below the arc of the Carpathians. This zone basically coincides with the Balkan peninsula, which is surrounded by the Adriatic and Ionian Seas to the west, the Aegean Sea to the south, and the Black Sea in the east. In terms of present-day states, the Balkan zone comprises western Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, most of Yugoslavia, southern Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and Greece. Most of this zone is covered by mountains (one range in Bulgaria actually carries the name Balkan mountains), although there are extensive lowland plains in southern Romania (historic Walachia) and northern Bulgaria, which are drained by the lower Danube, as well as in the Rumelian Basin in southeastern Bulgaria, the Thracian plain in European Turkey, and the Vardar Basin in south-central Macedonia and northern Greece. Although geographically part of the Balkan zone, the coastal areas of Croatia (Dalmatia) and central Albania are quite distinct. They have traditionally been linked to the Adriatic and Mediterranean maritime world and, until recent times, were cut off from the Balkan hinterland by high mountains. With the exception of the coastal areas on all sides of the peninsula, communication within the Balkan zone has been hindered because of the extensive mountainous ranges. The result has been the existence of large tracts of sparsely settled and frequently isolated areas that are incapable of sustaining populations of any significance.

The cultural spheres The population throughout most of East-Central Europe is characterized by great diversity in terms of religion, language, and nationality. By the nineteenth century, all of Europe’s main religions were well represented in the region: Catholicism in both its Roman (Latin)- and Byzantine (Greek)-rite forms, Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and Protestantism. Numerically,

Geography and borders

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the Catholic Church had until the twentieth century the largest number of adherents, with an estimated 56 million at the end of the nineteenth century and 83 million at the end of the twentieth century. The majority of Catholics were and still are of the Roman (Latin)-rite, with the Byzantine (Greek)-rite Catholics numbering respectively 5 million (ca. 1900) and 7.7 million (ca. 1995). Whereas both rites are within jurisdictions ultimately responsible to the pope in Rome, the Greek Catholics (or Uniates, as they are also known) use the Byzantine rite and follow other practices similar to the Orthodox world to which they had belonged before accepting union with Rome. Orthodox Christians had been the second but now represent the largest group in EastCentral Europe, having increased from 44 million at the end of the nineteenth century to 87.5 million at the end of the twentieth century. In contrast to the more unified Catholic world, with its ecclesiastical center in Rome, the Orthodox are divided into several self-governing, or autocephalous, churches. These autocephalous churches are loosely linked together by what is called a “communion of faith.” The head of each autocephalous church shows respect to the “ecumenical patriarch” of the Church of Constantinople (resident in Istanbul), a hierarch who is considered the “first among equals.” Despite frequent analogies, the ecumenical patriarch has never had the same jurisdictional authority within the Orthodox world as the pope does within the Catholic. The size of the Jewish population may have been considerably smaller than either the Catholic or Orthodox population; nevertheless, the 7.4 million Jews living in East-Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century represented 70 percent of the total number of all Jews worldwide. The Jews of East-Central Europe were basically divided into two distinct groups; the vast majority were Ashkenazim, or Yiddish speakers. The other group, numbering only about 193,000, were the Sephardim or Ladino speakers. In contrast to the Catholics and Orthodox, the number of Jews decreased dramatically in East-Central Europe during the course of the twentieth century. This is largely the result of their physical extermination during the World War II Holocaust, so that there are only 594,000 left in East-Central Europe (ca. 2000). As many as three-quarters of them live in the region’s former Soviet republics (western Belarus, western Ukraine, and Moldova). The Muslim population of the region has undergone even greater numerical fluctuation. At the outset of the twentieth century, there were an estimated 4.4 million Muslims living primarily in the Balkan zone, in lands under Ottoman rule. As the Ottomans were progressively pushed out of the region, so too was the Muslim, mostly Turkish, population. Between 1912 and 1926 alone, nearly 2.9 million Muslims were either killed or forced to emigrate to Turkey. Despite such demographic losses, a high birthrate (in particular among Muslim Albanians) has resulted in a total of nearly 8.2 million Muslims living in the Balkan zone of East-Central Europe by the end of the twentieth century. Protestants in the East-Central European region made their appearance already at the time of the Reformation. Various Protestant sects gained a significant number of adherents, most especially in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the eastern regions of the Hungarian Kingdom. Although numerically small in size, Protestants had a significant impact on their surrounding environment as promoters of education and printers of books and pamphlets in

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vernacular languages. By the nineteenth century, the most important Protestant denominations in East-Central Europe were the Evangelical (Lutherans) and Reformed (Calvinists). Aside from these “mainline” religious orientations, East-Central Europe also became home to several other smaller groups, many of which by the end of the twentieth century have dwindled further in size or have virtually ceased to exist. Among these are the Armenian-rite Catholics, Orthodox Old Believers, Karaite Jews, and Anti-Trinitarian Protestants. The spatial distribution of the major religions in East-Central Europe is uneven. The Catholics are concentrated in the northern zone and in the Alpine-Danubian zone, which is in lands formerly belonging to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria-Hungary. The Orthodox are found in parts of all three zones, but most especially in the western regions of the former Russian Empire/Soviet Union and throughout the Balkan peninsula. By the end of the twentieth century, fully 97 percent of all Orthodox Christians lived in the following countries, listed in order of the number of adherents: Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Belarus, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Before its decimation during World War II, the Jewish population was concentrated in what was known as the Pale of Settlement, that is, lands acquired by the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (i.e., present-day central and eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, central and western Ukraine) and the Ottoman Empire (Moldova and southeastern Ukraine). While one could find Jewish concentrations also in the Habsburg Empire (especially in the northeastern counties of the Hungarian Kingdom and in the urban conglomerations of Budapest and Vienna), there were very few Jews throughout the Balkan zone aside from some concentrations of Sephardim in small towns and cities, especially Salonika/Thessaloniki. Certain religious groups were linked to the state, while others were associated closely with national movements among stateless peoples. This was particularly the case in the Orthodox world, where the self-governing, or autocephalous churches often came into being at the initiative of the state’s secular authorities. In turn, the state would frequently use the church to promote its national and even socioeconomic agendas. For instance, in late nineteenth-century Macedonia, the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek Orthodox churches competed with each other in an attempt to convince the local population that it was either of Bulgarian, Serbian, or Greek nationality. Similarly, Islam served the interests of the Ottoman state throughout the Balkan zone, where it was not uncommon to find people who converted to Islam (Bosnian Muslims and Albanians among others), thereby becoming part of the country’s socioeconomic elite. Whereas the Catholic world did not permit the establishment of “national” churches, Roman (Latin)-rite Catholicism in practice functioned as a state church in many countries, most especially in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This meant that for a long time the Catholic Church controlled the Habsburg educational system, and being Catholic certainly enhanced an individual’s socioeconomic mobility, especially in the empire’s military and civil service. Some religions, on the other hand, were closely associated with stateless peoples and their efforts at attaining recognition as a distinct nationality. In this sense, Greek Catholicism came to be perceived as the “national” religion of the Ukrainians of Galicia, as did Roman Catholicism for the Poles who, after the three partitions, lived as a stateless people in the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian empires. Some ideologists went so far as to argue that one could not be


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a Pole unless one were Roman Catholic, or that one could not be a Ukrainian from Galicia unless one were Greek Catholic. The simplistic association between religion and national identities at times produced anomalies. For instance, Slovaks were traditionally considered a Catholic people, yet the leading figures of the nineteenth-century national awakening who promoted the idea of a Slovak literary language and identity distinct from Czech were all lifelong Protestant ministers (L’udovít Štúr, Michal Miloslav Hodža, Jozef Miloslav Hurban). The linguistic configuration in East-Central Europe is even more complicated than the region’s religious structure. Taking into account the unresolved debate about whether a given form of speech should be classified as a language or as a dialect of another language, it is still possible to refer to as many as 32 languages in the region. These languages represent all the major linguistic groups spoken on the European continent: Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Baltic, Turkic, and, in their own category, Romany, Albanian, Greek, and Armenian. By far the largest number of speakers is within the Slavic group, which in turn is subdivided into East Slavic languages (Russian, Belarusan, Ukrainian, Carpatho-Rusyn); West Slavic languages (Polish, Kashubian, Lusatian Sorbian, Czech, Slovak); and South Slavic languages (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian). The Germanic group is represented by German speakers not only within the boundaries of present-day Germany and Austria but in various areas throughout East-Central Europe. Some of these areas were part of a continual German speech area stretching eastward into Pomerania, Poznania, Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia. There were also Germans who lived in compact colonies. Some began to be settled as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (the Saxons of Transylvania, the Zipser or Carpathian Germans in north-central Slovakia, the East Prussians); others were first established in the fourteenth century (Galician Germans in southeastern Poland and western Ukraine, the Gottschee Germans in Slovenia) or in the eighteenth century (the Danube Swabians in southern Hungary, Slavonia, the Vojvodina, and the Banat; and the Volhynian, Bukovinian, Black Sea, and Bessarabian Germans in Ukraine). Many of these German colonies were decimated as a result of the events during and immediately following World War II; those which managed to survive after 1945 had significantly reduced numbers. Another Germanic language is Yiddish, spoken in Ashkenazim Jewish communities until their destruction during World War II. The Romance languages are represented primarily by Romanian speakers in present-day Romania (historic Walachia, Moldavia, Transylvania) and Moldova, as well as by Vlachs, a semi-nomadic livestock-raising people based in the mountainous areas throughout much of the Balkan peninsula. Italian remained the dominant language for many coastal towns and cities along the Adriatic coasts from Trieste to Dubrovnik, although by the second half of the twentieth century only a few Italian speakers remained in Istria (Slovenia) and Dalmatia (Croatia). The Finno-Ugric group is represented by Hungarian spoken by Magyars in present-day Hungary as well as in linguistically contiguous areas of all neighboring countries — Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia (the Vojvodina), and Austria. There is still a large community of Magyars farther east in Romania (in eastern Transylvania), some of whom designate themselves by the term Székely/Szeklers. The Baltic linguistic group is represented by the Lithuanians within the present-day country of the same name; the Turkic linguistic group is represented by Turks (primarily in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece), Tatars (in Romania’s Dobrudja region), and Gagauz (in Moldova and adjacent southwestern Ukraine).

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As for the distinct language groups, Greek is limited primarily to present-day Greece, although before World War I it was the language of the large Greek population in western Anatolia as well as of the traders and merchants living in numerous towns throughout the Balkans and as far north as Budapest. Albanian is spoken in a compact area covering presentday Albania, as well as in neighboring Yugoslavia (Kosovo) and Greece (Çameria/northern Epirus). Like Greek, Armenian was the language of merchant colonists living in cities stretching from Istanbul to as far north as Poland, although most of that otherwise small group became assimilated in the course of the twentieth century. By contrast, the number of Romany/Gypsy speakers has increased. Although not all Romany use or even know some form of their ancestral language, the number of Roma/Gypsies has increased dramatically, with conservative estimates being 820,000 at the end of the nineteenth century to over 2.1 million at the end of the twentieth. Traditionally an itinerant people, the Roma/Gypsies either voluntarily or through state intervention (especially during the Communist era) came to settle in permanent abodes. They live on the outskirts of villages and in towns and cities throughout virtually all countries of EastCentral Europe, although the largest concentrations are found within the present-day borders of Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Slovakia. Such extensive linguistic diversity might suggest that the speakers of the nearly three dozen language groups were isolated among themselves because they could not understand the neighbors with whom they often lived in the same state, province, city, or even town and village. Leaving aside the possibility of at least basic communication between speakers of related languages (in particular among the Slavic languages), it was not uncommon for communication to be carried out by means of a few lingua francas. Lingua francas were often the state languages. Hence, in the nineteenth century, Russian served the role of an intermediary between Belarusans, Ukrainians, and Jews, while Polish served the same function between Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, and some Ukrainians and Belarusans. German was the most widespread lingua franca in the Habsburg Empire, making possible communication between Austro-Germans, Magyars, Jews, speakers of various Slavic languages, and Romanians. To a lesser degree Hungarian played the same role within the Hungarian Kingdom, allowing for communication between Magyars, Slovaks, Rusyns, Romanians, Croats, Danube Swabians, Jews, and Serbs. For those who received a higher education, lingua francas like German, Russian, or Hungarian could be used for more sophisticated spoken and written communication. Therefore, bi-lingualism — even multilingualism — became the norm for most educated East-Central Europeans at least until the mid-twentieth century. After World War II, the status of Russian as a second language was enhanced because it was a mandatory subject in schools throughout most of the region as long as pro-Soviet Communist regimes were in power. Gradually, however, the former state languages — German, Hungarian, and eventually Russian — were no longer being learned, since each was associated with an “imperialist” and “occupying” power, whether the pre-World War I German and Austro-Hungarian empires, or the postwar Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The result is that a much smaller percentage of educated people in East-Central Europe know German or Hungarian at the end of the twentieth century than did their predecessors before and just after World War I; similarly, Russian is unknown to young people educated in the 1990s. Instead, since the Revolutions of 1989 it is English that is becoming the lingua franca that links the linguistically diverse peoples of the region.


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There is a crucial difference, however, between the old and new lingua francas. In the former multinational empires, it was quite common for educated individuals to have multiple identities, and the lingua franca, especially if it was simultaneously a state language, was an important badge associated with those identities. Hence, a native-born Yiddish speaker from Prague, aside from being a Jew, might in certain circumstances identify as a German or a Czech, because he or she had learned and used those languages. By contrast, English is a kind of “new Latin” in that it is a neutral and purely functional instrument, one that does not add another “national” identity to its user in East-Central Europe. Language, of course, is not simply a functional instrument for communication; it also has great symbolic value in relation to national identity. As nationalist ideology established roots beginning in the early nineteenth century, intellectuals throughout East-Central Europe were inspired by Herder’s rhetorical question: “Has a people, in particular a people without culture, anything dearer than the language of its ancestors? Therein resides its whole intellectual wealth, tradition, history, religion, and principle of life — its very heart and soul” (Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität; Werke 17: 58). Some thinkers went even further and began to argue that a nationality could not be said to exist unless it had is own language. To be sure, all peoples spoke languages, but not all peoples had a literary language. It was the struggle to create a literary language that led to great intellectual debates and often to political conflict that marked the era of national awakenings in East-Central Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Which dialect or dialects should form the basis of a literary language,” or, “Should not a sacred language like Church Slavonic or ancient Greek be adopted for modern usage?,” were the kind of questions that for decades absorbed the attention of national awakeners. At the same time, not all national awakeners felt that their respective people needed their own distinct literary language. For instance, supporters of Pan-Slavism, who saw strength in unity, favored a limitation on the number of Slavic literary languages. The Slovak Ján Kollár suggested that this number might be four (Russian, Polish, Czech, Illyrian/South Slavic); the Slovene Jernej Kopitar respected all the Slavic “dialects” but argued for the adoption of a single Slavic literary language; Slavophiles in Russia agreed, arguing that that one literary language should be Russian. Since literary languages were almost always associated with the existence of a distinct nationality, and since the creation of a literary norm was to a degree an arbitrary intellectual construct, the decision as to where the boundary of one language ended and another began often led to conflict between neighbors. Is, for instance, Kashubian a dialect of Polish or a separate language? Analogously, what is the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian, Slovak and Czech, Rusyn and Ukrainian, Macedonian and Bulgarian, Moldovan and Romanian? If the first in each of these pairs became recognized as a distinct literary language, this would imply and perhaps confirm that there exist distinct Kashubian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Rusyn, Macedonian, and Moldovan nationalities. These are the kind of debates that for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the languages of East-Central Europe into instruments of political, social, and cultural conflict. As recently as the 1990s, one literary language, Serbo-Croatian, has been deconstructed because of political reasons. With the creation of independent Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside what remains of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), the former common linguistic

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medium called Serbo-Croatian (rendered in two alphabets — Roman and Cyrillic) has been replaced by two new separate “national” languages, Croatian and Serbian. There have even been attempts to create a third variant, Bosnian. The linguistic diversity of East-Central Europe has, therefore, continued to evolve, since language remains both an instrument for oral and written communication and a political weapon and badge of national identity.

The socioeconomic sphere At the outset of the nineteenth century, East-Central Europe was overwhelmingly rural in character. This situation remained unchanged until the 1870s, when the first European-wide census data became available. The data not only revealed that most East-Central Europeans lived in the countryside, but that those rural areas were relatively sparsely populated. In comparison with Western Europe (Germany, Italy, France, the Low Countries), where large blocks of territory had well over 100 persons per square kilometer, only a few areas in East-Central Europe (northern Bohemia-Moravia and Upper Silesia) reached those densities. Most areas had between 20 and 100 persons per square mile, whereas the entire Balkan zone (south of the SavaDanube rivers) had less than 50 or even less than 20 persons per square kilometer. The last decades of the nineteenth century were to witness an increase of 50 percent in the total number of people throughout East-Central Europe, from 98 million in 1870 to 143 million in 1910. While the Balkan zone experienced a 3 to 4 percent greater increase during those four decades, it still remained the least populated part of the region. Associated with the overall demographic growth was the internal movement from the countryside to urban areas. If, for instance, in 1870 there were 20 cities in East-Central Europe with a population exceeding 100,000, by 1910 the number of such cities had nearly doubled. Nevertheless, by 1910 only nine cities had between 500,000 and one million inhabitants. The vast majority of settlements in the “urban” category were by present-day standards really quite small, ranging in size from 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. Another notable aspect of cities and even small towns was their multiethnic character. In most cases, the towns and cities throughout East-Central Europe were like islands composed of populations and cultures that were different from those of the surrounding countryside. Beginning in the medieval period and continuing through the early modern era, Germans, Jews, and, in the Balkan zone, Greeks and Turks had come to form a significant portion of urban populations. For instance, by 1900, Jews comprised as high as 50 percent or more of the inhabitants of twenty cities and towns in East-Central Europe and a significant portion of the population in some of the region’s largest cities: Odessa (34 percent), Warsaw (33 percent), Łódz´ (32 percent), and Bratislava (24 percent). As a result, cities and the larger towns were places where several different cultures flourished side by side. And whether or not these various cultures influenced each other — and at times they did — city and town dwellers had by necessity to be multilingual in order to survive. From this perspective, it is not surprising to learn that Vilnius was a “Polish” city and a “Jewish” city, even though it was “in Lithuania,” and that Bratislava was a “German,” a “Jewish,” and a “Hungarian” city “in Slovakia.” The list of similar examples can go on endlessly.


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The varied faces of these East-Central European cities were symbolized by their very names: Vilnius (the Lithuanian form) was as much Wilno (Polish) as it was Vilne (Yiddish), and Bratislava (Slovak) was as equally Pozsony (Hungarian) as it was Pressburg (German) or Presburg (Yiddish). The demographic patterns established before World War I continued throughout the twentieth century. Despite the enormous loss of life in East-Central Europe, caused by the two world wars (16.3 million lives alone were lost during World War II), the overall population in the region rose by 46 percent, from 143 million persons in 1910 to 209 million in 1990. The relatively largest increases came in the Balkan zone, where large portions of territory increased their densities to 50–99 persons per square kilometer, with even higher densities (100–200) in several districts of Walachia, Serbia, and central Bulgaria. This meant that by the end of the twentieth century the demographic disproportion between the Balkan peninsula and the rest of East-Central Europe was substantially reduced. The biggest change was brought about through urbanization, in particular during the decades after World War II, when the urban-rural dichotomy was reversed. For the first time in history the majority of the population of East-Central Europe did not live in the countryside but rather in the cities (59 percent). By 1990, only three countries — Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Moldova — had more than half of their population living in rural areas. These countries, moreover, were among the smallest in the region in terms of their geographic size and population. The growth of individual cities was even more dramatic. By the end of the twentieth century East-Central Europe had 9 cities with over a million inhabitants, (Bucharest, Budapest, Minsk, Warsaw, Vienna, Prague, Belgrade, Sofia, Odessa), and over 80 more with a population surpassing 200,000. In several cases the growth was phenomenal, so that, for instance, between 1910 and 1990 Constant¸a in Romania grew 2,791 percent to comprise 347,000 inhabitants and Skopje in Macedonia 2,120 percent to 444,000 inhabitants. The most exceptional example was the Baltic port of Gdynia, a small fishing village of less than 1,000 (1910) that by 1990 had burgeoned to a city of 252,000. Aside from sheer numbers, the twentieth-century migrations also altered the multiethnic norm that had been characteristic of most cities and towns. The influx of enormous numbers of people from the surrounding countryside was one factor in the change. The forced expulsion, physical elimination, or national assimilation of long-time urban residents (Germans, Jews, Magyars, Greeks, Armenians) were other factors that, most especially during the second half of the twentieth century, made many cities and towns more monocultural. In other words, Vilnius is now Lithuanian (although, for other reasons, with a new Russian component) and Bratislava is now Slovak; analogously, most other urban areas have taken on the ethnolinguistic and national character of the country in which they are located. Along with urbanization came industrialization. This was a particular priority of the centralized command economies of new Communist regimes set up in East-Central Europe after World War II. For them industrialization became the key to achieving socioeconomic prosperity. One result of the rapid industrialization was not only physical but psychological dislocation. In lieu of an often placid village and small town rural environment, urban sprawl, pollution, and

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residence in cramped cheaply constructed apartment blocks was quickly becoming the norm for over half the entire population of East-Central Europe. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries also witnessed the introduction of technological advances to improve physical movement and intellectual communication. In the four decades prior to World War I, a relatively dense railroad network was constructed. The hinterlands of each country were now more easily connected to their own political and economic centers as well as to urban centers in neighboring countries throughout the European continent. The high mountain crests of the Carpathians and the Alps, which had traditionally hindered communication, were breached by engineering feats that tunneled railway lines through places heretofore passable with only great difficulty or not at all. Not surprisingly, the railroads had a direct impact on migration patterns. Not only did they contribute to increased urbanization, they also permitted easy access to port cities and to emigration abroad. Between 1870 and 1914, an estimated 7 million persons emigrated from EastCentral Europe to the United States alone. It was from this time that the seeds were laid for the creation of new centers of East-Central European culture, whether in New York City, or in subsequent decades closer to home in Berlin and Paris. The railroads certainly enhanced the ability of central governments to control politically and, through an improved postal system, to tax more efficiently their respective citizenry. The postal services made possible the relatively quick delivery of the ever-widening range of newspapers, journals, and books produced in print shops and publishing houses based in the growing cities and towns. Such communicational facilities were absolutely essential to intellectual activity in general and to nationalist movements in particular, especially among stateless peoples whose cultures, languages, and understanding of historical tradition were either allowed limited access or were entirely absent from the school system. Despite its censoring efforts, the state could in effect be by-passed by print technology that allowed intellectuals based in cities to reach “their” national constituencies in the countryside. By the second half of the twentieth century new technologies — the telephone, FAX, and the Internet — were quickly adapted to promote anti-Communist political dissent, the demands of national minorities, or the products of “purely” artistic and literary creativity. Since 1989, the increasing use of the neutral lingua franca, English, has placed East-Central Europe well on the way to full intellectual integration with the rest of the European continent.

The political factor The borders of East-Central Europe have certainly been influenced by political developments. As international borders changed so did the concept of East-Central Europe expand or contract. Eventually, these new borders had an impact on an individual’s sense of belonging or exclusion. To choose but one of several possible examples, let us consider the historic region known as Galicia. Until 1918, Galicia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and from 1918 to 1939 part of Poland. Therefore until 1939 Galicia was firmly part of East-Central Europe and linked in terms of its political identity, communication patterns, educational system, and cultural values to either Austrian Vienna or Polish Warsaw. After 1945, eastern Galicia was annexed to the


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Soviet Union, becoming consequently no longer part of East-Central Europe, since it was integrated with a political, socioeconomic, and cultural framework defined by the Soviet regime in Moscow and secondarily in Kiev. With regard to the time frame covered in this volume, roughly the 1780s to the present, of key significance for political borders are the years 1815, 1918, and 1989. As a result of the three partitions of Poland (resulting in that state’s disappearance) followed by the changes wrought by the Napoleonic era, East-Central Europe was after 1815 within the framework of four states: Prussia (later the German Empire), the Austrian Empire (later Austria-Hungary), the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. This structure remained relatively stable throughout the nineteenth century, with the exception that the Balkan lands ruled by the Ottoman Empire were reduced in size and replaced by several independent states (Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria). By late 1918 and the end of World War I, all four empires had collapsed and were replaced by several so-called successor states: Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Albania together with three already existing states whose boundaries were enlarged: Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. This post-World War I state structure was dismantled on the eve of and during World War II, but then restored with some changes in 1945. The most important of these changes was the westward expansion of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the loss of territory by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, and Soviet domination over the political systems in those and most other countries of the region. The Soviet expansion also had a significant impact on the very concept of east-central, or what came to be known simply as Eastern Europe. This was the era of the West-East superpower dichotomy, so that the concept of east-central (eastern) Europe came to coincide only with the so-called satellite states, that is countries under Soviet political direction (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) or at the very least under Communist rule (Yugoslavia, Albania). According to this politically determined understanding of eastern/east-central Europe, East Germany was included but Austria and Greece excluded. Also excluded were Lithuania, the other Baltic states, Belarus, and western Ukraine, all of which had been annexed to the Soviet Union. The year 1989 ushered in the collapse of Communist rule in East-Central Europe followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. Aside from the existing states in the region, several new ones came into being (Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Moldova). Other states that gained their independence after 1989, such as Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, are today considered by some observers and by the inhabitants themselves to be entirely or wholly part of east-central or simply central Europe. At the dawn of the twentyfirst century it seems that East-Central or Central Europe is being defined more and more according to which country is already — or about to become in a relatively reasonable period of time — a member of the European Union. Clearly, the reality of simultaneously static, shifting, expanding, contracting, and overlapping borders in East-Central Europe remains a function of geographic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors.

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Figure 1.Central Europe: geographic zones.

Paul Robert Magocsi

Part I Nodes of political time

Introduction to Part I Literary nodes of political time Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer

František Palacký, the great Czech historian and leader of the conservative nationalists, opened his essay on Austria’s Concept of State (1866) by asking whether the Monarchy was a unified whole with a single purpose, destination, and mission. Is it, he asked, “a living organism” or “just a conglomerate of nations and people without order and internal cohesion” (1)? As an Austro-Slav, Palacký had for several decades believed that the various nations and ethnic groups could be accommodated in a federated Monarchy. But the answer to his question about the internal cohesion of the Monarchy could only be negative: according to romantic conceptions, only people held together by a common language could constitute a “living organism.” And this organic metaphor (a re-appropriation of teleological and eschatological temporality in Christian sacred history) guided not just Palacký’s thinking but all the national awakenings that led to the founding or reestablishment of the nations now existing in East-Central Europe. This leading image of most historiographies in the region was reinforced in the nineteenth century through Darwinism and social Darwinism, and persisted even in movements that turned against the romantic tradition. The Polish positivists of the 1870s, for instance, denounced romantic dreams, but their “realistic” program of building an integrated society spoke of “Organic Work” and “Work at the Foundations.” Treating society as an organism, they stressed the harmonic interaction of its parts. Thinking of society as an organic body and regarding its history as a “development” is still very much with us, though it has become all too evident that the metaphor of “living organism” often leads to violent exclusion and internal suppression. Organic concepts still structure most literary histories: they describe how the biographies and the oeuvres of writers “develop” in “phases” (of life or production) and ultimately constitute a coherent growth or decline. Individual works and writers are cells in organically perceived periods and movements (Romanticism, Realism, Modernism etc.) linked to a cross-cultural “Zeitgeist.” Similarly, national literary histories portray organic growths or declines, leading towards some envisioned national apotheosis or catastrophic extinction. Although specific historiographic works and writers never manifest the pure traits of such questionable generalizations, organic terms are still current. Our History seeks to replace such organic conceptions with the view that the data of history constitutes a phenomenological structure that is open to potentially limitless “mappings,” to borrow J. Hillis Miller’s terms from his essay on Wallace Stevens’s topographies. As Miller puts it, paraphrasing Stevens, a given mapping is always provisional, “infinitely variable, always open to revision.” The different mappings can be thought as “superimposed on one another and on the landscape, like different navigations through a hypertext” (Topographies 281). While we do not understand “limitless” in an absolute way, we do share Miller’s “not so totalizing or totalitarian” view, which replaces organic narratives of

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national cultures with open-ended “hypertexts” that interrelate different frames of reference and interpretive perspectives. Such an approach is particularly important in today’s climate, in which resurrected nationalist and ethnocentric concepts of culture vie with globalist ones. Though seemingly opposed, both the globalist and the ethnocentric models prefer “organicist” narratives, unified either by some romantic notion of ethnic and linguistic purity or by a Western trust in late-capitalist global markets. We propose to rearticulate East-Central European literary history around a transnational approach that foregrounds disjunctures as much as junctures, emphasizing the interplay of specific regional features without dissolving them in a European or universal melting pot. Each of our introductions will indicate how that specific Part attempts to avoid an organic presentation of its materials. How, then, do “Literary Nodes of Political Time” work? Nodes of time are points (or “crossroads”) at which various narrative strands come together without forming the heart or essence of an organic unit. Indeed, the political dates we chose tend to be moments of disjuncture, related to revolutions, wars, or flawed treatises that prepared the ground for new conflicts. Nodes are then simply historical moments (with a certain “thickness”) that occasion short and incomplete transnational narratives that differ from the national perspectives on the events. Take for example the node “1848.” It is, indeed, a historical point of (dis)juncture for literature because in most countries of East-Central Europe the performative and mimetic functions of literature radically changed as a result of the failed revolutions. The other possible historical nodes for literature (formal, topographical, institutional, and figural) will be foregrounded in the other parts of our History, as outlined in the general introduction. The focus on different nodes makes all of them contingent; their histories, neither of which is told by an omniscient narrator, complement each other. In this sense we replace the omniscient national narrators with a set of general but limited ones. By selecting in Part I politically significant nodes we do not imply that politics has primacy in literature. The choice acknowledges, however, that East-Central European literature could rarely free itself, especially during the last two centuries, from politics, and most writers did play important roles on their national stage. In East-Central, as opposed to Western Europe, literature and politics have been so intertwined that writers have time and again become political leaders: “In Western Europe modern nationalism was the work of statesmen and political leaders […]. In Central and Eastern Europe, it was the poet, the philologist, and the historian who created the nationalities” (Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism; a motto in Peter Brock). This is certainly true of the national awakenings in the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century politics has become, here too, more and more the domain of politicians, although traces of the older tradition are evident in the role that writers played in 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, as well as in the post-1989 presidency of Václav Havel and Árpád Göncz. The interpenetration of politics and literature in East-Central Europe goes beyond the recurrent political involvement of writers. It includes, more importantly, the political impact of literary texts, their ability to move politicians as well as the masses by means of words and images. Peto˝fi’s “Nemzeti dal” (National Song), for example, became an inspiration for the Hungarian revolution of 1848. Political involvement refashioned literature from the 1830s onward, blurring the borderline between poetry, journalism, and, later, reportage. The journals of Kossuth in Hungary and those of Havlícˇek in Bohemia were prime political forces in the pre-1848 years.

Introduction to Part I

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In the subsequent decades many writers and poets — including Mickiewicz, ZechenterLaskomerský, Mikszáth, Móricz, Eminescu, and Botev — used journalism to earn a living and to sway public opinion. Literary institutions (not just journals and newspapers, but also literary, cultural, and patriotic associations, even coffeehouses and pubs) move into the foreground as we approach a node of political time. A node like “1848” in East-Central Europe is heterotemporal and inhomogeneous because of the multi-ethnic, multi-national, and conflictual character of the region. Lacking holistic unity, its story will, at best, be a braid of narrative strands played out on the interlocking stages of Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Zagreb, and elsewhere. To complicate matters, the narrative strands are not fixed but undergo rewriting. Take, for instance, the stage of Prague with its various events: a memorandum to the court in Vienna, initial cooperation between the Germans and the Czechs followed by a break, a Pan-Slav congress, an eruption of bloody street fights, and their suppression by Windischgraetz — and much more. The historian’s perspective will determine which of these divers events to include. The dominant traditional perspective on “Prague 1848” was that of Czech national history, but this was itself by no means stable. “Prague 1848” assumed different meanings during the Austrian repression of the 1850s, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy of 1867–1918, the Czechoslovak Republic between the wars, the German-occupied Bohemia, the Czechoslovak People’s Republic, and the once more separate Czech and Slovak Republics today. To restrict oneself to the events “as they happened” is an impossible dream. Instead, we ought to follow the story through the ever-changing frames created by the historical representations of the past, and include an account of how changing political regimes changed the image of the event. Such political fictionalizations of the past are not reliable representations of what happened but they tell us something about the mentality of the fictionalizers. Historians have made as yet no serious attempts to braid the literary story of “Prague 1848” with those of “Budapest 1848,” “Zagreb 1848,” “Bucharest 1848” and others. They have not even attempted to place the stories side by side. The following Section contains integrated accounts for a number of nodes (including the 1848 one), each taking a different approach. For World War I, for instance, we have organized the material according to genres, for World War II according to the history of its reception. Each of the remaining nodes contains an introduction that functions as a framework and guide for the reading of the subsequent national accounts. It is our expectation that each national account will assume a different resonance if placed next to the others: the contiguity reveals the contingency of the national frames and their ideological presuppositions. Reading “Prague 1848” with one eye on the tales of the other cities asks for “bifocal glasses” — just as reading in the light of its reception history has done. In sum, even unintegrated stories ask for different reading strategies and for a change in the reader’s horizon of expectation. Individual national literatures, as well as their cultural and social contexts, are usually out of phase with respect to each other. Some countries of the region have a long history of independence, others came to conceive themselves as nations only in the nineteenth or the twentieth century. Although each group went through a national awakening, these did not occur simultaneously. Literary historians of East-Central Europe ought to heed Siegfried Kracauer’s warning to general historians that they are caught in a “cataract of times” (“General History”

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569), for as transnational historians they, too, must cope with a plurality of temporal sequences that “evolve according to timetables peculiar to their respective areas” (Kracauer 113). Any history worth its salt must indeed cope with Kracauer’s Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen (simultaneity of what is heterotemporaneous). Unfortunately, Kracauer’s recommendation that historians should limit themselves to histories of individual disciplines does not resolve the problem, for each cultural discipline (literature, architecture, film, etc), as each nation, is also inhomogeneous internally. Internally coherent nations (or disciplines) are organicist figments of the imagination. Writers and readers of a single country or language subdivide into various groups of class, gender, age, religion, race, etc., each with a historical rhythm of its own. We shall never find a subgroup that is sufficiently small to be homogeneous. Part I, “Literary Nodes of Political Time,” acknowledges the heterogeneity of each node and does not try to impose uniformity on the material. To take a recent example, the changeovers of 1989 were quite different in Czechoslovakia and Romania and were justly labeled therefore as “velvet revolution” and “bloody uprising,” respectively. Moreover, the paths leading to and away from 1989 were dissimilar. In Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia the changeover was prepared by the major democratic attempts of 1956 and 1968, while Romania and Yugoslavia had experienced intellectual revivals in the 1960s that partly survived the political retrenchment of the 1970s and 1980s. Similar drives can yield contrasting results: the drive towards independence in the Baltic countries led to national liberation, while in Yugoslavia to the disintegration of a multicultural Federation. De-Stalinization enhanced democracy in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, left Bulgaria largely unaffected, but gave rise to a kind of post-Stalinist totalitarianism in Romania and Yugoslavia that easily converted into postcommunist nationalism. Viewed through the prism of the 1989 node, the literary cultures of East-Central Europe reveal as many disjunctions, different rhythms, and even directions of development, as conjunctions. Some countries still need to confront resilient “communist political customs” as well as “resentful myths and atavistic phobias” of ethnicity (Tismaneanu, Reinventing 249) that were kept dormant during four decades of forced national amnesia. Democratization is complicated by a paradoxical interplay of conflicting models: “pro-European parties, inspired by liberal values,” vie with separatist forces that “look for inspiration in the exaltation of collective nouns like fatherland, nation, ancestry, or even blood community.” Anarchistic and “anti-state” impulses run counter, especially in the Balkan countries, “to the search for state protection [that] can be called the paternalistic temptation” (Tismaneanu, Reinventing 287 and 283). We use other modes of presentation elsewhere. For “1776/1789,” which predates most of the great national awakenings, we painted our picture in broad historical terms and did not seek to survey all parts of the region. In 1848 the political events passed through several interrelated “stages”; we offer here an extensive general account of politics in order to clarify the often shifting and contradictory position of writers. For the second node of the nineteenth century we had to choose the cluster 1867/1878/1881. The dates mark the Austro-Hungarian compromise and the Balkan peace treaties, which allowed a (very limited) national independence for Hungary and countries south of it but left the Baltic and Polish situation unchanged. The use of a cluster acknowledges that the various parts of the

Introduction to Part I

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region had at that point different problems and found themselves in different phases of the march toward nationhood. We have tried to suggest that the literary life of the region showed nevertheless (or perhaps precisely because of this) significant transnational movements. For World War I and its aftermath we organized the introductory overview in terms of genres, and we complemented this with five specific studies. Literature resisted but often also joined the war. A transnational view reveals different ethnic/national attitudes with respect to the war: in Hungary, the junior partner of the Monarchy, protest against the war emerged in 1915–16 only, and was then articulated almost exclusively in terms of a social protest that sought comradery across the frontline. In the suppressed minorities of the Monarchy protest against the war had a military character and served national aspirations. The social and national movements came to a head-on collision after the war, when these minorities and Romania fought against the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. Our discussion of World War II (node “1945”) gives special attention to the literature that relates to Warsaw’s triple defense and destruction, because this city, for all its uniqueness, emblematizes the horrors of war and genocide. The main part of the integrated essay is organized historically, following the path of the war literature from the war years through the decades of the cold war, which imposed severe (and changing) restrictions on what could and could not be said about the war. We cover in this case some fifty years (from 1939 to 1989) of both literature on the war and of its changing reception. In doing so, we repeatedly had to contrast the literature published in exile with works published behind the “Iron Curtain.” The literature of and on World War II indicates once more how much the literatures of East-Central Europe were shaped by political history. The 1956/1968 node is organized around a twin structure of dates that mark the struggle for political liberalization and the concurrent democratization and diversification of literary culture. Like other nodes, this cluster emphasizes both common trends in East-Central Europe and divergent results north and south of the Danube, for example. The process of de-Stalinization brought socio-economic liberalization in Hungary and Poland, cultural experimentation but also post-Stalinist nationalism in Romania and Yugoslavia, and new forms of cultural indoctrination in Bulgaria and the Baltic states. Again we are reminded of the complex relationship of literary culture to history and politics, the same phenomena being experienced differently in neighboring cultures. The 1989 node foregrounds simultaneously the confrontation of political paradigms (totalitarianism vs. democracy, capitalism vs. socialism) and that of cultural models (Modernism vs. Postmodernism, Realism vs. experimentation). By rereading East-Central European literature through a (partially) Western perspective (centered on theory and practice of Postmodernism), the essays of this Section valorize aspects not taken into account in local or national histories; they also revise the so-called Western model as in the case of the article on Estonian Postmodernism, which points out unexpected convergences between postmodernism, nationalism, and Socialism, or between the cultural features of late Capitalism and late Socialism. In conclusion we wish to emphasize once more that “Literary Nodes of Political History” was not conceived as a continuous narrative that covers most of the region’s literary/political history during the last two centuries. We have constructed instead limited transnational treatments around and about certain key dates from political history, without trying to give equal treatment to all writers,

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works, topics, and nations. The imbalances will be compensated for in the other Parts of the project. It ought to be clear also that the very “nodal” structure of the presentation functions as a means of avoiding a continuous and comprehensive narrative. The nodes ask for horizontal (spatial) breadth rather than chronological length. We offer them, sequenced as they are in reversed chronological order, not as a coherent evolutionary narrative but as representations of temporalities experienced between and across regional cultures. We hope that readers will understand this not as an odd mannerism but as a well-considered strategy that allows them to negotiate a path from better known literary and historical information towards less familiar areas in the more distant historical past. This strategy also opposes and negates the traditional discourse of national histories in the region, which speak of the (tragic) “fate” and “destiny” of their nation, or, during the communist regime, of a dialectical progress towards an eschatological fulfillment. Reversing the order of the nodes stresses our opposition to Marxist and other ideologies that ascribed inevitable laws to history. We do not assume the opposite position that cannot know why things happen one way rather than another. But our inverted chronology is meant to indicate that the events in East-Central Europe during the last centuries were neither an act of fate nor inevitable. Indeed, the key events of the last fifty years or so were hardly predictable: 1956 was as unexpected and unforeseeable as 1968 or 1989 — even if historians will construct a posteriori reasons for them. Some of the best literature in the region questions exactly these constructions.

1989

From resistance to reformulation Marcel Cornis-Pope Glasnost’ marked not the end of history but its rediscovery and its passionate rewriting. (Boym, Common Places 228)

I As Dorin Tudoran wrote in 1986, “the drama of the East-Central European intellectual is, that he has all too many ideas, and no faith whatsoever! Reconquering faith would mean for the [East European] intellectual a moral resurrection, it would adjust his life experience to the ideas professed in his works. … The first nonbloody barricade for the contemporary [East European] intellectual would have to be this rediscovery of self, without which he is doomed to remain a prisoner of the present crisis” (Frost 56). Tudoran could hace added other important tasks: the rediscovery of political imagination, renewed faith in literature, and release from polarized notions of the world. The revolutions of 1989 attempted to bridge the gap that had divided words from deeds, self from world, and art from politics. The year 1989 started with a few significant reform measures (the introduction of market economy principles in Poland, social and political reforms in Hungary) and pro-democracy manifestations (the twenty-year commemoration of Jan Palach’s public suicide in Prague, an Albanian protest against Milosevic´’s regime in Kosovo, the founding of a Democratic Union in Croatia, etc.). This early reformist phase created new social unrest, as the old ideological establishment tried to fend off more radical changes. Among those arrested were important literary and intellectual figures: the playwright and human rights activist Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, the dissident poet Mircea Dinescu in Romania, the Bulgarian philosopheractivist Zhelyu Mitev Zhelev, the Albanian political leader Azen Vllasi. Other dramatic confrontations followed, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 7 and the Timis¸oara anti-Ceaus¸escu uprising on December 16. One after another, the communist regimes were gradually dismantled or collapsed under pressure in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, parts of Yugoslavia, and finally in Romania. Much of the pressure to liberalize the political system came from writers, artists, and university activists, such as the signatories of Charter 77, who in June 1989 presented a petition to the Czechoslovak government, demanding the release of political prisoners, freedom of association and expression, free trade unions, and the abolishment of censorship. The anti-Ceaus¸escu rebellion in Timis¸oara was similarly led by writers and university students who managed to attract under a common prodemocracy program other social strata, including workers and the professional classes. In a key

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scene of the Bucharest phase of the Romanian revolution on December 22, a crowd of protesters broke into the national headquarters of the Romanian television to proclaim, through the voice of the recently freed Mircea Dinescu, the collapse of the Ceaus¸escu regime. The violence of this effort of realignment between words and deeds, or between the cultural and the political class took many by surprise, but it was not without antecedents. For twenty some years the literatures of East-Central Europe had tried to match words to social realities in a “very serious game of anti-totalitarian doublespeak and newthink” (Sorkin 29–30). The issues that writers had been debating since the 1960s contributed to a significant ideological overhaul in pre-1989 East-Central Europe. In particular, novelists and playwrights became acutely aware of the prohibitive boundaries set up by power around social “truth” and of their need to challenge them, first by injecting a strong element of subjectivity and mythopoïesis in the prescriptive realism of the fifties (Géza Ottlik, Marin Preda, Josef Škvorecký, and S¸tefan Ba˘nulescu); then by sharpening their political focus in the anti-Stalinist fiction of the following two decades (Václav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Miklós Mészöly, Milan Kundera, György Konrád, Jurek Becker, Ismail Kadare, Rexhep Qosja, Augustin Buzura, Enn Vetemaa etc.); finally, by questioning the very foundation of communist reality in bolder experimental fiction, exposing Eastern Europe’s dogmatic stagnation (Sławomir Mroz˙ek, Piotr Szewc, Danilo Kiš, Péter Nádas, Péter Esterházy, Gabriela Adames¸teanu, Mircea Nedelciu, Dubravka Ugrešic´, Mati Unt, Toomas Raudam). Not only genres with a clear political bite (debate dramas, ideological novels), but even more private ones like lyrical poetry became vehicles of cultural and “moral resistance,” opening “the doors and windows of poetry to life, reality, to history; to street language” (Iorgulescu 61). Literary and philosophic thought also played a liberating role: the various critical arguments developed in the margin of official ideology challenged the centers of ideological production, promoting alternative visions and discursive modes. Recent analyses of the communist period have tried to explain the relative success of this critical-artistic “resistance” in hypercentralized East-Central Europe by emphasizing socialism’s tendency to create dispersed states rather than monolithic power systems, as previously thought. Even in countries where the process of de-Stalinization remained superficial, allowing some maneuvering space for artistic culture but leaving intact the economic and political base (the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria), the Communist system was to a certain degree “permeated with anarchy and competition,” illustrating for Katherine Verdery (236–37) the essential paradox of “socialism’s ‘weak state’… in which excessive centralization was yoked with extreme anarchy.” By turning “language and discourse … [into] the ultimate means of production” (Verdery 91), Communism colonized people’s political imagination of people, but also created a cultural surplus — more intellectual work than the ideological system could absorb or control. This excess managed over time to threaten the system, “reinvigorating and reframing … social imagination,” “articulating kinds of social consciousness other than the authoritarian ones” (Clowes 4, 5). Censorship in its three manifestations enumerated by Matei Ca˘linescu (“pre-censorship,” which combined the pressures of the totalitarian power with forms of self-censorship; the institution of “censorship”; and “post-censorship,” which consisted of the mental state of “futility, shame, weariness” that the writer took from the process — Interview with Vianu 63, 67) continued to play an important role in East-Central Europe. Still, “slowly but surely, creative minds found ways to outwit it. [This process] required unusual energy,

From resistance to reformulation

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acquaintances in the right places, and savoir faire. A strong bond between writer and reader came into being, and the writer was eager to express what he was not allowed to say. The reader avidly awaited the least hint about how to read between the lines, an art perfected under communist censorship” (Vianu x–xi). One positive outcome of this confrontation with censorship was the emergence of several generations of subtle if oblique writers and of alert close readers, looking for hidden political references. As the doyen of Romania’s “new critics,” Ion Negoit¸escu, noted in his 1991 interview with Lidia Vianu, “censorship can sharpen the writer’s mind,” suggesting to him sophisticated strategies for insinuating truths officially censored (Vianu 19). But Negoit¸escu also conceded that one needed to view this struggle with censorship historically, acknowledging its distinct phases. During the period of massive indoctrination into socialist realism (1948–1955 in most East-Central European countries) writers beat censorship primarily by remaining silent. Only during the political thaw of the 1960s, and in Romania after Ceaus¸escu’s partially failed attempt to launch a “cultural revolution” in the 1970s, could East-Central European writers use the somewhat weakened institution of censorship to slip through heterodox ideas. As poet Nina Cassian explains in the same collection of interviews with censored writers: During the demagogical years when Ceaus¸escu’s reign was just beginning, a certain relative freedom of creation was apparent…. In the early ’80s Ceaus¸escu showed his true colors, by trying to bring back … works which were devoid of artistic values, works which were conventional, falsely patriotic…. But the mechanism of freed creation could no longer be stopped. A kind of parallel literature arose. On the one hand, there were the official, ridiculous and shameless books. On the other, the creation to which “nothing human was alien,” showing even signs of more or less obvious rebellion against the regime. (Vianu 42)

Literature and criticism provided for a while the only available forms of oppositional discourse in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and to some extent in Soviet Union. Edith W. Clowes has called attention to an important “meta-utopian” narrative trend in post-Stalinistic Soviet Union, represented by Alexandr Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights, Abram Terts’s The Makepeace Experiment, Vladimir Voinovich’s Moscow 2042, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s “Novye Robinzony” (The New Crusoes). Their experimentation with “literary style and narrative” projection served a “deeper cultural-ideological” task, contributing significantly to “the cultural soil that produced a phenomenon like glasnost” (5). Similar examples of convergence between literary and cultural experimentations can be found in the countries of East-Central Europe, some anticipating the examples of clowes. In Hungary, where a form of cultural “protopostmodernity” started with the “new economic mechanism” of 1968 that reacted against “aggressive modernization, forced socialist industrialization and urbanization, as well as against the irrationalities and voluntarism of an authoritative personality” (Tötösy 14), the most important “innovative force” of the late 1970s and 1980s was “the Hungarian postmodern literary culture” (24–25). Typically for an EastCentral European Postmodernism, innovative writers had to free their consciousness both from a version of socialism “that had produced infinite rules and bonds for Hungarian culture and civilization,” and from the “state of ritual immobility,” reinstating pluralism in the cultural, social, and political spheres (29–30). Beatrice Tötössy identifies one model of postmodern

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rethinking in Zoltán Endreffy, Erno˝ Kulcsár Szabó, and Béla Bacsó. These critics and theorists advocated a return to the discourse of “doubt” and to ironic modes of articulation, in answer to the power-oriented ethos of modernity (both in its Western and its bowdlerized socialist version). She finds another model in writers like Péter Esterházy, Endre Kukorelly, and Miklós Erdély, who called for a new linguistic-rhetorical “authenticity” liberated from the monologic discourse of power. A third possible model, described by Tötössy in the subsection “The Specter of the Man Without (Linguistic) Qualities,” upset the very distinction between literary and nonliterary discourse, artistic expression and “everyday speech or ungrammatical discourse.” According to Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (see the epilogue to Volume 4 of our History), this style of Esterházy and Kukorelly, adopted from the older poet Sándor Weöres, relied on a polyphony of sociolects to demythologize literary discourse. This suggests that in East-Central Europe the strategies of postmodern fiction were often anticipated in poetry. Czech literature, in which the term “Postmodernism” emerged as a critical term only in the 1980s, illustrates this point, for many features of the new writing (emphasis on intertextuality, linguistic deconstruction, questioning of received ideas) were anticipated in the poetry of Jirˇí Kolárˇ (Suchomel 419–20). It could be argued similarly that some features of Romanian Postmodernism were first rehearsed in the ironic “anti-lyricism” of the later Marin Sorescu, Mircea Iva˘nescu, and Daniela Cra˘snaru or in the dissident poetry of Dorin Tudoran and Mircea Dinescu that opened the way for the heretic experimentalism of Mircea Ca˘rta˘rescu, Matei Vis¸niec, and Marta Petreu. This poetry challenged the metaphoric buoyancy of the sixties, replacing the traditions of interwar Modernism, rediscovered by Nichita Sta˘nescu’s generation, with the more tentative, self-critical, and minimalist discourse that Sta˘nescu himself had prophetically called in 1969 “non-words” (Necuvintele). Prose fiction also played an important role in the interrogation of communist ideology and the “deregulation” of official literature. Anticipations of a new critical-experimental style, that challenged both cultural and literary clichés, can be found in the nonconventional, often unclassifiable works of the Polish Witold Gombrowicz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and Karol Irzykowski (see Bolecki’s article in this Section); also in the deconstructive-ironic texts of the “Tîrgovis¸te” group (Mircea Horia Simionescu, Radu Petrescu, Costache Ola˘reanu), written in the late fifties but published only in the 1970s, that provided early examples of the writer’s struggle to create — through comic-ironic fabulation — a space for individual manifestation and reflection. As Radu Petrescu suggested in Ce se vede (What One Can See; 1979), a novelist is not simply somebody who sees clearly, but also somebody who invents well, challenging naturalized perceptions of reality with his heretical poetics. The revolt of Mircea Horia Simionescu’s protagonist in Redingota (The Redingote; 1984) against those who dictate his destiny — “Leave us alone, Mister! … Do not decide for me! I alone am master of my life and everything I do belongs exclusively to me!” (233) — suggests a more general desire to escape the repressive control exerted by the totalitarian state as “author” on its citizens as “characters.” In Ceaus¸escu’s Romania, where historiography and political philosophy were not allowed to question the state’s master narratives, literature performed part of that revisionistic function (Cornis-Pope, Unfinished 133–35). Whatever starting point one associates with the development of new experimental modes of literature in East-Central Europe (and the periodization varies greatly from country to


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country), most critics would include in the “canon” of experimental literature Milan Kundera’s novels, beginning with Žert (The Joke; 1967); the narratives of the Slovak Pavel Vilikovský; the prolific work of the Hungarian Péter Esterházy, from Tremelési-regény (A Novel of Production; 1979) to his monumental Bevezetés a szépirodalomba (Introduction to Literature; 1986), which incorporates five earlier novels together with others texts in a self-reflexive ensemble; the fiction of Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavic´ in Serbia and the theater of Sławomir Mroz˙ek, Tadeusz Róz˙ewicz and Tadeusz Kantor in Poland. Other works usually mentioned are Éleslövészet (Shooting with Live Ammunition; 1981) by the Hungarian-Slovak Lajos Grendel, Stefica Cvek u raljama života (Stefica Cvek in the Jaws of Life; 1981) of the Croat Dubravka Ugrešic´, or Lumea în doua˘ zile (The World in Two Days; 1975) of the Romanian George Ba˘la˘it¸a˘, all dramatizing more or less overtly the struggle of a writer, narrator, or a whole community to give a truthful vision of life in an age dominated by ideological and cultural clichés. Discussions of East-Central European literature have frequently tried to find the models for the new fiction either in the interwar East-Central European Avant-garde, or in versions of Western postmodernism. The most often mentioned models are those of the absurd (for Havel, Kantor, Mroz˙ek, and Róz˙ewicz), American metafiction and surfiction (for Esterházy, Temesi, Vilikovský), and the Latin American Magic realism (for Ba˘la˘it¸a˘, Kiš, and Pavic´). Critics are quick to note the presence of pastiche, parody, montage of ironic quotations, deconstruction of narrative continuity, problematization of mimesis, the mixing of low and high styles, and the confusion of fiction and fact. But such lists of (mostly formal) postmodern features overlook the specific functions that such procedures play in East-Central European literatures and the degree to which they are adapted/rewritten in the service of a different ideology and poetics. Thus, Kundera’s Žert resorts to certain recognizable post-modern strategies in order to highlight the conflict between a playful individual imagination and a repressive totalitarian regime. Vilikovský quotes and parodies ironically the clichés of Eastern European political, scientific, and literary discourse. The focus on the ideological clichés and myths of Eastern Europe is also central to an unusual type of fiction, the “dictionary novels” of Temesi (Dust; 1986–87), Pavic´ (Dictionary of the Khazars; 1984), and Simionescu (Well-Tempered Ingenuity; 1976–1983) that catalogue, parody, and reinvent the features of a native town, national culture, or regional identity. Other works, from Jirˇí Kolárˇ’s early Dny v roce (Days of a Year; 1948), to Venedikt Ierofeev’s Moskva — Petushki (1977), record quotations, myths, everyday clichés, both local and “universal,” trying to find whatever meaning may still linger in their depleted semiotic structures (see p. 72 below). East-Central European writers worked in a political environment, in which pressures from the ideologies of state Socialism, nationalism, Soviet hegemony, and Postmodernism clashed. They gradually transformed the writers’ vision as well as poetics. Much of the Yugoslav literature of the 1980s, for example, was concerned with the breakdown of the “Yugoslav utopia,” i.e., “the idea of Yugoslav unity” (Moz˙ejko 443) but also of the myth of a successful (non-Stalinistic) communism. Questions of history (recent or more distant) vexed other writers as well, challenging them to try — often without much success as in Ba˘la˘it¸a˘’s Lumea în doua˘ zile — to disentangle history from fiction and ideological manipulation. Narration itself is brought into question, its authority and coherence disrupted. Esterházy’s Tremelési-regény breaks down distinctions between fiction and autobiography, original writing and pastiche, pointing to

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the difficulty of narrating a life in a century dominated by ideological myths. Representing the ‘continuity in the life’ of a minority is even more difficult, as Éleslövészet by Lajos Grendel and the fiction of Danilo Kiš amply prove. The narrative of the Hungarian minority living in Czechoslovakia can only take the form of a fragmented “minority anti-novel,” because it is concerned with “a community deprived of its collective memory” (Szegedy-Maszák, “Postmodern” 429). Similarly, Kiš’s effort to piece together the hybrid identity of the Balkans, especially in Grobnica za Borisa Davidovicˇa (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich; 1975) and Enciklopedija mrtvih (The Encyclopedia of the Dead; 1983) is mediated through contradictory strategies (documentary, myth, imaginary projection, metafictional allusions and references) that cannot provide narrative coherence or certitudes. The interdependence of poetics and politics, history and fiction is even clearer in the “new wave” poetry and fiction of the eighties. Emerging at the height of Ceaus¸escu’s “totalitarian absurd,” the last wave of innovative, self-questioning writers (Mircea Nedelciu, Gabriela Adames¸teanu, and Constantin Stan) attacked official representations, exposing the country’s ideological myths. For example, Mircea Nedelciu’s novel Zmeura de cîmpie (Wild Berries; 1984) dramatized the difficulties of extricating the culture’s “soul of facts” from official fictions and the totalistic language of the “tribe.” Similar concerns can be found in the fiction of Ryszard Kapusćinski and Miško Kranjec, who, in the wake of “new journalism,” mix reportage, document, and quasi-document with historical interpretation, problematizing both fact and fiction; or in the work of experimental feminist writers like Gabriela Adames¸teanu, Krystyna Kofta, and Dubravka Ugrešic´ who break down literary and historiographic conventions in order to accommodate a more honest representation of female identity and experience. The “yearning for the real” was obvious not only in the fiction of this generation, but also in its poetry and visual art that replaced the “yearning for style.” The young artists emerging in the 1980s resorted to most incongruous codes and representational strategies to suggest — in direct antithesis to communist totalitarianism — a “heterogeneous, fragmentary, and plural world” (Cârneci 41). The political thrust of this experimental literature was recognized by the party censors, who struck back whenever they perceived a threat against the party’s monopoly over truth, as in the 1971 official condemnation of the Romanian “oneiric” writers who promoted a revisionist social fantasy, or the similarly paranoid backlash against nonconforming literature in post-1969 Czechoslovakia, 1970s Poland (where postmodernism was treated with suspicion by traditional literary criticism), and in 1980s Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia (see below). The dialogue with Eastern European and Western cultural theories (particularly those associated with the avant-garde, deconstruction, and Postmodernism) played a catalytic role in the process of literary radicalization, empowering East-Central European literary and cultural criticism with the tools that allowed it to assume a reconstructive function, encouraging innovation and norm-breaking. Many of the ideas that animated the 1989 revolutions (cultural pluralism, “civil society,” a democracy of participation) had been prepared in the theoretical laboratory of dissident writers of the best Western and Eastern traditions. The postmodern grafts were useful to a number of intellectual and artistic groups interested in articulating an alternative model of cultural interaction — tolerant, pluralistic, reformulative. Even more important was the assimilation of new Western critical theories. Under their impact, East-Central European criticism underwent a process of theoretical retraining, becoming more explorative and broaching


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formerly tabooed subjects such as the limits of national specificity or the political role of cultural and literary innovation. The dissemination of translated theories (some of them of East-Central European extraction: Algirdas Greimas’ structuralism, Julia Kristeva’s poststructuralism, Tzvetan Todorov’s narratology, Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics) also challenged the “single culture” model, providing East-Central European critics with a permeable notion of culture, “always willing to assimilate, to be stimulated by foreign suggestions, without losing its own message” (Martin 19). Learning about these literary and theoretical models was often an eye opener; nevertheless, they were often adopted creatively. As a belated phenomenon, East-Central European postrealist literature could rethink the existing representational models, complicating the relationship between Modernism and Postmodernism. As Magda Cârneci explains, because of its “specific historical rhythm more typical of a circumference rather than of a center, … as well as because of repeated interruptions in the cultural evolution of the modern period, modernity is still a central theme [in East-Central Europe], a fertile obsession that has to be continued, completed, and consummated, simultaneously with its own critique and deconstruction” (26). The political role of East-Central European Postmodernism was also complex, mixing resistance with reformulation, internal critique with transgression. Emerging in the “decadent phase of state Communism” (which brought about the collapse of controlled economies), East-Central European Postmodernism presented itself as an aesthetic-ideological modality of “surpassing aberrant political conditions, anachronistic social difficulties, and artificial cultural obstructions” (Cârneci 91). Terms such as “pluralism,” “tolerance,” “relativism,” “anti-utopianism,” “diversity,” “global culture,” dominated the postmodern debates of the late 1970s and 1980s, suggesting a larger struggle against the monologic narrative of Communism. On the whole, EastCentral European literature can be said to have sharpened the distinction between a “postmodernism of resistance” and a Postmodernism of “anything goes,” adding to the “experimental work of feminists, people of color, and other traditionally silenced subjects” (Suleiman, “Postmodernism” 53) a specific East-Central European preoccupation with a. b.

the creation of a dialogic context in Eastern European cultures, more tolerant towards innovative-reformulative discourses; the outlining of an alternative model of intellectual and social interaction for (post-) communist “civil societies,” based on creative “disagreement” rather than blind consensus.

The second project had to disguise itself most often in order to escape censorship. For example in Romania, like in other neighboring countries, an attractive but somewhat arcane version of civil society was outlined by philosopher Constantin Noica, who argued the redemptive value of culture and proposed a Socratic model of social dialogue outside the channels controlled by the communist state. This project rallied around it not only professional philosophers, but also literary and art critics with views that often appeared postmodern. Departing from their master’s proud assertion of marginality as a preserver of true cultural values (which played very well into the regime’s own efforts to isolate any forms of resistance), Noica’s followers advocated an “ethics of engagement” against the party’s encroaching ideology. According to Verdery (259), “the Noica School came closest to articulating both the confrontation of culture with power and the possibility of an alternative vision — the foundation of a diversified

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ideological field and, through this, of transforming society from within.” Other dissident writers (for instance, Adam Michnik, Václav Havel, Zbigniew Bujak, and Paul Goma) tied their idea of an “open society” to notions of political pluralism, human solidarity, and European integration , as well as to the principle of “self-determination for individuals, groups, and for the nation” (Konrád, Antipolitics 123–4). The “Joint Declaration from Eastern Europe” (October 1986), signed by 123 pro-democracy activists from Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland, proclaimed that our common determination to struggle for political democracy in our countries, for their independence, for pluralism founded on the principles of self-government, for the peaceful unification of a united Europe and for its democratic integration, as well as for the rights of minorities. (qtd. in Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics 168–69)

These socio-political concepts were often linked to the idea of an “alternative culture” that needed to be reconstructed from ground up, unlearning the ideological, cultural and literary dogmas of the communist period but also its literary and cultural, dogmas. We ought to remember though that for every victorious discourse in pre-1989 Eastern Europe there were others that never managed to break the silence. With the cultural space carefully colonized by the redundant discourse of power, there was little room for whole-scale experimentation. New trends would emerge only when older ones would weaken or break up. The satirical work of Milan Kundera and Miloš Forman found only a brief window of opportunity in pre-1968 Czechoslovakia; the innovative fiction of Danilo Kiš could emerge only when the “specific Yugo-hybrid of socialist realist doctrines” receded, and even then it continued to struggle with a xenophobic Serbian culture that “rejected foreign literary influences as unauthentic,” preferring instead “realism with a specific national flavor” (Longinovic´, Border Line 109–10). In Romania, alternative modes of fiction (self-reflexive, psychological, feminist) gained attention only after the older political novels that interrogated the Stalinists fifties began to appear outdated. In criticism, stronger theoretical approaches emerged only after the antisystematic, paradoxical forms of “new criticism” had run their course. As a consequence, EastCentral European Postmodernism continually shifted its boundaries, fractured between an internal, often-underground production, and the more visible output of émigrés in the West. In the case of Czech literature, for example, we need to consider two parallel traditions, the transplanted work of Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký receiving more attention, at least initially, than the work of writers like Havel and Hrabal who stayed in Czechoslovakia. Similarly, Bulgarian and Romanian literatures lost a number of important representatives of Postmodernism through defection or forced exile. Not only theorists like Matei Ca˘linescu and Christian Moraru, but also a sizable group of experimental authors writing in German, from Franz Hodjak to Herta Müller and Richard Wagner had to leave Romania. The Bulgarian debate about Postmodernism could only begin after 1989, as the theories of Western Postmodernism and the practices of such exiled writers as Tzvetan Marangozov and Georgi Markov were finally integrated. Even in countries where the interest in experimentation was rediscovered earlier, the contacts between writers and movements in the West and writers at home developed gradually, having to overcome theoretical and cultural resistances, less significant in Hungary, more pronounced in Poland and Romania.


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As a further complication in East-Central European cultures, the postmodern privileging of the local over the “universal” was exploited by nationalist regimes such as those of Yugoslavia and Romania. According to Tomislav Longinovic (“Postmodernity” 121), the playful, selfquestioning writings of the postmodern theorists rallied around the Belgrade journal Vidici critiqued the Titoist foundations of Yugoslav culture, but in some ways also anticipated/ generated the indeterminacies that fed the ethnic wars in postcommunist Yugoslavia. Even though the Ceaus¸escu regime did not order ethnic “cleansing” of the kind carried out by extremists in Yugoslavia, it did inspire grotesque attempts to establish a “correct national ideology” such as the country’s propagandistic festival, “Song to Romania,” and the publications of the “protochronists” (xenophobic advocates of local traditions) that turned to advantage the Heideggerian philosophy of Constantin Noica. In the Baltic countries, the relationship between Postmodernism, socialism, and nationalism was even more complex, with the three terms interacting in unpredictable ways. Postmodernism functioned in this sense not only as an alternative to, but also as one of the catalysts of post-Soviet nationalism (see the article of Annus and Hughes in this section). As we will argue in the post-1989 Epilogue (vol. 4 of this History), the East-European cultures underwent an ideological identity crisis after 1989, which had largely to do with unsettled conflicts of theories and mentalities. The postcommunist landscape was strikingly incoherent: an Enlightenment rhetoric of cultural emancipation coexisted with forms of nationalism; a nineteenth-century notion of market capitalism overlapped with a distrust of mass consumerism, and over-politicized modes of cultural production competed with aestheticism and cheap entertainment. While it is true that the post-1989 restructuring produced a few poetpresidents, animated by the inclusive ideals of an open, pluralistic society, they were outnumbered by nationalist politicians who pursued ethnically “pure” countries and new political empires (Yugoslavia’s president Miloševic´, Hungary’s Vice President István Csurka, Croatia’s President Franjo Tu man, Romania’s National Unity Party president, Gheorghe Funar, and so on). Furthermore, a number of transition governments learned right away how to use postmodern tele-technics to revamp their own image and exploit the ingrained xenophobia and antiintellectualism of their voters. And yet, an alternative, more democratic model of political and literary culture was finally taking roots in East-Central Europe. Significant changes took place especially at the institutional level, from the abolition of censorship to a fundamental reconfiguration of the way literary culture is produced and disseminated in a market society (see vol. 3 of our History). New textbooks and literary histories had to be written, the high school and university curricula had to be revised thoroughly to eliminate the ideological biases and taboos cultivated by the previous regimes. Reading habits changed, as readers discovered a much broader range of literary styles (both high and low, indigenous and foreign). There was, and still is, an enormous hunger for works that attempt to reveal the truth about the past: memoirs, historical and sociological studies, political retrospectives. This perhaps naïve yearning for the truth was cultivated at the cost of the previous interest in literary fiction, and it created problems for some writers. It is an irony of history, for instance, that Csurka, considered to be a critical writer in the 1960s and 70s, turned out to have been a communist informant. In the context of the growing resentment towards the dissident figures that prepared the 1989 revolutions in Czechoslovakia, Poland or Romania (see

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the Polish examples analyzed by Irena Grudzinska Gross in “Postcommunist Resentment”), a reevaluation of the role of literature under Communism and postcommunist was launched in the last decade of the century. This reevaluation highlighted the hesitations, contradictions and compromises that eroded the revolutionary potential of literature under totalitarianism, but it also recognized the departures from official ideology that the best pre-1989 works accomplished. Not all changes brought by the events of 1989 were positive: state publishers fell on hard times (in Hungary, Akadémiai könyvkiadó was sold to the Dutch Kluwers, which now sold it again because it found little profit in it), theater subsidies were drastically cut, Academies and Writers Societies were curtailed or lost their authority together with their finances. The post1989 politicization of culture had mixed effects upon literature. “Literature” in the narrow, aesthetic sense, was partly supplanted by political and journalistic publications and by trivial literature. Left without state subsidies and the moral support of those who used to appreciate the oppositional role of literary culture under totalitarianism, some cultural magazines folded, some scholarly books were delayed indefinitely. Still, upon closer examination the concern with the “degradation” of the literary market was only partly warranted. Books continued to appear from many new or revamped presses, but they were no longer controlled by an elite of self-conscious artists, nor were they read by the same homogeneous, informed readership in pursuit of concealed political allusions. The very definition of “literature” became diversified and “carnivalized,” split into conflicting cultural styles, high and low. Many post-1989 publications (previously censored manuscripts, dissident texts published abroad, translations from the literary and critical work of the diaspora) filled important cultural gaps, expanding and restructuring the corpus of East-Central European literatures under totalitarianism. A number of political and critical themes could not be developed before the collapse of the communist regimes in East-Central Europe. Prior to 1989, many critics preferred to couch their cultural analysis in the paradoxical terms of deconstructive theorizing, rather than in the systematic critical terms of a new historicist, feminist, or sociosemiotic approach. Concepts like “national literature,” “minority culture,” “dogmatism,” “realism,” “postmodernism,” “tradition,” “innovation” shifted their meaning not only from culture to culture, but also within the same culture according to the agency that controlled the discourse (official or oppositional speakers). The debate concerning the possibilities of Romanian Postmodernism, initiated in 1986 by the journal Caiete critice (Critical Notebooks), wavered between an “autochthonous” weariness of, and a qualified plea for aesthetic and cultural experimentation. Similar discussions in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, hosted in periodicals like Nový Život (New Life), Literatura na S´wiecie (Literature in the World), Mozgó világ (World in Motion), Delo (Work), or in anthologies like Taborska and Marcin’s Postmodernizm — kultura wyczerpania? (Postmodernism — A Culture of Exhaustion?; 1988), viewed postmodernism alternatively as a mutation of Modernism, reflecting a new skepticism about the efficacy of literature and utopian imagination, and as a new literary approach responding to the complexities of postindustrial/posttotalitarian society. Absent from most pre-1989 discussions was the admission that Postmodernism was more than an aesthetic idea, challenging the ideological configurations that allowed a form of totalitarian power to survive. The postmodern features enumerated by Al. Ca˘linescu (impurity, pleasure of writing, irony, fantasy, artistic instinct, self-parody, open form, equivocation, tension, intertextuality, fragmentation) were primarily formal-poetic, even though


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they did acquire a sociocultural significance in their “interconnectedness,” “because a state of tension is created. Pluralism implies (to its credit) contradiction, opposition” (“Utopia” 4). In other critical overviews such as Poetikata na postmodernizmot (The Poetics of Postmodernism; 1983) of the Macedonian critic Danilo Kocevski, and Monica Spiridon’s “Le Discours de la méthode” Postmodernism played a stronger revisionist role, attacking traditional epistemologies though not to the point where it could cause a major disturbance. The ideological value of the self-problematized, oppositional discourse of Postmodernism has been fully recognized only in the post-1989 political environment. As Monica Spiridon has argued more recently, politics and poetics are intimately intertwined in the postmodern project, which offers a radical critique of “naturalness,” “transparency,” and ideological “reductionism” of any kind (“Poetica˘” 7). Pre1989 East-Central European critical discourse, she now concedes, had to obfuscate this relationship for fear of heresy. The book-length studies that have appeared since 1989 in Romania, for example — Ion Buzera’s Literatura româna˘ fat¸a˘ cu postmodernismul (1996), Cârneci’s Arta anilor ’80 (1996), Gheorghe Perian’s Scriitorii români postmoderni (1996), Mircea Ca˘rta˘rescu’s Postmodernismul românesc (1999), and Cornis-Pope’s The Unfinished Battles: Romanian Postmodernism Before and After1989 (1996) — have tried to “canonize” an East-Central European version of Postmodernism, placing it at the intersection of Western postmodern theories and Eastern European avant-garde traditions, poetic experimentation, and political subversion. The canonization attempted in Ca˘rta˘rescu’s and Cârneci’s books looks somewhat self-serving, associating the beginning of Postmodernism with their own 1980s literary generation, but it does recognize a number of anticipations (both literary and theoretical) in the 1960s and 1970s. The more interesting discussion in these and other works concerns the relationship between postmodernism and postcommunism. “Is Postmodernism a Cure to Postcommunism,” asked a 1991 debate hosted by the Polish monthly Dialog (see “Czy postmodernizm”). While no clear answer was given to this question, the participants in the debate saw postmodernism and postcommunism as two forms of culture in transition, two “amorphisms” that undermine the existing structure but will have to disappear once their deconstructive/cleansing function is completed. Not surprisingly, the post-1989 period not only opened new possibilities for aesthetic and political interactions, but also redefined the contexts and terms with which these discourses operate? We will address some of these contexts in the introduction to our Epilogue on post1989 literary phenomena.

II The articles clustered in this section, including the introduction, explore the literature leading to the moment of 1989, using that reference year both as a radical “turning” point and an interface in the evolution of various East-Central European literatures. In this sense the pre-1989 literature both contrasts and anticipates certain post-communist phenomena. The authors of these essays emphasize the subversive role that pre-1989 literature often played, eroding the tight grip of communist ideology and inserting alternative messages into the dominant discursive field. These analyses also point out the compromises that literature often made (e.g., adopting nationalist or

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Essentialist agendas). These compromises affect the post-1989 context (see our Epilogue in vol. 4), complicating and diluting its impact. According to Włodimierz Bolecki (“1989 in Poland”), 1989 is a less significant temporal marker than 1918, 1956, or 1968. It is not related, at least in Poland, to the appearance of new generations, aesthetics, programs and literary currents. For Bolecki, 1989 marks a historicoliterary caesura, more significant in what it disrupted or put an end to: censorship, the division between internal and émigré literature, centralization, but also independent publishing, clearly defined hierarchies, continuity of projects, etc. Still, Bolecki sees also some positive developments emerging out of the 1989 ethos of change: the lifting of political and cultural taboos, the incipient recognition of multiculturalism and multinationalism in Polish culture, and the “discovery” of Postmodernism. Polish Postmodernism looks to Bolecki more like an updated version of East-Central European Modernism, hence he seeks its pre-1989 antecedents in the work of Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and Schulz. Szegedy-Maszák (“Postmodern Literature in Hungary”) also finds a significant continuity between the style of Esterházy and Kukorelly and the early poetry of Sándor Weöres. This could suggest that the literatures leading to and emerging from 1989 are not divided by a true “caesura.” Still, if one considers the institutional aspects of literature (censorship, publishing, direction of theaters, curricula and textbooks), one can argue, against Bolecki, that 1989 represents very much a turning point in Poland, just as it does in the other former communist countries. Postmodern experimentation, innovation, neo-avant-garde, etc. are key terms in other articles that focus on some of the cultural and literary debate around 1989. Whatever their limitations, these cultural categories allow the contributors to this Section to focus on the reconstructive role of literature in the specific East-Central European contexts, refining its definition and interplaying it with other terms not ordinarily associated with Postmodernism. In their article on recent Estonian literature, Epp Annus and Robert Hughes foreground the convergence of Postmodernism, nationalism, and socialism. They argue that the categories of postmodernity, associated since Fredric Jameson with late capitalist societies, can be extended to the totalitarian states of “late socialism.” Not only did “late socialism” share a number of features with late capitalist postmodernity (“depthlessness,” “timelessness,” the “waning of affect” — to use Jameson’s wellknown terms) but it also radicalized them, making Communism’s “grandiose system of simulacra” all-encompassing and converting the “late capitalist commodification of simulacra [into] a late socialist simulacrum of commodity.” Thus the East-Central European version of Postmodernism emerged in reaction to a “postmodern” society already in place. Its role remained ambivalent, both encouraging and limiting political resistance by allowing cultures under “occupation” to dismantle grand narratives, including those of Soviet imperialism and local nationalism. By contrast, Monica Spiridon’s article regards Postmodernism as just another facet that the “will to modernity” took in countries like Romania, a facet that could equally well be defined as a form of “transmodernity” or “neo-modernism.” Like the two earlier guises that the will-tomodernity took (a mild, “well-tempered” modernity, followed by an arrogant high modernity), Postmodernism foregrounded problems of literary and cultural identity. It returned us to a few basic questions such as: Where should East-Central European cultures look for patterns that can offer cultural legitimacy and a secure identity against the external pressure of the neighboring empires? Can one assimilate and still remain oneself? But it also challenged the question of

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identity derived from the self-legitimizing narratives of modernity and socialism. In their effort to break up bipolar oppositions, the post-modern writers of the 1980s (including those belonging to the German, Hungarian and Serbian minorities, not discussed in this essay) undertook a critique of all identity models, including those that pendulated between Orientalism and Occidentalism, replacing them with more hybrid notions of identity. The problematization of national and ethnic identity went even further in the work of minority writers such as Herta Müller (see vol. 2 of this History). In his essay on postmodern literature before and after the “changes” in East-Central Europe, Péter Krasztev also reconsiders the relationship between Modernism and Postmodernism but further emphasizes the role of Postmodernism in challenging and rewriting political utopias. This impressive comparative excursus through most of the Balkan literatures, as well as through a host of other regional literatures from Lithuanian and Polish to Hungarian, manages to recontextualize the history of East-Central European Postmodernism, defining its specific approach to the grand narratives of socialism and to the issues of individual and collective identity. Even though Postmodernism is presented as East-Central Europe’s “last common language,” threatened by the post-1990 return to national narratives of modernity and differentiation, Krasztev does not view its retreat nostalgically: as he suggests in an analysis of a few recent works of fiction, the deconstructive impulse of Postmodernism can be fruitfully replaced with a presentation of the past in its realistic detail, however desolate or preposterous.

1989 in Poland: Continuity and Caesura Włodimierz Bolecki Two perspectives on the 1980s and after As in the other countries of East-Central Europe, 1989 marks in Poland the year of the collapse of the Communist system. However, this year does not necessarily signify an essential boundary date for the literature of East-Central European countries, and of Poland in particular. This is not only because the significance of 1989 is of a political-historical nature, but also because this year is impossible to relate directly to any sort of literary events. It is, therefore, a temporal marker completely unlike any other, for example 1918, 1945, 1956, or 1968. In the case of the latter, political events in all of Eastern Europe were woven together with specific literary manifestations, for example with the appearance of new generations, aesthetic programs, and literary directions. Nevertheless, 1989 obviously represents in Eastern Europe, including Poland, a clear historico-literary caesura. Why is that? First of all, 1989 marks the end of a long revolt in East-Central European societies against the totalitarianism of the Communist state. In Poland, the entire decade from 1980–1989 was a

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period of open social revolt, which began with the establishment of the Solidarity movement in 1981. The majority of Polish writers, scholars, and artists took part in it. Second, in terms of literary history, 1989 marks in Poland the end of another and somewhat longer phenomenon, the independent publishing movement that had functioned relatively successfully since 1976. For fifteen years, this movement created its own authors and readers, its own hierarchy (set of priorities), style, and criteria. It was, for all of its participants, a great “university.” Third, 1989 in Poland brought an end to the institution of censorship and, therefore, an end to a state structure whose function was the censoring of every dimension of public life (see the section on censorship in Volume 3 of this History). Fourth, 1989 abolishes the division between émigré literature (to which Witold Gombrowicz, Czesłav Miłosz, Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski, among others, belong) and national literature. After 1945, these two literatures constituted two different, totally unconnected circulation systems (in Poland, the publication of émigré literature was prohibited by censorship). Fifth, 1989 marks the end of a literary era whose borders and internal hierarchy were determined by the existence of a political (and earlier, ideological) center. 1989, or more broadly the turn of the decade, can be viewed as the point terminus of a model that had been dominant until then — one that emphasized the social role of literature and the public life of the writer. Summing up, we can say that the turn of the decade concluded an epoch in Polish cultural history that took for granted political periodizations (e.g., 1945–1956–1968–1976–1981), hierarchies, and judgments prevalent at the time. 1989 signifies, therefore, the violent rupture of the prevailing official evolutionary line in culture and literature. However, another perspective is possible here: Polish literary history after 1989 can be understood also from the point of view of continuity. First, after 1989 all the prominent writers of the previous period continued their creative work. 1989 did not seem to constitute for them any sort of a break. Second, literary production after 1989 was, even for the youngest generation of writers, a continuation of the artistic quests undertaken in the 1980s. The 1980s themselves can be read both as a unique historical-literary decade, with clearly marked boundaries (from 1976 to1989), and as a natural fulfillment and continuation of the earlier literary decades. These two different views of the 1980s, which appear to be contradictory and irreconcilable, underlie much of the current reevaluations and discussions. The turn of the decade drew the curtain over a certain understanding of literature. After 1989 literary life in East-Central Europe began to function under radically different organizational conditions from those operating during the previous half century. What this means is that the social and political conditions of literary communication have changed, not necessarily the literary styles or objectives. The period 1976–1989 brought about fundamental literary changes in Polish culture. Briefly put, these changes occurred in the readers’ range of literary knowledge. These in turn caused farreaching changes in the understanding, evaluation, and ranking of literary phenomena. Literary history is not constituted only of discrete texts, but also of the literary knowledge of their readers. After 1989, a number of previously tabooed topics reemerged in cultural discussions — the significance of émigré literature, the part that Polish writers played in creating a Stalinist system (literature’s participation in totalitarian propaganda), the multiculturalism and multination-

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alism of Polish culture (the presence of German, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, French, Lithuanian, etc., subcultures). In addition, thanks to translations of Western works, a number of contemporary intellectual and theoretical trends were adopted: Postmodernism, deconstruction, gender studies, and feminist criticism.

Postmodernism in Poland In Poland, Postmodernism was discovered and acknowledged around the time that Communism was abolished. At the beginning of the 1990s, political changes were linked to aesthetic and artistic developments. The period needed a new name, and if it was not to be found in politics, it was sought in literature and art. As the political organization changed, so did the role of literature and art; a new generation of writers and artists entered public life. Some critics linked these political and aesthetic changes so closely that post-Communism was associated automatically with Postmodernism. However, the term Postmodernism did not emerge in Poland in 1989. The works of many well-known postmodern writers and critics were translated already in the 1980s, and Polish critics contributed their own critical reflections and studies to international Postmodernism (e.g., Jerzy Kutnik’s 1986 The Novel as Performance, which offered the first book-length study of two pioneers of American narrative innovation, Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman — the editors’ note). Doubtlessly, however, Postmodernism became the key term for contemporary literature and culture after 1989. And here again, a conflict of perspectives became immediately apparent: Postmodernism was regarded alternatively as a break in the continuity of culture and as a continuation of Modernism. Because there were not too many examples of postmodern works in the Polish literature of the 1980s and 1990s, critics began to reach for examples from the past. These were found not in the literature written during the last few years but in the works of the best-known Polish writers born at the turn of the century — Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz. The new critical accounts of their works argued that they contained typical features of postmodern literature: parody, intertextuality, anti-mimeticism, polysemy, language games, hybrids of low and high cultures, ironic reversals of cultural hierarchies, and so on. The problem is, however, that these features are typical also of East European, especially Polish and Russian Modernism. The recognition of this paradox requires that literary scholars address the following set of questions: — What were the specific characteristics and temporal frames for the period of Modernism in Poland and Eastern Europe? — What relation exists between the meaning of Modernism in Western Europe and the USA, and that in Eastern Europe? — What kind of literature arose on the basis of today’s meaning of the term “modernism”? For example, such phenomena as the destruction of illusion, the short-circuiting of representation, dadaism, surrealism, intertextuality, hybrid (heterogeneous) genre, play with kitsch, are typical elements of Modernism in Eastern Europe while in America they are more often markers of Postmodernism.

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— What are the historical ties between literature and its social context? This latter question is justified in view of the paradoxes that attend Postmodernism: (1) Postmodernism is the culture of the post-industrial period but East-Central European countries are still deeply entrenched in the industrial period. Therefore, is postmodern literature possible under modernist conditions? (2) Postmodernism programmatically questions or casts off such categories as “subject,” “author,” “meaning,” “utopia,” “hierarchy”; yet these categories constitute the fundamental concerns for writers considered in Poland and in other neighboring countries as postmodernists. Therefore, are modernist ideas possible in a postmodern aesthetic? And if so, we could conclude, perhaps, that phenomena that in the Western tradition are designated by the term “postmodernism” belong in East-Central Europe (and Poland is a good example) to a later Eastern European Modernism. There are many such paradoxes, and their sources lie, of course, in the distinct historical and cultural traditions of East-Central Europe and Western Europe/USA. A description of these differences would be important and fascinating. Many of these questions are still left open. 1989 marks in Eastern Europe, above all, the beginning of an open, pluralistic discussion of the identity of East-Central Europe. After half a century under a political gag order for all sorts of discussions, we are still awaiting an answer/answers. For the moment, the most important thing is to put forth the question.

Reversals of the postmodern and the late Soviet simulacrum in the Baltic Countries — with exemplifications from Estonian literature Epp Annus and Robert Hughes Our article aims at imagining a point of convergence between three terms — Postmodernism, nationalism, and socialism — which are ordinarily understood to have a sort of allergic relation to one another. Consequently, our argument may seem at first surprising or paradoxical. Postmodernism, after all, tends to be conceived specifically through the prism of late capitalism. This has been almost axiomatic for certain theorists of the postmodern at least since Fredric Jameson proposed that “the emergence of Postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism,” and that “its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social system” (“Consumer Society” 125). Socialist systems, therefore, have been generally thought to fit uneasily under the label of postmodernity. We will argue, however, that some of the key concepts of postmodernity could also describe the totalitarian state with economic difficulties and a homogenized social order, not just late capitalism.

Reversals of the postmodern and the late Soviet simulacrum in the Baltic Countries

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Nationalism would seem to be a modern project, something essentially unifying and teleological, and on that account quite remote from postmodern thinking. Socialism, in turn, not only strives to overcome national thinking, but also explicitly expresses its disdain towards the postmodern. Yet, in our view, conditions in the period of late socialism in the Baltic states — and very likely in socialist countries more generally — provoked a complex interconnection between the three ideologies. More specifically, we will trace out the triangulation of late socialism, Postmodernism, and nationalism, as this knotted trinity gives rise to problems in literary works of art in Estonia. We will take a special interest in the transformations inside this trinity (and in its relationship to literary works) following the collapse of the Soviet empire. Because the cultural situation under the Soviet regime was so strongly tied to the ruling ideological program, it seems reasonable to start a cultural investigation of that period from the particularities of the socio-political atmosphere.

1.

Postmodernity: Social condition, critical discourse

Among the most important features of the late socialist condition (at least in the USSR), and chief among the socio-political particularities that structure the present essay, was a radical discursive split: literature and society were divorced from the critical metalanguage that was supposed to describe them. As Mart Velsker suggests, “Party control created a situation where the critical metalanguage became even more thoroughly enmeshed in the Stalinist networks than literature itself did” (127). Strikingly, Hando Runnel’s poetry collection, Punaste õhtute purpur (The Purple of Red Nights; 1982), was, for instance, allowed publication — only to be placed subsequently under a critical ban. While the collection was published and sold, no reviews were permitted, so Runnel’s published work had to contend with an absolute critical silence. One crucial consequence of this split between critical discourse and literature was the political impossibility of talking about Modernism or Postmodernism in literature, since in the metalanguage all literature was officially labeled “socialist realism.” Thus, whereas in Western societies Postmodernism was produced first of all as a critical discourse — as Brian McHale writes, “postmodernism exists discursively, in the discourses we produce about it and using it” (Constructing 1) — in East European countries it could be introduced as a discourse only after the loosening of the political control in the 1980s, and then it was extended back in time to cover the conditions of the 1970s and 1960s. Consequently, one could retroactively identify postmodern features as implicit literary strategies or as a “cultural logic,” even though Postmodernism was necessarily absent as a self-conscious discursive category at the time. One might even say that a postmodern condition that “anticipates retrospectively” the postmodern critical discourse is one of the particularities of the late socialist system. An investigation of the different ways in which the cultures in Central and Eastern Europe have characterized their situations bears out this theory of “retrospective anticipation”: countries with more or less similar backgrounds perceive their Postmodernism in very different ways, yet all clearly separate postmodernist literature from postmodern discourse. One prestigious collection of articles, Bertens’s and Fokkema’s International Postmodernism (1997) gives the following picture: Postmodernism is supposed to have started in Czech literature already in the

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1940s, in Russian literature in the late 1950s, in Slovak literature in the early 1960s, in Poland in the late 1960s, in Slovenian and Romanian literatures in the early 1970s (to be rediscovered in the early 1980s), in Hungary in the late 1970s, and — most strikingly — in Latvian literature there has never been any postmodern literature, despite some attempts to “imitate” it in early 1990s. The picture, therefore, appears greatly varied, with the common denominator being that discussions about Postmodernism had a late beginning — most typically in the 1980s. Hans Bertens has identified three phases in the development of Postmodernism: 1.

2.

3.

Postmodernism as a complex of anti-modernist artistic strategies: “they all seek to transcend what they see as the self-imposed limitations of Modernism, which in its search for autonomy and purity or for timeless, representational truth has subjected experience to unacceptable intellectualizations and reductions” (Bertens 5); Postmodernism as a Weltanschauung, a set of intellectual propositions: “It’s not the world that is postmodern, here, it is the perspective from which that world is seen that is postmodern” (9); postmodernity as a state of affairs, specific to the Western world, or a new cultural logic: “it is the world as such that has become postmodern, that is, entered a new historical era, that of postmodernity” (10).

Bertens follows the development of Postmodernism from its first stage in the late 1950s through the third stage in the 1980s. Initially, he says, Postmodernism was discussed as an artistic strategy, later as a way of seeing the world, then finally it developed into a new condition of Western capitalist society. This last phase, in particular, has been understood as something specific to late capitalism. One would expect, therefore, that it would be the phase least translatable to the Soviet system. Paradoxically, however, the evidence suggests that in late socialism this structure was maintained, only exactly in reverse. Postmodernism in the literature of late socialist cultures appears to have emerged in reaction to a “postmodern” society already in place. To develop this argument, we will begin by examining the prehistory of Postmodernism in Modernism.

2.

A brief, harmonious interlude: Estonian Marxist modernism in the 1960s

We might usefully start with a consideration of the 1960s. Whereas the 1960s in the West are often considered as marking the beginnings of Postmodernism, this period in Estonian literature is generally conceived in terms of Modernism, albeit one with a distinctive local flavor. In contrast to turn-of-the-century Modernism, Estonian Modernism in the 1960s was not an elitist project. Not only were distinctions between high and popular literature absent in the Soviet situation, but the very small number of books published could not support such a market segmentation. The aestheticism of Estonian Modernism also had its contextual peculiarities. Colin Falck considers Modernism in terms of aesthetic categories: “Modernism’s central function, and the real achievement of its technical explorations, was to remind us once again of the aesthetic nature of fictions” (149). In the context of the socialist system, the function of modernist


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literature expanded from the aesthetic nature of fictions to the aesthetic nature of human existence in the world. After the existential concerns of the preceding years of terrorist Socialism, Estonian Modernism in the 1960s was thought to bring people back into an existence that was both sensually human and socially contextualized. Rather than being regarded as an elitist project, therefore, Estonian modernist literature was considered a nationally important undertaking and fulfilled an important social task. “Poetry chapbooks turned out to be a kind of national celebration,” writes Kersti Unt in retrospect (“Muutuv kaanon” 1232); through such bundles of small verse collections, the poet regained, as was often claimed afterwards, the romantic position as the “conscience of a nation.” This was really a quite remarkable development — a romantic Modernism, in its strivings somewhat similar to the ideas of the National Awakening. The National Awakening in the nineteenth century had been a social movement that emphasized the importance of renewed social structures. The “mini-National Awakening” in the 1960s placed subjective freedom above the powers of the system, but by requiring freedom for everybody and presenting the question of the subject as a social issue, it gained once more national importance and acknowledgement. Indeed, the 1960s remained a remarkably utopian zone in Estonian cultural life. The experimental modernist novel focused on the most topical problems of the Lebenswelt; the theme of morality was foregrounded, and formal experimentation did not imply an abandonment of ethical values. The narrative plot typically opposed an arrogant member of the Communist Party, who had abandoned ethical principles in the name of career ambitions, to an honest artist/writer/ scientist of clear conscience, who had composed ethically and aesthetically valuable works. This was the case, for example, in Enn Vetemaa’s Pillimees (trans. as A Musician; 1965) and Monument (1967). This Modernism aimed at cleansing the subject from the grime of the system and collaboration with it, reaffirming the rights of human life. Although Modernism became the voice of a relative national freedom, the movement was nevertheless strongly tied to the Soviet reality. This reality was at the time thoroughly modern in its ideology insofar as it was widely and optimistically believed that the party and the socialist system could be renewed from inside. To a great extent, Estonian Modernism in the 1960s was part of the Marxist project of modernity. A sociological investigation conducted by Erle Rikman leads to the same conclusion — namely, that the dominant model of discussing the 1960s in the larger contemporary discourse coincided remarkably with the model used by party members (136). One suspects, however, that a Marxist Modernism could develop so fervently only because it accorded (or seemed to accord) with another grand narrative of modernity — the national narrative. In the late 1960s, the mood in the socialist government shifted, and the modernist push towards progress was abruptly crushed. At the same time, however, the machinery of Soviet ideology continued unabated to promote the myth of uninterrupted progress. Thus the construction of a grandiose system of simulacra, interrupted at the end of the 1950s by the loosening of Soviet ideological strictures on cultural life, resumed and attained perfection by the 1980s. We will later show that the whole period of simulacrum-construction fits well into the category of postmodernity. Our task now is to explore the modes of Soviet postmodernity.

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Epp Annus and Robert Hughes The postmodern features of the late socialist simulacrum

Jameson has approached Postmodernism through its two distinctive features, space and time: “the transformation of reality into images” and “the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents” (“Consumer Society” 125). Later, in “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson linked the two through a relationship of inference: he lists among the “constitutive features” of the postmodern “a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary ‘theory’ and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; [and] a consequent weakening of a historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality” (Postmodernism 6; our italics). Jameson adds the waning of affect and the importance of new technologies as marks of a postmodern culture. Apart from the new technologies, all of Jameson’s keywords are appropriate to characterize the state of late socialism. Depthlessness, timelessness, and the waning of affect seem to form a friendly cluster in late socialism just as they do in late capitalism; the new technologies are added by Jameson as a “shorthand” for something outside (a topic to which we will return). Simulacrum, “the identical copy for which no original has ever existed” (Postmodernism 18), is suggestive of the Jamesonian spatial dimension of the postmodern. We find, however, that the simulacrum was constitutive of the socialist totalitarian regime to a far greater extent than it was of late capitalism (including cyberspace). The multiple simulations of late capitalism, which are accompanied by a belief in a plurality of voices and possibilities, appear to have an innocence utterly unparalleled in the monolithic simulacrum of Soviet reality, which were directly and self-consciously promoted through the state apparatus and disciplinarian institutions. Nor was the socialist simulacrum unduly troubled about its truth-values, its correspondence to reality. The totalizing nature of the simulacrum, the fact that there was no exterior point of articulation to it, meant that the simulacrum could manufacture itself — not just in cultural or interpretive but also in economic terms, such as numbers and statistics. Such a thoroughly empowered simulacrum was able to counteract and master the facts of reality for decades — if only by neglecting them. The whole sphere of language turned into one grandiose performative speech act, directed towards the affirmation of the Soviet simulacrum. The speeches of Leonid Brezhnev, for example, published in newspapers all over the Soviet empire, were punctuated by the repetitious comment within brackets, “[constant applause].” If we consider the physical likelihood of maintaining steady applause through a two-hour speech (!), we understand that the printed speeches and their way of presenting the simulacrum were not to be interpreted as denoting any kind of reality; rather, the performativity of the speech acts supported the simulacrum quite apart from the real world. “[Constant applause]” was presented as a sign of a reality, a speech event being really heard, but it actually maintained only a simulacrum. Constant applause can also be thought of in terms of Jameson’s end of history: if applause is permanent, it cannot be connected to anything specific — either to the excitement and pleasure of an audience, or to any kind of change and development. Rather, the constant applause presents itself as an affectless accompaniment to a constant, unchangeable state of affairs. We begin to get a sense of what Jameson meant by the temporal peculiarity of postmodernity: namely its social timelessness, its denial of origin. He foregrounds one major theme of postmodern temporality within the deeper logic of multinational capitalism: “the disappearance


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of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind that earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve” (Postmodernism 125). The effacement of pre-colonial (preSoviet) historiographies constituted one of the most arduous efforts of the Soviet system. The system did not fully succeed in supplanting the “old” history — the story that Estonians told of themselves prior to the Soviet occupation — and yet the Soviet order was experienced on the most part as a boundless, everlasting presence with no way out. The times preceding the Soviet order attained for most Estonians the features of a mythical period of general happiness, something never again to be attained. We can find another example of this in Pavlik Morozov, the pioneer who informed the KGB against his father. In replacing the diachronic family relationships with the synchronic heroism of the Soviet order, he became a public hero, a symbol of the Soviet refusal of origins. Thousands of Young Pioneer organizations were named after this figure of a Soviet present without filiation. Among the most visible signs of the forced disregard of origins during the Soviet era was the new panel housing, large tracts of town consisting only of ugly apartment houses. Though as an architectural project these functionalist buildings had been associated with the alienation of modernity, by the 1970s their literary qualities had shifted to suggest merely the flatness and uprootedness of postmodernity. In Mati Unt’s Sügisball (Autumn Ball; 1979), for example, the character Eero sees his high-rise suburb in flat terms, as devoid of any kind of elevation.” Lacking either cellars or attics, these homes lack any psychological verticality: a free spirit can find no place in the small attic chambers, and chthonic creatures such as rats cannot live in the cellars and root the dwelling to earth (Sügisball 13–14). Jameson describes the obliteration of the past in late capitalist society through its news media, which induce and reflect a state of exhaustion: “The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia” (Postmodernism 125). But if in the Brezhnev era, “the ‘same’ newspaper was published every day, with the ‘same’ message in it” (Krull 172), something similar may have also been at work in the late socialist countries. Whereas in late capitalism, the news sweeps past quickly in an endless stream, leaving scarcely a trace in people’s consciousness, in late socialism the “news” repeats the same moral tirelessly every day, and greets it, so to speak, with “[constant applause].” In Western postmodern journalism, the event becomes an image, a vision of crisis or catastrophe that cannot support a positive resolution. Later developments are not reported. They are, in fact, no longer “newsworthy.” The movement of story gives way, one might say, to the flat presence of an image. In late socialism every event of news serves only as a repetition, yet another example of the same: the state of unchanging improvement in the progress of socialism. At the level of rhetoric, a certain change is announced (“improvement”), but the unvarying story of that change defeats any sense of movement (“still improving”). Each case brings about an effacement of the event. Naturally, descriptions of the specific features of society in late socialism and late capitalism reveal huge gaps between them. The Soviet empire lagged far behind the technological developments of late capitalism. However, one should not overestimate the importance of this fact. Jameson argues that technology is not the “ultimately determining instance.” Rather,

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“our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism.” And he concludes: “The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself” (Postmodernism 37–38; our italics). Thus the new technologies function in late capitalist postmodernity as a shorthand for a network of power and control. To speculate here on how late socialist culture grasped its networks of power through some alternate representational shorthand would lead us beyond the scope of the present analysis, but it stands to reason that Baltic late-socialist cultures should have produced their own synecdochal shorthand for the machineries of power and control responsible for the Soviet simulacrum, for example in the folkloric fascination with the flow of consumer goods and food. Similarly, the commodification characteristic of late capitalism, where aesthetic production “has become integrated into commodity production generally” (Postmodernism 4), was not a feature of the socialist countries. But this difference might mask a deep similarity of structure. David Ashley, writing in the tradition of Jameson and David Harvey, labels late capitalism as a spectacle-commodity economy: “Whereas market societies sold articles that promised instrumental efficacy (e.g., candles, bread, machine tools), contemporary capitalism offers far more abstracted and intangible commodities (e.g., image, diversion, identity, fashion). This is such a major shift that it transforms not just business but life as a whole” (11). Similarities with the socialist system come into focus when one shifts attention from the late capitalist commodification of simulacra to a late socialist simulacrum of commodity. Indeed, a spectacle-commodity economy of a similar kind was characteristic of late socialist society, even if it was not the product of “the global transformations in the overall process of capitalist accumulation” (Ashley 15). Images, identities, ideologies were the basic commodities in a society where the lack of instrumental efficacy was overwhelming. Instrumental articles were replaced with spectacle-articles in order to fill the void. As in late capitalism, an economy of intangibles supplanted an economy of tangible commodities. We could even argue that the Soviet system replaced economy with a spectacle of economy, insofar as it tried to administer the economy by the power of ideology. The outcome was a simulation of economy, wherein everybody had a job but no real duties. According to a well-known joke, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us!” People went to work to exchange information about where they could acquire the missing everyday instrumental commodities. Again, the Soviet simulacrum appears to be a more substantial version of postmodernity’s project of effacing reality.

4.

Nation and the problem of a postmodern resistance

The preceding sections have argued that late socialism supported a certain variant of postmodernity. One could suppose, therefore, that late socialism would be a fruitful soil for a postmodern literature. However, it is important to note here a most significant historical feature of late socialism in the Baltic states: the period of late socialism was also a period of occupation.


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The Soviet order had been enforced violently and without national consent; the socialist system sought to systematically obliterate and Russify the cultural life of the occupied nationalities. Such a system ought to have generated a national resistance. During the early- and mid-1960s, the national and Marxist projects of modernity seemed, indeed, compatible in their aims, yet the end of the 1960s announced an irrevocable divorce between them. If postmodernity can be said to have inhabited socialist ideology, one would also expect that the national discourse would react against Postmodernism as its enemy. One is reminded again of the “allergic relationship” between nation and Postmodernism mentioned earlier in this essay. Can a literature of national resistance be postmodern? Is not the nature of nation — to say nothing of political resistance — antithetical to a postmodern mentality? The project of nationhood is chiefly grounded in modern thought. Nationhood is most often a narrative of progress that aims toward an ideal, perfect future and expresses itself through a national mode of speech. It would seem that the postmodern could not ground itself in a national narrative, especially one belonging to an oppressed (and therefore pressing and agitated) nationality. Different answers present themselves to this complicated question. Without doubt, there were writers in East-Central Europe who avoided Postmodernism, turning instead to the national past and writing modernist or realist novels about important national figures. The officially honored Estonian authors today are still those who focused on the thematics of national identity. Chief among them is surely Jaan Kross, who since independence has been yearly nominated for the Nobel Prize. His novels and short stories raise problems of national identity from a modernist perspective: he exploits modernist textual strategies and poses epistemological questions from a national perspective. Kross’ best known historical novels, Keisri hull (The Czar’s Madman; 1978) and Professor Martensi ärasõit (Professor Martens’ Departure; 1984), are cases in point. The first of these revolves around Timotheus von Bock, an idealistic Baltic nobleman who comes to defy the Czar he serves; the second focuses on the Estonian-born diplomat Friedrich Martens and his reflections on his national identity while in the service of a later Russian Czar. In addition to Kross, there were underground modernist movements with Samizdat publications, but their productivity was slight and their role in the cultural life of the Baltic states insignificant. Most writers in the Baltics wrote from within the system and, somewhat surprisingly, were relatively unharmed by the Soviet regime. Still, national attitudes towards the Soviet occupation were quite complex, and we should refrain from labeling any and all as ipso facto modern and anti-postmodern. The resentment of a system need not manifest itself as a modern Résistance, with a capital R and a French roll of the tongue. Resistance may refer to more than secret codes and readings in-between the lines, the spreading of secret messages or battling in the streets; more also than just sneaking into a poem the national colors acrostically (as Andrus Rõuk did in a 1981 issue of the Looming magazine). Possibilities for a different mode of resistance emerged from the official claim of Soviet socialism that only its One True Project of Modernity could bring supreme happiness to the entire world. As with any other modern projects, it presupposed an open and pliant future and the possibility of forming the world according to its ideals. It described itself in terms of permanent advancement and the growth of well-being. It also claimed to tell the real story of the real world. What, could, therefore, be a more effective form of resistance for the voice of a nation than to move the occupying socialist discourse into the light of postmodernity, as if to say

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“I am the true modern and you are the fake”? What could be more offensive to an alleged modernist project than to be challenged through a postmodern critique but also have its own postmodern features exposed? Thus disclosing the modern myth of socialism as postmodern was also an oppositional move against the regime.

5.

Temporality, nation, and the development of a postmodern Estonian literature

Amid these strange circumstances — nationalist narratives of modernity, restricted critical discourse, a Soviet world order that was clearly postmodern but alleged itself to be modern — we must wonder how literary culture could develop an approach beyond the one pursued by modern nationalists like Jaan Kross. If Bertens conceives of Postmodernism in late capitalist societies as developing from a complex of artistic strategies to a Weltanschauung and finally, in its third stage, to the “cultural logic” of a new historical era, then in late socialist society we see that same development only in reverse direction. In the late 1960s, writers began depicting the Soviet system as a specific state of affairs, with features that correlated with postmodernity as a social condition of simulacrum, but at the same time these writers tended to distance themselves in a modern fashion from the postmodern world they saw around them. In the late 1970s, a postmodern Weltanschauung started to emerge, and the writers’ positions came to correspond closer to the postmodern world. Only in the late 1980s did postmodern technical and artistic strategies come to prevail in literature. But this aspect requires a closer look. At the end of the 1960s, the pointedly subjective, emotionally charged, ethically sensitive approach of the literature published earlier in the decade gave way to a more dispassionate observation of the discursive mechanisms of power. The optimistic belief in progress came into question when the dominant 1960s myth of a new and better future was replaced by a sense of static, unchanging present. Time stopped. Sõnumitooja (The Messenger; 1972), a short story by Arvo Valton, can be taken as a typical example of the new writing. Here, the protagonist heralds his message — the (more or less empty) content of which is that he is a messenger. Another narrative by Valton, Mustamäe armastus (Love in Mustamäe; 1978), describes a comfortable and satisfying suburban love affair between a man and a woman who contact each other by looking out of their windows. Here, love finds its fulfillment not in the immediacy of the body, but rather on the surface of an image. Conception is staged not inside the female body, but rather mediated across the void between the distant window frames. It is hard to find a better illustration of a postmodern depthlessness, the triumph of a surface-bound, denatured relation to the issue of origin. In Valton’s stories the critical distance between the implied author and the outlined reality is apparent. Consequently, the implied reader is positioned outside the unacceptable reality as if to say, “Yes, we live in a postmodern world, but it has not been of our free choice.” This attitude describes an enforced, not a narcissistic postmodernity. Those who accept it, like the characters in Valton’s stories, are implicitly “wrong.” Thus Valton’s texts stage the postmodern world through the eyes of disappointed Modernism, something they have in common with many celebrated postmodernist fictional works.


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By the end of the 1970s a subtle yet significant shift took place: Postmodernism began to emerge as the only possible Weltanschauung. Mati Unt, the leading Estonian writer in the 1970s who was praised for having captured the most hidden archetypes of Estonian society, had depicted the postmodern condition in his short narratives as early as the end of the previous decade. For example, re-presenting the tale of Judith and Holofernes (“Juudit ja Olovernes”; 1969) as a show staged by the characters for the book of history, Unt turned the “seriousness” of history into pastiche. Though his longer stories in the late 1960s retained a modernist flavor, by the mid-1970s, Mati Unt had turned decisively to Postmodernism and thus moved the core of Estonian literature of that period towards the acceptance of the postmodern condition as a given. Sügisball, another “love story,” presents suburban Mustamäe as the only reality, yet not as the locus of modern pathos or suffering but rather as a place suffused with the pleasures of simulacrum. Unt takes interest in Mustamäe as a spatial phenomenon, focusing on its constituent parts, its construction and its (mis)functioning. By the 1980s, the Soviet simulacrum had achieved a large degree of success in presenting itself as the never-ending totality of life. The writers’ positions were thus inexorably absorbed into the postmodern world. Moreover, the bold line drawn by the occupying ideology between past and present spread its influence in two directions: the present not only showed itself as an enormous simulacrum, but it also shed its reflections back into the pre-Soviet times. The nostalgic past acceded to a mythical perfection. As the past independence lost its sense of reality, the national project was deprived of its strength as a modern project. The ideas of a national modernity — independence, cultural freedom, and so forth — also acquired a mythical, “lost” character. The project of modernity is supposed to propel a movement from imperfection towards perfection: by the end of the 1970s-beginning of the 1980s, the national project had ceased to develop, achieving indeed its perfection, its completion — albeit retrospectively, in the past. Modernity was recuperated in the nation’s nostalgic memories as a perfect state of affairs, the very image of perfection. Through the looking-glass of the Soviet simulacrum, the preceding times were presented as closed, happy, and finished. As a consequence of its very perfection, then, the national narrative lost its modernity. The essence of the modern, after all, is that it cannot finally achieve completion and closure — modernity exists only in movement towards the perfect future. The national, ossified in the form of the mythical, could no longer contest the Soviet simulacrum — nationality could no longer support an attitude of modern disdain towards postmodernity. Hence the literature of the 1980s witnessed the disappearance of the distance between modern and postmodern; the national narrative got likewise contaminated by postmodernity. The national narrative revealed itself as one among other narratives, perhaps of utmost importance, but not of privileged validity or power. Those writers who turned to postmodernist practices did not adopt antinational positions nor did they avoid national thematics. Postmodern authors started to exploit the national mythology. They mixed the desire for national freedom with irony and constructed mythical spaces, while at the same time expressing an awareness of their mythical, constructed nature. In this way, a double discourse of national mythology was created: on one level, a nostalgic narrative carried by a longing for the perfect past, on another level, a questioning of the first, a conscious acknowledgement that this harmonious past is but a myth and has never existed as reality.

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A good example of this kind of double discourse can be found in Mati Unt’s 1974 short story “Lehekülgi Eesti kultuuri ajaloost” (Pages from the History of Estonian Culture). Here, the author narrates the historical meeting of two important figures of the National Awakening. In July 1868, Lydia Koidula, the celebrated Estonian national poet, visits Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, compiler of the epic Kalevipoeg (1854–57). In Unt’s tale, Kalevipoeg, the mythic, national hero from Kreutzwald’s epic, steps into the room to rape Koidula, the symbol of national purity, the “Virgin of Writing” (kirjaneitsi), as she was called. Kreutzwald stops the assault by killing Kalevipoeg. All this Unt describes with an objective, dispassionate voice, inserting well-known historical facts and quotations from Kreutzwald’s historic letter to Koidula. Thus Unt transposes national history to the level of narrative fiction, removing ontological boundaries between historical reality and fictionality. Koidula, Kalevipoeg, and Kreutzwald prove to be fictional to the same extent: they all belong to the pages of Estonian cultural history and to the mythical sphere of the nation, yet at the same time, because of the historiographic style of the narrative, they seem to belong to history. Unt amalgamates the fictional and the factual on the level of historical discourse. A similar example can be found in Enn Vetemaa’s irreverent Kalevipoja mälestused (The Memoirs of Kalevipoeg; 1971), featuring Kalevipoeg’s self-critical analysis of his motives and acts as a national epic hero. Such an approach to nationalism cannot be thought to serve as direct resistance to the Soviet system. Rather, it articulates a more genuine postmodern stance: “We were, after all, so precocious and had seen so much — or were we egocentric? — that any ‘human socialism’ or its end left us relatively indifferent” (Unt, “Maapoisi” 1252). Postmodernity was for many intellectuals — or became under the Soviet regime — just the given living condition, without special bearing on national or other social principles (which seemed to have been folded into the endless totality of the Soviet simulacrum). Postmodernity corresponded to an everyday life that did not consist of a permanent struggle against the Soviet regime.

6.

After the turn: The flourishing of a postmodern literature in the modern state

The decisive turn in the socialist system took place in the late 1980s, of course. With the collapse of the seemingly changeless Soviet present, the grand national narrative re-emerged, and the postmodernity of late socialism was replaced again with a modernity, the project of nationstate building. But this time, the modern project succeeded in turning the system upside down. In the course of this modern national reawakening, postmodern literature continued to appear. Postmodernism — of the type seen in capitalist countries in the 1960s, one that employs a complex of anti-modernist artistic strategies — spread but without taking into account the “depostmodernization” of the new social situation. The outcome of this was a dissonance between the critical metalanguage and literature. Postmodernist fiction — that depicted for example Tarzan’s activities in Estonia during the nationalist celebrations of independence (Raudam and Burroughs, 1991) or the return to Tallinn of Lydia Koidula’s husband in the role of a contemporary Dracula in Unt’s Doonori meelespea (Donor’s Guidelines; 1990) — was accompanied by the aggressive critical voice of a yearning for “real literature” and the claim that “nothing is happening in Estonian literature” (Veidemann 793). Against the critical expectation of great


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modern national artifacts, literature provided small stories of a postmodern world, in place of well-wrought myths, their deconstructions. One might say that whereas literature before the collapse of the Soviet regime was postmodern to a large extent because of its social concerns, literature after the collapse of the Soviet regime was postmodern in spite of its social concerns. Before the Turn, it was presumed that postmodern literature was an outcome of a postmodern society. Culture and society being inseparable, cultural spheres were understood as part of a certain social condition. After the Turn, however, it became clear that postmodernist literature could flourish in a modern state of society, in times of national state-building, of people singing in the streets, of everyday massmeetings, of an overall excitement at the prospect of a new-born world. Culture and society moved in a less rigid correspondence with each other, and expressed a different pathos. Is the relationship between culture and society, between modern, postmodern and national, thus wholly arbitrary? One could more precisely say that the logic of literary/cultural developments follows a different muse than the logic of social developments. Society might start “anew,” might rebuild something it had lost, but literature cannot jump back to an earlier stage. Mati Unt, having already written of Kalevipoeg’s attempt to rape Koidula, cannot write a straightforward novel depicting the modern spirit of the new times. Instead, Unt makes the best of the situation and writes the postmodern — but nationally flavored and politically attuned — Doonori meelespea, in which a contemporary Dracula abandons his sanguinary lust in deference to the new national feeling. Out of appreciation for Estonia’s strivings for independence in late 1986, Dracula commits himself to the use of blood banks in the future, rather than continuing to prey upon a small nation in such trying times. As he puts it in a delicious pastiche of contemporary sloganeering, “I started to sense your strivings towards liberty, your natural right to determine your own course and conduct business in your own fashion, your undeniable wish to be a free folk in a free country” (156). Thus Postmodernism has proved the most resourceful in the triad of concepts — Postmodernism, late socialism, and nationalism — that we have explored: late socialism has collapsed; nationalism has folded itself into the postmodern.

Models of literary and cultural identity on the margins of (post)modernity: The case of pre-1989 Romania Monica Spiridon Chronic identity crises and an obsessive interest in strong legitimizing models are, perhaps, the most symptomatic manifestations of Romania’s modern cultural consciousness. Between the end of the nineteenth century and 1989, this paradigmatic anxiety, and the counter-reaction generated by an obsession with identity, can be traced in Romanian culture on two main levels: a theoretical and an aesthetic-creative one.

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In the first half of the twentieth century, Romania’s cultural identity crisis resulted in a strong will to modernity. Intended to counteract the unhappy consciousness of marginality, it produced coherently articulated ideological as well as aesthetic programs of synchronization with Western modernist patterns (see my article, “The Modern Age”). One of the key questions underlying the modernization process in Romania can be stated as follows: Where should Romanians look for patterns that can offer cultural legitimacy and a secure identity against the external pressure of the neighboring empires? This question has received several answers that emphasize different facets of a (liminal) modernity: a mild, well-tempered modernity, an arrogant high modernity, and a rather ambiguous trans-modernity — mostly retrospectively perceived as a post-modernity. Even when Romanian culture was critically receptive to foreign models, the processing and assimilation of paradigms created delicate practical problems. The Romanian exiled writer, Eugen Ionescu (Eugène Ionesco), touched upon this sore spot by asking: Can one assimilate and still remain himself? This uncertainty generated plenty of polemics, humor, and positions (Ionesco 10). Assuming a radical position, the philosopher Nae Ionescu claimed in the 1930s that the “organic reality” of Romanian identity would reject any transplant, although transplantation had been abundantly practiced since 1848. Reviewing what he considered to be a century of bankrupt paradigmatic efforts, the philosopher concluded: “The falsity and artificiality of Romanian culture for the last hundred years has resulted from the repeated attempts to transpose (not even transplant properly) into the realities of Moldavia and Wallachia certain Western ways of life that had been organically born somewhere else. This is a fundamental error, proven as such everywhere” (10). While admitting that models could provide the fuel rather than the seeds for local creativity, Nae Ionescu insisted on defining Romanian cultural identity as an ontological rather than a historical reality: “This is a biological substance that cannot be influenced by our will or programmatically modeled” (197). The philosopher thus defined a persistent polarity of the Romanian cultural conscience, the autochthonous pole. Eugen Lovinescu, the most important literary critic of the interwar period, defined the other pole in the dispute between authentic, unaltered spirituality and cosmopolitanism. His theoretical program emphasized synchronization with the artistic patterns of contemporary Europe. He presented his doctrine with didactic clarity in Istoria civilizat¸ie române moderne (History of Modern Romanian Civilization; 1924–1925) and in the multi-volume Istoria literaturii române contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature; 1926–1929), which defined the ideological and aesthetic program of a well-tempered Romanian modernity. As president of the literary circle Sbura˘torul (Winged Spirit), Lovinescu advocated the systematic assimilation of Western models, including specific goals to be followed by prose and poetry, in order to catch up with the West. The theory of synchronism and its touchstone — controlled imitation, meant to subvert slow natural evolution — caught the polemical attention of the Romanian avant-garde, which chose radical revolt and fought the tempered Modernism of Lovinescu’s literary circle. The Avantgarde advocated shock therapy: brutal break with past traditions, but also with the well balanced and somewhat bland Modernism of the older Lovinescu. Lovinescu himself tolerated philosophically the avant-garde’s excesses. Such “extremism,” as he called it, was an inescapable

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byproduct of synchronization, “the shock wave of the small trends with unstable tendencies in the avant-garde literature of Paris” (Istoria civilizat¸iei 438–39). In a 1996 book, Marcel Cornis-Pope captured a relevant feature of the Romanian avantgarde’s (anti)models. Taking advantage of the “differential energies” found in the gap between “Western cultural canons and their (often belated) Eastern European counterparts,” the Romanian avant-gardists prided themselves with being “refractory” and “parasitical” to both, “living in a provisional state, on a margin that, considering the more general position of Romanian literature in Europe was in fact a margin of the margin” (The Unfinished Battles 116, 119). As the epitome of Romania’s radical (eccentric) strive towards modernity, the avant-garde had several faces. The first face was polemical, conceived as a response to European modernity: the poetical project of Ion Vinea — his so-called “revolution of sensibility” — responded directly to Marinetti’s “revolution of words.” The second face was prophetic, including such developments as Victor Brauner’s picto-poetry and Ilarie Voronca’s poésie concrète that foreshadowed important directions in the Western avant-garde. Thirdly, the Romanian avant-garde placed itself in the forefront of European experiments with the experimental prose of Urmuz, and the exportation of writers like Tristan Tzara and Benjamin Fundoianu/Fondane. Beyond a certain creative exuberance (set for and against models or the very idea of model), both the moderate and the more aggressive forms of modernity were consummated at a doctrinaire-utopian level. Between the theoretical programs and the creative practices there was often a considerable gap. In practice, the adoption, rejection, and mixing of various cultural paradigms led to a confusing stylistic eclecticism and terminological heteroglossia. Under these conditions, some dominant generic elements had to be identified, and these became quasiinstitutionalized at the level of group mentalities. In the Romanian intellectual discourse of the twentieth century, the interpretive categories of West (Occident) and East (Orient) provided, as we will show below, relevant signposts of reference for the study of marginal cultural identity. Literary, historical, ethnological, and political studies have typically placed Romanian cultural identity under the sign of two typological dominants. One side is represented by “Occidentalism,” defined by such features as confidence in progress, rationalism, historicism, individualism, secular spirit, the cult of originality, and commitment to a capitalist economy. The other side is represented by “Orientalism,” with such specific features as the overrating of primitivism, exoticism, anachronism, authenticity instead of individualism, Orthodoxist spirituality, phobia of capitalism, and fatalism. Converted into existential, ethical and political strategies, these antinomies have also acquired a rhetorical identity, developing into thematic topoi, literary genres, super-styles, images, and verbal clichés. The process of modernization gave rise to a fierce debate in the interwar press on the theme of “Why Romanians don’t have a novel?” and, “What do we need to do to revive the genre?” The obligatory landmarks of the debate were Marcel Proust and — in an almost ostentatious symmetry — André Gide. In Romania, as in France for that matter, Proust was an author without successors. Despite the great number of Proust-followers, no book is a direct descendant of À la recherche du temps perdu. In all the theoretical debates, Proust featured as the technical ideal (myth) of the Romanian novelist willing to align himself with the Western canon. With less fuss and on a deeper level, Gide offered Romanian novelists some practical and accessible solutions.

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During the campaign of realigning local fiction to contemporary European models, Romanian novelists and their critics worked together, and fiction cohabited naturally with technical discussions of the novel. As a consequence, the receptivity of modern Romanian fiction towards European models was visible also at a poetic level, in its capacity to respond to the image promoted by the critical discourse. Following Gide, the Romanian novel tested its ability to integrate a critical consciousness. In contrast to the novelists, the poets did not engage in noisy polemics, and their aspiration to be attuned to the major poetic developments in Europe did not create problematic tensions. Even the poets who made use of autochthonous materials were informed by a modern aesthetic sensibility. Recent criticism has discovered in the hermetic local-color poetry of Ion Barbu a path-breaking aesthetic consciousness, a postmodernist avant-la-lettre. After the Soviet takeover of Romania in 1945, the concepts of Synchronism, Orientalism, Occidentalism, identity, etc., acquired blatant political connotations. The communist authorities identified Occidentalism with bourgeois decadence while oppositional intellectuals saw it as means of resistance against abusive Russification and communization. The Soviet occupation of the country violently interrupted the intellectual communication with the outside. A period of absolute embargo on Western models (other than the Soviet ones) was instituted. It was reinforced, ironically, during the later, nationalistic stage in the development of Romanian Communism (1971–89), which replaced Soviet models with an officially displayed complex of cultural superiority, self-titled “protochronism.” This involved the rejection of outside models and forerunners in favor of a boastful emphasis on local anticipations of European cultural phenomena, anticipations allegedly ignored only because of Romania’s marginal status. In defining identity under Communism, ideology and literature followed increasingly divergent paths. Literature gradually distanced itself from both the early internationalist neomodernist models and from the later national-communist ones. Counteracting the cultural isolation of Romania by all available means was the most efficient way of opposing Soviet annexation. Both poetry and prose fiction fought the cultural embargo by reviving pre-war Modernism in its moderate and avant-garde versions. Prose fiction came more directly under the attention of party bureaucrats and their control over it was stricter and more efficient, at least in the early years of the communist dictatorship. The formal and thematic dogma of realism (having “socialist” as its qualifier) left little room for other aesthetic programs. Only between 1965 and 1971 did censorship soften a little. A small group of authors founded ad hoc the Tîrgovis¸te School of Fiction, trying to revive under a new guise the traditions of interwar modernity. On the one hand, they continued the interwar metafictional tradition, pushing it to its limit. On the other, they experimented with radical ego-graphy, manipulating it for parodic purposes. In this way, the Tîrgovis¸te writers aligned themselves with post-war Western trends of neo-modernism: the French Tel Quel, the Italian experimentalists of the 63 Group, the North American metafictional writers John Barth, William Gass, and Raymond Federman. Their obsession with the production of literature revealed an acute crisis of mimesis and a revolt against fictional representation (see Spiridon et al. Experiment). More resistant to easy decoding and direct censorship, poetry managed to extricate itself from the domination of proletcult principles in the 1950s. The 1960s were thus an age of the

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neo-avant-gardism and neo-modernism especially in poetry. The features of Romanian poetry resembled closely those of contemporary European poetry: ostentatious intertextuality, abstract lyrical discourse and the idealization of the word, the deconstruction of reality, and complicating the relationships between word and image. In the early 1980s, a new generation of Romanian writers (which included German, Hungarian and Serbian minority writers) settled their accounts with the modernist version of identity in all its forms. The 1980s also realigned poetry and fiction in the name of a shared program. The young writers of the “blue jeans generation” — as they were somewhat ironically labelled (by Flakker in Zagreb) — had been trained in the literary clubs of the University of Bucharest and of several regional universities. The collective debuts of these authors, as well as their strong group consciousness, is worth noting because it suggested a transgression of the Romanian modernist tradition en bloc. It also suggested a generational opposition, whose full political and aesthetic implications could not be articulated before 1989. It was only after the fall of Communism that the writers of this group overtly adopted and theorized the term Postmodernism for their pre-existing literary agenda. After a whole decade of fierce debates the status of these writers is still subject to controversy. The common denominator of their work was apparently the self-conscious control that these authors had over their texts as well as over themselves as their producers. However, this emphatic focus on technique disguised a political option: the deviation from institutionalized meanings, the refusal of thematic and stylistic censorship. These writers claimed that Modernism itself was a bankrupt ideological tradition. The main problems confronted by this generation of writers were: (1) the obstruction of artistic channels by the entrenched institutions of the ruling power, and (2) the attempt of totalitarian forces to manipulate literary representation. In their struggle against totalitarianism, the new writers of the 1980s used a variety of devices such as the refusal of the official conventions, the cultivation of formal pluralism, fragmentation, and parody. Embracing relativism and structural eclecticism, the 1980s generation broke certitudes, showing consensus — the pervasive utopia of any dictatorship — to be an impossibility. The communist rulers correctly saw that this type of literature could not legitimize any official metanarrative. The young authors were accused of being decadent, hypertechnical, caught in textualist games, but the unspoken real reason for putting them on trial (and several representatives of this group, including some German minority writers, were literally put on trial) was the subversive anti-totalitarian drive of their literature. Hence, the striking discrepancy between the alleged technical artificiality of their literature and the strong political reactions they elicited from their censors. During the last two decades of — let us call it — trans-modernism, the emphasis switched from polarization to the interplay of different models. At the height of the modernist paradigm, Romanian literature had fluctuated between the alternatively idealized and demonized antipodes of Orientalism and Occidentalism. In their endeavor to break-up the bipolar system of the central-marginal antinomy, the postmodern writers of the 1980s undertook a critique of all identity models. Their innovative approach to the concept of identity emphasized hybridity and cross-fertilization of models. Through them, the Romanian will to modernity that started under the aegis of strong, often conflicting theoretical models, progressively moved towards a structure of cultural identity beyond specific models.

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Viewed retrospectively, the logic of the relationship between Romania’s opposing cultural paradigms over the last hundred years of modernity has a paradoxical aspect. The categories of the Oriental paradigm (vitalist, autochthonous, traditionalist) are always built within the analytical discourse of, and appropriated by, the paradigm of the Occidental (rationalist and cosmopolitan). The reverse is not true. From this fact alone we can deduce that the two paradigms do not have an equal status: the Occidental one is the ab quo term, a reference for the other paradigm that has always manifested itself as a response. Romanian modernity has been dominated by an impulse to respond at all costs — against no matter whom and no matter what. From the emergence of modern Romania to its faltering redefinition under various nationalist and communist pressures, modernity was born exclusively as the product of intellectual reflection, a pondering upon both the paths to follow and the need to pursue verified models. Of the two discursive levels on which modernity manifested itself, the theoretical and the aesthetic, the latter is more symptomatic of the fierce conceptual struggle that translates an acute crisis of identity. The particular cultural context that I have analyzed from a post-1989 perspective is that of a small marginal culture. Its cultural insecurity betrays itself in the very effort to structure its semiotic space by means of strong concepts. The unavoidable consequence of this is that in the Romanian cultural space concepts such as Modernism, Avant-garde, and Postmodernism are assigned a hyper-significance. Interpreters should keep in mind the specific Romanian context when attempting to decode such concepts: their meaning will always depend on the precise culture they are part of.

Quoting instead of living: Postmodern literature before and after the changes in East-Central Europe Péter Krasztev 1.

How does the “East” deconstruct, or, Utopia as theme

In East-Central Europe, a different kind of (prose) writing appeared around 1989, which, in spite of certain similarities with its Western counterparts, can best be characterized as an East-Central European postmodern rather than as an international postmodern. The difference between the two can be explained in terms of the fundamental distinction between the Western modern consciousness in the nineteenth century and the modern consciousness of the East at the turn of the century. The appearance of a “modern attitude” — to use Michel Foucault’s term (“What is Entlightment” 114–18) — in East-Central Europe took the form of an opening-up, of a “self-

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examination” that resorted to comparisons with the West, signaling a desire to emancipate outer and inner culture. This is why the term “modern” can be applied to the totality of trends that appeared in the final third of the nineteenth century in opposition to the conservative popularnational direction, which demanded that artists serve the common cause of state-building and national preservation (see the article on Modernism in Part II of this volume). Modernity became an “attitude” here, too. Although it did not produce its own autonomous art movement, it did provide a small group of artists and thinkers with a strong intellectual focus, rallying them around the idea of the desirability of social and individual “renewal.” Literary and artistic novelty served as a mechanism for the accumulation of ideas: the new did not flush out the old, but rather settled beside (or more precisely on top of) it; although opposed, the old and the new shared plenty of characteristics for a long time. This is where Modernism in the East and West part ways: the abandonment of some of the alternatives offered by the Enlightenment did not appear in the East in the emphatic form proposed by the first modern, Charles Baudelaire. Instead, the early “moderns” of East-Central Europe still wished to serve the “public” and the shared national cause, but as individuals. Here modern thought conjoined the (part social, part mystical) strategies of “self-redemption” and “social redemption,” offering keys for the creation of an “earthly paradise” for individuals and communities. East-Central European Postmodernism must, therefore, be distinguished from that of the West since it reacted to a different “redemption focus” of modernity. The debate about East-Central European Postmodernism, began before 1989 and continued vigorously after the collapse of Communism, often returns to an integrative definition of Eastern modernity, emphasizing a sense of continuity rather than rupture with it. Western Postmodernism has often been viewed as inimical to this modern legacy that affirmed the irrevocable unity of individual and communal transformation. In an essay entitled “Hunting for Postmoderns — in Poland,” Włodzimierz Bolecki consistently suspends the word “postmodern” in quotes and asserts that writing in his homeland is incapable of adhering to such a radical category, the Poles being respectful of history and modern values while the postmodern is nothing short of an open attack on just these (26–27). The modern, in opposition to which the postmodern situates itself, is — in Bolecki’s succinct description — “the dominant ideology since the mid-nineteenth century, the essence of which is the conviction that social reality and the work of art are equivalent or homologous.” The moderns wished to create a “culture of the future,” they wanted to impress their own visions on the audiences of the future (12–13). In opposition to this “paternalist didaxis,” the postmodern presents itself as the premonition of a new era in civilization, rejecting all forms of dominance (13). If this were so, then all literature (and art) of the last decades of the twentieth century that rebelled against anything is postmodern, and the postmodern is an unwieldy vacuum cleaner, sucking up anything that moves into its bottomless sack (10). According to Bolecki, the greatest blow to Postmodernism was that deconstruction had, by definition, nothing to say about postmodern art since it is impossible to analyze a metalanguage with a metalanguage (19). Other interventions in the postmodern debate were less ironclad and dismissive. One of the best overviews of the possibilities of Postmodernism in the region was written by the Hungarian Endre Bojtár in the late eighties, when skepticism about Postmodernism in East-Central Europe still seemed reasonable. Bojtár began by asking what, if anything, the region’s contemporary

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prose had in common with postmodern writing in the West. Was it possible that, like so many trends of the last two centuries, this, too, would catch on here late and somewhat altered (“A posztmodernizmus” 76)? Was East-Central Europe so driven by the compulsions of its internal history (the violent breaks in the literary process, the existence of emigrant and samizdat literature) as to present a “postmodern condition” inherently dissimilar to, and not analyzable in terms of, that in the West? While Bojtár does not resolve these questions, he at least poses them. By contrast, Bolecki reveals an impatience with the question “are we or are we not postmodern”? The Polish essayist claims the knowledge of the latecomer, and profits from the already existing ready-made arguments against Postmodernism, which he then grafts onto the Polish situation to segregate the “familiar” from the “alien,” rather than to throw light on their similarities. This kind of segregation has not served East-Central Europe too well; particularly during the Communist years, it was a source of crippling directives and absurd stylistic and thematic taboos that prevented a normal literary development. A more complex view of (post)modernism emerges if we focus on the theme of realized utopia in East-Central Europe. The blossoming and the collapse of a historical utopia — which occurred in each East-Central European country at one time or another — has been a central literary theme since the end of the seventies. The novella Prˇíliš hlucˇná samota (Too Loud a Solitude; 1981), published abroad by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, A halál kilovagolt Perzsiából (Death Rode Out of Persia; 1979) by the Hungarian writer Péter Hajnóczy, as well as the “poem-novel” Moskva — Petushki (published in the West in 1977; trans. as Moscow to the End of the Line) by the Russian Venedikt Ierofeev, are suffused with an ambience thoroughly different from the literature of the sixties and early seventies, which packaged the “message” in oppressive or cheerful, but always heavily coded, parables. Hajnóczy, Hrabal and Ierofeev have no message other than “we’ve been here this long — we’ve made it this far.” The lives of both Hajnóczy and Ierofeev ended tragically, they both drank themselves to death: Hajnóczy finally killed himself and Ierofeev was practically hounded to his death by the Gorbachev administration that disallowed him from going to Paris for treatment. Literature and everyday life, fiction and reality, made close bedfellows here. Each of the three texts can be understood as an idiosyncratic salvation story without resurrection or redemption at the end. As we might expect of a good salvation story, time does not follow an orderly linear path, being replaced by the irrational time of vision, of (alcoholic) rapture. Ierofeev emphasizes in Moscow to the End of the Line the mythical nature of time: echoing the Passions of Christ, the narrating protagonist travels from station to station to the end of the line, along a series of railroads — biblical references include even darkness at noon. And wherever rational time stands still, real space must also be limited or enclosed: Hajnóczy’s real space is a room, Hrabal’s is a paper-shredder, Ierofeev’s a train carriage. The narratives of Hrabal, Hajnóczy and Ierofeev are not postmodern strictly speaking, at least not by comparison to Péter Esterházy’s “supra-novel” (a montage of typographic, visual, and thematic experiments, mixing fiction, autobiography and history), Bevezetés a szépirodalomba (Introduction to Literature; 1986). They did provide, however, an important link between the literature of the sixties and the questioning literature of the next period, even though that link was obscured by the publication history of these works: Ierofeev’s novel appeared in his native


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land only after his death in 1990, by which time everybody knew of the book’s existence but only a few had actually read it. The literature of the following period began deconstructing the central belief in redemption — the socialist myth itself — even though this “great narrative” was still unfinished when the writings of Danilo Kiš, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, Milan Kundera, and Ismail Kadare were already preparing a burial place for it. Milan Kundera was first to realize that the notion of attained utopia had to be re-historicized, its temporal dimension restored. The first page of Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being; 1981) invokes Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and subsequently contrasts it to the sense of “arrested time” following the Prague Spring. In other works time simply ceases to exist of its own accord, as in Milorad Pavic´’s Hazarski recˇnik (Dictionary of the Khazars; 1984), where the real land of Serbia is transformed at a stroke into a timeless space, the fictive empire of Khazar. In Ismael Kadare’s Piramida (The Pyramid; in French 1992) history writes myth and vice versa. This novel is set in Egypt (a stand-in for Albania), where the head-priests (party-functionaries) benefit from the clemency of a time frozen into eternity. Suddenly, however, everything kicks back to life, history restarts and inaugurates a series of dark ages before arriving at the darkest of all — modern Albania. In a lecture on French historiography, Georges Duby argued that the historical writing of the last decades had slowly returned to storytelling styles, to problems such as the role of individuals, and to an inquiry into the formation of strategies and alliances, which blur the distinction between the writing of history and fiction (87–94). The writers who deconstructed the grand narratives of socialism in the eighties — perhaps inspired by the historiographic trend inaugurated by Michel Foucault, François Furet, and Luc Ferry — brought literary fiction closer to history not by reproducing history but by creating it. This is Pavic´’s main approach. Danilo Kiš does much the same in Enciklopedija mrtvih (The Encyclopaedia of the Dead; 1983): his description of the numerous individual destinies that make up the complex of world history bears a striking resemblance to the storytelling by “case studies” favored in American historiography today. Likewise, the Lithuanian Saulius Tomas Kondrotas has written an epic narrative about his culture, Žalcˇio žvilgsnis (A Glance of the Serpent; 1981), which spans the years 1863 to 1925, but the picture of Lithuania that emerges contains no real historical events for it is constructed of popular beliefs and mythology, with Biblical echoes and Oriental legends in between. “Paralysis of time” is the expression coined by the Albanian writer Bashkim Shehu to characterize Albania in the last decades of the twentieth century: history in Albania was suspended since, as local rumor had it, redemption was already at hand (95). Following years of absolute dictatorship, Albania also had to confront the problem of representing an irrational space, frozen in time, retrospectively. While for the Russian utopianist Pavel Florenskii dream (the “time of imagination”) could transform time into absolute space, allowing the soul to exhibit and know itself in the realm of the impalpable (Mnimosti v geometrii [The Imaginary in Geometry]; 1923), those who lived through the “timeless” utopia of Communism had a different experience: for the protagonist-writer of Rexhep Qosja’s Vdekja më vjen prej syve të tillë (Death Comes from Such Eyes; 1974) utopia translated into a frightening web of political intrigue, secret police interrogation, and torture. Neither frozen time nor the illusion of absolute space could deliver salvation.

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The novels written after the break up of the “great narrative” display many similarities throughout East-Central Europe. The represented world often resembles Ádám Bodor’s Szinisztra körzet (Sinistra District; 1992), a closed, suffocating territory somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains that threatens to annihilate all those who stumble into it (readers did not miss the allusions to the totalitarian space created by Ceaus¸escu’s regime). In Ki jo je megla prinesla (Who Came In with the Fog; 1993) by the Slovenian Feri Lainšcˇek, a pastor is posted to a village on an island in “no man’s land,” where he serves for a while and restores the church. On his departure the entire settlement is swept away by a flood, only the church remains standing. The Bulgarian Victor Paskov’s semi-autobiographical novel Germaniia — mra˘sna prikazka (Germany: Dirty Story; 1993), has an unabashed fairytale feel to it. Even the prevailing space-time relations in the hated GDR (a constructed communist utopia) take on the appearance of myth: the author himself, as the hero of his own novel, arrives from Sofia to a small German town where his father is a musician in the theater. Despised as a foreigner, he fights his battles against the brutal “spirit” of East Germany and departs as a hero when the German public finally recognizes his musical talent. The uneventful plot of Zagłada (Annihilation; 1987) by the Polish writer Piotr Szewc unfolds in the claustrophobic space of a small closed town that negates time and movement. A ruthlessly ironic sketch of arrested time and history after 1968 emerges also from the Czech writer Michal Viewegh’s partly autobiographical novel, Bájecná léta pod psa (1995): Everything’s fine. Nothing happened to anybody. Dad wasn’t fired. Lawyers aren’t working as gardeners. Head doctors aren’t collecting tickets in cinemas. History is progressing normally. Peasants are harvesting the crops in the time-honored fashion, wheels are spinning in factories, and engineers, our greatest hope, are milling about comfortably on our so-called iron curtain to secure our luminous future by means of their brilliant contracts. (Viewegh, Varázsos 112)

The most spectacular “postmodern turn” took place precisely in the country where the future “had been accomplished,” Russia. Here an entire generation, not just one outstanding artist or two, emerged around 1989 from the “non-conformist underground.” It is difficult to find any example of Russian fiction of the last two decades that does not attempt to unravel at some level the “realized metaphor” of the socialist utopia. What this realized metaphor consisted of was already evident from Vladimir Sorokin’s earlier Norma (1984), where disparate narratives from everyday life are connected through the fact that each has a character who peels the cellophane wrapper from a “Norm” bar and eats it. Midway through the first narrative it becomes clear that “Norm,” which everyone consumes as a matter of course, is fecal matter. In Viktor Ierofeev’s short story Zhizn’ s idiotom (Life With an Idiot; 1991), translated and made into an opera by the composer Alfred Schnittke, it also becomes obvious that the idiot with whom the protagonist has to share his apartment is actually Lenin. Prekrasnost´ zhizni (The Splendor of Life; 1990) by Evgenii Popov mixes satire and historical document in a more original way by inserting random clippings from the 1962 through 1984 issues of the newspaper Pravda between the sections of the novel. This procedure undermines historical time, as does the novel’s subtitle, Glavy iz “Romana s gazetoi,” kotoryi nikogda ne budet nachat i zakonchen (Chapters without Beginning or End from a Newspaper-Novel).


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When Endre Bojtár wrote in 1987 that “Central and Eastern European writing seems to have reentered the European spirit via the postmodern” (“Postmodernizmus” 88), he meant this to be understood as a prediction rather than as a statement of fact. In 1990 Savo Cvetanovski published simultaneously in English and Macedonian an Anthology of Macedonian Postmodern Stories. Though there are few genuine examples of Postmodernism in this anthology, the desire of Macedonians to enter the flow of contemporary European thought along the tributary of the postmodern is evident, both in the gesture towards bilingualism and the (self-styled) title. The claim of Macedonian literature to Postmodernism was not entirely unfounded. Especially after the appearance of philosopher Ferid Muhík’s long essays, Noumenologija na teloto (The Noumenology of the Body; 1994), it was possible to identify a Macedonian Postmodernism in the making. This trend had its antecedents: Aleksandar Prokopiev, whose career began after “reemigrating” from Belgrade, had already written at the end of the 1980s short fiction in the Macedonian tongue that bore the mark of regional Postmodernism. Bojtár could have found more convincing proof for his claim in the work of the Bulgarian philosophers and writers of the Synthesis Group, who published in the final months of the communist dictatorship a samizdat anthology in English and Bulgarian called Ars Simulacri (1989). The volume’s title indicated the allegiance of these young authors to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum, which Baudrillard himself described in his essay “After the Orgy” as follows: in the current age when all revolutions are exhausted and “all utopias have been achieved, either factually or potentially,” nothing is left but to start all over again, to “hyperrealize” ideas, visions and dreams through perpetual simulation. Henceforth all existence is secondary simulated existence. Today nothing dies of its own accord — God himself does not die a natural death: He becomes “saturated” or transparent through the contagion of the simulacrum (4). In Bulgaria — pace Baudrillard — the revolution did not get exhausted in 1989, nor could it be said that things had collapsed to reach a point of transparency. To Ivailo Dichev, Vladislav Todorov, Aleksander Kiossev, and Ivan Krastev simulation meant something entirely different. In their totalitarian state everything simulated normality — pseudo-production replaced production, newspapers were printed in order to simulate the existence of a free press, and so on. Transparency was confined to the communal knowledge of who was doing what and why. People (bodies) could wander about at will, but the entire world was left utterly untouched, since everything was milling around inside the same closed system, which had significance only within and in relation to itself, utterly unconnected to external, time-bound events and processes. Ivailo Dichev wrote in 1989: After we had experienced Modernism on our own skin — we were the first, the originals, we stood as examples for progressive humanity — all of a sudden we reached the post-situation … Everything had already happened somewhere else, had been discovered and articulated, had been overcome. We, on the other hand, cross-fertilized our own soil with it. What does this mean? It means that if I undertake something, it is not for its own sake, nor because it has some unassailable value and I cannot ignore it — but rather because I have picked it out of lots of other possibilities; I salvage it from its context and replant it at home. I am not living, I am quoting. (“Hat izé” 18).

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This passage echoes Baudrillard’s claim that there are no more authentic responses in the postmodern era, “neither from the mirror nor from the empire of bottomless depth.” Neither above nor in the pockets of consciousness below are there solutions; no idea is left in this sea of equivalence that could summon up a new set of values. Who can tell any longer what is good or evil, what is beautiful or ugly (5–11)? To address the urgency of this dilemma, Vladislav Todorov and Ivailo Dichev came up with the metaphor of the transparent book, with cellophane pages and a glass jacket titled in colorless ink. Its pages, written in the same invisible ink, would feature the story of the creation of the book itself (Dichev, “Prozrachnata kniga” 83 84). By 1989 the right conditions finally emerged for considering similar theoretical problems in both East and West. After the collapse of the utopian systems of East-Central Europe, an intensely liberal Postmodernism supplied concepts and ideas that artists and thinkers of this period needed in order to explore and to refute the story of frozen time.

2.

The death of a theme — Beyond the postmodern

When Raymond Federman, one of the fathers of postmodern literature, casually remarked at a 1991 seminar in Stuttgart that “perhaps Postmodernism also changed tense on December 22, 1989, with the death of Samuel Beckett — the first and last Postmodern writer” (106), none of his illustrious interlocutors (John Barth, Malcolm Bradbury, William Gass, and Ihab Hassan) batted an eyelid; the colloquium proceeded in the same businesslike attitude. When Ziegler’s small book that resulted from the seminar reached me in 1996, I realized that while we, in EastCentral Europe, were preparing to deconstruct swiftly the last “modern narrative” of the dominant ideology so that we can step triumphantly into the “postmodern condition,” over in Stuttgart they were already nailing the coffin lid on questions we had not yet asked. Our sense of insecurity was understandable. It appeared self-evident to us at the time that one of the primary aims of social change was to transform the literary (cultural) system as well, liquidating the existing canon and establishing some new radical pluralism in its stead. In retrospect, our greatest post-1989 illusion was probably to identify globalization and the newly attained polyvalence with the inauguration of a “postmodern era” across the entire region. But in Stuttgart, in 1991, Malcolm Bradbury had already argued that the postmodern essentially reflected in all cultures the modern that preceded it (116). Every modern ideology promised redemption; our belated, communist-style Modernism duped us with the promise of a social salvation that only yielded arbitrariness and violence. According to Federman, Western Postmodernism began with the death of the author, the novel, art in general, and even of the reader. In East-Central Europe, the first truly postmodern works appeared when writers began to sense the death of the regime — between 1980 and 1989, depending on the country. “Postmodern fiction experimented with death,” writes Federman (110), and he is right, even if we are talking about two different kinds of deaths. Ours was a cheerful experiment. We saw our reality through the newly found prism of “writerly” language, through the linguistic irony and the cultural parody of Gombrowicz and Kundera, of Esterházy, Hajnóczy, and Lajos Grendel, of Mircea Nedelciu and Mircea Ca˘rta˘rescu, of Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešic´, of Pavel Vilikovský, Alexandar Prokopiev, Viktor Paskov, and Saulius Tomas Kondrotas. We still


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marveled openly at Ismail Kadare’s absurdism and the often-controversial experimental prose of Eduard Limonov and Milorad Pavic´, who prepared us for intertextuality, self-reflexivity, relative values, and permanent skepticism. This was the Postmodern Canon, if there was one, which “socialized” us. This is what history found when it caught up with us in 1989, when we first inserted our voices in the flow of events. How were we to know that this was already the past? Bradbury also argued that 1989 did not represent the end of history as Francis Fukuyama had asserted, and that this claim was utterly utopian. In fact, he added, we would be confronted again with the chaotic problems of forty-five years ago (134). In the same collection, Ihab Hassan contended that Heidegger’s “totalitarism” and Lyotard’s “terrorist fragmentalism” are not very different in their effects, each pushing the promised end of history further away (14). Shortly after 1989 this statement did not make much sense to us. In the meantime, the EastCentral European region had become hopelessly fragmented, divided by the different entry groups into the EU, with the institutions of the newly built nation-states pathologically fixated on national notions of modernity that polarize and separate even further. We only shared our East-Central European Postmodernism, and our common deconstruction of the legitimizing myths of despotism. In the countries where quasi-dictatorships survived well into the 1990s — Yugoslavia, Croatia and Belarus — a literature that unravels the ideology of despotism continued to be needed at least for a while. The post-1989 period raised hopes for a return to “normality,” but the definition of “normality” remained shifty and problematic even in countries that had been democratized more significantly. The formation of new literary canons often stretches the limits of normality, mixing strategies of control in an otherwise free exercise of options. In his study of the canon debate and the Culture Wars in the United States, Zsolt Farkas notes that theorists such as Harold Bloom have a penchant for regimenting even the most “normal” (most tolerant and pluralist) American manifestations, trying to impose normative order on what they perceive as an “anarchic” evolution. Hungary has become a relatively “normal” place in the region after the demise of censorship. It is undoubtedly a feature of normality, for example, that Hungarians no longer distinguish between “emigrant” and “domestic” literature. Although they still retain the terms “motherland” and “beyond the borders” to designate the production of minority Hungarian writers in the neighboring countries, these no longer carry special meaning. However, it is in keeping with the return to pre-1945 conditions that the schism along the lines of “urban” vs. “folk” culture has reappeared; similar ruptures have emerged in almost every culture in the region, albeit along differing vectors. There is, however, another sense in which literature in Hungary became “normalized” after 1989: losing its political aura, literature was gradually reduced to textual and interpretive transactions that carry little practical significance. Nobody was, therefore, particularly bothered when Ákos Szilágyi, the head of the Literary Society (an alternative writers’ organization), explained his break with the Writers’ Union on the grounds that it sickened him to walk into its traditional headquarter on Bajza street. In Serbia this type of statement would have instigated new animated debates: in that country decent democratic intellectuals simply avoided the Writers’ Union, whose members — according to Drinka Gojkovic´ — were actively drumming up war sentiments (365–94). Serbia represented the other extreme: sober-minded writers fled state-supported institutions and established their own independent organizations. One of the

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founders of the “Serbian postmodernist” group, Filip David, formed the Ex-Yu-PEN in Belgrade; other writers organized the K21K Literary Circle in Novi Sad, whose primary aim was to distance itself as much as possible from official Serbian literary discourse. Similar oppositional goals animated the PEN Club led by Lajos Grendel in Slovakia, and even, more so, the Union of Independent Macedonian Writers in Macedonia, constituted out of the members of the Nashe Pismo (Our Writing) circle who opposed the national ideology and by extension the state itself. In Bulgaria, where the state is ideologically neutral, members of alternative writers organizations took a stand against the official patriotic literary and academic discourse in the pages of publications like Literaturen Vestnik (Literary Newspaper). However there was no real “dialogue” in these cases: under such conditions literature remained the instrument of everyday ideological warfare. In Hungary, meanwhile, the attitude of writers also became “normalized”. A number of writers took on public roles and nurtured their own development into national institutions (Csurka, but also Göncz and Konrád). Like their Russian and Slovenian colleagues, the postmodern Hungarian writers travel around the globe with scholarships and public readings, organize translations of their own texts into German, English, and French, and sit on advisory boards that decide the apportioning of funds. The former leaders of the Hungarian Attila József Circle play the same role as the Polish Brulion group used to: they tell the advisory boards and the rest of the world who merits attention. This, too, is normal since a writer cannot live on the word alone, or as John Barth complained, writing is “a full time profession that is, paradoxically, a part time occupation” (“Novel” 183). Finally it is perfectly normal that the whole new system of literary promotion is of little interest to anybody other than an inner circle of writers. There are also filmmakers, philosophers, historians, musicians, biologists, theatre-directors, and many other sponsor-hungry interest groups, all mirroring society at large in being fragmented, all alienated from each other and public opinion. Innumerable factors contributed to the canonization of no-canon in countries like Hungary. One significant element has certainly been the incapacity of both the “classic” postmodern generation and their younger disciples to create literary works that credibly capture the transition period. That period has given birth to first-class journalism, essays, and studies, but no significant fiction. Perhaps the novella Jegyzo˝könyv (The Protocol; 1993) by the Nobel-Prize winner Imre Kertész is an exception, providing a link between an earlier, pre-postmodern fiction and Postmodernism in its various guises. On the whole, however, and with a characteristic delay of a decade or so, literature in East-Central Europe bears out John Barth’s observation about a seismic change in innovative writing in the 1980s: “[A]lthough most of the leading practitioners of what is called Postmodernist fiction are by no means finished yet with their careers […] and may feel themselves to be still in the process of exploring the style […] it cannot be doubted that the pendulum swung in the 1980s from the overtly self-conscious, process-and-historyconscious and often fabulistic work of Barthelme […] Gass, Pynchon […] Barth & Co” (184). I shall return to the last part of Barth’s statement in my coda.

Quoting instead of living 3.

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Generational responses to postmodernism: Hazai, Viewegh, and Popov

In democratic nations each generation consists of new people, claimed Alexis de Tocqueville. His statement is confirmed in East-Central Europe at the end of the twentieth century. With the possible exceptions of Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia, where some kind of “democratic minimum” was in place, there was little generational consciousness before 1989. Totalitarian societies that settled into the stasis and the timelessness of a utopia placed significant restrictions on publicizing events that could fortify a sense of generational consciousness: societal homogeneity was one of the fundamental principles of the communist utopian system. Before 1989, groups organized themselves primarily along ideological lines (e.g., samizdat vs. official publication) and only rarely in competing literary generations (e.g., the 1960s late modernist generation vs. the 1980s postmodern generation in Romania). After 1989, the generational consciousness returned with a vengeance. In the 1990s, Hungary witnessed at least four new age groups, each with its own published anthologies and journals. The magazines of these different groups (some of them long since defunct) can still be found on the shelves of Budapest bookshops: ’84-es Kijárat (Exit ’84), Törökfürdo˝ (Turkish Bath), and Sárkányfu˝ (Dragongrass). The first of these represents the age group that was then around thirty, the others published writers in their early twenties. A similarly active “generational life” emerged in other countries of the region. The Bulgarian periodical Ah Marija and Symposion from Novi Sad come to mind (the latter covered an entire range of local movements in the course of its existence). Other members of this set of “generational” publications are the Macedonian Margina, the Bosnian Album, the Croatian Torpedo published in Split, Recˇ from Belgrade and Transcatalog from Novi Sad, the Ukrainian Post edited in Lviv, and the Albanian MM, published in Priština and Tirana. Even the typography of these journals illustrates their wish to break the established canon as they see it. The contributors are young and they vigorously, if not exactly successfully, oppose their predecessors — although the latter are still going strong. Budapesti Skizo (Budapest Schizo; 1997) by Attila Hazai, Výchova dívek v Cˇechách (Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia, 1994) by Michal Viewegh, and Deniat na nezavisimostta (Independence Day) by Alek Vassilev Popov are relatively successful examples of post-1989 experimental fiction that reveal a generational consciousness, though the last one is closer to a short story. From an aesthetic point of view, the three are far from uniform: Budapest Schizo is a typically discomforting and at times inscrutable “anti-text”; by contrast, Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia is a pleasant reading and Independence Day is a genuine masterpiece. Our key criterion for comparison is the authorial “attitude,” the generational stance, and how this is manifested in each work. Hazai waves a spectacular farewell to the “sentencefocused” literature of Esterházy, László Garaczi and Gábor Németh — the text is disheveled, the author deliberately insisting on the carelessness of the spoken word (which inevitably gives the writing an affected feel). The narrator, strung out on drugs, frequently indulges in dilettantish philosophizing within the framework of a love story, which draws from myriad “guest-texts.” The origins of these texts are loudly proclaimed, a device that keeps the reader constantly apprehensive, expecting fresh citations. The volume is illustrated with the headstones of “respectable” musicians, philosophers, writers, and natural scientists. They become indistinguishable from brand names that litter the text, such as Drums, Pall Mall, Magyar Narancs and Duna TV.

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Next to them, circulate the writer’s contemporaries, Miki Déri, János Vázsonyi, and others. Thus dead masters and living idols (friends) cohabit, the latter defined in opposition to the former who have lost their significance. “Your sentences are superfluous,” the novel suggests, your politicizing and “briefcase-literature” is no longer necessary, we’re returning to the story (and the book illustrates this happily with a novel-within-novel), we’ll live the time as we see fit — with the help of drugs if necessary. The novel is subtler than this, but the reader cannot miss the point that the book refers to and addresses a new generation that identifies with an alternative value-system and iconography, even if it did not grow up within a subculture. The novel’s protagonist, Feri, is clearly intended to be an emblematic figure for an attractive, talented, but stalled and world-weary generation, oversexed and dealer-dependent. The narrator’s situation bears a certain resemblance to that of Gertrude Stein, who coined the term “lost generation” in her autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and who expressed herself in the “corrupt” diction of a salon-addict. Like Stein, who described the “alternative” personalities of her age, Hazai displays the (artist) generation of the 1990s through Feri, his own musician alter ego. The narrator of Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia starts his work with the intention of creating a postmodern novel but, of course, fails. This story about the relationship of an impoverished young teacher and his millionaire pupil sets itself up as a “transition novel,” exploiting the communication discrepancy between a child of the new Czech capitalism and the narrator, who still carries traces of the old regime. Viewegh’s novel is less language-conscious than that of Hazai, but it, too, teems with anti-heroes, socialist goons, religious cults, and other newly apparent subcultural symbols; it also cites the icons of the recent past generously. Viewegh adheres scrupulously to realism throughout: the plot is relentlessly linear, progressing via love-estrangement-break-up to its tragic conclusion. The incidental episodes neither support nor weaken the denouement. The concept of “life as a novel” dominates, and the author does not neglect a single opportunity presented to him by everyday life. Nevertheless, the presentation of a “lost generation,” inhabiting an attractive and talent-filled world is also important. In Hazai’s novel, Gábor, the hero of the novel-within-the-novel, is a new breed of money-grabber, a man of the transition. By the end of this didactic tale he is a broken man, fallen to pieces; opens an opportunity for self-referential jokes at the author-narrator’s expense. Viewegh goes even further by providing an actual death for his heroine, Králová, his paradigmatic modern character. The car crash that kills her is a disguised suicide. She is brought to it by an impulse to sample every possibility offered by post-1989 freedom. While Viewegh cannot be accused of post-communist nostalgia — a reading of his previous novel, Bájecná léta pod psa (The Wonderful Years that Sucked), confirms this — he does not politicize the comparison between pre- and post-1989 worlds. The history of dictatorship filters through in the background, but only as one component that informs the period of transition. The narrator of Independence Day tells a childhood story. The opening scenario suggests a confession before an independent committee, in which the protagonist-narrator recounts his memories of the “Great Famine.” His descriptions of this imaginary event provide a wonderful metaphor for the communist era. After having devoured everything it could find in the pantry and subsequently finished off all the birds and stray animals in the area, the family decides to sacrifice the protagonist’s grandfather, while he does everything in his power to convince them to eat, instead, the narrator, a young child at the time. The parents prevent the child’s dismem-


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berment and make preparations for carving up the grandfather; in the ensuing scuffle the old man falls out the window and disappears without a trace. Whether another family took him home and seasoned his leathery flesh or whether he escaped on his crippled legs is not revealed because at this point the “realist” narrative turns fantastic: the parents take off to search for fresh nourishment, and the child, on the threshold of starvation, reencounters his grandfather in a vision. Finally the parents stumble across manna from heaven on the outskirts of the city and they manage to survive on it until the bad times are over. Popov’s text has no philosophical commentary. It unfolds as a precise and detached narration, typical of the absurd, including the occasional fake newspaper citations. There is no trace of postmodern precursors here, no “musically composed fragments” as in Paskov; Popov abandons experimentation. Instead he constructs his fictive stories with traditional devices that demonstrate how vacuous the deconstructive impulse in prose has become, and how much more exciting it is to reconstruct the past in its realistic detail, however desolate or preposterous. The author does not explore space-time relations within an autocratic world as Ádám Bodor did in Sinistra District, nor does he try to reconnoiter the innermost workings of the dictatorial machine through the remembrance of friends and family as Péter Nádas did in Emlékiratok könyve (A Book of Memories, 1986). And unlike in Hazai and Viewegh, nothing in Popov’s text indicates the emergence of a new generation with radically new attitudes. Popov allows the text to suggest that the period belongs so much to the past that anything can be surmised, discovered, or written about it. The past, in other words, can no longer be problematized, it can only be rewritten as an entirely different kind of story. Only a few years after the death of the communist “metanarrative,” its place was taken by stories that do not seek to reinterpret the past, but merely to reinvent or fantasize over it.

4.

Coda: The pendulum swings

The second half of the earlier quoted Barth passage predicts the next swing of the pendulum : “toward that early Hemingwayish minimalist neo-realism” (184). It is amazing that a talk delivered in 1991, at a time when the mentioned writers were still unknown, should provide such an accurate category for their work. In the meantime post-1989 writers like Michal Viewegh and Alek Popov, the Czech Jáchym Topol, the Hungarians László Darvasi and Pál Ficsku, the Ukrainian Iurii Andrukhovych, and the Serb Vladimir Arsenijevic´ were able to prove themselves. Large editions of their books often sold out, not because they had shrewdly adjusted to public expectations but simply because they are children of a different age. Whether these authors have created works of genuine artistic merit or whether their writings will become historical footnotes is a matter of debate. Certain is merely that they worked hard to cleanse literature of “literariness,” to bring language closer to everyday life, and to smuggle back sentiment and a personal voice in the content. Our readerly instincts, sharpened by postmodernism, find them occasionally didactic and sentimental, and generally disconcerting that shortly after 1989 some fiction became once again uncoded and cathartic, but this, perhaps, is due to the swinging of the pendulum. Like other trends, postmodern literature generated its masterpieces but could not create a canon of stable values. Indeed it would have been against its very principles to do so. What readers in

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the 1990s seemed to witness was a return to something that had been present, for instance, in the works of Hrabal and Kertész: an experientially and intellectually charged writing that is difficult to categorize, wherein all readers can find their own level of interest and rediscover the pleasure of reading.

1956/1968

Revolt, suppression, and liberalization in Post-Stalinist East-Central Europe John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope in collaboration with Jolanta Jastrze˛bska, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Svetlana Slapšak, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Alfred Thomas

Introduction When the Soviet troops started their offensive on November 4, 1956 to crush the Hungarian Revolution, the Hungarian Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, and some forty other leaders of the Revolution sought asylum in the Yugoslav Embassy of Budapest. After having received a written confirmation of safe conduct (by the Soviet-installed new Hungarian ruler, János Kádár), they left the building on November 22 but were promptly abducted by Soviet forces and taken to Snagov, Romania. Among them was the philosopher György Lukács who served, somewhat reluctantly, as Minister of Culture in Nagy’s revolutionary government. According to a revealing anecdote, of which several, probably apocryphal, versions exist, Lukács pensively inspected a forlorn castle at Snagov (near Bucharest) to which they were brought and finally mumbled: “Kafka was perhaps right after all.” Like Kafka’s stories, the story about Lukács is (very likely) fiction, yet its fictionality in no sense diminishes the truth value we attribute to it: whether factually true or not, the story accurately reflects the extraordinary, and extraordinarily complex, mingling of fact and fiction under Communism. Whether it accurately reflects Lukács’s state of mind is a question to which we shall return later. For now, we note that the story also raises the two questions we wish to trace through the following account of some twenty-five years of East-Central European literary history that focuses primarily on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968: Were reform- or anti-Communist ideas and practices at the heart of these revolts? And what role did writers and their writings play in these revolts? We left out in this Section those countries that were largely sealed off during these decades from the rest of East-Central Europe: the three Baltic countries, which were part of the Soviet Union, and Albania, which functioned in virtual isolation even within the Communist camp. But their literature is covered in the history of World War II literature (pp. 143–176), which runs parallel to this section though it only covers a special topic.

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The thaw: From Stalin’s death to Khrushchev’s speech Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953 led very soon to political changes in East-Central Europe. On June 13–14 the Hungarian Communist leaders were summoned to Moscow, where the new Soviet leaders forced Mátyás Rákosi to hand over the Prime Minister position to Imre Nagy, his reformist opponent. Nagy abandoned the policy of forced collectivization, closed down the labor camps, and encouraged change, but, as we shall see, the conflict between the hard-liners and reformist members of the Hungarian Workers’ Party continued throughout the following years. In Czechoslovakia, the revaluation of the national currency on May 30, 1953 led to riots in Pilsen and elsewhere. In the GDR, the workers answered the government’s economic measures with strikes that led on June 17 with an assault on the party headquarters. Jerzy Andrzejewski’s “Wielki lament papierowej głowy” (The Great Lament of the Paper Head), published in September 1953, introduced a new, critical and satirical voice into Polish literature (Macia˛g 251–53). The short story describes the nightmare of a public official who gives a speech consisting of nothing but Communist clichés and suddenly realizes that people in his inattentive audience bury their heads in newspapers. Before awakening, he too feels his own head covered with newspapers. This allegorical criticism of Communist propaganda was all the more surprising as it came from the pen of a devoted Communist writer. The following year, Władysław Gomułka was released after years of house arrest for being a “right-wing nationalist,” and a group of Warsaw writers started the weekly Po Prostu (Simply), attacking the Stalinist legacy and broaching previously tabooed subjects. Together with Nowe Drogi (New Roads), Po Prostu published increasingly more critical pieces on such sore subjects as poverty, local power cliques, and the hopeless situation of youth. The emboldened intelligentsia established clubs, where open discussion became possible. In Slovak literature, the Thaw was started with Alfonz Bednár’s novel Sklený vrch (Glass Hill; 1954). The fictional diary of a certain Ema Klaasová from 1951–52 covers events from the National Uprising in 1944–45 to the building of a dam in the early 1950s. In so doing, the novel resurrects a more complex narrative mode and focuses on unique individuals and tragic moments in their turbulent lives. Similarly, the Hungarian poet Gyula Illyés speaks in his poem “Doleo, ergo sum” (I Suffer therefore I Am) of his personal sickness and suffering, pitting personal pain against official optimism. The turn to the painful subjective experience is linked to the general claim that it was always the (metaphorically conceived?) sick that understood world, life, and the uncertainties of the future. This implicit questioning of the Party’s supreme wisdom concludes with an explicit warning to the leaders of nations to heed the message (Teremteni 171–72). A few somewhat journalistic but extraordinarily vivid pages in Tamás Aczel’s and Tibor Meray’s The Revolt of the Mind (1960) describe how János Kádár and a great many “vanished” Communist leaders suddenly reappeared on the Budapest scene as if nothing had happened in those intervening years they spent in jail without trial. The gradual revelation of extorted confessions led to a shock of recognition for many Communists that one poet expressed epigrammatically as “it is my crime to have believed in yours.” Liberalization soon suffered its setback. In 1955, Rákosi succeeded in convincing the Soviet leaders that he was their best servant, and so Nagy lost his position on April 14, 1955 and was even excluded from the Party in early December. In May, the Soviet Union

Revolt, suppression, and liberalization in Post-Stalinist East-Central Europe

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strengthened its political and military control over Eastern Europe by concluding the military Warsaw Pact with its satellite countries. And Tito once more revealed his dictatorial penchant the same year by arresting and excluding from the Communist League Milovan Ðilas, Yugoslavia’s Vice President, for his criticism of the new Communist bureaucracy. Two years later Ðilas published in the West The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. At that time, most critics of the status quo were still supportive of the system as a whole. Thus Adam Waz˙yk’s “Poemat dla dorosłych” (A Poem for Adults), from 1955, was an eloquent criticism by a reform-minded Communist, who still thought that the Party could redress the woes: we seek redress and ask our land […] for keys which open doors for rooms with windows for walls without mildew for hatred of documents for a holy human time for safe return home for a simple distinction between word and act we ask […] simply truths, the seeds of freedom the burning reason […] we demand it daily we demand it through the party. (Karpin´ski 40)

The unexpected and unimaginable events of 1956 During a closed session, the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (held between February14 and 25, 1956), Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous speech, “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences,” coining the term “Cult of Personality” to explain the Party’s “faults” under Stalin. As in the case of Stalin’s death, events in Moscow had their instantaneous impact in the satellite countries. In March, Gomułka was rehabilitated and Rákosi was forced to admit that László Rajk was unjustly executed. In Bulgaria, the “April Plenum” of the Communist Party (April 2–6) made adjustments to the new political climate. As in the Soviet Union, the Party elite took control of the liberalization process. Those who asked for a more “humane” socialism, did not question the socialist system and the leading role of the Party. The April Plenum officially rejected Stalinism and the “Cult of Personality,” replacing the First Secretary, Valko Chervenkov, with Todor Zhivkov, who ruled Bulgaria until November 1989. The official propaganda of the late 1950s and 1960s turned April 1956 into an ideological emblem of the Zhivkov regime. Until 1989, April 1956 was hailed by the official propaganda as the starting point of a “New Golden Era,” but in reality, it launched the Zhivkov era, and dissidents felt a deep aversion against it. Literary culture was undeniably liberalized after 1956, but the process was initiated and controlled by the Party and the ideological restrictions on literary life were hardly eased. Communist ideology continued to manipulate literature after 1956, even if more

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subtly and flexibly. The official literary histories of the next thirty years overemphasized the 1956 Plenum, calling it “April Breeze,” “Life-giving Breath,” and “Spring Renewal.” 1956 was regarded as a starting point of contemporary Bulgarian literature, and the appropriate chapters received headings such as “The Contemporary Bulgarian Novel after the April Plenum” or “Our Contemporary Poetry After the April Plenum of 1956.” The June 28–29, 1956 strike by workers in Poznan´ led to a riot that could be crushed only by military force and at the cost of fifty lives. On October 19, the Politburo of the Polish Communist Party expelled several pro-Soviet members, in spite of protest by Khrushchev, who was present. Gomułka, elected as chief, announced the next day the reversal of the agricultural collectivization, and promised elections with more than one list. The de-Stalinization included the rehabilitation of imprisoned or executed Communist leaders, an amnesty for jailed activists and for former Home Army members, and, last but not least, greater freedom for writers. Two new literary journals emerged in October, Współczesnosć´ (Modernity) and Dialog (Dialogue). The latter was allowed to publish selections from the writings of Hesse, Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Bulgakov. The dogmatic tenets of Socialist Realism were no longer enforced. New poetic talents emerged, among them Stanisław Grochowiak, Jerzy Harasymowicz, Małgorzata Hillar, Tadeusz Nowak, Urszula Kozioł, and Ernest Bryll. The leading poets, Miron Białoszewski, Wiesława Szymborska, and Zbigniew Herbert, also switched to different styles of writing. The best-known Polish prose writers from Andrzejewski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and Kazimierz Brandys, to Jan Kott, Tadeusz Konwicki, and the controversial Marek Hłasko abandoned ideological clichés. In Czechoslovakia, Edvard Valenta published this year his Jdi za zelenám svétlem (Follow the Green Light), an introspective study of one man’s disillusionment with bourgeois politics during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, which ends to be sure, with his gradual acceptance of the need for a Communist transformation of society. In Hungary, Tibor Méray, Tamás Aczél (a Stalin-Prize winner in 1952), and others Communist journalists who supported Imre Nagy in 1953–54, intensified their criticism of the Rákosi regime at Party meetings organized by the Szabad Nép (Free People), the newspaper of the Party. The Peto˝fi Circle, formed by young writers, held its first public debate on March 17. Their subsequent discussions attracted large audiences. The circulation of Irodalmi Újság (Literary Newspaper), which had been languishing at 8,000 copies, suddenly shot up to 30,000. In the summer and early fall intellectual forums, especially the Peto˝fi Circle, debated ways to democratize public life and reform the system from within. Censorship became somewhat less strict, some plays condemned by Lukács and other Communists were performed, and several books by non-Communist writers appeared. Tibor Déry, Gyula Háy, and other reform-Communist writers shifted from a critique of Stalinism to attacks on the ideology that made its excesses possible. On September 8, the Irodalmi ujság printed Háy’s emotionally charged appeal that literature be granted “full freedom,” and that citizens be allowed to think in a non-Marxist way, to consider as unjust what officials regard as just, to dislike certain leaders and to condemn their way of life, tone, and style of work, and to “fight for humane conduct.” Significantly, however, Háy still believed that literature should not be permitted to advocate the overthrow of the People’s Democracy (qtd. in Aczel & Meray 428–29). On September 17, all the members of the Executive Committee of the Writers’ Association who had compromised themselves with Rákosi’s regime were voted out of office; some speakers at the General Assembly of the


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Writers’ Association asked for more tolerance. The newly elected members included Communists who turned against their own past (Déry, Háy, Zoltán, Zelk, and others) and prominent non-Communists who were silenced or ignored under Communism (Pál Ignotus, Áron Tamási, Lajos Kassák, and László Németh). Németh’s Galilei had its first performance in the Katona József Theater on October 20, and was interpreted by the audience as a protest against political persecutions. On October 23, a letter signed by the leaders of the Writers’ Association appeared in Irodalmi Újság, expressing sympathy with the Polish writers. The same day a peaceful demonstration of university students called for support of the Polish political reforms they wanted to replicate in Hungary. The starting-point of the revolution was this peaceful demonstration organized by the Peto˝fi Club, which started from the statue of Sándor Peto˝fi, who died a soldier’s death against the invading Russian armies in 1849, and proceeded to the monument of Józef Bem, one of the two Polish generals who joined the Hungarian revolution of 1848 (see the Section on 1848). Bem had become a symbol of Polish-Hungarian solidarity against Austrian as well as Russian imperialism. When the demonstrators reached Bem Square, Péter Veres, chairman of the Hungarian Writers’ Association, addressed the crowd. Within a few hours protests spread to other parts of the city, and the tension between the demonstrators and the defenders of Communism led to an armed conflict in front of the building of the Hungarian Radio. The following days brought radical changes in the political life of the country. Nagy, who became Prime Minister, announced a program of democratization but he soon discovered that the popular uprising wanted the Communist regime dismantled and replaced with a pluralist political system. Under the pressure of popular demands Nagy gradually adopted more radical agendas, initiating a multi-party system and putting the army under the command of a military-revolutionary council. On November 1, Hungary proclaimed its neutrality and started negotiations to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. When the United States made it clear that the West would not intervene, Moscow decided to put an end to the uprising and Soviet troops launched an attack on Budapest on November 4. Although numerous writers paved the way for the revolution, it would be misleading to overestimate their role in the events. Most of the revolutionaries who put up a strong resistance against the armed Communists and later against the Soviet tanks were young workers who had no contact with the politicians or the writers. Several of the journalists who supported Imre Nagy were disillusioned Communists whose artistic activity was of limited significance. Most of the prominent writers were extremely cautious, or explored alternative avenues. In the November 2 issue of the Irodalmi Újság, Németh published an article entitled “Emelkedo˝ nemzet” (Nation on the Rise), Kassák celebrated the toppling of Stalin’s statue with the poem “A diktátor” (The Dictator), Tamási and Lo˝rinc Szabó contributed essays. On the same day, Új Magyarország (New Hungary) published Németh’s “Pártok és egység” (Political Parties and Unity). These texts were written after consultations with István Bibó, Illyés, Veres, and other distinguished writers on October 30. The outcome of that meeting was the reconstitution of the Peasant Party in the Agricultural Museum on the last day of October. Since, according to Németh, the old National Peasant Party had been manipulated by the Communists when the one-party system was introduced in 1948, he decided to re-baptize it as the “Peto˝fi Party.” On November 2, the

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Hungarian government was reshuffled and Bibó, representing this party, became a member of the cabinet. Two days later the Soviet troops reached the building of the Hungarian Parliament. By then the only leading politician still in the building was Bibó. After further tribulations, which we merely sketched at the outset of this essay, Nagy and several other leaders received a secret trial and were executed in June 1958.

The aftermath of the 1956 revolution In Hungary, the Soviet intervention was followed by brutal repression. All forms of protest were banned. The activities of the Writers’ Association and the Journalists’ Union were suspended on January 18, 1957; the literary life of the country was deprived of its most important institutions for two years. The following leading writers (and many more) were arrested, jailed, and then sentenced to years of prison (from which, however, they were usually released earlier): István Eörsi (nine years), Tibor Déry (nine years), Gyula Háy (six years), and Zoltán Zelk (three years). Illyés fell silent for several years; Gyo˝zo˝ Határ and many younger writers left the country and made their careers in the West; Háy left in 1964. When Kádár’s regime felt more secure, the 8th Congress of the Party announced in 1962 a program of national reconciliation, an easing of the political control, and an encouragement of some private initiatives in the economy. It also granted amnesty to all those who fled the country, save those who participated in armed confrontations. Although the United States refused to offer military aid to the Hungarians, the revolution met with widespread respect in the Western world. From Albert Camus to e. e. cummings many distinguished writers and intellectuals expressed their sympathy for the revolutionaries. The most important Hungarian writer in exile, Sándor Márai, made a desperate attempt to return to his homeland. By the time he crossed the Atlantic and reached Munich, refugees arrived to the Bavarian capital and he recorded in his diary several conversations with them. When he returned to New York, at the end of the year, he composed “Mennybo˝l az angyal” (An Angel from Heaven), a prayer in verse and a testimony to the hopeless struggle of a nation that wished to liberate itself from Moscow. Hungarian literary life recovered only slowly from the paralysis it suffered. The first issue of Nagyvilág (Worldwide), which offered international literature in translation, came out in 1956, to be followed by the second in 1957. A new weekly called Élet és irodalom (Life and Literature) was launched in 1957. Kortárs (The Contemporary) became the organ of the reorganized Writers’ Association. Such local journals as Tiszatáj (The Tisza Region), a monthly from Szeged, and Alföld (The Plainland), a similar journal based in Debrecen, grew in significance. Jelenkor (The Present Age) was launched in Pécs in 1958, while Új Írás (New Writing) appeared in Budapest in 1961. Though the revolution of 1956 was officially condemned as a “counter-revolution” instigated by the Western powers, its impact continued to be felt within the country. The official cultural policy of the re-baptized Hungarian Workers’ Socialist Party (MSZMP) became somewhat more tolerant towards the intelligentsia. József Révai was replaced by György Aczél, who made a distinction between tolerated and banned literature. Concurrently, more and more


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writers were forced to compromise with the authorities. László Németh was among the writers who were awarded the Kossuth Prize on March 15, 1957; his works were published in carefully selected editions the following decades. While culture was restricted by censorship in the early 1950s, the period following the revolution was characterized also by self-censorship and reading between the lines. Some of the works composed before 1956 were published in the postrevolutionary years. “Apokrif” (Apocrypha), an apocalyptic poem that invokes the figure of the Prodigal Son, written between 1950 and 1954 by the Roman Catholic poet János Pilinszky, was published in 1959, first in Kortárs and later in the collection Harmadnapon (On the Third Day; Összes 27–59), that lends itself to both a tragic and Christian interpretation. Using some of the elements of his earlier avant-garde verse, Lajos Kassák articulated a bleak Stoical outlook. The poet Sándor Weöres felt increasingly drawn to imitation, prefiguring the postmodern eclecticism of the 1970s and 1980s. Both the Liberal democratic and the Populist opposition returned to literary life after long years of involuntary silence. Géza Ottlik’s Iskola a határon (School at the Frontier; 1959), a parable of the self-preserving power of internal autonomy, attempted to restore continuity with the culture of the Hungarian middle class. From an East-Central European perspective it may be regarded as one of the early narratives that used adolescent perspectives on politics and war (see the Section on 1945). The poets Ferenc Juhász and László Nagy defined their identity in relation to the legacy of the Populist writers of the interwar period by drawing inspiration from the oral culture of the peasantry. Of the several attempts to free the satellite countries of Communism, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 was by far the most important and painful: some 2500 people died, 200,000 Hungarians left the country by the end of 1956. The leaders of the revolution were executed and many participants imprisoned. One of the undeniable consequences of the revolution was that from the 1960s onward the political leaders of the country decided to tolerate differences in attitude and outlook, which led to a censorship that was more liberal than in the other countries of the Soviet bloc. The wide range of literary trends that developed after 1956 contrasts sharply with the monotonous and provincial didacticism of the works published in the early 1950s. But in one respect political tolerance was strictly limited in Kádár’s Hungary: no fair assessment of the 1956 revolution could be made. While no work of any artistic merit supported the official interpretation — József Darvas’s Kormos ég (Smoky Sky; 1959) is a badly written play by a writer whose aesthetic as well as moral standards were extremely low — it was only much later that the tragic aspects of 1956 were portrayed in a vaguely allusive manner in legal and literary publications. Fuharosok (Transporters; 1983), a short novel by Péter Esterházy is a characteristic example of a writing that encourages reading between the lines: the first-person narration of a raped young girl can also be interpreted as an allegory of the Soviet occupation of Hungary. In the late 1950s and the 1960s East-Central European readers had to turn to scarcely accessible Western publications to get information about the Hungarian revolution. Although they were numerous, most of them gave personal and sometimes distorted interpretations. The decline of Kádár’s “goulash Communism” was signaled, among other things, by the appearance of samizdat books after the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Painstaking investigations of

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the 1956 Revolution were started in the early 1990s; many documents were published, but it is still early to ask for impartiality. The revolution of 1956 has become part and parcel of the historical legacy that serves as a background to many literary works. Péter Nádas’s Emlékiratok könyve (A Book of Memories, 1986), one of the most important Hungarians novels published in the 1980s, contains a chapter entitled “A Year of Funerals” that presents a demonstration held on October 28, 1956. This may be one of the earliest literary works legally published in Hungary in which the word “revolution” is used to refer to the Hungarian uprising. In one of the episodes of Esterházy’s monumental pseudo-historical Harmonia caelestis (2000) the character called “my father” addresses a crowd that stands in front of the house of parliament with the word “Comrades.” He is greeted with a storm of indignant shouts. A reader familiar with the events of the “thirteen days that shook the Kremlin” will know that this scene is a playful re-enactment of Imre Nagy’s first attempt to speak to the demonstrators on the evening of October 23, 1956. The legacy of 1956 shows that one should not paint a rosy picture of the “goulash Communism” that followed the repression. Those writers who escaped from Hungary after the fall of the revolution were destined to work in isolation in the West. After an absence of three decades, their return to Hungarian culture seems very difficult. Those who stayed in the country often paid a high price for their survival. Today the reputation of such authors as Németh or Illyés is much lower than it was twenty years ago. Not even the younger generation could escape disillusionment. At the beginning of 2001, Esterházy was given access to documents indicating that his father, a member of an old aristocratic family, was forced to work for the Communists as an agent from 1957 to 1980. Some of his reports were written at the time the leaders of the revolution were executed, others gave information about people who spent years in prison because of their involvement in the revolution. Javított kiadás (Emended Edition; 2002), the diary Péter Esterházy kept while reading what his father had written for the political authorities, is a sad reminder that totalitarianism survived 1956.

East-Central Europe between the Hungarian revolution and the Prague Spring The November 1957 World Communist Congress in Moscow condemned all forms of revisionism and national Communism as dangerous deviations from the true Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Gomułka praised the Soviet intervention in Hungary as necessary and correct, and even Tito embraced the official description of the Hungarian uprising as a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. In Romania, the Hungarian revolution inspired a series of student demonstrations in Transylvania and the Banat. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime responded by promising educational reforms but followed them with military repression. Gheorghiu-Dej tried desperately to reconsolidate his power by eliminating simultaneously both Iosif Chis¸inevski, the ideologue of the Stalinist period, and Miron Constantinescu, a revisionist Marxist sociologist. One concession he made was to allow those deported to the working camps in south-eastern Romania to return home, but this was followed in 1958 by a massive purge of the Party and the intelligentsia, which reassured the Soviets and persuaded them to withdraw their troops from Romania the same year.


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Gheorghiu-Dej resisted Khrushchev’s renewed de-Stalinization in 1961 by continuing assiduously Stalinist policies, speeding up the industrialization, completing the agricultural collectivization by 1962, and eliminating all opposition inside and outside the Party. Capitalizing on the withdrawal of Soviet troops, he deftly played the card of national autonomy by resisting the creation of supranational economic organizations, initiating a rapprochement with Tito, remaining neutral in the Soviet-Chinese conflict, and even condemning the hegemonic power of the Soviet Communist Party. Almost inadvertently, Gheorghiu-Dej initiated a Thaw: prominent Romanian cultural figures were rehabilitated, Western languages were introduced in schools in place of the mandatory Russian, political prisoners were granted amnesty, and censored Marxist texts that contained embarrassing criticism of Russia were republished. Both Gheorghiu-Dej and, after his death in 1965, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu consolidated their own power by allowing, often against their better judgment, a genuine (if short-lived) liberalization and cultural renovation. Elsewhere in East-Central Europe, the events in 1956 had a relatively mild impact on literary life. Hesitant liberalizations led to (1) a limited revival of both living and historical authors formerly condemned as reactionary, (2) the appearance of new, critical journals, (3) the appearance of new generations that were not compromised by their Stalinist past, and, last but not least, (4) bolder deviations from Socialist Realism, which included adoptions of Modernist and/or Western ideas and literary techniques. In Czechoslovakia, for instance, the delayed publication of Josef Škvorecký’s novel Zbabeˇlci (The Cowards) in 1964 broached the painful subject of Czech acquiescence in Nazi rule. Set in the small town of Kostelec (Náchod) in May 1945, this novel pitched the cowardly older generation against the author’s cynical young alter ego, Danny Smírˇický. Throughout the 1960s, Czech writers continued to explore the split between generations, often turning wartime situations into mirrors of the contemporary division between the compromised Stalinists and their younger, reform-minded sons. Typical of this dichotomy were Jan Otcˇenášek’s novel Romeo, Julie a tma (Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness; 1959), which contrasts the heroism of a teenager during the Reichsprotektorat with the cowardice of his parents’ generation; Milan Kundera’s play on a similar wartime theme, Majitelé klícˇu˚ (The Owners of the Keys), produced by the Prague National Theater in 1962; and Bohumil Hrabal’s novella Ostrˇe sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains; 1965), which associates Czech pacifism with adolescent sexual inhibition. Ludvík Vaculík’s novel Sekyra (The Axe; 1966), which made use of extended authorial intrusions, struck an even sharper topical note by highlighting the tragic rift between the older Stalinist generation and their disaffected children as well as the author’s disillusionment with the Communist Party. Equally damning were the five novels of Vladimír Páral published between 1964 and 1969, which exposed the average Czech citizen as a soulless homo statisticus who had lost faith in the Communist system and who was channeling his frustrated energies into the private arena of extramarital affairs. In 1966 Pavel Kohout was thrown out of the Party, Vaculík would join him the following year. In Poland, Gomułka did soften the economic policies, showed some tolerance towards intellectual and artistic experimentation, but prohibited significant challenges to the ideological underpinning of the system, as witnessed by the closing down of Po Prostu and the banning of Leszek Kołakowski’s “What Is Socialism” in 1957, which boldly declared what socialism should not be (though in fact is):

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John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope Socialism is not: A society in which a person who has committed no crime sits at home waiting for the police. A society in which one person is unhappy because he says what he thinks, and another happy because he does not say what is in his mind. A society in which a person lives better because he does not think at all. […] A state whose government defines its citizens’ rights, but whose citizens do not define the government’s rights. […] A state that always knows the will of the people before it asks them. A state in which the philosophers and writers always say the same as the generals and the ministers, but always after them. A state in which the returns of the parliamentary elections are always predictable. A state which does not like its citizens to read back numbers of newspapers. (qtd. in Howe 31–32)

Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke (1937) was republished in 1957 with the author’s foreword, followed a little later by his pre-emigration plays, S´lub (The Marriage), Operetka (Operetta) and Iwona, ksie˛z˙niczka Burgunda (Yvonne, the Princess of Burgundy), but soon these works disappeared again, just like those of Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski and Czesław Miłosz. A number of important pre-war works, formerly dismissed for ideological reasons, were reissued, however. Bruno Schulz’s Proza (Prose) was published in 1956, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s most unusual novel, Nienasycenie (Insatiability; 1930), in 1957, followed by the edition of Witkiewicz’s collected plays in 1962. In Bulgaria too, “bourgeois” authors, both Western and Bulgarian, were now allowed publication. Alexander Voutimski’s poetry, considered sick and decadent before 1956, was published in 1960. Critical editions of works by Pencho Slaveikov and Peyo Yavorov, formerly neglected because of their “bourgeois individualism,” appeared between 1956 and 1960. The launching of the two Bulgarian cultural journals in 1957, the monthly Plamak (Flame) and the weekly Narodna kultura (People’s Culture), further liberalized literary life. In Slovakia the appearance of Mladá tvorba (Young Creation) in 1956 was followed by the Revue svetovej literatúry (Revue of World Literature) in 1965, and by Romboid in 1966. The older Kultúrny život (Cultural Life) also shifted radically towards advocating social and cultural reforms. In Romania, Luceafa˘rul (The Morning Star, relaunched in a new format in 1958) and Gazeta literara˘ (Literary Review, begun in 1954), followed in 1968 by România literara˘ (Literary Romania), were instrumental in promoting a revival of poetry (Nicolae Labis¸, Nichita Sta˘nescu, Ana Blandiana, Marin Sorescu), which they linked up with the modernist tradition and encouraged new prose fiction (Nicolae Breban, D. R. Popescu, S¸tefan Ba˘nulescu, Sorin Titel) at the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s (see pp. 42 and 68f). The cautious liberalizations did allow deviations from Socialist Realism. The change affected Bulgarian literature primarily on the level of genre and style. The large ‘epic novels,’ with their supposedly objective and all-knowing narrators, favored in the early 1950s, yielded to short stories and fragmentary novels organized around a personal point of view. Black-and-white fiction was replaced by more nuanced approaches to reality and personality. New authors


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emerged, who “tried to reintroduce a sense of the tragic into languishing Bulgarian fiction” (Slavov, Ba˘lgarska 66). This “lyricalization of prose,” as it was sometimes called, became more prominent in the mid-1960s with the work of talented young authors like Gencho Stoev, Nikolai Haitov, Yordan Radichkov, and Vassil Popov. The change in climate was presaged in several countries by young and daring writers. In Poland, the outstanding new talent was Sławomir Mroz˙ek, who began his career in 1957 with the short stories of Słon´ (Elephant) and soon became one of the most successful writers of absurd drama. In Bulgaria, an “April Generation” of poets, with Lubomir Levchev, Stefan Tsanev, and Konstantin Pavlov as chief representatives, emerged between 1957 and 1960, taking advantage of the post-1956 cultural atmosphere that allowed formal innovations if artists declared their loyalty to the Party. Levchev’s and Tsanev’s poetry were seen as lyrical expressions of a personal “faith in the revolution” that struggled against a philistine bureaucracy. But the absurdist, dissident poetry of Pavlov was labeled as “malicious satire.” While Levchev made a great career in the Party hierarchy, Pavlov was virtually forbidden to publish. Their different fates were emblematic for post-1956 Bulgaria. In Slovak fiction, a new cohort called “Generation ’56” made its debut. The first “wave” of this generation (Jozef Kot, Jaroslava Blažková, Anton Hykisch) published its early works in the late 1950s. These writers chose radically new themes, turning from large epic works focused on historical events to everyday issues and individual experiences. The second wave, which appeared in the early 1960s, abandoned the residual “journalistic” elements of contemporary fiction, introducing formal innovations and experiments. They depicted individuals in conflict with the world (Pavel Hrúz) or with themselves (Rudolf Sloboda), the search for harmonious relationships (Vincent Šikula), strategies for reaching emotional balance (Pavel Vilikovský), and even departures on existential quests (Ján Johanides). In doing so, these writers either revived Modernism or, as in the case of Vilikovský and Hrúz, went on to create an early Slovak Postmodernism. The latter two were either unable or unwilling to publish their works during the next decade, remaining silent roughly until the mid-1980s. Other authors who made their debut in the 1960s include Peter Jaroš, who used the techniques of the French New Novel and adopted an absurdist poetics; Ladislav Ballek and Dušan Mitana followed a similarly experimental poetics in their first works published at the end of the decade. The new groups of Slovak poets included the “Concretists” and the “Trnava group” (or “Neo-poetists”) of Ján Ondruš, Ján Stacho, L’ubomír Feldek, Jozef Mihalkovicˇ, and Jozef Šimonovicˇ. The “Concretists” rejected history and ideology in poetry, and turned to the senses and sensuality. Rehabilitating the body and perceiving life as a mystery, they adopted a playful creativity. Ondruš’s first collection of poetry, for example, showed affinities with Existentialism and Surrealism, drawing on memories of childhood. Prosaic everyday activities filled the space of poetry, questioning classical poetic decorum but also the capacity of language to communicate the human experiences of pain, suffering, and death. Štefan Strážay and Štefan Moravcˇík felt akin to the Concretists at the beginning of their careers, but went their own way later. Another new group, called “Osamelí bežci” (The Lonely Runners), also attacked the political conformism of postwar poetry. The search for authenticity and nonconventional forms in works of Ivan Štrpka, Ivan Laucˇík, and Peter Repka echoed the poetry of the Beat generation.

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The Catholic Modernists and Surrealists Ladislav Novomeský, Ján Smrek, Emil Boleslav Lukácˇ, Valentín Beniak, Janko Silan and other banned poets could return to public life and help in the fight against “schematic writing.” Early twentieth-century poetic styles and movements experienced a revival in Slovakia. Returning to the Avant-garde and the Modernist traditions, Miroslav Válek made use in Štyri knihy nepokoja (Four Books of Unrest) of the form of the multi-thematic poem in free verse, switching between different temporal perspectives to express a sense of alienation and to portray history and the contemporary world as absurd. Ladislav Mnˇacˇko’s Oneskorené reportáže (Belated Reports) and Roman Kaliský’s Obžalovaný, vstanˇte! (Will the Defendant Please Rise!), both revelations about political persecution, could only appear in 1963 and 1964, respectively. Mnˇacˇko emigrated to Israel in 1967, returned briefly to Czechoslovakia, and then emigrated again to Austria after 1968. His personal account of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Die siebente Nacht. Erkenntnis und Anklage eines Kommunisten (The Seventh Night: The Experience and Accusation of a Communist), appeared in Vienna in 1968, but only in 1990 in Bratislava.

The Prague Spring 1968, like 1848, was a year of revolutions. In the US, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement fuelled a series of violent student confrontations with the police that reached their climax in the turbulent summer of 1968. At about the same time in Paris, French students, inspired by the teachings of Karl Marx and Chairman Mao, were protesting against the rightwing government of Charles de Gaulle. In Communist Czechoslovakia, the reformist experiment known as the Prague Spring (January to August, 1968) was brought to a sudden and violent end by a Soviet-led military intervention. As in the case of the Vormärz, the years that preceded 1848, the decade of the 1960s played a crucial role in the subsequent political turmoil; the Prague Spring was preceded by a gradual liberalization that dated back to the early 1960s. Whereas the reform movement of the Soviet Union was discredited and abandoned after Khrushchev’s removal from power in 1964, internal factors within the Czechoslovak Communist party and government allowed the reforms to gain momentum. An economic crisis provided the instigation for the reform movement. Faced with economic adversity, the Party split into liberal and conservative factions, and the internal division spilled into the open, in spite of efforts to keep it secret. The Liblice Colloquium on Kafka, organized by Eduard Goldstücker in 1963, was all too cautious in questioning the official line that Kafka was a decadent and irrelevant writer, but it paved the way in several countries for translating and further discussing his work. Nevertheless, it still took years until writers could ask more directly whether his nightmarish visions reflected also the experiences of people living in socialist countries. Lukács did not come to Liblice but we may assume that he would not have demanded Kafka’s rehabilitation. His first major publication after 1956, Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Against Misunderstood Realism; 1958), grew out of a lecture he gave at a great many prestigious places in Eastern and Western Europe in the fall of 1955 and early 1956. Lukács refers to the events of 1956 in the foreword, but only in passing. The printed text criticizes both (Communist) Dogmatism and (reformist)


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Revisionism, but the latter is sharper, and actually constitutes Lukács’s most systematic rejection of Decadence, Modernism, and the Avant-garde. Its longest chapter carries the telling title: “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” (49–96). No, the experience at Snagov late 1956 did not bring Lukács closer to Kafka! The Stalinists tried but failed to dislodge the reformists at the Czechoslovak Central Committee meeting of December 1967. The conservative Antonín Novotný was ousted at the Plenary Session of January 5, 1968 (although he remained head of state). The new leader became the first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party, Alexander Dubcˇek. The Action Plan adopted by Dubcˇek in April 1968 maintained a commitment to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine but envisaged a democratization of the system. New guarantees for the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religious observance were introduced; the Party’s prerogatives in government, economic, and legislative matters were curtailed; and Slovakia was granted equal status in the federation. Encouraged by Dubcˇek’s call for free debates and openness in policy-making, civic groups, including non-Communist and even anti-Communist associations, challenged the Party’s reform program. The philosopher Ivan Sviták went so far as to advocate a complete break with the Communist system. On June 27, the first of a three-day Writers’ Congress, the Literární Listy (published by the Writers’ Union) printed Ludvík Vaculík’s “Dva tisíce slov” (2000 Words). Vaculík, a former Communist and anti-Stalinist writer, addressed “Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists, and Everybody” and called for a rapid transition to a multi-party system. Seventy people consented to sign it, including a few olympic champions (among them Zatopek), prominent figures of the Czechoslovak intelligentsia such as the film director Jirˇí Menzel and the philosopher Karel Kosík, but surprisingly few and mostly minor writers. The political thrust of literature published during the Novotný era remained allegorical and oblique. Under Dubcˇek, such allegorical methods were replaced by direct reportage and journalistic commentary (French 365). Labor-camp memoirs became prominent at this time, especially Jirˇí Mucha’s Studené slunce (Cold Sun; 1968), a diary of prison life during the Stalinist era based on scraps written in the mines six hundred meters below ground (French 368). Emboldened by revelations of such past abuses, many writers began to take an active part in the political life of the country. On February 4, 1968, Eduard Goldstücker, the new chairman of the Writers’ Union, appeared on TV to expose the cover-up around Novotný’s recent fall from power. On March 13 and 20 huge meetings were held, covered by the press and the radio, at which students and young workers grilled Goldstücker, Kohout, Jan Procházka, and other old or newly emerging dissidents. The visions that Goldstücker, Havel, Sviták, and others had about the country’s future political life alarmed the Soviet authorities in Moscow. At the March 23 Dresden summit with the Czechoslovak leadership Leonid Brezhnev actually named Procházka and the literary critic Václav Cˇerný as key figures in spreading a “counter-revolutionary” contamination (Williams 71–72). On April 2, the journal Student published a letter by Sviták to the Public Prosecutor that demanded an official inquiry into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jan Masaryk’s death in 1948 (French 302). The young playwright, Václav Havel, dramaturge at the experimental Theater on the Balustrade, entered the debates with the article “Na téma opozice” (On the Theme of an Opposition) in the April issue of the new journal Literární listy (Literary Gazette). Havel, who was not a Communist, perceived a lack of strong

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political leadership in the government and argued that an opposition was needed to counterbalance the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the Communist Party. His article was followed by Sviták’s demands for a genuine three-party system. Though Dubcˇek announced on June 13 that the Party was prepared to stop “anti-Communist manifestations,” the Soviet leadership felt it had to take resolute action. Out of imperialist concerns it found a decentralized Eastern block unacceptable: the Prague Spring was creating a rift in the Soviet block, for Yugoslavia and Romania seemed to support Dubcˇek’s drive for democratization — not out of ideological sympathy but out of a concern with Soviet hegemony. A number of Communist parties in Western Europe were already adopting the view that each national Party had a right to its own political line. This “Euro-Communist” approach tried to reconcile Socialism with pluralist democracy. The Soviets reacted by convening a Warsaw-Pact Summit in July, which sent an ultimatum to the Czechoslovak leadership, asking them to curb the “counter-revolutionary” tendencies. When Dubcˇek rejected the Soviet charges of Revisionism, defending his dream of an “open and honest” Socialism, the Warsaw Pact troops (without Romania) invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. The veteran Communist writers Jarmila Glazarová and Jan Drda condemned the Soviet invasion in letters published in the Party’s daily newspaper Rudé právo (Red Right) on August 27, 1968. Kohout, Kundera, Procházka, Antonín Liehm, Ivan Klíma, and other key members of the Writers’ Union remained active during the subsequent critical months. Foreign protests also poured in, albeit in vain: Andrzejewski wrote an open letter in September to Goldstücker, expressing his dismay at the Polish participation in the invasion; similar disavowals came from Hungary. Kołakowski and many other Polish university professors were expelled for their oppositional role; in Romania, important writers, led by the President of the Writers Union, Zaharia Stancu, castigated Soviet imperialism at an officially-sanctioned meeting. Dubcˇek, beleaguered both by the old-guard communists and the intellectuals demanding more radical changes, resigned in April 1969, leaving the power in the hands of Gustáv Husák, a Slovak Communist leader jailed during the Stalinist years, just like Kádár and Gomułka. Just like Kádár, he conveniently switched when the invasion occurred — none of these victims of Stalinist totalitarianism had much courage left in them. Husák’s policy of “normalization” sent a great many intellectuals into self-exile. Characteristic of this new climate of appeasement was ˇ eský údeˇl” (The Czech Lot), published in Literární listy an article by Milan Kundera entitled “C on December 19, 1968, which encouraged the citizens to take pride in what had already been achieved. Deploying the rhetoric of Czech national mythopoeia, Kundera argued that the postinvasion situation had left the country’s reformist program largely intact. He challenged the many thousands who had fled abroad to return home and urged those at home to be critically optimistic (Williams 182–83). For Havel, this position was a case of Czech myopia that confused patriotism with political passivity and celebrated the past as a means of ignoring the ˇ eský údeˇl?” (February 1969), he insisted on the sort of honest self-scrutiny that present. In “C was to become the hallmark of his later essays and plays. Ironically, it was Kundera who ended up going into exile to France in 1977, while Havel remained an active dissident at home, where a thriving samizdat continued to offer resistance to the process of “normalization.” Those staying behind had to fight suppression (more than 120 authors were not allowed to publish), isolation, and the temptations of compromise. Some, like the conservative opportunist


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Jirˇí Hájek, editor of the journal Tvorba, approved of the invasion; indeed, in a 1975 interview published in Tvorba, Hájek managed to squeeze out of Hrabal a support for the post-68 political situation — which brought Hrabal the permission to publish again legally but also a violent rejection by his oppositional colleagues. Yet the critical spirit was not completely extinguished . Vaculík, banned, founded in 1972 the first underground press, Edice Petlice (Padlock Edition), which in the following years published hundreds of books by silenced authors, including Alexandr Kliment, Ivan Klíma, Hrabal, Kohout, and many others. Kohout’s Z deníku kontrarevolucionáre (From the Diary of a Counter-Revolutionary) appeared in 1969, but, of course, only abroad, in German translation. Jirˇí Šotola’s allegorical historical novel, Tovaryšstvo Ježíšovo (Society of Jesus), could, however, be published in Dragne because it only hinted at parallels between the Counter-Reformation’s extirpation of heresy in Bohemia and the post-68 Communist crackdown. Kundera’s disenchantment with the Prague Spring is reflected in his novels written in exile, Kniha smíchu a zapomneˇní (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; 1979) and Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being; 1981). But even these works are marred by the author’s predilection for national mythologizing. Just as his article of December 1968 had deployed the language of revivalist mythopoeia to exhort optimism in his Czech audience, now Kundera’s fiction invoked the same rhetoric to induce pessimism in his western readership. Typical of this kind of mythopoeia are facile parallels between remote political events and the ills of the present: Prague, as Max Brod said, is the city of evil. When the Jesuits, after the defeat of the Czech Reformation in 1621, tried to reeducate the people in the true Catholic faith, they swamped Prague with the splendor of Baroque cathedrals. The thousands of petrified saints gazing at you from all sides and threatening you, hypnotizing you, are the frenzied army of occupation that invaded Bohemia three hundred years ago to tear the people’s faith and language out of its soul. (Laughter 216)

Josef Škvorecký, who emigrated to Canada in the early 1970s and founded in Toronto the influential Sixty-Eight Publishers, showed a more dispassionate and cynical attitude towards the Prague Spring in his later novels. In Mirákl (The Miracle Game; 1972) he treated the Prague Spring in a satirical vein and drew a humorous parallel between the political “miracle” of 1968 and the fraudulent miracle created by the Catholic Church in a small town in Czechoslovakia in 1948 (the year of the Communist take-over). This analogy not only made fun of the naive idealism of the Prague Spring, it also pointed to the ideological continuum between established religion and Communism. Škvorecký’s other satirical technique in Mirákl was to use thinly veiled references to participants in the Prague Spring, such as the famous novelist Nabal (Hrabal), who retreats to the Adriatic coast to avoid the consequences of the Soviet invasion. Havel continued to write plays for a dissident audience at home and a concerned minority in the West. Witty and thoughtful indictments of the moral cowardice and political compromise that characterized the “normalization” of the 1970s and early 1980s, these plays made Havel a celebrity abroad and the most influential spokesman of the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In Slovakia, “The Lonely Runners” were silenced after 1968, and Ivan Štrpka became a writer of lyrics for the popular music that was emerging then. The post-1968 party-driven “consolidation” or “normalization” process had other victims as well. Mladá tvorba, Kultúrny život,

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and other periodicals were banned, books were destroyed and authors excluded from literary life. The first book to deal with 1968–69, Jozef Kot’s Horúcˇka (Fever; 1973), interpreted the events from the official viewpoint of “normalization.” Válek, who revived the Avant-garde and Modernism in the early sixties, became after 1968 a member of Parliament and the Slovak Minister of Culture, and used his offices to “normalize” literary life in the 1970s. Slovak literature had to wait for more than twenty years in order to profit from genuine democratization and ideological pluralism. Only then could it embark on stylistic experiments and critical reevaluations of the past.

1968 in Yugoslavia By 1968, French structuralism and other influential trends of thought had been introduced in Yugoslavia; the ideas of the Prague school, Russian formalism had been adopted and used already earlier. Structuralism, with its precise analytical tools, challenged the socialist scholarly discourse that was still obliged, especially in the humanities, to praise Marx, Engels, the Soviets and the local “fathers.” The most ideologically exposed disciplines — sociology and philosophy — were also the most closely watched even in Yugoslavia. The inevitable re-interpretation of standard Marxist thought had to be assured of continued state support. To serve this strategic function and to safeguard intellectual integrity, scholars turned to those aspects of Marxist thought (like the “early Marx”) that seemed most promising and provoking. The emerging indepth studies of Marxism linked up socialist philosophers and sociologists with their Western pro-leftist peers, but produced much misunderstanding and confusion. Generally speaking, Westerners had an easier time detecting and protecting dissidents in the countries controlled by the Soviet Union. In Yugoslavia, however, the ruling Communist Party was clever enough to establish its own circle of Western intellectual supporters who were willing to believe that the break with the Soviet Union left no traces of Stalinism and that the Yugoslav model of selfgovernment was an ideal response to capitalism. The contest of Summer Schools in the late sixties and early seventies illustrates this point. While the Summer School organized by state and party institutions was hosted in luxurious hotels in the city of Cavtat, on the Adriatic coast, boasting the participation of the likes of Paul Ricoeur and Terry Eagleton, the dissident Summer School of Philosophy, held on the island of Korcˇula a few hundred kilometers to the North, worked under deplorable conditions and its participants were attacked verbally and physically by ideologically correct locals. Nevertheless, students from all over Yugoslavia attended the latter school that had Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and Lucien Goldmann among its guest speakers. About the same time, a group of Yugoslav and foreign philosophers and sociologists founded in Zagreb the periodical Praxis (1964). This publication gained immediate international recognition while being constantly attacked by the Party representatives, who accused the Praxis group of promoting “abstract humanism.” The Korcˇula Summer School was closed by the Yugoslav authorities in the mid-1970s. While the distinguished Western guests were earnestly interested in debating Marxist thought, the Yugoslav intellectuals were more eager to examine their history of Marxism. Discrepancies


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developed between the official ideology and the academic inquiries. Over the years, the critical reflection of the Korcˇula Summer School slowly turned away from Marxism-oriented debates and addressed such touchy questions of recent history as the Communists’ role in leading the people’s resistance during World War II, their methods of gaining power, their mockery of the parliamentary system, their break with Stalin and move closer to the West while preserving most of the Stalinist repressive mechanisms. Before 1968, hardly anybody rejected publicly the socialist system or questioned the foundations of the “Yugoslav way.” Intellectuals continued to entertain the illusion that the Communist system could be improved from within. The shocking Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 resolved the dilemmas of many pro-leftist Western intellectuals but consolidated the system in Yugoslavia by intensifying the fear of Soviet reprisals. The group of academics and students gathered around the Korcˇula Summer School now felt the need to expand the thematic range of their discussions in closed circles. Thus 1968 functioned as a watershed in the life of the Yugoslav social sciences and philosophy: moving away from the traditional Marxist debates, they opened themselves up to history and analytic philosophy. The events, practices, and activism of 1968 deeply affected the Yugoslav literary culture. However, their reverberations were so scattered and diverse as to make their connections to 1968 often difficult to discern. May 1968 in Paris, the 1968 events in West Germany, and the beginnings of the student movements in the USA and Europe, were closely watched and commented in Yugoslav student newspapers. The final spark that ignited a Yugoslav revolt came on the night of June 1, when a poorly organized show on the university campus just outside Belgrade led to a riot, and, next morning, to attempts to cross the bridge over the Sava river in order to demonstrate in central Belgrade. The police responded with unprecedented brutality, beating up even some of the Party representatives who tried to calm down the students. Still, the students managed to reach their schools in central Belgrade and organized sit-ins in most of them, including the Belgrade University, where a majority of the 50,000 enrolled students joined. For six days, students remained on the premises, organizing programs similar to those at Western institutions: debates, events of alternative culture, visits and performances by known artists, writers, old partisans, and forgotten politicians. Ordinary citizens brought food and moral support. The media relentlessly attacked the “June movement,” especially after a number of former detainees from the Goli otok (Bare Island) concentration camp for “Russian sympathizers” made a public appearance. The students were quite suspicious of them, but even more ill disposed towards the occasional representatives of the nomenclature, whose task it was both to engage in debates and to spy. The central stage for these manifestations was the School of Philosophy, where students debated issues uninterruptedly for 24 hours. Marshal Tito broke the silence six days later, addressing the students on TV and radio. He accepted the student demands for social justice and better quality of life and study, but he also stressed that while ninety per cent of students were well-meaning, a small group of “extremists,” instigated by their misguided professors, were harming the common interest. The speech was welcomed by students everywhere, except for those attending the Belgrade schools of Philosophy, Philology, and Arts. For the remainder of that summer, the rebellious students at these institutions continued their activities while an internal purge among party members at the University got under way. In spite of growing anxieties in the aftermath of the Soviet intervention

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in Czechoslovakia and the tightening repression against dissidents, thousands of new students applied the following year to all departments of the School of Philosophy. This “Chinese generation,” as it came to be known, produced important specialists in the humanities for years to come. The regime intervened by firing eight professors and assistants from the school; but the legal proceedings lasted several years because the law had to be changed to suit the Party’s will. Student movements, on a more modest scale, developed also in Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Ljubljana, mostly in reaction to the Belgrade events. The organizers knew each other well and often coordinated their actions. The regime intensified police repression in all university centers, stalking, beating up, and starting legal proceedings against various individuals. In Belgrade, about 250 people — mostly academics and students — were deprived of their passports and an even larger number was regularly harassed by the police. The first political trials against representatives of the younger generation took place in 1970, mostly against student leaders and people who had become visible since the events of 1968. All charges were predicated on “verbal delinquency,” according to article 133 of the Criminal Code. The 1970s were marked everywhere by such verbal delinquency trials. They received attention when they took place in large cities; others passed unnoticed for the victims were little-known people from smaller towns. A number of informed foreign friends, especially those remembering the Korcˇula Summer School, responded promptly, raising public consciousness about the repression in Yugoslavia. Internal networks of Yugoslav dissidents were also formed. The Yugoslav 1968 changed radically the ideas and behavior of dissidents, leading them to intellectual horizons beyond Marxism. While they did not represent politically the mainstream culture, they influenced friends in the artistic and literary circles, defending publicly works that were attacked by ideologically correct critics and even taken to court under Article 133. At the beginning of the seventies, many 1968 activists continued to publish in student and youth cultural magazines, gradually mastering a discourse that would tease, fool, and irritate authorities, while being perfectly understood by those who responded to its hidden meanings. Yugoslav literary and artistic culture, which had turned towards abstract aestheticism after the break with Stalin, shifted towards neorealism and engagement under their influence. The Yugoslav authorities tried to discourage this change, for, after Tito’s awkward attempts at rejecting abstract painting in the sixties, they had come to like art that was disengaged. Abstract art had little interest in criticizing the status quo and it gave the West the impression that Yugoslavia had total artistic freedom. The ambivalence of Yugoslav cultural poetics produced several different trends after 1968. In Serbia, a new literary group that sprang directly from the student movement proposed a neorealist approach in subject matter, style, and language. Provincial desperation, misery, alcoholism, sordid sex, and immorality were the main themes of this literature and the films related to it. Miroslav Josic´-Višnjic´’s Lepa Jelena (Helen the Beautiful; 1969), Milisav Savic´’s short story collection Ba˘lgarska baraka (Bulgarian Barracks; 1969), Vidosav Stevanovic´’s Refuz mrtvak (Refuz the Deadman; 1969) and Nišcˇi (The Basest; 1971), as well as Dragoslav Mihailovic´’s Kad su cvetale tikve (When Pumpkins Blossomed; 1968) were the most illustrative works of this group. The last example is paradigmatic: Mihailovic´’s novel tackled the theme of the camps for Soviet sympathizers, where the author himself spent several years. The play version was already in rehearsals at the Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade when a veteran actor declared that he


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could not perform in a production that represented Yugoslav reality in such a negative light. The play was banned and the author attacked in the media, but several critics insisted that the novel was quality literature. Živojin Pavlovic´, a member of the older generation, produced both films and prose. His work was immediately denounced by official critics as belonging to a “black wave.” Considering Pavlovic´’s movie The Ambush (original title Zaseda; 1968), the term is not that far fetched. The film tells the story of a young idealist Communist from Dalmatia, who comes to Serbia on a mission after the war and witnesses total chaos: people are liquidated on denunciations for profit or for revenge, partisan commanders invent victories and hide their mistakes, theft and debauchery are rampant. The protagonist is eventually killed by drunken soldiers passing by and looking for a victim. In another of Pavlovic´’ black-wave classics, When I am Dead and White (original title, Kad budem mrtav i beo; 1967), a petty thief goes to the big city trying to make a career as a singer, but ends on a field toilet and is shot by an old enemy. Curiously, the black-wave films were produced by younger filmmakers who attended the famous Prague film school. Goran Markovic´, Goran Paskaljevic´, Rajko Grlic´, and other filmmakers gained international reputation later. Although most of them lived in Prague when the Prague Spring was suppressed, they returned to Yugoslavia with a poetic vision that retained its humor and refinement rather than take on a dark critical tone. It could be argued that neorealism in literature and art irritated the Yugoslav regime because it mirrored a culture that masked its Stalinist roots through a superficial and profitable acceptance of Western-type modernity. The neo-realist critique may have been vague on issues or on defining responsibilities, but it did show that socialist culture was unable to tolerate honest self-reflection. The stereotypical literary models of the earlier, short-lived socialist realism had a similar relation to Communist ideology as the later, radical and socially irrelevant Westerntype modernity: both distracted Yugoslavia’s socialist culture from facing the failures of the system. This is why some non-neo-realist literary works that were critical of the official ideology or openly anti-Communist passed undisturbed and even won prizes and wide critical acclaim. Borislav Pekic´, for instance, who spent fifteen years in jail for his monarchic beliefs, felt compelled by the 1968 events to write Hodocˇašcé Arsenija Njegovana (The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan; 1970). The hero of this novel, the prolific Belgrade architect and real-estate owner Njegovan, refuses to leave his house and join the March 27, 1941 protest against the signing of a pact with Hitler, punished by the latter with the heavy bombing of Belgrade on April 6, 1941. Njegovan despises the rebellious Communist mob so much that he quits his selfconfinement only on June 2, 1968, to meet his death in another Communist demonstration. Pekic´’s earlier Vreme cˇuda (The Time of Miracles; 1965) became popular among dissidents. Jesus is shown here producing miracles that have a clear ideological purpose and awful effects on their subjects, especially Lazarus, who finally begs to be left dead and in peace. The “miracles” are marked by the same injustice, hypocrisy, and grotesque paradoxes that characterize the discrepancy between Communist ideology and socialist reality. When Pekic´ made a film scenario of his book some thirty years later, after the collapse of Communism, he turned it into a dated anti-Communist pamphlet, sparing Christian ideology. Two Serbian authors, born after World War II and participants in the 1968 events, exemplify the uncompromising position of the generation that detached itself completely from

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sterile Marxist debates and saw 1968 as their political and intellectual challenge. Pada Avala (Avala Is Falling; 1978) by the poet, novelist, and playwright Biljana Jovanovic´ is a seminal novel that combines different discourses, plays with “reality,” and parodies neo-realistic seriousness, creating a paradoxical modern urban setting. Biljana Jovanovic´ has gone even further in her dramas, which combine fantasy and radical political statements. Lazar Stojanovic´, film director, editor of a student periodical, and satirist, presented a feature movie, Plastic Jesus (1969), as his graduation thesis at the Belgrade Academy of Theater and Film. The film was banned and Stojanovic´ was sentenced to five years of prison for “verbal delinquency.” For years only agents of the secret police were allowed to see the movie as an example of enemy propaganda; it was released to the Yugoslav public only in 1990. Another film director of the older generation, Dušan Makavejev, had minor problems with the authorities but managed to gain international reputation with the ironic collages Innocence Unprotected (original title, Nevinost bez zaštite; 1968) and WR: Mysteries of Organism (original title, WR-misterije organizma; 1971), which followed the fashionable 1968 idea that totalitarian and sexual repression were intertwined. The post-1968 situation was rather different in Croatia. The student revolt turned there into a large nationalist movement that included intellectuals and many members of the nomenclature. Only a small Marxist dissident group was left out. The movement reached its peak in 1971 but was then crushed by Tito’s direct intervention. In order to restore the balance of power, several Serbian high party officials were purged as “liberals” while some Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina received national status and corresponding nomenclature positions. Against this political background, the youngest Croatian generation of writers began deconstructing genre conventions. At the University of Zagreb, narrative skills, plot-precision, adherence to literary rules, and stylistic competence were brought under theoretical scrutiny. The example of Goran Tribuson, Pavao Pavlicˇic´ and other new genre-authors was soon followed by a young specialist in avant-garde Russian literature, Dubravka Ugrešic´. More than any other Croatian and Yugoslav author, she successfully experimented with trivial literature, popular culture, and women’s writings through the seventies. Out of her humorous-ironic view of Yugoslav values and mentalities grew later a deeper criticism of nationalism, which never fell prey to cheap nostalgia, even when she had to leave Croatia during the Yugoslav war. The post-1968 literary and artistic situation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is harder to grasp, because the 1968 events had a lesser impact there. The legacy of Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric´ and his mixing of history, ethnography, and psychology, weighed heavily upon the authors of the region. The most significant follower of this literary line remains Meša Selimovic´, who settled in Belgrade but never abandoned Bosnian historic themes, Muslim culture, and the period of the Turkish rule. His novels Derviš i smrt (Death and the Dervish; 1967) and Tvr ava (The Fortress; 1970), published before and after the critical year 1968, injected their criticism of totalitarianism into another historic epoch, without losing their contemporary relevance. More philosophic than Andric´, Selimovic´ takes time to explore the psychology of totalitarian rulers and victims. His meticulous historic reconstructions and allusions to the present made him popular among intellectuals and at the universities. 1968 had an important impact on translating. After years of neglect, the dissident literature of the Eastern bloc came into focus both from a theoretical and an aesthetic point of view. The


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common Soviet threat forged a special bond between Yugoslav, on the one hand, and Czech and Slovak cultures, on the other, and opened the way for translating virtually every important book in these languages. The Yugoslav regime, although quite unpredictable in its choice of victims, was eager to play its old game of showing sympathies and antipathies both to the Soviets and the West. Embracing the idea of minority cultures, the Yugoslav officialdom provided work for numerous translators. A wide range of translations was supported by state-subsidized publishing houses, which obtained a certain level of independence. They had their links with the student and youth organizations, and there were informal channels of communication between the party staff, non-party specialists, and dissident-minded intellectuals. All this contributed to a wave of translations. Visitors from other Eastern bloc countries would often rush to bookshops to buy books that were not available at home. Memoirs about the gulags, survivors’ stories, fiction, and literary theory were translated, including works by the jailed Adam Michnik and Havel, all of Kundera’s and Skvorecký’s novels, Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov’s memoirs, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais. Unusual writers like Daniil Kharms and Bruno Schulz found roots in Yugoslav culture. The spirit of 1968 stayed alive also in the public debates that continued in the main cities, though the authorities attempted to curtail the available spaces and silence the more unsettling voices. 1968 represented a significant temporal conjunction in Yugoslavia, that brought together various socialist dissidents and produced cultural cross-readings, translations, and activism. It initiated a move away from the dominance of Marxism in the humanities and opened up such controversial questions as that of the camps for Soviet sympathizers in Yugoslavia after 1948. It furthered analyses of totalitarianism and an acceptance of Western liberalism. 1968 widened the political options and engendered a new solidarity with dissidents in the Soviet bloc. However, it remains to be seen whether today’s Western and East-Central European analysts will understand and value properly the complex intellectual and cultural activities before 1989, which constituted the underbelly of Yugoslav socialist culture. Outlook: Charter 77 and Solidarity The Prague invasion impressed once more upon the Soviet-block countries that they could not deviate from the Soviet version of Marxist-Leninism. Limited economic improvements and a relatively liberal totalitarianism seemed all that could be expected. Writers and intellectuals had to conclude that it was foolish to believe that Communism could be reformed from inside, or that the system would tolerate alternative models. Havel and others, who had no illusions about the flexibility of the system, gradually came to the fore, advocating the need for a radically pluralist system rather than a reconstruction of the Communist one. New social and intellectual initiatives emerged from under the “normalized” surface to challenge the Party’s monopoly. In Romania, the more liberal circles in the Writers’ Union represented an oppositional force that Ceaus¸escu first tolerated as a proof that qualified dissent was possible. Individual dissidents like Paul Goma, Dorin Tudoran, Doina Cornea, Ana Blandiana, Mircea Dinescu were, however, imprisoned, placed under house arrest, forbidden to publish, or forced into exile. The strikes of the Jiu Valey miners and workers in Bras¸ov (1977, 1979), as well as the subsequent attempt to form an independent workers’ union on the model of the Polish Solidarity, were smashed even

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more violently, and some of the leaders disappeared without a trace. In Poland, the radical student movement of 1967–1968, inspired by the critical writings of Catholic as well as neo-Marxist writers (Jacek Kuron´, Karol Modzelewski, Leszek Kołakowski) inaugurated a new mode of social and political activism that finally led to the collapse of the Soviet system. Former student leaders and other critical intellectuals sought to establish a coalition of forces with the working class, leading to the rise of the first independent, selfgoverning union, Solidarity. In time, it managed to become an alternative social organization capable of articulating the desires and interests of an increasingly large sector of Polish society. The workers became radicalized in the late 1970s as a result of Gomułka’s unpopular economic measures that included a 15–30% increase in prices. The ensuing workers’ strikes and their brutal repression led to the replacement of Gomułka with the technocrat Edward Gierek, who ordered similar reprisals against the workers’ strikes of 1976. His decision helped the coming together of a large-scale opposition force, embodied in the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), formed of activists and intellectuals, some of whom had been active also in 1968. In the August 1980 negotiation between strikers and the government, the writers Adam Michnik, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Jacek Kuron´, and Bronisław Geremek played a prominent role. Lech Wałe˛sa, the electrician from Gdan´sk who became the chairman of Solidarity, was inspired as much by the traditions of working class struggle as by the writings of Adam Michnik and other critical intellectuals. Adam Michnik started in the student protest at the University of Warsaw in 1960, participated in the formation of KOR, joined Lech Wałe˛sa’s team of advisors, and was imprisoned during the martial law in December 1981. He reemerged as one of the spiritual leaders of the 1989 transition to democracy. The 1980–1981 movement was squashed by the martial law proclaimed by the new Prime Minister and First Secretary of the Party, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, but a few years later the same Jaruzelski endorsed Gorbachev’s “perestroika” by lifting the martial law and embarking on a reformist course. Though momentarily defeated, the 1980–81 movement eventually forced the authorities to open up the official media (Kuron´ 202). A whole counter-culture, with new journals and newspapers, publishing houses, filmmakers, and flying universities came about. Intellectuals and writers played an important role in the liberalization of sociocultural life and the erosion of the Party’s ideological monopoly in Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The oppositional movements in these countries met with various degrees of success, depending on their public appeal and on the maneuvering space granted to them. In Kádár’s Hungary, for example, followers of György Lukács (Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, György and Mária Márkus, János Kis, Mihály Vajda, György Bence) were prevented from teaching and publishing, and some were forced to emigrate. Miklós Haraszti and György Konrád had to suffer in the 1970s the confiscation of manuscripts and subsequent legal proceedings against them. In both cases, the manuscripts were published with great success abroad but in Hungary only in 1989. In Czechoslovakia, Jirˇí Hájek, Václav Havel, and Jan Patocˇka signed and made public on January 1, 1977 the manifesto of “Charter 77,” which demanded that the Czechoslovak authorities observe civil rights in accordance with the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, of which Czechoslovakia was a signatory. The community of the Charter was defined as “free, informal, and open,” bringing together various convictions, religions, and professions in a common commitment to “human and civil rights” (Hájek et al 48). As such it was a radically different


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political organization: it was independent of state institutions but refrained also from setting up an oppositional political party. Still, the authorities dismissed the signatories from their jobs and harassed them in various different ways. The eminent philosopher Patocˇka died after an extensive interrogation, Havel was arrested, Kohout was evicted from his home, allowed to travel to Austria in 1978, and lost his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979. But all this could not stem the tide. The 243 original signatures (which included those of the writers Havel, Kliment, Kohout, Vaculík, and Dominik Tatarka) grew to 617 by March and to more than 800 by 1978. Prominent intellectuals from abroad joined, including 34 Hungarians and a number of Romanian writers, both from the country (Paul Goma) and from the diaspora. In 1979, a group of Czechoslovak and Polish writers published a samizdat collection of essays, On Freedom and Power (Havel et al.), which contained Havel’s famous “The Power of the Powerless.” The latter set the guidelines for the construction of a new civil society that would de-ideologize the public sphere, allowing the free exercise of individual rights but also of genuine forms of human solidarity. Looking back rather than forward, we may return to our initial questions, how important was the role writers played in the revolts and whether they wanted to reform or eliminate Communism. No single answer will do justice to the range of ideas and motives of all the participants. Undoubtedly, many loyal Communists came to see during the 1950s and 60s the brutality of the system’s power. Their often not all too clear vision of a Communist system with “a human face” did play a role in accelerating the process of reform and bringing it to a boiling point. But it is surely wrong to maintain, as Béla Pomogáts did as late as 1989, that in 1956 the Hungarian writers regarded “democratic socialism as the basis for the social and political reorganization of the country” and did not ask for “a Western-type bourgeois democracy” (7). Since many of the participants in the Hungarian revolution fought against Communism and Soviet (Russian) imperialism, the claim that the Revolution was organized by reform-Communists who supported the activity of Imre Nagy during the debates of the Hungarian Writers’ Association and the Peto˝fi Circle of the Democratic Youth Association founded in 1953 has to be regarded as a distortion. A similar caution should accompany our understanding of the Prague Spring, which may have been initiated by reform minded Communists but went far beyond their demands in the end. Precisely this radicalization scared the powers in Moscow most. Did the visions of poets and intellectuals finally prevail over the forces of coercion? The totalitarian systems of East-Central Europe did indeed collapse in 1989, and some of the protesting writers did get leading roles in the subsequent political reforms — reforms that fell far short, of course, of their former visions. But lest we fall into a glorification of the power of the word we ought to remind ourselves of the contributions that the organizations of workers and other social formations made to the protest movement. Above all, we ought to remember that 1989 was brought about by decisions made by the powers above as much as by the resistance of writers and other categories of people. Perhaps another story could tell how the figures in power absorbed, often without realizing it, what writers and intellectuals had been arguing for. But our History will not attempt to read the minds of people in power.

1948

Introduction: The Culture of Revolutionary Terror Tomislav Z. Longinovic´, Dagmar Roberts, Tomas Venclova, John Neubauer, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Marcel Cornis-Pope As the horrors of the war were being gradually put behind after the victory over the Nazis, EastCentral Europe underwent yet another subjection to authoritarianism, this time imported from the Soviet Union. The new ideological ordering of Europe was the result of the 1945 Yalta Agreement, the deal reached by the victorious powers over the “spheres of influence” on the ravaged continent. The introduction by the new “people’s governments” of Stalin-inspired revolutionary terror suggested to Winston Churchill the metaphor of the “iron curtain,” the imaginary dividing line between the two Europes. This radical splitting marked the destiny of the continent in political and historical terms in the latter part of the twentieth century. The political isolation of East-Central European culture facilitated the development of a specific cultural ideology that turned literature and art into tools in the hands of the “proletariat.” Local versions of Socialist Realism, the model promoted by Stalin’s culture czar Andrei Zhdanov, sprouted all around East-Central Europe, redefining culture officially as a realm of tendentious political activity in the service of Communist goals. Literary production-reception was seen as one of the vital semiotic instruments of ideological re-education. Free and experimental art was branded by the official cultural establishment as the symptom of a malady inherited from the bourgeois order — an order, which, according to the Bolshevik theory of history, deserved to be relegated to the proverbial “dustbin of history,” and replaced by a new order. The similarities with the Nazi persecution of “degenerate art” are striking, except for the fact that Hitler’s racial regime was now replaced by the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” no less ruthless in using the repressive apparatus to enact its vision of the new man and society. The egalitarian intentions of the proletcult, as the new cultural policy came to be known throughout the Soviet block, were to a large extent motivated by the perceived elitism of a significant segment in pre-war culture. The old order limited cultural access to the largely rural populations of East-Central Europe, confining the cultural activities of the nation to the developed urban centers. Since the new cultural policies were financially sponsored by the socialist state, its producers were expected to glorify the new order with a quasi-religious zeal and rectify the exclusionary evils committed by the “bourgeoisie.” While everyday life became increasingly more surreal, the reality produced by the formulaic trinity of Socialist Realism (party line, popular appeal, ideological correctness) projected a desirable vision of working class heroes, with a classless society looming around the corner of the newly erected edifice of the “people’s republics.” As Letit¸ia Guran and Alexander Kiossev point out below, national canons were reinterpreted to fit into Marxism-Leninism. The new ideology attempted to redeploy the writers in a scholastic yet vulgar fashion that

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Tomislav Z. Longinovic´, Dagmar Roberts, Tomas Venclova and Marcel Cornis-Pope

manipulated reality, eliminating “undesirable elements” from the collective memory. The perpetual purging of the social and cultural body left many scars. Those accused of political incorrectness were treated as obstacles in the path of revolutionary progress, whose aim was to introduce modernity to large segments of the disenfranchised rural and proletarian populations. In the aftermath of a horrifying war, the victorious Communists often resorted to the practices applied in Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany against political or racial enemies: character assassination, illegal detention, forced labor, concentration camps, torture, and murder. This is what Milan Kundera refers to as the work of “the hangman”; his repressive activities were covered up and made more palatable by the work of “the poet” who served the new ideology, and the state apparatus that enforced it. The writers who survived the Communist gulags, like the Moldavians Nicolae Costenco and Alexei Marinat, the Ukranian Vasyl’ Barka, the Estonian Jaan Kross, or the Romanians Ion Caraion and Paul Goma, continued to be repressed and could write about their dramatic experiences only in exile or after 1989. In Hungary, numerous writers with “bourgeois” affinities were forced to go into exile by 1948. Lajos Zilahy left in 1947, Sándor Márai in 1948. Internal exile became the fate of such established figures as Lajos Kassák, the leader of the Hungarian Avant-garde, the novelist Miklós Szentkuthy, the poets Milán Füst and Sándor Weöres, László Németh, the most influential and prolific representative of the “Populist” movement, and the publicist and political thinker István Bibó. Gyo˝zo˝ Határ, who tried to leave Hungary in 1950, was sentenced to prison. The writer György Faludi, who returned to Hungary in 1946 as a US citizen, was arrested in 1950 and served three years in prison — diplomatic protests notwithstanding. The essayist Béla Hamvas had to take a job as storekeeper at the Inota power station in 1950. Others were sent to labor camps. This was the dark period that inspired Gyula Illyés to write his poem “Egy mondat a zsarnokságról” (A Sentence on Tyranny; 1950), which was first published during the Revolution, on November 2, 1956, and then not until 1986. György Lukács, freshly returned from his exile in the Soviet Union, became for a while the Hungarian pope in matters of literature. Relying on ideas he developed in the 1930s, his Irodalom és demokrácia (Literature and Democracy; 1947) demanded a “partisan literature” that openly took the side of the newly emerging society and attacked the “reactionary thought of imperialism” (Irodalom 7). Twentieth-century bourgeois writers produced pure art of kitch, neither of which had a place in a country building Socialism. One of the articles in the volume, given already as a lecture in 1945, contained a violent attack on Márai and may have played a role in the writer’s decision to leave the country. Indeed, Lukács’ demand for partisanship contributed to an atmosphere of intimidation that silenced many non-Communist writers. But soon enough Lukács himself came under a severe attack by his Moscow fellow exile, József Révai, who was now Minister of Culture and the highest Party authority in matters on culture. Révai stepped in after László Rudas wrote a negative review of Irodalom és demokrácia in July 1949 and Lukács responded with a mild self-criticism. Révai had a list of serious accusations that obviously represented an official Party line: Lukács was a Hegelian rather than Marxist-Leninist, he preferred nineteenth-century critical realism to Socialist Realism (as witnessed by his disinterest in Soviet literature), he did not recognized that the budding Hungarian socialist literature was, for all its faults, ideologically superior to the Western literature of the day (which included Lukács’s beloved Thomas Mann), and he did not recognize

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the leading role that the proletariat and the Party played in building Socialism. Lukács did a necessary but perfunctory self-criticism and withdrew to the University, the Academy, and the privacy of his home. Most publications around this time obeyed the demands of the Party, defined in terms of Socialist Realism. Tamás Aczél’s badly written didactic novels were highly estimated by the Party and he was awarded the Stalin Prize by the Soviet leaders in 1952. Even Péter Veres’s semi-documentary Pályamunkások (Platelayers; 1951) came close to representing a “novel of production,” a genre canonized in the Soviet Union between the two world wars. The case of Tibor Déry’s novel cycle, Felelet (Reply; 1950–52), illustrates the ways in which rules were enforced. Révai accused Déry of presenting a distorted picture of the working-class movement of the 1930s by underestimating the role of the underground Communist cells. Long public debates followed, in which, Révai prevailed, of course: Felelet remained unfinished (see Aczel & Merai 94–118). In Slovakia, efforts were made in the years prior to the Czechoslovak communist coup d’état in February 1948 to prevent politics from interfering in the arts and culture. The Manifest socialistického humanizmu (Manifesto of Socialist Humanism), published in April 1948, sought to present an alternative to radical, Stalinist Communism, but failed. Pavol Hrtús Jurina, Gorazd Zvonický, Andrej Žarnov, and other Catholic authors, as well as Leopold Lahola, an author of Jewish origin and left-wing orientation, emigrated. Other writers, including Valentín Beniak, Emil Boleslav Lukácˇ, Ján Smrek, Július Barcˇ-Ivan, Janko Silan, and Štefan Letz were silenced or imprisoned after the trial of Ladislav Novomeský, Iván Horváth, Daniel Okáli, and Ivan Stodola, who were accused of being “bourgeois nationalists.” Vladimir Clements, who turned after the war from his exile in London, charged with the same “crime” i 1950 and executed in 1952. Arrests, secret trials, and show took place in all countries. In Hungary, Cardinal József Mindszenty was tried in February 1949, and, after an extorted confession, was given a life sentence. The same year, the Hungarian Communist leader László Rajk was tried and executed, and Władisław Gomułka, secretary-general of the Polish Communist Party and Vice-Premier, was jailed. He was rehabilitated in 1956 and became his country’s leader, just as the Hungarian János Kádár, who was arrested in 1951. The Czechoslovak purges in 1952 led to the execution of the former leading Communists Vladimír Clementis and Rudolf Slanský. The trial of the latter had strong anti-Semitic overtones. Among the great many other jailed victims was the Czech Germanist Eduard Goldstücker, who came to play important roles in Kafka’s rehabilitation and in the Prague Spring after his relase. In Romania, the Noica group and Ion Caraion were put on trial. In Czechoslovakia, established periodicals such as Elán, Tvorba (Creation), Nová práca (New Task), Verbum and Cˇas (Hour), were closed down at the beginning of the Stalinist period. The 1949 Congress of Czechoslovak writers adopted Socialist Realism as the sole method of writing, which resulted in an increasing number of ideological publications, including Milan Lajcˇiak’s poetry volume Súdružka moja zem (Earth My Comrade; 1949), Milan Ferko’s Vítˇazná mladostˇ (Victorious Youth; 1953), as well as Vojtech Mihálik’s Plebejská košelˇa (Plebeian Shirt; 1950) and Spievajúce srdce (Singing Heart; 1952). Some established poets, such as Ján Kostra, Pavol Horov, and the former Surrealist Rudolf Fabry, also became bards of the new regime. Ideology dominated the plays of Ján Skalka, Štefan Králik, and Peter Karvaš, as well as František Hecˇko’s novel Drevená dedina (Wooden Village; 1951) and Dominik Tatarka’s

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Tomislav Z. Longinovic´, Dagmar Roberts, Tomas Venclova and Marcel Cornis-Pope

Radostník (Joyous Welcome; 1954) and Družné letá (Summers of Comradeship; 1954). Tatarka later became one of the few Slovak dissidents. Several works written during this period could only be published later. In Lithuania (Vilnius) the Jewish communities had been practically destroyed in the Holocaust. A few survivors either departed for Israel (Abraham Sutzkever) or were forced to assimilate; some Yiddish authors were imprisoned (e.g., Hirsch Osherowitch, in 1949). All traces of Jewish culture were obliterated by the Soviets. The entire Polish intelligentsia was either destroyed or left for Poland. Kazys Boruta, Antanas Miškinis, Petras Juodelis, Viktoras Katilius and other Lithuanian writers were arrested and, as a rule, deported to Siberia in 1946–51. Balys Sruoga, who returned from the Nazi prison camp, was harassed and died prematurely in 1947. Two significant pro-Communist authors, Salome˙ja Ne˙ris and Petras Cvirka, died in 1945 and 1947, respectively. Socialist Realism was represented by Antanas Venclova, Teofilis Tilvytis, and Juozas Baltušis; there were two literary periodicals of Soviet bent in Lithuanian, Pergale˙ and Literatu¯ra ir menas (Literature and Art). Other cultural life was virtually negligible. Around sixty percent of the writers and cultural figures emigrated. In the Lithuanian diaspora (from the DP camps in Germany between 1947–49; also from the US, England and Australia) there was a rather lively cultural effervescence: in addition to poetry pursuing a patriotic agenda, aesthetic (Henrikas Radauskas) and existentialist (Alfonsas Nyka-Niliu¯nas) trends appeared, and Lithuanian visual arts followed European patterns. The culture produced for mass consumption by the newly formed totalitarian regimes, was highly schematic, relying on moralistic formulas in which the working class struggle, the hardwon victory over Nazism and its East-Central European avatars, and the corruption of the previous social order became key topoi of the new literary production. In the very first stage of the cultural revolution initiated in the late 1940s, the declared enemy was the heritage of literary Modernism, as a practice dominated by the cult of interiority that was seen as detrimental to the social commitment of intellectuals. Georg Lukács’s arguments against European Modernist practices in the first half of the twentieth century were adopted by the Communist ideologues as a rationale for marginalizing those who engaged in literary experimentation. Communist criticism exposed the escapist consequences of the avant-garde, while adopting a literalist interpretation of Realism as the intentionally constructed and enforced ideology of the new socialist man and his reality. As the officially sanctioned literary practice, Socialist Realism was charged with providing a utopian horizon for the new “revolutionary” society, while in fact often providing a cultural cover for the rise of the gulag and other forms of identity liquidation. The Bulgarian camp in Lovech, the Romanian ones in Pites¸ti and the Danube Canal, and the Yugoslav camp on Goli otok, are just a few locations that will be remembered as sites of unspeakable horror for those rendered politically incorrect by the brutal screening executed by the Communist security services. The fact that Tito’s gulag on Goli otok was anti-Stalinist did not change the basic rules of the authoritarian game: subjects opposed to the will of the revolutionary people’s dictatorships were to be re-educated through forced labor, brainwashing, torture, and murder. Renata Jambre¿sic´ Kirin’s article examines the legacy of Titoist rule and its often-overlooked abuses in its attempt to purge the political body of the Stalinist heritage in literature. Revisiting the 1948 legacy of the intra-Communist divide within the context of former Yugoslavia, this

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article offers a lesser-known aspect of cultural policies characteristic of the Titoist period. The Goli otok experience has plagued socialist Yugoslavia with its legacy of brutal brainwashing, torture and murder of those branded as Soviet agents and sympathizers. The analysis of cultural memory and its intergenerational transmission makes of Jambre¿sic´ Kirin’s article a significant contribution to the understanding of the ways in which official cultural politics treated the sins of its own totalitarian youth. Further fragmenting the notion of a common identity, the trauma of 1948 created a variety of responses that exposed the always-emergent fault lines of integral Yugoslavism, assimilating brutality into the very notion of community. Alexander Kiossev revisits the work of Todor Pavlov as the emblematic figure in the remaking of the Bulgarian literary canon during the age of Socialist Realism. The conflation of nationalist and Communist narratives of literary history in Hristo Botev, as the organic source of “people’s” cultural heritage, demonstrates how a revolutionary practice designed to overthrow all traditional values gets stabilized during the period of revision. The new orthodoxy of Socialist Realism always relied on the recovery of some aspect of the past — in this case the Bulgarian struggles for national sovereignty — to create an ideologically correct version of the people’s history. Kiossev’s case study, alongside Letit¸ia Guran’s, provides an example of how Stalinist terror resorted to two simultaneous types of cultural practices — the erasure of the pernicious “bourgeois heritage” through silencing by censorship and editorial selection on the one hand, and the revolutionary importation of the Zhdanovian cultural model with a specific national flavor on the other. The original aesthetic formula espoused by the new socialist art was soon modified to encompass areas of culture outside the narrow aesthetic domain. Reality tself needed some Socialist Realism to lift it out of its drab material restraints; national culture was to be its vehicle In Romania, according to Guran, the resistance of the dissident writers against such orthodoxy led to the development of Aesopian narratives, double-voiced literary texts whose occluded meanings escaped the totalitarian suppression of the imagination. This was a common pattern in East-Central Europe for the writers who dared yield the temptation of irony. Often sons and daughters of that very bourgeoisie that they were now enlisted to discredit, they could not abandon the spirit of irony. This hint of resistance was sometimes used by the authorities to place some of the authors in the re-education camps or to force them to seek refuge in exile. Others, like Arghezi, fought and resisted silencing by evasion and cultural compromise. The dissident movement in East-Central European literature began with the watershed year of 1948, when silence was the most common method of coping with the new, “scientifically” imposed system of Marxism and Leninism.

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Letit¸ia Guran and Alexandru S¸tefan

Romanian literature under Stalinism Letit¸ia Guran and Alexandru S¸tefan 1.

Preamble: Literary policies between 1944 and 1947 (Alexandru S¸tefan)

Romania embarked on a short passage to democracy after the coup of August 23, 1944, which put an end to the right-wing authoritarian regime of Ion Antonescu, bringing Romania into the Allied camp. The multi-party system and the Romanian Constitution of 1923 were re-established. But the following three years were characterized by governmental instability and by the gradual assumption of power by the Communist left. After three transition governments, on March 6, 1945, a pro-Communist government was installed for the first time in Romania. Its position was consolidated after the November 1946 elections won by the Block of Democratic Parties, an alliance in which the Romanian Communist Party held the power of decision. In retrospect the three years of relative democracy proved to be just a front for a symbolic revolution enforced by the Communists in typical totalitarian fashion, through the political patricide of December 1947, when King Michael was forced to abdicate, accompanied by a cultural purge that dismantled the traditions and models of the interwar years. The constitutive frames of modern Romania — the Constitutions of 1866 and 1923, the monarchic form of government, and the multi-party system — were abolished, leaving the stage for only one discourse, that of communism. Concurrently, the country was submitted to a policy of “economic colonization” (Boia, Cioroianu, and Sandqvist 27), embodied in the mixed forms of sovroms (Soviet-Romanian enterprises), specialized in different production areas. In culture, the break with the past was implemented through an efficient strategy that Toma Pavel has called “the rhetoric of the end” (Mirajul lingvistic 17). Informed by an apocalyptic imagination, this rhetoric fulfilled the essential function of degrading and disqualifying the prestige of the established culture. In the vacuum thus created, the same millenarian vision introduced a counter-discourse that celebrated the new prophets and agents of radical renewal. The relatively rapid takeover of Romanian culture by the Communist production would not have been possible without a shrewd double politics that combined incorporation with the creation of a successful counter-style. Chronologically, the first successful maneuver consisted of incorporating in the existing culture some key positions and arguments promoted in the political field. Thus, for example, new dogmas were imposed on the literary institutions, and many outstanding figures of Romanian culture (like Mihail Sadoveanu) were forced to capitulate partially or totally to the new ideology. Still, until the end of 1947, writers got away with only a formal adhesion, helped by the fact that the cultural values still belonged to tradition. The communists accelerated the transfer of discursive capital after 1947, forcing more dramatic ideological “conversions.” The second strategy in this transition was the creation of a counter-field inside the traditional culture, which subsequently seized the position of power. This counter-field was developed in a concerted way, through a new theoretization of culture, new critics, and a new literature. The beginning of this field was signaled by the emergence in 1946 of the first cultural magazine affiliated with the Communist regime, Contemporanul (The Contemporary).

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Until the arrival of Contemporanul the cultural debate of the period was carried out in the political rather than the cultural mass media. The newspapers debating the role of literature and art were Dreptatea (Justice), associated with the National Peasant Party, Liberalul (The Liberal), associated with the National Liberal Party, and Scânteia (The Spark), representing the interests of the Romanian Communist Party, with România Libera˘ soon adding its own weight to the Communist campaigns. The absence of Romanian intellectuals from the cultural debate gave the impression that they met the new cultural campaigns with minimal resistance, but this absence had several plausible explanations. To begin with, the Antonescu regime, while suspending Romania’s modern political system — the historical parties and the Constitution of 1923 — did not affect negatively cultural modernity. The Romanian cultural elite regarded Antonescu’s policies for the most part with sympathy. However, the rapid changes after 1944 took this elite by surprise, inoculating it with a sense of guilt over its acquiescence to the previous regime. The right-wing crisis of identity undermined the efficacy of a public cultural discourse, facilitating the establishment of a proletarian culture. The few surviving cultural magazines, such as Revista Fundat¸iilor Regale (Journal of the Royal Foundations) and Viat¸a Româneasca˘, (Romanian Life) and most of the critics associated with them, withdrew elegantly from the public debate. Another reason for the absence of Romanian intellectuals from the post-1944 public debate was bias towards aesthetic autonomy associated with cultural modernity, a bias that encouraged noninvolvement in the social and political field and which often translated into an incapacity to confront present history. As if to acknowledge the insufficiency of promoting a new cultural discourse from a political platform, the newspaper Scînteia founded at the end of 1946 its own cultural outlet, the magazine Contemporanul. It was here that the hard lines of a new cultural policy were set, Marxist-Leninist criticism was practiced, and proletcult literature was promoted. The communist overseers subsequently diversified culture without losing its coherence: Contemporanul, the magazine of the Society of Romanian Writers, was followed in March 1947 by Revista Literara˘ (The Literary Review) that became in January 1948 Flaca˘ra (The Flame), the outlet of the Union of Artists, Writers, and Journalists. This crafty distribution of cultural responsibilities proved efficient. Contemporanul hosted the new ideological critics (Nicolae Moraru, Ion Vitner, Ovid. S. Crohma˘lniceanu), whose tasks were manifold: revising the literary tradition and making it conform to a Marxist perspective; performing a symbolic purification of the recent past represented by literary modernity, purging it of “aesthetic collaborationists”; receiving critically the literary products of the present and endorsing proletcultist values. Flaca˘ra formed a perfect team with Contemporanul in promoting the proletcult dogma without neglecting the cultural revision of the past. The literary institutions coopted or newly created by the Communist regime between 1944 and 1947 played an equally important role in the establishment of proletcultist discourse. Two institutions were particularly effective in this sense: the Society of Romanian Writers (SSR) and the Union of Artists, Writers, and Journalists (USASZ). The purging of these institutions of “collaborationists” facilitated control over an important symbolic capital. The address of the newly elected president of SRS and the motion passed by the 1944 Writers’ Conference described the writers as intellectual workers, social fighters, “teachers and guides of the masses,” faithful followers of the “Soviet model” and activists committed to “cleansing the past.”

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Together with institutional measures such as the nationalization of the publishing houses, this language represented the core of a new cultural ideology in full offensive. After this first step, the left-wing mass media completed the work by adding other key phrases that made careers during the Stalinist period: “culture for the masses,” writers as “engineers of the soul” (coined by Stalin in 1932; see Boia 136), Socialist Realism (introduced in Romania in 1945 by Sas¸a Pana˘, a Surrealist converted to Communism), “new literature,” “new man,” “party-oriented literature,” and so on. The SSR and USASZ proved to be ideal platforms for promoting the new ideological discourse and providing guidance to the writers of the period. The USASZ Congress in October 1947 offered an eloquent example of the power of the new discourse. The espousal of Socialist Realism went hand in hand with the denunciation of critic George Ca˘linescu and poet Tudor Arghezi, perceived as the leaders of the traditional cultural field that had valorized aesthetic and cultural modernity. The following year marked the transition from theory to practice, the two writers being placed under total interdiction that — at least at the time — seemed irreversible. The new culture was thus established on acts of violent exclusion in 1948, acts that had been anticipated during the transition period by the gradual dismantling of the Romanian modernist tradition. The theoretical reconfiguration of criticism is illustrative for the operating style of the proletcultist discourse. The act of “purification” had as predictable targets the initiators of Romania’s critical traditions, Titu Maiorescu and Eugen Lovinescu. Once the purging of tradition was complete, the Soviet model grounded in Marxist-Leninist aesthetics was offered in its place. A more spectacular stage was to follow: the reinvention of cultural tradition. As founder of modern Romanian criticism, Titu Maiorescu was replaced by Constantin DobrogeanuGherea, viewed as a precursor of Marxist criticism, thereby offering the new method historical legitimation. The process of re-canonization was followed by a purging of the still active positions in the critical field, the charges brought against critics like George Ca˘linescu following the simple rule of affiliation: they were forthwith associated with a critical practice derived from Maiorescu, whose stigmatization had already become official. The new cultural ideology was thus established by systematically eliminating the symbolic foundations of cultural modernity. This followed the practice of the more radical Avant-garde trends that tried to legitimize themselves in their battle with previous experiments by claiming a return to the purity of origins. Along these lines, proletcultism promised a “return to the real,” a vision of messianic seductiveness implementing a radical purification. As a cultural form without history, proletcultism violently expurgated modernity from cultural memory. In the resultant vacuum proletarian cultural ideology offered a new set of presentist or futurist values. The great return to the real proved fake. The Communist discourse operated on the basis of the pre-eminence of utopia and the imaginary over the real. The real was adjusted to the imaginary, and not the other way round; hence the permanent need for the often violent readjustment of real forms to utopian demands. Not surprisingly, the first “wave” of proletcult literature, “the poetry of the building site” (Selejan, România 2: 143), had failed, for even the promoters of proletcult art harshly criticized it: the new poets, following literally the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, imitated actual reality, though they were supposed to imitate reality in the fictional space of utopia. This correction became a principle of art because the regime introduced


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a “permanent supervision of the writers in order not to illustrate reality in its real aspects” (Nit¸escu 138). In its early stage, the Communist utopia indisputably fascinated many writers. Before becoming a form of cultural terror, the new aesthetic ideology played the role of a genuine mirage, with a higher degree of attraction for intellectuals than for peasants or even workers (Miłosz, Captive 21). During the transition to Stalinism, the Communist discourse and its cultural translation still retained a certain flexibility because it was not yet submitted to total political control. But by the end of 1947, the forced expulsion of political and cultural modernity inaugurated a “fundamentalist stage” (Negrici 16) that bore all the marks of Stalinism.

2.

The instrumentalization of culture under Stalinism (Letit¸ia Guran)

The available documents and the scholarship on them give a double image of Romania’s literature under Stalinism. One pole is represented by the official texts between 1948 and the early 1960s, which attempted to impose Socialist Realism; the other is provided mostly by post1989 critical overviews that expose the instrumentalization of culture during the Stalinist period. In order to evaluate Stalinism without reducing it to stereotypes, we will have to move past these opposing images and reconsider not only compromised texts but also those enduring books that were banned, kept in the drawer, or devalued in official literary histories. We must also seek to understand the censorship, the self-censorship, the taboos, and the typical Stalinist themes that survived the age for at least another decade and indirectly influenced Romanian literature until 1989. A first reassessment of the Stalinist texts occurred during the brief political relaxation between 1965 and 1971, but dealt only with the worst Stalinist production. Socialist Realism vs. Stalinism Socialist Realism and Stalinism frame our understanding of the aesthetic and ideological profile of the age. The aesthetic connotation of Stalinism is negative, as the term has been used retrospectively (after Stalin’s death in 1953) to label an epoch defined as “proletcultist,” i.e., characterized by massive political interference in literature. Socialist Realism, on the other hand, has been employed both positively, by the official propaganda of the 1950s, and negatively, by contemporary or later critics, including post-1989 researchers. This distinction indicates that Socialist Realism is a challenging concept that posits a distance between its prescriptive and descriptive senses, and between these and their critical reception. As a term of periodization, Socialist Realism has a negotiable meaning, for it defines a broad period with remarkable inner contradictions, which gave rise to constant tensions between the term’s various senses. Moreover, what was called socialist realist literature in the 1950s was renamed Stalinist a decade later. Although Socialist Realism and Stalinism are sometimes used interchangeably as key terms for a period, the former stands for an aesthetic method — defined by Maxim Gorki, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Mikhail Sholokhov — and the other for the products of the Stalinist era. But this distinction is hard to maintain once the principles of Socialist Realism — “party spirit,

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verisimilitude, popular character, and orientation towards the future” (Selejan, România; 2: 368) — were put in the service of the Stalinist apparatus of propaganda and repression. Established originally as a method of creativity aimed at aiding the proletarian revolution, Socialist Realism soon became also “a method of knowing, of activism, and of work, […] a broad program, a revolution of artistic practice” (367). The latter was the practical outcome of the ideology of the former, supported by the political terror instituted by Stalin. Stretching from 1948 to the beginning of the 1960s, the Stalinist era in Romanian literature is defined by a number of dominant characteristics that allowed little room for exceptions. However, by focusing mainly on the results of the official doctrine we overlook the borderline texts that were both subservient and subversive and had a more lasting effect on literary practice than the purely compliant texts. These books that resisted instrumentalization, employing convoluted strategies of cooperation and evasion, generally belong to the classic aesthetics of Realism and Modernism but also to Socialist Realism. Even harder to classify, though definitely characteristic of the age, are the prison and anti-Communist memoirs written during the first two postwar decades but published only after 1989. In order to comprehend such borderline texts as “by-products” of Stalinist ideology we need to stretch our understanding of post-1948 literature, articulating a series of hybrid categories that integrate elements of tradition with new impositions and a basically duplicitous aesthetics. The explosion of socialist-realist texts between 1948–1954 had no precedent in Romanian literature, and it can only be understood as the result of political enforcement. In short, Stalinism was the reason Socialist Realism occupied the Romanian literary scene for more than a decade. This dynamics that reinforced the aesthetic doctrine through political pressure was replicated at the end of the Stalinist era by Ceaus¸escu’s regime. Ceaus¸escu’s autochthonous version of political and aesthetic control allowed the tenets of Stalinism and Socialist Realism to linger on in the 1960s and the 1970s. Periodization Though Stalin died in 1953, the period associated with his name in the history of Romanian literature stretched for several more years, until the beginning of the 1960s, which signaled a gradual return to the rhetoric of Modernism. However, Romanian literature passed through a number of phases between 1948 and 1960 that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. While the principles of Socialist Realism were continuously reasserted in literary magazines between 1948–1960 and referred back to Russian and Soviet models, the Romanian version of this method of creation became a topic of intense focus only in 1957. The debate around it was triggered both by internal circumstances — such as the “dangerous” revival of modernist models in literature — and by the heated exchange between Maurice Nadeau and Pierre Daix concerning the efficacy of this “method of knowing, acting, and working” (Selejan, 1957–1958 358). According to the definition provided at the time by Andrei Ba˘leanu, Socialist Realism was “that specific method of contemporary art which brings art closer to the concerns of the working class and employs the former in the service of the latter” (4). Socialist Realism impelled the artist “to adopt the Marxist-Leninist political doctrine and support the socialist cause by creating works close to the soul of the people” (Selejan, 1957–1958 361). In agreement with Pierre Daix,


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compliant Romanian critics argued that Socialist Realism “is not a movement like romanticism or surrealism … and it is not a literary school,” designating rather “a new type of social behavior of the artist, his link to the revolutionary movement and responsibility toward it” (Selejan 356). Finally, for Dumitru Micu Socialist Realism was simultaneously “a method of creation, defined by a precise formula which need not be revisited or abandoned, but explained and understood in its broadest sense”; and an “all-encompassing human and civil attitude, a comprehensive program, similar to a revolution in the aesthetic field” (“Probleme” 6). As a result of these efforts to expand its meaning, Socialist Realism became more of a utopian social theory than an aesthetic doctrine. As the prescribed manner for carrying out “the duty of the artist — as an engineer of the human soul — to develop social consciousness in an evolving socialist state” (Scruton 132), Socialist Realism became the aesthetic counterpart of Communist oppression and collapsed into Stalinism. Although the overwhelming majority of socialist realist texts are characterized by “clichéridden sentimentality and the lack of credibility” (Scruton 242), the period also produced fiction — Marin Preda’s Moromet¸ii (The Moromete Clan; vol. 1, 1955), Zaharia Stancu’s Descult¸ (Barefoot; 1948), and Petru Dumitriu’s Bijuterii de familie (Family Jewels; 1949) — poetry (Tudor Arghezi) and criticism (George Ca˘linescu, Tudor Vianu) that managed to maintain a degree of aesthetic individuality. While the offensive of proletcult literature was the prevailing phenomenon of the period 1948–1954, the gradual emergence of credible works with fewer concessions to the official doctrine was equally important. The literary magazines of the 1950s are awash with both directional pieces and articles criticizing cases of non-conformity. Either too realistic or too idealistic, the early examples of Romanian Socialist Realism exhibited alternatively an inherent lack of verisimilitude and a certain resistance to official tenets. After years of trial, “constructive” criticism, and vigilant supervision, a number of interesting hybrids emerged that satisfied both writers and party bureaucrats. Dumitriu’s Bijuterii, followed by his Cronica˘ de familie (Family Chronicle; 1955), Arghezi’s 1907. Peizaje (1907: Landscapes; 1955), and Preda’s Moromet¸ii managed to cross the borderline between propaganda texts and genuine aesthetic works. While the first two still obeyed the social command, being saved from platitudes only by the authors’ talent, Preda’s Moromet¸ii escaped the censor’s vigilance due to his earlier loyalty to official ideology and his focus on the hardships of Romanian pre-war peasantry, though within a politically neutral plot. Arguably, these are the most interesting products of the Stalinist era, exhibiting — as they do — both a certain political conformity and literature’s capacity to escape political instrumentalization. The profound mutations undergone by Romanian literature at the end of the 1940s can be understood only in terms of the political environment that caused an unprecedented instrumentalization of literary culture. After King Michael forced abdication on December 30, 1947, and in the continued presence of the Soviet troops, the country underwent a massive process of political and economic restructuring that violently eradicated traditional institutions and values. In 1947, both the National Peasant Party and the National Liberal Party were dissolved and most of their leaders imprisoned. In 1948 ninety percent of the industrial production was nationalized, and in 1949 agriculture underwent forced collectivization. Each of these events was accompanied by a campaign in the party controlled press. The nationalization by 1949 of all printing houses, newspapers, and literary magazines made the

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concerted propaganda assault on creative freedom possible. State control over the means of production and dissemination, aided by intimidation, public trials, interdiction to publish, and even imprisonment, drastically reduced the possibility of public dissent. The main cultural objective of the first years of Communist rule was to destroy the structures of literary authority (personalities, magazines, publishing houses) and to establish new, highly politicized institutions to control literary activity. The new institutions promoted a group of younger, zealous writers — the ideologues of the moment — who readily served the party. The period 1948–54 featured several debates and conferences aimed at displacing non-conforming writers and building the reputation of those who cooperated with the regime. Once the new literary authority was established, fresh strategies of intimidation and assimilation were employed to turn everyone into a cogwheel in the propaganda machine. The annual conferences of the Writers’ Union analyzed each writer’s contribution to the “annual plan of artistic production”; substantial financial rewards were given to cooperating writers. Political criteria decided from 1948 onward who was to receive the prizes. The period 1954–60 produced some important works (like Preda’s Moromet¸ii) that bypassed the dogmas of Socialist Realism, but the bulk of the literary production was plagued by thematic and character stereotypes. Most writers paid — often against their best intentions — their dues to the party line, illustrating the “captive mentality” that Miłosz, who quit Poland in 1951, described in The Captive Mind (1953). The situation changed significantly after the death of Romania’s first Communist president, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in 1965: whereas most literary works of the 1950s complied with the directives of the Communist regime, those produced after 1965 represented attempts to return to the “normalcy” of interwar Modernism (see 1956/1968 in this volume, pp. 83–105). In the long run, the most interesting outcome of Stalinism in literature was the two-way assimilation of traditional forms of Realism into a Marxist perspective and of socialist-realist prescriptions into a Modernist poetics. Some well-established writers managed to preserve some stylistic features of their interwar work, in spite, or because, of their political compromises; a number of younger writers served as pure propagandists for a while, out of vanity or naiveté, only to rediscover themselves as writers and reconnect to pre-Communist literary experiences. The latter group includes the striking cases of Petru Dumitriu, Eugen Jebeleanu, Zaharia Stancu, Geo Dumitrescu, and Dan Des¸liu. After writing compliant works on class struggle and socialist themes, they shifted their aesthetic views and, as in the case of Des¸liu, even became dissident writers in the 1970s and 1980s. Such cases raise challenging questions about the impact of Stalinism: how can one write “with two kinds of ink” — one for the “daily struggles,” the other for lasting works? This question is further complicated by the fact that, in its later stages, the “new literature” displayed a more complex version of Socialist Realism, in which the official directives had already been assimilated into a personal repertoire. This assimilation had wide repercussions, among which the most disturbing was the relativization of moral and truth criteria from works published after 1948. Nicu Steinhardt’s Jurnalul fericirii (The Diary of Happiness; 1991), Ion Ioanid’s Închisoarea noastra˘ cea de toate zilele (Our Daily Prison; 1991–96) and other prison memoirs that could only be published after 1989 reveal an uncompromising sense of truth that is absent even in some of the most daring works published pre-1989. For example, the satirical allegory


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underlying Ion D. Sârbu’s philosophical novel, Adio Europa! (Farewell Europe!), published only in 1992, is more direct and outspoken than any of the works published during the 1970s and 1980s by Constatin T¸oiu, Octavian Paler, Nicolae Breban, D. R. Popescu, and Augustin Buzura. Their criticism of the socialist order is still filtered through official or unofficial censorship, and the allegorical dimension of their work is subversive but also compliant with the rules of the game. By contrast, Lucian Blaga’s Luntrea lui Caron (Charon’s Boat), published posthumously in 1990, is a transparent allegory of Romanian politics between 1944 and 1960, exploring the consequences of post-war events on the career and life of Professor Axente Creanga˘. That this novel, which was not intended as a historical fresco but rather as a personalized view of postwar history, could not be published before 1989 shows the Communist intolerance towards alternative concepts of truth. Similarly, A. E. Baconsky’s novel Biserica neagra˘ (Black Cathedral) could only appear abroad during the author’s life, which came to an untimely end in the 1977 Bucharest earthquake. The first years of Socialist Realism Most of the directives connected with Socialist Realism were derived from Maxim Gorki’s definition of the term and from the examples offered by Soviet literature from 1917 to 1947. According to these directives, the writer “must eschew all formalism and represent the world of the proletariat in a dignifying, optimistic and generally intelligible manner, so as to achieve the reflection of reality in its revolutionary development” (Scruton 135). He must also endeavor not only to interpret but also to change the world in the direction prescribed by the party, acting as an “engineer” of society and of the human soul. This approach was supposed to give rise to a revolutionary literature, capable of serving the “class-struggle and the construction of the best society on earth.” This reductionist interpretation of literature as a means to achieve social, economic, and political goals was actually validated by the practice of Communist propaganda. But the outcome was far from satisfactory. The “perfectly attuned” ideological texts were all strikingly alike, not only in their thematic and stylistic choices but also in their lack of credibility and cliché-ridden characters. In trying to convey the required image of the ongoing struggle for the new socialist society, they focused on the collectivization of agriculture, the competition to top production targets, or on examples of working-class self-abnegation and heroism. Ironically, these literary works were far more interesting and accomplished when they depicted the corrupt and obsolete bourgeoisie. As we have seen in S¸tefan’s preamble, the Communist propagandistic machine started to intervene in Romania’s literary life between 1946 and 1948. Tudor Arghezi, one of the distinguished poets of the time, and George Ca˘linescu, the highest critical authority, were among the notable intellectuals who fell prey to ideological pressures. Both were fiercely attacked, Arghezi for his “decadent” leanings, and Ca˘linescu for his aestheticism and formalism. The denunciation of Arghezi was initiated by Ion Vitner, one of the regime’s literary ideologues, at the 1947 Congress of the Union of Artists and Journalists, and completed by Sorin Toma’s infamous pamphlet “Poezia putrefact¸iei s¸i putrefact¸ia poeziei” (The Poetry of Rottenness and Rotting Poetry; 1948). As a result of these campaigns, Arghezi was banished from public life for

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six years. The aesthetics of “ugliness” associated with his pre-1945 poetry was only a pretext in his public execution. Arghezi’s activity as a journalist, especially his columns “Bilete de papagal” (Parrot Tablets) published in the liberal daily newspaper, Adeva˘rul (The Truth), was the more immediate reason for the official attacks. The Arghezi case stunningly revealed that a personality of his caliber could vanish overnight from literary life without public objections. He was rehabilitated only when Arghezi agreed to compromise his political stance and writing. His 1955 volume of new poetry, 1907. Peizaje, showed clear signs of political accommodation, for the poet proclaimed in these poems his loyalty to the ideals of a “new world.” Broaching the 1907 peasant uprising, which the official propaganda regarded as the first manifestation of class-consciousness among Romanian peasants, this collection was animated by a revolutionary wrath that perfectly played into the hands of the ideologues. In 1956, after the focus of propaganda changed from “class-oriented wrath” to optimistic praise of the socialist man, the poet obligingly published Cântare omului (Praise to Man). Still, Arghezi’s post-1948 poetry never praised directly the Communist Party, its anniversaries, and its leaders, nor did it refer to specific contemporary events. Arghezi managed to resist the worst demands of regimentation and to write, at least partially, in the vein of his earlier texts. 1907. Peizaje rewrote in a mannerist style some of Arghezi’s earlier texts. Its violent rhetoric, which suggested both irony and decadence, met perfectly official expectations about a historical time dominated by wicked landowners and industrialists. As a result, the poet was showered with the highest literary prizes. As Ana Selejan puts it, “The critics competed with one another in demonstrating that the new vigor of Arghezi’s poetry was the sole result of the ideological clarifications of the seventy-year-old poet. With Arghezi’s acceptance of the political order, the oppressive regime had achieved its most important victory; it managed to defeat an obstinate personality and to homogenize the last great interwar conscience with the voice of the Communist collective” (România, 2: 76). But the themes of individual revolt against obtuse rulers, the condemnation of war, and the criticism of societal ills were present already in Arghezi’s best pre-war collections, Cuvinte potrivite (Matched Words; 1927) and Flori de mucigai (Flowers of Mold; 1931). Neither the tone, nor the style of these collections was characterized by “class-consciousness.” A close reading of 1907. Peizaje also reveals a rather ironic stance towards official prescriptions, insofar as a significant number of poems adopt a naturalistic perspective on the peasant’s revolt. Arghezi’s descriptions suggest a peasantry crazed by rage, a disturbing image that had little propagandistic value. Given the poet’s earlier predilection for the aesthetics of the ugly, for social revolt, and macabre imagery, the violent imagery of 1907 can be seen as a double-edged sword: on the one hand satirizing the grotesque rhetoric of the time, while on the other giving the officials what they asked for. Arghezi’s text can be read as both a proof of his compliance and as its pastiche. George Ca˘linescu also yielded to political intimidation and partially converted to the official ideology. The attacks against him were launched by a number of young militant writers, whose work Ca˘linescu disregarded, but this was not the only factor leading to his denunciations by them. More likely, the Communist authorities could not tolerate his independent position, however ironically concealed in official clichés. The full import of this attack became clear when Ion Vitner entered the stage in 1948 with six articles in Contemporanul (see Vitner


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Critical) that associated Ca˘linescu’s work with the much-maligned “Romanian aestheticism.” Ca˘linescu’s public status weakened, and, after further attacks in 1949, he lost both his professorship at the Bucharest College of Letters and his role as a leading literary critic. His subsequent books tried to reassure the party of his commitment to the official ideology. This change of attitude was conspicuous in Ca˘linescu’s travelogues Kiev, Moscova, Leningrad (1949) and Am fost în China Noua˘ (I Saw New China; 1955), and marred also his two postwar novels, Bietul Ioanide (Poor Ioanide; 1953) and Scrinul negru (The Black Chest; 1960). The fate of Ca˘linescu and Arghezi was far from being singular. By 1952, an impressive number of first-rank writers had either been banished or “convinced” to collaborate. Lucian Blaga’s chair of the philosophy of culture was abolished and the poet was left without means of subsistence. Al. Philippide, Vladimir Streinu, S¸erban Cioculescu, and many others could not publish because of their previous support of the democratic parties, while the books of Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Eugen Ionescu were banned because their authors had defected to the West. Nichifor Crainic shared their fate due to his editorship of Gîndirea (Thought), a nationalistic publication with fascist overtones. Some writers decided early on to cooperate with the authorities and thus escaped the controversies that entrapped their colleagues. Sadoveanu published the ideologically compliant and aesthetically weak novels Mitrea Cocor (1949) and Nicoara˘ Potcoava˘ (Nicoara˘ Horseshoe; 1952); Camil Petrescu wrote Un om între oameni (A Man Amongst Men; 1953–57) a historical fresco with a conventional ideological agenda. The strongest instruments in conveying party ideology and reassessing literature according to Marxist-Leninist principles were the new literary magazines Contemporanul, Revista literara˘, and Flaca˘ra. They claimed to be the “bulwarks of democracy,” but functioned as trial courts for ideological deviations and instruments of brainwashing. The power of these magazines became apparent only towards the end of the 1950s, once a number of significant writers had fallen victim to their campaigns. The attacks on these writers first seemed intellectual games, then ideological controversies, and finally, by 1949, they acquired momentous weight by involving charges of “inadequate commitment to the partyline,” or “deficient representation of class-struggle and of the construction of the new society.” Inter-generational disputes enhanced proletcult standards. Far from being the result of political impositions only, proletcultist pseudo-art was promoted through the efforts of several groups of writers interested in strengthening their own position in the literary world. Ironically, these ideological “hawks” had to submit at one point to the standards they had set for others. These literary battles increased the efficiency of the Stalinist system; the propaganda section of the Communist party, which regularly fulfilled its annual plan of compliant works, became the sole winner. Whereas the bibliography of 1945 included Lucian Blaga’s book of aphorisms, Discobolul (The Discus-Thrower), Gellu Naum’s Surrealist prose volume, Teribilul interzis (The Forbidden Extraordinary), and George Ca˘linescu’s compendium of Romanian literary history, and 1946 counter-balanced socialist realist texts by Mihai Beniuc, Marcel Breslas¸u, and Victor Efitimiu with Modernist plays by Camil Petrescu and Mihail Sebastian, and Blaga’s monumental study in the philosophy of culture, Trilogia valorilor (Trilogy of Values), by the end of 1947 the dogmatic grip on culture was firmly established. The number of texts with Communist themes increased significantly, professional associations like the Society of Writers expelled from their ranks uncooperative members, and the nineteenth-century socialist critic Constantin Dobrogeanu-

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Gherea displaced Titu Maiorescu as the reigning authority in criticism. The aesthetic tradition was thus officially replaced by a social criticism that assessed works of art according to their social function. 1948 marked the beginning of a cultural revolution: an impressive number of politicallycorrect books were published and all major professional organizations and institutions were radically restructured. Once the Society of Writers was overhauled in 1947 and the Romanian Academy in June 1948, the Communist Party tackled the educational system. Non-compliant writers, troublesome journalists, and disobedient professors were expelled from schools and universities. Their names were removed from the public records; citing their names or reading their books was strictly forbidden. At the famous Noica trial, Constantin Noica, Nicu Steinhardt, Dinu Pillat, Lucia and Mihail Nasta were sentenced to prison for reading banned books, receiving and spreading Western materials, and making favorable comments on Western culture. With the introduction of the first Annual Economic Plan in 1948, writers had to commit themselves publicly to begin and finish works according to party directives. As a result, each genre had a corpus of “exemplary” works by the end of the year. Poets did best. They sang hymns of praise to the new Popular Republic, to the constructive work of the “new man,” to the “glorious struggling past of the working class and the Communist Party,” while mercilessly exposing its enemies. Many poems were dedicated to the “brave Soviet army and to Lenin and Stalin, the brilliant leaders of the working class from all over the world” (Selejan, România 2: 31). By the beginning of the next decade, the theme of class struggle and the satirical portrayal of the corrupt bourgeoisie yielded to inspiring examples set by Communist heroes in the process of collectivization, industrialization, and the construction of new “socialist avenues” (among them the Danube-Black Sea canal built with forced labor). Yet establishment critics started to voice their dissatisfaction with the style of socialist-realist literature. A number of founding works of Socialist Realism had been published by then: Preda’s Întîlnirea din pa˘mînturi (Meeting Between the Lands) and Stancu’s Descult¸ in 1948, Dumitriu’s Bijuterii de familie and Sadoveanu’s Mitrea Cocor in 1949, Dan Des¸liu’s Minerii din Maramures¸ (The Miners from Maramures¸) in 1951, and Eugen Jebeleanu’s În satul lui Sahia (In Sahia’s Village) in 1952. At least three of them managed to reveal creative freedom in spite of the clichés that constrained their themes and style. Reread today, one is hard pressed to imagine that Stancu’s Descult¸ and Dumitriu’s Bijuterii de familie were written to fulfill a political command and that Preda’s stark realism in Întîlnirea din pa˘mînturi was used as a tool in class struggle. Following the example of Soviet criticism, which denounced in the 1950s the “hackneyed images, mannerism, clichés, and ridiculous optimism” of its own proletcult phase (Selejan, 1951–1953 264), Romanian magazines began a critical revaluation of works from the past decade. But instead of admitting that their deficiencies were due to political interference and the simplistic view of reality it promoted, critics continued to maintain that the shortcomings stemmed from “insufficient familiarity with the actual reality and from lack of an adequate ideological consciousness” (Selejan, 1955–1956 67). Defending the slogan that poetry was a weapon of class struggle, official critics argued that old common-sense aesthetic principles could be replaced by the writers’ commitment to propaganda. George Ca˘linescu’s 1948 warning that “a literary weapon is not helpful unless it remains literary, unless it stirs emotions in the soul of the reader and moves him through the force of believable artistic images” (Selejan, România 2: 86)


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remained unheeded. The “Mihai Eminescu” School of Literature was established in 1951 to “educate” writers in their new political tasks. In the 1950s, almost all young writers started their literary careers with a period of training in this ideological factory. The peak of Stalinism With all institutions under its control, Communist propaganda began to reap the benefits of its efforts after 1950. The indoctrinated writers began to turn out the long expected works that defined the style of the period. Dan Des¸liu’s epic poem Minerii din Maramures¸, Miron Radu Paraschivescu’s patriotic Cîntarea României (In Praise of Romania; 1954), Geo Bogza’s propagandist reportage Port¸ile ma˘ret¸iei (Gates of Glory; 1951), and Petru Dumitriu’s praise of the Danube-Black Sea canal in Drum fa˘ra˘ pulbere (Road Without Dust; 1950) established a new language and thematic repertoire. Since a new propaganda banner had to be inaugurated each year to disguise the insufficiencies of the previous one, 1953 started with a severe rebuke of writers who did not portray the “typical” according to Georgy Malenkov’s prescriptions, and with a fierce criticism of older militants who seemed to have abandoned class struggle. By 1953–54 most writers had accepted the Party directives. The subsequent battles were variations on the earlier ones. In this climate of almost total submission to ideology, the revival of authentic literature in the works of Nicolae Labis¸, Nichita Sta˘nescu, Ana Blandiana, Ioan Alexandru, Cezar Baltag, Nicolae Breban, and Dumitru T¸epeneag, was nothing short of miraculous. Their efforts to restore a modern manner of writing began around 1957, when most critics were ready to acknowledge that Socialist Realism had reached a dead end. After ten years of almost complete cultural isolation, literary magazines were allowed again to make references to non-Russian literatures, to debate problems of Modernism, and to mention some of the banned Romanian writers. Signs of this opening could be detected already in Nicolae Labis¸’s collection of poems, Primele iubiri (First Loves), published in 1956. But the first wave of liberalization was short-lived. In 1958 two official newspapers, Lupta de clasa˘ (Class Struggle) and Scînteia (The Spark), fiercely defended Socialist Realism against aestheticism, “bourgeois deviationism,” and “neutralism.” Young writers who tried to publish in the last years of the decade painfully noted a return to Stalinism. The emergence of a new generation of writers at the end of the fifties, coupled with a process of liberalization after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death, finally eroded the long hold of Stalinism on Romanian literature. But vestiges of the ideological thinking and writing survived in the works of even a leading new poet like Nichita Sta˘nescu. While O viziune a sentimentelor (A Vision of Feelings; 1964), 11 elegii (Eleven Elegies; 1966), and Necuvintele (The Nonwords; 1969), moved progressively towards intense subjective emotions distilled in an often cryptic discourse, his Ros¸u vertical (Vertical Red; 1967) and Un pa˘mînt numit România (A Land Called Romania; 1969) tried to accommodate prescribed themes in a Modernist style. Though his odd mix of approaches produced poems that were superior to the subservient texts of the 1950s, they were no less problematic: they perpetuated a compromising mentality that naively assumed that occasional collaboration with the regime would not endanger the substance of the author’s output.

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Romanian Stalinism, firmly established between 1948 and 1954, reemerged in a milder variant in 1971, when President Ceaus¸escu, inspired by a recent visit to China, promulgated a set of directives for a new cultural revolution known as the “July theses.” This retrenchment could not entirely reverse the process of liberalization that began around 1955–56 and continued, after the terrible witch-hunt of 1957–58 (Ca˘linescu and Vianu, Amintiri 154), through the 1960s. Vestiges of a Stalinist rhetoric and thematics survived, reminding writers of their precarious position in Communist society. What made communist propaganda so powerful? While Romanian literature had been submitted to outside political pressures before 1947, the intensity of this interference between 1947 and 1960 requires special attention. What held together the Stalinist propaganda machine? What were its chief strategy and logic? What features account for its specificity? One of the most striking features of the Stalinist period was the collusion of militant propaganda with a “scientific” claim about Socialist Realism’s “inevitability” and “progressiveness.” Presented as a rational theory of aesthetic reception — but backed by the Soviet army — the Communist doctrine about the nature and function of creativity sought support in Marx’s and Lenin’s sociological interpretation of art and the prestige of their revolutionary theory. The resultant theory of interpretation brought together a utopian social program and a nineteenthcentury positivistic method. The authority of official Communist critics was based not only on the regime’s institutional support but also on the “infallibility” of the Marxist paradigm and the quasi-religious force of the Communist utopia. This double legitimation gave literary interpretation a theoretical foundation in absolute truths, while also allowing certain deviations if the interpretive authority deemed them necessary. Reviewing the ideological debates of the 1950s, we notice that the truth and validity of official interventions were grounded in a few exemplary interpretations performed by the designated priests of the “sacred” dogma. The authority of these interventions emanated from an exterior source (most often a controlling authority at a central newspaper) that could not be questioned. But as the ruling priests changed, their texts became subject to dispute and criticism.

The retraumatization of the 1948 communist purges in Yugoslav literary culture Renata Jambre¿sic´ Kirin The social, economic, military, and political aspects of the exacerbated Soviet-Yugoslav dispute that followed the Cominform Resolution of June 28, 1948 have been thoroughly considered and studied.

The retraumatization of the 1948 communist purges in Yugoslav literary culture

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Some regard Josip Broz Tito as the Martin Luther of the Soviet-controlled bloc, while others see the discord among members of the Yugoslav Communist Party’s (KPY) that followed the break as a typical manifestation of Bolshevik radicalism directed against internal opposition. Ivo Banac argues that “the conflict with Stalin played the same part in the shaping of Yugoslavia’s political system that collectivization and the purges of the 1930s played in the history of Soviet communism” (Stalin 257); according to him, the establishment in 1949 of the concentration camps for disloyal ibeovci (supporters of the International Bureau of Communist and Labor Parties) on the Adriatic barren islands of Goli otok and Sv. Grgur remains “an unpleasant reminder of ideological links between Yugoslavia and the countries of the Soviet bloc” (253). These phenomena should not be forgotten when considering the genuine democratization and decentralization of the country that were products of the rift between Moscow and Belgrade. Dušan Simovic´, a general in the Yugoslav Royal Army, suggested already in 1938 that Goli otok could house a concentration camp for Communists. As Dragan Markovic´ has pointed out in Josip Broz i Goli otok (Josip Broz and Goli Island; 1990), history repeats itself in a strange way: the idea of a Communist concentration camp was realized by Tito, who saw it as a preventive measure against the Stalinist threat to transform all of Yugoslavia into a horrible camp. The repressive measures against real or bogus collaborators (rivals and nonconformists), “anti-revolutionary elements,” and former Partisan comrades, were unique among the other “people’s democracies” because they combined enlightened ideas on education, reformation, and self-correction with despotic attachment to ritualized physical punishment. For a short but decisive period of time, the concentration camp at Goli otok was emblematic for Yugoslavia’s totalitarian temptation; it was, as Tzvetan Todorov states, both “a part of the whole and an image of the whole” (Voices 17). Tito started in 1948 an all-out war against the “counterrevolutionaries,” whom he regarded far more dangerous than the anti-Communists. The ideological and penal measures against Communists were to a large degree an internal conflict of the elite. As Svetozar Stojanovic´ notes, Yugoslav resistance had for a long time “the earmarks of Stalinist anti-Stalinism” (Banac, Stalin 244). For those in power it served as an excuse to introduce close police surveillance of the entire population and to promote docility, denunciation, mistrust, isolation, and cynicism. The Stalin-instructed Cominform Resolution of 1948 charged Tito with misusing his charisma, with a slowdown of economic development, with a failed collectivization of agriculture, and with sympathizing with the capitalist West. According to Banac, the Communists who subscribed to it were led by a variety of motivations and interests, including historical, ideological, as well as centralist and autonomist ones (inequality within the federation was the most important issue in multinational Yugoslavia). These factors, coupled with prewar and wartime conflicts between factions within a diverse Yugoslav Communist movement, played a role whenever an individual or a group decided to support the Resolution. The far-reaching cultural and symbolic consequences of this historical cleavage on the Yugoslav left have been rather neglected in historical studies. The Yugoslav “gulag episode” has been examined mostly from juridical, political, penal, and victimological angles, though the symbolic and moral effect of totalitarian violence is more important for the maintenance of a totalitarian regime than the political one. As René Girard has shown, scapegoat victims of channeled violence reconcile and stabilize the community; but the Yugoslav case raises some

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new issues: due to “the sheer modernity of the Communist experience, its totalitarian impact [is] distinct from previously existing forms of dictatorship” (Courtois 13), and many of its facets are still unexplored. Although the scale of state violence and abuses of power in the Soviet Union was far greater than in socialist Yugoslavia, they both spread irrational and contagious violence through the state apparatus in order to maintain stability by instilling fear and terror, and in order to retain the illusion of consistency in a system that was guided by the logic that everyone was potentially guilty. The Yugoslav intelligence service, Uprava Državne Bezbjednosti (UDBA), adopted the Stalinist rhetoric of conspiracy and produced certain “enemy quotas” in all social and ethnic ranks, following Maxim Gorki’s slogan: “If the enemy refuses to surrender, it must be exterminated.” The Enemy was indecipherable and infectious: the friends and spouses of an enemy were, by their very proximity, the first targets of “socially corrective labor” in special camps. As Carol S. Lilly notes in her recent book on ideology and rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia between 1944 and 1953, the inconsistencies in the party rhetoric during this period illustrate the confusion that its members at all levels felt as they sought to resist Soviet domination while remaining loyal to their guiding ideology: As in the past, party leaders maintained a monopoly over organs of both persuasion and coercion and while they welcomed signs of renewed public enthusiasm, they aggressively persecuted any who dared oppose their program for change. (191)

Body pain and the pursuit of truth in internee confessions The Cominform culprits of the Goli otok camp were not sentenced to death, although some of them were tortured to death or committed suicide. Their suffering was due to hard and purposeless labor in a quarry, reduction of their food and water supply, the arbitrariness of their fate, the absence of any legal sentence, and special rituals of degradation. Partisan general Gojko Nikoliš remarked that physical and psychic torture was more “immoral than the capital punishment, harder than bullets in the head or guillotine” because the sword was replaced by a “systematic humiliation of man beyond humanity” (Banac, Stalin 253). The organizers of the Goli otok camp had their own methods of humiliation, but they also made use of inmate initiatives and of “self-managed punishments.” Among the rituals of degradation special importance was given to daily open confessions and self-criticism, which aimed at a compulsory alteration of one’s political biography. As Hannah Arendt writes: “‘Confessions’ are as much a specialty of Bolshevik propaganda as the curious pedantry of legalizing crimes by retrospective and retroactive legislation was a specialty of Nazi propaganda” (Origins 353). Public confessions as a form of Bolshevik propaganda have, however, a powerful tradition. Their inner structure, formal stages, and purpose correspond in important ways to the medieval ceremony of reintegrating the sinners into the Church — a ritual also known to the ancients as exomologesis. After the Cominform Resolution of 1948, Tito gave an emotional speech to army commanders and party leaders in Serbia, appealing to their sense of common experience and explicitly referring to the power of religious confessions:


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Yes, comrades, do not be surprised. For the first time in my life, just as the Christian believer senses the need to confess, I want to tell you my whole life, so that you may judge whether I could have chosen any other road than this road of ours… I am not a believer, and I did not feel obliged to settle accounts before anybody outside our country, not even in Bucharest, when the Information Bureau demanded that of me. (Banac, Stalin 128)

In “Notes on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual,” Talal Assad has shown eloquently how performative and socially efficient the Christian practice is in reconciling the sinner after rituals of public confession and repentance. The goal of the ritual is not to make amends but to impose permanent self-observation. This is closely linked to one’s ability to acknowledge one’s faults, or, rather, the work of “the enemy within,” giving clear instructions on how a straight conduct ought to be imposed on a believer. There can be no repentance or confession if the believer has any doubt that the imposed order is guided by absolute truth. The believer is most effectively subjected if the quest for truth flushes out “from within the self the power of the other, of the enemy, who is hidden there under the appearance of oneself” (“Notes” 305). Highly positioned Communists like Sreten Žujovic´ could publish their “mea culpa” along with a statement of loyalty in the main newspaper Borba. Žujovic´’s penitence of November 25, 1950 had a strong impact on fellow Communists: “The party was right. The party was correct with me because I had been a weapon, a blind weapon of the enemy’s devices […] The party did not arrest me but rescued me and saved me from them” (Markovic´, Josip 53). Actually, denouncing the external enemy and acknowledging the party’s infallibility was not enough for most Cominformists. As Antonije Isakovic´ suggests in the novel Tren 2, unconditional readiness to admit one’s self-deception was the final aim of self-correction for devoted Communists: The following virtues of a revolutionary would be quite often singled out: a readiness to admit, by all means, one’s own mistake. A principle came out of it: the self-destruction of one’s conscience […]. Totalitarianism calls for total death — and it is effective only if “it is not done by the system,” but by “the victim itself.” (262)

Dobrica Cósic´’s recently revised account of his ill-famed visit to the Goli otok camp makes a similar argument concerning the destructive effects of mutual cross-investigation and crosspunishment by internees: This was, in a way, a self-education of prisoners that utilized them for political ends; i.e., the prisoners had to take over the role of the investigator. And their “methods” were so drastic and cruel that Goli otok […] distinguished itself from all other camps by its interest in human souls and their remodeling. Terrified by this, I could not leave the management building for two or three days. I was reading many confessions of the ibeovci that, in the opinion of the camp manager, might interest me as a writer. I could see clearly from these records, and really soon I convinced myself, that this was an incomprehensibly cruel island, particularly for us, continental people; and its inhabitants were trained to become wretched people and spiritual cripples upon returning to routine life. (Ðukic´ 34)

As in medieval Christian rituals, the Communist penal authorities combined physical pain with a pursuit of confessional truth that the internees had to produce by writing weekly compositions. Both methods followed the concept of penance as “medicine for the soul.” As Assad points out, this “was no fanciful metaphor, but a mode of organizing the practice of penance in which

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bodily pain (or extreme discomfort) was linked to the pursuit of truth — at once literal and metaphysical” (“Notes” 305). The slogans “We are building the island, the island builds us!” and “It is easy to be a good Communist, with bright face and good name!” reflect a belief that human nature is transformable with the help of bodily pain. The methods of provoking and controlling “subversive” conduct had their impact on formalized self-exposure in party meetings, professional associations, and classrooms. Constant self-observation and self-censorship were incorporated in various cultural practices and texts. Yugoslav writers against the politics of oblivion: From the 1960s to the 1980s Traces of a totalitarian mentality can be found in carefully censored Yugoslav lexicographic publications. In the Yugoslav Literary Lexicon (1971), for instance, all compromising details and unpleasant experiences of the political purges and imprisonments were erased. Until the late 1960s, writers could not articulate the experience of the Stalinist purges and imprisonments because ideology dominated the public sphere and even their own memory. Furthermore, socialist artists were eager to adopt a “socialist modernism” that rejected the revolutionary concept of criticizing, shaping, and changing the world. In several Yugoslav disputes between supporters of modernist and realist poetics, we can detect an ambivalence between advocating the autonomy of art, on the one hand, and submitting to direct state sponsorship and the prevailing “regime of truth,” on the other. The beneficial effects of de-Stalinization in mainstream art production did not mean that socialist mass rituals in everyday life were eliminated, nor did the cosmopolitanism of “aestheticized modernism” imply a break with artistic opportunism. Art historian Bojana Pejic´ points out in “Socialist Modernism” that critical and “antimodernist” realism, rather than abstract art, was censored in the 1950s and 1960s. As an autonomous, independent, and “cryptic and iconic” art form, Socialist Modernism did not disturb the existing socio-political horizon. While American and European postwar art reflected existential traumas, a fear of the atomic bomb, and wartime horrors, Yugoslav authors contributed to an optimistic renewal and a utopian search for new social ideals. When domestic literary culture finally put the terrifying experiences of the 1948 purges on its agenda in the 1970s and 1980s, it became evident how morally devastating the belief was in the “plasticity of human nature and in the possibility of transforming it in accordance with a utopian blueprint” (Tismaneanu, Fantasies 27). Rhetorically enacting the trauma of Goli otok, writers of both fictional and factional texts responded not only to the forces internal to their literary culture but also to a psychological and social matrix. Like people coping with a personal trauma, writers first reacted with a shocked numbness to the images of the events frozen in the deeper layers of consciousness, and succeeded only later in retrieving the traumatic memory under the pressure of dramatic impulses in the social context. In Yugoslavia, the student demonstration of 1968 and the ethnic movements of 1971 exerted such strong liberating social drives. The victims of the political purges of 1948 had never been rehabilitated legally or politically in socialist Yugoslavia, which best indicates how deeply attached the Yugoslav Communists were to the totalitarianism of the people’s republics. Their cultural rehabilitation in literature and popular historiography was, therefore, even more important.


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As the dispute between Joseph Brodsky and Václav Havel on the difference between Czech and Russian experiences of Communist totalitarianism shows, we do not understand as yet how differently normal citizens behaved in the two different contexts. Brodsky notes that many recent anthropological approaches to post-Communism have adopted the Enlightenment myth that the common citizen is a “noble savage,” good at birth but corrupted by bad institutions, in this case those of the socialist state. He believes that in seeking to comprehend the reproduction of “totalitarian mentality” we should not disregard the traditional inclination of people in East-Central Europe towards patriarchal values, such as obedience to authority, passivity, opportunism, and resignation reinforced by autarchic politics. Now that most archives in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union are open to scholars, research on the common features of the Nazi and Soviet models of totalitarianism can serve as a guideline for a survey of Yugoslavia’s short “totalitarian experiment,” unfathomable without insight into its corpus of documentary and fictional “Goli otok literature” (see Vladimir Kralj’s article in vol. 4 of this history). Hannah Arendt’s classic Origins of Totalitarianism and Tzvetan Todorov’s Voices from the Gulag (1999) focus on the concentration camp as the epitome of the two “totalitarian projects” of the twentieth century. The most helpful anthropological survey of the Balkan variant of Communist totalitarianism between 1948 and Stalin’s death in 1953 was done by John B. Allcock. He remarks that recognizing the structural, directed, patterned, and constitutive character of violence in the Balkans is essential for understanding attempts to keep up with the modernization processes there. As in other parts of Europe, “legitimate violence has come to be regarded as one among many fields of special expertise — the police and the professional military” (384). The Yugoslav penal practice was designed to wear down slowly and thoroughly the psychic integrity of completely isolated political prisoners, and to eradicate all traces of their past revolutionary merits and public service through ritualized self-accusations. Penal authorities and political prisoners alike recalled experienced or fantasized fascist crimes and methods of torture. The worst false accusations against Cominformists, particularly NKVD commissioners, alleged that they collaborated with the Gestapo or Ustasha police. Such accusations offered the best method to publicly discredit and morally demonize the victims. In the so-called Ljubljana “Dachau show-trial,” a dozen of the leading Slovene Communists and Dachau survivors were charged and then executed in 1948 for collaborating with the Gestapo. Andrija Hebrang, a leading Croatian politician, was accused of having collaborated with the Ustasha while in the Jasenovac concentration camp; the circumstances and the date of his death are still unknown. Igor Torkar (originally Boris Fakin) incorporated in his documentary novel Umiranje na rate (Dying in Installments; 1982) passages from a real speech that the Slovenian minister of interior gave during the “Dachau trial”: “The fact that American imperialists make use of war criminals and Gestapo members to fight against us proves that they are consistently taking the same path as the Nazis did” (239). The head of the Special Police during the German occupation of Belgrade, who was imprisoned with Hebrang, was given the task, as he noted in his secret diary “to write his very detailed police biography, his work, methods, a list of detainees… to take classes for the special officers of UDBA, to provide the chief investigator in the A. Hebrang

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case with ‘professional consultations’ and with the analysis of the questions and answers obtained in the course of the investigation” (Markovic´, Josip Broz 87). The fervent supporters of the Cominform included leading figures of the Communist Agitprop office that were not prepared to break with Stalin’s concept of state-sponsored docile artists. While Agitprop’s controversial director, Milovan Ðilas, demonstrated an amazing ability of self-adjustment and self-correction, its other prominent members — the Montenegrin writer Radovan Zogovic´ and Slovenian Agitprop commissioner Boris Ziherl — defended the “infallible” Stalin and Socialist Realism. After several months of pressure by leading Slovenian Communists, Ziherl eventually opted for party leadership. Zogovic´, the once much-feared cultural arbiter, editor of the newspaper Borba, and vice president of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union, advocated most consistently Socialist Realism, from his first dispute with Miroslav Krleža in the 1930s to his silent rehabilitation in the mid 1960s. He was treated respectfully: his open letter to Tito, entitled “To the Falsifier of History,” landed him only briefly in prison, while many innocent people ended up with long-term penalties. These cases show that the Tito-Stalin dispute often served as a mere pretext for individual retributions, from the lowest to the highest ranks of power. Predrag Matvejevic´ shares Herbert Marcuse’s opinion that nothing has done more harm to the New Left than its “reified and ritual formulas of propaganda.” He adds that Yugoslav socialist double-talk has long been marked by ideological reeducation and indoctrination, “engaging writing,” banality, simplifications, and binary oppositions that promoted the simple model, we and the enemy, the righteous and the reprobates (Te Vjetrenjacˇe 50). In Carol Lilly’s view, the rhetorical methods applied in these early postwar years were simply “too crude and too didactic to change people’s minds or transform society.” According to her, during the first two stages of Yugoslav postwar history “the party had not really tried to change society; its persuasive policies had been geared toward the achievement of political and economic, not transformative, goals” (246). In later decades, the hagiographic partisan memoirs and biographies of leading Communists were recognized as biased and manipulated stories. Milovan Ðilas, for instance, rewrote his autobiographical Cˇlanci (Essays; 1947) in Conversation with Stalin (1962), turning them into the confessions of a disillusioned convert, portraying the same events, people, and judgments — e.g., the first meeting with Stalin — in a completely different light. Propagandist art was dying out, along with the gradual decomposition of the “partisan epic,” primarily in the works of Jure Franicˇevic´ Plocˇar, Branko Cópic´ and Mihajlo Lalic´. But the suspicion that memoirs were “distorted” confessions or hegemonic narratives remained alive. According to the often-quoted Krleža maxim, the value of memoirs “equals a tobacco-pipe.” Krleža considered that only writers who depict an “authentic Yugoslav experience” might avoid the constraints of Socialist Realism and of ivory-tower isolationism, respectively. Hence the writers of testimonial literature on Goli otok looked for narrative modes that could reveal the “shocking truth” of the “authentic” Yugoslav totalitarian experience. Literature, especially “fictionalized” autobiography, was generally considered more suitable to portray the traumatic experiences of confinement. Some writers, including Ðilas, were familiar with the horrors of the Soviet gulags and Stalin’s despotism even before World War II. Marko Ristic´ and Ervin Šinko, for instance, eagerly wrote lyrical dithyrambs until 1948 to honor “the greatest human being of all time,” but


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at the politically opportune moment they took the initiative of revealing the “real truth.” They labeled Stalin with the most derogatory epithets, embodying the Communist inclination to think in extreme categories. As the Croatian surrealist Radovan Ivšic´ noted in his book of essays and interviews, U nepovrat (Beyond Redemption; 1990), “it is ludicrous to see that these leftist revolutionary writers deliberately welcomed an unacceptable division: propaganda articles are good for the “masses,” but their authentic literary work is reserved for the elite!” (106). Šinko’s plays “Osu0enici” (The Convicts) and “Strašna srecá” (Terrible Luck), performed in Zagreb in 1952 and 1954, respectively, were among the first works that dealt with the Titoist methods of ritualized ex-communication of the Cominform supporters. Unfortunately, Šinko’s plays left no trace in the history of Croatian drama (they were never published), not because they were politically “incorrect,” but because they were poorly written. The most prominent Yugoslav memoir of the gulag imprisonment, Karlo Štajner’s 7000 dana u Sibiru (Seven Thousand Days in Siberia) was published in 1971, followed in 1975 by the severely criticized collection of short stories on the same subject, Grobnica za Borisa Davidovicˇa (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich) by Danilo Kiš (see Guido Snel’s article on fictionalized autobiographies, pp. 386–400). The two most relevant novels of the Goli otok experience came out in 1981 and 1982, respectively: Branko Hofman’s Nocˇ do jutra (Night till Morning Comes) and Antonije Isakovic´’s Tren 2. To understand them, we must consider the literary situation and the new politico-ideological constraints of the 1970s and 1980s. The reform movements to revise the Yugoslav federation started with the “Croatian Spring” movement (Maspok) of 1971 and ended with a wave of purging oppositional Communists, which was less repressive but as efficient as the one in 1948. The cultural and political agitators of the state were again passionately exposing the fallacy of “heretical” factionalists, though they erased their past merits with much less brutality than previously. Matvejevic´, a prominent PEN activist, addressed a collection of open letters to the official censors (Otvorena pisma), which show that after 1971 the prime target of censorship gradually moved from conspiracy (which had fed the internal Communist purges) to nationalism. It is a reflection of the more refined political control of the Croatian media, which epitomized the ethnic movement, that writers were forced to avoid documentarism and turn to the historical novel or — as in the case of the Croatian “Borgesovci” writers (named after J. L. Borges) — to poetic experiments. Meanwhile, Slovenian and Serbian Goli otok literature reached its apex in experiments with documentary novels that followed mainstream literary trends. Stjepan Cˇuic´’s Staljinova slika i druge pricˇe (The Portrait of Stalin and Other Stories; 1971) and his drama Orden (A Medal; 1981), Ferdo Godina’s Molcˇecˇi orkestar (Silenced Orchestra; 1981), Aleksandar Popovic´’s Mrešcénje šarana i druge drame (Hatching of Carps and Other Plays; 1986), and Dušan Jovanovic´’s play Karamazovi (The Karamazov Family; 1984) were accepted, but Kiš’s historical metafiction, Grobnica za Borisa Davidovicˇa, provoked political confrontations. Documentarism, ideological reflection, and Realism dominated the bulk of the Yugoslav Goli otok literature in the 1980s. Among the exceptions is Vitomil Zupan’s heavily autobiographical prison novel Levitan (1982), which describes the post-1950 prison life in Yugoslavia in a shockingly brutal, and unaffected language, focusing mainly on the (homo)sexuality of the prisoners. While in the 1980s historiographers continued to fetishize documents as having intrinsic value — Vladimir Dedijer’s Novi prilozi (New Supplements) to the Tito biography

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(1984) represented the central point of reference for all further historical research — writers came to reconsider the rhetoric of documentarism, emphasizing its constructedness, partiality, fragmentation, and contingent treatment of events. As Stevanovic´ remarked in his Afterword to Tren 2, Isakovic´ used documents only when “the fact would be far more exciting than any fabrication,” contributing thus in his own way “to the literature of documents that are so much used and misused today.” According to Stevanovic´, Isakovic´ used them “rarely, sparingly, and with due consideration to substantiate his artistic vision and give it a particular time frame” (“Isakovic´” 340). In most cases, the consistent fictionality of the narrative world replaced the incomprehensible reality of the historical protagonists. When the Yugoslav Communists attempted to materialize the promises of their ideology they began to lose faith in their ability to transform society, culture, and human beings by rhetoric only. The persistent conflict between short-term political and long-term transformative agendas, between improvisation and rigid party discipline, between modernist and preexisting values, became subjects of literature. Hofman’s Nocˇ do jutra, Isakovic´’s Tren 2 and other similar works were important contributions to Yugoslav literary culture, not because of their poetics but because they explored, to use Dominick LaCapra’s words, lived history’s “ambivalence or undecidability in the most unsettling and provocative manner possible” (Writing History 188). This literature was important, for it broadened the realm of free speech and civic engagement while respecting the complexity of lived history and the tensions of political and social life. Kundera’s belief that the novel was the most appropriate intellectual tool for challenging socialist authoritarianism (The Art 165) was powerfully exemplified by the Yugoslav literature of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Heritage and inheritors: The literary canon in totalitarian Bulgaria Alexander Kiossev in collaboration with Boyko Penchev

I Efforts to establish a Bulgarian literary canon began only in the 1890s (see the Section on literary histories in vol. 3). Prior to this, Bulgarian men of letters were full of self-doubt and passionately debated the question whether their literature and literary heritage even existed. But by the 1880s academic historicism and philology started to attack the negative topos that Bulgarian literature did not really exist. By means of professionally collecting, storing, preserving, and cataloguing the literary heritage, teaching and interpreting “great works,” and writing textbooks and literary histories, the philology professors Alexander Teodorov-Balan,

Heritage and inheritors

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Benjo Conev, and Ivan Shishmanov managed to constitute a clearly framed disciplinary field called “Bulgarian literature.” Their academic tradition was continued by the second and third generation literary historians, professors Boyan Penev, Jordan Ivanov, Georgi Konstantinov and others. But literary culture outside the universities continued to question the concept of “Bulgarian classics,” because it considered the literary texts up to 1910 to be politically motivated ephemeral verbal creations that did not deserve the precious labels of literature, classics, and heritage. The second generation was strengthened after 1890 with the return of a younger and welleducated intelligentsia from universities abroad that included such radical writers, intellectuals, and critics as Pencho Slaveikov, Kra˘styu Kra˘stev, Petko Todorov, Peyo Yavorov, and Ivan Radoslavov. They also declared the nullity of pre-1895 Bulgarian literature, claiming it was hastily put together for patriotic and political purposes. The writers Slaveikov, Yavorov, and Todorov, as well as the literary critic Kra˘stev, dreamt of a Nietzschean “revaluation of values,” envisioning themselves as the pioneers of a coming Bulgarian classic literature. They also invented a “genuine” literary tradition of their own, the oral song culture of the Bulgarian people, a national folklore with almost metaphysical depths. These classical writers of the future declared that this “hidden tradition” had to be continued and rewritten in order to express both the depths of the national spirit and the “modern, nervous Bulgarian soul.” The debates among the generations and literary groups at this time questioned the stability of the literary canon; they also argued over educational matters, writers’ anniversaries, literary textbooks, curricula, access to academic positions, spelling reforms, bibliographies, Bulgarian literary anthologies, and much more. The Bulgarian leftist critics were a third party in these debates. Their way of interpreting and evaluating the cultural heritage differed from both the academic tradition and the Nietzschean visions of radical modernism. During the period 1885–1939, the academic circles and the educational system tried to establish a Bulgarian literary canon, a unified national language, and a cultural code of national values, whereas the Communists and socialists developed an alternative literary culture. After the bloody political cleavage of 1923–25, leftist literature became further isolated from the official one. It was published in Communist journals and newspapers, and by publishing houses whose editors were often closely connected to the Communist Party leaders or rival leftist factions. This literature promoted aggressive countervalues and sought its own circles of poets and writers, its own readership, and leading critics that would fight for their ideological alternatives. Young authors who communicated with the Bulgarian literary establishment or dared to publish outside the party press were considered to be renegades. Prominent leftist critics such as Dimitar Blagoev, Dimitar Dimitrov, Georgi Kirkov, Georgi Bakalov, Georgi Tzanev, and Ivan Meshekov usually fought on several fronts: against official patriotic literature as well as “decadent” writing, against “agrarian fascism” as well as “bourgeois individualism and aesthetic formalism.” Leftist criticism wanted to find the “social equivalent” of the literary work, which was mechanistically identified with its literary meaning and social-cultural import. During the early period, Bulgarian Communist critics had little respect for the most prominent Bulgarian writers. They declared that Vazov, Slaveikov, Stojan Mihailovski, Yavorov, and other “bourgeois” writers were hostile to the genuine proletarian tradition. They

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considered these well-known authors (already institutionalized in school- and university textbooks) as typical of the limitations of the “oriental symptoms” (Bakalov) in a declining bourgeoisie, or as speakers for the isolated intellectual. Hence they were unworthy of being included in “the great Bulgarian tradition” and “the classic literary heritage.” Todor Pavlov, who came to represent and almost personify the cultural policy of the Bulgarian left in the 1930s and 40s, gradually broke through this leftist self-isolation. His Communist activity and literary criticism began in a rather traditional way. Pavlov was in the 1920s and 30s a leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party who participated in its legal activities as well as in its revolutionary and subversive struggles. He was active as a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, as an editor of Communist magazines and newspapers, as a leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, and as a founder of the Union of Bulgarian Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers (1932), which was set up to oppose the bourgeois union of Bulgarian writers established in 1913. Pavlov was imprisoned for terrorist activities in 1923, 1925–26, and 1927. The essays, poems, and short stories in Pavlov’s Luchi v preizpodnjata. Pisma iz zatvora 1923–1929 (Beams in Hell. Letters from Prison 1923–1929), published only in 1947, represent a typical leftist attempt to create an alternative tradition. Contrasting a cosmic panorama of the future with the “stinking hell” of prison, Pavlov envisioned a Communist pantheon of immortal poets and heroic classics as new “bright stars in the sky of the people’s soul.” These bright stars were authors like Hristo Smirnenski, Hristo Yasenov, Geo Milev, Sergei Rumjancev, and Tzanko Tzerkovski, none of whom were mentioned then in textbooks or included in the Bulgarian canon. Pavlov’s list was polemically opposed to the traditional canon of prominent “bourgeois writers.” His stars were staunch adversaries of the Modernist poets and critics Pencho Slaveikov, Kra˘styu Kra˘stev, and Peyo Yavorov (later also Teodor Trayanov and Ivan Radoslavov), who promoted themselves as the “young Classics” in a “new and genuinely modern” Bulgarian literature. Pavlov’s alternative constellation of “Communist Classics” was nevertheless linked to the national tradition through the expropriation of a revolutionary founder, the poet-genius Botev, and a transformation of the ideological metaphors and heroic imagery of the Bulgarian national movement. Pavlov claimed that Botev was the organic beginner of the Communist progression; the spiritual inspiration of his poetry was to be found in the dramatic experience of the imprisoned revolutionaries and the illegal struggle of the Communists — not in textbooks, dead libraries, and the official theatres of bourgeois Bulgaria. Legitimizing their adversary stance by inventing a tradition for it was a typical strategy for the Communist critics of the 1920s and early 1930s, when no “canon building policy” existed among the Communist literati. Pavlov himself strove not for consensual stability, cohesion, and continuity of “our” Bulgarian tradition, but for a list that reinforced Communist political orthodoxy. In 1930 Pavlov wrote another critical study based on these tenets, this time directed against the liberal Marxist Ivan Meshekov, whom Pavlov refused to call a Marxist, for Meshekov wanted to unite the proletarian poets and their non-proletarian “satellites” into a coherent “working class” tradition. Pavlov confronted his rival with an angry rhetorical question: One cannot deny that Liliev, Yavorov, Debelyanov and other bourgeois writers have influenced Smirnenski and the rest of our proletarian poets — but does that mean that we have the right


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to speak of a patrimonial “continuity” between proletarian poetry and Slaveikov’s or Yavorov’s arch-individualism and aestheticism? (Trudovo-sputnicheska 7–8)

In 1932 the Central Committee of the Communist Party sent Pavlov to Stalin’s Soviet Union in order to further his political education. This was a decisive turn in his life and, indirectly, in the fortunes of the Bulgarian literary canon. Through the mysterious workings of Stalin’s voluntaristic policy, Pavlov was appointed professor of philosophy at the famous Institute of Red Professorship. A year later he became honorary doctor in philosophy and dean of the Moscow School of Philosophy, History, and Literature. His vertiginous career vent beyond institutional successes. In Moscow he published in Russian the Theoriia otrazheniia (The Theory of Reflection; 1936), the key epistemological works of Stalinist philosophy, , and two years later his fundamental General Theory of Art. These were followed by a collection of critical essays, in which he dared to attack — with strong “dialectical-Leninist” arguments — such leading Communist critics as the Hungarian Georg Lukács, the Croat Zvonimir Richtman, and the Russians Mikhail Lifshitz, Elena Usievich, and Valerian Fedorovich Pereverzev (the latter was sent to Siberia for his “vulgar sociologism”). At home in Bulgaria, Pavlov enjoyed now the aura of Communist authority as an expolitical prisoner and an internationally recognized leader in Communist philosophy and literary criticism. During the late 1930s and early 40s he published an incredible number of books and party brochures, creating with them his own mighty Stalinist theoretical paradigm. His encyclopedic drive led him to write between 1938 and 1940 on all “important topics,” including Metaphysics and Dialectics, Nation and Culture, Freedom of Will, Chance and Necessity, Philosophy and the Sciences, and Contemporary Philosophical Trends. Within those two years he also wrote a series of popularizing books on Democracy, Matter, Nation, Patriotism, Practice, Consciousness, Philosophy, and Art, and he published Kritika i “kritika” na literaturni filosofski temi (Criticism and “Criticism” on Literary and Philosophical Topics), as well as books on Venko Markovski, Georgi Bakalov, Mayakovsky, and Hristo Botev. During this period Pavlov silently rejected the isolationism of the leftist literary tradition. Undoubtedly inspired by a Stalinist nationalism, his writings were dominated already by the classic Marxist concepts of heritage, national tradition, preservation, and continuation. He ceased to compile lists of orthodox proletarian writers and no longer excluded a priori the canonized names and the representatives of “bourgeois individualism.” His main task as theoretician, literary critic, and historian now became the “correct” (objective, Marxist, scientific, dialectic) evaluation and representation of the whole national literary heritage. His new policy of inclusion involved as a mighty methodological and rhetorical tool a simplistic variant of the Marxist dialectic method. His long residence in the Soviet Union, the fame of his Red Professorship, and his hard-core theoretical work, gave Pavlov the conviction that he was the only Bulgarian in full command of that method. Pavlov’s new rhetoric appropriated the national literary heritage by means of a double move. First he dedicated to his “forefathers,” Blagoev, Bakalov, and others, a series of articles that “purged” leftist criticism of its “vulgar sociologist” and cultural “nihilism”:

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Alexander Kiossev Our relationship to the creative work and the heritage of Ivan Vazov and the rest of the Bulgarian classics needs a precise revision, so that we do not to fall into the trap of vulgar sociologism and we do not swing to the other extreme, the position of aesthetic formalism. (Etyudi 300)

By “raising” the extremes of the left and the right into his own brand of “Hegelian” synthesis, Pavlov arrogated for himself a privileged meta-position. Cleansed of both the false bourgeois and the immature leftist extremes, and strengthened by the “maturity” granted by historical circumstances and trends, Pavlov saw himself as the only legitimate dialectical interpreter of the leftist literary legacy. He implicitly considered himself as the embodiment of a great dialectical synthesis, the only critic fully in command of the Bulgarian cultural heritage. The next, “anti-nihilistic,” step involved the retrieval of those previously excluded from proletarian culture, and the construction of new types of “wholeness” and “continuity.” The allinclusive narrative of dialectical and historical materialism now opened widely, so as to admit literary figures and phenomena that were previously excluded as alien, bourgeois, and reactionary. Thus Pavlov wrote in 1940: “I can’t imagine a contemporary development of our Bulgarian poetry without the entire poetry of Peyo Yavorov” (Etyudi 307), though ten years earlier he had labeled the same Yavorov an “arch-individualist,” and he attacked Meshekov for seeking a continuity between Yavorov and “our” proletarian poetry. “Arch-individualism,” now Yavorov’s only “negative” contribution to Bulgaria’s literary development, was no longer an obstacle to “continuity.” Yavorov’s tragic individual experience, Pavlov now claimed, allowed Bulgarian poetry to overcome the “traps of individualism” quickly and decisively. In this manner, the politically undesirable features of Yavorov’s poetry could further the dialectic development of Bulgarian literature. Following this “mature” dialectical method, Pavlov now favored those Bulgarian classics that, according to him, had until then been misunderstood and underestimated by the left as well as the right. In 1940 he turned against M. Arnaudov, who claimed that Botev’s twenty masterful poems were mere fragments of a great confession that his untimely death left incomplete. Pavlov was especially incensed by the idea of fragmentation. His strategy against the “bourgeois professor” was to demonstrate that the dialectical method could incorporate a classic and a romantic rhetoric: the ancient classical heritage had also come down to us in fragments only, but this did not destroy its “organic internal wholeness.” The latter was essential to genuine classical writers like Botev. Pavlov wanted to go beyond the “undialectical” argument that poetic geniuses simply “expressed” the soul of the people. According to him, Botev’s poetry was not accidental, fragmentary, and unfinished; his genius and poetry were dialectic and necessary products of the mighty historical tendencies of his age: [Botev] is an extreme manifestation of the deepest essence, the unconscious drive, and the conscious goal of the whole revolutionary spirit of the Bulgarian People and the Human Spirit in general! This is the reason for the force, greatness, beauty, and irresistible charm of Botev’s poetry! This is the reason behind its genuine immortality! (Botev 24)

“Dialectical” rhetoric is thus potentially all-inclusive: it surreptitiously replaces the dominant historical narrative of national emancipation with the sublime “objective dialectics of history,” radically transforming the romantic idea of the genius and the traditional discourse on the classics. According to the romantics, great authors are universal and immortal because they have


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the ability to express the immortal soul of the people. Through this mystical connection poets are able to transcend their time and their local circumstances. They are “contemporaries” of all epochs, and their works are “eternally alive.” In Pavlov’s Marxist dialectics the subject’s ability to express and to transcend is transferred to history, the only self-transcending agent that transcends also its own limitations. Furthermore, history’s dialectic movement expresses itself in works of genius. Not historians, philosophers, and literary critics, but History and Literature bring about the synthesis. The Pavlovian critic that speaks of a “negation of negation” and of “dialectical synthesis” speaks the very language of objective reality. No difference exists between History and the Hegelian-Marxist-Stalinist meta-language: the all-explaining and allinclusive theoretical language of Pavlov is totalitarian and secure.

II While the years 1936–44 could be called a “one-man theoretical Stalinism” in Bulgaria, the following period deserves the name “institutionalized mass Stalinism.” After the victory of the Red Army on September 9, 1944, a new Bulgarian regime was installed by the Anti-fascist Democratic National Front that was doomed from the beginning to lose its quasi-democratic character and be transformed into a Stalinist dictatorship. The earlier alternative leftist literary movement was now forcefully transformed into a totalitarian literary culture that tolerated no alternative. Totalitarianism was introduced both by direct repression and by the deeper and subtler manipulation of the unstable national literary heritage. The Communist repression covered a whole spectrum of cultural agents and fields. First of all, it masterminded brutal attacks against all autonomous literary voices that had earlier possessed cultural credibility and prestige. The aggression was directed against prominent Bulgarian writers, literary critics, and academics, who were accused of having been linked to the previous fascist government. Some of them were jailed, others were banished to provincial towns. Publishing was effectively prohibited for most of those who were ideologically suspect. The spreading of Communist terror silenced others or made them accomplices and obedient members of the new art unions. The bureaucratization, centralization, and strict ideological control of all literary and cultural life — schools, universities, unions of writers and journalists, publishing houses and the reading public — became one of the most successful tools of Communist cultural policy. The public domain was subjected to a severe Communist criticism that accompanied the gradual introduction of censorship and self-censorship in the Bulgarian radio, the main newspapers, and magazines. Some books were locked away in special library departments; library catalogues were purged of suspicious titles. Socialist Realism was introduced between 1944 and 1948, first as a dominant and then as only normative horizon for creating and receiving literary texts. Marxist theory, no matter how orthodox, was during those years always subservient to Party practice. The Party (its leader and his closest associates) was so sovereign that it could even dismiss theory as mere dogmatism. This explains why Todor Pavlov and other high-ranking party functionaries with side interests in literature were more flexible and tolerant than Pantelei Zarev, Pencho Danchev, Stoyan Karolev, and other professional men of letters who, without substantial party credentials, were

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busy reassessing the literary heritage and judging the new literature between 1944 and 1952. This became especially clear in the notorious 1951–52 debate around Dimita˘r Dimov’s Tyutyun (see p. 458–60), in which overzealous champions of Socialist Realism like Zarev were denounced. An editorial of the official daily Rabotnichesko delo, most probably by the party leader Valko Chervenkov himself, called him dogmatic and “out of touch with reality”: the Communist Party would not tolerate curtailing its judgment, even if it was based on its own theory. The Communist Party imposed its monopoly on culture through a system of interventions that ensured its dominance over the public space. After 1949 there were no private publishers left in Bulgaria and no periodicals except for those of the Communist Party. The weekly Literaturen Front (The Literary Front), established on September 29, 1944, became the chief promoter of the Party line and, from May 1945 onward, the official organ of the Union of Bulgarian Writers (UBW). After the National Conference of Bulgarian Writers in September 1945, the UBW became the primary instrument for masterminding the course of literature. It supervised the Literaturen Front and the magazine Septemvri, as well as the largest literary publisher, the Ba˘lgarski pisatel, founded in 1947 and responsible for publishing new editions of the Bulgarian Classics. Once primarily a private initiative, the republication of Bulgarian literary classics became after 1944 completely state-controlled. Two main editions emerged gradually. The multi-volume editions of the most important authors, the so-called Selected Works and Complete Works, were allegedly accurate and exhaustive but actually cleaned of certain “incorrect” texts and passages. The Biblioteka za uchenika (Student Library) for the school curricula comprised selected texts of an author or literary trend in thousands of copies, appropriately prefaced and referenced. During the first Communist years, discourse on literary history was dominated by the concepts of Realism and “discrepancy between ideology and method,” both coined in pre-1944 leftist criticism. The writers of the literary tradition were revaluated and categorized as “us” and “them.” Literary criticism could appropriate realist, revolutionary, and even problematic bourgeois authors such as Yavorov and Pencho Slaveikov. Realism — the principle supporting the epistemological model of totalitarian literary criticism — meant in this context portraying what matters in reality and portraying it according to Historical Materialism and class struggle. Revolution was at the heart of all realist art. Pantelei Zarev’s Problemi na razvitieto na ba˘lgarskata literatura (Problems of the Development of Bulgarian Literature) makes this logic blatantly clear: Realism, i.e., the truthful artistic depiction of reality in antagonistic class society, proves intransigent to that reality by revealing its true inconsistencies. The struggle for or against realism, for the cognitive and operative meaning of art, is thus actually not just a theoretical question but a political one as well. (34)

The discrepancy between method and ideology was the second key topic in the literary-historical discourse of the time. Based on Engels’s famous dictum that authors who were conservative in their private lives could portray the world truthfully when they wrote as artists, Bulgarian Communist criticism permitted inconsistencies between an author’s subjective views and his objective art. Thus, controversial bourgeois writers who had “mistaken” views but the right artistic insights could be reconsidered. This quasi-dialectic was based on the belief that a genuine


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literary work was first and foremost “objective” knowledge, while the subjective person could be discounted. The author’s self-awareness was insignificant: Pencho Slaveikov, for example, was recognized not for what he thought he was writing but for what he “unwillingly” expressed. This was the logic of Pencho Danchev’s Inividualizmat v nashata literatura (Individualism in Our Literature), which set itself the difficult task of appropriating from a correct Marxist standpoint the works of the first Bulgarian Modernists. In short, the post-1944 conceptual instruments and rhetorical techniques of the Communist critics were not new; radically novel was only the Party’s monopoly over the distribution and reproduction of cultural capital. The process that started within the leftist culture of the 1930s ended by depriving literature of all autonomy.

III This was the context of Pavlov’s later critical work, the golden age of the “lone Stalinist theoretician” in the People’s Republic. Pavlov’s career progressed stunningly. As a member of the Parliament’s Presidium he became one of Bulgaria’s three Regents (1944–46). In the division of power within the Communist leadership he was put in charge of the whole “superstructure,” and he came to occupy between 1945 and 1950 almost all of the crucial positions in ideology and cultural policy. He was among other things the “honorary chairman” of the new Union of Bulgarian writers, chairman of the Union of Journalists, chairman of the Bulgarian Academy of Science, founder of the Institute of Philosophy, professor and head of the philosophy department at the University of Sofia, doctor honoris causa at the same university, and chair of the SovietBulgarian Union. During this period Pavlov was apparently not involved in any direct or indirect repression of Bulgarian letters; he left that job to less important figures. But he was so heavily engaged in the state’s cultural and literary policy that one could get the impression, perhaps mistakenly, he was its single ruler. Between 1945 and 1948 he wrote a new series of books and brochures on the tasks of the “National Literary Front,” on the scientific plans of the Bulgarian Academy, on the teachers of the people, on “Science and Party Policy,” and much more. As he was especially concerned with the Bulgarian cultural and literary heritage, he treated the classics and interpreted literary issues within a comprehensive “historical dialectics.” By 1945–46 Pavlov’s idea of history lost its vague and abstract philosophical flavor. History now meant the heroic battles of World War II and the crowning victory on September 9, 1944, followed by the first five-year plan and the building of Socialism. In short, he identified history with the History of the Communist Party. References to crucial events within this History or to exemplary “party narratives” were mandatory rhetorical rituals in his numerous speeches. On Dimitar Polyanov’s anniversary, for instance, Pavlov began with a panegyric on the victory of the armies of the Third Ukrainian Front near lake Balaton, while his speech at Vazov’s anniversary opened with the following sophisticated ritual: After completing their heroic antifascist revolution on the 9th of September 1944, and after having been liberated with the decisive help of the Soviet army, the Bulgarian people had to

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After this stock introduction the question of heritage could be addressed in a “dialectic” fashion: It is a proven fact that the completion of the five-year plan and the building of an economic and cultural base in our country have been carried out successfully. It is also a proven fact that a socialist culture cannot be built without a proper base, and that one cannot erect the building of Socialism without articulating a new culture, national in its form and socialist in its content. Hence the unprecedented importance that is attached today to the positive cultural heritage, which can and must be included (although on a qualitatively new basis) in the building of our new people’s socialist culture. It logically follows that people today express great love, esteem, and reverence for all democratic and progressive national figures from our close or distant past. They never enjoyed (and never could enjoy) such reverence and love under the reactionary, monarchist, and fascist regimes. (Ivan Vazov 7–8)

The claim of these ubiquitous Communist mantras was that the dialectic of the Communist present and future, as well as the teleological march of Communist History, revived the cultural past and revealed its importance “on a qualitatively new basis,” which, according to Pavlov, “dialectically raised” this heritage. Since the positive cultural heritage had such an unprecedented importance for the building of Socialism, cultural policy was a state and party concern. Along with the struggle for a new, proletarian “literary front” and the ideological unification of all “progressive intellectual forces,” the Party never forgot the “literary heritage.” Under Todor Pavlov’s towering presence as chairman of the Academy of Science and of the Writers’ Union, an army of lesser Communist cultural activists carefully examined and cultivated this precious heritage. The procedure for ideological and institutional Aufheben was painful and uneasy. They involved introducing a mandatory ideological frame for interpretation, regulating the list and hierarchy of classics, and imposing new political norms in public debates. The party organized a number of anniversaries dedicated to Vazov, Botev, Polyanov, and other classical writers. The cultural activists of the Party rewamped all the university curricula and the school syllabi; they revised the textbooks or wrote new ones. They exercised visible and invisible censorship and made crude ideological choices through the new, party controlled publishing houses. Pavlov himself wrote several articles dedicated to the “right Communist understanding and evaluation” of Botev and Vazov, the two outstanding representatives of classical Bulgarian literature. His papers and anniversary speeches officially codified the norms for their “proper reading and understanding,” listed their small mistakes and “great, immortal contributions,” and established the official view that Botev was definitely greater than Vazov on account of his revolutionary life, heroic death, and Utopian Socialism. Nevertheless, Pavlov participated in the preparation of a new standard Vazov edition work. After proclaiming the genius and immortality of “our” classics and claiming for them a place next to Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Tolstoy, the heritage could no longer be questioned: ideological dictatorship stabilized Bulgarian literature and proclaimed its classic quality. Popularization demanded a language for the masses. If style is the man, then the metamorphoses of Pavlov’s style and rhetoric exemplify his loss of individuality. The high party


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functionary spoke impersonally, in an institutional Communist style, and his Marxist philosophy gradually succumbed to the wooden language of Stalinist totalitarianism. The philosophical dialectics of Hegel and Marx had to be pressed into lexical and syntactic clichés in order to serve a thoughtless rhetoric at great public meetings. Pavlov’s beloved turn of phrase was that Botev, Vazov, or Yavorov “were and will remain (or be).” This odd figure of speech merged classic universalist transcendence with Marxist historicism. Always in need of ritualistic slogans and signs of loyalty to the power, totalitarian language turned Hegel and Marx into hypnotic formulae. But this ritualization and automatization of language created exegetical problems. Would the masses be able to find sense and emotion behind the automatism? Would they understand correctly the Party’s intention? How were they to interpret the instructions of Todor Pavlov, the prominent Marxist philosopher? Such questions led to a new series of loyal interpretations and shibboleths that transformed the meta-language into a hermeneutic object in itself. Pavlov’s texts became more important than those of Vazov or Botev. Paradoxically, this was a further step towards canonizing Botev and Vazov and stabilizing the golden treasure of Bulgarian literature, for as preferred interpretive subjects of Pavlov’s authoritarian voice they too became unquestionable. Nobody dared to propose or even mention the earlier projects for an alternative Bulgarian literature. The unstable Bulgarian literary canon became thus fixed through centralization, bureaucratization, Aufheben, and a stringent control by a Marxist ideological discourse that evolved (or degenerated) into automatic mass rituals. This was accompanied by the destruction of all alternative centers of cultural authority, the prohibition of all autonomous realms of public communication, the takeover of all cultural institutions, and the repression of all rival literary voices. After this successful expropriation of the symbolic capital of the nation, the ideologically fixed Bulgarian classics became just another (cultural) metonym of totalitarian language. More than fifteen years had to pass before a new generation of critics risked some heretical interpretations. But due to its restricted literary horizon, this new generation of critics was unable to question the neatly ordered field of values, great authors, and classical texts called Bulgarian literature. They were unable to see that the literary horizon of their discipline was held together by the ghost of the Communist Commander.

1945 John Neubauer in collaboration with Marcel Cornis-Pope, Mieczysław Døbrowski, George Grabowicz, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Svetlana Slapšak, Guido Snel, Marzena Sokolowska-Pary˙z and Tomas Venclova

I. The war years The prewar exodus Paris, already the temporary home of the Romanians Benjamin Fundoianu, Ilarie Voronca, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu, and Mihail Cosma, received the Czech František Langer, the Pole Antoni Słonimski, and the Croat-Hungarian Ervin Šinko. Most of the émigrés, however, did not stay long: Šinkó joined the partisans in Croatia; Fundoianu signed up with the French Resistance; Langer and Słonimski escaped to London. The Serbs Miloš Crnjanski and Rastko Petrovic´ quit the Yugoslav diplomatic service and stayed in London and the US, respectively, where they were stationed. Mircea Eliade remained in the Romanian diplomatic service in Portugal and moved to Paris immediately after the war. The exodus to the Americas was relatively small: the Pole Witold Gombrowicz ended up in Argentina; the Lithuanian Antanas Vaicˇiulaitis arrived in the US in 1940, as did the Serbian Jovan Ducˇic´ (via Lisbon), the German-Czech Johannes Urzidil (via England), and the Poles Julian Tuwim (via Rio) and Jan Lechon´ (who committed suicide later in New York). Kafka’s friend Max Brod found his way to Israel. The Slovaks Theo Florin and Vlado Clementis settled in London, where the latter published two Slovak poetry anthologies, Zem spieva (The Land Is Singing; 1942, rev. ed., 1945) and Hnev svätý (Holy Anger, 1944). The communist and leftist writers who fled to Moscow included the Hungarians Béla Balázs, Andor Gábor, Gyula Háy, Béla Illés, Georg Lukács, and József Révai; the Lithuanians Eduardas Mieželaitis and Salome˙ja Ne˙ris; the Bulgarian Todor Pavlov; the Poles Jerzy Putrament and Adam Waz˙yk; and the Latvian Andrejs Upı¯ts. The outbreak of the war World War II, like the first one, was triggered by conflicts in East-Central Europe. In both cases, however, the powers controlling the wars resided beyond its borders. In World War II, the aggressor was unequivocally Germany’s Nazi regime, which launched its assault with the annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938. The Munich pact signed on September 29, 1938 set in motion the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, which involved Slovakia, Carpatho-Ukraine, and Hungary, and culminated in the German invasion on March 15, 1939. Slovakia’s autonomy was proclaimed in October 1938, and by the time of the German invasion the Slovak Republic was alread as a satellite state of Nazi Germany. The Slovak writer Janko Jesenský foresaw the war in “Tyran” (dni 9–11) as early as October 1937, while František Halas’s Torzo nadeˇje (Torso of Hope) cried out in anguish about

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the abandonment of Czechoslovakia. In May 1938 Peter Jilemnický, Ladislav Novomeský, Emil Boleslav Lukácˇ, and Hana Gregorová signed the joint Czech-Slovak manifesto, Veˇrni zu˚staneme. K svedomiu sveta (We Shall Remain Loyal. To the Conscience of the World). Other Slovak protests against the loss of territories to Hungary and the separation from the Czech part of the republic included Lukácˇ’s “Belvedere, On September 2, 1938 Vienna” (Pred ohnivým drakom; 1939), Novomeský’s editorial “Nelúcˇenie” (Non-parting) and his essay “O roku 1939” (On 1939), as well as Michal Chorváth’s Romantická tvár Slovenska (1939) which tried to explain why Czechoslovakia failed and why the young generation could not identify with the ideology of the republic. Jesenský responded to the partitioning with “Návrh” (Suggestion; dni 20) and “Vazal” (Vassal; dni 32), but the volume Cˇierne dni (Black Days), and Jesenský’s other warpoetry collection, Na zlobu dnˇa (On the Rancor of the Day), could be published only in 1945. During the war, Jesenský wrote exclusively for exile publications. Not all Slovak writers were against the partitioning. Tido Jozef Gašpar, for instance, welcomed the separate Slovak state in Vel’ký rok (A Grand Year) as a fulfillment of an age-old struggle for Slovak national emancipation. In 1940 a “cultural workers” conference was held to coordinate cultural policy with state ideology. Gašpar, later the director of the Propaganda Office, presided. Stanislav Mecˇiar, the new editor of the Slovenské pohl’ady, spoke about the importance of literature in the new state. Milo Urban, fiction writer and editor of the daily Gardista, reported that cultural workers reacted positively to the new political situation. The invasion of Poland After concluding a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 24, 1939 (the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact), Hitler gave the order to invade Poland on September 1, 1939 while Soviet troops marched into eastern Poland on September 17. The first weeks of the war became deeply engraved in Polish consciousness and memory. The German air raids that awakened Warsaw on September 1 to the brutality of war reality continued with mounting intensity until the city’s capitulation twenty-seven days later. Słonimski, already in exile, wrote: I hear the roar of the night raids. They glide over the city. Not planes. The devastated churches soar, Gardens turned into graveyards, Ruins, wreckage, rubble, Streets and houses familiar from childhood years, Traugutta and S´wie˛tokrzyska, Niecała and Nowy S´wiat, And soars the city on wings of fame And falls stone-weight on the heart. To the core. I announce the alarm for the city of Warsaw. Let it last! (“Alarm” Wybór poezji 60–61)

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“Soar” has a double meaning here: the stones of the church “soar” under the bombardment, while the capital “soars on wings of fame”; the speaker raises honor and glory above Warsaw’s physical existence, thus initiating a poetic “Myth of Warsaw.” The poem loudly echoes the famous 1939 radio speech of Stefan Starzyn´ski, Warsaw’s mayor: though in the places where wonderful orphanages were supposed to be, there are now ruins; where parks were supposed to be, there are now barricades covered with corpses; though our houses and libraries are on fire, though our hospitals burn, today — not in fifty, not in one hundred years — the Warsaw that defends the honor of Poland is at the peak of its greatness and fame. (Gronczewski 109–110)

Other poems on the city’s defense that glorified Warsaw include Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski’s “Zstøp, duchu mocy” (Descend Thou, Spirit of Power; Poezje 1: 211–12), written on September 5, and his “Modlitwa za zmarłych w Warszawie” (Prayer for the Dead in Warsaw), which beseeches the Lord with fervor: Lord of Justice, behold this measureless work The freedom constantly rising from them Though it had waned as they died one by one: Open the Heaven’s gate before them, Embrace them within your heroic church Preserve their might and give them back, oh Lord, Their motherland as eternal possession. (Poezje 219)

Many postwar fictional accounts of the September campaign and Warsaw’s defense, some written directly after the war, adopted a different tone, in part to accommodate the new political perspective on the events. While they show how common citizens and soldiers defended their country and, as in the case of Stanisław Zielin´ski’s Stara szabla (The Old Sword; 1957) and Jerzy S. Stawin´ski’s Szesć´ wcielen´ Jana Piszczyka (The Six Embodiments of Jan Piszczyk; 1959), portray the beginning of the war in humorous as well as mocking tones, they frequently take also an ironic view of the proud official assurances on Poland’s preparedness for war (“We refuse to surrender even a button from our uniform!”). Stefan Kisielewski’s highly personal Sprzysie˛z˙enie (Conspiracy; 1947) and Jerzy Putrament’s Wrzesien´ (September; 1952) portray the inadequacy of the preparation, the chaos, and the defeat from an explicitly leftist perspective. Wojciech Z˙ukrowski’s Z kraju milczenia (1946) describes September 1939 in the manner of Sienkiewicz, combining the tradition of chivalry (horses, swords) with Catholic subjects (the church). Z˙ukrowski’s Polish soldiers lack discipline and prudence in action; they try to push back the enemy one-by-one or in irregular formations, defending not so much their country’s independence as their own honor. Jan Józef Szczepan´ski’s Polska jesien´ (Polish Autumn; 1955) portrays a psychological crisis. Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Przed sødem (Before the Court; 1945) examines the ethical question of friendship and devotion from a Catholic point of view. The September campaign features also in Melchior Wan´kowicz’s Wrzesien´ z˙agwiøcy (A Scorching September; 1947) and Westerplatte (1959), as well as in Konstanty I. Gałczyn´ski’s “Piesń´ o z˙ołnierzach z Westerplatte” (Song about the Soldiers of Westerplatte; Wiersze 329–330).

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The war and its victims The Baltic countries came under Soviet control in 1939 and were officially annexed in June 1940, the very month that Stalin’s ultimatum forced Romania to cede Bessarabia and northern Bucovina to the Soviet Union. On August 30, 1940, the Axis powers pressured Romania to surrender northern Transylvania to Hungary and southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. After the resignation of Carol II, King of Romania, General Antonescu assumed command on September 13, 1940 and joined the Axis powers on November 23 in the war against the Soviet Union. When the Italian troops failed in their attempt to invade Greece from Albania in 1940, the German army moved into the Balkans. The changing fortunes of the war between Italy and Greece, the activity of Albanian partisans, the Allied bombing, and the German occupation of a small Albanian city are masterfully portrayed in Ismail Kadare’s Kronikë ne gur (Chronicle in Stone; 1971). The traditional world and childhood of the pubescent narrator are gradually destroyed by the bloody war. His naïve, trusting, and detached observations are punctuated by inane passages from the newspapers and bulletins of the occupying armies that “chronicle” the events from an official perspective. Bulgaria joined the Axis powers on March 1, 1941 and moved into Macedonia to implement the “Bulgarian Ideal,” which it had unsuccessfully tried to do since 1878, claiming that Macedonia was predominately Bulgarian. Yugoslavia also joined the Axis on March 25, 1941. The failed military uprising of General Simovic´ against this decision gave the Germans the excuse to invade Yugoslavia via Hungary and Bulgaria on April 6. By April 17, Yugoslavia capitulated and Croatia switched sides under an Ustaša puppet government. Dobrica Cósic´, Edvard Kocbek, Ivan Goran Kovacˇic´, Vladimir Nazor, Ervin Šinko, and other writers joined the partisans. In Latvia, 1941 was the Year of Terror: during the Black Night of June 14 thousands were deported to Siberia. On June 22, 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union but, after initial success, met serious resistance and were finally defeated in the key battles at Stalingrad (September 4, 1942 - February 2, 1943) and on the Don bend. The allied Hungarian and the Romanian troops incurred significant casualties. Four years later, by May 7, 1945, the war was over, although peace came too late for millions of victims. We can list here only a few writers who died violent deaths in concentration camps, in forced labor, in the hands of the Gestapo or paramilitary groups, while fighting as partisans, or by committing suicide. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, an eminent writer, philosopher, and painter, was among the first victims. As Władysław Lech Terlecki relates in Gwiazda Piołun (The Star Wormwood; 1968), he fled eastward to escape the German invaders but committed suicide when the Red Army invaded Poland from the east. The Polish victims also include Krzysztof Kamil Baczyn´ski, Tadeusz Gajcy, Andrzej Trzebin´ski, Leon Z. Stroin´ski, Jerzy K. Weintraub, Ewa Pohoska, and others of the generation of “Columbuses.” Named after Roman Bratny’s 1957 novel Kolumbowie rocznik 20 (Columbuses Born in 1920), this generation reached artistic maturity but perished during the Warsaw Uprising or in other forms of insurrection. Gajcy’s first volume, Widma (Spectres), held promise of a brilliant poet. Baczyn´ski, the most important member of this generation, wrote poetry that cultivated new metaphors and showed a deep faith as well as philosophical insights. Turning to Polish Romanticism in works like “Modlitwa I”

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(Prayer I), “Pokolenie” (Generation), “Historia,” “Z głowø na karabinie” (Resting With Their Head on the Rifle), and “Elegia” (Spiew z poz˙ogi 193, 230, 206, 234, and 200), he cautiously broached historical, philosophical, and eschatological issues, refraining from addressing the occupation directly. No part of East-Central Europe escaped the carnage. Among the dead were: the Czechs Karel Polácˇek, Josef Cˇapek, and Julius Fucˇík; the Romanians Nicolae Iorga, Benjamin Fundoianu/Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca (who committed suicide in 1946); the Hungarians Miklós Radnóti, Antal Szerb, and Andor Endre Gelléri; the Croatians Ivan Goran Kovacˇic´, killed by Cˇetniks under unclear circumstances, and August Cesarec, who was killed by the Ustaša when he tried to escape from the Kerestinec concentration camp. The Macedonian Kocˇo Racin and the Croatian Hasan Kikic´ died in combat. The Ukrainians Oleh Ol’zhych and Olena Teliha were murdered by the Nazis. The Estonian Heiti Talvik and the Polish communist Bruno Jasien´ski died while in Soviet captivity. Letters, memoirs, diaries, and poems by Fucˇík, Korczak, Kovacˇic´, Polácˇek, Radnóti, and others — some jotted down during the very last moments of their lives — represent the most moving legacy of these barbaric years. The few who survived include the Poles Tadeusz Borowski, Tadeusz Róz˙ewicz, Roman Bratny, Bohdan Czeszko, Miron Białoszewski, and Lesław M. Bartelski; the Hungarians Imre Kertész, István Örkény, and Erno˝ Szép; the Romanians Tudor Arghezi, Sergiu Dan, and Elie Wiesel; and the Lithuanian Balys Sruoga. Literature and its institutions War, dictatorships, and persecution destroyed the literary institutions of East-Central Europe. Ironically, German as a “lingua franca” also disappeared. The forced repatriation of Germans at the end of the war merely completed a process that began quietly during the interwar period in the newly independent countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states, but that took a dramatic turn when the German-Jewish culture disappeared in the Holocaust. As Antonín Meˇštˇan writes: “It was Hitler who liquidated the German literature of Prague, by no means the Czech nationalists or the communists after 1945” (Geschichte 330). The same can be said of the German literature in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, and the Baltic countries; only in Romania did it revive during the 1960s and 70s. In most of the occupied countries the indigenous journals, publishers, theaters, and other literary institutions were either closed or severely censored in their operation. Clandestine activities and publications were most numerous in Poland. The literati met in the house of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz near Warsaw and in Krzeszowice near Cracow; underground journals appeared; manuscripts were bought from writers with the help of funds from émigrés; and scholarships were granted. Mimeographed or printed illegal publications circulated widely, but, of course, much of the writing produced during the war had to wait until the conclusion of the fighting before it could be published. Examples are the stories from Andrzejewski’s 1945 volume Noc and Stanisław Dygat’s Jezioro Boden´skie (Lake Constance), an ironic portrayal of the author’s year-long confinement in a relatively mild German camp near Lake Constance for persons with dubious nationality (Dygat held a French passport). Jezioro Boden´skie adopts an antiheroic stance and plays even with the author’s own Polish Romantic roles and clichés. Dygat

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wrote the novel in 1942–43, after he was allowed to return to Poland, but he could publish it only in 1946. Under these circumstances, poetry, with its brevity and immediacy, took center stage in all East-Central European countries. Miłosz (History 446) mentions seven clandestine poetry anthologies, two mimeographed poetry volumes by Tadeusz Gajcy, the literary monthly Droga (The Road) that Baczyn´ski co-edited, and the mimeographed monthly Sztuka i Naród (Art and the Nation; 1942–44), which had curious right-wing leanings. Borowski’s first poetry volume, Gdziekolwiek ziemia (Wherever the Earth), was printed in 165 copies in 1942, the same year that Matej Bor’s Slovene collection of partisan poetry, Previharimo viharje (We Shoot Down the Storms), appeared. The Croat poet and partisan Vladimir Nazor published Pjesme partizanke (Poems of Women Partisan) two years later in London. Skender Kulenovic´’s “Stojanka majka knežopoljka” (Stojanka, Mother of Knežpolje), written in 1942 but printed only in 1945, renders in an elegiac folk style the grief of a mother who lost her three sons on the battlefield. Together with Ivan Goran Kovacˇic´’s Jama (The Pit) this poem belongs to the most poignant and terrifying poetical responses to the war. In the Romania of the early 1940s, a new generation of rebellious poets, which included Dimitrie Stelaru, Constant Tonegaru, Ion Caraion, and Geo Dumitrescu, turned against the increasingly nationalist-militarist rhetoric. Inspired by Rimbaud, Verlaine, and their Romanian heir, George Bacovia, this Romanian “lost generation” (a counterpart to the Polish “Columbuses”) adopted nonconformist attitudes, exploding polite forms of poetry and questioning officially sanctioned truths about the war. Several volumes of poetry, including Ion Caraion’s Panopticum (1943), were confiscated by the authorities; other poems could appear only after 1944, surprising critics with their abundance, feverish freshness, apocalyptic scenes of war, and descriptions of misery back home. In Libertatea de a trage cu pus¸ca (The Freedom to Fire the Gun), written in 1942 and published in 1946, Geo Dumitrescu addressed love songs to a mistress consumed by pellagra and to people desiccated by starvation and loss of hope. Dumitrescu’s style was deliberately coarse and impatient with conventions. This was no “literature of refinement” or metaphysics, but a poetry focused on “unmediated life” (Micu, Istoria 331). The theaters were heavily censored. In Slovakia, Július Barcˇ-Ivan´s Diktátor (1938) and Mastný hrniec (Greasy Pot; 1941), Mária Rázusová-Martáková’s Jánošík (1941), and Ivan Stodola’s Mravci a svrcˇkovia (Ants and Crickets; 1943) were banned after their première. BarcˇIvan responded to the ban on Diktátor with the essay “Sadness about the Play that Was Not Performed: Addressed to the Censor.” Others resorted to ploys. Steaua fa˘ra˘ nume (The Star without a Name; 1944), a nostalgic and brief love story between a solitary teacher of mathematics and a young socialite, written by the Jewish-Romanian Mihai Sebastian, for example, was performed in 1945 under the pseudonym Victor Mincu. The liberal and democratic periodicals were closed down in Romania, first during the Royal Dictatorship (declared on February 10, 1938), and subsequently under General Ion Antonescu’s military dictatorship, which was supported briefly by the right-wing Iron Guard. Vremea, Timpul, Ecoul, Revista româna˘, and Albatros survived for a while, continuing to publish uncompromised literature and criticism. Tudor Arghezi, Victor Eftimiu, Zaharia Stancu, and other important writers were imprisoned for their interventions. In Hungary, the great modernist journal, Nyugat, closed down in 1941, though not only because of the political climate.

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In Slovakia, Jesenský resigned as chair of the Writers’ Association. The first Slovak Surrealist almanac, Áno a nie (Yes and No), was confiscated in 1938, Ján Ponicˇan’s poem Divný Janko (Strange Jack) in 1941. A collection of articles by the Russian formalists, translated and edited by Mikuláš Bakoš under the title Teória literatúry, was banned in 1942. Margita Figuli lost her job and was practically silented after publishing the short story “Olovený vták” (Leaden Bird) in 1940. The Structuralist group Spolok pre vedeckú syntézu (Association for Scientific Synthesis), established in 1937, was prohibited in 1940. The periodicals Elán and Tvorba (Creation) used allegory and double entendres to oppose the pro-Nazi regime Kultúra and Mecˇiar’s Slovenské pohlˇady were safely pro-regime. The search for Slovak national symbols raised to quasi-mythic status the robber “hero” Jánošík, the language reformer Lˇudovít Štúr, the poets Janko Králˇ and Hviezdoslav, and General Milan Rastislav Štefánik. Jánošík was featured in plays by Ján Ponicˇan and Mária RázusováMartáková, and in essays by Barcˇ-Ivan, Chorváth, and Rudo Brtánˇ. Four of Štúr’s books were published between 1941 and 1943. Janko Králˇ’s remains were ceremonially transported to the National Cemetery in Martin when his alleged grave was found. A title by Novomeský’s from 1939 suggests that poets were indiferent, were saints “Outside the Village.” Indeed, most Slovak writers watched the deportation of Jews in 1942 with a complicit silence that Chorváth, Alexander Matuška, Jozef Felix, and others considered an intellectual betrayal. Lukácˇ’s two poetry collections, Moloch (1938) and Bábel (1944), portrayed the war and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia using apocalyptic images of destruction and suffering. His expressive language conveyed a pessimistic vision of history, but also a desire to spread a message of humanism. Lukácˇ was a member of the Czechoslovak Parliament in 1936–39 and, paradoxically, of the Slovak Parliament during the war. His poetic-lyrical diary “Stép hanby” (Column of Shame), written between 1940 and 1957 but published only in the 1965 collection Hudba domova (Music of Homeland; 267–314), also comments on the war and the suppression of his voice after 1948. During the war, Ján Smrek wrote the contemplative poems “Praha 1942,” “Stalingrad 1942,” “Toulon 1942,” “Belehrad 1943,” and “Paris 1944.” First published in 1945 and later included in Knihy nocí planých (Books of Sterile Nights; 206–11, 218–28, 239–40, and 261–64 respectively), these poems reflect on history, the various national contributions to civilization, the ambiance of each city, and the future of mankind. Some, like the poem on Prague, were inspired by music, others by the political and military events of the day. The titles of Ján Kostra’s Puknutá váza (Broken Vase) and Presila smútku (Overwhelming Sadness) and Pavol Horov’s Zradné vody spodné (Treacherous Undercurrents) and Nioba matka naša (Niobe Our Mother) reveal already what kind of poetry they contain. Vladimír Reisel’s surrealistic and free-associative collection on Prague, Neskutocˇné mesto (The Unreal City; 1943) is an homage to the Czech avant-garde poet Víteˇslav Nezval, Czech culture, and their occupied country. Valentín Beniak, labeled then as a Slovak “national” poet, published several poetry collections; whereas Vigília (Christmas Eve; 1939) and Druhá Vigília (Second Christmas Eve; 1942) conformed to the ideology of the regime, his later work affirmed universal Christian values. A democratic and anti-war attitude is evident in the work of the “Sibiu Literary Circle.” The Circle included poet and playwright Radu Stanca, poet and critic S¸tefan Aug. Doinas¸, as well as the critics Ion Negoit¸escu, Nicolae Balota˘, Cornel Regman, and Ovidiu Cotrus¸. The

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Circle, established in the early 1940s when the University of Cluj was moved to Sibiu after northern Transylvania was transferred to Hungary, sent in 1943 a letter of solidarity to the modernist, pro-Western critic Eugen Lovinescu, whose appointment as a university professor was blocked by Antonescu’s regime (Negoit¸escu, “Ardealul estetic”). The letter advocated that “ethnic specificity” and obsolete Romantic nationalism be replaced with imaginative cosmopolitanism and aesthetic autonomy. Predictably, the right wing attacked it as a betrayal of Romania’s national interests and a “wallowing in the waters of Judaic cosmopolitan aestheticism” (Nemoianu, “Models” 59). The group responded in the six issues (January-August 1945) of Revista Cercului Literar, stressing the need for European integration and the value of culture in democratizing and stabilizing the social body. The Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940 destroyed that country’s literary institutions and introduced measures to turn literature into a tool of Soviet ideology. Very little fresh prose was published at the time and only events of the day were reflected in poetry. Already in 1940, 212 publications were prohibited, all publishing houses were nationalized, and all manuscripts had to be submitted to strict censorship. When the war broke out, most leftist writers were sent to the front line as propagandists. The German occupation (1941–44) brought mixed results: the journal Looming was closed down, but the publishing situation improved somewhat and censorship became less severe. Literary life was enlivened by Henrik Visnapuu’s two-volume collection Ammukaar (The Crossbow), to which most writers remaining in Estonia contributed. Marie Under’s “Jõulutervitus 1941” (Christmas Greetings 1941), published the following year in her Mureliku suuga (From Sorrowful Lips), expressed anxiety with an almost visual clarity and served for several decades as a somber memorial to the country’s suffering. Betti Alver had prepared a volume of poetry in 1943 with the planned title “Tree of Life” but it could not be published; “Leib” (Bread) and other key poems from it were published in journals and in Visnapuu’s anthology. In 1939, Lithuania lost its third largest city and only harbor Klaipeda, which was occupied by Hitler; at the end of the year, after the collapse of Poland, it gained Vilnius/Wilno. In Lithuanian philosophy, literature, and journalism of the war years, a rather pronounced rightwing tendency with elements of fascist ideology was present (Antanas Maceina, Bronys Raila, et al.), which bears some resemblance to the Romanian generation of Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran. Another group of Lithuanian writers subscribed to a pro-communist program (Liudas Gira, Petras Cvirka, and, in part, Vincas Kre˙ve˙-Mickevicˇius). The more liberal writers were of a leftist, mildly nationalist, or Catholic persuasion (Balys Sruoga, Kazys Binkis, Antanas Vaicˇiulaitis). When Vilnius/Wilno was incorporated into Lithuania, the Polish university was immediately Lithuanianized — i.e., it switched to instruction in the Lithuanian language — which elicited strong protests from the Polish community. This conflict was soon overshadowed, first by the Soviet occupation and brutal Sovietization of 1940, then by the Nazi occupation of 1941–44. The Soviet invasion led to the emigration of many writers. Although some of them left or stayed abroad from 1940 on, by 1945–46 most of them landed in DP (Displaced Persons) camps. The Nazi invasion, in turn, resulted in the evacuation of the pro-communist authors who came back to Lithuania from Russia in 1944. Some of the right-wing writers were active on the Nazi side, contributing to anti-Semitic propaganda and, consequently, to the Holocaust; conversely, many

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of the pro-communists actively supported the Stalinist regime, covering and attempting to justify its crimes. Still, some authentic poetry was written at that time both in Lithuania (Vincas Mykolaitis-Putı¯nas, Bernardas Brazdžionis, Vytautas Macˇernis) and by the leftist Lithuanian authors in Russia (Salomeja Ne˙ris). Polish literature in Lithuania (that is, in the Vilnius/Wilno region) was dominated in the late 1930s by the Catastrophist trend of the Z˙agari group, to which Czesław Miłosz and his colleagues belonged. The group influenced Lithuanian authors active in Vilnius, such as Juozas Ke˙kštas; Bernardas Brazdžionis’s solemn but sarcastic poetic reactions to the European political and cultural crisis of the 1930s also bears resemblance to poems of the Z˙agari authors. When Poland collapsed in 1939, the group dispersed. By war’s end, the entire Polish intelligentsia in Vilnius either was destroyed or had left for Poland. The Jewish (Yiddish) group Jung Vilne, represented by such writers as Abraham Sutzkever and Chaim Grade, had certain analogies to Z˙agary. Jewish cultural life, indeed the Jewish community itself, was totally destroyed in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944, in spite of heroic efforts to maintain cultural activities in poetry and theater in the Vilnius/Vilna ghetto. During the Nazi occupation, the Jewish communities of Lithuania and of Vilnius were decimated. The few survivors either departed for Israel (Abraham Sutzkever) or were forced to assimilate; some Yiddish authors were imprisoned (e.g., Hirsch Osherowitch, in 1949). All traces of Jewish culture were obliterated by the Soviets. In Ukraine, Volodymyr Sosiura’s poem “Liubit’ Ukrainu” (Love Ukraine), written in May 1944, and Aleksander Dovzhenko’s 1943 film Ukraine in Flames indicate that certain forms of patriotism and innovative artistic expression were tolerated temporarily while the Ukrainians were fighting the Germans. However, they were repressed immediately after the war. Few politically writers escaped war censorship in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. In Hungary, the poems of Radnóti, Gyula Illyés, or Sándor Weöres, and Sándor Mára’s A gyertyák csonkig égnek (1942) were not political. In Romania, the novels tended to be dated explorations of eccentric intellectuals, Mme. Bovary type women, and venal industrialists in metropolitan or provincial settings. The narrative techniques often imitated interwar psychological analyses or urban chronicles. Ury Benador’s Final grotesc (Grotesque Finale; 1940) was an interesting exception for taking a fresh look at the world of business and of interethnic relations. The Jewish ghetto features prominently in its background, as it does in Benador’s later Gablonz — Magazin universel (Gablonz: General Merchandize Store; 1961), which focuses, however, on the suspenseful plot involving a shady traveling salesman who redeems himself in the end. The actual body of literature written during the war “for the drawer” was immense. But many of these works, and many of those published in exile, do not deal directly with the war and thus fall outside the scope of the present section of our History, which includes only warrelated literature. II. Resistance and uprising Armed national resistance against the Nazi (and to a lesser extent communist) invaders varied greatly throughout East-Central Europe and, correspondingly, played different roles in the respective literatures. The Baltic countries, Romania, and Hungary (which was invaded only on

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March 19, 1944) had no significant underground movements, whereas resistance was strong in Poland and Yugoslavia. Between these extremes lie Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Albania. In this period, literature served two very different functions. During the war, within the resistance movements, it played a “performative” role, as the aforementioned poems by Słonimski and Wierzyn´ski and the Yugoslav partisan poems show: they were intended to shock, encourage, and energize. Most of the postwar literature was representational fiction, and must be understood in relation to its changing political context. The communist governments that came to power everywhere after a transitional period were eager to gain popularity by promoting nationalistic poems and stories about the resistance against the Nazis. This encouragement led to a plethora of cliché-ridden works, which, nevertheless, had difficult ideological tasks to master. It was quite acceptable, for instance, to exaggerate the scope and intensity of the resistance, but (with the exception of Yugoslavia) this was not permitted to diminish the heroism and primary role of the Red Army. Furthermore, communists were to be given the leading role in the national underground and partisan movements. As we shall see, this became a particularly sensitive issue in representations of the Warsaw Uprising, which was inspired and supported from the West. Finally, the “composite” countries of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia had to cope with the historical fact that one constituent of their respective federations (Slovakia and Croatia) had puppet pro-Nazi governments during the war, which enjoyed a certain popular support, partly fed by separatist aspirations. Perhaps, Slovak literature has overrated its “National Uprising” against the Germans, for so long and so consistently in order to camouflage this embarrassing fact. We begin our account of the resistance movements with Warsaw, the “most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe” during World War II (Miłosz, Mind vii). Other cities, like Stalingrad or Dresden were also wiped out at a horrendous cost of human life, but the Warsaw ruins testified to three desperate and hopeless fights against the German forces: the defense of city at the outset of the war (as briefly discussed above), the Ghetto Uprising of April-May 1943, and the Uprising of August 1944. The uprising of the Warsaw ghetto The Jews of Warsaw (like those of Cracow, Łódz´, Lublin, and Radom) had been confined to a ghetto since 1940. The Germans, who sent about 300,000 Warsaw Jews to the gas chambers of Treblinka in the summer of 1942 (Rymkiewicz, Umschlagplatz), decided in the spring of 1943 to liquidate the remaining 80,000. The action started on April 19 but met with stiff resistance from a few hundred young Jews, who fought against all odds. The immediate poetic reactions beyond the ghetto walls were few but powerful. In 1943, Czesław Miłosz wrote two beautiful, elegiac, and accusatory poems: “Campo dei Fiori” (Ocalenie 21) and “Biedny chrzesćijanin patrzy na ghetto” (A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto; Ocalenie 37). The first interweaves the burning of Giordano Bruno and of the ghetto by contrasting the loneliness of those dying with the callous indifference of life around them. The second uses as a metaphoric refrain images of bees and ants that feed on the cadavers to build their own structures. Andrzejewski’s polemical “Wielki Tydzien´” (Holy Week), written in 1943 and published in 1945, was devoted to the ambiguous attitudes of the non-Jewish population

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towards the Ghetto Uprising. Tadeusz Sarnecki’s clandestine publication of 1944, Z otchłani (From the Abyss), contained poems by Jan Kott, Mieczysław Jastrun, Czesław Miłosz, Michał Borwicz, and others on the extermination of Jews. Irena Maciejewska’s 1988 anthology, Me˛czen´stwo i zagłada Z˙ydów w zapisach literatury polskiej (The Martyrdom and Annihilation of the Jews in Works of Polish Literature), brings together some of the works mentioned, including Andrzejewski’s “Wielki Tydzien´,” Miłosz’s above-mentioned poems, as well as poems by Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert. There was only a trickle of literary works on the ghetto and its uprising in the initial postwar decades. The ironic stories in Artur Sandauer’s S´mierc´ liberała (Death of a Liberal; 1946) reveal the drama of Jews who believed, up to the end, in the civility of German culture, thus making extermination easier. Adolf Rudnicki’s Szekspir (1948), Ucieczka z Jasnej Polany (Escape from Jasna Polana; 1949), and Złote okna (Golden Windows; 1952) employ a sophisticated technique to depict tragic and tragi-comic ghetto situations. In Chleb rzucony umarłym (Bread Tossed to the Dead; 1971), Bogdan Wojdowski uses a boy-narrator to offer an epic rendition of the Jewish tragedy in the ghetto from autumn 1940 up to the “big action.” Henryk Grynberg offers bitter personal accounts of the ghetto in Z˙ydowska wojna (Jewish War; 1965) and Prawda nieartystyczna (Inartistic Truth; 1984). Though the Ghetto Uprising did receive some support from the Polish underground movement, the ambivalent attitude of many Poles about the ghetto and the Jews led to Jewish resentment after the war. For several decades, the literary and documentary interest in the Ghetto Uprising came from abroad. In 1968, the communist anti-Semitic purges effectively suppressed publication activities for a while, and it was only in 1977 that the two key documents, Kazimierz Moczarski’s Rozmowy z katem (Talk with the Executioner) and Hanna Krall’s Zdøz˙yc´ przed Panem Bogiem (To outwit God), appeared (sections of Krall’s interview had been printed in a journal in 1975 see p. 438). They are conversations with leaders that were enemies: respectively, Jürgen Stroop, the SS officer responsible for the savage suppression of the uprising, and Marek Edelman, one of the very few surviving leaders of the Ghetto Uprising. Although both works were meant to be historical documents rather than literature, let alone fiction, these extraordinary documents must be included here, if only to show how tenuous the line between these genres is. Moczarski, a leader of the western-led Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, was arrested soon after the war and condemned to ten years in prison by the communists. Presumably as part of his torture he was placed on March 2, 1949 into a cell with the SS commander Jürgen Stroop. Both Stroop and Moczarski were condemned to death in 1952, but Stroop’s sentence was carried out while Moczarski was first pardoned and later, in 1956, rehabilitated. Stroop, who never for a minute did deviate from his Nazi fanaticism, obviously felt the urge to open up and speak about his life. Moczarski listened with astonishing patience and retorted only occasionally. Since he could not take any notes, he had to reconstruct the conversations from memory many years later. Despite the danger of exposing himself open to the charge of exaggerating the facts, he decided to reenact the conversations in a dramatic form, primarily as direct quotations. Most of his account — and Stroop’s report to him — seems factually reliable. The journalist Hanna Krall, who later wrote fictionalized accounts about the ghetto, the Jews, and the Poles — Sublokatorka, Taniec na cudzym weselu (1985) and Tam juz˙ nie ma z˙adnej rzeki (1998) — constructed her conversations in a different way for two reasons. On the one

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hand, she could immediately record the conversation; on the other, Edelman spoke in a decidedly anti-heroic manner, ironically weaving into his story accounts of uncomprehending and even hostile reactions to his earlier communications (10 ff), which debunked epic and mythic glorifications of the uprising. He continued to insist that only about 220 members of the Jewish Fighting Federation were involved in the uprising (10, 88), and he rejected the prettified account that L’Express gave of Anielewicz, the leader of the uprising (his mother sold fish on the market and he had to paint the fins of the unsold ones red). Yet, in spite of Edelman’s factual and sober account, Krall’s book has a poetic quality. The text contains several poems written in the ghetto by men who did not survive: lines from Władisław Szlengel’s “Kontratak” (Counterattack; shielding 61) — written on January 18, 1943, when the resistance fighters shot and killed a few German soldiers — and poems that Jurek Wilner jotted down in his notebook (99, 102, 104). More telling is a long section (73–81) in which Krall imagines scenes of Wajda’s planned movie, with documentary photos and Edelman as the narrator facing the camera. Edelman, who became a national hero and leading theoretician of the Solidarity movement (see the introduction and the Translators’ Afterword in Shielding) and is now a prominent heart surgeon, rejected these imagined scenes, even though they are not in classic Hollywood style (81). Wajda made a movie after 1989 about another Jewish hero of the ghetto, Janusz Korczak, “the old doctor,” teacher, and guardian of orphans, who accompanied his charges to Treblinka and perished with them, leaving behind his diary-memoirs (Wybór pism). The Warsaw uprising At 5 p.m. on August 1, 1944 units of the clandestine Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising, which lasted for sixty-three days and led to the death of 220,000 people and the third devastation of the city. The political and military background of this disaster is complex. When the Polish resistance against the invading German troops collapsed in 1939, a considerable number of Polish forces managed to reach the West. These, and the clandestine units remaining in Poland (the Home Army or Armia Krajowa), were subsequently assigned to the Polish government in exile that took up residence in London under the premiership of Władysław Sikorski, who died in an airplane crash under unexplained circumstances in 1943. As the war progressed, the Soviet Union set up a Polish division within the Red Army under the command of Władysław Anders, as a base for establishing communist dominance after the war. Although units of the Red Army had reached the Vistula across from Warsaw, they did not come to the aid of the Poles, who attempted to liberate the city independently but were ultimately suppressed. Hence the anger and frustration of Józef Szczepan´ski’s “Czerwona zaraza” (The Red Plague), written on August 29, 1944 as the Red Army reached the edge of Warsaw but not published, of course, until 1994, although it circulated underground throughout the 1980s: We are waiting for you, red plague, that you might save us from the black death, that, first tearing our country apart, you might be the salvation we greet with horror. […] May you know, hateful savior, what death we wish you in repayment,

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and how helplessly we press our hands, as we beg for help, underhand villain. […] Your victorious red army has fallen at the feet of the bright gleams of burning Warsaw and your carrion feeds its soul on the bloody pain of a handful of madmen dying in the ashes. (Klemin´ska 136–137; trans. Emma Harris)

The text is hardly a poem. But then Szczepan´ski does not claim artistic merit: he writes a redhot diatribe against the Red Army for watching with equanimity the destruction of the only Polish force that offered an alternative to a Soviet-controlled Polish government. Hatred and abusive language are all that he possesses when faced with the inevitable. The realization that the capital could only be liberated by the Red Army plunges him into a muddled outcry, in which insults (“There’s nothing you can do to us”) alternate with political apprehension (“we are waiting, so that you may drown us / by the flood of your slogans”) and haughty disdain (“you will not walk on this land, / red ruler of savage force”). The physical survival of the capital and its citizens was of secondary concern during the Uprising. Tzvetan Todorov rightly assumes that “the impact of certain heroic values was crucial for the decision to begin the uprising and for its progress” (Skazani 9). In Zbigniew Jasin´ski’s “Z˙ødamy anunicji” (We Demand Ammunition) “blood flows cheerfully”: Here we have wolves’ teeth and tilted caps, Here no one cries in Fighting Warsaw. […] And we, bare-breasted, against the cannon-fire, […] Why do you keep playing the mournful chorale in London, When the long-awaited celebration has finally come! The girls fight arm-in-arm with their boys, And little children fight, and the blood cheerfully flows. (Klemin´ska 138)

In Mieczysław Ubysz’s “Ostatni Komunikat” (The Last Announcement) fame also survives death: We are broadcasting from Warsaw. A special announcement from Warsaw. The radio station of the Home Army reports: The battle has ended and there is nothing left but Fame (Klemin´ska 168–69)

As Andrzej Gronczewski writes, patriotic duty demanded total dedication to Warsaw, and “every form of spiritual autonomy could be regarded as treason and the proof of ethical duplicity” (110–11). However, those who think that poetry on the Uprising spoke only of glory, honor, and sacrifice (or of anger at being abandoned) should note Stanisław Swen Czachorowski’s tragicomic “Elegia warszawska na s´mierc´ ZOO” (Warsaw Elegy on the Death of the Zoo):

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John Neubauer the terrible leap from the kangaroo straight into the night under the wheels of the freight train was the last. […] and the rainbow went to kiss the arse of the mandrill. […] warsaw heard the death cry of the seal (Was´kiewicz 325–330)

Ignacy Fik was among the very few poets who dared to undermine the poetic Myth of Warsaw, by contrasting in “Tematy współczesne” (Contemporary Themes) Warsaw’s humdrum reality during the war with its future glorification. The poem was included in Fik’s Cracow underground publication Przymierze (The Alliance) in 1940, and then published legally in 1954: They will envy us for the period in which we lived, […] They will speak of times of contempt, an era of chaos, the darkness of the century, dimmed dawns and springs, or they will see us as banners raised from the streets, like a bright storm, a heroic explosion from the enchanted mines while we stood for hours at the sink of the public kitchen with a jar for potato soup, and talked for hours about the difficulty of warming our homes, undernourished and unshaven for a week, tracked down like dogs at the wired fence of the park (Szczawiej 1: 33–34).

Constructing a poetic image of the city was both a psychological defense against defeat and occupation, and a poetic strategy to create another Warsaw beyond the ruins, the German repression, the daily fear, and the grim perspectives. While the citizens of Warsaw witnessed the annihilation of their home, poets answered, according to Gronczewski, with “an imaginative perception of Warsaw” that brought its tragic fate and history “into a consistent and coherent synthesis” (109). By living up to the demands of honor and glory, Warsaw became “the synthesis of a collective personality” (129). Słonimski’s “Alarm” and Jasin´ski’s “Z˙ødamy amunicji,” two of the most popular wartime poems, face tragedy and anticipate defeat: Słonimski depicts the enormity of the city’s destruction while Jasin´ski admits that resistance with bare hands is foolhardy. In “Alarm” the predicament of Warsaw is shown by way of the streets: though destroyed in air raids, Traugutta, S´wie˛tokrzyska, Niecała, and Nowy S´wiat are heroic in their suffering (Gronczewski 129). Other poems, some directly about the Uprising, also personify the city and its streets. In Jan Janiczek’s famous “Ulica Opaczewska” the street cries out: “I am the cruel street! Do not come to me, / Invader, who brings death by planes” (Szczawiej 1: 197). In Leopold Lewin’s “Warsaw” the

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ruins and stones “will soon begin to scream” and the skeletons of houses “will return to life” (Szczawiej 1: 204). In Stanisław Ryszard Dobrowolski’s “Stare Miasto zwycie˛z˙y” the Old Town “wins the laurel” and “bleeds from the heart” (Klemin´ska 23); in Seweryn Pollak’s “Mokotów” the district “bows its head under the sun / dies in the shining light” (Klemin´ska 49). The intensity of despair often yielded grotesque or nightmarish dream images. In Wacław Bojarski’s “Ranny róz˙ø” (Wounded by the Rose) the ruins of the city are “the proscenium of a wandering theatre, fancifully and primitively cut out from red-gray cardboard” (Was´kiewicz 165), while Tadeusz Gajcy sees in “Trójgłos” (Three Voices) an arch of swift light “pounding like a silver spring over the land; / precious marble crumbles, columns bend” (Pisma 120–121). The “specter Warsaw” insists, as in Gajcy’s “S´piew murów” (The Song of the Walls), that the dead and the ruins of Warsaw be heard: The moment you sigh, instantly you hear from beneath the floors as if from a keyboard, in whispers and murmurs of a swirling blizzard the painful voice of the choir of past existences. From under the ruins and rubble, like ivy we climb at night the roofs and the dream, for you, Warsaw, that dreams in our dreams, we hum our threnody, mourning September. (Pisma 101)

In Krzysztof Kamil Baczyn´ski’s “Oddycha miasto” (The City Breathes) the stones “howl like trampled dogs,” demanding revenge: But believe these stones, that from the pavement howl like trampled dogs and spurt with blood, and tear off, unrevenged, and crash at the gates. Oh! let them be for you like words for the lips, let them scratch out tenderness from eyes and blood from wounds, so that, loving the ages, you yourself will be loved. Oh, drink, drink this darkness from the rubble heap, […] Become the wrongs and the revenge, the love and the people. Oh, seize the sword of history and strike! and strike! (Utwory zebrane 2: 33–34)

The ghosts of the ruins speak to the underground organizations, the successors of the tragic September 1939 heroes. The legacy is willingly assumed by the poets but it is also imposed by the “Myth of Warsaw.” According to Gronczewski, Warsaw, as a physical and psychological structure, imposed its “will” upon individuals and the community, demanding “mythical loyalty” (110). This “mythical loyalty” called for an unrelenting hatred towards the enemy, the Germans (and implicitly the Soviets). Władysław Broniewski writes in “Homo Sapiens” (from the 1945 collection The Mourning Tree): Armed ominously with bombs of words, I hurl them into the darkness of war […]

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Words become here symbolic instruments of justice, weapons of patriotic revenge, but the verbal anger implicitly acknowledges also the frustration that the bombing of Warsaw cannot be answered appropriately. Secular concepts of loyalty constituted, indeed, the moral fiber of the underground movement. According to Miłosz, it was at the center of Andrzejewski’s philosophy of resistance but became problematic in the postwar communist era (Mind 91–97), starting with his famous and often republished Ashes and Diamonds (1948), which was marginalized after 1990 due to its alleged political opportunism. In the postwar period, narrative reconstructions replaced lyricpoetic expressions. What could be published and where became a matter of politics. The chief literary portrayals of the Uprising are Roman Bratny’s Kolumbowie rocznik 20 (1957), Miron Białoszewski’s Pamie˛tnik z powstania warszawskiego (Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising; 1970), and Aleksander Sćibor-Rylski’s Piersćionek z kon´skiego włosia (Horsehair Finger-ring; 1991), which was banned and published only posthumously. Bohdan Czeszko’s Tren (Threnody) from 1961 is also important. Bratny’s Columbuses Born in 1920, the first novel devoted to the resistance movement, sought to give a historically accurate account of the Uprising and attempted to acknowledge the contribution of those who were imprisoned and systematically annihilated after the war. Bratny saluted the patriotism of all who fought for their Fatherland, whether they actually fomented the Uprising or not. Czeszko dealt in Tren with the hopelessness of soldiers facing their destiny, while Białoszewski offered in Pamie˛tnik an early dismantling of heroism, by telling the story of the Uprising from the perspective of an average person who hides with others in a basement, fights fires, fetches water, prays, satisfies his physiological needs, and chatters. Białoszewski explored the psychology of average citizens who carry on with their lives and do not intend to meddle with history. As a linguist, Białoszewski knows the power of vivid language and uses special forms of it: his colloquial, alliterating, imperfect, and aphasic language enables him to attain a highly authentic narration. The Slovak “National Uprising” of 1944 was more diffuse and, at the time, more divisive. Several writers greeted it (sometimes anonymously) with essays, editorials, and poems, but in the essays of Stanislav Mecˇiar, in the poems of Karol Strmenˇ and others, in the articles of Kultúra, and in the pro-regime press it was portrayed as a fratricidal fight that violated “Christian” principles. The Slovak Writers’ Association published a manifesto condemning its bloodshed. But Slovak communist retrospectives had an easier time of ignoring the right-wing attitudes than the Polish communists had in suppressing the Home Army’s role in the Warsaw Uprising. As we shall see, the Slovak National Uprising became an ideologically favored and commercially successful topic after the war.

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III. Short-term memory Like František Halas in “Barikáda” (1945), virtually all East-Central European writers greeted the end of the war with enthusiasm. But the horrors of the war and the concentration camps defied representation, and literary mourning, and remembering in general, became ideologically controlled under the communist dictatorships that were soon established in all countries of the region. 1945 inaugurated merely a brief postwar interlude between two forms of totalitarianism. The new regimes came to suppress many war subjects as taboo and authorized only modes of memory that viewed the past from a heroic communist perspective. Some of the writers who had resisted the Nazis became victims yet again. The case of Moczarski is paralleled by the Romanian Caraion: having confronted the Antonescu regime with Panopticum, he was detained for five years in 1950 for his civic courage and condemned to death in 1958. The death sentence was commuted to a life sentence in a forced-labor camp; only in 1964 was Caraion finally released. The Sibiu Circle was dissolved in 1947, together with other democratic writers’ organizations. In the Ukraine, the liberties and literary departures of the war years were quickly suppressed in the postwar years through harsher censorship, new strictures, and new waves of purges. The second exodus and early exile literature The end of the war generated a huge second wave of migration from East-Central Europe, this time with refugees fleeing the communists rather than the Nazis. Baltic, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and a few refugees from elsewhere accompanied the retreating German troops in 1944–45 and landed as DPs in German and Austrian camps, waiting for permission to move on. Most of the Baltic refugees eventually came to the US or Canada. They included the Estonian Henrik Visnapuu, the Latvian Anšlavs Eglı¯tis, and the Lithuanians Jonas Aistis, Kazys Bradu¯nas, Bernardas Brazdžionis, Vincas Kre˙ve˙-Mickevicˇius, Alfonsas Nyka-Niliu¯nas, Henrikas Radauskas, and Antanas Ške˙ma. The Latvian Ja¯nis Jaunsudrabin¸š stayed in Germany where he had family, but several Baltic writers, primarily Estonians, fled to Sweden and they established there, notably in Lund, important cultural institutions. The Swedish contingent included the Latvians Ka¯rlis Skalbe and Ma¯rtin¸š Zı¯verts, and the Estonians Bernard Kangro, August Gailit, Kalyu Lepik, Karl Ristikivi (who fought for the Germans but deserted to Finland in 1943 and then, a year later, to Sweden), Gustav Suits (via Finland in 1944), and Marie Under. The Ukrainian refugees included Ivan Bahrianyi, Vasyl’ Barka, Dmytro Dontsov (who went to Canada in 1947), and Iurii Klen. The Romanian Vintila˘ Horia went to Italy in 1945 and moved later to Madrid, like the Transylvanian-Hungarian József Nyíro˝. A trickle of exiles — among them Sándor Márai (1948), Virgil Ierunca, Monica Lovinescu, Alexandru Ciora˘nescu, and Miron Butariu (1947) — managed to leave clandestinely before the borders closed down in 1947–48, or did not return home from abroad. Others, like Gherasim Luca (who finally migrated to Israel in 1950), were less lucky, being prevented from crossing the border and in most cases sentenced to prison for trying. Exile and expatriate writers were instrumental in setting up important publication channels in Paris, Madrid, London, Lund, New York, Chicago, and Toronto, but it took several years

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before they found a home abroad. Some never did. The Lithuanian Antanas Ške˙ma, for instance, staged plays in a DP camp and managed to publish in Tübingen Nuode˙guliai ir kibirkštys (Charred Stumps and Sparks), his first gruesome stories on the war and the crimes committed by the Bolsheviks; but he never found his footing in the US after 1949. Ma¯rtin¸š Zı¯verts, who described his escape from Latvia in Pe¯de¯jã laiva (Last Boat to Freedom; 1956), settled in Sweden. His Ka¯ds, kur¸a nav (One Who Doesn’t Exist), published in Germany in 1948 and made into a film later, is a tragic account of DP existence: a disfigured and half-blind man returns home but leaves again upon learning that his wife has found another man. Borowski’s stories in Kamienny s´wiat (World of Stone; 1948) portray the life of displaced persons, full of bitterness, cynicism, but also hope. Bylis´my w Os´wie˛cimiu (We Were in Auschwitz), written and published in 1946 by Borowski and his friends Janusz nel Siedlecki and Krystyn Olszewski, contains Borowski’s two most shocking stories, “This Way for the Gas” and “A Day at Harmenz.” Written immediately after the author was liberated in Dachau on May 1, 1945, they are considered the best works to emerge from the DP world. They shocked the Polish public when they were published even before Borowski’s return on May 31, 1946. As Jan Kott writes: “The public was expecting martyrologies; the Communist Party called for works that were ideological, that divided the world into the righteous and the unrighteous, heroes and traitors, communists and Fascists. Borowski was accused of amorality, decadence, and nihilism” (This Way for the Gas 18–19). Miłosz’s chapter “Beta, the Disappointed Lover” in The Captive Mind (110–34) offers an incisive portrait of Borowski, including his subsequent veering towards Communism and his suicide in 1951. Numerous Polish writers reached the West with the army of Władysław Anders, which advanced with the Soviets. Others, like Wacław Iwaniuk, who emigrated to Toronto from England to avoid returning to a communist-controlled Poland, served in the Allied formations of the Home Army. Janusz Meissner wrote about the pilots in England and the battle of Monte Cassino, which was also the subject of a grand reportage by Wan´kowicz. Ksawery Pruszyn´ski became the best soldier-writer: Trzynasćie opowiesći (Thirteen Stories; 1946) and Karabela z Meschedu (The Rifle from Mesched; 1948) echo the literature of the nobility and evoke the Polish Romantic tradition of heroism and exile. Pruszyn´ski takes an historical approach, which has him compare this war to the Napoleonic ones. According to him, the Poles have paid heavily for not recognizing that sentiment does not mix with politics. Finally, Andrzej Bobkowski’s diary, Szkice piórkiem (Sketches with a Quill; 1957), describes subtly and with perspicacity the war from a French perspective. The Ukrainian exiles produced some works of surprisingly high quality, but freed from dictatorship they were unable to settle their ideological differences on how to revive their national memory. 1945 initiated for them a period of stocktaking and of expressing pent-up creative energies. First and foremost, these writers recalled their own sufferings and bore witness to the memory of those who perished in recent cataclysms. They remembered not only the tragedies of the last war and of Nazi brutality, but also the hardships of Soviet totalitarianism — extending back to the Stalinist famine of 1933, when upwards of seven million Ukrainians perished, and to the purges of the 1930s. Focusing above all on the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, they produced mostly unvarnished memoirs made all the more powerful by the absence of literary artifice. This is particularly true of the Nazi camp accounts of O.

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Dans’kyi, Volodymyr Martynets’, Vasyl Koval, and Oleksa Stepovyi. Occasionally, as in Mykhailo Bazhans’kyi’s memoirs, the account was introspectively embellished, and the Soviet experience was, due to its temporal distance, frequently couched in belletristic form. While Semen Pidhainyi’s account of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the Solovki gulag camp was almost scholarly in its accuracy, Ivan Bahrianyi’s The Garden of Gethsemane created an exemplum of the national trauma by rendering the personal experience of Soviet arrest, interrogation, torture, and imprisonment into fiction. Likewise, Iurii Klen (Oswald Burghardt) powerfully melded the national and the personal in his poetry. His poem Prokliati roky (The Cursed Years), a lament for the victims of Stalinism, was first published in 1937, republished in occupied Poland in 1943, and maintained its currency after 1945. In 1946 Klen published a much longer and more ambitious epic poem, Popil imperii (Ashes of Empires), which depicted the war and the years leading up to it by means of a Dantesque journey through the hell of the eastern front. Meditations on the war and the Soviet terror are present also in the poetry of Vasyl’ Barka, Teodosii Os’machka, and Mykhailo Orest. Among the postwar Ukrainian émigrés, the central figure of discussions was Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, the premier Soviet Ukrainian prose writer, a galvanizing force in the literary debates of the late 1920s, and a national communist, whose staged suicide in 1933 rocked the literary establishment but made his name a taboo in Soviet criticism. The debate on Kvyl’ovyi’s strategy of “collaboration” and resistance went to the heart of the question of how Ukrainian literature could continue both under totalitarianism and in exile. For the “liberals” or non-nationalists Kvyl’ovyi became a cult figure, the epitome of the Ukrainian writer creating even under the most trying of circumstances; for the nationalists he was nothing less than a Chekist. By contrast, two members of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Oleh Ol’zhych Kandyba and Olena Teliha, became undisputed martyrs. The former was killed in 1944 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and Teliha was shot in 1942 by the Gestapo in Kyiv. Ol’zhych was the better writer, possibly the leading Ukrainian poet outside of Soviet Ukraine after the death of Bohdan-Ihor Antonych in 1937. His hard-edged, minimalist style categorically rejected the symbolist and rhetorical pathos popular among his contemporaries. With the outbreak of World War II he abandoned poetry and turned all his energies to the underground movement — and paid for it with his life. Teliha’s more modest poetic achievement echoed in large measure the patriotic pathos of her male contemporaries. The cult that arose around both of them was predicated on their symbolic value as national icons rather than on poetic achievement. Their place in the Ukrainian canon, as that of other victims and refugees of Nazi or Soviet totalitarianism, remains disputed. Anthologies such as Iurii Lavrinenko’s 1959 Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia (The Executed Renaissance), published in 1959, will have to be critically reread. Estonian publishing houses in exile were founded in Finland and Sweden even before the end of the war; and books also came out of the German refugee camps. Literature was a means of preserving national consciousness; later, writers also resorted to translations in order to introduce the occupied home country to other nations. Ristikivi, who published in 1946 and 1947 two volumes on life in Soviet-occupied Estonia in 1939–40 (Ei juhtunud and Kõik mis), soon started to write in Swedish, and by 1949 even won a prize with a story in that language. Yet Estonian exile writers were initially not receptive to foreign literary currents; Ilmaar Laaban’s surrealist poetry was a rare case of adopting a Western trend. The Modernism of a T. S. Eliot

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started to have an impact only around 1950, when the poetry of Kalyu Lepik and Ivar Grünthal, and Ristikivi’s surrealist novel Hingede öö (All Souls’ Night; 1953) began to respond to the concerns of the younger exile generation. These works treat exile and historical events but also claim a certain sovereignty for art. The end of the war led to a new wave of emigration from Slovakia as well. Rudolf Dilong, Mikuláš Šprinc, Karol Strmenˇ, Andrej Žarnov and most of the other members of the “Catholic Modern School,” the critics Mecˇiar and J. E. Bor, the poets Ján Okálˇ, Koloman K. Geraldini, Ján Doránsky, the novellist Cíger-Hronský, and others left because they had sympathized with the pro-Nazi regime. Cíger-Hronský was arrested in 1948 by the Italian police and barely escaped deportation to Czechoslovakia by fleeing to Argentina. Okálˇ described his exilic experiences in Leto na Traune (Summer on the Trauna; 1986) and Výpredaj l’udskosti (The Sale of Humanity; 1989), Šprinc in K slobodným pobrežiam (Toward Free Coasts; 1949) and Cesty a osudy (Journeys and Destinies; 1957). Most Slovak emigrants settled in Italy, Canada, the US, Australia, and Argentina. Urban other writers like Gašpar, Gráf, and Beniak eventually returned home. Contemplating the ruins The achievements of Polish postwar literature rested on the psychological and historical compulsion of returning to the war as a primary experience, often to the detriment of literary concerns like narration, language, style, and intellectual conceptualization. Polish war literature seldom probed the depth of history by giving the war experience a rigorous form and psychological or philosophical content. Often it merely imposed ideology on history. Furthermore, Polish literature had difficulty in finding adequate representations of the Holocaust experience for two main reasons. First, the official historiography and propaganda of the People’s Republic emphasized the martyrdom of the Polish people at the cost of the Jewish tragedy. They portrayed the Jewish death camps as concentration camps for the Poles, downplaying the racial dimension (though gassing “Aryans” was actually stopped in Auschwitz in April 1943). Secondly, many Poles tried to forget what happened to the Jews as too painful and difficult to deal with. In the country of Os´wie˛cim (Auschwitz) and Treblinka, in which only 10% of the Jewish population survived, the Holocaust remained a peripheral issue for decades. Nevertheless, some important fictional representations of the persecution and extermination of Jews appeared immediately after the war. Borowski’s Poz˙egnanie z Mariø, which contains the earlier mentioned stories, is the most important Polish text on the German extermination camps. Fictionalizing his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz from April 1943 onward, Borowski wrote about the cruelty that the system had engendered, and the emergence of a regime of “excluded morality,” which acknowledged the camp rules and forced the inmates to accept moral compromises. Many readers reacted with indignation and accused the author of cynicism and participation in crimes. Borowski replied that all those who had passed through the camps were contaminated by its evil. His protagonist and narrator (a prisoner foreman called Tadeusz) represents the collective consciousness of the camp, not a specific individual. In camps, individuality dissolved in the collective. What seemed cynical to the early readers, beginning with the title “Prosze˛ pan´stwa do gazu” (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), eventually proved to be an effective

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style and an appropriate way of speaking about most traumatic experiences: the descriptive, impassive, impersonal, and non-judgmental language of “Ludzie, którzy szli” (People Who Walked On) and “U nas w Auschwitzu…” (With Us in Auschwitz…) continues to move people. Borowski describes, for instance, how the “excluded economy” functioned in the camp by deceiving those in power, trading in smuggled goods and female flesh, and participating in detachments that unloaded the trains on the ramp. That this excrescence of immorality should reinforce the camp organization was, for Borowski, the greatest Nazi crime against humanity. Yet, Borowski also reflects on what goodness and philosophy mean in notes on foreman Tadek’s relation to his girlfriend in the nearby camp of Birkenau. Zofia Nałkowska’s Medaliony (Medallions; 1946) contains short fictionalized texts based on information she had received as member of the Commission for Investigating Nazi War Crimes in Poland. “Professor Spanner” (7–18) and “Przy torze kolejowym” (By the Railway Track) focus on the realities of occupied Poland; “Dno” (The Hole; 19–26) evokes the gruesome event of individuals resorting to eating the corpses of their fellow camp inmates; “Wiza” (The Visa; 50–54) is about the principles underlying the extermination of different peoples in camps; “Doros´li i dzieci w Os´wie˛cimiu” (The Adults and Children of Auschwitz; 63–70) shows how children, infected by the ideology of the camps, play “burn the Jews. (see also p. 378)” For writers remaining in East-Central Europe, writing about the war and the Holocaust became a political problem quite early on. In Soviet Lithuania, Sruoga’s Dievu˛ miškas, an account of his internment in the Nazi camp of Stutthof, and Boruta’s novel about his concentration camp experience were suppressed. The former was published posthumously in Chicago in 1957. As István Örkény’s Lágerek népe (The People of the Camps) shows, negotiating the various political taboos became more and more difficult. Örkény was called up as a Jewish forced laborer in 1942. He survived (and later wrote a play about) the great Russian breakthrough at Voronezh in January 1943, in which several hundred thousand Hungarian soldiers died in combat or of hunger or froze to death. Örkény was taken to Soviet camps, where he recorded during four-and-a-half years of captivity the life stories of his fellow inmates. Once back home, the weekly Új Magyarország started to publish his notes on February 15, 1947; however, the May 31 issue printed a reader’s ominous reaction that condemned Örkény’s portrayal of the camp as subjective, unrepresentative, and ungrateful to the Russian liberators (Örkény, Lágerek 314–18). Örkény acknowledged his “error” and claimed that he would now write his account differently (319–20). The publication of the texts as a book, with Örkény’s retraction at the head and with “some cuts,” was a huge success; it was republished in 1973 with further cuts, and only a posthumous edition (1984) reestablished the original version of the Új Magyarország. Örkény’s literary career after 1947 oscillated between recognition, political compromises, and utter disfavor. Though he became internationally recognized in the 1960s and 70s, to the very end of his life he had to accept “advice” from György Aczél, who coached (rather than censored) writers on making their manuscripts acceptable. Thus Örkény’s farewell interview (1979) still stressed what was politically correct: the camp inmates were linked to each other by solidarity (cf. Borowski’s account of Auschwitz!) and the Russians treated the war prisoners humanely. Sándor Márai, who despised the Nazis and their Hungarian lackeys but questioned the disposition of the “heroic Russian liberators,” was still able to publish his 1943–44 diaries in

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1945; but those of the following years, as well as his memoirs of 1944–48, had to wait for publication in the West. Ion D. Sârbu’s Jurnalul unui jurnalist fa˘ra˘ jurnal (The Journal of a Journalist without a Journal) could appear only in 1991–93, because it linked the disasters of World War II to the subsequent Stalinist and post-Stalinist terror. Sârbu’s recounting of violence and survival (three years on the front line followed by seven years of prison and labor camp) is filtered through a philosophic prose that reflects on his paradoxical identity as a TransylvanianRomanian estranged from his home but unassimilated everywhere else, a socialist without ideology, persecuted both by the Nazis and the communists, and an anti-Stalinist philo-Russian. Mihail Sebastian’s journal of 1935–44, which comments on the gradual degradation of political life in Romania and its lapse into right-wing violence, was published in its entirety only in 1997. A number of documentary texts did manage to get published right after the war. Among them were: Vladimir Nazor’s journal of his years with the Croatian partisans (S partizanima); Erno˝ Szép’s Emberszag (The Smell of Humans), a moving account of the author’s brief service as a forced laborer near Budapest; Sergiu Dan’s Unde începe noaptea (Where Night Begins), a documentary novel about life in the concentration camp, written towards the end of the war; and Vladimir Dedijer’s War Diaries, which became the official Yugoslav version of the partisan activities and Tito’s role in them — but only, until Dedijer broke with Tito and emigrated. Viktor Novak’s Magnum Crimen (1946), commissioned by the communist authorities to support Tito’s 1946 show trials, richly documented the Ustaša atrocities during the war: the three Croatian death camps, as well as the violent treatment of Croatia’s (and, partly, Bosnia’s) Serb, Gypsy, and Jewish populations. Novak came to be regarded for this, as a traitor to the Croat cause. The Slovak National Uprising became a favorite topic immediately after the war, as evidenced by Milo Krno’s Viadukt (1946) and Ján Bodenek’s Z vlcˇích dní (From Wolves’ Days; 1947). Jozef Horák’s Hory mlcˇia (The Mountains Are Silent) from 1947 showed that political portrayals with a modicum of sophistication were still publishable. He portrayed the response of a “silent” rural village to the brutal German occupation in 1944 without linking the local resistance to the partisans or the National Uprising. Similarly, the stories in Yordan Valchev’s Boeve (Fights; 1946) featured no heroic Bulgarian communists and suggested no ideological awakening of individuals or masses; neither did they follow a prescribed model nor end with a final statement of communist wisdom. Valchev’s soldiers were not confronted with examples of Nazi bestiality, communist bravery, or patriotic self-sacrifice. Jan Drda’s Ne˘má barikáda (The Silent Barricade), published in 1946, is free of doctrines but its characterizations are schematic. One of the stories describes how a gentle retired school director (who hides a clandestine radio emitter in his bee hive) and a mine worker (who supplies dynamite to the partisans) are murdered by brutal Gestapo and SS men. In another story, village men eliminate a peasant who betrayed another villager. Drda presents no sly Šveijks but rather men who rise to the occasion and respond to the nationalist appeal of the communist government that took power in 1948. Drda was soon afterwards appointed President of the Czech Writers’ Union, though his first stories were criticized later for not showing as yet that the fight against the Nazis was led by the communists. Kazimierz Brandys’s Miasto niepokonane (The Invincible City) and his Drewniany kon´ (Hobby Horse), both published in 1946, were well received by the officials in Poland because of their negative depiction of the intellectuals and the London-based resistance.

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IV. Ideologizing epic memory: 1948–1956 As the People’s Republics emerged in all East-Central European countries by the end of the 1940s, literature on World War II made painful concessions with respect to both theme and literary technique. Eusebiu Camilar’s two-volume Negura (The Mist; 1948), for example, still preserved some procedures and themes from the fiction on World War I; however, it became increasingly difficult to adopt modernist techniques and undertake a genuine exploration of moral dilemmas when taboos and ideological correctness began to dam up creativity. Of course, writers often complied out of conviction. In each of the East-Central-European countries, WorldWar-II literature became strongly tainted by and supportive of official representations of the past. This was particularly true of theater, which tended to avoid dealing with the war; when it did, the representation was unfortunately tainted by communist ideology. Even a rather sophisticated play like Horia Lovinescu’s Citadela sfa˘râmata˘ (The Crumbling Citadel; 1955) made significant concessions. This play revolving around two brothers is concerned with the decline of a middle-class family during the war and the first years of Communism: Petru, who returns from the war blind and thoroughly disenchanted, is reenergized by the communist takeover, while his brother lapses into madness and finally kills himself. The trials and tribulations of Josef Škvorecký’s Zbabeˇlci (The Cowards) are typical for these years. Written in 1949, the book follows the last days of Nazi rule through the eyes of a middle-class adolescent who prefers saxophone playing and girls to fighting. That Danny has ironic contempt for bourgeois cowardice and comes to admire the courage of the communists was apparently not enough for the censors, newly installed after the communist takeover in 1948. They preferred portrayals of heroic patriotism in the tradition of Drda and banned publication. In 1958, the book slipped through censorship but had to be withdrawn right after publication. The publisher’s editorial board was suspended. Zbabeˇlci was finally published in 1964 but achieved international renown only when Škvorecký left for the West after 1968 and the novel was translated into English. Jirˇí Weil’s novel Život s hveˇzdou (Life with a Star), which will be discussed at greater length in our section on censorship in vol. 3, fared better and could still get published in 1949. Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Popiół i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) from 1948, Oskar Davicˇo’s Pjesma (The Poem) from 1952, and Ferenc Karinthy’s Budapesti tavasz (Budapest Spring) from 1953 show that ideological bias was not incompatible with artistic skill and public appeal. Andrzejewski, who had been a leading intellectual in the resistance movement and had published in Noc (Night; 1945) stories of moral dilemmas rather than of epic sagas, towed here the Party line by suggesting that the Western-subsidized Home Army came, in the postwar years, to engage in criminal activities against the communists. The young protagonist is caught in the middle: he kills a venerable Party secretary as his last act of loyalty to the Home Army but then absurdly dies himself. A subsidiary plot reveals that a respected judge was a block warden in the concentration camp. The success of this spy story with a double moral dilemma was further enhanced when Andrzej Wajda turned it into a brilliant film in 1958. To what extent Andrzejewski was against the Home Army after the war and what revisions he made in the text under the pressure of censorship are not clear. He, like so many others, probably became convinced after the war, even if only temporarily, that the communists had the right answers

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after the war — and he closed his eyes to the outrageous persecution of people like Moczarski, who led the resistance against Hitler. Davicˇo, a surrealist before the war, spent five years in prison for his communist activities. His Pjesme, a story of resistance against the Nazis that was also concerned with communist dilemmas in occupied Belgrade, became a revered school text that catapulted the author into the nomenklatura. Davicˇo became a devoted communist. The novel’s curious mixture of surrealist techniques, naturalist descriptions (including steamy sex scenes), and interior monologues in socialist-realist style was important in shaping the genre of Yugoslav partisan novels and for its depiction of the urban milieu. The hero, Micá, is a dashing young student who opposes the old communists. Though the book allows some room between Leninist dogma and other viewpoints, Micá’s final heroic death seems to confirm that the communist option is the correct one. Budapesti tavasz represents the fate of several people hiding in an apartment during the long siege of Budapest from December 1944 to January 1945. The middle-class Zoltán Pintér deserted from the army with his comrade Gazsó, a miner; the engineer Turovszky hides there because of his Jewish wife but insists that Jutka, another Jewish girl hiding there, should leave. Jutka is killed by the Hungarian Arrow Cross, but Zoltán, who falls in love with her, joins a group of communists and survives. Karinthy, like Škvorecký, contrasts cowardly middle-class figures with courageous communists, but his protagonist has a less detached perspective. Both Budapesti tavasz and Zbabeˇlci end with music, but in the former this is a sign of a budding new society rather than an emblem of distance. Félix Máriássy’s 1958 film version somewhat trivializes the point by concluding with a woman waving the first issue of the communist newspaper Népszabadság. Representations of the war were usually more schematic. In Slovakia, the National Uprising continued to dominate the war literature written after 1948. Peter Karvaš’s S nami a proti nám (With Us and Against Us; 1950) embedded the Uprising in a history of the Slovak Republic’s final years, while Vladimír Minácˇ, a participant in the Uprising, gave journalistic but expressively narrated accounts of the events. His first novel, Smrt’ chodí po horách (Death Walks in the Mountains; 1948), was followed by his highly praised trilogy, Generácia (1958–61), which depicts the Uprising, the war, and the first postwar years within a Marxist interpretation of history — at the cost of authenticity. The war and the Uprising test the protagonists and enable those who acquire a communist vision, to engage with the future. Katarína Lazarová, also a participant in the Uprising, portrays in her first novel, Kamaráti (Friends; 1949), the partisans’ fight in the winter of 1944–45, while her next novel, Traja z neba (Three from Heaven; 1950), shifts the perspective to praise the Soviet parachutists and their friendly demeanor towards the villagers. Jilemnický’s Kronika (1947) is also concerned with the Slovak partisans and Soviet parachutists, who defend a small Central Slovak mountain village against the retreating Germans. The story is narrated informally to a silent chronicler-author by a simple forester who has little interest in the events on the national level. The village has apparently no Jews (anymore?), but plenty of thieving Gypsies who join the Uprising once the Germans burn down their settlement. The enemy includes, apart from the Nazis, the German/Slovak “Schwaben” and the Slovak supporters of the puppet government. Jilemnický, who was himself imprisoned in a German work camp, shows how the Uprising widens into a communal movement, facilitated, of course,

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by the communists activities. Kronika set the standard for representing of the Uprising as the outstanding mass movement of modern Slovak history. Dominik Tatarka’s Farská republika (Parish Republic), published in 1948, features a semiautobiographical high-school teacher, Tomáš Menkina, who is passive and bored under the proNazi regime but eagerly embraces the communist ideology out of disgust at the hypocrisy of the clerical state. Alfonz Bednár’s Sklený vrch (Glass Hill; 1954), usually seen as a signal of a political “thaw,” set the Uprising’s devotion and heroism against the norms of an unheroic present. In 1959, Jan Brocko, Boris Kocúr, and Marcel Herz compiled and published an anthology of poetry by participants in the Uprising, sentimentally called Kvet z našej krvi (A Flower from Our Blood). Departures from such sentimental and epic representations were rare. The first genuine departure was Svet na Trasovisku (World at Trasovisko [=Clash]), CígerHronský’s portrayal of a Slovak village suffering under the impact of the Uprising. But then this work appeared in Ohio in 1960. Bulgaria, which came under Soviet control after the communist coup d’état in 1944, got off to a head start in the process of ideologizing history. If Bulgaria’s war on the side of Nazi Germany produced hardly any literature, the “Patriotic War,” as communist propaganda came to label Bulgaria’s final turn against Nazi Germany, became a favorite fictional subject in the late 1940s and early 1950s — just as the National Uprising did in Slovakia. With the Party’s support, this literature established a “correct” interpretation of the war, as the title story in Pavel Vezhinov’s collection Vtora rota (Second Company) perfectly illustrates. The communist hero, Manev, assumes the command of the worst unit in the regiment and gradually transforms the hungry, demoralized rabble into “good” citizens. Vezhinov’s story exemplifies what the Party demanded of literature during the early years of totalitarianism: to show how heroic activists spread the communist “Truth” to the masses. “The people,” as readers, are encouraged to identify emotionally with the communists and to find a quasi-mystical tie between their own primordial “wisdom” and the new ideology. “Vtora rota” makes clear that the internalization of ideology makes use of a “natural” disposition of human beings. Two Bulgarian books deserve to be singled out of a huge body of ideologically inspired literature on the resistance movement: Vesselin Andreev’s V Lopianskata gora (In the Lopian Forest; 1947) and Emilian Stanev’s V tiha vecher (On a Quiet Evening; 1948). V Lopianskata gora is a documentary collection on the “Partisan Movement” in Bulgaria, which started when the Bulgarian government joined Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the Bulgarian Communist Party proclaimed a new “course of armed resistance” against the “monarchic-fascist government.” V Lopianskata gora portrays Andreev’s experiences in the resistance, presenting in the manner of communist-inspired literature attractive anti-fascist heroes and, especially, selfsacrificing communists. Nevertheless, this well-written novel also incorporates touches of lyricism. Stanev’s V tiha vecher is a novella about an imprisoned partisan activist who attempts to escape. Though rich in retrospection and internal monologues, this minor piece by an otherwise first-rate writer displays the “spirit of the time” rather than originality. In Yugoslavia, writing about the war came under strict control after the 1948 break with the Cominform. The official representation of Tito’s role in the war was established already in 1945, in Radovan Zogovic´’s hagiographic Pjesma o biografiji druga Tita (Song of Comrade Tito’s Biography). The author became a doctrinaire guardian of literature but lost his authority

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by 1948 and was silenced until Miroslav Krleža asked Tito to reconsider his case in 1965. Likewise, Milovan Ðilas was allowed to publish as long as he remained a loyal collaborator of Tito, but when he became critical of the Party bureaucracy he was ejected from his positions (1954) and then jailed (1957–61). Ðilas subsequently attacked the communist system and he could publish his memoirs only in exile. The Slovene Edvard Kocbek encountered different problems. This Catholic-socialist poet and partisan leader signed the Dolomite Declaration that recognized the primacy of the communists in fighting the Nazis, but then became increasingly disenchanted with the communist partisan leaders. His various official posts in the postwar years allowed him to publish his partisan diaries from 1942–43, but he fell into political disgrace in the early 1950s, and only in 1967, his diaries from the later part of 1943 appeared. The Serbian novelist Dobrica Cósic´ also had a checkered history. A political commissar with the partisans during the war, he assumed leading positions in the Party and the government but was later relieved of his duties because of his critical stance — only to become in 1992 the (controversial) president of a truncated Yugoslavia. Daleko je sunce (Far Away Is the Sun; 1951), his first novel, is generally recognized as the best portrayal of the war in Yugoslavia. His later Deobe (Divisions; 1961) focalized the war from a Cˇetnik’s perspective but was schematic in its representation of characters. In Romania, most novels about World War II that were written in the late 1940s and the 1950s also offered predictable themes and rudimentary typologies. Laurent¸iu Fulga’s fiction deviated partially. Fulga was seriously wounded in World War II and temporarily listed as missing; he planned but never completed a major cycle on the war. The manuscript of his first story collection, Straniul paradis (Strange Paradise; 1942), was lost, forcing him to reconstruct it from memory. In 1946 he wrote the longer narrative fragment “Retragerea” (Retreat) and subsequently expanded it into the first volume of a tetralogy. In the end, he completed only two volumes: Oameni fa˘ra˘ glorie (Men Without Glory; 1956) and Steaua bunei sperant¸e (The Star of Good Hope; 1963). The first one, concerned with the Romanian army’s retreat after its defeat on the Don River bend, describes the suffering of the soldiers and of the population behind the front line. Unfortunately, the novel sustains a Stalinist interpretation of history that exalts the heroism of the Red Army and the spread of Communism. The second volume is set in a prison camp, where officers undergo a process of self-examination, debating past mistakes and dreaming of a better future that is linked, once more, to Communism. The topics of the two volumes roughly correspond to Örkény’s Lágerek népe and his play on the battle of Voronezh, but here the perspective agrees more closely with the official communist one. More interesting is Fulga’s later Fascinat¸ia (Fascination; 1977), in which a whole group of soldiers is obsessed with the fleeting image of a woman in red (warning of war dangers) and subsequently dies in battles. Other subplots of this psychological novel focus on great passions, some elevating, others corrupting the soldiers. Eugen Barbu’s S¸oseaua nordului (The Northern Highway; 1959) pits communist heroes against local or foreign Nazi villains with little concern for psychological depth and, like other novelists of the period, overemphasizes the communist role in liberating Bucharest. The younger Titus Popovici showed more sophistication in Stra˘inul (The Stranger; 1955) by combining the epic tradition of Rebreanu with existentialist features in order to represent the effects of World War II on the provincial city of Arad. The novel includes scenes from the front as well as descriptions of the assault of Horthy’s army on the neighboring villages

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after Romania switched sides on August 23, 1944. Most of the conflicts are filtered through the maturing perspective of an adolescent hero, Andrei Sabin. Zaharia Stancu used a similarly strong personal filter later in Jocul cu moartea (A Gamble with Death; 1962), which depicts Bucharest under German occupation. Many East-Central European poets found it relatively easy to shift from the “anti-poetic” reportages they wrote during the war to a didactic-expository poetry they were encouraged to write during the period of “Socialist Realism.” At the height of Stalinism, poets all over EastCentral Europe praised the heroic deeds of the Red Army (and, to a lesser extent, those of the local communists), serving the Soviet peace propaganda and attacking western militarism. Eugen Jebeleanu’s expressionist-collage poem Surâsul Hiros¸imei (The Smile of Hiroshima; 1958), for example, takes a journey through a nuclear inferno, rehearsing dialogues and reactions preceding and following the nuclear detonation. While the book avoids direct moralizing, the suffering it records amounts to an indictment of American imperialism. Similarly, Hungarian poets like Zoltán Zelk dutifully sang hymns to Stalin, the Red Army, and the Hungarian leader Mátyás Rákosi for liberating the country. In contrast to the countries that had significant resistance movements, Hungary had only a handful of national martyrs and heroes to glorify. The Holocaust and the persecution of the Jews were virtually taboo in Hungarian literature for several decades, even though, or perhaps precisely because, most communist leaders of the Stalinist years were of Jewish origin. A focus on Jews and their fate could have raised questions about their own Hungarian identity and intensified the already powerful anti-Semitism that officially was said to be dead. The great exception to this general attitude towards the Jews and the Holocaust was János Pilinszky, perhaps the greatest Hungarian postwar poet, who became a deeply religious Catholic. Pilinszky served in the last year of the war and stayed briefly in Germany before returning to Hungary. Back home, he was able to publish the poems “Harbach 1944” (Összes 43–44) in 1946 and “Francia fogoly” (French Prisoner; Összes 44–45) in 1947, but soon afterwards his voice was suppressed. Nevertheless, the other remarkable poems he wrote during those years on hunger, persecution, pain, and death — among them “Egy KZ-láger falára” (Unto a Camp Wall; Összes 46), “Apokrif” (Összes 53–56), and “Rávensbrücki passió” (Összes 46) — did get published over the next decade individually, and they were finally included in the volume Harmadnapon (On the Third Day; 1959; Összes 29–59), in a section named “Egy KZ-láger falára.” The title poem condenses death, space, and accusation into three terse stanzas: Ahová estél, ott maradsz. A mindenségbo˝l ezt az egyet, Ezt az egyetlen helyet, De ezt azután megszerezted. Menekül elo˝led a táj. Lehet az ház, malom vagy nyárfa, Minden csak küzködik veled, mintha a semmiben mutálna. De most már nem tágitasz. Megvakítottunk? Szemmel tartasz.

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V. Enter the outsiders and anti-heroes: Perspectival representations of 1956–1968 Between 1956 and 1968 epic heroism slowly gave way to dramatic and ironic representations that found little to emulate in the fiction of the late forties and early fifties. Still, one is struck how much of what emerged in the sixties and afterward could be traced back to narrator types from the immediate postwar years: Borowski’s quasi-fictive narrators and Škvorecký’s saxophone-playing David, both of whom are older adolescents. From them one can follow lines that lead to Bohumil Hrabal’s and Imre Kertész’s anti-heroic adolescents, who retain their detachment and continue to regard the “official” world of adults with skepticism, even if they should engage in a heroic deed. In a similar way, though to a lesser extent, the war is now more frequently seen from the perspective of women. These new adolescent and female focalizations are crucial in refocusing the conflicts from schematized external clashes to psychological torments and divisions. This trend cannot be substantiated statistically but is clearly observable in the works that achieved great and lasting successes, whether written by writers in exile, those who “stayed behind,” or those who later departed. These are also the years during which many writers found their voice, overcoming a silence that was not always imposed by censorship or taboo. Although the writers in exile were never constrained by the ideological taboos that their compatriots behind the Iron Curtain had to face, their imagination too was overwhelmed by the sheer enormity and barbarity of what happened. The case of the Romanian-born Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986, is illustrative. A survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald extermination camps, Wiesel came to write about his experiences only after encouragement from François Mauriac. His Yiddish Un di velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Has Remained Silent; 1956), compressed in 1958 into the slim French volume La Nuit (Night), became over time an international reference point. Wiesel’s obsessive themes are silence, painful testimony, and the search for a justification of his own survival. La Ville de la chance (1962) focuses on the complicit silence of the non-Jewish population during the Holocaust. In Le serment de Kolvillàg (1973) an oath of silence is taken by the Jewish community itself just before its annihilation. In the latter, as well as in L’Oublié (The Forgotten; 1989), the protagonists finally break the silence, sharing their tragic past with a broader audience. Not surprisingly, Wiesel entitled his own threevolume collection of essays Against Silence (1984), and he devoted his main effort through the 1990s to the publication of his memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995), followed by And the

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Sea is Never Full (1999). Wiesel’s entire oeuvre is a passionate and pained response to the silence that attended the apocalyptic slaughter of World War II. As he put it in his Nobel Prize lecture: “Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living. If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope” (Kingdom of Memory 241). Most exiled writers remained preoccupied with memories of their childhood, their community, and the language they left behind — memories that asked for lyrical or dramatic, rather than epic representation. They remained to a considerable extent captives of their memories. This is certainly true of Sándor Márai, who managed to publish his aforementioned Hungarian diaries of 1945–47 in 1958 in Washington DC and continued to write in Hungarian until the end of his life. Ja¯n¸ is Jaunsudrabin¸š published in 1951 already a witty dialogue with his wife on his escape from Latvia (Es sta¯stu), and he continued in 1957 with his autobiography, Mana dzı¯ve, both published in Sweden. Representations of the exilic experience were by no means always lyrical or witty. As in the case of Ma¯rtin¸š Zı¯verts’s Ka¯ zaglis naktı¯ (Like a Thief at Night), they could also be bitter and highly satirical. This play, performed in Stockholm in 1962, portrayed the policy debates within the Latvian exile community and, for a while, severely damaged the author’s reputation among his compatriots. The curve of exilic writing stretches in this period from Antanas Ške˙ma’s Pabudimas (The Awakening; 1957) to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965), both published in the US. Ške˙ma’s play, which reverses the heroic communist schema, pits a Lithuanian communist interrogator against two underground fighters, his high-school friend and his wife. The latter lose the physical fight but win the moral victory. The case of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is different, and not only because it was written in English. Kosinski maintained that the gruesome experiences of his adolescent narrator in the devastated countryside of postwar Poland were autobiographical, but this claim later turned out to be untenable. The novel raised thus questions about authenticity, fiction, and facts — questions that became crucial both in some Holocaust literature and in the postmodern literary style. Whether Kosinski deliberately used innovative techniques that continually blur the line between fact and fiction, autobiography and invention, or whether he simply tried to mystify his biography is a matter of continued debate (see Jastrze˛bska’s “Traumas of World War II” in vol. 4 of our History). Like Kosinski’s novel, Hrabal’s Ostrˇe sledované vlaky (Closely Watched Trains) was published in 1965 and depicted the world through the eyes of an adolescent who is, once more, not a hero — even if he dies while blowing up a German train. But Hrabal’s Miloš has it easier than Kosinski’s narrator because he lives in a friendlier native environment and, above all, because sympathetic women sweeten his bitter experience of sexual maturation. He fails in his first intercourse because of premature ejaculation and tries to commit suicide, but his girlfriend remains loyal and confident and he succeeds in his second attempt, kindly granted to him by a mature woman from the underground movement. In the final scene he dies, just as the German he shot also dies crying out “Mutti! Mutti!” for his wife but reminding Miloš of his own mother. The gallery of motherly women is completed by Mrs. Lánská, the wife of the stationmaster whom Miloš also consults on his sexual problems. Miloš speaks his final sentence, “You should have sat at home on your arse,” to the German but also to himself. The tragi-comic anti-war

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message brings the two sides closer to each other and rounds off a story that ran through a gamut of moods, from earthy to grotesque, from hilarious to tender. Ostrˇe sledované vlaky, something of a breakthrough in East-Central European representations of the war and resistance, deservedly received international recognition, especially after Jirˇí Menzel adapted it into an Oscar-winning movie. In Yugoslavia, the 1960s brought the first departures from the epic partisan legends. The depictions of Nazis remained stereotypical, but portrayals of the resistance became more complex and, occasionally, even humorous. Mihailo Lalic´, a Serb-Montenegrin, began in 1950 with Svadba (The Wedding), which pitted noble-minded partisans against their cowardly Cˇetnik guards. Lalic´’s Lelejska gora (The Wailing Mountain) from 1962 still presented three partisans courageously defying hunger, cold, and illness, but it enriched the Yugoslav genre of partisan novels with long stream-of-consciousness monologues and supernatural elements (in one scene the protagonist meets the devil). Branko Cópic´, a Muslim Bosnian, began writing when still a partisan and subsequently had a brush with the communist Yugoslav authorities. His Prolom (Breakthrough; 1952) disappointed some expectations by representing the war in northwest Bosnia primarily through peasants, townspeople, and small officials. Cópic´ highlights longbrewing social, religious, and national conflicts in the region (including the communist uprising ´ opic´’s against the Ustaša and Cˇetnik movements), ignoring the Germans almost entirely. C Doživljaji Nikoletine Bursacá (Adventures of Nikoletina Bursac´), a loosely structured comicpicaresque novel about the adventures of a simple-minded Bosnian peasant and his frail follower in 1942–43, appeared in 1960. The novel was so successful that it was turned into a play, a movie, and a television series, and given a postwar sequel. Romanian literature of the late sixties approached the representation of individual and collective destinies during World War II with sophisticated methods that reflect, as well as reinterpret, history. Fa˘nus¸ Neagu’s Îngerul a strigat (The Angel Has Cried; 1968), for example, used some techniques that echoed those of Latin American Magic Realism in giving a mythicrealistic representation of changes during and after the war in a rural community in the South. In Martorul (The Witness; 1972), Gheorghe Schwartz resorted to a Kafkan manner to parable to describe how the Iron Guard took over Lugoj, a multicultural town in southwestern Romania. Wartime Lugoj and other areas of the Banat are also featured in Sorin Titel’s T¸ara îndepa˘rtata˘ (Remote Country; 1974). The stories traded by characters in this polyphonic novel recreate the period around and during World War II, as the placid provincial atmosphere of southwestern Romania is disrupted by green shirts, gang rapes, deportations of Jews, and refugees from the famine in eastern Romania. An archaic world, removed from history, vanishes in the debris of the 1940s. Polish literature of the 1960s continued to be intensely engaged with reminiscences of the war. We find them not only in the works of the older generation (Róz˙ewicz, Kruczkowski, Iwaszkiewicz, Konwicki, Szczypiorski, and Bryll), but also in writings by authors born after the war. This was, perhaps, a way of evading the postwar world, or even a sign of opportunism, since war issues were generally safer and the communist authorities encouraged their cultivation. In any case, literature came to focus on political history and a Marxist-sociological approach to the formation of individuals, at the cost of marginalizing philosophical and psychological issues. In Tadeusz Nowak’s A jak królem, a jak katem be˛dziesz (And When You’ll Be the King, and When You’ll Be the Executioner; 1968) two different ethical paradigms collide as myth meets

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civilization, while Tadeusz Konwicki’s Sennik współczesny (Dreambook of Our Time; 1963) portrays the damage that war inflicts on a stable identity. Iwaszkiewicz’s three-volume Sława i chwała (Fame and Glory; 1956–62) integrates the Uprising and many other experiences into a panorama of heroic historical and personal fates. In Slovakia, images of the National Uprising continued to dominate the war representations, serving, however, different purposes as time went on. Some works followed the Party line out of sheer opportunism (especially in the period of “normalization” in the 1970s); others conducted disguised polemics with the official style of epic writing. The narrator of Ladislav Mnˇacˇko’s Smrt’ sa volá Engelchen (Death Is Called Engelchen; 1959) is a wounded fighter who tells his story during his postwar convalescence to a nurse with whom he falls in love. The postwar love affair in the hospital, the young bourgeois narrator’s gradual shift towards the Party, the partisan successes in killing Nazis, and the inclusion of some “good” German soldiers that desert and join the partisans — all this is rather cliché-ridden and predictable. But the novel goes beyond kitsch and epic representation by revealing problems and tensions within the partisan organization and by focusing on guilt. When the partisans kill some ranking German officers, the Germans retaliate by annihilating a Slovak village. Furthermore, the novel’s dramatic center is an enigmatic beautiful Jewess who prostitutes herself with leading German officers in order to help the partisans by spying on the enemy. She takes leave from the convalescing narrator, but is unable to come to terms with her past in Canada and commits suicide. The Holocaust, about which Mnˇacˇko remains silent, reentered East-Central European fiction around 1960 with Rudolf Jašík’s novel Námestie sv. Alžbety (St. Elisabeth Square), Jan Otcˇenášek’s Romeo, Julie a tma (Romeo, Juliet, and the Darkness), both published in 1958, and Ferenc Sánta’s Az ötödik pecsét (The Fifth Seal; 1963). Though conventional in their narrative method and characterization, these novels inspired more sophisticated works. Jašík’s unfinished novel Mr´tvi nespievajú (The Dead Do Not Sing; 1961), as well as Ladislav Tˇažký’s Amenmária. Samí dobrí vojaci (Amenmaria: Only Good Soldiers; 1964) and its sequel, Evanjelium podl’a Matúša (The Gospel According to Matthew; 1979), also turned to new themes and morally torn characters by focusing on Slovak soldiers forced to fight for the Nazis. Amenmária, a diary of a Slovak soldier on the eastern front, reveals the absurdity of the war as well as the emotional and moral maturation of a young man. The sequel describes the journey of Slovak soldiers from the battle front to camps in Romania and Austria.

VI. Alienation and reconciliation: 1968–1989 The suppression of the Prague Spring, the attempt to establish “Communism with a human face” (see “1956/1968”: pp. 94–98) meant a setback for the liberalization of literature and culture, especially in Czechoslovakia. But the liberalization gathered again momentum in the 1970s, and accelerated as Gorbachov’s perestroika got on its way in the early 1980s. New characters, perspectives, and narrative modes emerged, enriching the repertoire of the previous period. This was partly due to a new generation of writers born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, who experienced the war only as children. Thus, several of Danilo Kiš’s and György Konrád’s “fictionalized autobiographies” (see Guido Snel’s article in this volume) represent the war

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experiences of a child. But unlike Kadare’s aforementioned Chronicle in Stone, which tries to retain an element of verisimilitude, these texts veer off into the fantastic and mythical (for example, in the portrayal of Kiš’s father figure). The fantastic and the grotesque significantly figure also in Hrabal’s Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England), published in 1971. Its narrator, Ditie, is a young picaro who never outgrows his adolescence and puny size (echoes of Günter Grass’s boy with a tin drum). Working in the restaurant/hotel business where he serves the elite of the Czechoslovak Republic, the German occupiers, and the communists of the postwar era, he seeks power and money but remains alienated, partly because of his own blunders, partly because of his contrary spirit. His war adventures lead him to marry Lise, a German woman who bears him a demented child, Siegfried, and then dies in the rubble of a bombing. Ditie is pardoned after the war for his unpatriotic behavior and builds a fabulous hotel by selling the stamp collection of his former father-in-law, but ends up, voluntarily, on a road repair crew. Alternatingly hilarious, erotic, racy, and wistful, the novel mocks all forms of patriotism and ideology. The Romanian novels of the sixties and seventies used both documentary and mythicsymbolic methods to represent World War II. Francisc Pa˘curariu’s Labirintul (The Labyrinth; 1974), for example, chronicles the war years in occupied northern Transylvania through the perspective of a journalist traveling through the “labyrinth” of a war-torn world. Scenes of battle intersect with pogroms, deportations, and repressions spearheaded by Baron Uhry, one of the commanders of the occupying armies. In Dumitru Radu Popescu’s Cei doi din dreptul T¸ebei (The Two at the Gates of T¸ebea; 1973) the war provides the background for a psychological evocation of ancient myths (T¸ebea recalls Thebes). Although a Romanian peasant’s love for a Hungarian woman leads to his death and to that of the girl’s intervening brother, the story also promises some form of interethnic truce at the end of the war. Marin Preda’s Delirul (Delirium; 1975), admittedly not his best work, offers a complex representation of General Antonescu as an essentially flawed but active leader who tried to negotiate some maneuvering room for Romania between the demands of Germany and the threats of the Soviet Union. His failed policies led to the dismantling of Romania’s fragile democratic system. To a relative of the Moromete patriarch (from Preda’s Moromete cycle, discussed in Part II), Romanian society appears caught between the “delirium”of extremists on both wings and the lethargy of the remaining population. Alexandru Sever’s play Îngerul ba˘trân (The Old Angel; 1976), set in an extermination camp, features characters who fight for their survival, all the while debating whether personal salvation makes any sense under the threat of collective obliteration. Gheorghe Astalos¸’s play Vin soldat¸ii (Here Come the Soldiers; 1970) takes a more unusual approach to the war by presenting a group of soldiers engaged in apparently innocuous actions such as playing chess, arranging sand bags, and reciting erotic poems — activities that suggest an effort to defeat death through spontaneous living. Sever left later for Israel and Astalos¸ for France. By the 1970s, ethnic conflicts and forced expatriation slowly seeped into the war stories, although the Soviet camps remained a taboo. The war in the so-called kresy (borderlands) of eastern Poland took an specially dramatic turn because of their mixed population of Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, and Russians. Literary treatments of this complex history are to be found in Leopold Buczkowski’s Czarny potok (Black Torrent), Włodzimierz Odo-

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jewski’s Zasypie wszystko, zawieje (1973) — see Z˙ofia Mitosek’s article on family novels: pp. 505-10 — as well as Andrzej Kusńiewicz’s Strefy (Zones; 1971) and Nawrócenie (Conversion; 1987). Halina Auderska’s Ptasi gosćiniec (Bird’s Highroad; 1973) and Babie lato (Indian Summer; 1974) deal with the forced expatriations. Buczkowski’s linguistically elaborate and artistically sophisticated book from 1954 foregrounds the drama of war and the evil it brings about but is hardly concerned with the tensions among the ethnic groups and does not judge their conduct. Odojewski, however, is preoccupied with ethnic tensions. Alluding to the literary tradition of early Romanticism and the political reality of the seventeenth century, he portrays the continual conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians within a panorama of great historic events. While Kusńiewicz optimistically foresees an ethnically differentiated Galicia and downplays its conflicts, Odojewski harbors a tragic vision of history that forecloses interethnic accords. Kusńiewicz’s heroes leave the eastern territories with a feeling of nostalgia, while those of Odojewski depart with desperation and hatred. For her part, Auderska reveals through simple heroes the pain of leaving one’s homeland and the hardships in resettling elsewhere. Many of the books published in the 1970s and 80s could not appear earlier due to political restrictions and sensitivities. They include Irena Maciejewska’s anthology of literature from and about the ghetto, Rastko Petrovic´’s memoirs, and Moczarski’s aforementioned prison conversations with Jürgen Stroop. In the Baltic countries and Moldavia, in addition to the usual political interdictions, literature had to contend with a brutal denationalization and Russification. Alexei Marinat’s novel about his war experience in Moldavia, Inimi fierbint¸i (Feverish Hearts), appeared only in 1973 and his account of internment in the Stalinist prisons, Eu s¸i lumea (Me and the World), was not published before 1989. Ion C. Ciobanu’s fiction, which portrays the Stalinist deportations more obliquely, was published over almost three decades, between 1954 and 1982. The most important Moldavian novelist and playwright of the postwar period, Ion Drut¸a˘, focuses in Povara buna˘ta˘¸tii noastre (The Burden of Our Goodness; 1968) on a Romanian rural community against the historical background of World War II, the reoccupation of Bessarabia by the Soviets, Russification, and Stalinism. Remembering the Soviet camps The Russian camps were a taboo in the Soviet block; their documentary and fictional representations could only be published in the West. After 1989 they became, however, a major literary topic. We mention here only a few of those that link the camps to the war. Further discussions can be found in various sections of our History, notably in the one on traumas (vol. 4). Historians estimate that about a million people were sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan from eastern Poland when the USSR annexed it after September 17, 1939. Some of these people joined the army of General Anders; others returned to Poland after 1956; but many of them remained in exile. Several gifted writers gave an account of their life after returning from “the house of bondage” (W domu niewoli), as Beata Obertyn´ska entitled the book she published in Rome in 1946. The majority of the accounts of the camps are personal documents rather than works of literature, but the most important of them, Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Inny s´wiat (Another World), first published in English in 1953 and two years later in Polish, is a careful literary account of the author’s stay in Yercevo. Like Borowski, Herling-Grudzin´ski believes that

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ethical decisions in camps were conditioned by hunger, fear, absence of culture, and lack of hope. He regrets that there was moral degradation in the camps but asks that it be judged with sympathetic understanding. Sćibor-Rylski defied political taboos by describing in the second part of Horsehair Fingerring the postwar Soviet occupation, showing in conclusion how the members of the Polish National Militia who had been arrested are corralled into a train to Siberia, singing “Bogurodzica” (Our Lady), a beloved patriotic and religious song since the time of the Battle of Grunwald (1410). Unfortunately, Sćibor-Rylski painted his passionate and symbolic scene in outdated historical and aesthetic colors, and it failed to find appreciative readers when it finally appeared in print. Józef Czapski’s Wspomnienia starobielskie (Starobelsk Memoirs), and Na nieludzkiej ziemi (On an Inhuman Earth), published in Rome (1944) and in Paris (1949) respectively, are important. The latter recounts how the author, as a representative of General Anders, searched for more than 10,000 Polish soldiers, officers, policemen, custom officers, and others, who were transported to the camps of Ostashkov, Starobelsk, and Kozelsk, and subsequently disappeared. The answer was found, in part, at Katyn, where the Germans unearthed the mass graves of Polish officers murdered in 1943. The Soviet Union admitted only in 1990 that the crime was committed by the NKVD, with authorization from the Soviet leadership. A brief overview of the most recent portrayals of war will be given in our Epilogue in vol. 4.

1918

Overview John Neubauer in collaboration with Marcel Cornis-Pope, Dagmar Roberts and Guido Snel

The gruesome opening scene of Liviu Rebreanu’s Pa˘durea spânzurat¸ilor (Forest of the Hanged; 1922) depicts the hanging of a Czech officer of the Austro-Hungarian army who tried to desert. The novel’s Romanian protagonist, a member of the military tribunal adjudicating the case, votes for the death sentence without hesitation; later, however, when he is sent to fight the Romanians he likewise attempts to desert and is likewise hanged — as, indeed, was Rebreanu’s brother Emil in 1917. In the last chapter of Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch Carl Joseph Trotta cuts off three such hanged men from their tree and buries them with his sword — just before he himself dies. During World War I, many nationalities were forced to fight for the Dual Monarchy, even though their national aspirations urged them to the other side. An estimated 50,000 Czech and other legionnaires fought against the central powers, mostly on the Eastern front (Meˇštˇan 230–37), and the experience is depicted both in the heroic mode (for instance in Medec’s Anabase) and in more sober terms by František Václav Krejcˇi, František Langer, Jozef Gregor Tajovský, Melchior Wan´kowicz, even Jaroslav Hašek. In 1916, Romania dramatically shifted from neutrality to form an allegiance with the Allies in order to extricate Transylvania and northern Bukovina from the moribund Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It fell under German occupation and formed a pro-German Conservative government in the Spring of 1918, but finally remobilized on the Allies’ side and won the battle for Transylvania. The shifting fortunes of war and the conflict of political allegiances (Marghiloman’s Conservatives were pro-German, Bra˘tianu’s Liberals and large sections of the army sided with the Allies) affected also the response of the writers. Much of Romanian World War I literature reflected on such traumas of division, as well as on other dramatic moments and effects of the war. Within a few years, the language of violent dissociation from neighbouring “enemies” and invading “barbarian hordes,” couched in a discourse of unification and nation-building (as in some of the early articles of Barbu Delavrancea, Octavian Goga, and Ion Agârbiceanu) gave way in Romanian literature to what critic Eugen Lovinescu called “humanitarian emancipation” (“Poezia notat¸iei” 256), a literature that tried to free itself from the “tyranny of patriotic writing,” asking questions about the human implications of war and interethnic conflict. Rebreanu’s novel thematizes a problem that far fewer soldiers and civilians on the Western front experienced because, with the exception of the Irish, and, to a lesser extent, the Scots, they belonged to relatively homogeneous populations and nations that did not have to face the agony of Rebreanu’s double loyalty. On the Eastern front, however, clashing ethnic and imperial loyalties could pit brother against brother, father against son, and one soul against the other in

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one and the same individual. Reports and fictional portrayals of this drama constitute much of the war literature in the Baltic, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, and Croatian literatures. In Hungary, patriotism ran high in the early years. Rebreanu’s protagonist, for example, is characteristically caught by a Hungarian officer who was on friendly terms with him. However, support waned as Hungarians increasingly recognized the war as serving mainly German and Austrian interests. Hence Hungarian opposition to the war, which increased substantially by 1915–16, was fed by revulsion at its violence and inhumanity rather than by patriotism. Such revulsion at bloodshed may, of course, be found also in Egon Erwin Kisch’s diaries, in Miloš Crnjanski’s and Miroslav Krleža’s poetry, and in many other texts from the region. Censorship, self-censorship, and the general misery of the war severely affected the quality and quantity of the literary production. In Slovakia, for instance, literary production ground almost to a halt. Some writers joined the army; others, like the authors of the Slovak Modern School, stopped writing altogether. Publishing opportunities were limited and most literary magazines, along with the important Živena, disappeared. Timrava’s [Božena Slancˇíková] V cˇas vojny (In Times of War; 1917) and Hrdinovia (Heroes), written 1918, were published in censored form; Hviezdoslav’s Krvavé sonety (Sonnets Written in Blood) were written in 1914 but published only in 1919. Hungary’s first avant-garde journal, Lajos Kassák’s Tett (Action), was banned for pacifism in 1916, barely a year after its launching, and the March 1, 1917 issue of the leading journal, Nyugat, was confiscated because of Mihály Babits’s anti-war poem “Fortissimo” (Babits, Összegyu˝jtött 290). Ioan Slavici’s Tribuna (published in Sibiu, in Southern Transylvania) was confiscated by the Romanian government in 1916. Much of what was not allowed to appear during the war was published afterwards, but it is impossible to determine how much was irretrievably lost due to self-censorship, death, and physical destruction. This introduction and the following articles by Ambros, Arens, Higonnet, Kielak, and Snel cannot give a comprehensive overview of the vast World War I literature in East-Central Europe; they can only highlight, for the first time, certain salient features and illustrate them by means of case studies. The introduction focuses on aspects and literatures not covered by the essays.

Writers in the war The Great War brought unprecedented suffering and destruction to Europe, and East-Central Europe bore the brunt. The writers of the region were among its victims as well as its observers. The Serbs Borisav Stankovic´ and Ivo Andric´ were jailed because they suddenly turned into enemy nationals in their place of residence; Liviu Rebreanu could not enlist in the Romanian army because he was born in Transylvania, then part of the Monarchy; the Romanian Camil Petrescu, the Hungarian Géza Gyóni, and others were taken war prisoners; the Slovak Janko Jesenský and Jozef Gregor Tajovský let themselves be captured by Russians and then joined Czechoslovak legions fighting on the Russian side — as depicted in Tajovský’s Rozprávky z Ruska (Fairy Tales from Russia; 1920), Jesenský’s poetry volume Zo zajatia (From Captivity; 1919), and his autobiographical Cestou k slobode (On the Way to Freedom; 1933). The Czech Richard Weiner had a nervous breakdown on the Serbian front in 1915 and the Latvian Andrejs Upı¯ts was evacuated to Baku and subsequently to Estonia. The young Croat Miroslav Krleža

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commanded, as a non-commissioned officer of the Austro-Hungarian army, a platoon of domobrani (Croatian soldiers in Habsburg service). He developed tuberculosis in 1916, recovered and was sent to Galicia, but a renewed outbreak of the disease led him to seek medical treatment in Budapest. The Serbian Miloš Crnjanski, born in Csongrád, Hungary, also fought on the Austro-Hungarian side in Galicia until he was hospitalized. Gheorghe Bra˘escu graduated from the Romanian Infantry School of Officers, rose to the rank of major in 1915, and was seriously wounded in 1916 in Transylvania. He was interned in German camps for refusing to pledge that he would not fight the forces occupying Bucharest. In camp he started to write stories about the comic-burlesque discrepancy between inner life and martial poses, real emotions and artificial routines in war. Roiban, the protagonist of Bra˘escu’s 1927 novel Mos¸ Belea (Old Man Trouble), is a participant of the war in 1877 and a retired general by the time of World War I. He is taken as a prisoner to Germany, just like his author. This simple, halfilliterate, but unbending soldier (nicknamed “Old Man Belea” because of his refusal to adapt to new military routines) tries to survive with dignity under exceptional circumstances. In what ways did the war experiences of writers differ from those of other citizens? Many writers and poets served for a while as war reporters or commentators. They included the Hungarian Zsigmond Móricz and Ferenc Molnár (Egy haditudósító emlékei; 1916), the Romanian Mihail Sadoveanu (who edited the newspaper România at the Bulgarian and Moldavian front from 1917–18), and Krleža. Their texts were, at least in the beginning, not lacking in patriotic fervor. Though most of the personal testimonies were not commissioned, many notes, journals, and diaries were nevertheless probably meant for the public from the very outset. As Egon Erwin Kisch tells in the foreword of his war diaries, his title, Schreib das auf, Kisch!, originated in the custom of his unit to remark about every light and serious event, “write this up, Kisch!” And write he did: the horror contained in his notes on the disastrous Austro-Hungarian withdrawal on September 10, 1914 over the river Drina (97–115) surpasses most fictional war stories.

Fiction There is no sharp dividing line during these years between personal documents, public reports, and fiction proper. Titles are often deceiving: as Miro Mašek shows (pp. 407–12), Miloš ˇ arnojevic´) was no diary in the usual sense for Crnjanski’s Dnevniko Cˇarnojevicú (Diary about C Crnjanski deliberately broke up the traditional narrative to produce an avant-garde text about the horrors of the war — not unlike Ivan Cankar, who, perhaps more appropriately, entitled his 1917 publication on the same horrors Podobe iz sanj (Dream Visions). On the other end of the spectrum are works like Melchior Wan´kowicz’s Strze˛py epopei (1923), which portrayed battles and troop movements of the legionnaires in the Polish Republic, by going beyond personal experience. Still, the war-related writings of the first years of fighting were almost exclusively accounts of personal experiences and reports or reportage from the front. Only later were such personal experiences transformed into fictional accounts of the war. Krleža, for instance, started to sketch his novellas on the domobrani who served under him once he was back in Zagreb and no longer in active service. The stories of his Hrvatski Bog Mars (The Croatian God Mars) were first

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published in 1917 and only in 1922 as a book. By contrast, Margit Kaffka’s “Az elso˝ stációnál” (At the First Station) and Zsigmond Móricz’s “Szegény emberek” (Poor Folk), the best Hungarian anti-war stories about soldiers, appeared in 1916 and were pure fiction rather than transmutations of a personal experience on the front — though Móricz had been a reporter there. Both stories confront the war with class differences. Kaffka tells the story of two boys from Makó, Feri Kujtor and Jóska Bagi. While retreating, Bagi is lightly wounded on his right hand, and immediately starts dreaming about being sent home. There, as son of a rich family, he is somebody, while Feri, with whom he has shared the miseries of the front, is a poor schmuck. Once his hand is bandaged, he notices that Feri seems to be severely ill, but he no longer feels the camaraderie: “[T]hat poor Feri should have fled from his side — without a farewell. But perhaps it is better like this! Hmm, that’s how this war is!” (333). The “first station” leads to the hospital and back home (or possibly to death in Feri’s case), and instantaneously reinstitutes the class differences that were temporarily erased at the front. The war appears in a double light, and one could argue that social injustice rather than the war itself is subject of the story. Móricz’s “Poor Folk” also combines the themes of war and class, while foregrounding the war’s brutalization. His protagonist is a poor soldier who has a furlough of 28 days after more than two years of service in the war. Unable to feed his family and repay the debt his wife has racked up, he breaks into the house of a rich family and kills the babysitter and a young girl with a pitchfork and knife (although not the baby in the crib). He is quickly tracked down and arrested. The shock effect of the story lies not just in the detached description of the brutal murder but also in the portrayal of the murderer’s simple-minded, confused, yet also logical reasoning. Conversing with somebody before the murder, he begins to tell the story of his first war murder, that of a young girl. Throughout the rest of the story scenes of the war impose themselves on his mind and actions; he can kill in cold blood because that is how he was taught to confront the enemy (at one point he was even forced to drink the blood of an Italian soldier to survive). Surrendering to the gendarme he explains, “childishly excusing himself” that earlier he too would have been unable to look at a murder; he had to look away when his mother or wife killed a chicken; “but in the war one gets used to many things that are difficult to give up at home” (“Szegény” 488). Yet his problem is not simply that he applies at home what he was expected to do in the war against the enemy, for his desperate financial situation opens for him a second front at home between rich and poor: “not the Russians are on the other banks [of the water] …but the rich … we are here, you know, on this side, the poor folk … all of us are here who have a stinking hovel […] on the other bank is the officer’s mess hall […] that’s where even the sun shines” (Móricz 482–83). While the enemy bullets made little difference between rich and poor soldiers, class difference still rules at home. Marxist critics not unreasonably have seen in this a foreshadowing of a revolution, although Móricz never became a communist. War fiction was not always based on personal experience; it often expressed personal convictions, literary affiliations, and political traditions. In Hungary, Kaffka, Móricz, and the poet Babits were leading writers of the liberal and cosmopolitan Nyugat, which took an increasingly anti-war attitude even though it refrained from reopening the explosive issue of the Hungarian minorities, probably not merely as an act of self-censorship but due to an article of patriotic faith that they too had shared.

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These matters looked different from a Romanian perspective. Ioan Slavici, the first important Romanian novelist of the nineteenth century, tried to balance the interests of Romania with those of Austro-Hungary, towards which he felt a certain loyalty as a Transylvanian-born Romanian. At the turn of the century, his literary magazine Tribuna supported both Sturdza’s Romanian government and Dezso˝ Bánffy’s Hungarian one. Such ambivalence was not unusual for Romanian periodicals from the Banat and Transylvania: the multilingual press of Timis¸oara, for example, maintained a certain neutrality at the beginning of World War I, deploring the collapse of the Central European empire but refusing to vilify its Serbian and other enemies. Slavici rightly protested that the Romanian government’s confiscation of his Tribuna was “Byzantine,” but chose to ignore the Hungarian reprisals against the Banat Romanians. Such inconsistencies reflected the contradictory loyalties of writers born in multicultural areas like Transylvania or the Banat, which had changed rulers and were alternating between autonomy and subjugation. Rebreanu’s prose did emerge from personal experience. Calvarul (1919), his first work on World War I, was a thinly disguised autobiographical novel on his paralyzing fear while stranded in occupied Bucharest, with the German and Hungarian police searching his house and finally arresting him for being a self-exiled Austro-Hungarian subject. Remus Lunceanu, like his author, manages to escape to Ias¸i, but the Romanian authorities suspect him of being a Hungarian spy and he finally commits suicide. Catastrofa (1921), a sketch for Pa˘durea spanzurat¸ilor, features David Pop, an ordinary Transylvanian Romanian, who is drafted as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and finds himself shooting unthinkingly at his brethren in the Romanian army. In Pa˘durea spânzurat¸ilor, the subconscious becomes a determining factor in the protagonist’s actions. Modeled after Rebreanu’s hanged brother, Apostol Bologa wavers between his burgeoning ethnic feelings and his sense of duty towards the Austro-Hungarian Empire of his birth. When he has to face the Romanian army as a young artillery officer of the imperial army, he unsuccessfully requests to be transferred. He makes a half-hearted attempt to desert but is caught and condemned to death. The sentence gives him a sense of relief for he no longer has to face an unsolvable problem. His relationship with women reflects the same ambiguity: he breaks his engagement with a Romanian middle-class woman because he catches her flirting with a Hungarian officer, but then marries a Hungarian peasant girl just before his execution. According to George Ca˘linescu, Pa˘durea spânzurat¸ilor “could have been a political novel but remained a novel of analysis out of artistic instinct” (de la origini 650). Rebreanu’s Bologa attains, with great difficulty, a political and moral consciousness, and he evaluates his situation with increasing lucidity. His indecision and divided loyalty resemble those of the Czech captain Otto Klapka and other minority characters serving in the Austro-Hungarian army. Lack of patriotism and national hope may allow them to seek alternatives to the polarizing ideologies of the war. Bologa first defends the war as a “real generator of energy” (Rebreanu, Forest 16), but the execution of the Czech officer Svoboda raises doubts in his mind, and he gradually “substitutes the irenic principles of nonviolence and unconditional love for both nationalistic ideal and ethnic myth” (Spariosu 170). He remembers his childhood in multicultural Transylvania, where his mother taught him love for a “kind, gentle, and forgiving Deity” while his father tried to instill in him a sense of “duty” and pride for being Romanian (Rebreanu,

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Forest 36). Bologa’s difficult task is to reconcile these two legacies by valuing his duty to his fellow humans over either imperialistic or nationalistic loyalties. Refusing both the ethnocentric “holy war” of his co-nationals and the naïve “internationalism” of Lieutenant Varga, who calls on all nations to fight for the Empire against a “common foe” (56), Bologa opts for an integrative love instead of polarization, and finally questions the war itself. As long as he divides the world into two halves, “one of love and one of hatred” (204), his heart remains “tainted with hatred” (205). His affection for the Hungarian peasant girl is a first step towards an integrative love that surmounts social and ethnic differences. His next step is to desert and to wander aimlessly in a liminal space, a “no-man’s land between the two warring sides” (Spariosu 176). He would like to inhabit it indefinitely but eventually loses when he runs into a patrol. Even though “Apostol” Bologa ends predictably as a self-styled martyr, he bequeaths to the next generation a “model of coexistence in a multicultural region such as Transylvania, perpetually troubled by ethnic conflict” (Spariosu 175). In this sense, Pa˘durea spânzurat¸ilor is not just a psychological novel, but also a text of “tormenting uncertainties outside any political considerations” (Ca˘linescu 650) that puts forth a generous moral-political program of reconciliation. Rebreanu continued to pursue the themes of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the absurdity of double loyalties in It¸ic S¸trul, dezertor (1932). Like Rebreanu’s Pa˘durea spânzurat¸ilor, Camil Petrescu’s Ultima noapte de dragoste, întîia noapte de ra˘zboi (Last Night of Love, First Night of War; 1930) represents a major breakthrough at the level of theme, psychological and intellectual analysis, and narrative technique. Illustrating his view that fiction is a “formidable means of penetrating and objectifying human souls” (Petrescu, “Proust” 18), the prize-winning novel confronts its introspective protagonist, S¸tefan Gheorghidiu, with the “limit situations” of passionate love, war, death, and betrayal, and also with obsessive jealousy. In his ambitious desire to represent life en toute vérité, Camil Petrescu chose the “unmediated” personal narrative forms of diary, letters, and confession. In the long soliloquy of the first part, the protagonist from the new urban middle-class observes himself and his Bucharest entourage, unsparingly analyzing his jealousy towards his wife, a former student colleague with whom he wants to share both his philosophic speculations and his sexual desires. The internal analysis disrupts chronology, moving digressively through experiences and the protagonist’s perception of them. The second part is a long war diary that reorients the character’s attention from analysis of eroticism to a vivid documentary that represents the war in its tragi-grotesque intensity. The protagonist finds fault with the strategies of the Romanian army, deflates heroism by recounting moments of cowardice and confusion, and records numerous instances when people caught in history display a simple and fragile humanity. Cezar Petrescu’s two-part novel Întunecare (Gathering Clouds) from 1927–28 combines the chronicle approach with intellectual debate in presenting the first comprehensive image of Romanian society before, during, and after World War I. The narrative alternates between the frontline and the world beyond it, studying the effects of the war on several strata of society, from the rural laborers to the urban upper middle class. Cezar Petrescu is recognized today as “the Romanian novelist who brought, into the space of the novel, the urban atmosphere in all its great social and moral diversity” (Munteanu 193). The novel’s opening on the terrace of Constant¸a’s Casino brings together Colonel Pavel Vardaru, politician and landowner Alexandru Vardaru, his daughter Luminit¸a, her fiancé Radu Coms¸a, science professor Virgil Probota˘, and

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other representatives of Romania’s elite to discuss the morality of the impending war. Probota˘ claims that war, like science, is neither moral nor immoral but simply an “indifferent” mode of “scientific killing.” The scenes that follow question ironically this understanding of morality and war. Back in Bucharest, Alexandru Vardaru continues to sell grain to the Germans, Romania’s potential enemies, and Radu Coms¸a indulges in frivolous pastimes and erotic relationships. The war throws this self-indulgent world to the Moldavian front, where even some of the questionable characters seem to discover their heroism. In a section that reads like a war chronicle, a hospitalized Radu Coms¸a listens to war stories exchanged by wounded soldiers. When the war ends, soldiers discuss Romania’s chance of regaining normalcy and their own expectations upon returning home. Most of them anticipate a life of hardship, laboring in the fields, and a strenuous effort to forget that the war dehumanized them. These expectations are confirmed by other, half-documentary sections that take us to the countryside to observe the impact of the war on simple people. The new society seems to have forgotten its heroes. Leaving the hospital disfigured, Radu Coms¸a is rejected by his former fiancée, and has difficulty finding his place in society. After seeing Luminit¸a and her child on a beach near Constant¸a, he pricks his face, and probably his eyes, with thorns in the final, sensational scene. Coms¸a’s fate is representative of Romania’s “lost generation” (Munteanu 194). The novel revolutionized narrative technique by presenting characters unconventionally: a cinematic view of reality crystallized in the simultaneous presentation of heterogeneous events, an emphasis on interior time that relativizes, and an interest for the authentic document, integrated in the flow of the narrative (Munteanu 194). In one of the first reviews of Întunecare, Mircea Eliade wrote that it contained “pages of the future Romanian psychological novel” (2). George M. Vla˘descu’s Moartea fratelui meu (1934) approached World War I with a humanistic-pacifist attitude, relating it to other wars in the troubled history of the Balkans. In one of the plots Major Arnota˘ confesses to his protégé Lucu that he had to kill his soul “brother,” Flo, in order to spare him the agony of slow death once he was mangled by Turks in a battle of 1877. In another subplot, the Major is killed by a thief (who turns out to be an enemy spy), and the impoverished Lucu leaves his house and goes to live with a Jewish family, showing that the Major’s idea of brotherhood could be extended to other ethnic cultures. When World War I starts, Lucu rejoins his childhood friend, Nucu Arnota˘, son of a Romanian Major and a German mother, but their friendship is dramatically interrupted when Nucu is condemned to death for freeing an old German who was caught by the Romanian army while looking for his son’s dead body. In order to save his “brother” from a humiliating death, Lucu kills him, the way the Major killed his “brother” several decades earlier. The novel’s pacifist message upholds humanism and cross-cultural “brotherhood” by means of this rather melodramatic plot but also by anti-war statements. As the narrator suggests, World War I could have been prevented had the priests of all religions refused to bless the troops. Felix Aderca’s pacifist articles during the war questioned nationalistic claims over territories with a multicultural population like Transylvania. His novel, 1916 (1936), realistically reconstructs the retreat of the Romanian army towards Moldavia. The exploits of Captain Ursu are motivated more by military duty than by patriotic sentiments. He becomes a right-wing nationalist after the war, then recants and joins the opposition, but finally commits suicide, unable to resolve his contradictory allegiances.

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A generation later, Sorin Titel and others thematized the paradox that the disappearance of traditional empires promoted new nationalistic and ethnic separations. Titel’s T¸ara îndepa˘rtata˘ (Remote Country), Pasa˘rea s¸i umbra (Bird and Shadow), Clipa cea repede (The Fleeting Moment), and Femeie, iata˘ fiul ta˘u (Woman, Behold Your Son) contrast the early years of the century, when Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs, Poles, Germans, and Jews still experienced cultural solidarity in the interstices of the Habsburg Empire, with the ethnically and politically polarized world of the mid-century. Other novelists returned to World War I to understand Romania’s subsequent transformation, its progress, dramatic detours, and missed opportunities. Vica, Gabriela Adames¸teanu’s feminine Leopold Bloom from the prize-winning 1984 novel Dimineat¸a pierduta˘ (Wasted Morning), undertakes a routine journey to visit relatives and friends, but the trip allows her to explore Romania’s socio-historical history from World War I to the present. Vica’s prodigious memory reconstructs the waning of a middle-class family, whose fortunes can be identified with the post-World-War I destiny of Romania itself, moving from hope to disappointment, from democracy to totalitarianism. The fact that Vica undertakes her reconstruction towards the end of the twentieth century suggests that retrieving those energies of a “Wasted Morning” could relaunch individual and collective history.

Poetry Most Hungarian writers were swept away by the first wave of war enthusiasm in the summer of 1914. Among those was, Béla Balázs, who wrote in 1914 in Nyugat that this war was “sacred”; all wars in history washed with their bloodshed a ravine for evolution (200). He volunteered and soon became seriously ill. By 1916 he would preface his soldier’s diary, Lélek a háborúban (Soul in War), with a poem that warns all those (Géza Gyóni seems to meant specifically) that wave their flags with too much enthusiasm. Ady was in two minds about the war, and Mihály Babits, who at moments felt the necessity to “defend the fatherland,” always shuddered at bloodshed and destruction. By the end of 1914 he would ironically contrast the vanished enthusiasm of 1848–49 with that of the present, which would end, like the previous one, as a cheap old picture on a pub wall (“Kép egy falusi csárdában” Összegyu˝jtött 253–54). In “Itália,” a lead article in Nyugat on June 16, 1915, he still ironically accused Italy of entering the war at the instigation of Marinetti and his Futurist movement, claiming that Italy had become a “completely futurist” state (643). Babits’s public turning point came with the publication in Nyugat (August 16, 1915) of a rather innocent love poem, “Játszottam a kezével” (I Played with Her Hand), which ended with the lines, “I’d shed with greater joy / gushing blood for her little finger / than for one hundred kings and flags!” (196). Jeno˝ Rákosi, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Budapesti Hírlap, saw here an opportunity to broaden his attacks on Ady, Babits’s friend and co-editor of Nyugat. The pawn in this polemic was the young poet Gyóni Géza, who admired Ady. Though in 1912 he loudly refused to join the coming war in “Cézár én nem megyek” (Cesar I Won’t Go; Élet 104–105), he volunteered when the moment came. When his unit was caught in the famous Russian siege of Przemys´l, he wrote war poems for his fellow soldiers, which were published immediately and distributed. Gyóni dedicated the slender volume of these poems to Rákosi, who

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had it republished in Budapest (March 1915) with a highly laudatory foreword. Rákosi was interested not only in the poems that fuelled patriotism but also in the October 1914 poem “Levél Nyugatra” (Lengyel 23–25), which attacked those who stayed at home and frequented the cafés. Whether this “Letter to the West” was really aimed at the journal Nyugat and Ady is just as debatable, as is the question of whether Gyóni’s still popular poem from October/November, “Csak egy éjszakára küldjétek el o˝ket” (Send Them Just for a Single Night; Lengyel 37–39) attacked the war, as is usually thought, or just those who profited from it at home (the fact that Watson Kirconel’s translation won a first prize during the war in England supports the former hypothesis). Be it as it may, Rákosi got hold of (or perhaps provoked) some of Ady’s critical remarks on Gyóni, and on October 14, 1915, he published, under a pseudonym, a blistering attack on the allegedly unpatriotic and decadent Ady. Six days later he broadened this attack with a critique of Babits’s “Játszottam a kezével,” even demanding that the author be relieved from his job as a schoolteacher. This unleashed the acrimonious exchanges of what became known as the Ady/Rákosi affair (excellently documented in vol. 11 of Ady’s Összes prózai mu˝vei), which involved, on the side of Ady, Babits, and the Nyugat, not only such notable contributors to the journal as Ignotus, Zsigmond Móricz, Miksa Fenyo˝, and Margit Kaffka, but also Oszkár Jászi and many other liberal writers and intellectuals. The counter voices appeared mostly in nationalist, clerical, and provincial organs. Babits was indeed transferred to a non-teaching job, although he was reinstated at the end of 1916 (Kardos 154–73). Gyóni was captured (with some 120,000 other soldiers of the Monarchy) when Przemys´l surrendered on March 22, 1915 to the Russians. He wrote the anti-war poems Levelek a kálváriáról during his seven-month march to Siberia and he sent from his captivity in Krasnojarsk additional pacifist poems. However he died there in 1917, probably unaware of the controversy that his poems unleashed at home. As to Babits, he oscillated throughout his life between public engagement and a highly polished voice tending to a religious metaphysics. By 1916 he raised his voice against the war and all those who advocated it in “Háborús anthológiák” (Anthologies of War; Összegyu˝jtött 275f) and other poems. In his greatest anti-war poem, “Húsvét elo˝tt” (Before Easter; Összegyu˝jtött 262), which Babits recited on March 26, 1916 at a charitable matiné organized by Nyugat for blind soldiers, he spoke with “tattered” and “torn” lips against the great war “mill” that ground all life to shreds: de nem gyo˝zelmi ének az énekem, érctalpait a tipró diadalnak nem tisztelem én, sem az önkény pokoli malmát (Összegyu˝jtött 263) But my song is not a victory song, / The metal soles of trampling triumph / I do not respect / Nor despotism’s infernal mill

After several hesitant attempts the poem finally bursts into jubilation: Én nem a gyo˝ztest énekelem, […] hanem azt, aki lesz, akárki,

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“Húsvét elo˝tt” miraculously passed censorship, unlike “Fortissimo” (290), which urged mothers to cry and men to curse a “deaf god” who does not hear the suffering of the war. This epitome of Babits’s anti-war stance was published in Nyugat on March 1, 1917, resulting in the issue’s confiscation and a lawsuit being launched against Babits. Similar blasphemies abound in the last collection of poems that Endre Ady saw in print, Halottak élén (Leading the Dead; 1918). In “Mai próféta átka” (Curse of a Poet Today; Összes 2: 205–206), for instance, the “curse” is not that the prophet is coerced by God to speak but the timidity of the modern prophet to speak out. Hence the concluding blasphemy: “There is no deeper, no greater hell: / Give this, you famous, give this, You God.” It was a pacifist horror a death and destruction that led Babits, by inclination a rather Parnassian poet who hated the “slow poison” of cheap slogans — see the July 1919 poem “Szíttál-e lassú mérgeket?” (Did You Inhale Slow Poisons?; Összes 281–82) — to take an angry and heroic stance against the war. Nevertheless he held on to a bitter national pride that prevented him from reaching a fuller understanding of the other nationalities of the region. His resentment against Hungary’s truncation in 1919 resulted in poems like “Dal az esztergomi bazilikáról” (Song about the Basilica of Esztergom; Összes 315–16) and “Csonka Magyarország” (Truncated Hungary; Összes 317–18) that were either edited or dropped from the collected poems published under the communist regime with the explanation that “their irredentist voice could hurt the national sentiments of our neighboring people” (Összegyu˝jtött 542). Ady, who also cherished a certain doomsday patriotism, lashed out more often at the Hungarians and went further in seeking reconciliation with the neighbors (see Király Intés), though his courting of Octavian Goga ended in a fiasco (see the article “Transylvania” in our Volume 2). Above all, he tried to remain “a human being during inhumanity” (Ember az embertelenségben), as he wrote in September 1916 in the poem of the same title (Összes 2: 198–99). A year before his death, singing a “chronicle” of 1918 (“Krónikás ének 1918-ból”; Összes 2: 235–36), he attacked the young and the poor for their participation in killing and destruction when even the crows are fed up with the corpses. The other leading writers of

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Nyugat also turned against the war, though in different ways. Margit Kaffka’s contributions were focalized from a woman’s point of view (see Margaret Higonnet’s article in this volume); Dezso˝ Kosztolányi’s “Gyászkar” (Dirgeful Choir; Összes 309–10) and Árpád Tóth’s “Katonasír” (Soldier’s Grave; Vas 2: 584) both commemorate young soldiers, but whereas Tóth’s verses constitute a quiet and plaintive dirge, Kosztolányi condemns the real culprits — not the enemy but the warlords at home. Martin Rázus’s 1916 essay, “Vojna a krest’anstvo” (The War and Christianity), takes up the question of war from a Christian perspective and concludes, in response to Luther’s question of whether a war can be holy, that it results in an unholy loss of material and human life, and, most importantly, in a disintegration of the moral order. Rázus subsequently published the antiwar poem collections, Z tichých I búrnych chvíl’ (From Quiet and Stormy Moments; 1917) and C’est la guerre! (1919). The Serbian Miloš Crnjanski, who fought in the Austro-Hungarian army, published in 1919 his first volume of poetry, Lyrika Itake (Lyrics of Ithaca), an elegiac reaction to the horrors of the war. The Romanian Camil Petrescu depicted apocalyptic scenes of battle, forced marches, and the tense repose before an attack in his first collection of poems Versuri. Ideia. Ciclul mort¸ii (Verses. The Idea. The Cycle of Death) from 1923, and his posthumously published Însemna˘ri de ra˘zboi (Notes of War). As Eugen Lovinescu writes (“Poezia notat¸iei” 257–60), Petrescu’s poetry is deliberately anti-romantic and anti-symbolic, dissociating poetic statement from musical expression, emphasizing dissonance, lack of rhythm, and prosaic imagery. This poetry is not aural but visual, accommodating our eye to the realities of war through intense notation. Lines like an “army column/collapses on the side of the road/like a ghost without skeleton” and soldiers resume their “crawl/stretching their collective/myriapodic neck” (Însemna˘ri 15, 22) recall Pound’s imagism, mediating abstractions through clusters of precise analogic images. The Croat Krleža had difficulties publishing his poetry during the war and finally published the poetry cycle Pan at his own expense in 1917. The commercial success was unexpected: 700 copies sold in a few weeks! The same year Krleža published his Simfonije (Symphonies), three long cycles of lyrical poetry. In 1918 he published, again on his own, two collections of poetry, Pjesme I and II (Poems I and II), where the war is distant yet prominent: in “Podne” (Afternoon), for instance, a burlesque afternoon scene of sunshine and child play is permeated with the sense that “somewhere far away in the south/the guns roar” (Krleža, Poezija 14). Other poems like “Plameni Vjetar” (Wind of Fire) express a revolutionary spirit (Poezija 25). Most poems offer deeply subjective images of a shallow sensory life ruled by the dark reality of the war. The tone is desperate, the imagery explores extreme, expressionist contrasts of darkness and light. Written in the 1920s, a few years after Pjesme I and II but thematically related to them, is the “Pjesma Mrtvom Cˇovjeku” (A Poem for a Dead Man), which Krleža dedicated to the memory of his fallen friend Zlatko Gall. To him he dedicated also the novellas in The Croatian God Mars: “A strange thing. In your grey room a candle is burning, / but you are not there. / In the grey uniform of an Austrian officer you are already facing the Last Judgment. / Are you standing on the left or on the right? […] You have fallen and with you […] the white banners of our childhood” (Poezija 175). In 1933 Krleža denounced his own war poetry, saying in “Moja Ratna Lirika” that “they reek of a provincial imperial menagerie, but when reading them one

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should not forget that they were written in the uniform of the Monarchy, that they are the poems of a dead youth that had nothing worth living for.” Theater That productions and performances of war dramas were rare during the war was surely due to large extent to the reduced funding and to censorship. The great new talent, Miroslav Krleža, frantically kept writing plays throughout the war years that were all rejected by Josip Bach, who was between 1908 and 1920 the drama manager of the Hrvatsko Zemaljsko Kazalište, the Croatian National Theater in Zagreb. Krleža’s first, mostly short plays do not deal with the war directly, but the war certainly inspires their gloom and violence. The famous, long drawn-out dispute with Bach marked Krleža’s public appearance as a playwright. It was triggered by the article “The Most Courageous Dramatic Poet” (January 1919), in which Bach claimed he admired Krleža’s plays but had to refuse them due to unsolvable technical problems in some of their scenes. Krleža’s furious response in the April issue of his own journal Plamen, “Mister Bach: A Document for the History of Yugoslav Drama,” listed all the dramatic works Bach had refused to stage. Krleža harshly criticized the Croatian theater, made Bach responsible for its shortcomings, and asked for his resignation. He was offended by Bach’s praise, for he interpreted it as a dubious and unprofessional double standard. In retrospect one is inclined to side with Krleža, even if his early plays would have been difficult to stage: Kraljevo (written in 1915, published 1918) and Krleža’s other “legends” contained long, non-functional stage instructions aimed at building an oppressive, nightmarish atmosphere; fragmented ecstatic visions; a sequence of idiosyncratic scenic pictures; and a whirl of bodies in a historical dance macabre. But Bach feared above all censorship and negative audience reactions to Krleža’s avant-garde radicalism. Denied a stage, Krleža made a scene on April 6, 1918 at the general assembly of the Croatian Writers’ Association, though he was not even a member. Shouting that the convention wasted its time on trivial matters while the world was in an uproar, he claimed that ninety percent of the writers in the Association “had nothing to do with literature” and found it utterly despicable that nobody spoke out against the war atrocities. Krleža’s own first portrayal of war was the three-act play “Galicija” (Galicia), written in 1920. Bach, no longer the head of the Croatian National Theater, enthusiastically supported its staging, and the director Branko Gavella started rehearsal. This time another force intervened: on December 30, 1920 a new law took effect that prohibited the proliferation of communist propaganda; the premiere of Galicija, set for the next day, had to be called off just half an hour before curtain time. A right-wing newspaper in Belgrade, unaware of the decision, cheerfully reported the next day that the audience disliked the play and the premiere was a flop. Krleža revised the play in 1934 and renamed it U logoru (In the Camp). Set in an AustroHungarian military camp near the Russian front on the eve of a massive attack against the Russian forces “during the last days of the rule of the emperor Franz Joseph,” the play focuses on cadet Horvát (=Croat), a young pianist, and the lawyer Gregor, now a first lieutenant. Horvát, who managed to ignore the reality of the war surrounding him, must hang an old woman charged with insulting the visiting baroness Meldeg-Cranensteg. He carries the order out but his

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nerves give way. Invited afterwards to play the piano at the farewell party for the baroness, he insists on playing a funeral march instead of the requested waltz. The conflict escalates, Horvát draws his gun, and is killed in the ensuing shoot-out. Gregor stands by his friend, kills an Austrian officer, and escapes. The Hungarian captain Lukács concludes: “A pack of high treason, these Croats!” — but the last words belong to the Russians, whose offensive forces all of them to flee. The dramatic tension of U logoru is both ethnic and social, for Krleža includes in his tragic satire of the Austro-Hungarian military a portrayal of how the domobrani, mostly Croatian peasants, are mistreated. The aristocratic and bourgeois Croatians of the old commanding cadre are unconditionally Austrophile. But Horvát is appalled by the cruel treatment of the old peasant woman he is ordered to hang. Faced with the choice of “hang or be hanged” he is no more able to resolve the dilemma than Bologa in Rebreanu’s Forest of the Hanged. Krleža is satirical when portraying in operetta style the decadence of the old guard, but expressionist when depicting the protagonists’ hysteria. The contrast is supported by linguistic heteroglossia: large portions of the army dialogues are in German, while the domobrani are presented in their northCroatian, Kajkavian dialect. The divided ideological loyalty of the Croatian officers is reflected in their frequent switching, even within a single sentence, from one language to another. The problem of Rebreanu’s novel and Krleža’s play appeared already in Mihail Sorbul’s 1919 play Dezertorul (The Deserter), one of the earliest Romanian literary works that focused on the war and its impact on common people. The play revolves around Silvestru Trandafir, a lower middle-class character from the slums of Bucharest who comes home to visit his wife just when the Germans occupy Bucharest. He finds there a German officer assiduously courting his wife. Since Silvestru has lost track of his army unit and is thus practically a deserter, the officer negotiates his liberty in exchange for his wife’s favors. Silvestru saves his wife by cutting his enemy’s throat, and allows himself to be caught and shot by the guards. Though the play has a somewhat sensational plot and (with the exception of Silvestru) stereotypical characters, it manages to capture refractions of the absurdities and dramatic tensions of the war in the lives of simple people. Like Rebreanu’s Calvarul, published the same year, Sorbul’s play documents the ambiguities of life in occupied Bucharest as well as the capacity of ordinary people to rise above their ordinariness when confronted with events that threaten their basic humanity.

The aftermath Revolutions and the birth of new nations marked the aftermath of World War I in the various countries of East-Central Europe. Here, we can only discuss briefly some of the representative attitudes and involvement of writers. As a rule, the initial reaction of writers with leftist sympathies was to welcome the Russian October Revolution and its short-lived Hungarian counterpart, which came into being on March 21, 1919, and fell in good measure due to the invasion of Romanian and Czech armies, on August 1, 1919. Árpád Tóth, for instance, sang a hosanna in 1919 to “The New God” (Az új Isten), the red god coming from Moscow that was going to cleanse the world: “You, among the gods new and proletarian […] Lift us unto your mighty palm, / and knead us to your image” (Vas 2: 599). Other middle-class writers from the Nyugat circle were less sanguine, though they mostly joined in, at least until the ugly face of the

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dictatorship revealed itself. Many other writers and intellectuals continued to support the Soviet regime, though it is unclear how many of them did so out of fear or opportunism. Only a handful spoke out, among them Lajos Kassák, who wrote an open letter to Béla Kún in defense of artistic freedom, with the result that his journal Ma (Today) was banned in July 1919. Ironically, Kassák started Ma in 1916 to replace his Tett, which was banned for its pacifism. The few non-Hungarian works that deal with the Hungarian communist rule of 1919 include Timrava’s Záplava (The Flood; 1938), which portrays its effects in Eastern Slovakia, and Felix Aderca’s Moartea unei republici ros¸ii (Death of a Red Republic). Corporal Aurel, Aderca’s transparent autobiographical mask, proclaims a rather blatant socialist and anti-nationalist message that approves of the Hungarian Communist Republic and disparages the efforts of Transylvanian Romanians to achieve national autonomy. Krleža was fascinated with the Great October Revolution, and he dedicated his play on the heroic Cristoval Colon (written in 1917 and published 1918 in his Hrvatska rapsodija) to Lenin — although he later withdrew the dedication, claiming that the play was not worthy of the great leader. Krleža’s Columbus, like the heroes of his other plays then, was, indeed, more of a Nietzschean superman than a communist revolutionary leader. Yet Krleža was a founding member of the Yugoslav Communist Party and he explicitly turned to revolutionary conflicts in Golgota (Calvary), which, to everybody’s surprise, Gavella was allowed to stage in 1922. Krleža’s internationalism, a heritage from the Monarchy recast as communist internationalism, made him a skeptical supporter of the euphoric nationalism that led to the formation of Yugoslavia. His greatest theatrical achievement in the years to come, the so-called Gemblay trilogy — U Agoniji (Agony 1928), Gospoda Gemblajevi (The Gemblajs; 1928), and Leda (1958) — ironically portrayed the post-war disintegration of the Monarchy’s former Croatian high society. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from nationalism. Most Slovak writers, minority partners in the other new union, welcomed the Czechoslovak republic. Hviezdoslav, the “national bard,” wrote poems with revealing titles such as “Mladé Slovensko” (Young Slovakia; spisy 274–78), “Národe” (Nation; spisy 237–41), “Mládeži” (To Youth; spisy 228–36), and “V dnˇoch vykúpenia” (In Days of Redemption; spisy 226–27). The Czechoslovak government gave a pension for the publication right of his poetry. Štefan Krcˇméry’s poems in Ked’ sa sloboda rodila (When Freedom Was Born; 1920) greeted the Czechoslovak Republic as the fulfillment of Slovak desires, but Timrava’s stories in Všetko za národ (All For the Nation; 1930) and Dve doby (Two Eras; 1937) portrayed the anarchy under the new regime. Rázus’s poems in Kamenˇ na medzi (A Stone on the Boundary; 1925) opposed the unified Czechoslovakia, while Emil Boleslav Lukácˇ criticized the Hungarian irredentist attempts to revise the borders established by the Versailles Treaty in Spev vlkov (The Singing of Wolves; 1929), but his title and title poem are very likely an adaptation from Peto˝fi’s poem with the same title. The lyrical subject is in both cases a pack of wolves speaking in the “we” form about national freedom. Lukácˇ’s wolves, surrounded by vultures, avow to defend their territory, even if it be poor. Romania emerged from World War I significantly larger in territory and population, due to the collapse of empires and the unification in 1918 of the Old Kingdom (Regat) with Transylvania, northern Bucovina, and Bessarabia. With a territory more than double in size, Romania became the most populous East-Central European country after Poland, and one of the ethnically

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and religiously most diverse ones: the minorities, fewer than 8% of the population in the Old Kingdom, rose to almost 30% after the war. This significant increase created conditions for a radical modernization and diversification in all areas. Romania undertook three revolutionary measures immediately after the war: “universal male suffrage, a sweeping land reform, and the emancipation of the Jews” (Livezeanu 11). The new structure also confronted Romania with the “unpredictable challenges and struggles” of nation-building (7). Surrounded suddenly with a much richer social scene that included both growing modern cities and culturally diverse villages, writers consciously pursued new literary forms capable of representing the changes. If “Romanian literature was in a state of stagnation” before the outbreak of World War I because the great achievements of nineteenth-century romanticism and realism were exhausted by imitators (Nemoianu, Romanian 79), post-war poetry and fiction went through a revival that added to the well-tried nineteenth-century modes of romantic fantasy and social realism a number of new perspectives in symbolic, psychological, analytic, and political discourses.

Women writers and the war experience: 1918 as transition Margaret R. Higonnet What does it mean to discuss women as a category within a temporal node such as 1918, which as a military and political moment would seem to belong to men? The complex political turning point of 1918, marked by war and the eventual end of war, had an impact on women that differed from place to place, just as the experience of the Great War differed among men. Yet war and a postwar politics of self-determination and extension of suffrage indeed possessed a lively, even life-determining importance for women. As a “total” war, World War I blurred the lines between men and women, between soldiers and civilians. It came at a moment when greater numbers of urban women (and of the working classes) had access to literacy. They could therefore participate in the widespread impulse to report on and shape the meanings of the war. We should remember, however, that oral cultures also shape the motives and meanings of war, as some of the materials discussed here will show. Not all women writers of the period adapted their focus or their forms to the rearrangements of the social order that accompanied the war, but a number did so in ways that often linked their literary experiments to those of their male compatriots, using neologisms, fragmented syntax, and generic innovations to evoke this historical rupture. Literary theorists such as Julia Kristeva have asked whether women experience time in the same way as men. If diplomatic and military history seem to set the frame of war for soldiers, the boundaries are less clear for women’s understanding of war. Moreover, historians such as

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Joan Scott ask whether historical “experience” is not continuously reconstructed by the shifting nature of human subjects, a question that invites us to consider the recasting of war experiences over succeeding decades. On both these counts, the singular date of 1918 to mark a boundary between social-political systems may seem even more arbitrary in the case of women’s literary history than in that of men. It may be helpful to think of the armistice of 1918 phenomenologically, as an object of desire and as a focus for disillusionment as well as relief. Most of all, 1918 may serve as a heuristic tool for thinking about the relationship between historical change and shifts in women’s artistic responses. Certainly, the war had a catastrophic impact, an impact that continued beyond 1918. As on the Western front, many women on the Eastern front had lived under occupation. To a far greater extent than in the West, they had suffered from mobile battle fronts, forced displacements, and devastating scorched earth policies. Casualty rates on the Eastern front were far higher, transferring to women the increased burden of caring for their families. Moreover, when the armistice was signed in November 1918, the war did not come to an end for most of the women in Eastern Europe. The “hunger blockade” against the Central Powers would continue for another eight months. The influenza epidemic attacked and carried away not only soldiers but those women and children who had been weakened over the course of the war by near starvation, including the distinguished Hungarian writer Margit Kaffka. The emergence of hyperinflation in the twenties made the simplest of household provisioning difficult, especially in urban areas. Armed conflict continued in places such as Latvia, Finland, Poland, and Carinthia; revolutions and retribution perpetuated violence. Women continued doing “men’s work,” since many of the region’s men would not return at all or would slowly find their way back from prisoner-of-war camps and hospitals. The temporal node of 1918 thus knots together preceding wartime experiences with the war’s continuing impact after the armistice. At the same time, texts produced at the end of the war and in the decade thereafter often connected the striking shifts in women’s lives catalyzed by the war to the expectations of political and social change that emerged at the end of the fighting. 1918 therefore was a highly symbolic, if often ironic, date. The range of women’s texts that appeared bracketing this moment, from autobiographical forms to fiction to poetry, corresponded in some ways to the range of women’s experiences, from fighting, to nursing, to weeping. Chaotic war conditions had thrust women into a wide array of unfamiliar roles. A few thousand perhaps, notably in Poland, Romania, and along the Russian front, became soldiers or partisan fighters. Many more turned to nursing or relief work, traditional auxiliary roles for women in wartime. Others stepped into the shoes of factory workers, transportation workers, schoolteachers, or functionaries. Massive losses, disruptions, and innovations in labor assignments during 1914–18 catalyzed many women’s responses in writing. Their efforts to record, to make sense of these events, or to resist the war took varied forms. That heterogeneity reflected women’s geographic situation (urban or rural), class positions, educational backgrounds, as well as ideological positions and degree of engagement in the avantgarde. Note that gender and class differences inscribed in these texts were not only reinforced by war, but also affected by access to literacy, salons, and publication. Not surprisingly, much of women’s self-expression poured into relatively informal autobiographical genres, into prose

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sketches, or into lyrical poetry — all forms that tended to be encoded as feminine and that permitted a relatively immediate inscription of experience. Yet we must keep in mind that literary genres, however informal, were not the only form of cultural expression to which women turned. Most women, of course, especially rural women such as the famous Romanian soldier Ecaterina Theodoroiu (Teodoroiu), did not write at all. Instead, she and others participated in the highly ritualized forms of oral expression. Although from a simple peasant family, Theodoroiu had an unusual ten years of schooling. In the war period, she first joined the scouts, then became a nurse, and eventually joined the battalion in which her two brothers had served before they were killed. The Balkan tradition of the vergina, a girl who cross-dressed as the family son if there was no brother, may have helped legitimate this role. Wounded, Theodoroiu won medals and the honorific title of second lieutenant. After her death on the battlefield of Ma˘ra˘s¸es¸ti in 1917, the soldiers of her unit reported that she had sworn a powerful oath. Her oath reflects the recitative form of oral laments and prayers, such as the doina, an outcry of grief. Even where high rates of female illiteracy bar women from the history of literature, such oral forms offer a poetic outlet and a public, however short-lived. I swear to fight until we no longer hear the footsteps of the invader on the soil of my fatherland! I swear to fight until the eyes of our children and their parents no longer shed tears. I swear to fight and to avenge those who have fallen far from the quick waters of the river Jiu and from the shadow of Mount Paringului. I swear to fight and to scatter over the tomb of the hero who fell here clay taken from the old riverbanks that have been invaded and water from the heart of the Jiu, water which my merciless fight shall set free. (“Battle Oath” 84–85)

A soldier’s oath of vengeance, this prose poem implies both a history and a promise; she makes a pledge with her hand not on a sword or holy book but on the soil. The simple anaphora that links each sentence or line by repetition to the next establishes a progressive image of the war as invasion, separation, death, and loss of national independence. Theodoroiu’s chthonic imagery of the land and the waters of the Jiu are the sources from which her passionate patriotism draws its strength. The reversal of tears by these purifying waters provides an emotional symmetry that promises meaningful closure to the war for her listeners. Even if Theodoroiu wrote nothing, her oath became a legendary component of the Romanian war story. Oral traditions also drew young Polish women into partisan combat that became the subject of postwar memoirs. Zofia Nowosiełska Lipowicz was inspired by her grandfather’s memories of the nineteenth century heroines Emily Plater and Henryka Pustowojt. First she joined Piłsudski’s Legions in 1914 (her family brought her home), then she smuggled money and arms for the Polish Military Organization; in 1918 she volunteered in a defense force, eventually serving in the Polish Women’s Voluntary Legion as a lieutenant. The 1917 popular uprisings in Russia, together with the formation of Maria Botchkareva’s Russian Battalion of Death in 1917, may have served as a model for women’s combat units in Poland as well. Although Nowosiełska came from an indulgent and wealthy family that permitted her to spend summers as a tomboy on their estates in Romania and the Carpathians, she might not have written at all, had she not understood that her experiences reflected world-historical shifts. Nowosiełska dealt with some of these anomalies in her memoir Pamietnik bobrujski (ca. 1921) by deploying an ironic, self-mocking tone. She recounts her inability to shoot when first passed

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a gun: she told the sergeant “the trigger is jammed,” only to receive a quick lesson in handling a safety rifle, while already under Austrian and Ukrainian fire (Hurricane 48–49). She describes wounded comrades as ragamuffins who played with toys in hospital, then returned to fight “with rifles against cannons.” Changed not only by cutting off her hair and putting on men’s clothes but by combat itself, she notes, “I am sure my mother would not have recognized me at that moment” (Hurricane 56). A mother and schoolteacher in later years, Nowosiełska combined a vivid story-telling ability with great pride in what she and other children had accomplished in freeing the cities of Poland from occupying forces; she signed copies of her memoir with her military title. More highly crafted and politically sophisticated was the memoir of Alexandra Szczerbin´ska Piłsudska, tracing her growth from child patriot to militant socialist and eventual wife of Marshal Piłsudski. Like Nowosiełska, Piłsudska as an orphan had listened to her grandmother’s stories about participating in the insurrection of 1863. Starting in 1905, she smuggled weapons and military secrets, formed the women’s intelligence section of the Riflemen’s Association, then worked for the Polish Legions until her arrest by the Germans in 1915. Her Memoirs of Madame Pilsudski (1940), written in exile in England, is punctuated by sharply observed, often humorous or ironic stories. In one she recounts a narrow escape, when the stitching of a fellow smuggler’s skirt gave way, releasing a cascade of cartridges onto the cobblestone street. Her most horrific story depicts the attempted suicide of a group called “the prostitutes” (teachers, a dressmaker, and a secretary) who “had been forced by starvation to sell themselves in the streets of Warsaw” and were abused nightly by the German soldiers. When these women and girls swallowed several packets of needles in their hut, Piłsudska and her friends were able to save their lives, but not rescue them from their degradation: “it was wartime” (Memoirs 251). Piłsudska is highly conscious of political distinctions and of the heterogeneity of Polish society represented in her prison hut. Deftly she places into the mouths of others questions that she herself wants the reader to ask. Thus she recreates a Christmas Eve conversation with the German guard of her prison at Szczypiorno, who asks, “Gnädige Frau, I see that you have had much more education than I or any of the men in my regiment, so perhaps you can answer for me a question I have often asked myself. Why precisely are we fighting this war?” (Memoirs 248). Piłsudska’s autobiography should be read not simply as a monument to her dead husband. Like Nowosiełska, she unhesitatingly lays down a building block in the postwar project of nation-formation, and, at the time of publication, national resistance to Hitler. Her memoir also marks an important confluence in women’s war texts of protofeminist consciousness with historically innovative roles. Her attention to sexual politics helps make this a lively instance of the war memoirs that proliferated in the decades after 1918. She notes that by 1912 the feminist movement was beginning to spread through Europe (Memoirs 204), and that socialism had promised a measure of freedom to women (Memoirs 205). Into this historical context she sets the formation of the women’s section of the socialist Strzelcy, “the first women’s army auxiliary organization to be formed in any country” (Memoirs 205–206). Already engaged in intelligence work in the prewar period, Piłsudska stresses the themes of disguise, falsification of identity papers, and covert operations. In a kind of underground writing, she permits the narratives themselves to carry the witty play between political resistance and resistance to sexual stereotypes. She particularly relishes examples of German and Austrian


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misreading of her identity and celebrates her defiance as a female courier on the road, able to cross and recross proliferating border barriers with impunity. This lively prose modeled on the genre of the adventure story helped shape an avid audience for accounts about women’s exceptional contributions as soldiers, especially those with a high sense of drama like the memoirs of Nowosiełska and Piłsudska. There was also an audience for far more traditional war stories about nursing or relief work, roles that reinforced an accepted feminine image, domesticated women’s involvement in the war, and extended temporally across the arbitrary line of the armistice. Women as soldiers fostered the notion that the war was an exceptional event. By contrast, women as nurses symbolically reassured audiences of the long-term stability of gender roles and the promise of recuperation of the social order after the war. Not all nursing, however, took place in safe locations behind the lines. The Hungarian Countess Nora Kinsky was an energetic, daring, highly educated young woman, who sought precocious responsibilities early in life, becoming her siblings’ tutor, then her father’s secretary at 14. In 1914 she established a hospital with 110 beds on their country estate, and in 1916, chosen for her exceptional linguistic abilities, she became a delegate of the imperial AustroHungarian war ministry sent to inspect prisoner-of-war camps in Russia. In the next two years, she traveled from Vienna to near Vladivostok and back, moving after the February Revolution to Astrakhan, where she stayed as a nurse in a hospital for prisoners, until her brother could be released from his own prisoner-of-war camp. Kinsky’s diary, Russisches Tagebuch: 1916–1918, kept largely in French but published posthumously in German, offers a vivid, private version of her fact-finding mission, colored by observations of corruption in the administration of the camps, friendships across lines of official enmity, diplomatic imbroglios, and the collapse of the Russian economy. With a sharp eye for physical detail as well as for psychology, she traced anomie and despair among prisoners whom she interviewed in German, Hungarian, Czech, Croat, Polish, Romanian, Turkish and other European languages. Even in minus fifty weather she read Russian classics at night out loud with her Russian “chaperone,” i.e., guard. Trapped later in a tuberculosis hospital during fighting between factions, she snatched moments to describe with humorous detachment the shooting and burning of neighboring buildings seen through the terror of her fellow nurses. These capsule entries resemble the snapshots that Kinsky, like so many other nurses at the front, took to preserve a memory trace of what they had observed and thought. As miniature ironic narratives, they resemble her epigrammatic understatement in response to the March 1917 uprising she witnessed in St. Petersburg: “What would they say at home, if they knew that I am all alone here! But I’m quite content, since I want to stay in this country, for it is certainly more interesting than in Chlumec” (Tagebuch 94) Kinsky reminds us of certain salient elements in women’s literary history. Her elite background made it much more likely that she would undertake a wartime adventure, find official support even among Russian bureaucrats for her exceptional choices, write about them, and belatedly reach a cosmopolitan audience. (Her work was translated and published fifty years after her death.) Furthermore, young women like Kinsky, who were very unlikely to be professional writers, might nonetheless produce a memoir or autobiography about these years of upheaval rather than more elevated literary forms. To capture women’s responses to the war and

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the turning point it marked, therefore, we need to include the more subjective, less formal genres, especially those written immediately at the time of the war experience. We must also note the frequent lag in publication that meshed with the exclusion of women from an emergent canon of autobiographical war writing, a lag that lasted even longer than the ten years before soldiers themselves began to print their diaries and memoirs in large numbers. A few women, however, did approach the project of writing about the war with professional ambitions and developed aesthetic skills. They belonged to a generation of women who acceded to positions in artistic circles, collaborated on journals, and found a sympathetic audience. The Romanian novelist Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, for example, who worked as a Red Cross nurse during the war at the railroad station of Foçsani, translated her experience into a dramatic “document novel,” Balaurul (Dragon; 1923), centered on the figure of a young nurse. Noted for her Proustian investigations of women’s inner lives, she also dissected social relations in her contributions to the journal Sbura˘torul (The Incubus, 1919–27), edited by Eugen Lovinescu. The war marked a shift from narcissistic heroines in search of themselves to more forceful psychological analyses. She became one of the major figures in the Romanian modernist movement with her analytic novels Ape adînci (Deep Waters; 1919), Fecioarele despletite (Disheveled Virgins; 1926), and Concert din muzica˘ de Bach (A Concert of Music by Bach; 1927), which stress morbid situations and liminal states of consciousness. She won the grand national prize of the Society of Romanian Writers in 1936. In Balaurul, which she rewrote and polished over six to seven years, Papadat-Bengescu experimented with grotesque metaphors and neologisms. She fractured spurts of thought into free indirect discourse, to capture the incoherence of individual panic in the face of death and physical mutilation. Her verbal twists evoke the wartime perversion of logic. Life is stranger than art, she reminds us in chapter ten, “Omul ca˘ruia i se vedea inima” (The Man Whose Heart They Could See) turning that cliché into an instrument of social critique: “Fantasy is but a humble apprentice compared to the huge genius of evil” (Man 357). Through the young nurse Laura, Papadat-Bengescu captures successive perceptions of the war like the packed cars of a military train (the dragon of the title). She compresses moments of crisis with almost hallucinatory vividness. Chapter one, “Goarna” (The Bugle), for example, offers a hyperrealistic impression of the advent of war through sounds perceived by Laura and others. The case of a “man whose heart they could see” is physically laid out for us by refraction through the eyes of others — the doctor, for example, tries to force Laura, the novel’s center of consciousness, to look at the gaping wound, but she deflects that imperative ironically toward its origin: “‘ [H]ow did it happen?’ she asked, to find out what she had not seen” (Man 359). The exposed organ is not, of course, Papadat-Bengescu’s real focus. Rather, she leads us to the intensive care unit, where Laura finds “everybody” and presses us to ask, “How did the war happen?” There the patients, no matter what their initial wound or illness, are caught up in the same death and infected by a common hospital-born disease: “The contact of those wounds with organic ‘matter,’ the penetration of organisms by shrapnel of varied texture inside those bodies, permitted live, morbid putrefaction. In tandem with the standard rational treatments there simmered and burst out unexpectedly new and strange epidemics: typical gangrenes independent of the progress of the cure; infectious pustules linking disparate cases. A flora specific to modern wars” (Man 361–62). This intense yet chilly scientific description


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evokes well the outbreak of resistant pathogens, at the same time that it permits, even invites, an allegorical reading. The chapter closes on the “rational” doctor’s complacency: “Even the doctor was saying that his had been indeed a unique case in the museum of war surgery — a liminal form of the huge ingeniousness with which destruction humiliated and dismembered worn out bodies” (Man 362). It is precisely such liminal moments and figures that PapadatBengescu extracts from actual history, then transforms for the purposes of her art. Particularly penetrating is her ability to pin together the psychology of the doctor, the institutional construction of memory as a “museum of war surgery,” and the propagandistic absence of agency in a rhetoric of ingenious destruction. Another writer whose artistic consciousness had already been shaped by the time the war began was Zofia Nałkowska, from roughly the same cohort as Piłsudska and Kinsky. Nałkowska grew up in an intellectual family amid the avantgarde, reading Flaubert and Stendhal, and publishing her poetry in the modernist journal Chimera. The diary she kept during the war, Dzienniki czasu wojny: 1909–1917 (Wartime Diaries) chronicled her observations; she also published in 1917 the short stories, Tajemnice krwi (The Secret of Blood) and in 1920 the novella Hrabia Emil (Count Emil) dealing with the war. Curiously, Hrabia Emil (published serially in Swiat in 1917–18) depicts the sensitive protagonist Count Emil displaced in his country manor, which has been taken over for wounded soldiers. His situation of passivity feminizes him, in contrast to the women who take action nursing the wounded. Emil’s emotional confusion comes to the fore, making him helpless: he calculates defeat and victory in the “currency” of blood and pain, and struggles to understand the meaning of barbaric drives and arduous suffering. Nałkowska does not sentimentalize women as nurses: if one shows compassion, another uniformed aristocrat is depicted as a sexual profiteer. Nałkowska’s writings about the traumas of the war and about Piłsudski’s legions reflect a complex mix of feelings: her diaries combine pacifism, welcome surprise at the revival of “the ghost of an independent Poland,” and prescient fear that a new Poland would become “national-democratic and antisemitic” (Wartime Diaries 252). As she foresaw, independence would be followed by the anti-Semitism of thinkers like Adolf Nowczyn´ski and the Polish-Soviet war of 1919–1920. Romans Teresy Hennert (Romance of Teresa Hennert, 1924) depicts the degeneration of wartime heroism into domestic violence after the war, in a comment on the brutalization wrought by men’s military experiences. In 1933 she became the only female member of the Polish Academy of Literature, famed for her salon and patronage of younger writers. In 1946 she composed Medaliony (Medallions) a laconic series of reflections on the Holocaust (see also p. 163). A more explicitly nationalist stance was assumed by one of the most distinguished Latvian writers of the twentieth century, Anna Brigadere, the child of a weaver who became a preeminent playwright, poet, and prose writer. Brigadere was literary editor of the newspaper Latvija from 1908 on, and published reviews in the major periodical Baltijas Vestnesis. After she took refuge in Moscow in 1915, she contributed to Latvju strelnieks (Latvian Rifleman), published by the émigré community of Latvian intellectuals. Brigadere adapted her interest in folklore to a poetic allegory about the war in “Spe¯ka de¯ls” (Invincible Son; 1917), which depicts the liberation of Latvia through an epic narrative about the liberation of a princess and the defeat of the devil. On the last day of 1917, however, she struck a less militant stance in a letter she wrote to her publisher, “My destiny — the same as my nation’s — is the orphan girl’s role,

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without any rights. I have grown tired of fighting” (Per garı¯go 339). Her postwar work Dzelzs du¯re (Iron Fist; 1921) reflects on Latvia’s struggle to emerge from domination by Germany and Russia. We should not discount the possibility that some patriotic texts of 1914 to 1918 were the product of calculation. The Slovak novelist Božena Slancˇíková-Timrava, known as Timrava, grasped that she might win a competition set by the women’s magazine Z˙ivena if she wrote the war story “V cˇas vojny” (In Times of War; 1917). But her writings of the decade following the war indicted the postwar chaos and anarchy. Všetko za národ (All for the Nation; 1930) offered a critique of Slovak nationalism, and her sarcastic novel Hrdinovia (Heroes; 1929) masked its pacifist disillusionment under an ironic title. “Záplava” (The Flood; 1938) depicts the communist rule of 1919. In a related reversal, shifting from wartime writing that would not be censored to writing critical of the war, the Estonian Marie Under, whose salon brought together writers and artists and who led the group Siuru from 1917 to 1919, devoted much of her wartime poetry to love and nature, in classical, rhetorically decorated forms. By 1920, however, she released a rebellious antiwar collection, Verivalla (Bloodletting), whose apocalyptic, bleak vision was couched in startling figurative language and less disciplined syntax. One slender but interesting strand of women’s war poetry from East-Central Europe is the radical, even blasphemous cooptation of the prayer poem. Women’s traditional literary assignment in war is elegiac: men wage combat, while women weep. These poems resist or complicate that role. It is difficult to say what might have shaped this common strategy across national boundaries: a secular turn linked to the artistic avant-garde, the sense of helpless victimization among peoples caught between the millstones of rival empires, perhaps even a rebellion against the association of women with piety and passive acceptance of their lot. Ariel Roshwald has also called attention to a Jewish tradition of iconoclastic responses to calamity that call God to account, questioning His commitment to the Covenant, a tradition revived during the war (Jewish Cultural Identity 93). Certainly, blasphemous poems were also penned by male leaders of the avant-garde: witness the discussion in the earlier overview “1918” (p. 186) of Endre Ady’s “Mai próféta átka”, Mihály Babits’s “Húsvét elo˝tt”, and Babits’s “Fortissimo”. In this context, we can better understand a writer like the Hungarian Margit Kaffka, who turned to experimental poetry as a vehicle for responding to the war. A high-school teacher, Kaffka was a member of the avant-garde circle around Nyugat, praised by Ady and a friend of Anna Lesznai. Nyugat published during the war a mix of material such as reports from the front, political reflections on Hungarian minorities, translations of Chekhov and Balzac, antiwar poetry by Ady and Babits, or minor poetry on the war by Sarolta Lányi. A feminist and pacifist in her politics, closer in this regard to Babits than to Ady, Margit Kaffka was complex and obscure in her style. Like Papadat-Bengescu she shocked the reader with neologisms, synesthesia, and grammatical irregularities. Married in August 1914 to the brother of the prominent writer Béla Balázs, Kaffka wrote impassioned verse letters to him; she left her teaching job to join him, and drew on impressions of his hospital at Timis¸oara in her fiction. A novella, Két nyár (Two Summers; 1916) traced the evaporation of initial nationalistic war enthusiasm and the working class heroine’s bitter realization of the costs of war. Visiting the hospital where her husband’s mistress has just given birth, she juxtaposes the blood of war with the blood of “surplus” babies in a birth clinic, a new generation “destined to be exterminated with most terrible weapons, in an infinite variety of bloody ways.”


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Addressing her husband in a free verse letter, “Záporos folytonos levél” (A Cry Through the Storm [A Letter], literally “Continuous, Rain-shower Letter”; Az élet útján 86–89; Higonnet 461–3), Kaffka boldly declares as well as questions the right to private happiness at a time of apocalyptic suffering. In the first stanza, the long lines address the “millions of small soldiers” tramping on the front who yearn to return home and dare not question what or why. The second stanza speaks on behalf of the “millions of little women” who worry at home about their loved ones at the front. By contrast to the public realm of these suffering millions, the private passion of the speaker and her lover appears “invisible.” Yet in the third stanza, that passion reclaims its right: “And yet … only you and I! / I call out to you on this grim night / Nothing beyond us exists, we have only ourselves!” (élet 87; Higonnet 462). In a flashback she momentarily recovers “our wholly private world” and ecstatic happiness when together in Italy, where “peace sang out” as they lit a candle; yet even there the stones spoke of past wars, and even there news reached them of the outbreak of war. In a shocking accusation, she suggests that God is hiding in shame, that he has tried to divide them in his jealousy. The short final stanza returns to the initial contrast between the front and the home: the force of her private love seems to empower the suffering wives to reverse the work of war: “Love is strong as death, hard as a coffin / Is true love” (élet 89; Higonnet 463). One of Kaffka’s most powerful texts is a prose poem that echoes the laments and denunciations of Biblical psalms. She had been convent educated and began her teaching career in a convent, a closed world that she described critically in several of her novels. In “Imádkozni próbáltam” (I Tried to Pray; 1918) she depicts God as a hidden god, one whom the human species has “formed … into the God of Terror.” Despair pervades the text of “I Tried to Pray,” where God may be a mere projection of the imagination. Kaffka condemns the prayers of those who implore that their enemies be ground to dust, those who have slaughtered in the name of religious difference, those who have invoked Hadúr, ancient Hungarian Lord of War. Kaffka appeals instead to an ideal of manifold differences: “How marvelously we all differed from each other, we millions and millions of individuals; in what myriad ways we mirrored your countenance” (Higonnet 459). She reminds us that in peacetime, human arts record divinity and celebrate difference, as opposed to the uniformity of armies. The prayer condemns a failed supernal power, as one that has made female fecundity meaningless. Kaffka’s authority to speak is rooted in the fact that she is a mother, a maker of life through “millions of minutes.” She turns from the present to the ancient female deity Gaea, whose chthonic cult of fertility was preferable to this destruction, and finally to the Virgin Mother, whose losses resemble those of grieving widows and mothers. While religious language offered a familiar frame of understanding to her audience, Kaffka’s mix of allusions and her sarcasm defamiliarize the form. Kaffka assembles a number of the themes that characterize wartime laments by women. She challenges a male God to find meaning in the works of men, to prove his identity as “Merciful Father” of men. Hers is the voice of a prophetess crying in the wilderness of war, heard neither by men nor by God. Turning away from this deaf divinity, as Babits would do in “Fortissimo” a few years later, she invokes her femaleness and supplicates a female pantheon. The sense that as a woman she and her people have been swept helplessly into war finds expression through the prayer’s oscillation from apostrophe, to exhortation, and finally

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despairing denial. Kaffka’s life was cut short by influenza, but already from the outset of the war, she turned away from her previous impressionistic, lyrical voice toward a harsher style that used more painful and raw images and metaphors to describe wartime sufferings. Because war curses all peoples, one might say that it forces the detour of prayer into dark paths. One brilliant instance is a cryptic diptych by Vida Jeraj [Franziszka Vovk]. This Slovenian poet and author of children’s books wove black arts of imprecation into a funeral wreath entitled “1914.” The first part baldly offers antithetical forms of prayer: Black berries in a rose wreath, each a dead man’s skull, each a drop of blood, May God have mercy! Pray, pray, O Slovene, perhaps God remembers you! He who does not pray, shall curse: May Satan have mercy! (Izbrano delo 28; Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac´, in Higonnet 554–55)

Just as metaphor transforms the dried blood in the dead man’s skull into a black berry in a wreath, so too the poet transforms the physical destruction of life into a tightly patterned invocation and elegy in the voice of those left behind: “Where does that red trail lead in the snow?” In the second part of the poem, memory and loss become ghosts knocking at every door, awakening mothers to sleepless wandering on a fruitless quest across land and water, “nine mountains high” to recover their sons. The mothers’ task of lament and recuperation resembles the arduous, even impossible task traditionally imposed on heroes in folklore. Jeraj fuses modernist techniques with traditional themes to expose the impossibility of women’s traditional assignment to mourn. War “silenced” men, as Walter Benjamin so famously observed in his essay on “The Storyteller,” and it silenced women as well. Censorship affected some writers, but more important were the contradictions to which Benjamin points between propaganda and actual experience, between wartime necessities and moral values. The Slovenian poet and translator Lily Novy identifies preparation for war as preparation for death in her poem “Sprememba” (Preparation): “Just as sleep ends a brief rest, / what awaits us now is like sleep.” In times when slaughter threatens and national unification calls, “We are all like iron fused by fire.” Aesthetic values, personal affections, and sweet pleasures must all be set aside. “Now we cannot speak of ourselves / nor of the fragile things we love” (Higonnet 552–53). The elegiac mode turns prophetic, shifting from a focus on individual loss to the loss of a whole world. The metaphors of hardness and sacrifice that energize the discourse of war are hung in suspension here, raising questions for Novy’s readers to resolve. The political upheavals that followed 1918, as Nałkowska had feared, also seemed to impose a choice between “hideous din” and silence. Danica Markovic´, a Serb schoolteacher and author of short stories, had participated in the Serb uprising against Bulgarian occupation during the war. But in the early 1920s, she composed “27-mi Juni” (June 27), a bitter poem about the perpetuation of pompous war mongering at the patriotic festival of Saint Vidovdan on June 28.


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The heat of emotions as a huge crowd gathers and drinks with “frantic clamor and rancor” is as searing as the midsummer heat that dries the speaker’s flowers (Trenuci 34–35; Higonnet 541). Collectively orchestrated memory can become a psychological prison in which the many entrap the few. In the contest over the meaning of memory, the past continues into the present and the future. It is only in retrospect, after a second world war and further atrocities, that the prophetic power of such poems has become legible and that we have been able to write a cultural history to include them. At the end of the twentieth century, the verbal dislocations deployed by so many of these women in order to evoke wartime disruptions have acquired their full expressiveness. These discursive ruptures speak to the question whether we should understand the war as a hiatus or as a rupture historically. Literary critics have asked whether women’s writings at the critical threshold of 1918 marked their participation in modernism, or whether they perpetuated older forms, as well as older ideologies such as the chivalric cult of the soldier’s sacrifice. Indeed, the relatively traditionalist poetics and politics visible in postwar literary production have often been understood as the special failure of women’s writings. Certainly many women produced and embraced propaganda in this period. But a literary history is not the same thing as a literary sociology. The modest evidence presented here suggests that the story is more complicated. Each of the three areas I have sketched here suggests how some of the most prominent East-Central European women writers participated in prevailing forms of expression but marked them with a difference. Thus, the female soldier’s tale focuses on conflict, especially against weighty odds, a formula that provides the bedrock of most male soldiers’ tales. Yet the most striking features of a story like that of Nowosiełska are her ironic awareness of her exceptional status as an untrained girl-volunteer and her emphasis on mutually protective comradeship. Impelled forward by patriotism, her irony aims not at military incompetence (as in so many men’s memoirs) but at her own anomalous situation. Likewise, memoirs and fictions about nursing draw on traditional notions of femininity that often bolster traditional views of heroism in wartime and draw on older devices of realism. At the same time, however, the moral shock of militarized medicine and industrialized destruction of men’s bodies could provoke among some writers a deeply ironic response to the war. In her nursing fiction, an avant-garde writer such as Papadat-Bengescu found a subject that impelled her into the experimental mainstream, where cubist fracture of perspective and a jazzy vocabulary mixing neologisms with technical terms could fuse in an estranged image of the war scene. Women who participated in the literary salons of Belgrade, Budapest, Prague, St. Petersburg, or Warsaw were exposed both to international artistic trends and to national movements such as a return to folkloric roots. These women may not have traveled as commonly as did men from East-Central Europe, but books traveled to them. Just as Natalya Goncharova fused the rough form of wood-engraved lubki with avant-garde images of war, so writers like Brigadere and Vida Jeraj invoked the formal rhythms of folk narrative to give a deeper resonance to their literary images of the war. The polyglot nature of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the experience of colonization by successive waves of imperial masters also created a rich linguistic pool for avant-garde writers in general, at a moment when a breakdown of older ideologies and discourses was being given

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expression through the breakdown of syntactic and semantic conventions. The resulting cultural hybridity in some women’s writing may have been most conspicuous in their poetry. Autobiographical poetry was the most conventional of feminine forms, but the lives to be inscribed were suddenly very different. The verbal experiments that women wrote in response have not always been found acceptable. Indeed, they have won recognition more slowly than their male counterparts. Margit Kaffka’s contemporaries worried that her style was either pompous (Ady, “Kaffka” 789) or not polished (Tóth, “Kaffka”). Timrava’s ambiguous prose, with its echoes of modernism, faced editorial cuts. More recently Ion Ba˘lan condemned Papadat-Bengescu for her “lack of clarity” and “vaporous” gossiping “in an impossible spoken language” (629), and Sirje Kiin, while acknowledging the German expressionist inspiration of Marie Under’s prose calls it “rambling,” “brittle,” and “cacophonic” (283). Papadat-Bengescu, Kaffka, Under, and other women writers such as the Czech Ru˚z˙ena Jesenska explored transgressive linguistic forms in their representations of the transgressions of war. Had they been men, perhaps these experiments would have found greater resonance and recognition in the years following 1918, when modernism reigned.

The footsteps of Gavrilo Princip: The 1914 Sarajevo assault in fiction, history, and three monuments Guido Snel 1.

The fate of a monument

There can be hardly any greater contrast between representations of one and the same historical figure than in the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassin Gavrilo Princip. Take, for instance, the winged words of the Yugoslav historian Veselin Masleša: “Princip challenged with his gun Habsburg’s Drang nach Osten” (Dedijer, 1914 445). Consider then the appearance of Princip in The Question of Bruno, a recent work of fiction by the Sarajevo-born, now Chicagobased Anglophone writer Aleksandar Hemon, where the assassin appears in the biography of the imaginary Alphonse Kauders, a bizarre character that witnessed many decisive events of the twentieth century but is remembered exclusively for his odd physical talents: Alphonse Kauders stood behind Gavrilo Princip, whispering — as urine was streaming down Gavrilo’s thigh, as Gavrilo’s sweating hand, holding a weighty revolver, was trembling in his pocket — Alphonse Kauders whispered: “Shoot, brother, what kind of a Serb are you?” (26–27)

The countless historical representations of the Sarajevo assault reach no consensus as to the full facts of the case. In the seventies the assassination still provoked a feud between Serbian and

The footsteps of Gavrilo Princip

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Austrian historians (Würthe criticizing Dedijer). The Bosnian war of 1992–95, whose rhetoric of nationalism was preceded and prepared for by a polarization of academic and literary discourse, has certainly not reconciled these antagonisms; in fact it has shown that this almost century-old event remains a major key to the successive attempts to connect and disconnect Serbian and Yugoslav concepts of nationhood, as well as to similar attempts to draw the cultural map of Europe in relation to South-Slav cultures. The figure of Gavrilo Princip is consequently presented in all possible roles: as a terrorist, as a victim of history, as a hero, and as a martyr. The latter reaches idolatry in Masleša’s cited phrase, which echoes the official Titoist-Yugoslav version of the assassination. These highly divergent representations of one and the same historical figure are extremes of a historical paradigm determined by an imagining that is specific to small nations. In these imagined communities, to apply Benedict Anderson’s concept, representations of biographies constantly shift between fantasies of ultimate power (the figure of the dictator) and ultimate powerlessness (figures of the rebel, the revolutionary, and, ultimately, the martyr). In the imaginative realm in which the nation is created, a desire to exercise control over historical events is both aroused and frustrated by the experience of a chaotic reality that denies individual lives coherent biographies. The greater the chaos, the stronger the desire for coherence, the more excessive the demands on the biographical narrative. The genre of biography accordingly faces a political demand: to impose an essentialist narrative on the events that make up the course of a single life. The numerous representations of Gavrilo Princip are a case in point. In Vladimir Dedijer’s The Road to Sarajevo, the narrative of Princip the martyr, whose sacrifice triggered the downfall of the oppressive Habsburg Empire, has to compete with the narrative of a simple individual, whose historical role is determined by the larger processes in the Marxist view of historical dialectic. Princip also appears in a number of fictional narratives that I tentatively call “tendentious” literature because of their narrative’s obvious affinity with the protagonist. These narratives had made important contributions to the myth of Princip and mostly subject themselves to the Yugoslav imagined community (see Wachtel 161). Together with Socialist Realism (a relatively weak tradition in Titoist Yugoslavia), these narratives share a dominant didactic and utilitarian intention. Many of them have been discredited recently due to contestatory or competing claims of other national ideologies. Like the highly controversial A Tomb for Boris Davidovicˇ (1975) by Danilo Kiš, the prose of Aleksandar Hemon poses another challenge to this tradition of Tendenz-narratives: it exploits intentional metafictional and intertextual narrative strategies, blurs imaginary and real lives, and leaves no stable ground for establishing an ontological hierarchy between fictional and nonfictional biography. Hemon’s prose offers therefore no revision of the historical event; it merely lays bare the powerful mythologizing strategies that have turned the marginal figure of Princip into a legend of both the Serbian and the Yugoslav imagined communities. Hemon’s prose is then a means to explore how continued prose experiments in the former Yugoslavia invoke rereading of canonical Tendenz-narratives, whose dominant political intentions have been outdated by more recent historical events. It offers a specific critical reading that goes beyond biased ideological receptions, whether approving or contestatory, for these are ultimately rooted in the same monologizing culture. But the question remains whether postmodern narrative

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strategy, in particular parody through quoting and paraphrasing, suffices to avert the menace of complete silence. One would wish a culture of reception that responds ironically to the pathos of individual intentions (be it the author’s, the narrator’s or the characters’), one that pursues its intellectual, historical, and affective involvement in the interplay of voices not only in the individual text but also in between genres, even outside the textual domain. For what now proves to be a weakness was once the hidden force of these texts: their scope reached far outside the literary domain. The narrative of a single bridge, Andric´’s “chronicle” of the bridge over the Drina, served as a major imaginative source for the Yugoslav imagined community. Irony has proven rare in the interpretation of texts concerned with traumatic historical themes. I therefore propose to look at a domain where relations among the individual and collective voices allow for more perspectivism, by which I mean willingness to give room to different or contrasting views and voices. The urban space of the region offers, I believe, such a culture of reception. On the one hand, this seems a contradiction for nowhere are destruction and destructiveness more visible than in the urban spaces of the region — witness Bogdan Bogdanovic´’s recent concept of urbicide, which intimates the destruction of cities like Sarajevo and Mostar — and nowhere is the myth of durability more headstrong than in the region’s literature. On the other hand, in the contiguity of diverse urban historical buildings, individual edifices with an explicit political intention, like monuments and museums, are automatically in dialogue, while in the succession of texts they are not. This is due not only to the visual presence of older intentions in urban space, but also to the explicit historical consciousness of the city, whose different historical layers (like ruins and archeological sites) tend to be very much present. A newly erected monument in a city has to confront its context. Its relation to it, even when it is physically dominant (like Ceaus¸escu’s palace in Bucharest), is likely to be ironical. A literary or historical text that has, just like a monument, the intention to glorify a historical figure or even to create a legend, also attempts to silence its dialogic background but its monologizing endeavor is far more successful. A single text solely determines and transforms its historical space; such is the case in epic culture, in universal history, in myth, in which the reader or listener entirely identifies with the intention of the narrator. Irony is here hardly an option — the text either confirms or rejects. Another strategy may be to transform the intruded context and to rewrite it. Here, chances of success depend heavily on the attitude of the reader. The closing section of this paper considers some specific historical aspects of the Yugoslav culture of reception. The several monuments erected since 1914 at the spot where the assassination of Franz Ferdinand took place can serve as material for an architectural counter-history of the event. The first monument displayed busts of the Archduke and his wife Sophia. These were placed at the parapets of the Latin bridge, in the direct vicinity of the assault. The pedestal in the form of a stone bench, below the busts, can still be seen today. In 1931, in what was then the “Kingdom Yugoslavia,” a memorial tablet for Gavrilo Princip was unveiled. I have not been able to find the precise text on the stone. Friedrich Würthe mentions that the monument was politically such a sensitive issue — King Aleksandar’s and the Serbian politician Nikola Pašic´’s alleged complicity in the assault was a hot issue at the time — that the speech at the unveiling was cautious and extremely brief. The monument erected during the Tito era consisted of two parts: the footsteps of the assassin, cast in concrete, and another memorial tablet that said “Sa ovoga


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mjesta 28. juna 1914. godine Gavrilo Princip svojim pucnjem izrazi narodni protest protiv tiranije i vjekovnu težnju za slobodom.” (On this spot, on June 28 1914, Gavrilo Princip’s shots expressed the people’s protest against tyranny and their centuries-old striving for freedom). The text is in the Ijekavian dialect and engraved in Cyrillic script. Nearby was a museum dedicated to Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), the revolutionary movement of which Princip was a member. Recently, during the 1992–95 siege of Sarajevo, another monument was erected: a human-sized stake with an inscription in several languages, “Peace to the whole world.” The number and the different appearances of the monuments may be representative of the recurrent revision of what the event of the assault means; but the presence of remnants and leftovers from the older monuments underneath, behind or in the direct vicinity of the latest monument tells a different story, less prone to political revisionism and more open to an ironic, dialogical view. Hemon writes: “When I was a little boy, I imagined him [Princip] waiting for the archduke’s coach, waiting to change the course of history, stuck up to his ankles in wet concrete. When I was sixteen, my feet fitted perfectly into his feet’s tomb” (Bruno 35). Unlike former rereadings, this one does not reject these texts altogether but dialogizes them and grants them, as does urban space with the presence of individual monuments, a historical irony. In a dialogue of architectural representations of the 1914 Sarajevo assault, then, I intend to explore the possibility of a history of the event that would dialogize the textual (fictional and historical representations) with the architectural domain and would attempt to be both a critical endeavor and a powerful act of remembrance.

2.

The creation of the Princip legend: Dedijer’s The Road to Sarajevo

Dedijer’s book is often quoted, and even used as a main source, in the many recent studies (called “instant history” by Gale Stokes et al) that reconstruct the 1914 assassination and its background in order to shed light on the origins of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. These studies overlook Dedijer’s political agenda which, deliberate or not, colored much of his historical work. Dedijer was early on a revolutionary, became a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party, and actively participated in the Spanish Civil War. His writings often suffer from strong ideologization. His biography of Tito is saturated with quotes from the marshal’s speeches and, although the Novi prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza Tita (New Supplements to the Biography of Josip Broz Tito), published in 1984, brought up the politically sensitive subject of Tito’s purges in 1948, yet his function as Tito’s official biographer hampered his judgment. His last book, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican (first Serbian publication in 1987), dealt with the Vatican’s alleged participation in the genocide of Jews, Roma, and Serbs in the Jasenovac concentration camp, run by the “Independent State of Croatia,” a puppet state of the Nazis. In this book, which is more closely related to the rise of nationalism in the 1980s, Dedijer goes as far as to quote his own war diaries as a reliable historical source. His view of the “larger historical process” (Dedijer’s phrase) was deeply influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology, which probably explains his belief in (and active support of) revolutions as a means “to make history.” A rather naive, and from our perspective ironical, belief considering the role his other, more explicitly academic writings, played in the rise of Serbian nationalist discourse.

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As a supporter of Milovan Ðilas, who was jailed in the fifties, Dedijer had to go into exile in the sixties and became an internationally renowned scholar living in England. The Road to Sarajevo stands out both for its stylistic brilliance and its biased tendencies. It has seldom been criticized, and then on partially fallacious grounds. Würthe’s critique, for instance, is based on Austrian national sentiments. Yet almost forty years after its publication it tells more about the author and the discourse of the Yugoslav imagined community (partially supranational, partially Serbian) than about the events of 1914. The Road to Sarajevo is nevertheless a thorough piece of historical work. We shall concentrate on Dedijer’s depiction of the key events and especially of the protagonists, which adhere to the conventions of historical texts. Only the opening chapter serves as an in medias res introduction, and partially reads like a realist historical novel. After an accurate description of the Archduke’s visit, the historian-narrator continues with a description of the characters’ inner lives: “On the eve of the big day, the Archduke was in a good mood” (Road 10). The archduchess is said to be less comfortable with the visit: She “had come to Bosnia with a dark foreboding that something might happen to him [the archduke]. She remembered these fears when one of the leaders of the Sabor, the Bosnian parliament”, was presented to her (Road 10). The narrator-historian mentions the exorbitant costs of the visit (“a hotel room, converted into a private chapel for their stay at a cost of 40,000 gold crowns”) and the local population’s lack of enthusiasm: “a few shouts of Živio! (Long may he live!) from a thin crowd that stood under the shade of the houses and the trees” (Road 10, 12). The narration then moves to the first assault that failed: a bomb is thrown by one of Princip’s fellow revolutionary from “Mlada Bosna,” Nedeljko Cˇabrinovic´. The parade resumes. Once more, the archduke’s inner self is displayed, showing his mental strength after the first assault, during the delivery of a speech to the mayor of Sarajevo: “The archduke was a man of great presence of mind and to the prepared speech he added a few words about the abortive attempt against his life” (Road 14). Then follows a detailed account of the fatal assault. After stating the exact time and place, the account describes that the car with the archduke and his spouse took the wrong turn, which proved to be fatal. At the moment when they want to drive the car backwards, “a short young man with long hair and deep-set blue eyes took out a revolver” (Road 15). The short chapter ends with a detailed description of the corpses, including the jewelry the archduke and his wife wore. The sources for this detailed information and quoted direct speech are stated in the notes. The slip into fictional narrative technique, which serves to represent Franz Ferdinand’s mind, is anexception. The rest of the book, about five hundred pages, offers detailed descriptions, all supported by historical evidence. The ins and outs of the historical events are presented in detail. Chapter VI (“The archduke Franz Ferdinand and his many enemies”) and Chapter X (“Primitive rebels of Bosnia”) deserve special attention: these chapters juxtapose the careers and the psychological profiles of the victim and his assassin. The archduke is portrayed as the heir of the old Habsburg family, who is a military man with a bad temper, can hardly stand music, and despises poetry. He seems adverse to all modernizations and prefers hunting as a pastime — a preference that Dedijer corroborates by listing the absurd number of animals that were shot during a single hunt. Princip, for his part, is presented as the heir of a young and lively nation. His brother Jovo, the first in the family to move from the mountain village of Grahovo to Sarajevo, is said to have “the vitality of a highlander.” Gavrilo himself, according


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to the historian, becomes an atheist early in his life. He is a quiet boy who reads a lot and longs to become a poet. At one point, he even asks Ivo Andric´ to have a look at his poetry, but he never actually gives it to him. Instead, he reads epic folk poetry to his illiterate family members whenever he returns to his village. Thus Dedijer invokes a commonplace contrast in South-Slav histories: Princip’s “Mlada Bosna” represents the young Yugoslav nation against the fatigued feudal Habsburg Empire. Indeed, when Dedijer quotes Vojislav Jovanovic´, a direct source that describes the Young Bosnians as “living ascetics for whom physiological life had no meaning” (Road 209), he uncritically corroborates with several other sources the view that the Habsburgs deliberately attempted to morally corrupt the population. One of these sources is Rebecca West’s famous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a romanticized travelogue, whose best pages are picturesque but whose worst ones represent an Orientalist or rather Balkanist point of view. Dedijer’s main sources for Princip’s biography and his character are his friends and fellow revolutionaries, whose recollections were designed in one way or another to create the Princip legend. Another main source is a certain Dr. Martin Pappenheim, a Viennese psychiatrist, at the request of whom Princip wrote a few pages about his life during his detention in Terezín/Theresienstadt. What Pappenheim recorded as a statement by Princip, Dedijer presents as direct speech. In Dedijer’s account, biographies are of major significance in analyzing the historical events. This does not support Dedijer’s conclusion that the assault was a mere incident, “which under more normal circumstances could not have provoked such momentous consequences” (Road 445). His main conclusion is that the Young Bosnians were “primitive rebels, unable to adapt themselves to the modern ideologies of mass movement against systems of oppression.” They killed the archduke “as a protest against the colonial status of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and as an integral part of the intensified struggle of the South-Slavs for self-determination.” A few lines further Dedijer places Princip’s deed in a national Yugoslav context, and grants Princip himself the role of the martyr-revolutionary: “While Princip was suffering through his dying hours in Theresienstadt in April 1918 the Bosnian horizons were lighted every night by the burning of the feudal landlords’ konaks, announcing the end of the bondage which had lasted for so many centuries” (Road 446). Enter the Yugo-Marxist discourse. Suddenly, the Habsburgs represent a mere phase in Bosnia’s history, and Princip inaugurated, at the price of his life, the freedom of his nation. The paragraph concludes that the South-Slavs lost 1,900,000 million lives. As in official Yugoslav histories after World War II, Dedijer’s climax emphasizes the collective Yugoslav loss; internal tensions are covered up. The narrator-historian Dedijer, whose Yugo-Marxist project has now become apparent, focalizes, as in the first chapter, from the perspective of Franz Ferdinand in order to render Gavrilo Princip enigmatic. Franz Ferdinand, whose character, allegedly, was determined by old and decadent state customs and Habsburg family habits, is an open book compared to Princip, who remains a mystery, in spite of the massive information on his life. He is part of a young nation that has no historical consciousness, only a mythical one. Seen in this light, Dedijer presents a disguised case of Balkanism, even though he takes the stance of a positivist observer who lays bare the historical reality of Sarajevo in 1914. By opting for a Western focus, i.e. writing from the perspective of Franz Ferdinand, he renders the assassin enigmatic: “Princip’s crime was rightly called ‘the perfect political murder’ in the sense that it might be impossible

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for the truth ever to be established” (Road 18). Princip remains a shadow; the authoritative narrative posits the impenetrability of South-Slav culture. The difference between the decadent Habsburg empire and the young and vital Yugoslav nation was in accord with the official Titoist doctrine that Yugoslavia was a “bridge between East and West.” The identity of Yugoslavia demanded a separation from Europe, and Balkanism was instrumental in this process. As a result of Dedijer’s Balkanist discourse, ethnic identity and ethnic hatred could be taken for granted, as elemental forces and causes, not as effects of an imagined community. No more surprising is the centrality of the image of the bridge, evoked by the narrator-historian when he qualifies the Young Bosnians as “a bridge linking the revolutionary youth groups of the different South Slav provinces, preaching the idea of Yugoslav federalism” (217). The bridge is the outstanding ideological image of Yugoslavia’s imagined community. How does the metaphor of the bridge relate to Dedijer’s Balkanist discourse and its assumption of given ethnic identities? The metaphor opens for us a passage to Ivo Andric´’s Bridge on the Drina. In Dedijer’s Road to Sarajevo, it is explicit but functions at more implicit levels as well. First, Princip’s biography “bridges” the various ethnic identities in the region. The more enigmatic the figure of Princip, the better suited as an icon for all South Slavs. By the end of World War I, his biography was turned into a legend for other Balkan nations as well, helping to overcome internal South-Slav war tensions by making the Habsburgs the common enemy. Dedijer takes great pains to show that Princip’s tolerant and open view of the South Slavs evolved from a pan-Serb to a federalist Yugoslav ideal of nationhood. Dedijer quotes an anecdote from the memoirs of a schoolmate of Princip in Sarajevo a certain Kranjcˇevic´, to show that ethnic differences may be overcome. Kranjcˇevic´, a Croat, once stood up for Princip in the classroom. Princip, surprised that a member from another nationality should take risks for a Serb, thanked him, and they became friends, “often discussing politics and the relations between Serbs and Croats in June 1914” (Road 216). The way in which the anecdote is incorporated in Princip’s biography turns the scene into hagiography. The bridge also serves as a means to characterize the historian’s project. First, in a spatial sense, he spans East and West. He pays lip service to the modernization of the Balkans by writing a history according to the standards of nineteenth-century Western historians, but his study opens local sources, hitherto inaccessible to them. This actually invokes an opposite effect, a double closure. Western historians are given the local sources, but these are shown to be ultimately incomprehensible on the cultural level. And while the region gets a history according to Western (positivist) standards, it is represented as a form of Balkanism, which relegates it to the department of folklore. Secondly, the historian spans the present and the past. Dedijer grants a past to the Bosnians, and in a broader sense to the Yugoslavs, who have usually been represented as passive rather than active subjects of their own history. Dedijer links this past to the present by the inevitable coming of Yugoslavia followed by its conversion into a Marxist state. Here, as in spatial bridging, a counter-effect occurs. The attempted synthesis, designed to pacify old traumas and tensions, actually invokes the grand Yugoslav narrative on an ethnic basis. This occurs first with traumas that were partially or entirely left out of the grand narrative. The past is thus not respected as an equal partner in dialogue. On the contrary, it is subjected to the politics of the present that seek to pacify old traumas by exclusion and silencing. Instead of overcoming ethnic


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identities and tensions, the metaphor of the bridge reinforces them. A fourth dimension of the bridge is related to the treatment of sources. Dedijer brings together memoirs, chronicles, testimonies, travelogues, and fiction. All sources get equal treatment and all are being granted the same truth-value. The first-person voice of Kranjcˇevic´ has in Dedijer’s scale the same historical value as the Rebecca West’s travelogue and the firstperson narrator in a story by Ivo Andric´. This “emancipates” the memoir but appears reductive when applied to a fictional narrative, as when Dedijer quotes Andric´’s story “Pismo iz 1920-e godine,” as a “proof” of endemic ethnic hatred. The same story was appropriated during the Bosnian war of the 1990s by nationalist Serbs, whose leaders handed out translations to international officials visiting their headquarters. Dedijer’s quoting flagrantly violates the story’s discursive signposts. He takes the quote from a letter that an anonymous narrator receives from a friend, a Sarajevo Sephardic Jew, who cites ethnic hatred as his motivation for leaving Bosnia. Even if we read the story autobiographically, we should respect the distinction between the narrator and the character, between the letter and its frame of presentation. Similarly, Dedijer’s treatment of Rebecca West’s travelogue ignores its easy identifiable informants, who make the narrator unreliable as a reporter of history, and West’s Balkanist fascination with folklore. This abuse seems contradicted by an article on Ivo Andric´ that Dedijer published in 1983. He asks here “why Andric´’s literary opus illuminates the periods described by him more completely than the works of many historians?” A possible answer is given by Dedijer’s list of comparisons, which includes Dobrica Cósic´, Antonije Isakovic´, and the poet Matija Bec´kovic´ — writers who incorporated Serbian national themes into their fiction when these were still unacceptable in official histories. But this explanation focuses on the shift of the sixties and seventies from a Yugoslav to various national imagined communities. Dedijer’s work is symptomatic of a disguised, though not necessarily intentional, censorship that suppresses literary complexity in order to neutralize its subversive potential, its ability to re-conceptualize facts. This reductive reading serves the construction of Yugoslavia’s grand historical narrative in terms of now dominant national communities. Both the Yugoslav and the national communities are allergic to fiction’s force to relativize. Dedijer’s reductive reading has proven far more stubborn than many explicit forms of censorship.

3.

Ivo Andric´ The Bridge on the Drina

Nobel laureate Ivo Andric´’s Na Drini cúprija (The Bridge on the Drina), published in 1945, relates the story of the bridge at Višegrad, eastern Bosnia. The first hundred pages cover the period from the construction of the bridge in 1516 until the Serbian uprisings against the Ottomans in the nineteenth century. The remaining two hundred pages deal with the Habsburg rule and end with the destruction of the bridge during the Serbo-Austrian fighting in 1914. Since Andric´ consistently focuses on the bridge and Višegrad, the Sarajevo assault is not described directly, though it is presented as a fatal event behind the scenes that deeply influences the lives of the characters. Most interpreters of The Bridge on the Drina focus on its central topos, the bridge, and they tend to agree on the synthesizing force of the narrator’s discourse, regardless of the historical

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value they ascribe to the novel. The bridge is recognized as “not only a structural, but also a symbolic link” (Hawkesworth 125) and the narrator is identified as a synthesis of West and East, a “supra-individual storyteller” who provides “an overarching truth in the novel which the characters do not recognize” (Wachtel 167). A specific narrative posture — a rather patronizing omniscience — exerts a crucial function with respect to the position of the narrator: it enables him to be inside, but also outside, his characters and to serve as an interpreter of the characters for the reader. As an impersonal instance reading the mind of all characters, he is simultaneously a mediator between them. He points out the typicality of their experience in many generalizations that express a universal truth. This reinforces his authority, granting him a grip on history that the characters cannot have: “The worst and most tragic weakness of men’s weaknesses is undoubtedly its complete incapability to foretell the future which is sharply contrasted to his many talents, to his knowledge and to his skills” (Drini 360). The novel is often called a chronicle, but differs from one because the narrator observes the characters retrospectively and from a supra-reality above the characters, out of their reach. Whether interpretations respect his claim to universality or, on the contrary, historicize his transcendent voice, they all regard his project as monologic. By affirming his authority, they neglect the novel’s dialogism. Some recent interpretations of Andric´’s work contest the narrator’s authority, due to the reconstitution of the region’s national communities. Nationalist Serb interpretations claim the narrator’s discourse and affirm its monologic character, while nationalist Bosniak interpretations reject his authority and implicitly emancipate the Muslim characters, sometimes even reject the work altogether as pro-Serb. Ivo Žanic´’s article offers an insightful summary of recent “abuses” of Andric´’s oeuvre: at the political level which attempts to miuse matters that do not belong there, Andric´ is a renegade to the Croats who sold himself to the Serbs for a diplomatic career; to the Serbs, the matter is about “one of the greatest not-Serb-born Serbs”; an example of how all Croats should act in the name of “higher interests of the unity of the state,” to the Bosnians he is a slanderer who has deliberately chosen the most morbid, bizarre, and sickening elements and whose work has thus stimulated “a negative, even racist characterization of the Bosnians on the ideological grounds of a “romanticist tendentious stylization of the past” and of the political theses of Great-Serbian historiography. (49)

Andric´’s narrator intends to show that the present of the characters is fully incorporated in his present. Now the past is said to revive: where there was first progress, there is now regress, decline. Thus nationalist Serbs read the novel as an authoritative historical study that “lays bare the roots of the Bosnian conflict,” whereas rival Bosnian nationalists side with the Muslim characters. Politically opposed, they take similar reductive stances toward the text of the novel. The cited extreme nationalist interpretations leave no middle course. They radically shift authority by universalizing either the narrating instance or the characters’ voices. They not only violate the generic conventions of realist fiction by relying partially on the author’s biography but, more important, they ignore the ambiguity of free indirect discourse. We should resist such moves: the downfall of the Yugoslav supranational community does not simply discredit Andric´’s novel. Nor can it be read as a representation of irreconcilable ethnic differences, since (contrary to many interpretations) it never tried to prove the existence of shared traditions by means of facts and events.


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Two reasons seem to be responsible for the extreme shifts in the interpretation of The Bridge on the Drina. First, by claiming that the discourse of Andric´’s impersonal narrator has universal value, interpretations have tended to deny its embeddedness in history. Second, the authoritarian narrator consistently negates the characters’ own explanations. The first point concerns the reception of Andric´’s work, the second the text’s narrative mode and its resemblance to oppressive discourses. Since the shared Bosnian tradition (and, implicitly, a Yugoslav one) exists only in the narrator’s comments and never in the minds of the characters, the loss of the narrator’s authority polarizes differences on national grounds. In the final chapters that describe the events leading to the destruction of the bridge in 1914 the narrator continues to speak from a supra-national perspective, but he focuses now on the victimization of the Serbian population by Austrian policy. The Serb Nikola Glasincˇanin attempts to convince his fiancé Zorka to join him in emigrating to the United States but is forced to flee to Serbia after the outbreak of hostilities. In the final chapters, the Serbs are no longer opposed to change. They instigate it. They are revolutionaries. The Muslim population of Višegrad, in contrast, is unwilling to accept historical change. The Muslims, Alihodža in particular, oppose change. Whenever the narrator’s discourse is historicized and his universalism is shown to be historically and geographically determined, an irreconcilable opposition of character voices and a rigid division between East and West emerge: the narrator’s project is shattered, precisely in opposition to what seemed to be his original intention. What I propose is to read against both the narrator’s and the characters’ intentions and to focus instead on the interplay of the many voices in the text and the context. Such a reading is suggested, for instance, by the novel’s linguistic complexity. The Ijekavian dialect of Andric´’s youth in Bosnia is present in the direct speech of the characters; the narrator, however, speaks in the Ekavian dialect specific to Serbia proper and not specific to Eastern-Bosnia. Both discourses are interwoven with Turkisms. Moreover, the direct speech of the characters contains German as well as traces of Ladino. Recent nationalist interpretations simplify this linguistic complexity. The pro-Serbs foreground Andric´’s choice to have his narrator speak in the Ekavian dialect, which radical Bosnians again see as a choice of the author against Muslim culture. Both tendencies want to purify what is essentially a hybrid multilingual consciousness. Even if the narrator’s views echo the discourses of the time, especially those that consider racial and linguistic hybridity a threat to national identity, we as readers and interpreters of his work are confronted not just with this single view, but with a complex whole of fictional and non-fictional texts.

4.

The politicization of narrative technique in contemporary Bosnian prose

Aleksandar Hemon’s collection of stories entitled The Question of Bruno is a major achievement in recent fiction from the former Yugoslavia. It is tributary to a powerful tradition of experimental prose initiated by Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for Boris Davidovicˇ in the seventies, which evokes the theme of biographical and linguistic homelessness in Vladimir Nabokov and Bruno Schulz. The indeterminacy of Hemon’s work is related both to its language — the author prefers to be called an Anglophone writer — and to its ambiguous form that expresses a continued need for literary experimentation in East-Central and South-Eastern European prose after 1989. Indeed, the work

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is a borderline with respect to genre, for it blurs imaginary and historical lives: in Hemon’s stories we encounter Joseph Goebbels, Josip Broz Tito, Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, and Richard Sorge. More importantly, the stories juxtapose mutually exclusive narrative devices that confront the reader with ambiguity. The name of the author, “Hemon,” figures next to the other historical figures but is nowhere associated with the various narratorial discourses. “Hemon” is mentioned as a mere source, and an unreliable one at that, in three biographical stories, for example in “Roesenbrinck”s reader,” which was left out of the 2000 English edition. The anonymous narrator is concerned here with the true and definitive biography of the imaginary Nazi bully Paul Roesenbrinck. The two stories are told in the first person by an anonymous narrator relating childhood reminiscences from a space-time that is unmistakably former Yugoslavia. “Harmonika” (The Accordion), which relates the Sarajevo assault, comes closest to autobiography, but here too the narrator remains anonymous. Moreover, the section that narrates the archduke’s assassination complicates the story’s status by using what Dorrit Cohn calls psychonarration: the first-person narrator penetrates the mind of a character. This break with a narrative convention distinguishes this story from the others. The first section of “Harmonika” opens with the archduke viewing the behind of the horses in front of him. The sight of the archduchess’ sickness and of the two horses opening their bowels “like a camera aperture”, and the memory of Wagner’s Liebestod performed by the archduchess one night in Mayerling give the archduke a profound sense of banality. His attention is then attracted by an accordion player whose instrument lacks one key. When the archduke is shot by “a young, scrawny man, with a thin moustache and fiery eyes” (Bruno 89), his last thought concerns the banality of his own death. The second section first points to the arbitrariness in the sequence of events in the first narrative: “Most of this story is a consequence of irresponsible imagination and shameless speculation. (A case in point: the Archduke died in a car, which took a wrong turn and then virtually parked in front of the assassin, whose pants were soaked with urine)” (Bruno 89). For the narrator, only the appearance of the accordion player is trustworthy in the story; it was his great-grandfather, he claims, who arrived at Sarajevo from the Ukraine on the eve of the assault to claim a piece of land promised to him by the empire. In the concluding fifteen lines narrated time rapidly accelerates. The narrator sums up three biographies from three generations and concludes: “Uncle Teodor is now stuck in the Serb part of Bosnia. Most of my family is scattered across Canada. This story was written in Chicago (where I live) on the subway, after a long day of arduous work as a parking assistant, AD 1996” (Bruno 90). The anonymity of the narrator and the unusual appearance of the author’s name in several other stories, extend and reduce “accordion”-like the distance between narrator and author. “Hemon” figures in the stories but has been nominally cut off from his biography. His authorial speech seems incapable of subjecting the other voices and uniting them in one reality. Optic metaphors, cameras, and the theme of television and film constitute a meta-narrative, which allows a movement of characters, images, and events between the stories. The narrators respect the conventions of biography and autobiography, denying themselves access to the minds of the characters. The resultant multiple autobiographies and biographies suggest a meta-narrative, but the contradictory data are not resolved by an overarching perspective. Next to psychonarration and first-person narration, Hemon’s stories also contain evocations


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of childhood scenes. “Sorge’s Spy Circle”, for instance, offers two parallel biographies of the famous spy. In the main text, the narrator recalls that as a child he was convinced his father was Richard Sorge. Numerous footnotes (so many that they need to be read parallel with the main text) offer a traditional biography of Richard Sorge, based on and quoting from historical sources. No comments are made on the truth-value of either story. The childhood scenes, taking place in former Yugoslavia, become affected by an ontological confusion: a child becoming frightened by a film (obviously “War of the Worlds”) on TV becomes a harbinger of the coming real war, which figures in “A Coin.” The latter also relates past and present experiences and alludes to the wandering of the narrator’s great-grandfather in “The Accordion.” Thus the archduke focalizes the assault but what he sees are facts that are historically false, at least partially. This instance of psychonarration contests other representations of the assault in factual and in fictional discourse: it questions the traditional narrator’s access to the minds of characters as in Andric´’s fiction. Hemon’s narrator penetrates the archduke’s mind, and gazes through him at his own great-grandfather, whose importance with respect to the archduke and his assassin is vanishing in large-scale histories. The story therefore also challenges the mythos of some factual discourses that posit the subject as a central force that is capable of “making history.” Even if, for instance, Dedijer’s representation of Princip shows the powerlessness of the individual, he adds to Princip’s biography the afterlife of the socialist revolution, into which he inscribes the role of the archduke’s assassin. Like Andric´’s narrator, his retelling of history offers consolation by giving a national sense to the act. The story relates the historical representation of the subject as a controlling and powerful individual to the fictional device of psychonarration. Some of the other stories capture the reader’s attention by emphasizing the subject’s panoptic spatial position as the observer or the one observed. In “Imitation of Life,” for instance, a child hidden on a balcony spies on people in the street and feels embarrassed; when he climbs to the top of a lime tree, he observes everything and everyone below him as if he were floating on the sea. Similarly, the position of Kauders in “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders” (Život 7–15) could also be called panoptical. Kauders’s biography is intertwined with those of Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Andric´, Rosa Luxemburg, King Aleksandar, and others, and he manages to be present at the Latin bridge, standing right behind Princip. We recall that the narrator of “The Accordion” denied himself the privilege of being an omnipresent observer, for he found it “irresponsible imagination and shameless speculation.” The most extreme and harrowing politicizing of narrative technique occurs in “Montaža atrakcija” (A Coin; Život 69–83). Here there are two first person voices: one is an anonymous male exile in the US who receives letters from a female friend in Sarajevo during the siege. There is no integral narrative perspective, which is all the more painful because of temporal gaps, sometimes lasting months, between the writing and the reading of the letters. The story shows that transcendent narrative perspectives and psychonarration can provide insight and offer consolation. But a consoling flight into the “divine perspective of the grey winter clouds,” as Danilo Kiš once wrote, is out of question for Hemon. In the same story, snipers hidden on the hills looking down upon Sarajevo assume the all-seeing vision into the panopticon. Hemon’s story may be said to politicize Andric´’s narrative technique. But this is an intertextual dialogue; the link between politics and narrative technique is metaphorical, in terms

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of optic instruments (cameras, binoculars, snipers) that thematize the power game between observer and observed. It is no coincidence that Hemon dedicated one of his stories to Semezdin Mehmedinovic´, another writer from Sarajevo who describes the following scene in Sarajevo Blues: ˇ etnik position The C First a bulldozer came to dig trenches in the ground, then the truck hauling cement blocks to shore them up. Tanks are dug in at the side with just the barrels veering out. And rocketlaunchers. Beyond the range of our rifles. Maybe you could even spend the winter in the trenches like that. It’s August now: tobacco comes from Niš, and plum brandy from Prokuplje. I don’t know where the women come from, but I saw them too, through my binoculars. One of them put an air mattress down by the trench to sun herself in a bathing suit. She lies like that for hours. Then she gets up, goes to the rocket launcher, pulls the catch and lets a shell fly at random toward the city. She listens for a second, looking towards the source of the explosion: she stretches on the tips of her toes, innocently. Then she goes back, rubbing her body in suntan oil to fully give in to her own state of well-being. (53)

That the sniper is observed without noticing it adds another layer to the relation between observer and observed. The hierarchy between the sniper and her target is complicated by a third party, the narrator, who is present in the scene and also a possible target. The contrast is between two triangles: a visual one — who watches whom? — and a physical threat triangle — who aims at whom? Hemon’s “A Coin” dramatizes this metaphorically, by letting the sniper claim the dominant visual position, allowing no refuge in a transcendent perspective and no consolation. By contrast, Andric´’s narrator could quit the scene and assume a transcendent perspective, fostering the illusion that escape from the war and the siege is possible. The dialogue between narrative and political perspectives is implicit in Mehmedinovic´’s short fragment, explicit in Hemon’s prose. 5.

How to save monologic literature from revisionism

Can literary texts resist reductionist, monologizing interpretations? Andric´’s case shows that resistance depends as much on text-immanent features as on a reader’s respect for the convention activated by narrative devices in the text. Not every text forces the reader to question its narrators. Andric´’s even seeks to avoid it. Andric´’s project of modernizing the epic imagination has proven extremely vulnerable to revisionism. In his case, we may need “defensive interpretive tactics” to explore the potential of the text, even if this requires deliberate misreadings of both the narrator’s and the characters’ intentions. To put it simply, as Enver Kazaz does, to say that fiction is by definition different from other discourses is not enough. In the case of Andric´ we may even maintain that his narrator wants us to read his story as a chronicle, as history. Dedijer’s and Andric´’s narratives have one thing in common, in spite of their obvious differences. Both defer to the conventions of their chosen genre, both narrators tend to equalize the voices in the text. Dedijer does this under the pretext of (historical materialist) objectivity; Andric´ strives towards universalization. When Dedijer imposes his will onto the voices from the


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past, misinterpretation arises; Andric´’s narrator has full access to the minds of the characters and he lords over a reality above the characters of which they are unaware. He avoids dialogue with them, and this is precisely where the novel’s vulnerability lies. Once the narrator loosens his grip, the characters assert the monologic discourse of their national stereotypes. There has been, to my knowledge, no convincing new reading of Andric´ that would attempt to prevent this “fall” of the narrator. Andric´ attempted to reconcile contradictory, mutually exclusive national myths on a supranational level that would lay bare their common ground. But his premise was that they all shared one feature of epic culture, the total identification of the reader (or listener) with the hero of the epos. Recent extreme nationalist interpretations of The Bridge revert to such a reception of epic culture; at the same time they identify author and narrator by using Andric´’s biography to read the novel. An intertextual reading of Hemon and Andric´ reveals, then, a fundamental paradox. Andric´’s dominant auctorial narrator claims universal values; he tries to make conclusive statements about the experience of the characters. But this proves vulnerable to readings that contest its intention. Hemon’s postmodern project, which explicitly aims at ambiguity, is open towards other genres (for example, history), but seeks to establish, successfully I believe, its own dialogic individuality. History writing and authorial biography are explicitly incorporated into the literary text, creating confusion as to its status. Reading conventions change textual practices and vice versa. Andric´’s narrator was regarded as authoritative during the supranational Yugoslav imagined community (see Wachtel), while now several national communities contest or confirm him by forcing a national identity on him. The political scene has changed, but the modality of literary reception has remained the same in more than one respect. The nationalist readings continue the monologizing tendencies of the reception in supranational Yugoslavia. The culture of “Mlada Bosna,” the revolutionary group to which both Andric´ and Princip were related, does not distinguish itself in this respect either. At the request of Lev Trotski, Vladimir Gacínovic´, a member of the group, wrote in 1915 a short article called “Sarajevski Atentat,” which describes the vital role of literature in the “revolutionary awakening” of Mlada Bosnia: “With enormous love we read Cˇerniševskij’s novel What Is to be Done?, baffled by the powerful figure of the ascetic Rahmetov. Because of one ˇ erniševskij’s hero as much as we Rahmetov we ardently loved young Russia… We supported C could” (qtd. in Palavestra, Književnost 247). Different as the literary cultures of nationalism and socialism may be, their didacticism turns literature into a monologic ideological vehicle. Andric´, who was claimed as one of the “greatest Yugoslav writers of the 20th century” in a Bosnian secondary school anthology from the early seventies (Milanovic´ 123), is now ardently rejected. The crisis of psychonarration and mimetic representation in Hemon’s prose is therefore not so much avant-garde provocation as a response to “epic” reception. More precisely, it responds to a culture that identifies the speaking voice of a narrator or a character with an ideology, denying it a contesting or confirming stance towards other textual voices. If we are to save Andric´’s work from the graveyard of cultural history, we must activate its dialogic potential. In spite of its deep immersion in Balkanist and Orientalist discourses, Andric´’s fiction could be revitalized by ironically playing out against each other the narrator and the characters. The result may resemble the position of a monument in urban space amongst other edifices with ideological,

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aesthetic or simply functional purposes. This way, the boundaries of literary genres may also be softened. For if we compare The Bridge to a monument commissioned for a specific ideological purpose we sharpen our sensitivity to discursive diversity: just as the monument is a monologic statement of remembering compared to more complex edifices, so, too, Andric´’s novel co-exists with Hemon’s intentional intertextuality and metafiction.

Beyond Vienna 1900: Habsburg identities in Central Europe Katherine Arens “Vienna 1900” suggests Austrian decadence, decline, and imminent decay; the reference point can be used by the Habsburg successor states as the symbol of their pre-1918 oppressors and of the city to which refugees from the emerging East Block fled. Yet cultural evidence does not support that image of Vienna and its “gay apocalypse.” Many Germanophone and Slavic intellectuals focus on a more complicated legacy of governmental hubris and on the particular tactics of self-representation that stabilized otherwise untenable economic and administrative situations to bring a modicum of development to an impossibly fragmented region. Their work suggests how that questionable Habsburg state without an official name created lived compromises among the internal interest groups, compromises that never found adequate correlates in Austro-Hungarian politics or thereafter. Several novels from the years after 1918, and from several parts of the one-time Habsburg lands make the case that the stereotype of Vienna 1900 reflects neither the insiders’ experience of that transition nor Central Europe’s cultural memory of the Habsburg successor states. I shall analyze two novels to illustrate this view. My first author thematizes the tensions between margin and center in the Empire, as they played out through the Empire’s end. Joseph Roth tells in Radetzkymarsch (1932) the story of three generations of multi-ethnic Habsburg citizens who define their identities vis-à-vis the image of Franz Joseph. Roth’s work finds a surprising parallel in my second, Austro-Serbian, author, Milo Dor, whose Der letzte Sonntag: Bericht über das Attentat von Sarajewo (The Last Sunday; 1982) shows a Habsburg official reconstructing the assassination of Franz Ferdinand from the Serbian government’s point of view. Both Roth and Dor underscore what was politically contemptible with the state, but also what was pragmatically superior to ethnic nationalism. Their works are Germanophone, but not necessarily Austro-German in focus (Arens, “For Want of a Word”); they point to a range of ethnic experiences that lie decisively outside the conceptual bounds set by the notion of “Vienna 1900,” which reduces Central Europe’s legacy to a footnote in the struggles between East and West. These representations of a world that nominally came to an end in 1918 suggest that the region’s cultural identity and memory

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needs to be correlated more closely with questions of lifestyle and lived experience than with nationalist-political concerns. From another point of view, they suggest the Habsburg state’s (almost unwitting) success in creating an identity that might have been able to supersede the nationalist-ethnic political frameworks imposed on the region for a century.

Joseph Roth: The persistence of the Habsburg The typical post-1918 narrative from inside the one-time Habsburg Empire takes the long view of the monarchy’s final century. The opening lines of Roth’s Radetzkymarsch typify the retrospective view of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s last century, which can all-too-easily be taken as nostalgic. They introduce the Trotta dynasty, whose tale, in all its improbable details parallels those of other families throughout the empire (Bruckmüller et al.): “The Trottas were not an old family. Their founder’s title had been conferred on him after the battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene and chose the name of his native village, Sipolje” (Radetzky 1). Roth portrays then how a dynasty (personal or political) comes to an end, but he does not argue for any particular change in the conditions that determine it. This Slovenian-Habsburg dynasty emerged into history with Emperor Franz Joseph. During the battle of Solferino (1859), the young Emperor was inspecting the troops at the front line. He lifted a field glass to his eyes to check the retreating opposing forces. The young lieutenant Trotta knew this gesture to be a provocation to the enemy. He reacted as follows: With both hands he gripped the monarch’s shoulders to push him down. No doubt the lieutenant’s grasp was too rough. The Emperor fell at once. The escorts flung themselves on the falling man. That same instant a shot pierced Trotta’s left shoulder — a shot aimed at the Emperor’s heart. Trotta fell as the Emperor rose. (2)

This last line reflects the family’s paradox: its nominal success but decline into a somewhat alien Austro-German point of view that will end it. The first, historic Trotta was awarded the Order of Maria Theresa, and ennobled as “Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje” (3), the first of three generational transitions that the novel recounts. In Trotta’s own mind, his Habsburg-sponsored fate is both negative and positive, as he assesses his position as a second-generation citizen of the monarchy. This will be a dynastic fairy tale: As if his old life had been replaced by a strange new one, manufactured to order in some workshop, he would recite to himself every night before going to sleep and every morning after waking his new rank and his new status; he would stand in front of the mirror to make certain that his face and appearance were unchanged. (3)

Yet this fairy tale has in it nightmare potential: His grandfather had been a smallholder; his father an assistant paymaster, then sergeant-major of the gendarmery on the southern frontiers of the monarchy. Having lost an eye in a tussle with Bosnian border smugglers, old Trotta was now pensioned off as an invalid as was caretaker in the part at Schloss Laxenburg. There he fed the swans, trimmed the hedges, and

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Katherine Arens in spring protected the laburnum and later the elder from pilfering hands. … The rank and status of a plain infantry lieutenant had been natural and fitting enough to the son of a noncommissioned officer. But his own father felt a sudden chasm between himself and the titled Captain, who moved in the strange, almost unearthly radiance of Imperial favor as if through a golden cloud. (3)

Two factors will thus determine this family: an upward mobility that, they believe, depends on Imperial favor, and the question of ethnic identity as a largely unused unbalancing force within the Empire. Allegiance to Haus Habsburg has opened a gap in Trotta consciousness, subjecting it to new, entropic forces as they emerge into their new world. Army success, for instance, has created a class and ethnic divide within a family whose power is manifest, but not reflected upon. Captain Trotta’s father speaks to him “using the ordinary harsh German of army Slavs”: His consonants rumbled like thunderbolts, the final syllables laden with small weights. Only five years previously he had addressed his son in Slavonic dialect, although the young man had merely a smattering of it and never used a world of dialect himself. However, to address his son in his mother tongue on this day, his son who by the grace of fortune and the Emperor had been removed so far from him, would have struck the old man as an impertinence not to be risked. The Captain, in the meantime, was watching his father’s lips, ready to welcome the first sound of Slavonic like long-lost, familiar sounds of home. (5)

Such scenes signal the family’s loss of essential roots, even as the Captain takes as his new family title the name of a village he will never see and never wants to, once he has entered the sphere of the Hofburg: “He himself, the District Commissioner, had never felt any desire to see the home of his fathers” (119). The family is becoming something else, neither Slovene nor German. As the novel casts them, the Trottas become true subjects of Haus Habsburg. They have, indeed, lost their prehistory in the Sipolje for which they are titled, yet they have entered Western history in an unexpected and potentially significant way. Later in life, this soldier-turned-local-bureaucrat finds a version of his story in his son’s reader, under the title “Francis Joseph I at the Battle of Solferino.” The story presented there is a highly fictionalized version of the incident that describes his impassioned defense of the Emperor with a drawn sword (7). This exaggeration frustrates Trotta, even though everyone tells him that such a tale is not serious, meant just for children. Unconvinced, he writes a protest letter to the ministry of education, to which they respond that such pieces help build the “patriotic sentiments of each new generation” (9). Finally, he demands and gets an audience with the Emperor, who simply says he understands, but that he must rely on his ministers (10). Nonetheless, because the Emperor has taken notice of the situation, those same bureaucrats remove the story from the next edition of the reader. These events underscore the paradox of the Trotta’s new status in world history. After his protest, Trotta tries to withdraw and tend his own garden, just as his father had tended that of the Emperor: “A small, gnarled, Slavonic peasant, this Baron Trotta” (11). Yet that willed isolation cannot hold, despite the eldest Trotta’s attempt to restore truth to history. As the son of a Baron, the next Trotta, Franz, is sent to boarding school under the Emperor’s patronage. These Habsburg Trottas remain tied to the state through such patronage, as well as in the

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presence of an old family retainer, Jacques. The Baron Joseph eventually rises to the level of Assistant District Commissioner and dies around the time when the son becomes a lawyer. Franz follows in his father’s footsteps to become “Royal Chief District Commissioner” (16–17). And his son, Carl Joseph von Trotta, is in turn sent to cadet school in Moravian Weisskirchen (19). Despite their outward differences, the Trotta generations move steadily in the sphere of Habsburg civil servants. Carl Joseph, for example, also recognizes his father through his voice, a voice that has become part of the Habsburg world: He spoke the nasal German of higher civil servants and the Austrian upper middle class. It was somewhat reminiscent of the twanging of distant guitars in the night or the last peal of bells dying away: a gentle yet precise idiom, at once tender and malicious, in harmony with the speaker’s thin bony face — his narrow aquiline nose a kind of sounding box for its resonant rather melancholy consonants. Mouth and nose, when the District Commissioner spoke, were wind instruments rather than the features of a face. And, apart from his lips, nothing in his face moved. (25)

This family alternates as soldiers or bureaucrats in the Emperor’s service: “[The District Commissioner] sits here every day from five to seven reading the foreign news and the Civil Service Gazette while smoking a cheroot. The whole town has been aware of it, for three decades” (55). Significantly, their social rise is by no means a moral one: the young cadet gets into scrapes with love affairs, eventually requiring the Emperor to salvage his commission and career. Through such missteps, yet always saved by the presumed interest of an Emperor who remembers his family dimly, the last Trotta ends up stationed at the periphery of the monarchy, in a cavalry regiment on the Ukrainian border, carefully separated from his hereditary ethnic group: It would hardly have been fitting to permit the sole heir of this recently created baronetcy of Trotta von Sipolje to serve in the native province of the hero of Solferino, the grandson of illiterate Slovenian peasants, the son of a gendarmery sergeant-major. … But the prudence of the Imperial and Royal Ministry of war avoided sending the bearer of such a title, a title identical with the actual Slovenian village in which the first baron had been born, to serve in the neighborhood of the village. (119)

His fellow officers are just as displaced geographically and ethnically as he is, but are unified by their commissions and circumstances within the Habsburg hierarchy, a mix which includes “Lieutenant Kindermann (of German extraction) and Reserve Ensign Bärenstein von Zloga, a rich, recently titled, lawyer,” as well as a Jewish regimental physician (65). The Emperor presides over their circle in the form of a portrait, just as the first Baron Trotta presided over his descendants at the family estate. At the border, however, the Emperor is present as war lord, the persona in which the Trottas first met him. Crucially, this move to the periphery of the Habsburg world reveals how a new kind of community has gradually been forming, through the intervention of Haus Habsburg, but not necessarily in its image: Eastward to the frontiers of the Tsar, the Habsburg sun shone forth its rays. It was the same sun which had fostered the growth of the Trottas to nobility and esteem. Francis Joseph had a long memory for gratitude and his favor had a wide reach. If one of his favorite children was about

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Katherine Arens to commit some folly, the servants and ministers of the Emperor intervened in good time to force the erring child into prudence and reason. (119)

This is, on the one hand, the traditional publicity image that the monarchy had cultivated at least since the time of Joseph II, with the Emperor as father to his children. On the other hand, since these children had been “raised” by this father over the intervening century, they had indeed become some kind of a family. As Roth pictures them: In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When one of the living had been extinguished another did not at once take his place in order to obliterate him: there was a gap where he had been, and both close and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they became aware of this gap. … Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely. (107)

Roth’s meditation about a lost world of civility is confirmed here by the elder Trotta, who can write in all sincerity to his son at the edge of the world: “Fate has raised our stock from peasant frontiersmen to Austrians. Let us remain such” (120). His letter confirms that this vision of civility is Austrian as opposed to ethnic — it is not hyphenated, not Austro-German or Austro-Slovenian. The younger Trotta will not find a future at the edge of that empire simply by trying to become a reborn Slovenian, to recreate the world of his great-grandfather, the gardener-veteran. Under official pressure, the younger Trotta gives up his vague thought of returning to Slovenia in the south. He chooses an eastern frontier regiment as the post that will help him escape his shame (the debts he has incurred), a post that will be his demise. What he discovers is not an alien place, but a very familiar experience of cultural progress: “At that time the borderland between Austria and Russia in the north-eastern corner was one of the most remarkable areas of the monarchy … the northern sister of Slovenia” (120). As this Trotta sees across ethnic and geographic lines, he loses his traditional reference points. His family’s retainer, Jacques, dies after revealing that his name was in fact not Jacques, but Franz Xavier Joseph (141). The first Trotta he served had taken his name from him — the Emperor’s name they all bear (and serve) in the novel. With this, Roth shifts our expectations concerning the Trottas’ downfall. Their loss of specific ethnic identification seems less serious, once the youngest Trotta discovers Galicia. But they remain attached to the Habsburgs by name and by disposition. Count Chojnicki, with whom Carl Joseph is stationed, diagnoses the situation as he prefers to see it: the Fatherland has ceased to exist. … [I]n the literal sense, it still exists. We still have an army … and government officials. … But it’s falling to pieces here and now. Falling to pieces? It has already. An old man with one foot in the grave whose life is endangered by any cold in the head keeps his ancient throne by the sheer miracle of still being able to sit on it. How much longer? How much longer? This age has no use for us. This age wants to form independent national states. People no longer believe in God. Their new religion is nationalism. Nations don’t go to church, they go to independence meeting instead. Monarchy, our monarchy, is

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founded on piety, on the belief that God chose the Habsburgs to reign over a certain number of Christian peoples. (153)

Yet this tirade opens up a new avenue for Roth’s analysis: class and estate may be the blind spot in the vision adopted by the Trottas. Chojnicki is espousing not a German-Austrian vision of the Habsburg (by name, he is Polish), but a distinctly Polish-aristocratic one. The border posting of this fourth Trotta generation allows Roth to emphasize the Empire’s plural ethnic character as its true source of strength. He especially wishes to show readers the Empire’s eastern, Russian and Galician, Jews (Radetzky 122), who traded (or smuggled) on the border, wedged between Russia and the Western Empire. Roth’s own background comes into play here, given that he himself was born in that multi-ethnic Galicia (in Brody, now in Ukraine, a town at that time two-thirds Jewish). Historically, that Galicia combined sizeable Polish, Ruthenian, Jewish, Russian, and German-speaking Austrian minorities, which, in Roth’s sympathetic depiction, can learn to interact successfully because of their distance from Vienna. Unfortunately, however, other factors come into play to disturb the harmony that Galicia might otherwise have represented. These marginal Habsburg subjects occupy a border squeezed between Cossacks and Count Chojnicki’s old and new castles: “They lived remote from it, wedged between East and West, cramped between day and night, themselves a species of living ghosts spawned by the night and haunting the day” (121). But those “ghosts” haunt only Count Chojnicki, the regional representative to parliament, who has little faith in the political future of his nation: The monarchy is bound to end. The minute the Emperor is dead, we shall splinter into a hundred fragments. The Balkans will be more powerful than we are. Each nation will set up its own dirty little government, even the Jews will proclaim a king in Palestine. Vienna’s begun to stink of the sweat of democrats — I can’t stand the Ringstrasse any more. (129)

The younger Trotta is seduced by this aristocratic vision that conflates ethnicity with class-based stereotypes, denying what he had felt about the vitality of these borderlands. As his father, the last old Baron Trotta, ages, looking ever more like the Emperor, the son begins to drink, listening to his friends decrying new labor unions and socialist politics that, they believe, destroy traditional industries and ways of life (168). Significantly, as the Emperor himself ages, Roth portrays him as aware of how the system is trapping him. That system is at fault when it implants in the old man the refrain, “It does not become an Emperor” (Radetzky 209). The Emperor knows that information is being withheld, but he is no longer strong enough to destabilize everyone’s expectations. When he goes to review the troops on the Russian front, for example, Franz Joseph clearly sees the end: For he saw [his army] already dispersed and dashed to pieces, split up among the many nations of his monarchy. For him the great golden sun of the Habsburgs was setting — shattered against the primeval basis of the universe into sunballs which, as isolated stars, would be set to shine on independent nations. It’ll never suit them to be ruled by me, thought the old man, there’s nothing to be done about it, he added to himself. For he was an Austrian. (218)

Franz Joseph’s vision is clearly marked as that of the wrong generation — he confuses Carl Joseph Trotta with his father or grandfather. This error causes Carl Joseph to want to leave the

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army, to which his father assents: “determine your own future” (233). But this is still a future with a wrong course: Carl Joseph Trotta will run up debts, which the Emperor will cover (264 ff.); the old Baron will not go into retirement so that he does not abandon the country in time of war. The apocalyptic ending of this aristocratic-Habsburg vision, on the day of the Sarajewo assassination in 1914, arrives during a celebration planned for the regiment’s centenary. The oldstyle Habsburg celebration disintegrates almost immediately: when the bad news arrives, the attendees all begin to assert their divisive ethnic identities. Significantly, their underlings begin to desert, not follow them. The story is finished: Carl Joseph is shot in the Ukrainian trenches as he tries to bring water to those under him; his father Franz dies on the day they bury the Emperor in the Kapuzinergruft. The border Habsburgs and underlings, however, survive. Significantly, Roth does not let the Trottas die out — he only kills off the baronial line created by Franz Joseph. Another branch of the family appears in a subsequent novel, the Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor’s Tomb), published in 1938. There, Roth allows his first-person narrator Trotta to underscore much more explicitly that the Habsburg Empire had not only brought failure: Only much later, long after the Great War which is now, in my opinion, rightly called the World War, not only because the whole world was involved in it but also because, as a result of it, we each lost a world, our own world; only much later, then, was I to realize that even landscapes, fields, nations, races, huts and coffee houses of the most widely differing sorts are bound to submit to the perfectly natural domination of a powerful force with the ability to bring near what is remote, to domesticate what is strange and to unite what seems to be trying to fly apart. I speak of the misunderstood and also misused power of the old Monarchy which worked in such a way that I was just as much at home in Zlotogrod as I was in Sipolje or Vienna … spoke that same nasal, government, language of the upper classes, a language which was hard and gentle at the same time, as if Slavs and Italians had been the founding fathers of this idiom full of discrete irony and a cheerful acceptance of harmless chatter, even of genuine nonsense. (Tomb, 38–39)

This powerful force was a promise of access to power through membership in shared institutions. The rot in that promise was the assumption that Vienna, the Austro-German hegemony, and aristocratic distinction were superior. Thus the power of the monarchy was “misdirected” to create new divisive forces instead of recognizing that the “government language” was not pure German, but already something else to which many ethnicities had contributed. The Emperor’s Tomb underscores how the officers and bureaucrats, to whom the main line of Trottas belonged, were doomed by their exclusive reference to the Hofburg in Vienna and their assumption that it had created them. In fact, Vienna itself had forgotten that it, too, was created by the whole of the monarchy: They [Habsburg bureaucrats and officers] had been much too spoiled by growing up in a Vienna ceaselessly sustained by the Crown Lands of the Monarchy. They had become feckless, almost laughably feckless, children of this capital city and court residence, the praises of which had much too often been sung, and which sat like some brilliant and seductive spider at the heart of the mighty black and yellow web, ceaselessly drawing power, energy and brilliance from the surrounding Crown Lands. The taxes paid by my poor cousin … helped to support the proud houses on the Ring which belonged to the ennobled Jewish family of Todesco, as well as

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public buildings like Parliament, the Law Courts, the University, the State Bank for Land Credit, the Court Theatre and even the Headquarters of the Police. The brilliant variety of the Imperial Capital and Residence was quite visibly fed … by the tragic love which the Crown Lands bore to Austria: tragic, because for ever unrequited … all these were the open-handed providers of Austria; and the poorer they were, the more generous. So much trouble and so much pain so freely offered up as though it were a matter of course and in the natural order of things, so as to ensure that the centre of the Monarchy should be universally acclaimed as the home of grace, happiness and genius. (60–61)

The Emperor’s Tomb is the story of the Zugereiste, those newcomers who arrive at the capital to feed its web, yet without necessarily losing themselves, as the remaining branch of the Trotta family attests. Chojnicki from Radetzky March turns up here to remind us of the evil side of that “tragic love,” as he summarizes the relations between ethnic Germans and other “ethnic minorities” of the monarchy: You didn’t want to understand that those fatheads from the Alps and the Sudeten Germans, those cretinous Nibelungen, had insulted and damaged our two nations for so long that they actually began to hate and betray our Monarchy. It was not our Czechs, or Poles, or Ruthenians who betrayed us, but the Germans, only the Germans, at our very heart. (117)

The Emperor’s Tomb thus tries more explicitly to correct a nostalgic retrospective vision of the monarchy by blaming aristocratic Austrians who assumed their class’s superiority for the catastrophe, not the whole shared lived experience that the Empire had imposed. Chojnicki’s statement makes no sense within that framework, for who is his “us” except for those very Czechs, Poles, and Ruthenians? In 1938, his reference to the “Germans” would have additional resonance, as yet another self-satisfied empire was rising. Roth explicitly counters the dominant Trotta point of view through one of the family’s cousins, a peddler and country bumpkin named Joseph Branco, who understood clearly what had happened to the Dual Monarchy: “Every year I could do business everywhere in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia” — and he counted up all the old Crown Lands. “And now everything is forbidden. And with it all I have a passport.” … [Chojnicki responds:] “This is a symbolic trade. Symbolic for the old Monarchy. The gentleman has sold his chestnuts everywhere, in half the European world, one might say. And wherever people ate his roast chestnuts, it was Austria, and Franz Joseph was on the Throne. Now there are no more chestnuts without a visa.” (140)

Chojnicki expresses the sense of loss felt by the purportedly dominant culture. Yet more real and more significant is Branco’s response: as an ordinary man, he has lost access to his own trade and identity, once the region fragments into nations whose purpose is not clear. As the novel follows the newly-extended Trotta family back from the periphery of the region into Vienna, it documents how that lived reality has superseded the survivors’ assumptions. The power of the monarchy to make the strange familiar had not disappeared. In Emperor’s Tomb, this Trotta — a Franz Ferdinand, significantly marked as victim by carrying the name of the murdered Austro-Hungarian crown prince — and a number of his friends live in his mother’s house in Vienna, which she has turned into a pension. His world is dead, but he won’t die, as he lives through the end of the monarchy and emerges as something else.

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In another historian’s joke, Roth has him marry an Elisabeth (whose namesake, the martyred Empress Elisabeth, “saved the monarchy” by working for the Hungarians at the time of the Compromise). Their child starts an important new phase in his life: “I was no longer Trotta, but the father of my son” (141). That son’s name was Franz Joseph Eugen, an unmistakable reference to the power of assimilation, since Austria’s most famous Eugen was Prince Eugene of Savoy, the French immigrant who defended Vienna against the Turks in 1683 and then Belgrade in 1718. A new human wave has continued to feed Vienna and come to share a life that is Austrian but not necessarily Haus Habsburg or German. No wonder, then, that Trotta feels himself to be “obsolete” (153), and that Austria is, at best, “a religion” (145). The book ends by looking back at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the author’s point of view at the start of the Second World War, when this “religion” will not suffice to free the region nor redefine it. Trotta encounters a Viennese café’s pet dog: “He followed me. He could not stay. He was an old dog. He had served Café Lindhammer for at least ten years, just as I had served the Emperor Franz Joseph; and now he could do so no longer. Now neither of us could” (156). His last question: “So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?” (157). The aristocratic-HausHabsburg vision could no longer serve history, and he will not follow Joseph Branco into a new generation. Roth’s two novels use the reference point of 1918, instead of “Vienna 1900,” to show the genesis and danger of an identity that has deluded the Trottas and kept them from seeing a different truth in their own family history. In this sense, Roth tells a tale of a Habsburg Empire which squandered its human capital. Its institutions created a race of Austria subjects who all too easily forgot their natural roots and who, like the successive generations of the Trotta family, preferred to relate to each other as aristocrats, bureaucrats or soldiers rather than as individuals. The main (Haus Habsburg) branch of the Trotta family has indeed died out, but even it had strength underneath the aristocratic pretensions of its later generations. After all, Carl Joseph Trotta dies in the trenches, bringing water to his men; he dies of duty to the men for whom he is responsible, not to a War Lord who is himself dead. His cousin Franz Ferdinand Trotta visits the Emperor’s tomb and wonders where he can go, since he has lost the power to innovate within the lifeworld of the Habsburg world. In the late 1930s, Roth is anything but optimistic about the future of the Habsburg legacy he has identified. He sees only a world of passports and new, emerging misuses of power. At the same time, his two novels are anything but nostalgic. Instead, they diagnose very specific aspects of Austro-Hungary’s legacy, both positive and negative. The image of the Emperor and his Vienna persist in our world as in the Trottas’, but Roth marks both as traps (even for Franz Joseph himself, who ends up filling expectations rather than ruling). The power that needs to be identified and used in the lee of that Empire is its power as an imagined community, that sense of familiarity and blending that for a time held together what ethnic nation-states try to suppress — the voices and lives of those between the great powers.

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The (post-)Cold War response Roth’s vision of the true lived power of Austro-Hungary did not die with him. Parallels recur in the later literature of the Empire’s successor states, especially when the question of an alternative to the East-West split of Europe arises. Thus Claudio Magris writes the biography of the river Danube (1986); Péter Esterházy parodies it in The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube; 1994); Anton Hykisch writes a novel about Maria Theresia (1984). Western critics often take such references to Habsburg history as a kind of nostalgia for what Stefan Zweig called the Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday; 1942), a humanist fallacy in the face of power-block politics. Nonetheless, another Germanophone novel from the Habsburg successor states argues for the salience of Roth’s analysis. Milo Dor took up the Habsburg legacy directly in 1982 when he retold the story of the assassination at Sarajevo that started the First World War, in a novel entitled variously The Shots at Sarajewo, or The Last Sunday. As he notes in his introduction: The consequences of this war and the disintegration of an apparently solidly built order are incalculable, because they still continue. Hence the upswell of emotion whenever someone tries to interpret this assassination that was decisive for the fate of Europe, even though almost seventy years have passed since then. (Schüsse 7)

Dor tries to avoid such upswells of emotion, so he uses a fictional character, a government investigator, to lay out the assassination’s facts as evidence of the region’s unacknowledged strength. His protagonist (and sometime narrator) is Leo Pfeffer, introduced at the point when he is about to walk through the streets of Sarajevo on the day of the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand. Pfeffer is the descendant of converted Jews, affiliated politically with Croatian viewpoints: “Leo Pfeffer’s ancestors were Jews, whose centuries-long peregrinations lead them into Germany and, driven out of there, to east Poland” (83). His wife seems to be more oriented towards Serbia, which allows her to see how dangerous such an imperial visit is: “My brother is no Serbian nationalist, by God no, but he’s right: for the Serbs, this is a provocation. Or is it pure chance that the Heir to the Throne goes walking through Sarajevo precisely on Saint Vitus’ Day?” (15). Pfeffer, who is on the street when the fatal shots are fired, is subsequently appointed to be the case’s inspector, as well as the official interrogator of the accused Gavrilo Princip and of witnesses like Graf Harrach, who was in the car with the Archduke and Duchess. The first section of the novel ends with Pfeffer’s decision to work against the press verdict that the murder was the result of a Serbian plot — an assumption made without knowing the facts. Nonetheless, the case begins to corrode the certainties that Leo (and presumably others) have: The assassination that, like a summer storm, had suddenly broken over Sarajevo, as well as the interrogations of the two assassins, forced him to think over things which he had to this point assumed as given. For example, about his heritage and the world into which he had been born because of the will of his father and his mother. (83)

At this point in the narrative, the texture of life in the Habsburg state emerges as the real focus of the investigation. And Pfeffer, like the Trottas, is a creation of the world that is coming apart.

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He enters history like the minor Trottas and the state itself. Pfeffer’s family name came from the trade of his ancestors who had sold spices in small rural towns before his grandfather came west to avoid the pogroms, moving via Budapest and Vienna to finally open a store in Sarajevo. That grandfather also converted to Catholicism out of convenience, not conviction. His grandson makes the leap into officialdom when he becomes a civil servant (85), but his world is still fraught with ethnic tensions, almost of the kind his grandfather had fled: Young Leo Pfeffer tried honestly to fulfill what was expected of him. He adapted to his environment and considered himself completely a Croat, without noticing that his family had fallen from a rock to a hard place in this deliberately chosen change. They had just traded their membership in another group of people without rights. The Croats, who had once possessed their own state, were now only minor dependents of the Kingdom of Hungary. (85)

The family’s nominal Catholicism led the Pfeffers to identify with the Croatian (rather than Orthodox Serb) cause. But their political self-image combined a belief in the Habsburg state with a sense that they had been sold out after the Compromise. Significantly, Pfeffer’s family lost political faith in Austria, but it did not necessarily become alienated from its day-to-day life. Dor’s family tale extends the history of privileged families like the Trottas down into the middle classes, who took on their own roles between the dominant powers: Just as young Englishmen and Frenchmen went to their colonies to start careers, so many young people moved from all parts of the monarchy to Bosnia — Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Poles, Rumanians, Hungarians, Slovenes and naturally Croats and Serbs, who could establish themselves there most easily because they knew the language of the population. The language of bureaucracy was in any case German, and all higher civil servants were German-Austrians or Hungarians. All the more were the young Croats and Serbs needed as go-betweens between the authorities and the provisional subjects who were to be pacified and civilized, as they noted so nicely on formal occasions. The young Court Adjutant Leo Pfeffer took his duties seriously in any case, which didn’t exactly make him popular with his superiors. (87)

This sense of functional belonging is put under pressure by circumstance, by the legal moves that required ethnic censuses, instead of Austrian ones — by new laws that required individuals to claim differentiated ethnic identities to claim their “rights” as citizens. The generation younger than Pfeffer’s own protested (first verbally, then with arms) against the Hungarians who ruled over part of the Empire, including some Slavs (89), even using armed militias. Princip had, for example, participated in the Balkan wars. A climate of violence forces the protagonist Leo to undertake a detailed investigation of the assassination, bringing him into contact with officials from all over the crown lands — a community of officials similar to Trotta’s army comrades. When his wife asserts that, as a Catholic, she will no longer acknowledge any Eastern orthodox Serbs as acquaintances, he accepts her declaration, assuming that his wife may perhaps be a bit more realistic about the new situation, since she is a sophisticated city dweller (230). Part 3 of Dor’s work shows how Pfeffer is received when he tries to file the report with his superiors. He looked for a simple truth: whether or not Princip acted with the support of the Serbian government. But his superiors take the assassination plot as multiply entwined with their nations, as an ethnic plot, a political uprising, and as motivated by economics (187). Pfeffer

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ultimately finds that Princip acted alone: “No one in Belgrade had deluded the assassins into doing it” (241). Yet the Habsburg officials declare the assassination a plot and plan suppression and revenge by concocting a story that it was the work of the Black Hand organization (243). Thus the Austro-Hungarian government begins to alienate its own citizens by orchestrating demands against the Belgrade government. Dor includes in his text both the official ultimatum and the (ineffective) Serbian response (244 ff.). He notes that the Serbian government rejected only one clause in the demands, an intervention into local court jurisdiction (266). Although the Serbian government all-but-completely capitulated, Austria declared martial law and sent troops into Serbia. Dor gets into details but does not want to debate legalities; interested as he is in the psychological dimension of these decisions, he has Pfeffer recall an incident when he was bullied, and thus empathize with Princip rather than scorning him. Returning to his report he must resist the temptation to fulfill his superiors’ expectations (287). During his last search for evidence he finds in Princip’s room only a copy of Kropotkin’s book and takes it as evidence of a deranged mind rather than a Serbian government plot. The truth is thus psychological: war had been in the air, and Princip, who had served in the war against Turkey, reached his breaking point in a kind of post-traumatic stress reaction to his war service. Dor uses details to underscore the complexity of individual positions: all of them were employees and citizens, subjects of Haus Habsburg, Austrians, and ethnic minorities. But the tale’s ultimate judgment parallels what Roth has already shown: reductive dichotomies between victims and perpetrators do not explain why individuals respond as they did. Each individual had some agency in his political identity (or at least personal choice), and some lack of freedom: “We [the players in the Sarajevo drama] were most assuredly not all that innocent” (290). It was the “last Sunday” when those bureaucrats from all over the empire were still able to delude themselves that they were at peace and innocent — that same undefined “we” that Roth had identified, a group sharing an experience, but all too easily divided along ethnic lines. That Dor takes this view of a great political crime almost a half-century after Roth is significant for an evaluation of the Habsburg Empire. In the successor states of that Empire, the psychological sense of belonging to a multi-ethnic community persisted as a reference and achieved a measure of civic permanence (if no acceptable politics or national form). These two Germanophone authors, one of Galician-Jewish descent in exile from the Nazis, and one of Serbian heritage living in today’s Austria, tell essentially the same story about the meaning of Austro-Hungary for families and individuals: this failed political entity facilitated the entrance of new groups into a historical space, by allowing them membership in the Empire’s institutions, above all its civil service and its army. In accepting that pact with the devil, the families involved lost their roots in their ethnic communities and joined something that they thought was larger, and more just: an administration that guaranteed some kind of civilization and order, even while it facilitated its own abuse of power. While these hopes were ultimately not realized, being sold out by the Empire, Roth and Dor find fault in the Habsburg leadership and in individuals’ willingness to surrender themselves, not in the system itself. Pfeffer cannot deflect the willful political scheming of what seems to him to be a new climate of ethnic separatism. This sense of self as part of a multi-ethnic nation may long have been a fiction, but it was to those like Trotta and Pfeffer a guide for humane actions, a spur to accept a shared fate. The strength of that vision led these families into Europe, but also

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into the First World War — the strength and weakness of an Austro-Hungary that was, in the last accounting, unable to transform its vision into reality.

The Great War as a monstrous carnival: Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk Veronika Ambros The starting point of modernism is the crisis of belief that pervades twentiethcentury western culture: loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and shattering of cultural symbols and norms. (Friedman 97)

The Anabasis of the Novel Through Literary Tradition The unprecedented experience of the Great War left many artists bereaved and bewildered. Their search for the means to cope with the unfathomable destruction led in the West to Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (1916), Karl Kraus’ Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1922), Arnold Zweig’s Der Streit um Sergeanten Grischa (1927), and Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues (1929) — to name only a few works. The following article focuses on Jaroslav Hašek’s Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za sveˇtové války (The Fortunes of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War), one of the key East-Central European books related to World War I. Švejk takes a unique position among these texts. Like Kraus’ closet drama, it opens with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand but ends before the protagonist faces the trenches. Hence, the horrors of the war enter the text mostly as a monstrous backdrop for Švejk, who goes “to war to tell anecdotes” (Jankovicˇ 121). The war and its cause have no particular significance. As Milan Kundera observes: “In Homer and in Tolstoy, war had a perfectly comprehensible meaning; people fought for Helen or for Russia. Schweik (sic!) and his companions go to the front without knowing why and, what is even more shocking, without caring to know” (Art of the Novel 9). Though the title names a World War, the text is no historical novel and does not deal specifically with this particular war. Considered a masterpiece of satirical writing it introduced “an internationally novel style of humor” (Jakobson, “Retrospect” 896). Jakobson also claims that Švejk could emerge only because the Czechs did not generate a canonical humor in the nineteenth century (Jakobson, Decline 152). The Czech literary tradition Švejk might evoke is Comenius’s The Labyrinth Of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (1623), where in the first part two guides (Allquist and Deception) accompany a pilgrim on his way through the Labyrinth. The world the pilgrim faces causes him to turn to Jesus to find with him the paradise of the heart. In contrast to Comenius, Hašek’s Švejk functions as both the pilgrim and the guide who

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takes the reader through the maze of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy before and during the war. As Ripellino writes: “Some may find an analogy between the course of this Baroque pilgrim and the tortuous journey of the pilgrim Švejk from hospital to prison, barracks to police station, for Hašek’s hero traverses a “labyrinth” full of distractions, fools and madmen whose absurd behaviour often makes one’s blood run cold” (40). Yet, there is no paradise awaiting the reader. Mostly, however, Hašek’s novel has an international literary pedigree, for it is written in the tradition of Cervantes, Rabelais, Diderot, Sterne, Dickens, and Twain. It has often been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses as well. John Willett, referring to the German editions of the two novels, writes: “Schweik with its interweaving of real life incidents and characters, its anecdotes and quotations and shifts of linguistic level, appeared in 1926; Ulysses, with its journalistic parodies and its alternation of styles, in 1927” (Sobriety 110). Milan Kundera calls Hašek’s work “perhaps the last great popular novel” (Novel 9). Indeed, elements of popular culture are intertwined in it with other discourses and devices typical of Dada, surrealist parody, and the avant-garde, such as a predilection for punning and other verbal games, as well as for the humorous, often scatological or otherwise “scandalous” rewriting of traditional texts or images, the predilection for collage and collage-like techniques of juxtaposing heterogeneous elements (Suleiman, Subversive 146). Although Hašek was not a member of any avant-garde movement he certainly predates some antics of the Dadaists. Akin to a Dadaist work of art, the entire book is in its basic structure “a complex and cunning collage” (Frynta 87). Moreover, his use of dreams and incongruous elements anticipates the techniques of the Surrealists. Hašek also plays with the conventions of verisimilitude, realistic setting, and linear causality in the realist novel, imbuing them with elements of the picaresque novel, manifold simple forms, as well as some genres of urban folklore. In Kraus’s satirical and polyphonic drama the different layers remain apart, whereas in Hašek’s work the disparate episodes are held together by the protagonist and the discourse of the narrator. Cecil Parrott’s unabridged English translation includes a map of Švejk’s journey and his Budeˇjovice anabasis. Švejk’s fortunes take place in a concrete time and space and the narrator claims in the preface that his protagonist can even be encountered strolling in the streets of contemporary Prague. All this prompts a realistic reading of the novel as an account of the Great War. But the preface also draws a mock parallel between Švejk, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and Herostrates, hence suggesting another ancestry of the protagonist outside the realistic novel. Allusions to Rabelais confirm this assumption. But the hero appears also as a not-so-distant relative of Sancho Panza, Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, and other fictional characters of the satiric and picaresque novel. J. P. Stern sees in Švejk even a fusion between Dickens’s Fat Boy and Sam Weller (War 104). Kundera in the foreword to his dramatization of Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste draws a line of Švejk’s literary relatives that leads from Don Quixote, through Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby, Diderot’s Jacques, who jokes and philosophizes on the road with his master, all the way to Becket’s Vladimir and his servant on an empty stage waiting for Godot: “The journey is over” (Misurella 15). It is yet another irony of Osudy that one of Hašek’s last pranks, his claim to international glory, proved to be posthumously prophetic. Confronting his readers with his riddles of the war, Hašek gained their warm acclaim, including such prominent authors as Joseph Heller (Catch 22) and, above all, Bertolt Brecht, who helped adopt Švejk for Erwin Piscator’s remarkable stage

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production of it in 1928, and wrote during his American exile Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (Švejk in the Second World War), first performed in Polish posthumously in Warsaw (1957). Švejkian pragmatism is evident also in Brecht’s Herr Puntilla und sein Knecht Matti and Mutter Courage, as well as in Brecht’s own life. As Herbert Knust comments in a catalogue to an exhibition of George Grosz, Brecht “observed about Schwejk that in a state of disorder only disorder can lead back to some normalcy” (Knust, caption 2). In Švejk the chaos of the war appears as a monstrous carnival from which Švejk emerges as a king.

The author and his work — Biography as a work of fiction Hašek’s life exemplifies Milan Kundera’s claim that mystification is “an active way not to take the world seriously” (Guski 149). Hašek’s pranks, notorious in Prague, made him into an author whose biography reads like his fiction. It seems to fulfill the Avant-garde striving to abolish the division between life and work. In 1911, the anarchist Hašek derided the upcoming election by founding his own party called Party of Mild Progress Within Limits of the Law. But by 1920, the year that André Breton’s first Surrealist automatic text, Magnetic Fields, was published, the notorious fixture of the Prague inns, Hašek, became a sober Bolshevik commissar in the Red Army. He began writing Osudy upon his return to the newly founded Czechoslovakia, retaining the episodic structure of his previous work, including the two books of short stories in which Švejk is the protagonist. Švejk’s discourse and that of the volunteer include some of Hašek’s tricks. Marek’s experience includes, for instance, the production of new species of animals, something that Hašek claimed as editor of the journal Sveˇt zvírˇat (The Animal World). Andreas Guski rightly notes then that mystification is the main textual strategy of Osudy as well.

The Caprichos of the War — The caprices of the text Hašek’s premature death prevented the completion of the last two volumes. The four completed volumes, respectively entitled “Behind the Lines,” “At the Front,” “The Glorious Licking,” and “Great Licking Continued,” introduce different stages of the war. Although they seem to follow its linear progression, Švejk’s fortunes do not develop in a straight line. In the tradition of Sterne and Diderot, the journey is less important than its interruptions through digressions. Hence the spatio-temporal continuum of the text is further divided “into the outer space and time into which Švejk is put, drafted and sent to the front and the space and time with which he deals as a creator” (Jankovicˇ 119). Jankovicˇ suggests that Švejk is a passive object of the war machinery (the Chaplain, whom he serves as an orderly, loses him in a card game to Lieutenant Lukáš) and an active ‘subject’ as narrator. Piscator staged Švejk’s double position by placing him on a conveyor belt between actors and George Grosz’s cutout figures (Grosz, Hintergrund), which “brought out Hašek’s malicious attacks whenever they were left unspoken in stage action.” The text undermines the notion suggested by the title that Švejk is a “good” soldier for being militant. Instead, Švejk is presented primarily as a narrator of stories. “Fortunes” (osudy) in the title underscores Švejk’s passivity, and this is supported by the Czech za (during), which


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denotes a more passive and indirect involvement than the “in” used in the English translation. As the philosopher Karel Kosík writes: It is as if the author was afraid that the meaning of his work would not be understood, so he clearly and distinctly emphasized the meaning in the title. The most readable of all books is called “The Fortunes of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War” but interpreters — i.e., so called experts — read the novel as if the title was “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk in the War.” … Every word of the title is ambiguous, and ironic. (91)

According to Josef Škvorecký, Švejk embodies passive resistance: he observes that “by always behaving as a model citizen, an exemplary soldier, a super-obedient orderly, he exposes the impossibility of such behavior. To define his philosophical meaning … he shows the absurdity of ideological orthodoxy” (Talkin 42). Švejk’s passivity may also be seen as part of a mystification strategy, for although he is an object of the authorities he also makes his “fortune.” He steals the dog of an officer, pulls the alarm brake in a military train, drinks in a pub until he is left penniless and cannot afford the fare to return to his unit, gets involved in a nationalistic brawl with Hungarians civilians, follows his own logic and leaves behind books meant to help decoding orders, and, finally, puts on a Russian uniform — all the while claiming his innocence. Constantly on the move, serving, entertaining, and confusing different masters and escaping them through a variety of detours, he is akin to the heroes of the picaresque novel. Like them, Švejk is of low social status. Moreover, as the very beginning of the novel states, he was “certified by an army medical board as an imbecile” and made his living by selling dogs, “ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigree he forged.” This social and moral deficiency, which is unworthy of a “good soldier” and the vita of an allegedly simple hero, shows that ambiguity and irony are the narrator’s dominant strategies, while Švejk’s discourse betrays from the very beginning his literary lineage: the hero promised by the title and the preface emerges as his parody. Švejk deviates from the expected course of action most blatantly when in the anabasis episode of the second volume he circles around his regiment. This allows him to confront a variety of social institutions and groups. The Budeˇjovice episode, for instance, leads away from the war and shows the anti-militarism of the civilian population, as well as the stupidity of the bureaucrats who arrest Švejk as a Russian spy. They constitute a grotesque universe, a Bakhtinian carnival in which the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand is just like the Ferdinand who collects the dog manure or the one who is a messenger to a chemist (4). To stay alive, to dodge the danger, Švejk becomes a “creator” of stories, one who is in command of another space-time continuum. His presentation of stories evokes the popular oral tradition, making them resemble tales. Švejk, like Scheherazade, talks himself out of precarious situations; as Jankovicˇ says, he escapes danger through his prater (119). Furthermore, he often adjusts his narrative mode to his intended addressee. While Scheherazade manages to capture the attention of the King and thus prevents her own pending execution, Švejk achieves a similar effect by confusing his addressees. When he faces his superiors, incongruous narration is the rule. In contrast to Scheherazade’s king, who is keen to listen to the continuation of her story, Švejk’s interlocutors are annoyed by his talk and order him to stop (the German imperative schweig! [keep quiet!] may be a source of his name).

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Digressions and detours are as characteristic of Švejk’s stories as they are of his fortunes. When facing dangerous confrontations with his superiors, Švejk’s tales chain and embed a number of incongruous narrative elements, which Todorov finds typical also of The Arabian Nights (“Narrative” 70–73). Indeed, Todorov’s comment about The Arabian Nights applies to many Švejk stories: “By telling the story of another narrative, the first narrative achieves its fundamental theme and at the same time is reflected in this image of itself.” (72). Furthermore, like the narratives in The Arabian Nights, most of the stories in Osudy are modeled on popular oral story telling, though not on fairy tales. Some resemble urban folklore, especially as found in taverns and beer-halls among men; others are debased versions of sacred texts; still others parody the “simple forms” of the exemplum, the memorabilia, the legend, and the riddle. Thus, for instance, Švejk poses the following absurd riddle to the medical experts: “Take a three storied house, with eight windows on each floor. On the roof there are two dormer windows and two chimneys. On every floor there are two tenants. And now, tell me gentlemen, in which year the house-porter’s grandmother died?” (29) Instead of replying to this nonsense, the experts declare Švejk a “patent imbecile”: “he expressed himself in terms such as ‘Long live our Emperor Franz Joseph I.’ which utterance is sufficient to illuminate the state of mind of Josef Švejk” (29). Like folk tales, Osudy does not probe the psychology of its protagonist. Švejk expresses himself with a simple or naive smile. Confronted with the experts, he explains: “because my papa was Mr. Švejk and my mamma was Mrs. Švejk. I can’t disgrace them by denying my own name” (25). This mocks biographical accounts as much as official descriptions; embedded in a report, it mocks at documents that seek to individualize. His document merely states: “The enclosed has a small stocky figure, a symmetrical face and nose and blue eyes without special characteristics” (283). Osudy offers several songs, newspaper articles, and even sermons given to the soldiers to spurn their patriotism. “The Glorious Licking,” for instance, opens with a “beautiful and edifying” story (448). A chaplain spurns the soldiers to heroic behavior with the words of a dying soldier to Radetzky: “What do I care about death now that we have won this glorious victory and the Emperor’s territory is restored!” (449). Švejk debunks the exhortation: “I love it when people drivel utter bunkum” (448), but he makes such remarks usually only when speaking to his equals. To them he often appears but to wet his tongue (he talks even in his sleep); the stories he tells are anecdotal and follow a single story line. The quoted “exemplum” illustrates also the sundry ways in which Hašek’s anti-clericalism comes to the fore. Ernest Gellner, relying on T. G. Masaryk’s notion that fighting the Austrian ˇ apek, Hovory 130), claims that the Habsburg dynasty state meant fighting the state church (C “stood for theocratic absolutism” (Velvet 184). Attacking the church Hašek derides the monarchy. He foregrounds the tie between Habsburg absolutism and clerical hegemony by introducing church representatives that support the monarchy’s military expansion. Chaplain Katz, a Jewish convert and one of the most memorable characters of the novel, loses his orderly in a card game. Chapter 11 of the first volume opens with the remark: “Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination” (125). Chapters 10–13 describe various pranks that ridicule the corruption of the church.


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The collage of songs, manifestos, orders, letters, poems, fragments, literary works, even mock chronicles of the Great War derides the official language of war propaganda by containing prayers and edifying exempla. Various speeches of officers to the soldiers are juxtaposed with the bawdy language attributed to the lower classes that was considered inappropriate for literature or as a source of educating the masses. Like the opening “merdre” of Jarry’s Ubu le Roi (1896), Hašek’s bawdy and colloquial language upset the literary norms and taboos. The scatological vocabulary is reminiscent of Rabelais, to whom the narrator alludes when describing the gluttonous chaplain (340). The epilogue of the first volume ironically requests the Czech audience not to take offense at these “strong” expressions, but the speaker adds: “this novel is neither a hand-book of drawing-room refinement nor a teaching manual of expressions in polite society” and he ridicules those “who would like to turn the Czechoslovak Republic into a big salon” (214). Hašek’s fictional world is meant to be a voice in the new republic. The many conversations among soldiers and officers on food and excrements suggest that in the process of destruction “all that was to be left of man were his excrements” (Balakian, Surrealism 133). Expressions like “Austria’s victory crawled out of her latrines,” or the general “laid so much stress on latrines that you would think that the victory of the Monarchy depended on them” (537), as well as graphic representations of feces and digestive problems reinforce the impression that Austro-Hungary is “a Dreckkatafalk, one large latrine, a fetid land of enteroclysms, shit-filled trousers and suppositories — in short, a Cacania-Arsinia. Clearly, for Hašek war is all physical, all bodily function and filth” (Ripellino 245). In contrast to English and some other languages, Czech obscenities focus on the excremental rather than the sexual. Similar to Kafka’s novel The Castle, where the assistants invade Josef K.’s and Frieda’s intimacy, the latrine general pays no heed to the privacy of his subordinates when they use the latrines, hence exposing the ways in which the elementary taboos are ignored. Hašek frequently juxtaposes different language strata, mixing layers of the Czech language, grafting the colloquial and the vernacular upon the standard and higher styles. He also adjusts Švejk’s speech to his interlocutors, and, depending upon the depicted character, often employs corrupted Czech (as in the case of the latrine general), German, or expressions in other languages. That Švejk should use a text fragment by the well-known writer Ru˚žena Jesenská as toilet paper (539) is another example of Hašek’s Bakhtinian “carnivalization” of discourse: he ridicules the exalted style of some contemporary women writers and juxtaposes prewar idyllic fiction with the soldiers’ abject experience. By combining and juxtaposing the voices of soldiers, officers, police officers, priests, and prisoners, the novel becomes polyphonic, though voices are often doublets. The volunteer Marek, for instance, frequently accompanies Švejk and he even duplicates his discourse. The insatiable chaplain has his double in the gluttonous soldier Baloun, Švejk’s friend Vodicˇka in Dub, etc. The speeches of the officers and soldiers often counterpoint each other, and stories often come in variation. While the tales of the officers are often not addressing listeners, Švejk’s associative narration seeks to confuse his superiors. Many of his yarns use obscure metonyms, predating thus the surrealist écriture automatique. Švejk’s prating is not unique. The novel’s fictional world is inhabited by characters who constantly talk, whatever the situation. But this talking seldom involves women in conversation or action, possibly because all the embedded stories reflect the great story, the war, which is overwhelmingly male dominated. The prisons, insane asylums, trains, and police stations that

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Švejk enters are like big pubs, relatively democratic but exclusively male forums, where the external rules are suspended and stories can be exchanged. In the lunatic asylum, in particular, there is freedom “not even Socialists have ever dreamed of. Everyone there could say exactly what he pleased and what was on the tip of his tongue, just as if he was in parliament” (31). The closed public spaces stimulate narration; they also show that reality is no less absurd than the narrated events. Most of the narrated stories revert to the time of peace, the world of the monarchy they are supposed to defend. Hence the depicted reality of the war is compared to the bureaucratic machinery of the monarchy. Volunteer Marek, who is charged with the task of writing the history of his regiment, presents fragments of an alleged chronicle modeled on the heroic legends about brave soldiers who sacrifice themselves for the monarchy. Like the preface and the epilogue to Volume 1, or the remark that the successors of the dead secret agent Bretschneider are “still knocking about today in the Republic” (216), Marek’s mock-historical account transgresses the novel’s fictional time with a reference to Czechoslovakia, which was founded on October 28, 1918. Marek’s revision also reveals that writing history means to collect ready-made clichés rather than “particular facts” in the Aristotelian sense: Marek’s derides the myth of the brave soldiers while shedding light on the myths of the present. The first-person narrator of the preface and the epilogue to the first volume is usually replaced in the rest of the text by an external narrator: “Storm and rain had uncovered the torn shreds of Austrian uniforms lying on the edge of the shell craters. Behind Nová Cˇabytna entangled in the branches of an old burn-out pine there was hanging the boot of an Austrian infantryman with a piece of shin bone” (592). This narrator describes, comments, and ridicules the bureaucratic system, the warfare of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, even the newly founded Czechoslovak republic. From the preface onward, he draws frequent mock parallels between Švejk and historical leaders such as Napoleon and Alexander the Great. The anabasis starts with an excursus on the term and its historical connotations, listing Xenophon, the Goths, and Caesar as Švejk’s predecessors, but it culminates in the non sequitur that since all roads lead to Rome they also lead to Budeˇjovice (241). By recalling models of traditional heroic discourse and confronting them with the lowly reality of the fictional world, the narrator both mocks the past and suggests that the Great War is “business as usual” — with one difference perhaps. As Kundera remarks: “In the novels of Kafka, Hašek, Musil, Broch, the monster comes from outside and is called History; it no longer has anything to do with the train the adventurers used to ride; it is impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible — and it is inescapable” (Novel 11). The Anabasis of the text — Its reception When Švejk came out in 1921, Hašek exclaimed: “A victory of a Czech book abroad! The best humorist-satirical work of the world literature” (Janouch 240). The exaggerated claim befits his image of as man of capers. Though Kundera agrees that Švejk “is perhaps the last great popular novel,” he puts the emphasis on “popularity” rather than the text itself. The anarchist Hašek was often labeled as a mere humorist and the naive illustrations by Hašek’s friend, Josef Lada, may have contributed to the impression that Švejk belonged to popular culture. Hašek’s strategy of


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emulating different types of urban folklore made the book accessible to a broad public but did not help to promote him as a serious author. Popularity and Hašek’s own dubious personality contributed to the mostly negative reception among Czech literary critics (Brod, Streitbares Leben 265). Even René Wellek regards Hašek as cynical and Švejk as “a grotesque picture of the Austrian Empire” that is “not much of a work of art, as it is full of low humor and cheap propaganda” (Czech 41). Hašek’s bawdy and coarse language violated taboos and caused an Angstlust (pleasure of fear) typical of lowbrow literature (Nusser 199), as, indeed, Kitsch was frequently used for subversive and ironic purposes by the European avant-garde (Calinescu, Modernity 254). Švejk challenged the heroic reading of the immediate past, even its most important national event, the foundation of the Czechoslovak state. It is estimated that no less than 50,000 Czech soldiers switched sides, like Hašek, during the war, usually joining Czech legions on the Russian side. Several of these, including Rudolf Medek, Josef Kopta, and František Langer, wrote autobiographical or fictional texts about their experiences. Some of these, especially Rudolf Medek’s five-volume Anabase, were written in the heroic mode, continuing older national myths about a glorious past that drew its strength from the Hussite movement of the fifteenth century. As Gellner writes, even the state founder and first Czechoslovak president, Masaryk (who courageously helped to demonstrate that Hanka’s mythologizing manuscripts were a forgery), could not quite free himself from mythmaking: “The political aim had to be vindicated as a corollary of the overall historical trend. He was inclined to confuse the acceptance of the Czechs by History with their acceptance by the Great and the Good in the West. Consequently he confused national policy with national image and propaganda” (Gellner, “Velvet” 84). Wellek prefers works that treat the legions “in a genuine heroic spirit,” though he admits that “the type of the foolish, smiling cowardly Czech Sancho Panza who goes unscathed through the military machine of the Empire is difficult to forget, however unheroic and uninspiring he may be” (Czech 41). Max Brod, in contrast, wrote a rave review of Švejk, comparing Hašek to Cervantes and Rabelais (Brod, Leben 265). Brod later co-authored a rather conventional stage adaptation of the book that served as a departure for Piscator’s production (1928) and thus helped to launch the novel’s German career. Kurt Tucholsky, a reputable humorist, mocked at the comparison with Cervantes, criticized the presumed foibles of the German translation (1926), and, above all, objected to its colorless grammar. Cecil Parrott, the English translator, extends this dictum to the original, by remarking that Hašek “does not bother about syntax” and disregards grammatical rules (Hašek, Švejk XXI). But Tucholsky, without knowing Czech, sensed correctly that the peculiarity of Hašek’s language was to achieve a comic effect by incongruously mixing lexical, morphological, and grammatical elements of high style with a crude vocabulary. Tucholsky shared Brod’s enthusiasm for Švejk and exclaimed in conclusion: “How lucky is the nation that can call such heroes its own!” (121) Yet, it was only in the sixties that the philosopher Karel Kosík introduced a new reading of the novel by comparing the two great writers of Prague, Kafka and Hašek, and questioning the stereotype of a simpleton or a shrewd petit-bourgeois, for which Hašek and his Švejk were often taken by the Czech critics:

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Kosík also claims that the war begot a specific irony: There is an irony in Socrates and there is also a romantic irony, but the “World War” gave birth to yet another kind of irony: the irony of history, the irony of events, the irony of things. Events themselves bring together and drag down into one space and maelstrom things so dissimilar and mutually exclusive as victory and defeat, the comic and the tragic, the elevated and the lowly. [… W]ho would have been so bold as to say that in Hašek’s ingenious novel the great humor […] of the modern age was born. (98)

Hence, Kosík’s article proposes yet another re-evaluation, namely that of a lesser ‘Kafkaesque’ and more humorous Kafka on the one hand and more Kafkaesque Hašek on the other. By revising the traditional interpretation of the novel as a mere popular text, Kosík’s reading of Švejk confirmed the international acclaim of Hašek’s text in the Czech context and drew attention to the discourse of the text, which has the making of the modernist prose. Moreover, through Hašek’s lens the Great War perpetuates the monstrosity of the Habsburg monarchy, which appears, as much as the pandemonium of the war, as a monstrous universe and a carnival, from which Švejk emerges as a king who uses laughter as his sceptre.

Polish literature of World War I: Consciousness of a breakthrough Dorota Kielak Polish literature writte during and right after World War I documents Polish attitudes, political options, hopes, and indecision concerning a war that divided the country among the occupying powers of Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It is a shocking record of the fratricidal war that pitted Polish subjects of the three territories against each other. It also shows the revival of the Polish State and the struggle of Polish units formed by Józef Piłsudski in the Austro-Hungarian army. The struggle for Polish independence as portrayed in the literature of that time reveals literature’s relationship to politics as well as to the modernist literature of 1890–1914. In the novels of Stefan Z˙eromski, Andrzej Strug, Zofia Nałkowska, and Stanisław Przybyszewski the struggle for the homeland became symptomatic for modernist culture. In Przybyszewski’s short story Powrót (The Return; 1916), Z˙eromski’s Charitas and Strug’s Chimera, both published in 1919, and Nałkowska’s Hrabia Emil (Count Emil; 1920), the heroes lose their fascination for the

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fin-de-siècle when they start military service: they give up their relationship with a femme fatale, or a stormy desire for a beautiful but morally suspicious woman, in order to return to the old values of community life free of erotic fascination. In Chimera, a woman leads the hero back into a traditional bourgeois culture that, prior to the war, represented narrow-mindedness and inauthenticity. In Nałkowska’s Hrabia Emil the Church reconciles the hero with the world by way of his new love: his fiancée succeeds in getting him to confession in the last moment of his life. Abandoning modernist eroticism in favor of altruistic love, best expressed in the title of Z˙eromski’s Charitas, shows how egotism is transformed into usefulness, how the individual is reconciled with the world by returning to the community: the hero of the war novel abandons modernist individualism. The war neutralizes the dissonance with the world that was so important in the novels of 1890–1914. The abandonment of modernist lifestyles and experiences is often accompanied by the theme of the hero’s homecoming from cities like Paris, London, or Florence, or from the German cities. The hero’s mentality changes and traditional values reassert themselves. The hero of Strug’s “Italia” from the collection Kronika S´wieciechowska (S´wieciechowska’s Annals) uses the motif of return to describe a mental breakthrough rather than a real journey. As in other works, homecoming becomes representative of an anti-modernist breakthrough. But the hero’s return to the community and the surrender of modernist values during the war are paradoxical because the system of communal values is also disintegrating. The altruism, sacrifice, and patriotism that the heroes of war literature embrace are exposed to the same process of disintegration as modernist values. In Nałkowska’s Hrabia Emil the hero’s high-mindedness is only a function of his sado-masochistic dreams. The hero’s self-denial seemingly manifests a love of his neighbor but is actually motivated by his mental disorder, which pushes him to experiment on himself, to study the limits of his strength. In Z˙eromski’s Charitas the hero’s patriotism is a perfect means to deal with his most egoistic needs and secret frustrations, an empty vessel that easily fills with cruelty. For one of the characters military service miraculously realizes a modernist dream of art: soldiering excellently fulfills his artistic biography. Modernist dreams about Nietzschean power find realization in the mystique of violence and death; the search for an artistic expression ends in the atrocities of war. Another person desires the death of a cripple and legitimates this desire by making this death heroic. In the novel’s most farcical and tragic scene the protagonist fulfills his idea of a chivalrous death by hanging a dead man on the gallows. He believes that this action manifests the chivalrous ideal because the man’s rigid legs do not bend under the weight of his body; his body expresses courage in death. The war hero’s abandonment of modernism and apparent return to the time-honored values of nineteenth-century culture actually drive him to the verge of nihilism. The war as a Nietzschean “revaluation of all values” questions the meaning of returning to approved values, to common models of behavior. Hence many 1914–1918 novels and short stories deal with the disintegration of, or “crack” in, social conventions. The war hero is tested by life, which challenges his conception of the world and various social stereotypes, mental matrixes, and established life scenarios. The social conventions that govern the relation between man and woman disintegrate in the stories of Leon Choroman´ski and Zygmunt Kawecki; the stories of Wincenty Kosiakiewicz, Tadeusz Jaroszyn´ski, Feliks Brodowski, Helena Pajzderska, and Andrzej Strug show how social prejudices, as well as bourgeois customs and morality, vanish.

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War literature does not copy the revolt against narrow-mindedness so typical for the literature of 1890–1914. World War I literature is not interested so much in the social and sociological context of the disintegrating common prejudices, as in its psychological effects. The subject of the narratives is the consciousness of a people liberated from established patterns. This is the main problem in Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski’s Łuk (Arch), which shows us the mind of a woman who changes her family and financial position when her husband is drafted, and, faced with the demands of life, regains her own self. Łuk can be interpreted as a moral satire but it is actually a psychological novel that follows the heroine while she regains her freedom from social conventions and a social role into which her husband forced her. The novel shows how she liberates herself from bourgeois conventions that forced her to be a decent wife, a priestess of the hearth. She has several love affairs, which make her a depraved woman in the eyes of the others, but she believes that her new life has a justification beyond the stereotypes imposed by society, and she is able to free herself from the models of her culture. Bandrowski created his heroine according to the ideas of Florian Znaniecki, a sociologist of his generation who held that life was not just adaptation to social structures but an active and conscious fulfillment of the conventions imposed by society. Bandrowski deleates the dynamics of the heroine’s changing social roles, focusing on the moment when she finds her own subjectivity in a world dominated by social principles, when a breakthrough takes place in her thinking about herself and her place in the social structure. The most important experience of the hero in the literature of 1914–18 is therefore a breakthrough with respect to modernist values as well as to the values of the entire nineteenth century. The wartime literary heroes are thus an index to the political, social, and mental breakthrough in their collective consciousness. The mental breakthrough, the most important one, informs the consciousness of literature. It becomes the criterion according to which literature on World War I develops its own identity, as the best literary criticism and commentary of the period by Karol Irzykowski, Cezary Jellenta, Jan Lorentowicz, Tadeusz Micinski, Tadeusz Pini, and Kazimierz Przerwa Tetmajer show. The concepts of breakthrough, radical change, and transformation dominate their understanding of their time, their reflections on man and culture, and their notion of literature’s place in the world, especially Polish literature’s in the Polish universe. Zdzisław De˛bicki called the war a period of humanity’s mysterious inner transformation, a time of radical change in every mind (708). The literary critics of the period, like those of the previous one, believed that the psyche determined human activities, and this is why the idea of mental and psychic breakthrough became so crucial in the war commentaries. Marian Barski’s 1917 article on the reasons and purposes of the War considered it a moral, mental, social, and national revolution, but, significantly, he gave priority to the moral and mental revolutions over the social and national ones. This is why war literature so often described the crack in conventions and cultural stereotypes as psychological processes in the minds of literary heroes. According to Juliusz Kleiner, the war changed the face of the world through a spiritual and intellectual change of the individual (“O twórczej” 94). The literary critics charged war literature with the mission of describing and reflecting these psychological transformations in the individual and collective consciousness. The reviewers judged authors by their ability to create a hero that underwent such a transformation.

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This is Emil Breiter’s view of Bandrowski’s Łuk, Karol Irzykowski’s of Nałkowska’s Hrabia Emil, and Jan Lorentowicz’s of Polska piesń´ wojenna, a poetry anthology for the Polish army formed by Józef Piłsudski within an Austrian company. It is from this perspective that Eustachy Czekalski valued so highly Rok 1794 (1794), a trilogy by the future Nobel prizewinner, Władysław Stanisław Reymont, published 1913–18. Wartime criticism treated the experience of the breakthrough as a thematic postulate and a call to bring it about. Reviewers expected that literature would provoke mental breakthroughs, transformations of individual and collective consciousnesses. The hero of Nałkowska’s novel dreams of books that would bring about an inner transformation. Hence catharsis became a key aesthetic category, and literary works that effected a catharsis met the requirements of the war reviewers. The desire to bring about mental changes altered literature’s romantic Tyrtesian stance. Tyrteus’s call for soldiers to fight was changed into an appeal to transform national attitudes. This call created a project for the new Polish man, who would be aware of his national tradition but without surrendering to the fascination of Polish myths and stereotypes. The literature on 1914–18 viewed the war as a transitional period, the time between night and sunrise, the turning point in the history of the world and humanity. But the breakthrough in this literature did not reveal a future; it only brought a past to a closure. The moment of inner mental breakthrough crowns the hero’s lifelong search but does not start new activity. The adjective “new,” so readily used by the critics and commentators, never characterized the present. The expression “new epoch” was not used with reference to 1914–1918 but reserved for the time that had yet to come. “New” belonged to the sphere of premonitions and intuition. The heroes of Nałkowska and Z˙eromski die after experiencing an inner transformation: the breakthrough ends life instead of bringing another one forth. The consciousness of a breakthrough intimates that the existing cultural models are exhausted, but yields no new projects. Polish literature of World War I participated in the overturning of nineteenth-century values but stayed within its culture by means of a negating gesture.

1867/1878/1881 John Neubauer in collaboration with Vladimir Biti, Nikolai Chernokozhev, Gábor Gángó, Albena Hranova, Nenad Ivic´, Ewa Paczoska, Dagmar Roberts, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and Tomas Venclova

Bolesław Prus’s great novel, Lalka, opens not just with exact historical and topographical data but also shows that politics and commerce have different interests, though both are tied into events on a European scale: Early 1878, when the political world was concerned with the treaty of San Stefano, the election of a new Pope, and the chances of a European war, Warsaw businessmen and the intelligentsia who frequented a certain spot in the Krakowskie Przedmiesćie were no less keenly interested in the future of the haberdashery firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski (The Doll 1).

The shattered political hopes of the 1863 uprising, which could only be hinted at in the novel, led to a strengthening of commercial and industrial interests in Poland. Wokulski, the hero of the novel, made a fortune in the just concluded Russian-Turkish war by working together with a Russian businessman whom he befriended during his Siberian exile after the uprising of 1863. The freedom fighter against Russia now prospers by means of his Russian connections. Wokulski’s financial bonanza in Bulgaria shows that Poland, though in the North, is tied via Russia to the Balkan conflict. But whose interests are actually served — apart from those of the haberdashery firm? Wokulski believes that his business dealings with the hegemonic suppressor, Russia, will ultimately help alleviating poverty in Poland, but his economic interests clash with his country’s political ones, though they may help the national aspirations of the Serbian and Bulgarian fellow-Slavs — if, indeed, he sold arms against and not for the Turks. Prus’s thick “baggy monster” of a novel (serialized in 1887 and published as a book in 1890) follows the now prosperous Wokulski as he hopelessly woos a beautiful young aristocratic woman and her indolent aristocratic circles. Tragically, he is not only a shrewd and sober businessman who fights Polish Romanticism but also a hopelessly Romantic Don Quixote. Though Wokulski’s world is uniquely Polish, it reflects problems that all of East-Central Europe experienced. If 1848 was an explosion “from below” after a long period of gradual national awakening and reform, the cluster of dates 1867/1878/1881 marks political compromises and Realpolitik made “from above.” If the events of 1848 were to an extraordinary degree led by Romantic poets and writers, the new cluster of dates mark (with the exception of Bulgaria and, partially, Romania) the retreat of literature and Romanticism from the political arena, the renewed power of politicians, and the emergence of industrial and commercial powers. We link these changes not to a single year but a cluster of dates, each relevant for a different area of East-Central Europe. 1867, the date of the Compromise that gave rise to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and 1878, the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, were the crucial dates for the people in the orbit of Austrian power. 1881 was important for the Balkans; 1863 could have been added for the Polish uprising, but its spirit was closer to the revolutions of 1848 than to the treaties we chose as our node this time.

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This temporal dispersion of the historical focus is accompanied in the following pages by a certain diffusion of literary subjects. Compared to 1918 and 1945 (or the upcoming node of 1848) there is relatively little literary material available on the politics of the day. The diplomatic negotiations and treaties involved, for all their impact on the countries of EastCentral Europe, only a small part of the population, certainly very few writers. They also lacked human interest and drama. The great exception in this respect was Bulgaria, for which these years represented the defining moment in the national awakening and striving for independence, and, equally important, in which writers were, for a moment, in the forefront of political and military life. For these and other reasons we have taken a broader view of literature in this Section, including not only literature directly related to the political events. Instead of an all too narrow thematic limitation, we chose, for this constellation, a broader approach that brings together close to twenty years of national literary histories.

I. The political events Within the Austrian Empire, absolutism reigned for about ten years after the suppression of the 1848 uprisings and the Hungarian war of independence in 1849. The Hungarians were crushed; the Slavic and Romanian peoples in the Hungarian territory were disappointed that Austria did not reward them for their moral and even military support of it in 1848–49. Austro-Slavism weakened and the various nations were even willing, for a moment, to cooperate against Austria. The exiled Kossuth prepared and made public in 1862 a visionary but unrealistic and ultimately limited proposal for a Danube confederation (Kann 2: 108–14). Bulgaria and Romania between Russia and the Ottoman Empire Emigrant formations in Bucharest and Odessa enrolled, organized, and equipped Bulgarian volunteers to join the Russians in the Crimean war of 1854–56 against Turkish Empire, but the uprising in the summer of 1856 was unsuccessful. Russia lost the war because Great Britain and France supported Turkey, and the Treaty of Paris (1856) imposed restrictions on Russian foreign policy. The hegemonic powers bypassed the question of Bulgaria’s independence. But Turkey released at the beginning of 1856 a state act known as the Khatikhumayun, which continued its reform course and reaffirmed that all ethnic and religious groups living in the Empire had equal rights and opportunities. Citing the Khatikhumayun, the Bulgarians claimed a Church of their own that would be independent of the Greek Patriarchy in Constantinople, and their struggle ended successfully in 1872 with the foundation of the Bulgarian Exarchate. During this extended religious and political struggle Constantinople’s large Bulgarian colony became self-conscious of its ethnic ties. Economic consolidation, political projects, educational initiatives, Bulgarian periodicals in Constantinople, and commitment to publish books in Bulgarian turned the Sultan’s capital into one of the most important centers of Bulgarian cultural and spiritual life.

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North of the Danube, Walachia and Moldova were more successful in taking advantage of a weakened Turkey and Austria, electing as head of both principalities a former member of the 1848 revolutionary committee in Moldova, Colonel Alexandru Ioan Cuza (January 5 and 24, 1859), de facto unifying the two principalities into a new state, Romania, though the unification was recognized internationally only in 1861. One of the first political acts of Prince Cuza was to meet with the representatives of the Hungarian revolutionary emigration to discuss the possibility of a confederation between Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, against Austrian and Turkish hegemony. The confederation was never achieved, but the unification of the Romanian principalities prompted a rapid economic and cultural modernization of the country. It also led to the emergence of the first Romanian “authors” in the modern sense: poet Mihai Eminescu, storyteller Ion Creanga˘, playwright Ion Luca Caragiale, novelists Ioan Slavici and Duiliu Zamfirescu. They revolutionized not only the three traditional genres, but also journalism and political writing (see the article on the Romanian novel in Part II). The political events, especially the 1877–78 War of Independence from the Turks, were featured directly in some of the new literature: Eminescu’s 1877 articles published in the newspaper Timpul (Time), Vasile Alecsandri’s collection of poems, Ostas¸ii nos¸tri (Our Soldiers; 1878), Caragiale’s psychological short story “În vreme de ra˘zboi” (In Time of War; 1894), and Gheorghe Bra˘escu’s novel Mos¸ Belea (Old Man Belea; 1927), which we also discuss the context of WWI (p. 179). Ion Creanga˘, on the other hand, wrote in 1859 the first tales about the union of the principalities of Moldova and Walachia: “Mos¸ Ion Roata˘ s¸i Unirea” (Goodman Ion Roata˘ and the Union; 1885) and “Mos¸ Ion Roata˘ s¸i Cuza Voda˘” (Goodman Ion Roata˘ and Prince Cuza; 1887), which use the wise and comic perspective of a simple peasant. The 1863 uprising and its aftermath in Poland and Lithuania In the northern part of East-Central Europe, Russia was no agent of liberation but rather the great suppressor, especially after the defeat of the Polish 1863 January uprising in the Russiandominated “Kingdom of Poland.” The defeat of the 1863 January Uprising was a trauma that writers came to describe (due to censorship only in letters or other private documents) as an Apocalypse. In the territories annexed by Russia, Poles experienced the cruelty of the Russian soldiers, internal strife between political “whites” and “reds,” and class conflicts. Czarist enfranchisement of the peasants in the Russian partition dimmed the hopes of the insurgents, for the Polish peasants came to see the Uprising as the “lords’ war,” and thus a matter for the nobility only. The indifference, even hostility of peasants towards the insurgents became a frequent theme in finde-siècle Polish literature. The repressions following the January Uprising hit first of all the nobility, which was the standard-bearer of Polish national and cultural values then. The manor played an important role in the cohesion of the nation. After 1864 many noblemen lost their properties and had to live and work in the big cities. These “unhorsed people” became frequent subjects of the positivist writers. Since the livelihood of those who kept properties also became unstable, especially in the territories attached to Russia, the nobility lost its leading role in Polish culture. A new class, an

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intelligentsia coming from the “unhorsed people” was to be the motor of the social transformations envisioned by the Positivists. The defeat of the January Uprising brought to an end the rebellious Romantic period and for many years extinguished Polish dreams about independence. But it affected the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German partitions differently. For inhabitants of the “Kingdom of Poland” and of the Polish territories annexed to Russia this was the beginning of a hard life in “a house of slavery,” today often called the “After-January Night” in Polish history (Borejsza). Polish inhabitants of the Russian partition became second-class citizens; in the Kingdom of Poland the remnants of autonomy were liquidated, and even a new official name, Vistula land (Privislansky Kraj), was introduced. Poles were not allowed to work in the government; Russian became compulsory in all schools, depriving thus the Poles of education in their native tongue. Warsaw’s famous Main School (Szkoła Główna) was closed down in 1866; a Czarist Warsaw University was founded a few years later, but Polish professors were not allowed to teach there. Since all Polish and foreign publications were heavily censored, Polish writers had to take recourse to allusions and allegories. In the German partition, Catholic Polish culture suffered under Bismarck’s policies. The social malaise continued through the 1860s, producing a sense of hopelessness, but new projects were also forged to move away from political Romanticism. Once hopes for an armed victory against Russia were shattered, Positivism became popular among journalists, artists, and merchants, for it advocated building a national future by abandoning Romantic fantasies about political freedom. At the end of sixties, these ideas were promoted by a group of conservatives from Kraków/Krakau in the Austro-Hungarian partition, who adopted the name of “Stanćzyk,” a clever royal jester who became their symbol of political wisdom. The group capitalized on political changes in Galicia. Forced by the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 to abandon the idea of a homogeneous Empire, the Habsburgs tried to win the loyalty of their Polish subjects by granting them regional autonomy. In Galicia, Polish schools, publishing houses, and cultural institutions were permitted, including the re-Polonized Universities at Cracow and Lwów, and the Polish Academy of Learning (1872). They became magnets for Poles in the other partitions. In Lithuania, the defeat of the 1863 uprising also led to an intensified Russification. The Polish cultural life in Wilno/Vilnius was severely restricted. With the death of Władysław Kondratowicz-Syrokomla in 1862, and the departure of Adam Kirkor for St. Petersburg in 1866, no Polish writer of note remained in the city. Polish theatrical and musical life virtually ceased; the Polish theater was replaced by a Russian one. The Wilno/Vilna Public Library (with a museum) was considered to be the third largest in the Russian Empire. Only Russian newspapers and journals were allowed to appear. In 1860, Samuel Fuenn started to publish in Wilno the Hebrew weekly Ha-Karmel, which became a monthly in 1870 and survived until 1880. The defeat of the uprising contributed to the emergence of a Lithuanian-speaking intelligentsia that no longer cherished hopes of resurrecting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and frequently took an anti-Polish stance. In 1865, the Czarist government forbade the Latin script in an attempt to switch Lithuanian publications to Cyrillic, but the attempt failed and the ban was lifted in 1904. The first periodical in Lithuanian, Aušra (in Latin script), was edited by the physician Jonas Basanavicˇius. Published from 1883 onward in Tilsit (then Germany), it was

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smuggled from there into the country, at great risks, by a network of people. Lithuanian authors of the period included Motiejus Valancˇius (bishop of Samogitia) and Antanas Baranauskas (bishop of Sejny/Seinai). The Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867 The constitutional settlement between Austria and Hungary was a decisive moment in Hungary’s history that determined, in a favorable manner, the development of its industry and civilization. The layout and highlight of its biggest cities, above all Budapest and Szeged, as well as Hungarian music, dramatic art, or even gastronomy preserve the marks of this Dualistic Period of 1867–1918. But as a political construction, the Austro-Hungarian reconciliation remains a key issue in debates on Hungarian history. Did Hungary’s political elite have no other choice but the cordial agreement of 1867? Was Lajos Kossuth, the intransigent opponent of the Compromise, politically clairvoyant when he prophesied that “Hungary, having tied its fate to that of the German nation and the Habsburgs, would go down with them” (Deak 349)? The argument that 1867 should be considered as a purely political decision that promoted the interest of the AustroHungarian ruling classes at the expense of the other peoples of the Empire, is countered time and again with the response that 1867 should rather be seen as the final outcome of realistic bargaining processes, yielding for all concerned as much as was possible under the circumstances. Was the suppression of the other nationalities a priori included in the Compromise, or was rather 1875 the point at which the “Magyar line” hardened (Sugar 717)? The Compromise of 1867 proposed a constitutional solution for the normalization of Hungary’s relations with the House of Habsburg, and, indirectly, with the Western parts of the Empire. Constitutional anomalies had hindered favorable developments in the Danube Region since 1849. When the Austrian-Russian forces suppressed the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848–49, the Land of the Magyars was treated as an occupied territory and administered by the imperial bureaucracy with absolutist measures. But the 1850s brought considerable changes. The Hungarians, living in the vicinity of the two rising powers of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, Prussia and Russia, were reminded of their precarious geopolitical situation and learned to prize the safety of belonging to a more powerful state. And the Viennese Court, suffering from diminished power in the new configuration, had no other choice but to show strength by holding on to East-Central Europe. The Era of New Absolutism ended abruptly when Emperor Franz Joseph dismissed in 1859 the chief of the Home Administration, Minister of Interior Alexander Bach. The Imperial Court issued subsequently two blueprints: the so-called October Diploma in 1860, drafted as the frame of a future constitutional system, declared the Emperor’s willingness to share the legislative power with the Reichsrat and the parliaments of the provinces; the February 27, 1861 Patent modified this proposal by extending the jurisdiction of the supranational Reichsrat. The Czech leader Palacký held two speeches in the Reichsrat but resigned from it on September 30, 1861. The Bohemian delegates marched out of it in 1863 and stayed away until 1879. Aiming at the ratification of the Diploma and the Patent, Franz Joseph convened the Hungarian Parliament in 1861. But the land-owning nobility that got elected to the Lower House consisted mostly of members that distinguished themselves in the Hungarian national movements during the Reform

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Period or in the Revolution and the War of Independence. The Parliament rejected the proposals unanimously and was dissolved in the same year by the Emperor, who then reintroduced an absolutist administration. Other nationalities also started to stir. In February 1861 Jozef Miloslav Hurban sent to the Home Ministry a memorandum, requesting that Slovakia be considered a separate region with a government of its own within the Empire. On June 6–7, 1861, a meeting in Turcˇiansky Svätý Martin (the Slovak national center by the 1870s) adopted the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation, demanding that Slovakia be recognized as a nation with a territory of its own, with Slovak as its administrative language. The Memorandum also sought to establish a Law School in Slovakia, a Department of Slovak Language and Literature at Pest University, and the right to establish literary and cultural associations. Slovak loyalties were split, however, on the question whether the Memorandum should be addressed to the powers in Pest or Vienna. It was finally sent to the Hungarian Parliament, where it was initially well received by József Eötvös and Kálmán Tisza. But the Parliament was soon dissolved and the Memorandum was then presented to the Emperor, who promised to consider it. The Hungarians rejected the constitution proposed by Vienna mainly because it insisted on the political Doctrine of Forfeiture (Verwirkungstheorie), which would have subjected Hungary to the administration of Vienna’s hereditary provinces. The Hungarian elite insisted on the country’s historic rights, and regarded the Pragmatic Sanction, a bilateral treaty from 1723, as the guiding principle of a new covenant. Furthermore, Hungarian experts of constitutional law were inclined to give the Pragmatic Sanction the radical interpretation that Hungary entered contractual relations only with the house of the Habsburgs and not with the Western parts of the Austrian realm. In this view, the Pragmatic Sanction acknowledged no more and no less than the right of the dynasty to succeed to the throne of the Lands of St. Stephen’s Crown. Although Hungary’s fate was bound through the person of the ruler to those of the hereditary provinces, the Pragmatic Sanction preserved for the nation the right to its own legislative assembly and farreaching administrative autonomy. Between 1865 and 1867 Hungary’s policy successively moved from the demand of such a personal union — enacted already in the April Laws of 1848 — toward a less radical solution, as formulated ultimately in Act XII of the 1867 Compromise. The suicide of Count László Teleki in 1861, the leader of the Resolution Party that did not recognize Franz Joseph as ruler of Hungary, considerably increased the Hungarian elite’s inclination to concessions. Negotiations with the Viennese Court were led by the head of the Address Party, Ferenc Deák, a distinguished opposition figure of the Reform Period’s Diets, whose reputation as Hungary’s intellectually most circumspect and unimpeachable statesman was further enhanced by his participation in Count Lajos Batthyány’s Government of 1848 as Minister of Justice. Deák withdrew from politics after 1849 and rejected renewed requests by the Austrian Government to accept political posts. He became the most respected figure in Hungarian public life when he moved to Pest from his native Zala County in 1854, and he announced a program of nation-wide passive resistance against the New Absolutism in the 1850s. Deák published in 1865 his Adalék a magyar közjoghoz (A Contribution to Hungarian Constitutional Law) and his Húsvéti cikk (Easter Article) “in order to inform Hungarian public opinion about the outcomes of secret compromise negotiations” (András Molnár 36); he waited

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for a favorable moment to achieve the Austro-Hungarian reconciliation. The opportunity presented itself when Austria’s defeat in the Prussian-Austrian War of 1866 further weakened its European position. Having lost her chance to lead a unified Germany, Austria had to accept the role of a relatively powerful multinational state in East-Central Europe. Franz Joseph’s “flexible conservatism” (Hanák 22) led to the appointment of Count Gyula Andrássy as Prime Minister on February 17, 1867. Four months later, the Emperor was crowned King of Hungary as an “outward and visible sign of reconciliation between ruler and ruled” (May 31). His consort, the beautiful and oversensitive Elisabeth, secret and devoted supporter of Andrássy’s political aspirations, was crowned Queen of Hungary. The constitutional law for AustriaHungary was followed by others for Romania (1866) and Serbia (1869). What exactly did the Compromise entail? Act XII of 1867 specified that Hungary had to carry a third of the Dual Monarchy’s financial burden. Common ministries had to relate to delegations elected by the two Parliaments. Decisive steps in foreign affairs required a consensus of the legislative bodies; military affairs of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (as it was called since 1868) remained, however, under Franz Joseph’s personal control. Hungary’s actual dependence on the Western parts of the Empire went far beyond common political affairs: the “economic compromise,” re-negotiated and renewed decade by decade, resulted in a common commerce, customs policy, and banking as well. Ferenc Deák, “the Sage of the Fatherland,” responsible for preparing the final draft of the Compromise Act, accepted no function in the new Government and rejected honors and decorations. Contrary to some conservative historians, he never regarded his achievement as a fulfillment of the national struggle in 1848–49 or of Hungary’s nineteenth-century political aspirations. The agreement of 1867 meant for Deák what its very name suggested — a compromise determined by the historical constellation. It returned to Hungary the unity and territorial integrity it lost in the sixteenth century due to the Turkish wars, and it brought her “a degree of autonomy unprecedented since 1526” (Kann and David 351). But the AustroHungarian Compromise gave no political rights to the non-Magyar nationalities living in the Dual Monarchy. One of the first measures adopted by the legislative body of the newborn constitutional Hungary was the Nationality Act XLIV of 1868 and the Elementary Education Act XXXVIII of 1868. The Law on Nationalities adopted Deák’s conception that the Magyars were the only “political nation” in Hungary; non-Magyar nationalities were given autonomy in religious and educational matters only. The law “assured an extensive use of the native language by individual citizens in every forum of public life” (Katus 152), but “did not have provisions for territorial autonomy or collective political rights” (157). Baron József Eötvös, Minister of Education in the Andrássy-Government, tried his best to enforce the law, but the Hungarian political elite pursued an aggressive policy of Magyarization in the last decades of the nineteenth century, especially in the period of 1875–90, when Kálmán Tisza was prime minister. Strongest resistance to a Dual-Monarchy came from the Czechs. Palacký, still promoting his idea of Austro-Slavism, published in 1865 a blistering attack on the coming Dual-Monarchy: If Austria should not grant equality to all of its people, if the Slavs are regarded as an inferior race, then “nature will defend its rights” and conflicts will arise, whose end and consequences nobody can predict. The day that Dualism [of Austria-Hungary] is proclaimed will, by an irresistible law of nature, also be the birth of pan-Slavism in its least desirable form […]. We

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In 1865 widespread protests against the Viennese plans forced the resignation of Prime Minister Anton von Schmerling; his successor, Count Richard Belcredi, leaned towards a broader federalism that would have involved crowning the Emperor also as King of Bohemia. After the 1866 defeat, Franz-Joseph appointed Count Beust as Foreign Minister; the new elections in Bohemia and Moravia led to a Czech majority. For a moment it seemed that the new central Parliament would be federalist, but the Germans and the Hungarians protested and the events took another turn. The Diets of Bohemia and Moravia were dissolved after the Compromise of 1867, leading to pro-Slav demonstration in Prague, and to the Czech Declaration of the Right of State (1867). Palacký signed the Declaration and demonstratively departed then, with other Czech leaders, to visit the 1867 Slavic Ethnographic Exposition in Moscow, where he was received by Czar Alexander II. Svatopluk Cˇech and Josef Václav Sládek started in Prague the new patriotic journal Ruch (Rumor). At the laying of the cornerstone for the Prague National Theater in 1868, Palacký affirmed his conviction that the Czechs people would live on: not even the gates of hell could prevail against the spirit of civilization and true patriotism. In 1870–71 the Czechs started negotiations with Vienna. The Emperor reaffirmed his good intentions in the declaration of September 12, 1871 and an agreement seemed in the offing, but German and Hungarian protests prevailed once more. The Slovak strategy from 1881 to the mid-1890s, was political passivity and refusal to participate in the parliamentary elections of the AustroHungarian Empire. The Croat-Hungarian settlement of 1871 gave Croatia a special, but controversial status. From a Hungarian perspective, it granted a wide political and administrative autonomy to the Croats within the Kingdom of Hungary. This gave the Croat political elite a relatively privileged situation, but from a broader Croatian perspective the settlement made Croatia heavily dependent on Hungary. Croatia’s leader in these years became Ivan Mažuranic´, one of the few Romantic poets who continued to fulfill a political role after 1848 — albeit at the cost of abandoning poetry. Born in a peasant family, Mažuranic´ got an excellent education in Fiume/Rijeka, Szombathely, Zagreb and Pest. He was an active member of the Illyrian movement in Croatia, wrote patriotic poetry and contributed to the Slavenski Jug (Slavic South) and other newspapers. As discussed further in our Section on 1848, he wrote the verse epic Smrt Smail-age Cˇengicá (Death of Smail-Aga Cˇengic´), a patriotic song on the defeat of a local Ottoman ruler. Mažuranic´ was active in the definition and codification of the South-Slavic language, and he published in 1848 the Hèrvati Madjarom, a pamphlet in both Croatian and Hungarian that addressed the Hungarians on the problems and possibilities of Croatian-Hungarian coexistence. He participated in the events as a moderate revolutionary among the Croat liberal democrats who unsuccessfully sought recognition from the Viennese court (he characterized his stay in Vienna as tribulations of a drunken hen). Mažuranic´’s career was in a sense the reverse of Lord Byron’s: the Croat Romantic poet turned into a shrewd civil servant, not into a revolutionary; this can be read as an emblem of nineteenth-century Croatian history. In 1849 he became a high-ranking civil servant who

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collaborated with the liberal Austrian minister von Schmerling and drafted the bills initiating the transformation of the feudal judicial system. In 1854 he was appointed Attorney General of Croatia, in 1860 its Chancellor. In the latter capacity he achieved the unification of Dalmatia and Istria with Croatia, but he resigned his post when he lost the elections in 1865. As a Slavophil, a liberal democrat, a federalist and a legitimist, and an exponent of the political middle course, he was savagely criticized both by the Croat and Hungarian nationalists, and deeply distrusted by the Austrian Court. Nevertheless, he accepted his appointment as Governor-General (banus) of Croatia in 1873, for he thought that a political compromise was necessary. His appointment came at a delicate political moment, which seemed to replay the conflicts of 1848: fierce Croatian and Hungarian nationalism; repeated demands for a home-rule, if not an outright separation from the Empire; and imperialist aspirations of Hungary over Croatia in terms of Germanization and Magyarization. The achievements of Mažuranic´’s governorship were impressive. He reformed the educational, judicial, and administrative systems, introduced compulsory elementary education, opened the university, founded the National Council for Health and Culture, declared freedom of speech, separated the political from the judicial administration, and, finally, abolished the last remnants of serfdom. Croatia’s social and cultural life achieved an unprecedented high level during his governorship. Modernization, fierce nationalism, the cohabitation of diverse ethnic elements in Croatia, the uncertain status of the national borders, the multiple and contradictory relations with the centers of power — most of these problems that he tried to solve continued to plague even the independent Croatia state that came about in 1990. Yet, despite several political setbacks and Austrian legitimism (he resigned his governorship in 1880, when the Hungarian government opposed the unification of the Cordon militaire with the rest of Croatia), and despite shortcomings in his achievements, Mažuranic´ was a towering cultural and political figure of Croatia in the nineteenth century. Its Governor-General during 1883–1903 became the repressive Hungarian Károly Khuen-Héderváry. Mažuranic´ exemplifies two directions in the nineteenth-century modernization of Croatia: in politics, his Governorship of Croatia represented a final touch in the institutional transformation known as “the modernization from without” — i.e., mostly dictated by the Viennese power centers and opposed by the remnants of feudal society; in culture, his literary opus, especially The Death of Smail-Aga Cˇengic´ marks a final point of the rattrapage of the contemporary literary trends in the East-Central Europe. The Berlin Congress of 1878 and the Austro-German-Russian alliance of 1881 Once Britain and Austria forced Russia to disgorge the gains she had made in the war against Turkey, the Berlin Congress went ahead to set up new boundaries and states in the Balkans. Bismarck negotiated an Austro-German alliance in 1879, merging this into an AustroGerman-Russian one in 1881. A new European balance of power was thereby achieved — albeit temporarily. The momentous social, literary, and cultural trends of 1868–78, became formative forces in Bulgaria’s later life. All the major national, political, and cultural projects were started in the 1860s. A Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee in exile, headed by Lyuben Karavelov,

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was founded in 1869 in Bucharest to prepare a revolution against Turkish domination. Vassil Levski, who established secret revolutionary societies in the Bulgarian lands until he was captured and hanged in 1873, was associated with it and became a great national mythic figure. The Bulgarian Literary Society (renamed Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1911), headed by Marin Drinov, was also founded in 1869 in Bra˘ila, Romania, bringing to a climax the project of the Bulgarian National Revival. The “church question” was settled in 1870 with the Sultan’s “Firman,” which authorized a Bulgarian Exarchate. This church, independent of the Greek Patriarchy, was established in 1872 (see p. 242). Two key events took place in Bulgaria during the late 1870s. In 1876 the April Uprising broke out in Koprivshtitsa; after ten days it ended with the defeat of Botev’s detachment in the Vratsa part of the Balkan Range. In 1877–78 the Russo-Turkish War was fought out, leading to Bulgaria’s (and Romania’s) independence. The two events had curiously different reverberations. The April Uprising, full of glory and trauma, became the key topos in Bulgarian literature after the Liberation, while the Russo-Turkish War became glory and trauma in Bulgaria’s subsequent political existence. The San Stefano Peace Treaty of March 3, 1878 drew the map of a great Bulgarian territorial utopia (Figure 1), and the day was declared a national holiday. But the celebration became a wishful traumatic vision, for the Berlin Treaty, just a few months later, drew a very different map of the national territories (Figure 2).

II. The literary dimensions The Compromise of 1867 initiated swift changes not only in Hungary’s economy and society but also in its cultural life. With the unshackling of the constraints that had been imposed by the absolutist government, capitalist enterprise gave a massive impetus to the pace of urbanization. The bourgeoisie expanded rapidly as the processes of assimilation of ethnic Germans into its upper stratum and, somewhat later, the rise of the Jewish population to an increasingly prominent role continued apace. Yet with the hindsight of what was to come it would be wrong to view the results of 1967 as entirely felicitous, certainly not in their immediate impact on literature. Contrary to 1848–49, literature and politics no longer moved synchronously. While the Revolution and its heroes became the subject of literature, neither the Compromise, nor its agents did. The discontinuity seemed to signify a collective disorientation, recognized already in 1980 by the philosopher Bernát Alexander: “The great concern of safeguarding the nation’s very existence having been lifted from our shoulders, the old tie that linked the public to literature became looser: neither the public, nor literature could find their place immediately” (22). One disillusioned camp of writers crossed over into opposition. János Asbóth put forward his own ideas on an alternative approach in Magyar conservativ politika (Hungarian Conservative Politics; 1875), and he presented a portrait of spiritual decline, loss of purpose, inner discord and skepticism, along with a critique of Positivism and superficial Liberalism, in his confessional novel Álmok álmodója (Dreamer of Dreams; 1878). László Arany, son of the great poet János Arany, expressed a similar sense of disillusionment in his verse novel, A délibábok ho˝se (The Hero of Mirages; 1873).

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Figure 2.

The latent hostility between the supporters and the critics of the ruling political régime came into the open with Zsolt Beöthy’s six-hundred-page A tragikum (The Tragic; 1885), which asserted that the tragic hero commits a crime and tragedy postulates a restoration of the moral world-order. Jeno˝ Péterfy rejected this sort of moralizing concept in his own essays A tragikum (1885), A tragédiáról (On Tragedy; 1887), and Költo˝i igazságszolgáltatás a tragédiában (Poetic Justice in Tragedy; 1891). Jeno˝ Rákosi was likewise sharply critical of Beöthy’s interpretation, though he later became a conservative jingoist. At this stage he was still professing liberal bourgeois views. His two-hundred-page A tragikum (1886) anticipated existentialism in adducing an ontological interpretation which saw the tragic as the quality that defined human existence. Posterity can hardly avoid the conclusion that many people at the end of the nineteenth century must have had warped impressions of the achievements of the preceding generations. Even the view of János Arany’s oeuvre that lived on in most people’s mind was somewhat lopsided. In the last years of his life, after several years of silence, Arany had enjoyed a fresh burst of creativity to produce lyric poems of great quality, including such masterpieces as the self-addressed “Mindvégig” (From First to Last) and the multi-voiced ballads “Tengeri-hántás” (Corn-husking) and “Vörös Rébék” (Red Becky), all from 1877 (Arany, Összes 373–74, 368–70, and 403–405). Yet the first book on him, Frigyes Riedl’s highly successful Arany János (1887),

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celebrated him as an epic poet, largely ignoring his lyrics and essays, while representing him personally as an embodiment of “the attributes of the Hungarian race.” Compared to the years of absolutist rule of 1849–1867, the 1880s and ’90s could fairly be said to have abounded in minor writers. The social satires of Lajos Tolnai were overblown in their tendentiousness. Az urak (Gentlemen; 1872), his portrait of the absolutist era, presents capitalism and urbanization as a manifestation of foreign oppression. Noteworthy attempts to bring new approaches to the novel were made by Ödön Iványi with A püspök atyafisága (The Bishop’s Kinfolk; 1889), which opens with an episode taking place in front of the Budapest stock exchange, and by István Toldy with Anatole (1872), which may be regarded as an early Naturalist work in that it portrays character as subject to circumstances and attempts to depict the workings of instincts. A case can be made for the supposition that the upsurge in journalism and the faster pace of life had a hand in relegating the novel to a secondary status behind the short story. That certainly applies to the output of Elek Gozsdu and István Petelei. Gozsdu came from a bourgeois family with ancestors in Macedonia, Armenia, Romania, as well as Hungary, while the Transylvanian Petelei was from a well-off merchant family of Hungarian-Armenian stock. In his short stories Petelei is a self-assured master of internal monologue, of symbolic delineation of Nature, and of the inexpressible. He was surpassed only by Kálmán Mikszáth, who likewise began to earn national renown during the 1880s. The vernacular speech style that was one of Mikszáth’s hallmarks (see Péter Hajdu’s article in vol. 4 of our History) is already evident in the four medium-length stories that make up Tót atyafiak (The Slovak Kinfolk; 1881), but the compression and ballad-like elisions which were more truly characteristic of his art are more apparent in the shorter stories of A jó palócok (The Good People of Palóc; 1882). Mikszáth took quite a long time to find his individual voice; this was the case even more with János Vajda, who was influenced by Determinism, Vitalism, and mechanical Materialism and only began to become a fully accomplished poet during the 1870s. A generation younger than Vajda, Gyula Reviczky, one of Baudelaire’s early translators, set himself against the latterday imitators of what he saw as an outworn nationalist style and urged greater openness to foreign literature. While the era of absolutist rule had been marked by such major writers as the novelist Zsigmond Kemény, the poet János Arany, and the dramatist Imre Madách, author of Az ember tragédiája (composed in 1859–60), the decades following 1867 were a period of breakthrough for mass culture. In 1881 altogether 504 newspaper and periodicals (334 of them Hungarian language) were produced in Hungary, whereas by 1892 that total had risen to 734 (526 of them Hungarian). This proliferation was undoubtedly part of the reason for a lowering of standards; it was also the product of a relative lack of truly original creative talent, which is all the more remarkable if we bear in mind the simultaneous blossoming that was occurring in translated works and the performing arts. There are two ways of looking at Hungary in the late nineteenth century. One is to emphasize the intellectual division that was inextricably bound to the crisis-point that had been reached in politics and society in the Dual Monarchy; the other is to take stock of the extraordinary abundance of initiatives that emerged on the path to creating the country’s modern culture.

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Poland and positivism The Compromise of 1867 strengthened Galicia’s ties to the Empire. Polish writers, journalists, and conservative political activists even wrote a servile letter to the Emperor that year. In 1867 as well, the “Stanćzyk Group” of Cracow published a cycle of short stories and letters entitled Teka Stanćzyka, in which Stanisław Tarnowski and Józef Szujski lampooned the Romantic conception of liberum conspiro and criticized national myths and fictions. They wanted to reveal the mistakes of the Polish tradition, to encourage surrendering unrealistic dreams, and to accept the political status quo. The Cracow conservatives thought that the Galician Poles could develop new projects for social progress and create a modern society, an “organism” within the limits allowed by the Austro-Hungarian government. They believed that only the “natural” political classes of the nobility and aristocracy could carry out such projects, without realizing that these historical classes lost their traditional roles. The conservative program from Cracow remained unpopular, in part because most Poles could not muster loyalty to the foreign occupants. The projects of the Positivist writers in the Kingdom of Poland, also inspired by a philosophy of Organic Work, were more consistent and realistic. The columns of the Przeglød Tygodniowy (Weekly Review), edited by Adam Wis´lick in Warsaw from 1866 onward, encouraged working for a new civilization, but this actually started only in the early seventies, in reaction to events elsewhere in Europe. After the defeat of the January Uprising, many Poles expected revolutions in Italy and France. These dreams evaporated with the French defeat in 1870–71: the capitulation at Sedan strengthened the hands of the German and Russian invaders of Poland. When Prus’s Wokulski visits Paris in the post-Sedan years, his Russian friend feels like a victor in the city and patronizingly shows him the tourist attractions of the Boulevard des Capucines, the Place d’Étoiles, and the Opera. The Parisians accept Wokulski as a rich foreigner; having abandoned their Romantic and revolutionary past they now represent the new Europe of money. The Polish problem was quickly forgotten in the new political order. In the early 1870s, Europe adopted the words that Czar Aleksander I spoke on May 23, 1856 to a Polish delegation that asked him to grant Polish life a chance in the Russian partition: “No dreams, my Poles!” When the Warsaw Positivists began their campaign in 1870–71 they knew they could not expect important and imminent political changes in this new Europe. In Aleksander S´wie˛tochowski’s “My i Wy” (We and They; 1871), Piotr Chmielowski’s “Utylitaryzm w literaturze” (Utilitarianism in Literature; 1871), and other positivist writings, Polish readers could hear Europe ticking while Poland was silent. These young authors encountered no serious opponents except for despair and social passivity; the dead silence about the past and the future thwarted the socially necessary reforms. Thus they urged Poland to start a new life, emphasizing first of all work. The Positivists of the Weekly Review argued that Polish society had many ways of progressing in spite of the political situation. They learned their programmatic optimism from Buckle, Comte, Spencer, and, above all, from John Stuart Mill, whose Liberty became a bestseller in Poland. Heartened also by Darwin’s theory of evolution and the general development of science, the Positivists were convinced that knowledge of facts yielded power and progress was a law of civilization. There was hope for Poland, though its political freedom could only be reached by means of civilizing work, not armed fighting. Planning to build a modern and integrated society

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on genuine foundations, the Positivists launched the slogans “Organic Work” and “Work at the Foundations.” Only the harmonious interaction of all parts could further the growth of the societal organism. The authors of the Weekly Review wanted open public discussions on the topic of a new social life. They wanted to enlist writers to generate much needed discussions on social education, women’s emancipation, and the assimilation of Jews. Since the political situation had forced Polish writers to assume educational roles, they injected utilitarian ideas into literature. For them, the primary role of writers was to participate in the community, to satisfy its needs, and to give a true picture of the contemporary world. Novels became a way of describing social life; art was to illustrate vividly the truths attained by scientists. Characters were supposed to be typical, not individual. Accordingly, the realist roman à thèse became the most popular positivist genre. The young Positivists depicted the life of the new middle class and ordinary people, not of the nobility and the aristocracy; fascinated by the social landscape, they kept their characters and plots simple and schematic. Most important was to convey to the readers the message of how they ought to change their lives. The tendentious novels held no surprises and sought no dramatic effects: they wanted to present an idea. Positivist critics and writers were originally unaware that tendentiousness and Realism clashed, but as they became conscious of the problems the program failed. Indeed, the best novels of this period, for instance Eliza Orzeszkowa’s Martha (1873), offered dramatic histories of living people instead of ideas. In the later 1870s Positivist critics abandoned the slogan of Utilitarianism in favor of a new literary mode often called “full-grown” Realism. The great Realist panoramas of society of the 1880s came about when mature Polish writers changed their style of writing. The Positivist slogans influenced Polish cultural life, especially in the Kingdom of Poland, but by the late 1870s the conservatives accused them of breaking with the national tradition, and others, for example the young socialists, taunted them as loyalists. These accusations, further distorted by the strictly censored press, hurt the Positivists. They encouraged working legally but were no loyalists: their program embodied the formula integrans conspiro, conspiratorial work to achieve social integration. They became irresolute and troubled by the anti-Positivist sentiments. Problems in the Kingdom of Poland led to further disappointments. The economy developed but led to an aggressive and greedy capitalism; the lack of political freedom caused everyday difficulties; the results of Positivist reform were not evident to many. The 1876–78 war in the Balkans, especially the conflict between Turkey and Serbia, divided Polish public opinion: conservatives from Galicia sided with the Austro-Hungarian support for Turkey, while the Positivists sympathized with the independence movement in Serbia. The debates revealed that Polish society was divided and paralyzed. Deep differences among the three partitions led many writers and publicists to conclude that the Positivist project to build an integrated modern Polish social organism was unrealizable. These disappointments are evident in Dumania pesymisty (Meditations of a Pessimist) that Aleksander S´wie˛tochowski started to published 1876 in the Weekly Review. He sided with the Serbs and was accused of favoring the Russians. S´wie˛tochowski put all Positivistic truisms, especially optimistic planning, to a test here. His pessimist claimed that Polish society had no common values and aims. Insisting on solitude he isolated himself from the social “herd,” now

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claiming that civilizing progress was possible only if individuals actively struggled to free themselves from social conventions. Society could be changed only if individuals clashed with their community. S´wie˛tochowski held on to the Positivist cult of science but reminded the scientists of the need to heed the imperfections of human nature: individual progress was the only foundation of civilization. Since the essay deviated from the Positivist platform, the Weekly Review suddenly interrupted its publication and S´wie˛tochowski was forced to publish it in Ljubljana (1877). 1878 to early 1879, a difficult time for the Positivists, is the period when Prus’s Lalka takes place. The novel reveals a society with primitive national myths, customs, and every-day life styles — a world that resists the Positivist aims. People live in isolation, apprehensive of change, oblivious to their past, and without common standards and goals. Wokulski, is succesful but unhappy and melancholic. This former insurgent of the January Uprising has great visions, but he disregards national values by attending to his own fortune and opposing protective trade barriers. His great love for an aristocratic woman remains unrequited, his social ambitions and engagements lead to frustration, and he gets deeply unhappy about his whole civilization. With no hope to realize his visions, his life becomes as empty and futile as those of the others. The following conversation with his idealist right-hand in the haberdashery, Ignazy Rezky, shows how cynical Wokulski’s vision of a new Europe has become: “Well, and what’s the latest news?” asked Ignacy […].”I suppose you mean in politics?” replied Wokulski. “There will be peace.” “Then why is Austria arming?” “At a cost of sixty million gulden? She wants to seize Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Ignacy opened his eyes very wide. “Austria wants to seize…” he echoed. “How so?” “How so?” Wokulski smiled. “Because Turkey cannot prevent her.” “And what about England?” “England will get compensation.” “At Turkey’s expense?” “Of course. The weak always pay the cost of any conflicts between the strong.” “And justice?” exclaimed Ignacy. “Justice lies in the fact that the strong multiply and increase, and the weak perish. Otherwise the world would become a charitable institution, which would indeed be unjust.” (Doll 25)

The Doll diagnosed Polish society and the crisis of the Positivist trust in European civilization. In search of new artistic expressions and new modes of realism, Prus’s generation had stopped writing tendentious books by the end of 1870s and started to produce literary records of the social and spiritual crisis. Prus’s “Szkice warszawskie” (Warsaw Sketches; 1874) and his first novel, Dusze w niewoli (Souls in Slavery; 1877) already portray a disintegrated society. His new approach to reality found its expression in the Kroniki, journalistic-essayistic comments on the events of the day, in which Prus exercised his social observation. Orzeszkowa published in 1878 Meir Ezofowicz, a novel about the problems of the Jewish diaspora in a provincial small town. She followed here the Positivist interest in Jewish assimilation, but her hero was no model character from a roman à thèse. In other novels, for example Z róz˙nych sfer (From Various Circles; 1879), Orzeszkowa showed the world much darker and complicated than it appeared in her earlier tendentious novels. Her subsequent trilogy Widma (Phantoms), consisting of Widma, Zygmunt Ławicz i jego koledzy and Sylwek Cmentarnik, presented painful cases from her times: careers of blackguards, powerless noble idealists, and young people turning against their parents. In Zygmunt Ławicz, the most interesting novel of the

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cycle, Orzeszkowa showed how a lost generation with vague utopian ideas faced life in the territories annexed by Russia. The young heroes of Phantoms abandon the Polish tradition in favor of Socialism. The Polish socialist movement, which emerged at the end of the 1870s, was considered by Orzeszkowa, Prus, S´wie˛tochowski, and others a national treason, because many Polish Socialists were connected with the Russian anarchist organization People’s Will. Orzeszkowa regarded Socialism as an illness that attacked her society while it found itself in political slavery. Her young characters are unable to communicate with the generation that grew up at the January Uprising. The early 1880s brought new disappointments to the Positivists. They were shocked when in 1881 Ignacy Hryniewiecki, a Polish member of the Russian “People’s Will,” hurled a bomb that killed both Czar Alexander II and himself in St. Petersburg. For the Positivists, who believed that no Pole would ever become a regicide, this was further evidence that Polish youth had abandoned the national tradition. The second shock came in the same year with a pogrom of Jews in Warsaw, instigated by the Czarist government though many Poles took part in it. The shocks further dimmed the Positivist optimism: “Darkness surrounds us on every side” (Prus, Kroniki 5: 223). Slovak literature 1867–1881 The previously mentioned Memorandum of the 1861 meeting in Turcˇiansky Sv. Martin was celebrated in Andrej Sládkovicˇ’s allegorical poem Svätomartiniáda and L’udovít Kubáni’s epic poem “Denˇ 6. a 7. júnia roku 1861 v Turcˇianskom Sv. Martine” (June 6 and 7, 1861 in Turcˇiansky Sv. Martin). Slovak literary culture gained in the 1860s important new institutions: the Matica slovenská was established in Turcˇiansky Sv. Martin (1863); Slovak grammar schools were opened in Revúca (1862), Turcˇiansky Sv. Martin (1867), and Kláštor pod Znievom (1869). In the early 1860s, Slovak conservatives and liberals split. In “O vzájomnosti slovanskej” (On Slavic Reciprocity), written in 1862 but published only in 1864 because Sokol had rejected it, Ján Palárik discarded the traditional understanding of Slavic reciprocity as formulated by Ján Kollár. Perceiving it as a political rather than literary matter, he severely criticized Slovaks who looked towards Russia. Jozef Karol Viktorin published in the same issue of Lipa his “Myšlienky inojazycˇných mužov výtecˇných” (Thoughts of Outstanding Foreign Men), which compared Slovak literature with Western texts, quoting Robespierre, Voltaire, and Feuerbach, and accusing Lipa of conservatism. The editors reprimanded him and Hurban wrote three articles against his alleged spreading of Materialism and freethinking. Palárik, Viktorin, Ján Mallý-Dusarov, Koloman Banšell, L’udovít Kubáni, and others responded by founding in 1867 the Nová škola slovenská (Slovak New School) and by starting in 1868 in Pest the Slovenské noviny (Slovak Newspaper). They argued for democracy and federation within Hungary, rejecting the Russian orientation in foreign relations. But the liberals got reconciled with the conservatives when in 1875 the Tisza government closed down the Matica slovenská and the Slovak grammar schools, and the Slovenské noviny had to stop publication. As a protest against these measures and as a manifestation of solidarity with the Czechs, Hurban published the sixth and seventh volumes of the Nitra almanac (1876–77) in the Czech language. In 1879, Hungarian became mandatory in all elementary schools.

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In the 1860s and 70s, prose and drama became the main forms of literary expression. In Valgatha, an unfinished historical novel serialized in 1872, L’udovít Kubáni dealt with the relations between the German, Hungarian, and Slovak population of the Monarchy by turning to fifteenth-century political intrigues and love affairs involving a planned wedding between János Hunyady’s son, Ladislav, and Milica, a daughter of the Slovak knight Valgatha. ZechenterLaskomerský published between 1872 and 1877 the Listy Štefana a Dˇura Pinku (Letters of Stephen and George Pinka), satirical commentaries on the military policy of the Monarchy. Jonáš Záborský wrote, next to comedies and historical tragedies, Dva dni v Chujave (Two Days in Chujava; 1873) and a Faustiáda, written in 1864 but published in its entirely only in 1912. Faustiáda satirized the destruction of order, law, and hierarchy by the revolution, and parodied the culture, religion, morals, and politics of the petit bourgeoisie. Its protagonist fights against both the nonsense of Austrian bureaucracy and the chauvinism of the Hungarians and Slovaks. Palárik’s “Incognito” (1858) showed a rapprochement between true Slovak nationalists and people indifferent to the nation. His essay “Dôležitost’ dramatickej národnej literatúry” (Importance of the National Dramatic Literature; 1860) demanded that dramas reflect topical societal problems. Slovak Messianism, which reflected a disillusionment with the revolution of 1848, peaked in the 1860s with the works of Michal Miloslav Hodža and Samo Bohdan Hrobonˇ. Revolutionary fervor was replaced here with pained brooding, religious pathos, and hope for a divine justice. The oppression of the Slovaks was to be taken in the spirit of the first Christians, spiritual activities would redeem the nation and the universe. Jánošík, the folk hero of Hodža’s large epic poem “Matora” (written in 1857 but published only between 1910 and 1913), is caught between the Hungarian count Rákóczi and the Austrian Emperor and realizes that neither of them really wishes to free the common people. He starts with his friends a struggle to liberate the common people, but most of them get killed and Jánošík seeks refuge in the mountains. Confronted with a choice between the sword and the cross he chooses the latter — thus emblematizing not passivity but a Slavic rejection of violence. While Hodža saw the vices and virtues of the Slovaks and focused on their martyrdom, Hrobonˇ’s somewhat obscure poetry called for a Slovak Messiah to break the millennial spell on the nation, the youngest brother of the Family of Slavdom. The Slovaks were to reach salvation through suffering. Beyond national identity, Hrobonˇ foresaw the return of a mystic unity that had survived, according to him, in the Indo-European grammatical roots. Nature and poetry offered contacts with the universal spirit of divinity. Searching for a future universal language that would reunite mankind, he combined elements of the different Slavic languages into an idiosyncratic language of his own. Koloman Banšell and Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav published in 1871 the almanac Napred (Forward) and in it Banšell’s poem “Just Love me!” (188), which led to a generational conflict. Hurban and Andrej Trúchly-Sytniansky rejected the new idiom as morally unacceptable and formally poor, but the grip of the older norms and concepts slowly weakened. Svetozár HurbanVajanský and Jozef Škultéty published in Orol their “Kritické listy” (Critical Letters; 1880), an aesthetic program called Ideal Realism that demanded that writers should give accurate depictions of reality and provide a moral example to the nation. The oxymoron Ideal Realism reveals a conflict: writers wanted both to serve their nation and its language and depict the world as it really was.

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Bulgarian literature: the decade 1868–78 Two maps and two 1878 visions of Bulgaria (see the illustrations) reverberated throughout the Bulgarian Unification in 1885, the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912, 1913), and World War I. All these national earthquakes occasioned struggles to realize the Bulgarian national ideal of the San Stefano map. While 1878 had direct political consequences, the April Uprising of 1876 against the Turkish Empire left a deep impression in many literary texts written in later decades and under changing artistic conventions. The relevant literature includes Zahari Stoyanov’s biographies of Botev and Levski, and his exceptional three-volume Zapiski po ba˘lgarskite vazstaniya (Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings); Ivan Vazov’s cycle of odes “Epopeya na zabravenite” (Epopee of the Forgotten), published in his collections Gusla and Polia I gori, and his novel Pod igoto (Under the Yoke); Pencho Slaveikov’s unfinished epic poem Ka˘rvava Pesen (Song of Blood), which interpreted the April Uprising through an intricate ideographic network of Modernism, individualism, Nietzscheanism, Romantic Titanism, and skepticism; and Teodor Trayanov’s symbolic lyrical interpretation of it in Pantheon (1934). Though 1878 has been established (arguably for too long by now) as the watershed for a whole cultural period called the Bulgarian National Revival, the cultural processes of the Revival lived on in a literary language modeled after the discourse of the April 1876 Uprising, especially in the literary idiom of Vazov, whose late poetry, written 1912–18, in wartime, repeatedly interpreted history in the ideographic modus of the Revival Period, keeping a nineteenth-century figurative language alive. During the decade 1868–78, the relationship between the historico-political and the literary developments was extremely complicated, though the two field were thought to be linked causally, even in terms of genre; hence the paradoxes and gaps within their common ideographic parameters. In Stoyanov’s Zapiski, for instance, these relationships are defined by an open oxymoron: “Bulgarian literature preceded and became the cause of the Bulgarian [April 1876] Uprising” (1: 203). A few hundred pages further on, while listing the causes for the defeat, Stoyanov notes: “As far as the Bulgarian insurgents are concerned, we have the mitigating circumstance that we have been deprived of our national literature, which has to precede every movement” (3: 748). The astonishing argument that the Uprising was defeated because no literature existed to bring it about informs a variety of critical discourses that try to link the politics of the 1860s and 1870s to literature. Be it as it may, connections between politics and literature were, indeed, established by the literature and political journalism of this decade. In 1868 Hadji Dimitar’s, and Stefan Karadja’s detachment passed across the Bulgarian lands, fought battles against the Turks in North Bulgaria, and was finally routed at Mount Buzludja in the Balkan Mountain Range. Botev published in 1871 “Na proshtavane” (On Parting; Pesni 3–9), originally entitled “On Parting in 1868,” and his masterful poem, “Hadji Dimitar” (Pesni 24–26), in 1873. These poems made 1868 the focal point of a national mythology. Literature did not just follow the developments but also produced enduring character types (the haidut, the revolutionary, the man of letters) that embodied the national cause and even safeguarded the continuity of Bulgarian history by appropriating the national glory that preceded the Ottoman domination from the fourteenth century onward. During this decade, much of Bulgaria’s cultural and social energy poured into the founding of newspapers and magazines, as well as into the establishment of library clubs and other local

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cultural institutions. The periodical press brought public attention to individuals, whereas cultural institutions highlighted specific towns or villages (usually the birthplace of the biggest benefactor) and offered a center for their social life. Library clubs hosted also theatrical performances, meetings, and other social events. Dobri Voinikov and Vasil Drumev wrote the most significant dramatic works during this decade, some of which were staged. Their works abandoned identificational and psychological stereotypes and offered new perspectives on the world. Voinikov authored, next to stage histories, the most significant Revival Period comedy, Krivorazbrana civilizatsiya (Civilization Misunderstood), which portrayed Bulgarian attitudes towards Europe, the prestigious Other, whose strangeness could be threatening to certain notions of “civilization.” Drumev published in 1872 Ivanku, ubietsat na Asenya I (Ivanko, the Assassin of Assen I), one of “the capital works of the future Bulgarian theatre” (Slaveikov, sa˘chineniya 400). History now invaded the stage, adding visual and auditive dimensions to its narrative, displaying to the audience the glorious forefathers for emotional experience and edification. Drumev’s drama did not merely portray national history but explored also the psychological drama in quests for power, which complicated, of course, the historical events and plots. During this decade, Todor Peev worked on, but could not stage, his drama Fudulescu, prokoptsaniyat zet na hadji Stefania (Fudulescu, the Lucky Son-in-Law of Hadji Stefania), which picked up the problem of Voinikov’s “misunderstood civilization” and continued the debate about the national cultural identity. Konstantin Velichkov, in turn, managed in 1874 to publish and stage in Tzarigrad/Istanbul the historical play Nevyanka i Svetoslav (Nevyanka and Svetoslav), and a dramatic rendition of Karamzin’s short novel, Natal’ya, doch’ boyarskaya (Natalia, a Boyar’s Daughter). Velichkov’s play was the last adaptation of foreign cultural experiences. The historical subjects that dominated playwriting were also present in poetry, though the latter was more concerned with the contemporary woes of the Bulgarian struggle for selfidentification. Poetry, published in periodicals or in books, covered increasingly diverse forms of self-expression that often lacked conceptual organization. The literary highlights of the decade were Hristo Botev’s and Stefan Stambolov’s collection of poems Pesni i Stihotvorenia, published in Bucharest in 1875, followed next year by Ivan Vazov’s first collection of poems, Priaporec i gusla (Banner and Rebec). Botev and Vazov, maturing in the early 1870s, laid the foundations for a Bulgarian national classic literature. They developed two main models for cultural identification, each of which had intricate constellations and plenty of internal contradictions: for Botev, the poet was a hero that mythically fused literature with national history, while Vazov considered the poet as a witness, a registrar of history and exponent of its values. Botev’s and Stambolov’s Pesni i Stihotvorenia, filled with romantic and nationalist pathos, was accompanied by a number of other important publications. Nikola Kozlev published in 1868 “Cheren arap i haidut Sider” (Black Arab and Haiduk Sider), which stood somewhere between folklore and literature; Raiko Zhinzifov came out in 1870 with Ka˘rvava koshulya (Blood-Stained Chemise), devoted to the sufferings of the slaves; and Tsani Ginchev published in 1872 Dve topoli ili neozhidana sreshta (Two Poplars or an Unexpected Meeting). 1871 is the date of Hristo Botev’s unfinished poem “Haiduti” (Rebels). Petko Slaveikov’s “Izvorat na Belonogata” (The Spring of the White-Legged Maiden) of 1873, the most significant lyrical poem of these years, strongly

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defended the Bulgarian “self” and urged the preservation of traditional patriarchal values in a changing, threatening, and obscure world by offering a set of archetypal, historical, and folkloric images. The poetry of Petko Slaveikov outlined an evolution in his poetic thinking and marked the creative and ideological crises of the decade. His “Ne pei mi se” (I Do Not Feel Like Singing) and “Zhestokostta Mi Se Slomi” (My Cruelty Was Broken) oscillate between dissociation from and association with the people. As such they are emblems of losing and finding a poetic voice. Writers of prose showed practically no interest in historical subjects. Lyuben Karavelov, the leading figure, published in 1868 in Russia Stranici iz knigi stradanii ba˘lgarskogo plemeni (Pages from the Book About the Sufferings of the Bulgarian Tribe), which included most of the literary, as well as ethnographic, folkloristic, and autobiographical texts he had earlier published in Russian periodicals. He later published their Bulgarian translations in booklet form, or in the newspapers and magazines he edited in Romania: Svoboda (Freedom), Nezavisimost (Independence), and Znanie (Knowledge). In Novi Sad, Karavelov published in 1869 parts of Kriva li e sudbata? (Is Fate to Blame?) in Serbian (complete Bulgarian translation only in 1946). He published in Serbia other prose as well, and he took part in the literary and cultural life of that country. He continued to write short novels, short stories, feuilletons, literary criticism, and political articles -texts that leaned towards documentaries and journalism with a strong political criticism. Iliya Blaskov published in 1870 his second Revival Period short novel Zlochesta Krastinka (Ill-Fated Krastinka).

1848 John Neubauer in collaboration with Mircea Anghelescu, Gábor Gángó, Kees Mercks, Dagmar Roberts and Dinko Župan

Introduction For the territories in Austria’s orbit the revolutionary year of 1848 culminated a long process of national awakening but ultimately ended in a failure and occasioned bitter disappointment. The failure was mainly due to Austria’s and Russia’s brutal interventions, but also to social conflicts and disagreements between the moderates and radicals in each of the territories, as well as clashes between the various national movements. For the Baltic countries and the still Turkish-dominated Bulgaria 1848 was not a pivotal year. For divided Poland, it was part of a long series of armed confrontations with the suppressors of its independence. After the brutal crushing of the 1830 Polish uprising, national renewal could make little headway. The conservative Count Adam Czartoryski headed from 1843 onward a “Monarchist Society of May 3” in the Parisian Hotel Lambert, as a government in exile, seeking Western help to reestablish the rights of the Kingdom of Warsaw. The great Romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Cyprian Norwid, were forced to live abroad, mostly in Paris and Italy (Norwid also had a lonely stay in the US in 1852–54). Mickiewicz and Słowacki tried to participate in the 1848 revolutions — but to little avail. Słowacki returned to Prussian-occupied Poland to help the uprising that was quickly put down. Mickiewicz went to Italy and organized there a Polish legion against Austria. When the revolutions failed, he edited in 1849 the short-lived newspaper La Tribune des Peuples in Paris. At the outbreak of the Crimean War he made another attempt to organize a Legion, this time against Russia, but he died in 1855 of cholera in Constantinople. Among the other exiles, Józef Bem and Henryk Dembin´sky became military leaders in the Hungarian revolution and went into Turkish exile after its defeat. Bem died there, while Dembin´sky, who failed as a military leader in Hungary, spent the last years of his life in Paris. It was there that the Polish painter Henryk Rodakowski made a portrait of him in 1852 (now in the National Museum for Nineteenth Century Polish art in Cracow), which became a great success in the Paris Salon the same year. That portrait in turn inspired Norwid to write the poem, “Na portret generała Dembin´skiego” in 1856 (Wiersze 253–54). Norwid’s even more impressive epitaph for Bem, “Bema pamie˛ci z˙ałobny-rapsod” (To the Memory of Bem, A Funeral Rhapsody; Wiersze 186–87), belongs to his finest poems. Bem’s funeral “takes on features of an old Slavic pre-Christian rite, and this march of primitive tribesmen and women it itself transformed into a march of all humanity over the obstacles of tyranny toward the future” (Miłosz, History 275). Bem also figures in Bołeslaw Prus’s great Polish novel The Doll, which devotes a large portion of a chapter (110–26) to the experiences of a young Pole fighting for Bem and the Hungarians against the Austrians (called “Huns”!). This youthful adventure

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remained the most cherished memory of Ignacy Rzecki, who became a grey sales clerk for the rest of his life. Many Poles moved from the Russian dominated Warsaw (or “Congress”) Kingdom to Austrian controlled Galicia and the free city of Cracow, where ineffectual conspiratorial activities continued until the February 1846 uprising, which the Austrian forces easily quelled. The city was subsequently incorporated into Galicia; its Polish university, which had been a magnet for Polish culture and resistance, had to adopt German as the language of instruction. A subsequent peasant uprising in Galicia is said to have been instigated by the Austrian officials against the Polish landowners. The event is remembered in “Chorał” (Chorale; 1847), which nearly became Poland’s national anthem. In this poem, and the eleven other ones of a cycle, the Galician-Polish poet Kornel Ujejski used the biblical figure of Jeremiah to lament the horrors of the fratricide. But we get a very different image of the same event if we read “Panski Zharty” (The Passing of Serfdom) that the great Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko wrote forty years later (Zibrani tvory 2: 7–116). Ujejski ’s Polish peasants become here Ruthenian serfs who are savagely exploited by Migucki, the Polish lord of the manor, responsible for the death of their village priest. When the Imperial Commissar arrives a year later with the declaration that serfdom has been abolished, Migucki refuses to obey and mistreats him. But the Commissar returns with the Imperial army and terminates serfdom on East Sunday 1848 to the great joy of the Ruthenians: “Yes, Christ is risen! There’s is no doubt / That serfdom’s gone to hell” (Cundy 155). Migucki dies abroad and his estate is sold to a Jewish tavern keeper. From a Ruthenian/ Ukrainian perspective, Vienna was an ally against the local suppressor, the Polish landlord. 1848 saw no significant revolutionary events in the Russian controlled Kingdom of Warsaw, but Poles in the Prussian controlled Grand Duchy of Posen/Posnan´ participated in the Berlin revolution, where on March 20 a triumphant crowd freed Ludwik Mierosławski, the philosopher Karol Libelt, and six other leading conspirators from 1846 who had been tried in August to December 1847 and condemned to death but then just jailed. They joined the newly formed Polish National Committee of Posnan´, which attempted to assume power in the Grand Duchy but failed and had to capitulate to the Prussians on May 5. The related Galician rebellions were also easily crushed by the Austrian army. The Grand Duchy’s delegation to the Frankfurt parliament included only one Pole against eleven Germans. The parliament voted with a great majority to keep Posnan´ in the German Bund; its promises for a limited Polish autonomy were never kept. Meanwhile national demands started to bombard Vienna. The Hungarian parliament, which had been convening in Pozsony/Bratislava since November 1847, voted on March 3 for Lajos Kossuth’s constitutional reforms. On March 9, the Viennese Leseverein petitioned the Emperor to abolish censorship, carry out judicial reform, and establish more representative provincial Diets. On March 11, the German and Czech leaders of Prague drew up a petition to convene a Czech Diet, to grant equality to the languages, abolish serfdom, and grant communal autonomy. On March 15, the Court granted freedom of press, and promised to convene a general Constitutional Assembly in May for drafting a new Constitution. Metternich resigned. On March 17, Emperor Ferdinand accepted the demands of Kossuth’s Hungarian delegation, and appointed a Hungarian government headed by Count Batthyány. The Slovenians addressed a manifesto to the Emperor on April 1, asking for equal rights for the Slovenian language, opportunity for a closer cooperation with other Slavs, and removal of the Slovene territories from the German Bund

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(Kann 1: 299–300). On May 11, a national meeting at Liptovský Mikuláš adopted the Žjadost’i slovenskjeho národa, a slovak petiton to authorize the use of the Slovak language in schools and in government. The Imperial rescript (“April Constitution”) of April 25, addressed to Franz von Pillersdorf, the minister of interior, declared the inviolability of nationality and language for all Austrian people, save Hungary and the Lombard-Venetian kingdom,. But the rescript was never put into practice. The Austrian parliament opened on July 22 with 383 delegates, 190 of them Slavs. Most of the latter adhered to František Palacký’s Austro-Slavism, which wanted to save Austria but turn it into a federation of equals. Hungary asked that its delegation be admitted, but the Czech-led parliament refused, for fear that the government would form a coalition with them, which incensed the Germans, Poles, and radical Czechs. On October 6 a Viennese crowd prevented troops from leaving the city to fight the Hungarians. Upon Palacký’s recommendation (Gedenkblätter 176–80), the parliament moved to Kremsier/Kromeˇrˇíž in Moravia and resumed its work there on November 22; by then Windischgrätz had freed Vienna with Croatian help, and his brother-in-law, Félix Schwarzenberg, was appointed Prime Minister. Palacký and František Rieger managed to work out a constitution for a decentralized Austria by March 1849, but Schwarzenberg dissolved the parliament on March 7. He decreed a constitution drawn up by Franz Stadion, the minister of interior, but this too was abrogated on December 31, 1851. In April 1849, Hungary declared its independence, and in May Adam Czartoryski, László Teleki, and Rieger agreed in Paris on a comprehensive plan to eliminate the existing Habsburg power, to unify Germany and Italy, to establish a loose federation in Hungary (to appease the Romanians) and a strong federation in the remainder of Austria. But Kossuth was unwilling to grant political rights to the Romanians and their language claims were granted only on July 14, a month after the Russian troops had entered Hungary. Under the impact of the Hungarian revolution and other movements in Europe, the Romanians in Walachia established a provisional revolutionary government on June 26 and launched a program of political and cultural reforms, but on September 25 the Turkish troops occupied Bucharest, repressing the movement. An earlier attempt to attain autonomy and democratic reforms in Moldova failed due to political miscalculations and the threat of foreign invasion. Historians widely disagree as to why the revolutions of 1848 failed. Many of them hold, with good reason, that the fault lay with the nobility, which was reluctant to emancipate the serfs and to grant greater political role to the bourgeoisie. Others blame the various ethnic groups and nations for their inability to form a common front against Austria. The social and national issues were hopelessly tangled, and, depending on the particular point of view, the accents could be placed differently. For example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who closely followed the events in the columns of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, erroneously expected an imminent proletarian revolution in France and neatly divided the Europe of 1848 into reactionaries and revolutionaries: “[O]n one side the revolution of the Germans, the Poles, and the Hungarians, on the side of the counter-revolution the rest: all Slavs save the Poles, the Romanians and the Transylvanian Saxons” (Engels, “magyarische” 168). Engels attacked with savage irony those who came to the rescue of Austria, be it the Croatian Baron Jelacˇic´, the Bohemian Palacký, the Slovak L’udovít Štúr, or the Croat Ljudevit Gaj. Above all, he ridiculed Pan-Slavism: “where is a single [Slav] tribe, not excepting the Czechs and the Serbs, that have a national historical

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tradition still living among the people, which goes beyond local strife? […] these scrapings of people [Völkerabfälle] are every time, and remain until their complete annihilation or denationalization, the fanatic carriers of the counter-revolution” (172). Hence Engels also rejected Bakunin’s Appeal to the Slav People by a Russian Patriot, which advocated the overthrow of the Monarchy by the Slavs and the Hungarians and the establishment of a federation of free republics. Of course, Engels would have liked to see the end of the Monarchy, but he thought that the Slavs would not start a revolution: “All Pan-Slavists prefer nationality, i.e., the fantastic, general-Slav nationalism to revolution” (“demokratische” 285). But “democratic Pan-Slavists,” as Engels called them, did exist. The Czech poets and revolutionaries, Josef Václav Fricˇ and Karel Sabina, for instance, came to support Bakunin and barely escaped death. Palacký, on the other hand, rejected Bakunin’s appeal on January 22, 1849 (Gedenkblätter 181–84), for popular unrests endangered his plan to federalize Austria in a peaceful manner. In 1848, and in the events leading up to it, poets and writers played leading roles with words as well as deeds. According to Antal Szerb, on March 15 it seemed for a moment that an unprecedented dictatorship of poets would arise in Budapest (Magyar 305). His remark could be extended to much of East-Central Europe at the time. Attempting to revive that moment one must consider not just literature proper but also a large body of journalism by poets as well as by politicians that powerfully moved the course of events. Indeed, the line between poets and politicians became blurred for a moment (which may be one way to read Szerb’s remark). In retrospect, that moment now seems also a failure of the poetic call, “let the imagination rule” — though the moment survived as a celebrated memory in the various national literary traditions.

1848–49 in Hungary The Revolution and the subsequent War of Independence decisively shaped historical consciousness in modern Hungary. The alternatives that emerged during these critical years — national sovereignty vs. development under foreign power, friendly compromises reached through negotiations vs. violent confrontations — are patterns of thought that reasserted themselves at later historic turning-points, like that of the revolution in 1956. For a better understanding of all that happened in Hungary during 1848–49, we should divide the events into three distinct but interconnecting trajectories. The first one concerns the discussions between the spokesmen of the last Hungarian feudal Diet in 1847–48 and the Viennese politicians around Emperor Ferdinand I, who was also King of Hungary since 1835. These were followed by negotiations on the formation and recognition of an independent and responsible Hungarian Government in 1848. Secondly, we have to delineate the revolutionary mass movement that radical intellectuals organized in Pest on March 15, 1848. Finally we must give an account of the Civil War that commenced in the autumn of 1848, pitting the Hungarian Government’s army against Austrian troops and the insurgents of the non-Magyar nationalities. The Kingdom of Hungary, one of the most powerful states in East-Central Europe during the late Middle Ages, had lost its independence in the sixteenth century due to Turkish expansion and the rise of the House of Habsburg. The Lands of the Hungarian Crown were

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acquired by the Habsburg dynasty, but the Magyar nobility could preserve considerable power in municipal administration and it continued to assert its privileges at the irregularly returning Diets. During the so-called Reform Period, which started in the 1830s, these Diets contributed decisively to the abolishing of feudal institutions and they took the first steps toward democratization and modernization. One of the most important demands of these Diets, to make Hungarian the official language of the Land, was granted in Act II 1844 of the 1843–44 Diet: Hungarian, instead of Latin, became the official language in all branches of administration. In Hungary, as in all of East-Central Europe, cultural nationalism preceded or accompanied the aspirations of political nationalism. György Bessenyei, Ferenc Kazinczy, József Kármán, Ferenc Kölcsey, Mihály Vörösmarty and other writers opened a new era for literature by rendering patriotic themes in original poetic texts written in the vernacular. Hungarian literary institutions were established to function as places of cultural memory. The Hungarian National Museum and National Library opened for the public after a generous gift from Count Ferenc Széchényi in 1802. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences was initiated in 1825 by his son, Count István Széchenyi. Scholarly and literary periodicals were launched one after the other: Urania (1794–95), Tudományos Gyüjtemény (Scholarly Collectanea, 1817–41), Aurora (1822–37), and Athenaeum (1837–43). Lajos Kossuth’s Pesti Hirlap (Pest News), the harbinger of modern political journalism in Hungary, started in January 1841 and continued publication until the end of the Civil War in 1849. Working in these institutions, the pre-March generation undertook the task of transforming and modernizing Hungary. Count István Széchenyi’s epoch-marking studies at the beginning of the Reform Period, Hitel (Credit; 1830), Világ (Light; 1831), and Stádium (Stage; 1833) “put into words the ideas already circulating among many of his contemporaries” (Niederhauser 205). For Széchenyi, credit meant first of all an economic modernization of the ancient law of family entail, a powerful obstacle to credit operations in Hungary, which made “the sale, and even the mortgaging, of farms” virtually impossible (Kosáry, History 192). But “credit” in a wider sense was also trust in Hungary’s better future. Hence Széchenyi concluded: “Many think that Hungary is a thing of the past; I like to believe its greatest achievements lie in the future” (Kosáry, History 193). This plan was complemented by the political program of the centralists. Baron József Eötvös, relying on contributions from his allies, above all from László Szalay and Ágoston Trefort, elaborated in his great study, Reform (1846), a project of modernizing Hungary that principally demanded that the system of feudal counties be abandoned and a responsible government be established. The pace of democratic transformation increased in the first days of March 1848. Having received in Bratislava/Pozsony/Pressburg at the Diet session the news of the French February Revolution, Kossuth, the leader of the liberals, summed up the Hungarian demands in a draft address. He asked on March 3, for “a separate and independent financial board for Hungary,” and he called for changes in Austria, reminding his audience that “the constitutional future of our nation will not be secure, till the King is surrounded by constitutional forms in all the relations of his government” (Headley 64). Some historians hold that this speech was not a systematic exposition of Kossuth’s political views: “Kossuth’s political genius” rose to the occasion and sensed in a flash the relevance “of the centralists’ demand (which he had previously not taken very seriously) for a responsible government for Hungary” (Macartney 155).

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When the Revolution broke out in the imperial capital on March 13, Ferdinand introduced the freedom of the press, allowed the arming of the people, and promised to formulate a Constitution, which the Western part of the Empire did indeed obtain on April 25, 1848. The Viennese Revolution made all further Bratislava discussions about the Hungarians’ claims and demands superfluous: a delegation under the leadership of Kossuth and Palatine Prince Stephan departed for Vienna to enforce the claims and to induce the ruler to appoint a responsible Hungarian government. They returned with good news: on March 17, Ferdinand consented to appoint Count Lajos Batthyány as Prime Minister, and he formed a government from the most prominent liberal figures of pre-March Hungary. Count István Széchenyi became Minister of Communication and of Public Works, Kossuth acquired the portfolio of Finance, Baron Eötvös became minister of Education and Religion, and Ferenc Deák Minister of Justice. The Diet of 1847/1848 thus finished its legislative work in the enthusiastic atmosphere of the European revolutions. The April Laws, charter for a breakthrough towards a modern Hungary, were approved by Ferdinand on April 11, 1848. The literary movements of the 1840s, led by an intellectual group that was more radical than the bourgeoisie and the liberal nobility, played a leading role in the revolutionary events in Pest. Peto˝fi, Mór Jókai, Dániel Irínyi, József Irányi, and many other adherents of this “March Youth” — named after the title of a poem by Peto˝fi — belonged to a table society in Café Pilvax, where the editors of the Pesti Divatlap (Pest Vogue) and representatives of several other literary papers gathered. The older Vörösmarty was their spiritual father. The radical youth of Pilvax’s “Opposition Circle” became increasingly more discontent with the legislative work of the Status et Ordines, and summarized its claims in twelve points, going beyond reform and assuming an “openly revolutionary character” (Deme 17). In József Irinyi’s final formulation: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

We demand the freedom of the press and the abolition of censorship. Responsible government in Buda[sic]Pest. Annual meetings of the parliament in Pest. (sic) Equality before the law in civil and religious matters. A national guard. Equality of taxation. Abolition of the feudal burdens. Jury system on the basis of representation and equality. A national bank. The armed forces should swear allegiance to the constitution; our Hungarian soldiers should not be removed from our soil. 11. Political prisoners of the state should be freed. 12. Union with Transylvania. (Deme 16–17)

Time was ripe for manifesting these demands when the news on the Viennese Revolution arrived in Pest on March 15. A mass demonstration organized by the “March Youth” was able to wring that afternoon some concessions from the Viceroyalty Council, head of the Home Administration in Hungary. Above all, the press was declared free. Indeed, freedom of the press had already been attained the previous morning, when the revolutionary crowd seized a printing-machine and printed the “Twelve Points” and Sándor Peto˝fi’s “Nemzeti dal” (National Song; Összes 2: 283–84).

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During the following months the newspaper Márczius Tizenötödike (March Fifteenth) became the voice of the heroes of that “Great Day,” constituting the opposition to the new Hungarian Government. Although a minority in relative isolation, the “March Youth” filled an important social role in the Hungarian Revolution: it should be considered “the intellectual vanguard of the strata intent on bettering themselves — the petite bourgeoisie in the making” (Kosáry, Press 27). The story of March 15 “became national legend in Hungary; to this day the average Hungarian thinks of the events of this day when he thinks of 1848” (Deme 21). Hungary’s first representative Parliament convened in Pest on July 5, 1848. According to a relatively liberal franchise law, one quarter of the male population over twenty could vote for 377 seats in the House of Representatives. The liberal wing of the land-owning gentry retained its political predominance with an overwhelming majority. Only about 30–35 seats were allotted to the opposition with radical-leftist views. One of the first resolutions strengthened the independent Magyar Honvéd army. In a masterpiece of old Hungarian rhetoric, Kossuth demanded “200,000 soldiers, and the necessary pecuniary grants” (Headley 103). Recruiting began in September. During the summer, the Hungarian Government and legislature found themselves in an awkward situation vis-à-vis the Imperial Court of Vienna, but they were convinced of their firm legitimacy. The situation changed suddenly when an Austrian Ministry Paper was issued on August 27, 1848, declaring that the activities and the very existence of independent Hungarian Ministries of Finance and War were illegitimate. In the autumn of 1848 the political events leading to an armed confrontation between the Hungarian Government and the Austrian Imperial army accelerated. On September 11, Baron Josip Jelacˇic´, Ban of Croatia and a supporter of Viennese policies, crossed the river Drava/Dráva/Drau in Southern Hungary and mounted an offensive in the direction of the capital. Two weeks later, Count Ferenc Lamberg, whom the Emperor had appointed commander-in-chief of the Hungarian armies, was assassinated by a crowd upon his arrival in Pest. Unable to maintain the legal order sanctioned by the King, Prime Minister Batthyány resigned on October 2, and the executive power was transferred to a National Defense Committee. Kossuth, the head of it, became the Land’s supreme leader. On December 2, 1848 Ferdinand abdicated and his nephew, young Francis Joseph I ascended the Imperial throne. The new monarch, whose hands were not bound by the April Laws, immediately initiated operations for the pacification of Hungary. During the winter of 1848–49 these military operations brought considerable successes for the Imperial armies, and the Hungarian Government with the Parliament were forced to move to Debrecen on December 31, 1848. A young and brilliant officer, Artúr Görgei’s promotion to commander-in-chief of the Honvéd army on March 31, 1849 changed the fortunes of the war: the Honvéd reconquered a great part of the Land, and, on May 21, the capital. The Parliament followed by taking a radical step toward independence: it declared on April 14 the Habsburg dynasty dethroned and elected Kossuth Governing President. A new Government was formed on May 2 under Prime Minister Bertalan Szemere. In this critical situation, Emperor Franz Josef I asked for Russian help, Czar Nikolaus agreed to intervene on May 9, and Hungary’s invasion began the same month. The united Austro-Russian armed forces had a strong numerical superiority and won several battles. After

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the decisive defeat of Honvéd army at Timis¸oara/Temesvár on August 9, Kossuth and his Government resigned; Görgei, in the possession of plenipotentiary power, surrendered on August 13 at S¸iria/Világos. Kossuth fled to Turkey with hundreds of army officers. The aborted War of Independence was followed by heavy-handed revenge. On October 6, Count Batthyány and thirteen generals of the Honvéd army were executed, the former in Pest, the latter in Arad. In 1850 Hungary came under the absolutist administration of Alexander Bach, Minister of the Interior, who severely restricted political and civil rights. The south-eastern provinces of Transylvania, the Serb Vojvodina, and the Temes/Banat were separated, while Hungary’s central territory was divided into five districts, “delimited to some extent according to national lines” (Kann and David 347), with seats in Budapest (for the Magyars), Bratislava (for the Slovaks), Košice /Kassa/Kaschau (for the Slovaks and Ruthenians), Oradea /Nagyvárad/ Grosswardein (for the Romanians), and Sopron/Ödenburg (for the Germans). Yet, the achievements of spring 1848 could not be completely revoked: the law on the perpetual liberation of the serfs was, for instance, not annulled. The socage writ of March 2, 1853 declared in the spirit of the April Laws that the former serfs were granted “full ownership and free disposal rights over the socage land they hold” (Orosz 76). But the indemnity that the new absolutist government paid to members of the landowners fell far below what was reasonable. The middle-nobility, short-changed by the serf emancipation, was compelled to choose civil professions but remained the predominant group of fin-de-siècle Hungarian society. Its social prestige and national pride were disproportionally higher than its modest means (Kann 1: 110). A third main stream of events in revolutionary Hungary concerned the nationality issue. As mentioned, the forces of the Hungarian Government were tragically tied down by the ethnic conflicts with non-Magyar nationalities. The Hungarian intelligentsia, even brilliant and devoted liberals like Baron Wesselényi in his Proclamation on the Matter of the Hungarian and Slav Nationalities (1843), were inclined to overestimate the Pan-Slav movement and saw therefore Magyarization, rather than emancipation, as the proper means to maintain peace and order. The non-Magyar nationalities, filled with enthusiasm in the first weeks of the Revolution and united against the Old Order in the spirit of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” soon realized that the Hungarian Government was not ready to satisfy their political claims. The Hungarian elite regarded the new legal independence as a reassertion of the Magyar nation’s historical rights. The other peoples living in Hungary turned to the Imperial Court for redress, and bloody interethnic confrontations ensued. The desperate military situation finally forced the Hungarian House of Representatives in Szeged to grant far-reaching cultural and administrative autonomy to the non-Magyar nationalities on July 28, 1849, declaring the emancipation of Jews and the right to “free development of all nationalities living on the territory of Hungary” (Irányi 1: 357). Although the Hungarian Government “announced it immediately and tried to utilize it both in its European propaganda and in the appeasement process” (Gergely 55), the Nationality Resolution was weakened by the knowledge that the Hungarian liberal leadership “tried to avoid granting even minor concessions” as long as it did not consider the danger to be sufficiently serious (Spira 203). Acts VIII and IX of 1849 spectacularly show that ethnic reconciliation projects tended to be too late in EastCentral Europe.

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The 1848–49 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence raised the crucial political, social, and intellectual questions of nineteenth-century Hungary but could not answer them in a reassuring manner. The Settlement of 1867 and the foundation of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy brought the constitutional conflicts to a rest for half a century. But the Hungarian elite’s insistence on political supremacy and on the historical principle of Hungary’s territorial integrity made a resolution of social conflicts — especially interethnic conflicts — impossible. During the second half of the century, the conflicts of the Magyars with the Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Romanians intensified, contributing ultimately in a decisive way to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918. Hungarian literature confronted the dilemmas of bourgeois society. Lyric poetry above all accompanied the events of 1848–49 with an abundance of martial poetry not seen since the War of Independence at the turn of the seventeenth century (Hermann 339). The poetry of 1848–49 includes a rich variety of genres, ranging from trashy propaganda, through patriotic works by Hungary’s very best poets, from János Arany’s “Nemzeto˝r dal” (National Guardist’s Song; Összes 46–47) to Vörösmarty’s “Harci dal” (Battle Song; 169–71) and Peto˝fi’s revolutionaryrepublican Romanticism.

1848 in Bohemia The decades leading to the revolutionary year of 1848 were characterized in Bohemia by the emergence of two interrelated cultural currents: linguistic renewal and Pan-Slavism. The first was led by Josef Dobrovský, Josef Jungmann, and Josef Šafarˇik, the second by Jan Kollár, who was, like Šafarˇik, Slovak born but writing in Czech. From the mid-1830s onward, František Palacký became the leading figure of the National Renewal (Národní obrození). While the Czech patriots agreed on the emancipation of Czech language and culture, they had significantly different visions of the political and cultural shape of Czech identity. Three major models emerged: (1) Pan-Slavism, advocated most powerfully by Kollár, (2) Austro-Slavism (quasi-independent Bohemia within the Austrian empire), advocated by Palacký, and (3) independent Bohemia in union with Moravia and Silesia. A Czech/Slovak union was not a major option at the time since the Slovaks lived under Hungarian rule, and Štúr’s codification of Slovak, based on the dialect of Central Slovakia, accented the differences between Czechs and Slovaks. Štúr was a member of the Hungarian Parliament that convened in Bratislava in 1847–49. Karel Havlícˇek, the leading younger advocate of Austro-Slavism, started out as a follower of Kollár and a believer in Pan-Slavism, but two years of tutoring in Moscow (1843–45) disillusioned him. Upon return he established his reputation in 1845 with a devastating critique of patriotism in Josef Kajetán Tyl’s prize-winning novel Poslední Cˇech, and soon became Bohemia’s first great journalist. Upon Palacký’s urging, on January 1, 1846 he took over and then radically revamped the newspaper Pražské noviny (Prague News) and its literary supplement, the Cˇeská vcˇela (The Czech Bee). Like Palacký, Havlícˇek advocated a continued union with Austria, based on a federal notion that would grant the Bohemian Crownlands a special administration and the Czech language a status equal to those of the other major languages in the Empire. In a series of articles on “Slav and Czech,” he questioned Pan-Slavism by pointing

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out that differences among the various Slavs, especially between Poles and Russians, made a united Slav nation impossible. His conclusion, “With great national pride I say, ‘I am a Czech,’ but never, ‘I am a Slav’!” (qtd. in Reinfeld 25), was bitterly attacked by the Pan-Slavists, but he also had to fight censorship, surviving in good measure only because Šafarˇík (!) was at the time the censor of the Czech newspapers in Prague. Inspired by the events in Paris and Vienna, a radical student group in Prague that named itself “Repeal” called for a gathering on March 11, 1848 to adopt a petition to the Emperor. František Brauner drafted the text; the organizers, calling themselves the St. Václav Committee, became a binational body with German representation, though at the price of toning down the petition. To hold the two groups together, Palacký and his friend Karl Egon Ebert called a meeting of Czech and German writers for March 18. Since the two factions could not agree, Palacký’s four-point resolution was initially adopted two days later by the Czech writers only, but several German writers eventually rejoined, and some sixty writers, the majority Czech, adopted a brief statement on March 21, which reaffirmed the adhesion of the Bohemian Crown to the Constitutional Monarchy and expressed a wish to use the newly won freedom in harmony and complete equality between Czechs and Germans. The Czechs writers included, Šafarˇik, who presided the meeting, Václav Hanka, Karel Havlícˇek, Josef and Hermengild Jirecˇek, Jan Paroslav Koubek, Jakub Malý and Josef Kajetán Tyl (the latter two members of the National Committee), Antonín Marek, Karel Sabina, Václav Vladivoj Tomek (a historian), Jan Slavomír Tomícˇek, Jan Erazim Vocel (editor of Cˇasopis, the journal of the National Museum), and Karel Vladislav Zap. Ebert, Moritz Hartmann, Rudolf Glaser, and Alfred Meißner were among the Germans (Palacký, Gedenkblätter 146) — all of them writers sympathetic to the Czech cause who frequently turned to Czech medieval and legendary history. The harmony was short-lived: Glaser soon stopped publishing Ost und West, the excellent journal he had be editing since 1837, while Meißner became critical of the Bohemian events and participated in the Frankfurt parliament. The St. Václav Committee’s petition (Kann, Empire 1: 168–69), printed in the Pražské noviny, asked for a firm union between Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the convocation of a Diet, an extension of the franchise to commoners, equality between the Czech and the German language, equality of all before the law, guarantees for the freedom of the press, and emancipation of the serfs. But the delegation that carried the petition to Vienna returned empty handed, and a new petition had to be drafted. The beleaguered Emperor finally issued on April 8 a rescript that promised to call a Diet and to grant equality to the Czech and German languages in Bohemia, but the issue of the unity and autonomy of the three Crownlands (and the related crowning of the Emperor as King of Bohemia) was relegated to the central parliament in Vienna. In April, the more radically disposed Karel Sabina became the editor of Pražské noviny, and Havlícˇek started the Národní noviny (National News), which had a liberal line that supported the St. Václav Committee and the Czech demands, and criticized the radicals. His series of articles on “Our Policy” essentially supported Palacký’s program of saving the Empire via AustroSlavism. Rejecting Pan-Slavism as Pan-Russianism, Havlícˇek argued for a union of Bohemians, Silesians, Moravians, and even Slovaks. Opposition to this program came not only from Vienna but also from the latter three regions. The St. Václav Committee, calling itself now a National Committee upon Havlícˇek’s suggestion, vigorously fought the internal dissension but soon had

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to face another divisive issue: whether to participate or not in the Frankfurt Parliament. The “Committee of Fifty,” which prepared the parliament and included Czechs as part of the German Bund, invited Palacký on April 6 to become a member of the Frankfurt parliament; however, Palacký, who realized that many Germans preferred a unified Germany to the political entity of the imperial rescript, declared on April 11 he was no German: I am a Bohemian of Slavic extract, and I have devoted myself wholly and forever to the service of my people, with whatever little I possess and am capable of. Though this nation is small, it had always autonomy and individual character. Its rulers have for centuries participated in the German Fürstenbund but they never regarded themselves as part of those German people; neither did others ever count them among them. […] Surely, if the imperial Austrian state had not existed for ages, it would be incumbent upon us to create it as fast as possible in the interest of Europe, even of humanity. (Gedenkblätter 149–50, 152)

Palacký argued that the Austrian Monarchy was needed to counter Russia’s expansionist policies, and the Frankfurt Parliament was out to “mortally” weaken the only Empire able to counterbalance Russia’s drive in southeast Europe. Austria had to be strengthened, rather than weakened, by helping it become a Constitutional Monarchy respectful of its constituents. Palacký’s vision, however reasonable, forced thus a wedge between the German Bohemians, who wanted to send delegates to Frankfurt, and the Czech National Committee, which resolved to boycott the election to it. In the end, only the German Bohemians participated in the Frankfurt deliberations that started in May.

The Slav Congress On April 30, Havlícˇek’s Národní noviny reprinted a proposal to hold a Slav Congress, launched by the Croatian nationalist leader Ivan Kukuljevic´ in Zagreb on April 21. The Czech leaders saw in the Slav Congress an answer to the Frankfurt parliament. Palacký, member of the Organizing Committee, hoped to advance his idea of Austro-Slavism. Havlícˇek agreed: “We must define Austria as our own federation” (qtd. in Reinfeld 42). Participation was in principle restricted to Austro-Slavs, although external observers were welcome; the program proposed to discuss an Austro-Slav union, the federalization of the Empire, the relation with Slavs outside, the impact of the Frankfurt deliberations, and a deputation to the Emperor. Havlícˇek traveled to Cracow and Zagreb to recruit participants, others went in other directions, but mutual distrust, differences in outlook, and the Czarist regime’s injunction against attendance by Russians made for difficult preparations. When the Congress opened on June 2, the participants included Palacký, Rieger, Šafarˇík, Havlícˇek, and Tyl, the Slovak patriots Štúr, Jozef Miloslav Hurban, and Michal Miloslav Hodža, and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Alexandrovic Bakunin, who lived in the West. Palacký’s inaugural and Šafarˇík’s presidential speech were received with great enthusiasm, but the program of Austro-Slavism soon got mired. The Prussian and Austrian Poles saw the nationality problems of Austria as part of larger problems facing all Slavs, and wanted a permanent Slav Congress with yearly meetings and a permanent Executive Board. Bakunin wanted to replace all Slav external affiliations with a

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powerful Slav supranational organization but received little support. Štúr, supported by Havlícˇek, asked the Congress to organize armed resistance against the supremacy of Hungarians in Hungary. Three draft manifestoes emerged: responding to Mierosławski’s and Libelt’s Polish concerns, the first addressed the European nations, asked for self-determination, and protested against the suppression of the Slavs in Prussia, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. The second manifesto, addressed to the Emperor, asked for the reorganization of the Empire, while the third one recommended that the Slav Congress be established as a permanent body. The Congress was unable to adopt these drafts formally because of events on the Prague streets. On June 12, Whit-Monday, a solemn mass was held in the St. Václav square to celebrate the brotherhood of all Slavs. When the crowd dispersed after the mass, it was attacked with grenades from the building of the military commanders. In response, the students and radicals threw up barricades in the center under the leadership of Sabina, Fricˇ, and Karel Sladkovský. After three days of fighting, the troops of Windischgrätz finally suppressed the uncoordinated and unpremeditated revolt that seriously embarrassed Palacký and his supporters. When the students held hostage the governor, Count Leo Thun, Palacký and Havlícˇek successfully negotiated his release, but this only widened the split between the Czech liberals and radicals, for Thun came to dissolve the National Committee. Freedom of the press was rescinded; elections to the Bohemian Diet continued, but the Diet did not convene. The Austrian parliament opened, however, on July 22 with 383 delegates. The 76 Czech delegates, most of them believers in Austro-Slavism, included Palacký, Rieger, Brauner, Tyl, and Havlícˇek. The latter was elected in five districts but resigned on December 14 in order to pursue his fight through the press. In January 1849 he added to the Národní noviny the satirical supplement Šotek (The Wag). When both were suppressed a year later he started the Slovan (Slav) in Kutná Hora, but gave it up in August 1851, realizing that the struggle was both futile and dangerous. He was nevertheless arrested on December 16, 1851 and exiled to Brixen. He was released in January 1856, only a few months before his death in July. Palacký came under police surveillance after the revolution and abandoned politics during the Bach regime. The radicals were, however, encouraged by Bakunin’s call for the overthrow of the Monarchy, excerpts of which were printed in the Prague Noviny lípy slovanské. But the uprising, planned for May 12, was discovered and Sabina, Fricˇ, and Karel Sladkovský were arrested. The politically engaged literary works of the next decade, Fricˇ’s Písneˇ z bašty (Songs from the Bastion), Sabina’s Oživené hroby (Graves Revived), and Havlícˇek’s Tyrolské elegie (Tirolean elegies), could be published only much later. Slovakia in 1848 The regular meetings and discussions that the literary circle Spolecnost cesko-slovanská (CzechoSlavic Society) at the Bratislava Protestant Lyceum held in the years 1827–29 led to a new activism among Slovak youth in the 1830s. Following other movements in Europe, secret Slovak associations, such as Alexander Vrchovský’s Vzájomnost (Reciprocity), sprang up. Samo Chalupka, one of the most important poets of Slovak Romanticism, participated in the Polish uprising of 1830. Janko Matuška’s play Siroty (Orphans), published in 1846, showed sympathy towards the emigrated Poles.

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The Czech-language student almanacs Plody (Fruits; 1836) and Jitrenka (Morning Star; 1840) are generally considered to have ushered in Slovak Romanticism, with their interest in folk poetry and their publication of ballads, romances, and poems that resembled folk songs. Famous national songs date from this period: Samo Tomášik’s “Hej, Slováci” (Hey, Slovaks; Básneˇ 7) from 1834, Karol Kuzmány’s “Sláva šlachetným” (Glory to the Noble; Dielo 122), written in 1848, and Matuška’s “Nad Tatrou sa blýska” (Lightening Flashes Over the Tatras), which became the Slovak part of the Czechoslovak anthem in 1969 and Slovak anthem after 1993. The authorship of the poem, first published anonymously, remained unclear until after World War I: Nad Tatrou sa blýska hromy divo bijú zastavme sa bratia ved’ sa oni stratia Slováci ožijú To Slovensko naše dosial’ tuho spalo ale blesky hromu vzbudzujú ho k tomu aby sa prebralo. Over the Tatras lightning flashes / thunders are wildly in strife / Let us take our stand, brothers / they will disappear / Slovaks will come to life. This Slovakia of ours / slept for a season / but the lightning and the thunder/ bid it in this fashion / to wake up from its slumber. (Matuška “Nad Tatrou”)

Language codification moved into the center of discussion in the 1840s. Anton Bernolák’s 1789 codification of Slovak was accepted only among Catholics, mostly in western Slovakia, the region upon which it was based. In 1843, Ján Hollý, a Catholic of Bernolák’s generation, agreed with the Protestants Štúr, Hurban, and Hodža on a new Standard Slovak. The second, 1844 volume of the almanac Nitra became the first book in “Štúrist” Slovak. Štúr defined the aims of his codification in Nárecja slovenskuo alebo potreba písanˇja v tomto nárecˇí (Slovak Dialects or the Necessity to Write in this Dialect) and his grammar Náuka recˇi slovenskej (Theory of the Slovak Language), both published in 1846. His decision to base the codification on the central Slovak dialect was viewed as a radical split from Czech, and, as Kollár argued in his contribution to Hlasové (Voices), a danger to the idea of “Slavic reciprocity.” When the revolution broke out in Vienna in March 1848, the radical Slovak members of the Hungarian Diet in Bratislava, among them Štúr, demanded that serfdom and the privileges of the nobility be abolished, that common people be given political rights, and the nationalities within Hungary be granted equality. The Diet eventually declared Hungary’s independence and abolished serfdom but did not satisfy the Slovaks, for not all Slovak peasants fell under the new law. Janko Král’ became one of the leaders of the rebellious Slovak peasants, and this is probably when he wrote “Krajinská piesenˇ” (Country Song; Súborné dielo 80). Král’ was subsequently arrested and sentenced to death by the Hungarian revolutionary authorities, but

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released from prison in January 1849. A few months later, he participated in and recruited for the anti-Hungarian militia, together with Chalupka, Hurban, and others. “Duma dvoch bratov” (The Contemplation of Two Brothers; Súborné dielo 84–85), “Jarná piesen” (Spring Song; Súborné dielo 86–87), and “Šahy” (Súborné dielo 88–93), dated May 28, 1849, were probably written during that period. Jozef Karol Viktorin, reputed to be a Pan-Slav, kept contact with Havlícˇek and wrote for his Slovan. He was imprisoned in May 1848 (until 1850) for expressing his joy over the revolution a bit too openly. The March Laws showed that the Slovak and Hungarian leaders had different political and social agendas. In the spring of 1848, numerous gatherings demanded political rights for the Slovaks. On May 11, a national meeting in Liptovský Mikuláš adopted the aforementioned fourteen-point Žiadosti slovenského národa (Requests of the Slovak Nation), asking for the right to use the Slovak language in schools and as the official language of administration, and also for the equality of all nations in Hungary and a separate Slovak Diet. The Hungarian government responded by proclaiming martial law in Upper Hungary (Slovakia) and issuing an arrest order for the authors. Štúr, Hurban, and Hodža fled to Prague and attended the Pan-Slav Congress. They represented its radical faction, but rejected the Czecho-Slovak political unity proposed by the Czech leaders. The Congress broached the Ruthenian question by linking it to the Slovak one, and, since no Ruthenians attended, Hurban took up their case and coordinated their requests with the Slovak political program. The Congress finally recommended that the Slovak and Ruthenian issues be resolved within Hungary in order to leave Hungary intact, but expected that the Hungarian authorities recognize the Slovaks and Ruthenians as independent nations and grant them equality as well as separate Diets and schools. The Slovak participants at the Congress joined the Prague uprising and had to flee to Vienna and Zagreb when it was suppressed. Štúr sought financial support for organizing a militia; two Czechs, František Zach and Antonín Bloudek, supervised the military training. On September 16, 1848 Štúr, Hurban, and Hodža established a Slovak National Council in Vienna, and, swayed by Jelacˇic´’s anti-Hungarian campaign, marched into Slovakia. The militia, formed in Vienna, was joined in western Slovakia by people from the Czech lands, Moravia, and western Slovakia. On September 19, the Council declared a revolt against the Hungarian government and encouraged the Slovaks to start a mass uprising, but the Hungarian army suppressed the rebellion within a month and the Slovak militia had to retreat to Moravia. The Hungarian government accused Štúr, Hurban, and Hodža of treason and deprived them of their citizenship. At the end of October, the Hungarian authorities executed in Hlohovec two members of the militia, Karol Holuby and Viliam Šulek. The October 6 Vienna uprising in support of the Hungarians was put down by the Austrian army by the end of the month, and the Slovak National Council could launch, still the same month, a second military campaign into northwest and southeast Slovakia, this time with the help of the Imperial army. The besieged territories were immediately placed under Austrian administration. In the winter of 1848–49, Palacký proposed again to the Kremsier Diet that the Czech and Slovak territories be united and be accepted as part of a federation subordinated to the Austrian Diet. The proposal got nowhere because the Diet was dissolved. In March 1849 representatives of the Slovak National Council presented in Olomouc the Slovak requests to the new Emperor,

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Franz Joseph I, asking again for a separate Slovak territory, for their own Diet and administration, and the use of Slovak as the official language within this territory. The Emperor made only vague promises. He met again with the Slovak leaders after the final suppression of the Hungarian revolution in August 1849 at Világos and offered them positions in the state administration. They refused, insisting on the proposed political program. The Austrian government responded by placing Štúr, Hurban, and Hodža under strict surveillance. As a result, all three of them retired from politics. By 1850, disappointment and depression paralyzed Slovak national life. A suppression of liberalism and obstinate refusal to deal with Hungary also contributed to the paralysis. When in 1851 Samo Vozár suggested in his posthumously published Hlas od Tat’jer (Voice from the Tatras) political collaboration with the Hungarian liberals, Štúr, an old opponent of Vozár, strenuously objected. In Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft (Slavdom and the World of the Future) he also turned against Austria. Seeking light in the post-revolutionary darkness he turned toward Russia, hoping that it would preserve Czarism and the Orthodox religion as it underwent momentous changes and gained influence. After Štúr’s death in 1856 the manuscript of Slawentum, written after 1849, somehow reached Russia in the early 1860s, where it was translated and published in 1867. Significantly, the complete Slovak text was published only in 1993. Ján Kollár stayed out of the revolution. When the Austrian army besieged Pest in 1849 he left for Vienna, where, as a loyal follower of the Emperor, he was rewarded with a professorship in Slavic archeology at the University of Vienna. As an advisor to the government on Slovak issues, he became instrumental in the introduction of Old Slovak (Slovacized Czech) as the language of instruction in Slovak schools. The discussions on Standard Slovak continued in the 1850s, but the “corrected” version of Štúr’s codification, adopted in 1851, proved resilient. In 1852 Martin Hattala prepared for it a grammar book, Krátka mluvnica slovenská (Brief Slovak Grammar), and in 1860 Jozef Karol Viktorin published a Slovak grammar in German, Grammatik der slowakischen Sprache. Numerous Slovak articles and literary works covered the revolution. Gustáv Kazimír Zechenter-Laskomerský, a student of medicine during the revolution in Vienna, wrote regularly about the Viennese events in the Bratislava newspaper Orol tatránsky (Tatra Eagle). Others welcomed the outbreak of the revolution. Kuzmány’s aforementioned “Sláva šlachetným” was a kind of ode to the revolutionaries, though in “Do zbroja, Slovania!” (To Arms, Slavs!; Dielo 125), written in the fall of 1848, he also expressed a trust in Austria’s policy. Andrej Sládkovic, who was eventually forced into hiding, wrote “Zaspievam piesen o slobodnej vlasti” (I Shall Sing a Song about a Free Motherland; Dielo 1: 307–309). In a poem that is sometimes published under the title “Národná piesenˇ,” Hurban exclaimed: “Bije zvon slobody, cujte ho národy” (Ring the Bell of Freedom, Hearken to It, Ye Nations). Ján Botto wrote “Pochod” (March; Spevy 176–77), but was accused of having plagiarized from Peto˝fi’s “Nemzeti dal.” During the Monarchy, publishers had to omit the poem from Botto’s works, and in 1901 an editor even received a three-day sentence for republishing it. Today, Slovak scholars regard it as an “allusion” to Peto˝fi. Because of censorship, a considerable proportion of the literature written during or about 1848–49 could only be published in a truncated form and/or much later. The press laws adopted on March 21, 1848, during the revolution in Hungary, were rather liberal, but they required (§ 30)

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a fee for publishing journals that the Slovak publishers found too high. Štúr suggested a cut of 50%. Bach introduced stricter regulations for journals in July 1851, and a new press law in May 1852. § 10 of the 1852 law stated that periodicals must be published at the publisher’s permanent residence, which meant the end of Slovenské pohl’ady, since Hurban, its editor, did not meet the requirement. The restrictions on the freedom of the press were eased in 1867, when the 1848 laws were reintroduced, but the minorities in Hungary protested against some of their consequences. Since 1848, policy on printing and censorship was delegated to the Hungarian Home Ministry, and nationalities could no longer appeal to Vienna. The Hungarian government proclaimed already in April 1848 that it would not tolerate violations of the freedom of the press. This could be interpreted as a warning to non-Hungarian nationalities not to promote their political views. The post-revolutionary years were otherwise rather unproductive in literature. Emphasis on folklore, theology, ethics, and nationalism led to the imitation of earlier Romantic writers and poets. Jonáš Záborský, a staunch opponent of Štúr’s codification of Slovak, continued to write in Czech, though the poems in his Žehry (Complaints; 1851) were widely criticized, especially for still using quantitative verse. Unlike Štúr, Záborský was not interested in folklore and the common people. He did not like Štúr’s political tactics in 1848–49, and considered him a demagogue. He himself kept away from the “mob” and applied literature to sway ministers and the nobility. As an adherent of rationalism and aristocracy, Záborský saw the revolution as a violation of order and law. He opposed not only Štúr’s collaboration with Vienna during the revolution but also the liberal plans to collaborate with Hungarians. The Hungarian Revolutionary Committee briefly imprisoned him. After the revolution, he accepted a position at the pro-government Slovenské noviny in Vienna, but left his job after conflicts with the censors. He was always somewhat “difficult”: a protestant vicar, he converted to Catholicism after getting in conflict with his Protestant parish and his superiors in the Church.

Croatia in 1848 When the February 1848 revolution of Paris spread to Vienna, Pest, and Prague, Zagreb was first on the periphery, responding only to the occurrences elsewhere. But 1848 marks the genesis of East-Central-European nationalism. While only small groups of Croatian intellectuals entertained nationalist ideas before 1848, larger national movements emerged that year. No mass movements as yet, but certainly respectable political forces. The main factors contributing to the breakthrough of nationalism in Croatia were: (1) The Illyrian Revival Movement, which provided the cultural foundation for Croatian nationalism; (2) the creation of public consciousness through intensified use of print; (3) enmity towards the Hungarians as a way of strengthening Croatian identity; (4) the war, which homogenized and mobilized parts of the population; (5) struggle for the positions in public services held by “foreigners”; (6) fascination and identification with the image of the leader embodied in Viceroy (Ban) Jelacˇic´; and (7) an increasing number of politically active citizens. The majority of the population, especially the peasantry, remained indifferent and immune to nationalism. Croatian nationalist ideology emerged from the Revival Movement (1835–48), which was

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inspired by Herder’s and Humboldt’s ideas about language. Primarily a cultural movement based on linguistic nationalism, its chief aim was to standardize the Croatian language. Until 1847, Latin was the official language in Croatia; the nobility, the only politically active part of the population then, rejected it only when the Hungarian nationalists tried to impose Hungarian as the official language. They embraced Croatian as the official language in order to protect their “historical rights.” The merger of linguistic nationalism and the historicist conception of the nobility’s “historical rights” laid the foundations for a wider Croatian national movement in 1848. The “revivers” built a number of important cultural institutions to promote their ideas. Especially significant were the public “reading-rooms” founded in Varaždin, Karlovac, and Zagreb, and the Matica Ilirska (1842), a publishing house formed on the model of the Czech Cˇeska Matica (1831). Whereas the leaders of the Illyrian Movement were intellectuals and writers, the proponents of the Croatian national movement were public servants, professionals merchants and aristocrats. Strangely enough, ethnic origin was not particularly important then in the genesis of national identity. Stanko Vraz, the poet and editor of the literary magazine Kolo, was Slovenian. Dimitrija Demeter, the playwright and founder of a national theater life was of Greek origin. Bogoslav Šulek, the most influential newspaper editor and essayist during 1848–1849, was a Slovak who embraced the concept of Austro-Slavism and supported it at the Prague Slavic Congress. Ljudevit Vukotinovic´, a prominent cultural and political activist, made the most important symbolic identity change by turning Farkaš, his Hungarian last name, into Croatian. Until 1848, the Croatian political arena had been open only for the nobility. The first important document of the 1848 Croatian National Movement, entitled Zahtevanja naroda (Demands of the People), requested, however, the establishment of a representative parliament. This document, in fact a political program, was drawn up at the National Assembly in Zagreb (March 1848) and most of its claims were supported by the first representative parliament. It asked for the establishment of an independent government, the unification of all “Croatian lands,” the introduction of the national language into public service and education, the abolition of serfdom, the freedom of press and speech, an independent legislation, the release of political prisoners, and the founding of a university. The demand that only indigenous sons be allowed to hold important state and church positions shows that the national movement had a pivotal interest in power and dominance. The main organizers of the Zagreb Assembly were Ljudevit Gaj, leader of the Illyrian Movement, Ambroz Vranyczany, a wholesale merchant, and Ivan Kukuljevic´, writer and politician. The 1848 elections for the Croatian parliament (Sabor) were the first ones in the history of the nation; in conjunction with the decree to abolish serfdom, they marked a turning point in the democratization of Croatian society. But high proprietary and educational restrictions denied voting rights to the vast majority (97.5%) of the population. The leading spokesmen in the Sabor were prominent citizens belonging to the upper class nobility. The Sabor voted to separate Croatia formally from Hungary and demanded a higher level of autonomy for the nation within the Habsburg Monarchy. In accordance with “revivalist” ideas about South-Slavic solidarity, the Sabor opened the possibility of political integration with Slovenia and the Serbs living in southern Hungary. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, brochures, and books became important in swaying

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Croatian public opinion during 1848. The public demand for more information resulted in larger print runs and the appearance of twelve new papers in 1848 and 1849. This gave rise, at least in a fraction of the population, to a sense of cohesion needed for the emergence of a nation as an “imagined community.” But illiteracy severely limited the access to the written media. Considering that 80% of the rural and 52% of the urban population was illiterate according to the census of 1869, the situation must have been disastrous twenty years earlier. The spread of literacy was one of the priorities of the National Movement, and articles proposing educational reforms frequently appeared in newspapers. Since a universal and standardized education was believed to homogenize Croatian culture, the Sabor voted for a bill on modernizing education, which redefined the entire educational pyramid from top to bottom. Primary education was to be made accessible to all people. But the Emperor refused to ratify the bill and educational reform was carried out only in 1874. Anti-Hungarian sentiments increased in Croatia when the Hungarian parliament passed the April Laws and moved Hungary towards a centralist state with Hungarian as the official language. The Croatian press reported that non-Hungarians living in various parts of Hungary were becoming victims of growing Hungarian nationalism, and solidarity with the Slovaks and Serbs living in southern Hungary became especially strong. The Hungarian and Croatian presses waged a ruthless propaganda war, and both sides issued countless manifestos and pamphlets. The best-known Croatian response to the various Hungarian manifestos was the pamphlet Hèrvati Madjarom (The Croatians to the Hungarians) by Ivan Mažuranic´, author of the most famous work of revival literature, the epic Smrt Smail-age Cˇengicá (1846). Hèrvati Madjarom demanded equality among all the existing nations, languages, and confessions in Hungary. Next to Mažuranic´, the leaders of the 1848 National Movement were Vukotinovic´, who published in April 1848 the significant pamphlet Nekoja glavna pitanja našeg vremena (Some Important Questions of Our Times), Kukuljevic´, who wrote the same month in the newspaper Novine dalamatinsko-hervatsko-slavonskim the programmatic article “What Our Politics Should Be,” and Demeter, who wrote for the influential liberal newspaper Südslavische Zeitung. The leaders of the National Movement were mostly members of the middle class and intelligentsia; the movement was male-dominated, women served only as decoration. Most of the participants belonged to the National Party, which came to power in most counties, gained control of the newspapers Slavonski Jug, Südslavische Zeitung, Saborske novine, and Jugoslavenske novine. It dominated the newly formed political society Slavenska lipa na slavenskom Jugu (The Slavic Lime-Tree in the Slavic South). Some clergymen who wanted church reforms also joined the Movement, but the highest clerical circles held on to their conservative views and soon suppressed all reform attempts. The political interests of the Viennese Court and Croatian nationalism coincided in the election of Colonel Josip Jelacˇic´ as Viceroy. Loyal to the Emperor but supportive of Croatian nationalism, he was an ideal opponent of Hungarian nationalism. The tension between the Croatian and Hungarian nationalists culminated when Jelacˇic´ made a proclamation on severing all official ties between Croatia and the Hungarian government. When the Emperor disbanded the Hungarian parliament the Viceroy crossed the Drava River with his troops and attacked Hungary. Croatian nationalism thereby adopted the aggressive attitude previously attributed to Hungarians. The Croatian public enthusiastically greeted the onset of the war, which the press

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presented as a defense of the rights of the non-Hungarian peoples. The newspapers wrote about the war uncritically and glorified Jelacˇic´; the public approved even his participation in suppressing the Vienna rebellion as an act of moderating German dominance. However, when early in 1849 the Emperor granted Croatia a Constitution and disbanded the Austrian parliament, public opinion split. The first faction (Slavenski Jug and Südslavische Zeitung) criticized the Viennese decisions, the second one (Agramer Zeitung) showed increasing loyalty to it. The two factions exchanged harsh words and mutual accusations, leading to profound disagreements within the National Movement. The temporary law governing the press that was passed in 1849 and signed by Jelacˇic´ showed that the authorities either feared or overestimated the influence of the press. The law significantly limited its power, and Jelacˇic´ thus became a perfect executor of the Viennese government policies. His signature marked the end of the 1848 Croatian Movement.

1848 in Bucharest: Revolution as restoration The 1848 Revolution started at different times in the three Romanian provinces. While closely linked, the three movements shared no common course or fate. On February 28, 1848, young upper-class ideologists gathered in the hall of the St. Petersburg Hotel in Ias¸i/Jassy to formulate the demands that the Moldavian Revolution was to submit to the ruling Prince. These included individual security, ministerial accountability, improved welfare for peasants, and the abolition of corporeal punishment in the army. Having compiled the list, the authors quietly returned home but were apprehended by the police during the night and subsequently banished. This routed the movement before it began. Three months later, on May 15, a large meeting outside Blaj/Balázsfalva celebrated the outbreak of the Romanian Revolution in Transylvania, demanding the abolition of serfdom and political rights for ethnic Romanians. And on June 9, in an open field at Izlaz (Walachia), local peasants and soldiers stationed nearby approved a proclamation read by young revolutionaries from Bucharest, which demanded political representation of all social ranks and a constitutional system of government. The Walachian demands differed from the other ones since they claimed to restore an earlier state of affairs. The June Proclamation submitted to the ruling Prince Gheorge Bibescu depicted the revolution as a “regenerative movement,” and the Prince was assured that the twenty-one claims — virtually a draft Constitution — were “based on our old laws and traditions.” Father Radu S¸apca˘, who blessed the meeting, even appealed to God for support, claiming that “we ask for no law other than Your Gospels” (Heliade Ra˘dulescu, Mémoires 64). Largely similar to the claims of other revolutionary movements across Europe that year, the Izlaz Proclamation presented its demands as a restoration of the rules that had prevailed before the introduction of the Règlement Organique less than twenty years earlier. These “organic regulations,” enforced under Russian pressure, served political expediency, rather than new ideas about society and its modernization. Hence the Romanian revolutionaries advocated the restoration of the rule of law, asking Turkey (in its capacity as suzerain power), France, England, and Germany to monitor its application: “we only demand our rights and we appeal ahead of time to the Sublime Porte, France, Germany and England against any invasion of our lands” (Bodea 541).

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Demands for civil rights in a modern society were thus combined with persistent pleas to restore an earlier order, which was an ambiguous though probably deliberate mix of old laws and long-established customs. The document proclaimed that every Romanian was to enjoy the same civil and political rights “according to old traditions.” It further stated that the Romanian people reinstate “every class and station to its old right to be represented in the General Assembly”; that the Romanian people, “in accordance with old rights,” want the Prince to be strong through public love. In order to emerge thus from the election, the people decree, by old rights, that he be chosen from all stations of society, from the entire nation”; that the Romanian people renounce “any title introduced through corruption from foreigners, against its traditions”; and finally that the people, “having proclaimed the civil and political rights that citizens used to have,” declare all Romanians free, noble, and “masters” of themselves (tot românul e un domn). Flogging as a form punishment was therefore abolished (Bodea 536–37). Such a statement of principles — no matter how vague as to their specific implementation and obscure in its Romantic rhetoric to the hundreds of peasants and townspeople who listened to it — had to be based on an underlying reference system, a value code that was not unknown or meaningless to the lower segments of the population. While certain ideas, such as freedom of the press and guarantors of public freedoms, may not have been familiar to all the ordinary citizens called to support the new provisional government (by taking up arms, if necessary), there was widespread and unconditional support for the demands. When the revolution started on June 11, no one sought to trace its roots, let alone explain its ideological foundations. The early stage of the revolutionary fervor seemed a Walachian overflow of the waves that had swept across the continent; indeed, some of its initiators claimed it was no more than a reflection of events in the West. In a letter subsequently published in Le Courrier Français, Ion C. Bra˘tianu and C. A. Rosetti, who had arrived from Paris just a few weeks earlier, wrote on June 26 to Edgar Quinet, their former professor at Collège de France: France has raised and educated us. The spark that set our country ablaze, was drawn by us from her hearth. […] Furthermore, we took her as an example in everything we did. (Bra˘tianu 108)

Indeed, many Romanian students who were in Paris when the Revolution broke out there on February 24, 1848 returned home inspired, with the aim of helping their country enter a revolutionary new era. The poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu, an active participant in the French Revolution, recounted twenty years later: “After the Paris revolution […] of February, all young Romanians returned home to make a revolution modeled on the one they had seen in Paris. Such was their enthusiasm that […] on the boat back they sang passionate French revolutionary and socialist songs” (Opere 12: 181). Other participants were also left with the impression that France had given the signal for the events that took place. This was exploited by hard-line conservatives like Alexandru Depa˘ra˘¸teanu, who claimed that the Revolution in Walachia “was not national, it only mimicked the one in Paris” (158) and it eventually provided ammunition for autochthonists, for whom the revolution was a historically unjustified imitation of what the Romanian students had seen in Paris. “All Walachian revolutionaries of ’48,” Nae Ionescu claimed, “came from France” (108); Nicolae Ros¸u concurred: “the incentive for prompt violent action came from outside, from the France of February 1848” (163). But a counter argument emerged about the same time, which viewed the 1848 revolution

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in the Romanian Principalities as a local development. As Nicolae Ba˘lcescu was to point out in his 1850 study Mersul revolut¸iei în istoria românilor (Revolution and Its Course in Romanian History), “the general revolution was the opportunity rather than the cause of the Romanian revolution. Its cause is lost in time” (Opere 2: 107). Soon afterwards, the participants and commentators of the revolution began relating it to various earlier demands. According to them, the purpose of the revolution was not to change the state of affairs but to provide a general, primarily ideological, framework for the stability of modern state institutions. These ideologists believed initially that the old administrative structure was capable of self-renewal. Ba˘lcescu wrote already in 1846 to Constatin Filipescu, a member of the Chamber, that the Romanian Assembly ought to steer the Government toward “lawfulness and progress,” that the great mission of the Assembly was “to set the foundation for our hesitant (state) institutions and put them on a path to progress” (Opere 4: 57). But this belief soon faded, and the young ideologists gave up their hope that the extant institutions were capable of changing themselves. The time was ripe, however, for tracing the history of an idea — the very idea of historicism. The widely held Romantic notion of rediscovering and praising a glorious past of freedom was to provide an example to the younger generation and help their passage to modernity in culture, values, and beliefs. To achieve this, the past was depicted according to Romantic models adopted from Western literatures. The first to signal the new trend was Ioan Budai-Deleanu, who realized by the time he wrote the first version of his epic poem T¸iganiada (The Gypsiad), probably in the first decade of the nineteenth century, that all nations had gone through exploits like those narrated by Homer and Virgil but not all of them had poets who could sing about them and thus transmit them to later generations. Of course, Romanians had their heroes. As Budai-Deleanu wrote in the Prologue to T¸iganiada, “History records the names of Stephen, Prince of Moldavia, or Michael, Prince of Transylvania, who would have towered over all other heroes, had there been a poet to praise their feats” (T¸iganiada 7). Following him, Gheorghe Asachi, Vasile Alecsandri, Heliade Ra˘dulescu, Bolintineanu and other poets extolled the bravery of Romanians in by-gone ages and the freedoms they enjoyed — expressed in rather indefinite terms and set in the heroic times of the great Princes mentioned by BudaiDeleanu: Stephen the Great in late fifteenth century, Michael the Brave at the turn of the sixteenth century. Characteristically, the poets set the milestones of this heroic history, and they did so by disregarding the difference between the Romanized inhabitants of ancient Dacia and the Romanians-to-be centuries later. Thus, for Ion Heliade Ra˘dulescu, history’s long list of battles against the enemies began with the Roman Emperor Trajan, founder of the nation and its first hero, and continued with the legendary Prince Radu Negru, the founder of the medieval principality of Walachia in the thirteenth century. As Heliade Ra˘dulescu wrote in 1836 in the celebrated poem “O noapte pe ruinele Târgovis¸tei” (A Night on the Ruins of Târgovis¸te): “Here they stand before me, the heroes of Romania, from Câmpulung, from Arges¸, from Jassy, and from Bucharest / beginning with Trajan and [Radu] Negru” (Opere 1: 90). Historians were just as ready as poets to accept as truth quasi-legendary characters like Radu Negru. In one of the first modern histories of the country, Histoire de la Dacie, des Valaques transdanubiens et de la Valachie (1837), Mihail Koga˘lniceanu described Radu Negru, who came from Transylvania in 1241, as “the first Prince of Walachia.”

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The need for foundational history was paramount and imagination was summoned to fill the gap when historians were ill prepared to do it. The confrontations that developed in East-Central Europe from the late eighteenth century onward, as well as the instability of the power structure and the borders, made the Romanian political class aware of the need for historical arguments. Such was the case after the peace at Kutchuk-Kainardji in 1778: the old treaties between the Romanian principalities and the Ottoman Empire (referred to as “capitulations”) were to provide the arguments for a new political status; but being unavailable in time for discussion, they were “reconstituted” by tradition and indirect reference. The Turkish negotiators bought the arguments and included in the treaty a reference to records that only recent research could verify! The need for reconstructing the background and traits of various peoples, as well as their checkered history and exogenous influences, was sharply felt throughout East-Central Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It comes as no surprise then that, along with the foundation of a modern national historical research, based on collected and published records, “patriotic fakes” with mix of history, tradition, and poetry also blossomed. Witness the Czech Hanka manuscripts, the Russian Song of Igor, and the Romanian Huru’s Chronicle (1856). Precisely the need for drawing the line between history and literature spurred the emergence of a new generation of historians that was mainly concerned with building a body of reliable evidence. Starting with the third decade of the nineteenth century, research on and publication of documents increased. The first genuine book collection of historical documents was probably Dinicu Golescu’s Adunare de tractaturile ce s-au urmat între preaputernica împa˘ra˘¸tie a Rusiii s¸i Nalta Poarta˘ (Collection of Treaties between the Almighty Russian Empire and the Sublime Porte) published in 1826. The volume includes a selection of excerpts from Russian-Turkish treaties since 1774 that concern the Romanian Principalities, providing the legal grounds for the relations between the principalities, the two big neighboring powers, and foreign countries in general. The journals soon started to examine critically the historical sources. Among them were Arhiva româneasca˘ (The Romanian Archive), edited by Koga˘lniceanu between 1840 and 1845, and Magazin istoric pentru Dacia (Historical Magazine for Dacia) edited by Nicolae Ba˘lcescu and August Treboniu Laurian in 1845. To indicate a growing interest in history, all cultural magazines and many political newspapers began printing collections of documents, occasionally within the regular sections of their issues alongside news items and reports on archaeological excavations or scholarly polemics on history. Modern politicians, keen to suggest that they shared the values and ideals of their illustrious predecessors, commended their example and identified with them. Soon after acceding to the throne of Walachia in the summer of 1844, prince Gheorghe Bibescu went on a journey across the country, and the newspaper reports on the official events singled out his efforts to identify with history and the historic “grounds” on which he stepped. One such example was the traditional reference to the founder of the country, Radu Negru: after arriving in Câmpulung (former capital of Walachia), the official chronicler of the visit, Simion Marcovici, recalled the glorious deeds of the legendary figure: “As Europe was disrupted by barbarian invasions […] you were fighting with heroic virtue to bring together the scattered remains of the Roman colonies and give them political identity by merging them into a state” (M[arcovici] 274); and Ion Brezoianu, who gave a speech at the local festivities, looked at Prince Bibescu but believed he saw instead the legendary prince Radu Negru (Brezoianu 283). Prince Bibescu himself set the

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stage for a political spectacle during his visit at Dealu Monastery where he prayed at the grave of Michael the Brave and spectacularly cultivated his memory: “After the traditional Te Deum, His Highness [dressed the way his illustrious predecessor used to] crossed himself before the sacred icons and, turning around, saw the humble stone behind which lies the head of Prince Michael the Brave: he crossed his hands on the chest, looked at it for a minute in sadness and distress and, overwhelmed by emotion,[…] kneeled down in tears and kissed it with a sigh” (M[arcovici] 169–70). Prince Bibescu obviously sought to claim with this populist spectacle not only a profile but also legitimacy: identifying with his role models, he wanted to inherit their entitlements. The national symbolism of Prince Bibescu’s act did not go unnoticed by his opponents (the party known then as “Russian-Phanariot”), who ridiculed him in an anonymous French pamphlet published in Brussels soon afterwards. Addressing the West, which carefully sought to maintain the status quo in that part of Europe, they denounced the national character of the Prince’s policies and his tendency to revert to earlier institutions, not just to ethical role models: By inspiring part of the young people with ideas that are dead and gone, by misleading them to investigate a past where they would seek in vain famous personalities that never existed, the Prince turns them away from the new institutions [i.e., the Règlement organique introduced in 1830 under Russian pressure]; they […] obligingly praise the head of state who would shed a few tears over the tomb of his favorite role model, Michael the Brave, thrown as food to sick and imaginative minds. […] That’s where the Prince shed tears over that Walachian glory ignored by history, and there were fools to applaud the patriotic feelings of the head of state. As a consequence, cries are heard against the numerous and highly respectable families of foreign origin […] their political rights are suspended in the name of that misunderstood nationality. (Billecoq 123)

In contrast, pro-national supporters approved the Prince’s gesture, praising it in prose and verse alike. An anonymous author published on September 16, 1844 in Vestitorul românesc a poem entitled “O lacra˘ma˘ de print¸ pe mormântul lui Mihai Viteazul” (A Prince’s Tear on the Grave of Michael the Brave — see Anon.), which responded precisely to the “contractual” relationship between the ancestor and his follower centuries later: “Cu umbra el vorbes¸te, îi da˘ o socoteala˘ / De tot ce are-n peptu-i, de tot ce va lucra” (He speaks with the shadow, to him he unveils / Everything he has in his heart, everything he plans to do). Inspired by the past and a fashion ushered in by the early-nineteenth-century Romantics, the Prince’s gesture was at the origin of an inflated body of pre-revolutionary poetry that conjured up Michael the Brave: “Trecutul” (The Past) by Alexandrescu (Opere 1: 7), as well as “Mihai sca˘pând stindardul” (Michael Dropping the Flag; Opere 1: 122) and “Cea de pe urma noapte a lui Mihai cel Mare” (The Last Night of Michael the Great) by Bolintineanu (Opere 1: 109). About the same time, in 1847–1848, Heliade Ra˘dulescu, a poet and a civic personality highly sensitive to public opinion, began to write an epic poem entitled Mihaida, and a drama on Michael the Brave’s death. Nicolae Ba˘lcescu, in turn, outlined his plans for a great monograph on Michael the Brave, designed as a “historical poem”; he also urged Vasile Alecsandri in 1847 to follow his example and write “an epic poem on Dacia” (4: 63) that would focus on its Roman colonizers, regarded by Romantic writers and others as the great founders of Walachia. During this period, history and poetry supported each other, jointly constructing an epic

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synopsis of the Romanian past. Politicians saw in the past a foundation for their new political approach; society as a whole wanted it to serve as a base of its future institutions and its own identity. For this reason, the discourse of historical identification began to articulate its political claims as a return to the country’s earlier institutions, before they were altered and perverted first by the Ottoman, then by the Russian waves of foreign oppression. The transition from a praise of the past that was indiscriminately assumed to be “better,” to broader and more specific political objectives was apparent also in literature, especially in poetry. What was once perceived as progress, as a modern achievement, gradually became an attribute of restoration. In his poem “Anul 1840” (The Year 1840), written at the end of 1839, Grigore Alexandrescu depicted the future as a time of innovation that would once and for all overcome the imperfections of the past: “The world’s foundation is trembling, shaking / Its rusty institutions are swept away, outmoded” (1: 22). Two years later, on a trip to the Olt valley, Alexandrescu discovered places rich in symbols of the past. Old, ruined fortresses exuding a mysterious charm (“Ossianic palaces” etc.) aroused in him a sense of direct filiation (“Son of these ruins, their dust I praise”). While he saw in that landscape just “different colors,” he wrote in 1843 in “Trecutul. La ma˘na˘stirea Dealului” (The Past. At Dealu Monastery) that warriors must find in it “models,” for “we deserve to be free” only “if we honor the shadow of the brave” (7). The future would become open, provided the past was well understood. This explains why the Proclamation read at Izlaz and the whole revolutionary program of the Draft Constitution was not just a summary of envisioned democratic provisions but also society’s image of an idealized past. Heliade Ra˘dulescu and others probably thought that no new order or society could be founded by simply rejecting the old one: a coherent and consistent structure had to be built, with legitimately obtained new laws and institutions, whose durability would be warranted by their origin in ancient times. The revolutionaries in general, and Heliade Ra˘dulescu in particular, always claimed that their movement aimed at reinstating the country’s old laws and traditions. In his Mémoires, published while in Parisian exile, Heliade Ra˘dulescu concluded his exposition of the true goals of the Romanian revolution and the causes of its failure by saying that on the eve of the revolution the “liberal party” comprised “enlightened Romanians who were only interested in keeping unchanged the country’s rights based on treaties and old laws and national traditions that were fairly liberal and progressive” (19–20). The Jassy revolutionaries also sought to restore the traditional legal and administrative system, but they had no illusion as to their sufficiency. In the manifesto Dorint¸ele partidei nat¸ionale din Moldova (The Wishes of the National Party of Moldova), Koga˘lniceanu spoke about the need to adjust them to the modern times: We want “a return to the institutions that had their origins here in our land, which we had for five centuries and which we would only like to adjust to the lights and the needs of the age” (26). In Walachia, the revolutionaries took a more tolerant approach to their past: Bra˘tianu wrote poetically in an 1851 article published in the magazine Republica româna˘ that Romania was “born, raised, and strengthened on the soil of democracy” (112). Bolintineanu, who participated in the revolution, like Heliade Ra˘dulescu, saw true democracy in the country’s ancient history: “The Romanians do not owe to Russia their right to a national assembly; this is a right they used to have in ancient times. They enjoyed it until the Principalities were put under the suzerainty of the Porte” (Les Principautés Roumaines, 1854; Bolintineanu, Opere 44).

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Once it became a principle to revert to the past to find true models of justice and behavior, the young ideologists naturally sought answers to historical issues left unresolved by experts. Thus, social and Christian ethics easily became a model for reconstituting a past for which records were lacking. Since the inhabitants of Dacia were Christian and evidence on either their organization or administration was unavailable, it could be assumed that their laws were based on the Holy Scripture. This was the line of reasoning that Heliade Ra˘dulescu took in his rather chaotic but highly significant post-revolutionary work, Echilibru între antiteze (Equilibrium between Antitheses, or Spirit and Matter): There is just one thing the checkered history of the region could not change, namely the organization of the Romanians: so many transformations, circumstances, and disasters spanned seventeen centuries, yet there is one thing that has stayed unchanged and inherent in the nature of the Romanians […] the form of our institutions, the form of ecclesiae or assemblies of citizens, democracies comprised of several democracies. This is what the judet¸e (counties) are. […] It is to the credit of the Romanians that as early as the second century, and many centuries before the Swiss and the English in America, they established ecclesiae or federal democracies, in the true spirit of Christianity. (221, 222)

Christian laws were assumed to have been the organizational principles of the country, and even the number of its regions or subdivisions must have been twelve, just like among Israel’s biblical tribes: “From the thirteenth century, or from Radu Negru to Dan, that is until about 1382, central Romania was comprised of or divided according to the model of Palestine in twelve Christian democracies or autonomous judets. Confederated under a Prince, they were still untouched by such heresies as absolutism and feudalism. Princes ruled according to the pure institutions of the ecclesia.” While a visionary like Heliade Ra˘dulescu did not need accurate documentation or sources, he was aware of its absence: “Where do you know all this from? Someone may ask us, what historical records do you rely on?” And he answered quite simply: “intuition, induction, deduction, analogy, individual and social physiology, the study of ages and of the doctrines and beliefs of those epochs that moved people’s, knowledge of the laws of agglomeration are sciences above documents and evidence” (211). Was this poetic fantasy born out of frustration, the intrusion of dream into the prose of reality? Or was this perhaps the painful escape of a spirit that had experienced suffering and failure, the fancy of a popular poet and leader sinking into insanity? This would be too simple an answer. In this vast and chaotic work, which nevertheless attempts to systematize the foundations of his political creed, Heliade Ra˘dulescu merely adopted and logically structured ideas that circulated prior and, especially, during the revolution, some of which may have been his. The most important and typical ones concerned the legitimacy of an originally pragmatic movement led by non-professional military forces. This eventually became the structural principle of an evolution that had been more like a Brownian movement until then: the movement’s restorative character provided legitimacy. It established nothing, it reverted to a much earlier foundation and did not need the approval of either the suzerain power, Turkey, or a Russian “protector.” Nor did it need to establish anything: it restored, or “progressed by conserving,” according to a principle launched by Heliade Ra˘dulescu during the revolution and derided by the liberal posterity for a long time.

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Heliade Ra˘dulescu carefully adhered to this principle when he administered the provisional government for three months in the summer of 1848. By September, when the fate of the movement was still unclear, he wrote to Ion Ghica about Magheru, the commander of the irregular troops that had not yet met the invading Turkish army: I advised caution, “not to let the revolution look like a rebellion” (Scrisori s¸i acte 68). In March 1851, he wrote to an exiled revolutionary in Brusa: Speaking of the revolution: May the glory of a troublemaker go to whoever would choose to claim it. I never wanted it for myself, much less for the nation. Whether at home, or abroad, I never uttered the word revolution; whenever I speak about our 1848, I refer to it as a regeneration movement. […] To me, a movement is legitimate only if it is in defense, and a revolution beneficial only if it is in ideas. (Scrisori din exil 78)

Opponents interpreted Heliade Ra˘dulescu’s attitude as cowardice, fear of a harsh intervention by powerful neighbors like Russia, or as excessive caution since no revolution could be made without bloodshed. Whatever his motive, it fitted into a strategy whose validity was independent of history. Legality, the watchword of that restorative revolution, was not confined to the restoration of the legal and administrative order that existed prior to the nearly twenty-year-old Russian quasi-occupation. It ruled at the movement’s very birth: the proclamation read out at Izlaz was signed (admittedly under popular pressure) by Prince Gheorge Bibescu, who appointed by virtue of his powers the government nominated by the revolutionaries. Three days later, when he realized he could not continue as a mediator between the revolutionaries and the Russians, who threatened through consul Duhamel to send in the Czarist troops, he stepped down and left behind a legitimate and lawfully appointed government. Lacking any other reasons for intervention, for instance infringement of an international agreement on the Principality of Walachia, public opinion abroad would, he hoped, not allow an invasion and the revolution would stand a good chance to prove its viability. This position, though proven uselessly prudent by the Russian-Turkish invasion of September 1848, fell within the logic of the Romantic vision of a past that was not only heroic but also enviably democratic. It further addressed the need to put before the European powers (which opposed all changes) the idea that the Romanian revolution was a mere restoration of old institutions that could easily be adjusted to present-day needs. Heliade Ra˘dulescu’s memorandum to the British cabinet made this clear in 1849: If ever a movement was right in its principle, lawful in its means, and, above all, free of excesses this was definitely the case of Walachia in 1848, which was a peaceful protest after all. […] Once freed from Moscow’s influence, the Romanians moved quickly to proclaim solemnly the autonomy of their country based on treaties. […] They gave themselves a Constitution that reiterated their ancient rights and revived their national traditions. (Mémoires 387)

That Heliade Ra˘dulescu was not the only one to cherish these illusions is obvious from foreign press reactions. On March 3, 1849, the Parisian Le Temps wrote: [T]his Romanian movement is really something apart: respectful of its vassal ties to the Porte, the Romanians only rose against Russia, the odious protection of which had turned through the carelessness of the great powers into sheer tyranny. It certainly took all the hate that the name of Russia inspired in the population, and the fiery enthusiasm of the young people educated in our schools to make a small province stand up, with no armed forces, to the despotism of Emperor

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Nicholas. In this respect, the revolution in Bucharest was an act of rare energy […] it was no longer a fight between the people and the king, it was a fight between liberalism and despotism.

Ten years later, Heliade Ra˘dulescu reemphasized that the Romanians were neither Communists nor Socialists in 1848: “Europe has realized that the Romanians were conservatives [my emphasis], not rebels (Echilibru 143). Such images, summarized and disseminated through the 1848 revolution, herald the idea of a natural state, which can be traced throughout Mihai Eminescu’s political and journalistic writings, his poetry, which worships history and traditional values, and his political conservatism, which favors a natural, slow development of capabilities. Through Eminescu (who knew of the Echilibru) and through Heliade Ra˘dulescu’s direct impact on popular writers like Nicolae Filimon, the attempt of the 1840 generation to restore old rights and freedoms was kept alive. Indirectly it helped provide historical foundations for Romanian cultural conservatism. Literary memories of 1848–49 Ignacy Rzecki’s idealized memories in The Doll makes Prus’s novel itself one of the great memories (or epitaph’s?) of social revolution and national uprising in East-Central Europe. How memory functioned under different social and political circumstances in different countries and under changing historical circumstances would necessitate a comprehensive study, of which we can offer here only a few salient aspects. In Hungarian literature, the heroic-mythical immortalization of these years was carried out above all in Mór Jókai’s late romantic novels. This member of the “March Youth” described the events of 1848–49 from continually new angles during his long life, always pursuing a selfcreated mythology. The creation of his national myth began in the lethargic atmosphere of the defeat with his Egy bujdosó naplója (Diary of an Outlaw) and Forradalmi és csataképek 1848 és 1849-bo˝l (Revolutionary and Battle Scenes form 1848 and 1849), and culminated with the novel A ko˝szívu˝ ember fiai (Sons of a Stone-Hearted Man; 1869). These texts endow 1848–49 with a special aura in Hungary’s history. Sons of a Stone-Hearted Man evokes the most important moments of the revolutionary years by means of a romantic epos: the alliance between revolutionaries in Pest and Vienna; the adventurous desertion of Hungarian Hussar troops from the Emperor’s army to join the Honvéd; and the siege and liberation of Buda Castle by the Magyars. It would be an exaggeration to attribute a philosophy of history to this novel, yet, by glorifying Mrs. Baradlay, the mother of the heroes, assigning to her even attributes of the Holy Virgin, Patrona Hungariae, Jókai was able to connect 1848 to perennial Hungarian values and attitudes. Representatives of the pre-March liberal intelligentsia were also confronted with the memory of 1848. Thinkers, who believed in the doctrine of French-style liberalism, now came to consider it an illusion that mankind was capable of improving itself, and political institutions could be improved by laws and philosophical ideas. Baron József Eötvös drew utterly pessimistic implications from 1848 in Einfluss der herrschenden Ideen des 19. Jahrhunderts auf den Staat (The Influence of the Prevailing Nineteenth-Century Ideas on the State; 1851–54). Imre Madách’s Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man; 1861), a world-famous Hungarian dramatic

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poem, also emerges from this disillusionment. A third distinguished writer of mid-century Hungarian literature, Baron Zsigmond Kemény, contributed to an understanding of the socio-political factors that led to the Revolutions with his post-1848 essays, Forradalom után (After the Revolution; 1850) and Még egy szó a forradalom után (Another Word after the Revolution; 1851). His tragic stories, A rajongók (The Fanatics; 1858) and Zord ido˝ (Grim Time; 1862), explored sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hungary and Transylvania as well as some deep-lying determinants of Hungarian history. The literary historian Pál Gyulai represented in Egy régi udvarház utolsó gazdája (The Last Master of an Old Mansion) the value conflicts between Old and New and the possibilities of reconciliation — albeit with shades of resignation. The revolution continued to engage the memory of Slovak writers, but censorship made publication difficult. Hurban depicted the events of spring 1848 in the story “Slovenskí žiaci” (Slovak Students; 1853), while Hodža’s epic “Matora,” written in 1857 but published later, presented an idealist philosophy of history with 1848 playing a key role. L’udovít Kubáni’s verse drama Traja sokoli (Three Falcons), written in 1868 but published only in 1905, is set in the Gemer region in the spring of 1848 and focuses on the revolutionary activities of Ján Francisci, Štefan Marko Daxner, and Mikuláš Bakulíny. Allusions to the revolution can also be found in Samo Chalupka’s epic poem Mor ho! (Annihilate Him!; 1860s). Among the participants, Mikuláš Dohnány published in 1850 a História povstania slovenského z roku 1848 (History of the 1848 Slovak Uprising). The memoirs that the others wrote, mostly in Slovak periodicals, include Hurban’s Rozpomienky (Remembrances; 1886–87); Francisci’s Vlastný životopis (Autobiography; 1909); Daxner’s Po roku 1849 (After 1849; 1892) Daniel Maróthy’s Rozpomienky na dni peknej mladosti (Remembrances of Days of Fair Youth; 1873); and Viliam Paulíny-Tóth’s Tri dni zo života Štúrovho (Three Days in the Life of Štúr; written 1870). In Romania, much of the early literature on 1848–49 was personal (letters, memoirs, confessions), but it was also mixed with analysis, both historical and literary. The most important memorialist of the 1848 revolution was Ion Heliade Ra˘dulescu who published letters, documents, and memoirs concerning the events in Walachia, during his years of exile in Paris, immediately after the revolution. The 1848 movement in Moldova was recorded by Ion Ghica in his letters to Vasile Alecsandri and Nicolae Ba˘lcescu. Alexandru Antemireanu published in 1898 a novel about 1848 entitled Din vremea lui Ca˘pitan Costache (From the Times of Captain Costache; in book form in 1937). Moderate in its political views, showing sympathy towards the deposed prince Gheorghe Bibescu and opposing Heliade Ra˘dulescu, as the “regenerating genius of Romanians,” to the more liberal members of the 1848 revolution in Walachia, this novel blended fine cultural observation with a good historical plot. The plot focuses mainly on Radu Cret¸escu, a former student of Heliade, who finally joins the revolution in order to revenge the fate of his lover who is kidnapped by Captain Costache, the historic figure of a wicked and corrupt chief of police in Bucharest. Two major panoramic historical reconstructions can be mentioned from the second half of the twentieth century, Camil Petrescu’s monumental historical fresco, Un om între oameni (A Man Amongst Men; 1953–57) and Dana Dumitriu’s Print¸ul Ghica (Prince Ghica; 1982–86), both trilogies. Petrescu attempted to erect a literary monument to Ba˘lcescu that was at the same time a historical fresco; unfortunately, neither the psychology of his hero nor the drama of the

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moment is quite successfully represented. Dumitriu focuses on the historical figure of the writer and politician Ion Ghica, whose activities facilitated the 1848 revolution, and the later double election of Alexandru Ioan Cuza to the throne of Moldavia and Walachia, leading to the establishment of a unified Romanian state in 1859. In 1843, Ghica, Ba˘lcescu, and Christian Tell formed a “Brotherhood,” which played an important role in the revolution. During the 1848 revolution, Ghica was diplomatically active in Constantinople, managing to dissuade the Turks from intervening in the Walachian revolution. The novel, which focuses more on Ghica’s role as Prime Minister under Cuza (the early 1860s) and his role in forming the conservative-liberal coalition that led to Cuza’s abdication, offers both minute historical reconstructions (we are privy to discussions in cafés, musical soirées, dinners in aristocratic homes, activities in shops and the streets), as well as twentieth-century meditations on power and Romania’s history. In Praque, Alois Jírásek’s “Filosofská historie” and Jan Neruda’s “Jak to Prˇušlo…” (How it Came to Pass…) approach 1848–49 obliquely and with mild humor.

1776/1789

Introduction John Neubauer Dates of two revolutions, outside East-Central Europe and poised between Enlightenment and Romanticism, mark the beginning of modern history in our region, reminding us that both the impulses for its modern emancipation and the forces resisting it were not internal. How exactly the national awakening and the institutionalization of literature took place at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century in the various parts of the region (Poland and the Baltic lands, Hungary, the Romanian principalities, Bohemia, Moravia, the Balkans) will be treated in Part IV. The essays in this section offer merely a few paradigms. Characteristically, only Vilmos Voigt’s article on the aborted Hungarian Jacobine movement deals with the direct and immediate impact of western ideas and movements. The remaining ones either associate regional and Western texts (Wolff) or take a broader historical view (Peleva, Roberts, Slapšak). In the long range, the American Revolution’s idea of self-determination and the French Revolution’s concept of social justice and equality both had a profound impact on East-Central Europe’s history, though the two legacies were as often in conflict with each other as working for a common aim, and their clashes account for much of the region’s turbulence. More often than not, movements of self-determination opposed transnational social revolutions. An overcoming of this clash is precisely the point of Endre Ady’s poem “Magyar Jakobinus dala” (Song of the Hungarian Jacobine) that Voigt rightly sees — together with Frigyes Karinthy’s youthful poem on the execution of the Jacobins in 1795 (written around 1910 but published only in 1947) — as signs of a Jacobin revival in the Hungarian literature of the early twentieth century. The question of Ady’s Hungarian Jacobin is whether “the Babel of the servant nations” will ever awaken, for “Hungarian, Romanian, Slav sorrow / Will remain one sorrow forever” (Összes versei 1: 199). The speaker ultimately answers the rhetorical questions in the affirmative: “When are we going to join forces? / When are we to utter a great word, / We the suppressed ones, crushed ones, / Hungarians and non-Hungarians? (1: 200). However, it is also characteristic of the regional tensions in East-Central Europe that the Croatian Miroslav Krleža’s article on Ady (“Madžarska lyrik”; 1830) should quote from this poem while disregarding its transnational appeal. For him, “such political lyrics from Endre Ady resemble the temperamental politics of a quarrelsome drunken provincial nobleman, who shouts ‘vivat!’ in county assemblies and strikes with his tin saber the green felt of the Presidents table” (161). The brilliant formulation catches a bit of Ady’s theatricality but quite unfairly casts aspersions on the sincerity of his desire for regional solidarity.

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The spirit of 1776: Polish and Dalmatian declarations of philosophical independence Larry Wolff Introduction: Slavic peoples “The first links in the long chain of reforms and revolutions, projects and delusions, rebellions and repressions that led in the eighteenth century to the collapse of the old regime, are to be sought not in the great capitals of the West, in Paris and London, or in the heartland of Europe, in Vienna and Berlin, but on the margins of the continent, in unexpected and peripheral places,” wrote Franco Venturi, thus beginning his historical study of the “first crisis” of the ancien régime, from 1768 to 1776 (End ix). For Venturi the crisis began in the 1760s with such peripheral rebellions as the Corsican revolt against Genoa and France, the Greek and Montenegrin rising against the Ottoman Sultan, and the Confederation of Bar in Poland fighting against both the Polish King and the Russian Tsarina; that crisis then culminated in the geographically even more marginal and remote revolution of the American colonies against the British crown in 1776. Each episode stimulated and complicated the political consciousness of an enlightened public in Europe, so that such exotic place names as Massachusetts and Montenegro made their mark on the further diffusion and evolution of revolutionary possibilities. Venturi’s wide-ranging approach encourages the writing of a history of literary culture in East-Central Europe or Eastern Europe that would correlate cultural manifestations in the region with distant trans-Atlantic developments, especially those that emphasized the principle and agenda of national independence. In fact, from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, no principle has exercised a greater appeal, or occupied a higher priority, than this one in the history of East-Central Europe. The affirmations of a national agenda against imperial rule have been so recurrently important there that they may even overshadow the many relevant lessons and consequences inspired by the revolutionary sensation of 1789. The nodal date of 1776 permits the historian to focus on the lands and peoples of East-Central Europe as they contributed from their peripheral positions to the “first crisis” of the ancien régime, which would become a fundamentally enduring crisis in the traumatic national struggles of the region. To evaluate the international importance of the cultural climate at that moment one may consider particular intellectual samples from around the region, focusing on the publication of works that were exactly contemporary, though not causally consequent, to the American revolutionary events. It was in 1776 that Ignacy Krasicki, perhaps the foremost literary figure of the Polish Enlightenment, published in Warsaw what may be considered the first modern Polish novel, Mikołaja Dos´wiadczyn´skiego przypadki (The Adventures of Mikołaj Dos´wiadczyn´ski) completed in Berlin in 1775. As bishop of Warmia, Krasicki had become a Prussian subject of

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Frederick the Great at the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772, but he continued to publish in Warsaw, the capital of the still nominally independent, though Russian-dominated, Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Also in 1776, in a completely unrelated literary development, Giovanni Lovrich, also known as Ivan Lovric´, from the region around Sinj in Venetian Dalmatia, published in Venice his one and only literary work, Osservazioni di Giovanni Lovrich sopra diversi pezzi del viaggio in Dalmazia del Signor Abate Alberto Fortis (Observations on Various Parts of the Voyage in Dalmatia of the Signor Abbé Alberto Fortis). Lovrich was a student of medicine at the University of Padua, a Dalmatian subject of the Venetian republic, who considered himself a Slav but wrote and published in Italian, criticizing the celebrated account of Dalmatia by the Paduan philosophe Fortis. Lovrich died of tuberculosis the next year, in 1777, still in his early twenties, a writer of very little renown. In the twentieth century Dalmatia has become part of Croatia, and Lovrich has been rediscovered in Croatian historiography as a native philosophe “who unfortunately did not write in Croatian” (Stojkovic´, Lovric´ 1–3). Since, however, he never referred to himself as a Croat in his limited written legacy, one might also consider Lovrich in the context of an Adriatic Enlightenment that brought together intellectuals of Dalmatia, Venice, and the Venetian Italian possessions such as Padua, in one literary sphere bound by common discursive concerns. Both Lovrich and Krasicki completed their works of 1776 in cultural contexts that encouraged the exploration of national identity, at a moment when modern nationalism was emerging, in the last generation of the ancien régime. For both Lovrich and Krasicki, issues of national identity were also complicated by the circumstances of state sovereignty, between Venice and Dalmatia, between Prussia and Poland. The relevant issues of national identity and state sovereignty suggest the significance of considering these writers and their respective works of 1776 in the light of the contemporary American crisis. The personal connections between Poland and the American Revolution are celebrated in the names of roads and monuments all over the United States. Kazimierz Pulaski, after fighting for Polish independence against Russia with the Confederation of Bar, came to America to join the cause of independence and died at Savannah in 1779. Tadeusz Kosćiuszko survived the American revolutionary war to return to Poland, where he would later lead Poland’s national insurrection against Russia in 1794. The historian Zofia Libiszowska has argued that the American Revolution, representing the ideals of republicanism and liberty, “won great support and popularity in Poland.” The Gazeta Warszawska (Warsaw Gazette) edited by the ex-Jesuit Stefan Łuskina and generally unfriendly to the Enlightenment, was nevertheless notably sympathetic to the American revolutionary cause and published a summary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (Libiszowska, “Polish” 5–7; Libiszowska, Polska 33–53; Sokol 7–8). The Polish poet Kajetan We˛gierski traveled to America in 1783, at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, and wrote to the American patriot John Dickinson, comparing the inspirational success of American independence to the miserable consequence of Polish partition: “When I think, Sir, that with three million people, and without money, you have shaken off the yoke of such a power as England, and have acquired such an extensive territory — and that Poland has suffered herself to be robbed of five million souls and a vast country — I acknowledge, I do not understand the cause of such a difference” (Wandycz 38–39; Drozdowski 18–20). The comparison between Poland and America seemed compelling to the Polish generation that experienced the partition of 1772.

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In the crisis that preceded the partition Krasicki was torn between his courtly attachment to King Stanisław August and his national sympathy with the Confederation of Bar, and the bishop ended up making a strategically evasive voyage to France. After the partition of 1772, Krasicki visited the enlightened court of Frederick, his new sovereign in Berlin, and found himself intellectually at home there (Cazin 80–90; Golin´ski 202–22). Perhaps more a Tory than a rebel, Krasicki was, on account of the political circumstances, nevertheless inevitably sensitive to the subtleties of patriotism and independence. The imperial relation between Venice and Dalmatia was also peculiarly analogous to that between England and America, inasmuch as the Venetians, in an exaggerated sense of selfimportance, perceived Dalmatia possessively as the oltremare, “beyond the sea,” the narrow Adriatic rather than the great Atlantic. Lovrich was responding to Fortis’s Viaggio in Dalmazia, which appeared in 1774, the year of England’s Coercive Acts and America’s First Continental Congress; Fortis advocated the colonial exploitation of Dalmatia’s natural resources in the interest of Venice’s national economy. He even compared the primitive Slavs of the inland mountains, the Morlacchi, to the American Indians. Lovrich, like Krasicki, was certainly no rebel, and never hinted at any political disloyalty to Venice, but he was very much aware of Dalmatia’s colonial relation to the Venetian republic. Perhaps the most interesting triangular point of comparison among Poland, Dalmatia, and America in 1776 is that both the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, or Rzeczpospolita, and the Serenissima Repubblica of San Marco, including Dalmatia, were already republican states at the moment when America made its own republican move. Poland possessed an elective monarchy, but the institutions of gentry (szlachta) democracy were arguably as important as those of patrician republicanism in Venice with its elective dogedom. As a bishop, Krasicki was, for instance, also a member of the Polish Senate before the partition of 1772. In both Venice and Poland republicanism meant that civic responsibility and irresponsibility were important issues in politics, and this shaped the development of cultural life in the public sphere, where even non-patrician subjects, like the Dalmatian Lovrich, participated in the discussion of contemporary political concerns. Krasicki and Lovrich, publishing their texts respectively in Poland and Venice, were writing for a public whose perspective was conditioned by republican forms and values rather than the institutional norms of royal absolutism. In both Poland and Venice the political culture of the ancien régime was inimical to despotic rule, and could sympathetically appreciate the condemnations of tyranny that echoed from across the Atlantic in 1776. Poland and Dalmatia, however, did not constitute parts of a coherent region in the eighteenth century, whether under the name of “East-Central Europe” or “Central Europe” or “Eastern Europe.” It was only during the course of that century that the philosophes of the Enlightenment began to conceive of Europe as divided between “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe,” to which they ascribed, respectively, a more and less civilized character. In fact, both Krasicki and Lovrich, writing in 1776, demonstrated some awareness of what it meant to be perceived as backward in Poland and Dalmatia. Lovrich, at least, was certainly aware of the ethnographic connection that might link Poland and Dalmatia as Slavic lands. The idea of Slavdom as a linguistically, ethnographically, and anthropologically unifying character in the eastern lands of Europe was a subject of increasing interest in the age of Enlightenment. Alberto Fortis, who inspired the critical response of Lovrich, was one of the first philosophes to

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formulate the unity of the Slavs; in Viaggio in Dalmazia (Voyage in Dalmatia) he recognized Dalmatia as part of a larger grouping of peoples resembling one another “in customs and language in such a manner that they can be taken for one sole nation, vastly extended from our sea to the glacial ocean.” Thus he outlined the geographic and ethnographic domain of a single Slavic nation, from the Adriatic to the Arctic. Johann Gottfried Herder made this mapping famous in the fourth part of Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind) published in 1791, when he described the “Slavic peoples” (slawische Völker) as living in an area “from the Don to the Elbe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic” (Fortis, Viaggio 1: 44; Herder, 14: 277; Wolff, Inventing 284–331). This concept of “Eastern Europe” thus connected the Baltic to the Adriatic, the Poland of Krasicki to the Dalmatia of Lovrich. Though neither Krasicki nor Lovrich explicitly noted this relation between their respective lands, it was remarked by the Polish writer’s younger contemporary, Julian Niemcewicz, who traveled to Dalmatia in 1784. On the way, he passed through Styria and Carinthia, where he was pleased to hear “the ordinary people speaking Slavic, fraternally related to my own paternal language.” Once in Dalmatia, Niemcewicz came to Split and fell asleep on the embankment beside the Adriatic Sea: “What a surprise! When I opened my eyes, drowsy with sleep, I saw the port by the rising sun, and the walls of the town, and I heard people standing by the shore, conversing in Polish” (Niemcewicz, Pamie˛tniki 169–71). It was not Polish, of course, but a South Slavic speech compatible with his West Slavic comprehension, creating for him a sense of fraternal Slavic relation. Niemcewicz would later travel at length in America, taking an admiring interest in the society of the early republic. His sense of “Polish” being spoken in Dalmatia in 1784 suggests that, although Krasicki and Lovrich in 1776 may not yet have conceived of themselves as living in related lands of “Eastern Europe,” the continent of Europe, in the age of Enlightenment, was already on the way to a modern sense of itself as divided into east and west.

Nipuans and Morlacchi Krasicki’s Adventures of Mikołaj Dos´wiadczyn´ski was divided into three parts: the first concerned the hero’s Polish education, the second the lessons he learned when he found himself shipwrecked on the imaginary and utopian island of Nipu, and the third his more mature return to Poland. The work as a whole demonstrated the Polish assimilation of enlightened literary models, especially of the satirical play of perspective employed in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the philosophical voyage from naiveté to disillusionment most famously represented in Voltaire’s Candide (Piszczkowski 116–160; Dworak 232–94; Kostkiewiczowa 85–98). Krasicki’s previous work, Myszeidos (1775) was a mock-heroic poem that satirically described a struggle between mice and cats. The Adventures also borrowed from foreign literary models of the Enlightenment, but Krasicki reflected ironically here also on the influence of those models, mocking especially the prestige of French manners and values in Poland. The hero’s French tutor, for instance, supposedly an émigré marquis, made an imposing first impression. “For our part, we tried as hard as we could not to appear bumpkins and simpletons,” remarks Mikołaj with regard to his

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tutor, who “graced us with more and more forms of special politeness, the likes of which had never been seen in our parts.” A French education, even from a rather frivolous tutor — “henceforth your lessons will consist solely in small talk with me” — rested on the principle of the absolute priority of the French language: “Since his discourse was still fresh in my mind about French being the sole repository of all knowledge, I did not believe that entertaining or useful Polish books existed or even could exist” (Adventures 16, 18, 27). The Polish bishop clearly meant to express a certain ironic resentment at the pretensions and presumptions of French culture in a century when the French first began to employ the neologism “civilization.” Krasicki went so far as to satirize the Enlightenment itself as a manifestation of foreign presumption. A Polish character in the novel provided this insight for the hero’s better education: As to philosophy, you should know that our present age is one of enlightenment (wiek nasz teraz˙niejszy jest to wiek os´wiecony). Along with English frock coats, philosophy has come into vogue (filosofia w mode˛ weszła). In the boudoirs of the most fashionable ladies, right next to embroidery hoops and face powder, you will find volumes of M. Rousseau, the philosophical works of Voltaire, and other writings of that sort. Consequently, it is absolutely necessary to prove you can carry on a conversation about such matters should someone turn to you with a question. Do not think, however, that for this reason you must constantly read to improve your mind or enter the realm of profound speculation. It is not nearly so difficult to become a philosopher as you think. Praise only what others criticize, think whatever you wish as long as you take pains to be incisive now and again, jest at the expense of religion, make bold resolutions, and talk loudly. I guarantee that in no time you will pass for a great philosopher. (Adventures 32; Przypadki 44–45)

Krasicki thus represented the philosophy of the Enlightenment as a merely fashionable accessory to generally refined sociability. To be sure, he also intended to satirize the superficial assimilation of the Enlightenment in Poland; but French philosophy, like English frock coats, appeared as a foreign instrument of fashionable tyranny from a Polish perspective. The Observations of Lovrich were far more explicit and specific in giving expression to Dalmatian resentment against the hegemony of foreign, in this case Italian, enlightened literary influence. “The errors of certain illustrious writers,” declared Lovrich at the outset, “often obtain such dominion over the minds of many men, that it takes centuries, and not years, to eradicate them. This everyday prejudice made me tremble every time I thought of having to publish some small observations about the Voyage in Dalmatia of Signor Abate Alberto Fortis” (Lovrich 5). The publication of Fortis’s work in Venice (1774) was followed by its German (1776), and its French and English translations (1778), thus giving Fortis a continental “dominion” over enlightened public opinion concerning Dalmatia. Lovrich had to publish his Observations in Venice, since there was no effectively established printing press in Dalmatia before 1792; he denounced the inaccuracy and superficiality of Fortis’s pronouncements upon every aspect of Dalmatia from geology and marine biology to antiquities and folk poetry. Fortis attracted the most attention for his anthropological treatment of the primitive customs of the Morlacchi, the inland population of the Dalmatian mountains, and, on this matter, Lovrich felt that “there are such gross errors, that national spirit (Spirito Nazionale) obliges me to remark upon them, so that concerning this completely new subject readers should not trust blindly” (Lovrich 6). The “national spirit” that obliged Lovrich to speak out against Fortis was his Dalmatian pride, and

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the Observations were bilious with the resentment of a provincial subject who felt that the discussion of his own native province had been hijacked and preempted by a self-proclaimed foreign expert; still worse, the foreigner’s expertise was then consecrated and saluted by the enlightened reading public. Lovrich was not the only Dalmatian who felt compelled to counter Fortis’s representation of the province. In 1775 Pietro Nutrizio Grisogono, from coastal Trogir, had already contributed his Riflessioni sopra lo stato presente della Dalmazia (Reflections on the Present State of Dalmatia), criticizing Fortis for traveling too hastily in the province and failing to register the miserable poverty of its inhabitants (Venturi, Repubblica 348–51). Lovrich came from Sinj, an inland town, and had crossed the Adriatic to study in Padua, so he had experienced both sides of the Venetian imperial divide. Still in his twenties, Lovrich wrote with almost adolescent outrage against the presumption of the Paduan Fortis, making a first and last literary contribution to Dalmatian culture. The Observations recorded the full range of colonial resentments as formulated by a Slavic Dalmatian, a subject of the Venetian republic in 1776. Indeed, the book could be considered a kind of Dalmatian declaration of intellectual independence. In the first part of the Adventures, Krasicki set up an ironic tension between native Polish naiveté and the foreign pretensions of French civilization, including the supposed pretense to being philosophical or enlightened. In the second part of the novel he let his hero be shipwrecked on the island of Nipu, and deployed the perspective of the Nipuans to undermine ironically the presumption all Europeans, French and Polish alike. “Knowing that the Nipuans were obliging and decent, yet uncivilized and unenlightened (dziki i niewiadomy), with regard to learning, the arts, and the way in which they conducted their lives,” reflected Mikołaj, “I composed a speech which I intended to deliver the next day, exhorting them to give up their uncivilized ways and follow in the footsteps of Europeans (wkroczyc´ w s´lady narodów europejskich), who surpass all other peoples in accomplishments and knowledge.” To his surprise, however, it was the Nipuan elder who delivered such a speech to him, declaring that “one must take pity on the ignorance, naiveté, and blindness of one who certainly should not be blamed for having been born among crude and uncivilized people (w pos´rodku grubych i dzikich narodów).” From the English translation, one might suppose that the “crude and uncivilized people” were the Polish people among whom Mikołaj was born, but the Polish text, with its plural reference to multiple nations (grubych i dzikich narodów), more clearly suggested that all the nations of Europe appeared savage from a Nipuan perspective. Mikolaj was struck by the reversal of evaluations: “I who wished to teach these simple and uncivilized beings reason was judged by them to be uncivilized and in need of enlightenment” (Adventures 66–67; Przypadki 92–94). Eventually he conceded the superiority of their natural utopia: it “altered the way I thought about that which we consider savagery” (Adventures 71; Wołoszyn´ski 191–254). Candide had similar lessons to learn in El Dorado, but Mikołaj’s enlightenment among the Nipuans was complicated by the Polish perspective, by his earlier education as a Pole receiving instruction in civilization from the French. Lovrich’s Observations were also very keen on establishing a natural primitive perspective on the civilization of Europe, though in his case the primitives were not imaginary Nipuans but the anthropologically authentic Morlacchi, the European inland Slavs of Dalmatia. It was Fortis, surely inspired by Rousseau, who had first envisioned the Morlacchi as noble savages, and

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marveled at “how much delicacy of sentiment may be found in unformed spirits, or, to say it better, spirits uncorrupted by the society that we call civilized” (Viaggio 1: 58). The Paduan thus boldly made the Morlacchi into a means of achieving some critical Nipuan perspective on his own Italian society, but Lovrich, his Dalmatian rival, was determined to press home the point that Fortis himself, with his pretensions to enlightened intellectual mastery over the province, was included in any criticism of the self-presumed civilized. At the same time, Lovrich could not afford to be quite so unreservedly sympathetic to the Morlacchi, because he felt the need to distinguish himself, as an educated Dalmatian, from his fellow Slavs who lived so primitively in the mountains. His rebuttal of Fortis concerning the Morlacchi was imbued therefore with an ambivalence that derived from his own Dalmatian identity. “It would seem superfluous, since Fortis has done the description of the customs of our Morlacchi, that now I should set about the same work,” wrote Lovrich, “but whoever likes order, accuracy, and the entire notion of the customs of a people, will find my labor necessary” (67). Fearing that he himself was already intellectually superfluous, Lovrich assumed possession of “our Morlacchi” on behalf of his fellow Dalmatians. Fortis, writing for the public of Venice, could also claim the Morlacchi, along with the rest of Dalmatia, as “ours,” for the province was ruled imperially from Venice (Stojkovic´, “Morlakizam” 254–73; Pippidi 1–23; Maggs 546–63; Zoric´, 301–312; Wolff, Venice 428–55). For Lovrich, the possessive was based on a sense of national relation and regional proximity to the Morlacchi, but though he came from inland Dalmatia, he made it clear that he did not actually identify himself as one of them; they were always “nostri Morlacchi,” rather than “noi Morlacchi.” He also claimed a Slavic linguistic edge over Fortis in understanding the Morlacchi, however much the Paduan might pose “as the Maestro of the Illyrian language” (108). Lovrich thus challenged Fortis for misunderstanding a whole array of customary issues, from the anatomical question of whether Morlacchi women had such long breasts that they could nurse their infants over the shoulder, to the culinary issue of whether the Morlacchi had such an aversion to eating frogs that they would rather die than violate that taboo. In general, Fortis had staked out the more extreme position on the exoticism of the Morlacchi, while Lovrich preferred to argue that they were more or less like other human beings. Though “in the eyes of foreigners” the breasts of Morlacchi women might seem “immense” in size, Lovrich nevertheless affirmed the normality of Morlacchi mammary anatomy: “in the same country one may also observe some of mediocre size, similar to those of many women of the other European nations” (81) — Lilliput and Brobdingnag were merely matters of perspective. Furthermore, the Morlacchi, however exotic they seemed to Fortis, were undeniably a nation of Europe. Lovrich did not doubt that they would rather eat frogs than die: I would not dare to affirm, like Fortis, that no true Morlacco would eat frogs, even at the cost of letting himself die of hunger. But if hunger has induced men at other times and other places in this universe to feed upon that which human nature most abhors, how could it escape from the mouth of a reasonable man that the Morlacchi would sooner die than eat frogs? And what would he aver if I were to say that many true Morlacchi, without any necessity, for some time have begun to eat frogs, and maybe it will not be long before the whole nation discards the prejudice against eating them? (Lovrich 95; Josip Milicévic´ 309–18)

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The formula of hypothetical debate — “what would he aver if I were to say” (“che avverebbe, se io dicessi”) — demonstrated Lovrich’s eagerness to enter into direct controversy with the famous Paduan philosophe. In fact, Fortis did reply the following year, with savage condescension, in a “sermon” that purported to be written by a Dalmatian named Pietro Sclamer. Using this mask, the Paduan bestowed upon Lovrich, as a pretended compliment, the epithet to which the Dalmatian was most sensitive: “you, who are a Morlacco, and therefore more noble, more valorous, and more virtuous than I am” (Sermone 6). The attribute of primitiveness, which Fortis pretended to admire, could also be deployed as a weapon against provincial impertinence. Lovrich himself was generally able to muster a certain admiration for the Morlacchi, though he emphatically distinguished himself from them. Krasicki, who also took a positive view of his invented Nipuans, could easily imagine reciprocal perspectives concerning who was more and who less civilized, precisely because Poles, like Dalmatians, sometimes found themselves on the receiving end of condescension toward the “uncivilized and unenlightened.” Civilization and citizenship Lovrich and Krasicki found in the Morlacchi and the Nipuans a sort of noble savagery and natural simplicity in the spirit of Rousseau. The Morlacchi seemed especially noble and natural to Lovrich when he admired the nakedness of their children, interpreted as an anthropological illustration of the natural childrearing advocated by Rousseau in Emile. “They expose the nude chest equally to the excessive boiling heat of summer and the most insufferable rigor of winter,” wrote Lovrich about the care of children among the Morlacchi. “Therefore it comes about that they acquire that valuable health and robustness that is rendered very desirable and very rare in the civilized and delightful cities, notwithstanding the most delicate attentions and every possible diligence” (83–84). There was surely some element of tragic self-awareness in this remark, for Lovrich, who considered himself a civilized Dalmatian and no savage Morlacco, was mortally unhealthy and would die the very next year of consumption. Interestingly, this same educational custom concerning children’s clothing prevailed among the Nipuans: “From earliest childhood we train the children to dispense with clothing so that their bodies are inured to extreme cold and heat” (Krasicki, Adventures 88). Like Lovrich, Krasicki saw the salutary nudity of savages as a critical counterpoint to the civilization of Europe, thus effacing the distinction between France and Poland, or Venice and Dalmatia. In fact, the implications of such a distinction in the matter of dress was important to both Lovrich and Krasicki. In Poland there was some sartorial division between Sarmatian-styled Poles, who favored such garments as the traditional long coat (kontusz), and more modern Polish men, who wore the frock coat and knee breeches typical of general eighteenth-century European fashion. Mikołaj opted to purchase an entire new wardrobe when he traveled to Paris, and resolved “for the honor of Poland (dla honoru narodu polskiego), to try to surpass in any and all ways the Parisian gallants in both taste and magnificence” (Krasicki, Adventures 53; Krasicki, Przypadki 78). Fashion, with its constant fluctuations in the eighteenth century, thus appeared as one of the markers of refinement, distinguishing not only among the French, but between the French and others nations, like the Poles. In his historical study of clothing and fashion in the ancien régime, Daniel Roche has found that in the utopian fiction of the eighteenth century “descriptions of

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clothing made apparent the relativity of European behavior compared with a fictional exoticism” (423). Mikolaj, after having experienced Paris, was all the more struck by the classical simplicity of clothing on Nipu; he noted especially that “changes in fashion were unknown,” that “clothing styles had been the same for eons” (Adventures 65). Lovrich was similarly struck by the insistently characteristic clothes of the Morlacchi, worn in an “excessive” attachment to custom: “They think there is no clothing in the world more noble. The Morlacco who changes clothing receives the opprobrium of the nationals.” Lovrich translated into Italian a Slavic poem about “the contempt that the Morlacchi have for the clothing of the Italians.” The poem by Filip Grabovac had actually been written in 1729, and published in Cvit razgovora naroda i jezika iliricˇkoga aliti rvackoga (Flower of Conversation of the Illyrian or Croatian Nation and Language), Grabovac’s anthology of verses and stories concerning the legendary and historical past of Dalmatia (1747). Quoting Grabovac in Italian translation, without attribution, Lovrich sought to define an educated Dalmatian perspective on the balance between Slavic and Italian culture in the province. The poem mocked Dalmatians who had gone to Italy and discovered Italian clothes: “Who having just arrived from Italy on our shores / Made themselves Italians, and blushed / To call themselves Slavs” (Lovrich 116–19; Grabovac 290–92). Lovrich represented this as a contemptuous Morlacchi perspective on Italian clothes, though, in fact, it defined the dilemma of his own Dalmatian identity: he himself was caught between the customs of the Morlacchi and the fashions of the Italians. Unlike the Nipuans, the Morlacchi were, according to Lovrich, not uniform in their sartorial simplicity. Considering the Morlacchi women he observed that “the variety of ornaments that they wear on their caps in the various districts of Morlacchia not only seems strange to the eyes of a foreigner, but even to the eyes of the nationals,” since “these ornaments not only vary from territory to territory, as well as from village to village, but they change capriciously from year to year, from month to month” (Lovrich 123–24). Such capricious change observed its own customary cycles, but had nothing to do with following fashion. Lovrich sought to underplay the absolute exoticism of the Morlacchi by this emphasis on variation, by refusing to see them only through the eyes of foreigners. His account of reciprocal observation between Morlacchi and Italian women, witnessed in his native Sinj, made this point more emphatically. He first introduced an Italian perspective, probably intended as an ironic reflection on the philosophical Fortis studying women’s clothes among the Morlacchi: For an Italian who has never seen it before and observes with every diligence when the occasion presents itself, this becomes philosophical curiosity. I once happened to see at the fair at Sinj some Morlacchi women observing with admiration, seeing for the first time the clothes of some Italian women, and these Italians began to laugh and mock them; so that which appears as philosophical curiosity in an Italian, passes for simplicity and foolishness in the Morlacchi. (126)

The Italian women seemed to be laughing not at the clothes of the Morlacchi women, but rather because the latter were staring amazedly at their first sight of foreign finery. When Italians observed Morlacchi, the study counted as enlightened anthropology; when Morlacchi stared at Italians, it was considered gaping ignorance: the gaze of the Enlightenment did not admit reciprocity. In undercutting its pretension to “philosophical” perspective, Lovrich suggested that

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a work such as the Voyage in Dalmatia should be considered as Fortis’s foolish gaping at the Morlacchi. Lovrich’s Dalmatian irony about Italian “philosophical curiosity” resembled Krasicki’s satirical Polish perspective on the vogue for French philosophy sweeping through “the boudoirs of the most fashionable ladies.” The poem about Dalmatians who “made themselves Italians” and “blushed to call themselves Slavs” was relevant to Lovrich as a student in Padua, at a time when the Slavs of Dalmatia, courtesy of Fortis, had achieved a dubious fame for their primitive customs. Praising the folk poetry of the Morlacchi, Lovrich regretted that “the most civilized Dalmatians (i piu colti Dalmatini) today do not deign to employ their talent in national poetry; for fear of being considered barbarians (pel timore di essere considerati barbari) some of them claim — foolishly thinking it a virtue — to be ignorant even of the language” (Lovrich 132). This was the dilemma of the youthful Lovrich, seeking to define his national identity at a moment when even the most civilized Dalmatians, with whom he presumably associated himself, had to fear the reputation of barbarism. The youthful Mikołaj in Poland was educated to believe that “useful Polish books” did not exist, and Krasicki had his hero learn another lesson from the Nipuans: “Disdain for one’s country and language (wzgarda kraju i je˛zyka własnego) denotes a frivolous mind and a false heart. In your country you are guilty of this and therefore of having a vile and harmful impact. You abandon your own language, and you order your children to study foreign ones as diligently as possible.” As a consequence, Poles would come to regard foreign cultures as “superior” to their own (Adventures 73; Przypadki 101). Lovrich was analogously indignant on behalf of “the most civilized Dalmatians, who can not be virtuosos equal to Italians by whom they are reputed to be stupid by nature (riputati stupidi per natura)” (Lovrich 169). Poles and Dalmatians were thus cautioned against accepting their own cultural inferiority with respect to French or Italian “civilization.” The principle of national self-assertion in 1776 meant navigating the treacherous currents of an awkward literary imbalance. Though Lovrich himself must have known the “national” language of Dalmatia — which he called “Slavic” or “Illyrian,” and which Grabovac had called “Illyrian” or “Croatian” — the Observations were written in Italian to address the “most civilized” public on both sides of the Adriatic. It was only in Italian that he could challenge Fortis’s mastery of the imperial discourse concerning Dalmatia. The misfortune of Lovrich was that Fortis not only preempted the debate by sensationally exploring the province but also publicized the primitive customs of the Morlacchi with such success that their barbarism reflected upon even the most civilized Dalmatians. Lovrich was both intellectually possessive of Dalmatia as a whole and sentimentally possessive of his native region around Sinj. The first sentence of his book declared that “among the most important and the most delightful objects which may merit the reflections of a naturalist in our region may be counted, it seems to me, the course of the Cetina River and its surroundings.” He promised to correct Fortis’s inaccuracies concerning the area, and went on to celebrate the river’s caverns, beginning with “the most magnificent, the most beautiful, and the most marvelous.” Lyricism overwhelming bile, Lovrich described a cavern chamber where “the accidental combination of the drops of water could not have designed a gate of greater magnificence and perfection, so that at first sight to any eye it appears to be made by art and not by nature.” The Morlacchi also recognized “that it was something prodigious” (Lovrich 9–15). Thus the civilized Dalmatian and the primitive Morlacchi were in agreement in marveling at the

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natural beauty of their native region. When Fortis presumed to comment on the flooded marshlands around Sinj, Lovrich protested at the implication that there was anything “insalubrious” about the area. “That certainly is not permitted to be said by anyone except Fortis,” remarked Lovrich sarcastically, indignant on behalf of his homeground (Lovrich 63). This sentimental manifestation of a “national spirit” was also a crucial literary aspect of Krasicki’s Adventures. It needed a Nipuan to make Mikołaj aware of his own inner stirrings: “You are far away from both homeland (oddalony od ojczyzny) and home, and doubtless you are nostalgic” (Adventures 90; Przypadki 125–26). Leaving Nipu, Mikołaj finds himself “filled with the hope” of seeing his native land again, and this newly discovered sentimental impulse continues to motivate him through the third and final part of the novel (Adventures 105). Though tempted to settle in Paris, he receives there another republican lesson in the spirit of 1776: You owe your fatherland your presence there as a citizen (Jestes´ winien ojczyz˙nie twojej istnosć´ cywilnø). To those of honest mind the word citizen (imie˛ obywatela) is not without meaning. It is a calling that entails responsibilities. Indeed, the first and most all-embracing of these is that one should be of the greatest possible use to one’s native land. To defend one’s country courageously or to administer it well are not the only ways to serve one’s country: There are other ways of fulfilling this duty, and no citizen is exempt from doing so. (Adventures 127–28; Przypadki 175)

To defend one’s country might have been the American meaning of citizenship in 1776; in Poland, partition and foreign domination made military means seem unpromising for the moment, but a patriotic republican legacy nevertheless demanded civic responsibility from its citizens. In Mikołaj’s case service took the form of not only returning to Poland but also retiring to his own family estate and dedicating himself to the pursuit of enlightened agriculture. This denouement differed from that of Candide because Mikołaj ended up cultivating a specifically Polish garden, and this was conceived as the execution of his civic duty. Krasicki’s next work of fiction, Pan Podstoli, of which the first part appeared in 1778, would continue this engagement with the life of the gentry on a country estate, and would leave some literary legacy to the great nineteenth-century Romantic exploration of the provincial landscape, the Lithuania evoked by Mickiewicz in Pan Tadeusz. In 1776 Lovrich struggled with “national spirit” as an intellectual challenge, never even hinting at the possibility of political independence in Dalmatia, and Krasicki, writing for a Polish public after the first partition, already seemed to envision the sort of civic life that might exist without independence — the circumstances that would follow the final partition at the end of the century.

Conclusion: Homeric theme and Washingtonian variations Lovrich bristled with intellectual hostility, and the literary pendant that he added to his Observations offered a representation, even a celebration, of social violence: after finishing his criticism of Fortis he offered his readers a short biographical sketch of the haiduk bandit Stanislao Socivizca, famous for pillaging Ottoman caravans and murdering Turks. The reputation of Socivizca made him a hero among the Morlacchi, who lived on both sides of the Venetian-

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Ottoman border; they celebrated in song his violent resistance to Turkish “tyranny” and “barbarism.” Lovrich thought that Socivizca “merited being called more ferocious than a wolf” for his bloody massacres, but he attributed to this violence the salutary effect that the Morlacchi in the Ottoman empire were now “treated with more humanity and gentleness by the Turks, who in the past had become intolerable for their tyrannies” (Lovrich 238, 258; Mimica 239–51). Though such lupine ferocity might seem a far cry from Thomas Jefferson’s denunciation of tyranny, it was not far in spirit from the insurrectionary violence in Montenegro, or even Corsica, other sites in the peripheral first crisis of the ancien régime. Prior to the twentiethcentury Croatian translation, Lovrich’s Observations appeared in their entirety only in Italian, but the section on Socivizca was translated and published in French, German, and English in the late 1770s. Though the setting on the Triplex Confinium, the border of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian empires, may have been geographically peripheral, the ferocious exploits of Socivizca caught the attention of a European reading public. Though Lovrich died in 1777, Krasicki lived on, and commented upon the American Revolution in his correspondence. Inquiring in 1777 after the English minister in Berlin, Krasicki wrote to his friend Count Ahasverus Lehndorff there: “You say not a word about Mr. Eliot; are you a Washingtonian? Be so as much as you like, but render justice to merit; I also love my Franklin, but that does not prevent me from eating pudding at the hotel d’Angleterre.” Such was Krasicki’s qualified enthusiasm for the American Revolution, though in another letter of that year he asked for news from Berlin: “What are our good Americans doing, please tell me something; our gazettes are silent, and the winning of the battle seemed to be invented” (Korespondencja 1: 297, 300). Krasicki may have admired Benjamin Franklin, but there was something distinctly unengaged about his casual epithet “nos bons Americains.” The case of American independence after 1776 and, further, the example of the American Constitution after 1787, were especially influential in Poland at the time of the Four-Year Sejm between 1788 and 1792, and particularly relevant for the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, which amounted to a kind of declaration of independence from Russian domination. The relevance of the American example was, however, ambivalent, since conservative nobles like Seweryn Rzewuski interpreted the American revolt against royal tyranny as an argument for the feudal liberty of the privileged nobility, the szlachta, and against monarchical power, while enlightened reformers like Hugo Kołła˛taj appreciated the revolutionary implications of American liberty and equality. “The system of Franklin,” wrote Kołła˛taj in 1790, in response to Rzewuski, “is concerned with the freedom of man and with the means by which he shall try to recover his rights.” King Stanisław August wrote in 1790, “I am more and more convinced that Washington and those of his countrymen who share his views are the best preceptors of mankind” (Libiszowska, “Polish Opinion” 11–12; Libiszowska, Opinia Polska 125–42; Sokol 12–17; Frick 89–91). Thus the spirit of 1776, as invoked by the American names of Franklin and Washington, continued to play a role in Polish politics. Krasicki, a noble bishop of the ancien régime, was by philosophical temperament no rebel. In 1789, at the time of the French Revolution and the Four-Year Sejm in Poland, he was generally unenthusiastic about contemporary prospects: “Thanks to the so-called philosophy of this century, the stupidest that ever existed, we are prey to every possible misfortune” (Korespondencja 2: 436). The subtly subdued national concerns in Krasicki’s literary work were more

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energetically pursued in the political writings of such younger Polish contemporaries as Hugo Kołła˛taj and Stanisław Staszic, who stood much closer to the values of modern nationalism and national independence (Walicki 38–87). Yet, the spirit of 1776 was not merely a matter of partisanship, and the revolutionary considerations of the moment could be addressed from different perspectives and embraced in different degrees. There were Washingtonian elements to be discerned in the Nipuans as well as the Morlacchi. In Dalmatia, native perspectives on the condition of the province notably multiplied in the 1780s and 1790s — an indigenous intellectual mobilization that Lovrich had both advocated and stimulated. This took place largely in the context of the agricultural academies at Split, Trogir, and Zadar, featuring such figures as Giulio (Julije) Bajamonti, Rados Michieli-Vitturi, and Giandomenico (Ivan Dominik) Stratico, the enlightened bishop of Hvar (Venturi, Repubblica 360–413). In 1797, the year that the Venetian republic was abolished under pressure from Napoleon, Bajamonti published an essay called “Il Morlacchismo d’Omero” (The Morlacchismo of Homer), arguing that the Morlacchi resembled the heroes of Homeric times. Like Lovrich a most civilized Dalmatian, Bajamonti invoked Homer “to make him become a Slav,” and thus to establish a relation between Homer and himself. Lovrich could not help being ambivalent about the Morlacchi, but Bajamonti now embraced them in a spirit of almost modern nationalism: “In establishing this Homeric Morlacchismo it is too evident that I shall have procured an honor to the Illyrian nation” (77–78, 97). The anthropological interest in the Morlacchi in the 1770s thus contributed to an Illyrian national affirmation in the 1790s. After 1797 the future of Dalmatia lay with the Habsburg monarchy, and the nineteenthcentury evolution of South Slavic nationalism in the province took place within that new imperial context. National priorities had come into sharper focus across the monarchy in the 1780s, especially in Hungary, in resistance to the centralizing concerns of the Emperor Joseph II. In the nineteenth century the national development of Habsburg Dalmatia and Habsburg Poland, or Galicia, would be conditioned by the broader dimensions and dynamics of the Habsburg “nationalities question” in East-Central Europe. The ambitions of the Habsburg nationalities, including the Yugoslav aspirations of Dalmatia and the Polish drive for independence, would ultimately obtain American sponsorship from Woodrow Wilson under the ideal of national self-determination at Versailles in 1919. The intellectual tensions of the Enlightenment contributed to the crystallization of hierarchical rankings and resentments of language and culture within the Republic of Letters: for instance, Polish in relation to French, and Dalmatian in relation to Italian. Such cultural presumptions of superiority and inferiority provoked the emergence of some aspects of national self-assertion, a kindred spirit of 1776. This nascent national spirit may be discerned within the literary forms of the ancien régime in its first crisis. Furthermore, the consciousness of foreign domination among Poles and Dalmatians in 1776, in conjunction with a sensitivity to foreign literary condescension, provoked certain common cultural patterns of response. The idea of “Eastern Europe” was invented from the western perspective of the Enlightenment, as this selfassumed “civilization” defined its own importance in the complementary discovery of backwardness. The eastern responses to such western presumptions, as represented by the Polish and Dalmatian works of Krasicki and Lovrich in 1776, suggest the emergence of a regional resemblance based on a common search for philosophical independence.

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The cultural legacy of empires in Eastern Europe Svetlana Slapšak The Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian empires left most distinct stamps on the cultures of East-Central Europe. Two other empires of the distant past — the Roman and the Byzantine — continued to play an important role in the cultural narratives of the region. We should also add Ancient Greece, which was not imperial but functioned as the original democracy, and the nomad empires of the Huns, Slavs, and Tartars that roamed the region from east to west. The imagined or ancient ancestral kingdoms (Illyrian, Macedonian, Medieval Serbian, Croatian, the Carinthian alliance), as well as tribal units like those of the Dardanians and Dacians, also played a role in national and state projects, especially through the nineteenth century. A cultural mapping of the empires that left the most recognizable textual and visual traces in the cultures of East-Central Europe may distinguish between (1) a civilizational legacy, associated with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, (2) a revolutionary one related to the French and American revolutions, and (3) an anthropological one, associated with the Ottoman and Russian empires. These three types of legacies may be further divided into Christian and Muslim, with the Christian further subdivided into Catholic and Orthodox. Although the cultural legacy of the empires extends into the nineteenth century, the focus of our mapping is the very beginning of the national movements that destabilized the frontiers of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires under the influence of French-American revolutionary ideas. We are concerned here not with political relations or the history of events, but with images, concepts, and narratives linked to the political projects that constitute the bulk of collective memory. These images, concepts, and narratives are neither stable nor related exclusively to specific cultural settings. Their main features are rather mobility and transformability: they travel through different cultural settings, float over the constructed vistas of diverse mentalities, and mask or unmask colonial desires. Their density and transparency vary, revealing deeper changes in the cultural constraints and the making of collective memory. The civilizational legacy is connected to the Austro-Hungarian domination of Central Europe and some parts of the Balkans, a domination extending over several centuries and many distinguished European dynasties. It is easy to identify the local colonizer (Hungarians for the Vojvodina area and for Croatians and Slovaks, Austrians/Germans for Slovenians and the Czechs), but it is more difficult to draw a clear conflictual line (battles, defeats, subjugation) that led to the colonization of the area. For most of the colonized regions, the imperial centers were producers of elites, knowledge and welfare. The growth of the imperial administration from

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the second half of the eighteenth century onward led to centralization but also to regionalization, especially in regard to the military draft and the network of public schools. The imperial propaganda severely denigrated revolutionary France for allowing mob rule (leading to the execution of a member of the Austrian royal family); it promised instead peace and respect for local languages and cultures (quite slow in coming with respect to the Jews). The Austrians, and, after 1867, the Hungarians as well, continued to project this self-image of order and respect. The national and revolutionary movements needed ideological cleverness and imagination to present the empire’s order, stability, and conservatism as harmful for the majority. Thus the image, or collective memory, of the empire was divided between nostalgia for a timeless imperial peace and order, and dislike of imperial repression, which varied according to the sub-region’s status and privileges. After 1989, the civilizational empire emerged again as one of the forces shaping the cultural imagination of East-Central Europe. Imperial colonialism reached its terminal grandeur when Bosnia and Herzegovina were annexed in 1878. It so strictly respected multiculturalism and multilingualism that the Emperor signed the documents on the administration of the region with Cyrillic letters (marked with pinpricked traces on the paper). The annexed region was immediately furnished with libraries, museums, archives, post offices, railways and other institutions built on the “local” imagery. Professionals were sent to make the institutions work, and local youths were given grants to study in the imperial centers in order to ensure continuity. However, the Bosnian and the SouthSlavic youths in general were looking in Vienna for intellectual, social, and ideological tools to overthrown the empire. Enjoying the period of imperial stability and multiculturalism, the young intellectual diaspora busied itself with the invention of national and South-Slav imagined communities at the very heart of the empire. The civilizational empire was not limited to state functions and administration, or to institutions and cultural networks. For the non-German and non-Hungarian intellectuals, work always meant shuttling back and forth within the empire. Cultural developments often originated in Vienna and were subsequently exported to the provinces. Metropolitan professors, printers, authors, architects, and other professionals tended to produce local texts, culture, and values, as was the case, for example, with most opera houses in the Monarchy. This was especially true in the years preceding Word War I, when Secession, psychoanalysis, and Expressionism emerged on the imperial cultural map. The revolutionary legacy was translated in different ways and on different levels in EastCentral Europe. Its transformability made it a model of resistance inside the civilized empire, but it was also used by the national liberation movements against imperial oppression. The revolutionary ideology starts with the assumption, usually articulated as a secret agenda, that the community ought to be awakened, liberated, reconstructed, or just forced to accept a reinterpretation of the past with consequences for the present and future. In this view, the truth residing in the past must be recovered by means of education and persuasion that can be institutional, individual, long-term or short-term, peaceful or violent. Whatever the means, collective memory must be corrected, edited, or radically reconstituted. The narrative of the revised past must also escape imperial censorship. In this kind of cultural legacy, personal memory visibly condenses history. In order to explain and exemplify the new ideas and to introduce a new mentality, revolutionary authors feel compelled to work simultaneously on encyclopedic, educational, and

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popularizing projects. They often write autobiographies in which the collective may recognize itself or recognize the new perspective. Integrating the self into a collective narrative, a strategy used by French intellectuals already before the revolution, is a quick and clever way of convincing the public of the existence of a community. In East-Central Europe, too, writers frequently wrote memoirs in order to conceptualize the birth of a collective through revolution, liberation, or a change in mentality. Matija Nenadovic´, a leader of the 1804 Serbian uprising against the Turks, wrote memoirs; Dositej Obradovic´’s personal story of liberation from religious zeal and the clutches of the church, Život i prikljucˇenija Dimitrija Obradovicá (The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradovic´; 1788), made him a model. Vuk Karadžic´, the founder of the modern Serbo-Croatian language, also wrote a very personal history of the Serbian rebellion. Even more visible were the poet-prophets, singers of tales, who allegedly formulated and expressed the “spirit of the collective.” Later romantic iconology tended to obscure the ideologically constructed nature of this figure. Petar Petrovic´ Njegoš, a Montenegrin archbishop, ruler and national poet who was directly involved in the revolutionary events in the Balkans, left a fascinating literary testimony of the making of both individual and collective identity. He shaped collective identity with the publication of his epic Gorski vijenac (Mountain Wreath) in 1847, by turning a rather unimportant historic episode into a symbolic event for Montenegrin identity. In Lucˇa mikrokozma (1845) he offered an allegorical-philosophical epic on individual identity by relating the fall of Satan. The revolutionary cultural legacy included projects of democracy and egalitarianism, distant in time and space — Ancient Greece, USA, France, Revolutionary Russia, the Spanish Republic, and anti-colonial movements outside of Europe. This legacy was utopian by definition, but it worked in different contexts and adaptations. Some East-Central Europeans participated in the American and French revolutions, as they later did in the Soviet one. But the main cultural hallmark of the revolutionary legacy was the ambiguous and complicated relation between collective and individual, national and democratic, historical and contemporary narratives. These narratives were sometimes integrated into local ideological programs, other times they represented their most subversive counterpart. The revolutionary legacy overlaps with the other two; for example, since it was sometimes identified as “barbaric,” it was identical with the anthropological legacy. The cultural legacy of the revolutions effected important changes in the conceptualization of the place of literature in society, leading to the production of topical educational publications outside the traditional school system. Periodicals, manifestos, programs, declarations multiplied in the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before and after World War I, presaging its imminent end. The rise of this engaged literature — poetry in particular — was furthered by the revolutionary legacy. The dynamics of producing topical literature was quite different from the literary practices of the civilizational empire, and it often involved risks for the engaged authors, especially during the revolutionary phases. The production and distribution of revolutionary histories, memoirs, and texts that shaped the collective consciousness differed from those of the classical genres of the official culture: such texts were often produced illegally or in the diaspora, in external metropolitan centers that did not mind and even supported the revolutionary activities in rival empires.

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The anthropological cultural legacy was associated with the Ottoman Empire, the Russian empire in the case of Polish culture, and with the Soviet empire after World War I. The term may appear questionable; it is based on Edward Said’s studies on orientalism, Homi Bhabha’s on colonialism and post-colonialism, and Maria Todorova’s on Balkanism. For obvious political and ideological reasons, the Ottoman Empire was regarded as the “evil” one in the European inventory of imagined spaces. The Turkish culture was considered non-Christian, cruel, irrational, and mystical, producing not only a specific social organization but also human beings to inhabit it. Although Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other European intellectuals used exactly these features to present ironically the Ottoman and Asian Other as identical with the Europeans, thus pleading for universal human criteria, the “Oriental” was too attractive a proposition for the identitarian techniques of Europe. The Ottoman Empire could not be realized without the human material capable of reproducing, supporting, and inventing it. The “oriental” defined the empire from the inside, requiring not only a certain psychological disposition but also the adaptation of all individuals to the collective. We recognize European traumas and neuroses in this imaginary product of racism and ideological censorship. The anthropological cultural legacy assumed that the Ottoman Empire was dysfunctional, yet enslaving. The nineteenth century European press represented the Ottoman Empire as a dilapidated old man, a living corpse “on its last leg.” The alternative representations of the Ottoman Empire, coming from Jewish culture or from the Balkans, acknowledged “Oriental sensuality” as a positive feature of these phantasms, but could not blend with it. Moreover, the European representations made no distinctions within the Ottoman cultures and regions, so that the terms “Oriental,” “Balkan,” “Asian,” or even “Russian” freely and confusingly floated over vast areas from Poland to Greece. French and French-influenced historical anthropologists have described accurately such techniques whereby cultures construct an Other who is everything we do not want but possibly desire to be. They have shown, for instance, that ancient Greek males constructed their self in terms of counterimages of women, barbarians, animals and nature, or imaginary creatures pieced together from the symbolic elements taken from non-self groups. The anthropological cultural legacy merges the individual and the collective. Unlike the revolutionary one, it does not recognize a conflict between them. Applying a basic racist strategy, it does not recognize the Other as a fully developed individual, whose existence is “organically” linked to a collective. Paradoxically, the national liberation movements produced new cultures that were rich in hybrids. In the regions close to or still part of the Ottoman empire at the time of the San Stefano Treaty (1871), historical research has called attention to the Bosnian Ladino culture of the Sephardi who found refuge in Sarajevo after their banishment from Spain in 1493, to the sevdalinka love songs, to Muslim oral poetry in Serbo-Croatian (the Serbocroatian Heroic Songs collected by Milman Parry and translated by Albert Bates Lord are mostly based on Muslim singers), to the Karayoz shadow theatre, which was still active in Bosnia and Macedonia in the 1930s, and on to Serbian poetry that used oriental motives and a plethora of Turkish words. The Ottoman Empire was omnipresent in the literatures of South-Eastern Europe, including Slovenia and Hungary. But this anthropological cultural legacy was also used in revolutionary projects, for instance in the construction of modern Yugoslavia. The intellectuals engaged in creating a new Yugoslav culture found that the legacy of Ottoman multiculturalism, its relative

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tolerance toward other religions and urban cultural structures, could be reactivated in the organization of the new Yugoslavia. The decentered Ottoman imperial model differed from the unifying Austro-Hungarian imperial one, and was considered advantageous for the new, Balkanconscious Yugoslav culture. The Nobel-Prize winning novelist Ivo Andric´ took the AustroHungarian and the Ottoman cultures as thematic pillars in Na Drini cúprija (The Bridge on the Drina; 1945), Travnicˇka hronika (The Chronicle of Travnik; 1945), and Omerpaša latas (Omer Pasha’s Concubine; 1977). He constructed anthropological, historical, and political images of the contacts, misunderstandings, and clashes between the two cultures. Each of the three imperial legacies promoted specific types of multicultural models, and they are still alive in the cultural space of contemporary East-Central Europe. Their conflicts codetermine the region’s culture, and this may well be their most fruitful and perhaps most important legacy.

The Jacobin Movement in Hungary (1792–95) Vilmos Voigt The French Enlightenment, the Revolution, and Napoleon’s Empire had a strong and lasting impact in South-East Europe as well (see Iorga, La Révolution française). This is confirmed in the Habsburg countries by the political debates and police intelligence reports. The terms “revolutionary” and even “Jacobin” were used in innumerable cases, often without referring to any social and cultural movement. For when students at the (Royal Hungarian) University of Pest cut their hair, wore “Jacobin caps,” erected “liberty trees,” or frightened the audience with “toy” guillotines (directed against invited reactionary or court dignitaries), this was more an épater l’ancien régime frolic than an organized political movement. We know that Jacobin clubs or circles existed in the 1790s in various parts of Poland and Galicia, and to a lesser extent in the Romanian lands, Croatia, perhaps in Serbia, and, of course, in Vienna. The trend was most widespread in Hungary, primarily among the nobility and intellectuals, but only to a minimal extent in the other social strata. It is indicative of the Hungarian linguistic situation that the revolutionaries would translate and sing the “Marseillaise” in Latin, which was the official language of jurisprudence and of the constitutionalism in Hungary, available also to the minorities. The Hungarian movement was international and interconfessional. Writers and other intellectuals who referred to French political publications or events were soon accused of being Jacobins. Ignác Martinovics, who was among the most intriguing figures, rose to become the leader of the movement. Son of a bourgeois family in Pest, he became a Franciscan, with a doctoral thesis in theology and philosophy. An extremely unstable character, he joined the Austrian army in Galicia as a military chaplain. Emperor Joseph

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II nominated him for a professorship in science at the University of Lemberg in 1783. Martinovics traveled widely in Europe and in all parts of Hungary; from 1788 onward he published pamphlets in French and Latin on current political issues, using fierce revolutionary language. In the summer of 1791 he met Gotthardi, the police minister in Vienna, to whom he sent regular information on his friends and on the Hungarian political situation. There are even hints that Martinovics was asked to organize “illegal peasant revolts” in Hungary. The new emperor, Leopold II, paid well for his services, but upon his death in 1792 Martinovics was expelled from the city of Vienna, and from 1792 onward he tried to organize a large Hungarian movement to achieve a two-fold political change: a radical reform program for many, and then a libertine coup d’état by a chosen few. From May 1794 onward he organized secret societies, involving several hundred persons from Hungary proper, as well as from Croatia and Transylvania. Practically all progressive Hungarian writers participated in it, more or less directly. At the end of July 1794 the Viennese police arrested, however, the Austrian leaders (including a former police minister) and subsequently the Hungarian members. At the hearing, Martinovics gave colorful and detailed reports about all of the Jacobin movements, stressing his own great importance. One gets the impression from the reports that he became (at least temporarily) mentally ill during the hearing and the trial. The process went through several phases in the period October 1794-May 1795. Of the fifty-three accused, eighteen were sentenced to death and only four were discharged. Five of them — Ignác Martinovics, József Hajnóczy (a Slovak Hungarian), János Laczkovics, Ferenc Szentmarjay, and count Jakab Sigray — were actually ˝ z followed in June; the others got executed in May 1795 in Buda, Sándor Szolartsik and Pál O life sentences or long prison terms. Contemporaries were surprised that most of the accused persons defended their revolutionary ideas, and behaved stoically at their execution. Martinovics’ composure fell apart, however, at the last moment of his unhappy life. Two of the leading Hungarian writers, János Batsányi and Ferenc Kazinczy, were deeply involved in the Hungarian Jacobin movement. Batsányi, who was found guilty even though he did not participate, was in jail until 1796 and was never allowed to return to Hungary. In 1809 he allegedly wrote Napoleon’s proclamation to the Hungarians and had to flee from Vienna to Paris. It is an irony of literary history that the Hungarian language revival received a major boost from the jail sentences meted out to some of the other figures associated with the conspiracy. For Kazinczy started to translate in jail Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey as well as his correspondence with Eliza, and Ferenc Verseghy, another conspirator who barely escaped the death sentence, began to copy the first chapters of Tristram Shandy between the lines of a copy of the literary journal Uránia (Hartvig 9–10). When Kazinczy was finally released from prison in 1801 he continued to translate and to lead for a number of years the renewal of Hungarian literature. The diary of his jail years, Fogságom naplója, a first-rate autobiographical document, written by 1828, was published only posthumously. A few contemporary copies of it exist but the original has been lost. The first complete publication, made from a copy, appeared in 1931. Benda republished the section on December 14, 1794– September 24, 1795 (3: 296–325) and evaluated some of the editions (3: 8–11). Benda published in the 1950s the documents then available, but new documents have been discovered since then. One may suspect that there were Croatian and Galician affiliates, but no summary publication on the topic is known to us. Imre Szeli, a Hungarian literary historian in

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Novi Sad, wrote a short monograph on the (Serbo)-Croatian contacts of Hajnóczy, the true liberal ideologist of the movement. The short life of the Hungarian Jacobin movement and the years of repression afterwards mark a turning point in Hungarian cultural, political, and literary history. Among the first to write about these events was the Hungarian writer and politician Ferenc Pulszky, secretary to Lajos Kossuth, the finance minister in the first Hungarian government in the 1848–49 war of liberation. Pulszky, who was an envoy of the Kossuth government in London, lived in emigration until 1866, and became Director-in-chief of the Hungarian National Museum (1869–94) after his return to Hungary. He published during his emigration the novel Jacobins in Hungary, translated into Hungarian as A magyar jacobinusok in 1862. The novel was based on historical, though obviously incomplete, materials. Interest in the Hungarian Jacobin movement, was part of Pulszky’s political orientation; he was the Grand Master of the Hungarian Free Mason Lodge. The Jacobins became once more popular before World War I. Witness the republication of Pulszky’s novel, Endre Ady’s poem “Magyar jakobinus dala” (Song of a Hungarian Jacobin), written 1908 (Összes versei 1: 199–200), and the melancholic historical poem by the young Frigyes Karinthy, “Martinovics,” written in 1910, but published only posthumously. In the interwar years Miklós Bánffy wrote a drama about him.

1776 and 1789 in Slovakia Dagmar Roberts The reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II furthered the Enlightenment in the Austrian Empire and Classicism in Slovak literature. They were generally welcomed: in 1781 Pavel Šramko wrote an ode to Maria Theresa and Augustín Doležal one to Joseph II. The first Slovak novel, René mládenca príhodi a skúsenosti (Adventures and Experiences of Young René), published 1783/85 by the Catholic priest Jozef Ignác Bajza, was confiscated by the church censors because it was critical, especially in the second volume, of the church and worldly authorities. Juraj Fándly, another Catholic priest, combined a satirical dialogue with a serious treatise on the reforms in Dúverná zmlúva mezi mníchom a diablom (Confidential Treaty Between a Monk and a Devil). Published in 1789, it gave a critical picture of the church, its history, and wealth, and even of the mendicant orders. The church banned the last two of the four volumes. Ignác Martinovics, leader of Jacobin conspiracy (see Voigt’s article in this section), and József Hajnóczy, a member of the conspiracy and probably the Slovak translator of the “Marseillaise,” were both executed in Buda in 1795. Michal Blažek was suspected of Jacobinism and investigated for participation in a peasant revolt in 1797. Though the police found in his

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house the manifesto Vox clamantis, a text by the Hungarian Jacobin Ferencz Abaffy, Blažek denied having any connection with the Jacobins. He was imprisoned but soon released. Blažek’s poem Helvétska cˇi frajmaurská rebélie z roku 1797 (Calvinism or the Freemason Revolution in 1797) describes the peasant revolt, as well as Blažek’s arrest and penitence. On the conservative side, Michal Institoris Mošovský rejected in 1793 the French revolution as a violation of the social order and religion in Strom bez korene a cˇepice bez hlavy (A Tree Without a Root and a Cap Without a Head). Six years later Mošovský attacked Napoleon in Od Boha zlomená pýcha naších a božích neprátelu (Divine Humiliation of Pride in the Lord’s and our Enemies). Joseph II’s Patent of Toleration (1781), which granted equality to the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, intensified Czech-Slovak literary contacts, since Slovak Protestants used the Czech language. Joseph’s attempt to replace Latin with German as the administrative language in Hungary reawakened interest in the vernacular. In 1787 the Catholic priest Anton Bernolák codified Standard Slovak in Dissertatio philologico-critica de literis Slavorum-Orthographia (Philological and Critical Treatise on the Orthography of Slavic Letters); he added three years later a Slavic grammar and in 1791 an etymology of Slavic words. In 1825–27 he published finally a Slovak-Czech-Latin-German-Hungarian Dictionary. In 1801 the Ústav recˇi a literatúry cˇeskoslovenskej (Institute of Czechoslovak Language and Literature) was established in Bratislava upon Martin Hamaliar’s initiative, which came to play an important role in Slovak emancipation. These first scholarly and institutional efforts to cultivate the Slovak language were soon followed by the first poetry volumes in the vernacular, which sang over the beauties of the native landscape. Witness Juraj Palkovicˇ’s Muza ze Slovenských hor (Muse from the Slovak Mountains) from 1801, and the Tatranská Múza s lyrou slovanskou (Tatra Muse with a Slovak Lyre) by the young Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1814). The introduction of German, and, after Joseph II’s death, of Hungarian into the administration led to Slovak nationalist reactions and an increased interest in history, both real or fanciful. Juraj Papánek, for instance, wrote in 1780 a Historia gentis Slavae (History of the Slavic People) to refute István Salagi, a Hungarian church historian, and to establish Slavic “autochthony.” He enumerated the Slavic rulers, territories, and tribes, and gave a brief summary of the region’s church history, including the liturgical use of Old Slavonic, the arrival of Christianity in the Slavic territories, and the temporal priority of Slavic bishops. Fándly used Papánek’s book as source material for the Compendiata historia gentis Slavae (Historical Compendium of the Slavic People), published in 1793. Fándly also compiled Slovak manuals on beekeeping, working in the fields, and other rural activities. Juraj Sklenár’s propagandistic rather than scholarly Vetustissimus Magnae Moraviae situs et primus in eam Hungarorum ingressus et incursus (The Most Ancient Site of Greater Moravia; and its First Hongarian Penetration and Invasion) gave rise in 1784 to a five-year long polemic with István Katona and other Hungarian historians over the political rights of the Magyars. Ancient Slavic history became a subject of serious research in 1837, with the publication of Pavel Jozef Šafárik’s Slovanské starožitnosti (Slavic Antiquities). Basing his research on ancient sources, Šafárik traced the history of Slavic tribes from ancient times to the end of the tenth century. Ideas of the Enlightenment stimulated the rise of science, as well as the foundation of educated societies and journals. In 1792 the Slovenské ucˇené tovarišstvo (The Educated Slovak Guild), also known as Tovarišstvo literného umenˇá (The Guild of Literary Arts), was founded in

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Trnava. It had approximately 450 members, and published twenty volumes, mostly ecclesiastic writings, before it closed in 1800. Other societies included Matej Holka Jr.’s Erudita societas Kishontensis (The Educated Society of Small Hont), which published an almanac between 1809 and 1842 (with a break between 1832 and 1840), and Bohuslav Tablic’s Ucˇená spolecˇnost bánského okolí (The Educated Society of the Mining Region), founded in 1810.

1789 and Bulgarian Culture Inna Peleva Having lost the war with the Holy Alliance, Turkey was forced to sign the Treaty of Karlowitz early in 1699, and during the next century it was repeatedly defeated and underwent a severe economic and political crisis. At the end of the 1770s and the early 1780s the disintegration of social structures led to the kardzhaliistvo, large-scale organized robbery by gangs of several hundreds on settlements without governmental protection. The weakness of the state encouraged the local notables to oppose the Sultan and become autonomous local rulers (Mutafchieva, Kardzhaliisko). But from this chaos signs of a new system started to emerge. After numerous territorial losses, the Empire revalued the Bulgarian lands economically and politically (Mutafchieva, Osmanska). In the feudal Timar system of land ownership of farms, the owner of a Timar was obliged to participate in all of the Imperial military campaigns in return for the income from the Timar. As this system died out the number of Chiflik estates and farms rose considerably. The Chiflik estate was market-oriented and stimulated the adoption of the modern forms of land ownership. The cities also changed considerably. The Bulgarian population of the cities increased immensely; handicrafts, pertaining to the processing of wool, cotton, silk and leather flourished. Manufacture established itself in the cities and Bulgarian merchants gradually mastered the European type of trade organization. Joint-stock companies were formed, sampletrade practice gained impetus, promotion and advertisement grew. The increasingly wealthy Christians expanded their economic and cultural relations with the non-Ottoman world. The number of Bulgarian men of letters and book transcribers grew gradually. The damasquins (handwritten compilations of texts for religious edification) enjoyed increasing popularity; printed books from Russia, Greece, and Serbia started to reach the Bulgarians (Genchev, vazrazhdane). Growing interest among the South Slavs in their past and medieval state was particularly evident in Christophor Zhefarovich’s important Stematographia (1741), which contained the coats of arms of nations and territories, Moesia, Thrace, Macedonia and Bulgaria included.

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Images of Bulgarian and Serb kings and saints, and explanatory verses accompanied the coats. Another manifestation of this interest was the Istoriya slavyanoba˘lgarska, a Slavonic-Bulgarian history, whose manuscript the Athos monk Paisii of Hilendar completed in 1762. Bulgarian scholarship attributes epochal importance to the Istoriya in the second half of the eighteenth century for giving rise to ethnic self-awareness (cf. Drinov). The book tells of the kings, saints, and spiritual leaders of a once bold and powerful nation, in an attempt to replace Bulgarian shame with pride, inspired by a past full of battles, kings-warriors, glory, and spoils, and even philosophers. The text breaks with Christian universalism and emphasizes the differences between Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs; it makes ethnic belonging a dominant feature in distinguishing between “self” and “alien.” Paisii’s main sources were Russian translations (published 1719 and 1722 respectively) of Cesare Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici and Mauro Orbini’s Il regno degli Slavi. Today about sixty handwritten copies of the Istoriya are known. Hristaki Pavlovich published a first adaptation of it in 1844 under the title Tsarstvenik ili istoriya ba˘lgarskaya (Book of Kings or a Bulgarian History). The first known handwritten copy of Paisii’s text was made by Sofronii of Vratsa, who also made a second transcription of it in 1781. Like Paisii and most early Bulgarian men of letters, Sofronii was a churchman. This remarkable figure of the Bulgarian Revival became a priest in 1761 and bishop of Vratsa in 1803. He then settled in Walachia (Craiova, Bucharest) and founded an emigrant circle, which, it is believed, organized the first Bulgarian diplomatic mission: two envoys went to Russia to seek support for improving the status of the Bulgarians in Turkey. In the subsequent Russo-Turkish war of 1806–12, Sofronii made an all-out effort to aid the Russian offensive South of the Danube. In Bucharest, Sofronii finished in 1804 (published only in 1861) the first Bulgarian autobiography, Zhitie I stradanie gresnago Sofroniya (The Life and Sufferings of Sofronii the Sinful), which was probably inspired by Dositej Obradovic´’s The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradovic´ (1788). Sofronii’s autobiography is seen today as one of the most interesting and provocative South-Slavonic texts of the early nineteenth century (Georgiev, Mutafchieva). Furthermore, Sofronii finished in 1802 the two so-called Vidin Collections, the first of which resembles the damasquins, while the second contains translations of Aesopian fables, and of the excerpts from Amphrosius Marlian’s Theatrum politicum (1631) that Sofronii found in the Greek edition of 1802. Sofronii’s selections in the handwritten Vidin Collections reveal his interest in education, political constitution, and public moral. Within his educational program Sofronii published in 1806 in Rîmnic (Romania) a collection of sermons entitled Kiriakodromion, sirech Nedelnik (Chiriakodromion or a Sunday Book), the first printed book in Bulgarian. Dr. Petar Beron’s “Primer with Various Didactic Texts” (the book has become popular as “Riben bukvar,” i.e., “Fish Primer”), an encyclopedic publication from 1824, represented a new stage of cultural revival by advocating that Bulgarian schools should turn towards mundane education and rely on the common spoken language. In this, Beron was inspired by works of Romanian, Greek, and Serb men of the Enlightenment from the early nineteenth century. His hunger for learning sent him to Heidelberg, Munich, Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, and Prague; his studies and investigations in physics, astronomy, mathematics, geology, chemistry, meteorology, and philosophy yielded thirty-two volumes. Education was a precious commodity in the early nineteenth century, and Bulgarians

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considered Greek schools the most attractive and prestigious. Love for Greece did not diminish the patriotic feelings of the best educated Bulgarians — quite the contrary. The outstanding early-modern phil-Hellenist intellectuals in Bulgaria, Hristaki Pavlovich, Raino Popovich, Emanouil Vaskidovich, and Konstantin Ognyanovich, translated and published books while seeking careers in teaching. The French Revolution of 1789 had no immediate echo in Bulgaria. Its image was mediated through Greek culture, the Bulgarian students abroad, and through textbooks of general history used in Bulgarian education. Commentaries on the ideas of the revolution appeared in the Bulgarian press only in the late 1840s, and only in the 1870s did Lyuben Karavelov, Petko Slaveikov, Svetoslav Milarov, and Hristo Botev pick up, to varying degrees, ideas of the Revolution. Vassil Levski’s writings on the tasks and purposes of the Bulgarian national revolution come occasionally rather close to the revolutionary La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789, but the evidence is insufficient to postulate that the latter served as a source (Genchev, Frantsiya). We must also remember that literate contemporaries of Karavelov, Slaveikov, Milarov, Botev and Levski studied history in textbooks translated from Russian, which vilified the revolution for leading to regicide, mountains of corpses, rivers of blood, the guillotine, and the monstrous assassins of Robespierre and his ilk. In the diatribes of Slaveikov’s ideological opponents, “Jacobin” and Robespierre were stigmas. Nevertheless, the French Revolution was a model for the organizers of the April 1876 Revolt, the key episode in Bulgaria’s national myth. Zahari Stoyanov, one of its leaders, hurried to Paris in 1889 to see the centennial celebrations that promised a replay of the events in the streets. The “latecomers” could experience what they had missed or attempt to replay the revolution in their national history at home. But “latecomers” usually have an ambiguous attitude towards what they missed. Ivan Vazov’s pathos-filled poem from 1883, “Kam svobodata” (To Freedom) praises the “Dantons” as champions of human progress. The speaker claims to share normative values in “everyone’s” common history, and believes that his values are “up-to-date” with respect to those of the world (Sa˘brani 2: 191–192). Yet Vazov’s humorous novel Chichovtsi (Uncles) from 1884 reveals that he was skeptical as to the ability of the average Bulgarian to decide which historical figures and events are important for mankind, especially when they are French. The desire to give a “correct” reading of the European past, and mistrust in the nation’s ability to translate 1789 without distortions, yielded conflicting Bulgarian cultural texts.

Part II Histories of literary form

Introduction John Neubauer

Traditional concepts of literary periods and genres have lost their secure mooring and can no longer be used in a naïve, self-evident way. How did this crisis come about and how does our History propose to cope with it? The problems of periodization can largely be attributed to questions that have been raised concerning the nineteenth-century presupposition that history is (or can be) a science, whose categories, such as period concepts, are comparable to the concepts in the natural sciences. Meanwhile it has become evident that Marxist or other theories on the “laws” of history are both illusory and hazardous. Furthermore, the continuous growth of empirical material, in this case the extension of periodization to hitherto neglected or ignored areas, has presented ever greater problems to historians. Finally, periods and movements constantly change their shape and color in retrospect. Their unstable image changes as new experiences and perspectives emerge for observers in later periods. In our field, particular problems arise when historians attempt to impose Western period concepts (problematic already in themselves) to histories of literature in East-Central Europe. The use of terms like Romanticism, Realism, or Modernism for these literatures confronts, therefore, a double problem: they are notoriously vague already in their Western contexts (Are William Blake and Heinrich von Kleist Romantic poets? When does Realism begin, and Modernism end?), and their application (even in modified form) becomes particularly problematic when we try to expand them to the specific phenomena and conditions of East-Central Europe. Virgil Nemoainu’s study of the East European “Taming of Romanticism” is a fine exploration of the kind of metamorphoses that concepts and movement undergo in voyaging across the map. General period concepts should be defined on the basis of a consensus corpus, but that corpus can only be established if we know what we mean by the term. This vicious circle proves to be even more vicious if the concepts are stretched to become pan-European, for then we are confronted, once more, with Kracauer’s Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen, a problem we have broached in the introduction to Part I. With the possible exception of Constructivism, all the literary periods and movements in post-1800 East-Central Europe have been imported from Western Europe — with a time lag that complicates attempts to define both the terms themselves and their function within the receiving culture. The literatures of the region have often been concerned with their belatedness in relation to the Western literary cultures, and they occasionally measured their lag also in relation to neighboring cultures. Romanian literature, for example, experienced its “will to modernity” in the nineteenth century not only with an acute sense of belatedness but also with an “unhappy consciousness” about its need to choose “imitation” (Matei Calinescu, “Romanian” 31) to recover the lost ground. We may, however, understand imitation in terms of “mimetic rivalry” (Girard, “Innovations”), which implies a pendular action/reaction movement, a constant “violence” to (reappraisal of) models. It also implies a constant search for those mysterious ways

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of transcending imitation, of reliving the “will to modernity” in terms proper to the receiving culture. From this perspective, the “lag” has been useful to East-Central European literatures, providing them with opportunities for a new synthesis. At their best, these cultures have managed to turn the frustration of “belatedness” into a creative assimilation (reconstruction) of particular European trends, at their worst they gave rise to xenophobic and populist movements that glorified a mythic national cultural past against foreign imports. As Péter Krasztev argues in his article on Modernization and Modernism, the lag led to a contemporaneity peculiar to East-Central Europe: the various periods and movements overlapped with each other much more extensively than in Western Europe — thus making neat separations and definitions difficult. For these and a host of other reasons our History problematizes the use of such traditional terms as the Enlightenment, Classicism, Romanticism, and Realism. Although the focus on periodization foregrounds them in the following Section, we do not accept them as givens with specific and stable meanings. Instead, we explore the difficulties of periodization and the contradictions to which their uses lead. Take, for instance, Roman Koropeckyj’s article on the battle between Classicism and Romanticism in Poland. In this case, the use of the terms is imperative because they were employed by the early nineteenth-century poets and scholars, most explicitly by Kazimierz Brodzin´ski. But Roman Koropeckyj shows that both Classicism and Romanticism meant different things to different people (Brodzin´ski popularized German Romantic aesthetics, whereas Niemcewicz introduced aspects of English Romanticism, notably Walter Scott’s ways of writing historical novels), and that the Philomats of young Mickiewicz in Vilnius was, at least initially, inspired, by Voltaire’s Rationalism and Schiller’s Idealism. Mickiewicz’s “Ode to Youth” signals “what was to come” (namely Romanticism), yet it used “Classicist form and Masonic symbols.” Robert Pynsent starts his essay by outlining the ways in which Czech Decadents, for all their debt to French poets, differed from them significantly and “when they bothered about it,” preferred to call themselves “synthetists” or “dilettantists.” And Endre Bojtár, finally, faced with a terminological disarray, frankly admits that defining periods and movements is a constructive enterprise: “here, as in all reconstruction, the literary historian must select those ideas that will best demonstrate regularity and conformity.” Precisely because we did not wish to demonstrate regularity and conformity, our History allows for different ways of slicing historical time. But three broad and flexible categories do seem appropriate for the literary history of East-Central Europe between 1789 and 1989: the age of national awakening, the age of modernism, and the age of communist domination. A fourth, post-1989 one is still emerging. Within this structure, Western literature and its delayed reception no longer plays a central role, though we must still cope with an intra-regional Ungleichzeitigkeit in two different ways. First, the different national awakenings did not occur simultaneously and did not run with the same rhythm; second, in most literatures the national trend (often labeled as romantic) continued to live on during the modernist phase, not only by opposing imported ideas and movements but also as a modifying force within them (which is, as Krasztev argues, one reason why Modernism was different here).

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Genres Categories of genre have a long history, and for a long time it seemed that they have essential and lasting features. But, curiously, the very nineteenth century that believed it had found the laws for periodizing history, was busily engaged in taking the classical genres apart, both by submitting them to irony and by creating ever newer hybrid forms. For the literatures of EastCentral Europe, the genre problematic was, therefore, very different from that of periodization. The novel — specifically its historical, Modernist, and Post-modern variants — the historical drama, lyrical prose, Symbolist and Avant-garde poetry and other (sub)genres have, like movements and periods, been imported from Western Europe. But there are important “native” genres, for instance heroic epic and folk poetry in general, and quite a few more recent genres that originated wholly or in part from the region. Hence our focus in the Section on genre on reportage, literary theory, certain forms of parody, fictionalized autobiography, national operas — and the list could be extended. Given the conceptual framework of this History, our treatment of genres will by necessity be dispersed. The essays in the present Part (II) will focus largely, though not exclusively, on the novel, and its salient form, the historical novel. Drama (perceived as an institution) will be accommodated in Part IV and lyric poetry in a section of Part V, which is concerned with the canonization of national poets. The heroic epic and folk poetry will be treated in vol. 3, in the framework of folklore. Not only are the genres dispersed over different Parts of this History; their treatment in the chapters of Part II is also dispersed in more than one sense. Instead of seeking the “core” of a national or regional genre (the “essence” of Polish lyric poetry or the Romanian novel) we tend to focus rather on “boundary transgressions.” Thus the section on “Shifting Voices” highlights the emergence of new (sub)genres like the reportage, the lyrical novel, the fictionalized autobiography, parody, and literary theory, while the section on the multimedia arts of opera and film examines literature’s transgression of its own linguistic boundaries. More important is another, less evident, centrifugal pressure on the articles in this Part, most of which are, for practical as well as theoretical reasons, on a single national literature. In addition to explicit comparative references, these articles are indirectly decentered as a result of the context in which they appear, their contiguity or vicinity to articles that affect their monolinguistic character. For instance, the national focus of the article on twentieth-century Polish poetry is indirectly relativized by the article on Polish-Jewish literature that makes both generic and national boundaries hazy (is that literature Polish, Jewish, or both? Is it a genre? Are its texts connected by the ethnicity of their authors? By a common theme?). Similarly, the article on the Romanian novel should be read together with the neighboring articles on other “shifting genres” that transgress their original conventions, but also with the article on Transylvania in vol. 2, which will give ample attention to the novels written in Transylvania in the German and Hungarian languages. Though national traditions of genres have been very important, and will remain so, our History attempts, probably for the first time, to allocate appropriate space to texts with impure pedigrees, both in terms of nationality and genre.

Shifting periods and trends

The articles of Krasztev and Bojtár attempt regional overviews of the various East-Central European literary styles and movements between 1880 and 1940. Although both of them attempt to define traditional terms like Symbolism, Modernism, and the Avant-garde, they are ultimately more concerned with the border crossings and overlappings between them — transgressions that are not, primarily, related to the regional treatment but seem to be inherent in each of the national literatures involved. The articles by Koropeckyj and Pynsent represent in-depth studies of limited subjects that do not easily lend themselves to a regional treatment: the rise of the young Mickiewicz from both an intellectually and ethnically mixed culture has no parallel in the other East-European literatures, while the brief rise and fall of Decadence in Czech literature can only be related to French models, for nowhere else did writers in the region form a group under the banner of Decadence. An attempt to cover all movements and periods could only have led to superficiality, encyclopedic elephantiasis, or both. What we offer then are exemplars of a regional approach, one in which micro- and macro approaches complement each other.

Between Classicism and Romanticism: The year 1820 in Polish literature Roman Koropeckyj In 1820, the main topic of a largely dismissive conversation among the established literati in Warsaw and Vilnius was a thing called Romanticism, what it meant (no one was quite sure), what it portended (nothing good), what relevance it had for Polish literature (little, if any). At the same time, Kazimierz Brodzin´ski continued to press his Slavic “third way” between Romanticism and Classicism with his Wiesław, an idyllic evocation of Polish peasant life. Stanisław Kostka Potocki, one of the most influential literary critics of his time, published that same year in Warsaw Podróz˙ do Ciemnogrodu (A Voyage to Ignoranceville), a caustic satire of old-fashioned Polish obscurantism; Ignacy Humnicki staged his Z˙ółkiewski pod Cecorø (Z˙ółkiewski at Cecora), a patriotic tragedy that slavishly imitated its French classicist models; Feliks Bernatowicz published Nierozsødne s´luby (Injudicious Vows) a pseudohistorical epistolary novel that reflected the anglophile atmosphere of Poland’s aristocratic salons; and Kajetan Koz´mian, the most implacable of the Warsaw neoclassicists, was still working on his georgic Ziemian´stwo polskie (Polish Husbandry; 1839), which he had been publishing in bits and pieces since 1812. But then in 1820, too, the budding young poets Seweryn Goszczyn´ski and Józef Bohdan Zaleski, together with their friend and future literary critic Michał Grabowski, arrived

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in Warsaw from the Ukrainian provinces, where they had been exploring Ukrainian folklore and the history of the Cossacks. And in provincial Lithuania, Adam Mickiewicz, a twenty-two-yearold graduate of Vilnius University, was producing a string of programmatic Romantic ballads that would eventually constitute the core of his first published volume of poetry. In that same year, he also wrote an “Oda do młodosći” (Ode to Youth; Dzieła 1: 42–44), an unabashedly Schillerian poem that signaled the appearance of a new generation in Polish literature. All of this literary activity was taking place against the background of — and, indeed, was invariably and inevitably implicated in — far-reaching socioeconomic changes and rising political tensions. In the wake of the partitions and the Napoleonic interlude, a growing bourgeoisie as well as a déclassé gentry began changing the complexion of the Polish nation, gradually eroding the cultural hegemony of its landowning aristocracy. At the same time, despite constitutional guarantees extended to the new Polish Congress Kingdom in 1815, Alexander I and his minions were making every effort to stifle untoward expressions of Polish autonomy, there as well as in those Polish lands absorbed by the Russian Empire between 1772 and 1795. In response, more and more Poles began dissenting against perceived injustices. Some did so openly, as when in 1820 the Polish Diet in Warsaw protested to the Tsar against violations of the Constitution; others, under the cover of Freemasonry or university fraternities, began conspiring for the restoration of pre-partition Poland. Still others chose to acquiesce, guided ostensibly by traditional notions of loyalty that more often than not were informed by vested interests and a desire to maintain the sociopolitical status quo. Mickiewicz’s “Ode to Youth” constitutes something of a prism in which much of what characterizes this period is refracted. In this respect, as the first programmatic contribution on the part of the young generation to what was becoming an increasingly heated debate among Polish intellectuals about the significance of Romanticism, it constitutes a remarkable gesture, one not fully understood at first even by the poet’s own fraternity brothers in Vilnius. Its versification and imagery, full of classical allusions and Masonic symbols, deftly met the literary expectations of Polish neo-Classicism. Ideologically, however, the ode’s content subverts its classicist form and what that form had effectively come to represent: the superannuated cultural paradigm of Poland’s conservative establishment. Juxtaposing as it does youthful vitality, enthusiasm, and idealism with the smug calcification of old age, the ode articulates, in no uncertain axiological terms, not so much the program of a new generation, but rather the significance of that notion as such. And it does so in a way that was altogether radical. In its appeal to the “wisdom of folly” and summons to “overcome what reason cannot overcome,” this ode is nothing less than a manifesto of a new sensibility, one that in the charged atmosphere of the time had, and was quickly understood to have, implications that were as much political as they were literary. Indeed, its concluding lines, “Welcome, morning star of liberty, / The sun of salvation is next” (Dzieła 1: 44), would become a rallying cry during the Polish insurrection ten years later. As Koz´mian observed in his reminiscences of this period, Mickiewicz conjoined with this ode “revolutionary aspirations in literature with aspirations for patriotic revolution” (Kawyn 447). Although “Ode to Youth” could not be published at the time (it first appeared in 1827, and then only in the Austrian partition), it weighed in on what in 1820 was to a great extent a debate in posse. As a strictly literary practice, Romanticism in Poland was barely registering: the ballads Mickiewicz and other members of his cohort were writing awaited publication though they were

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already circulating. And while in this respect the early neo-Classicist attacks on Romanticism should be viewed as something of a prophylactic, they were nonetheless aimed at a phenomenon that was still foreign — and German, to boot. As a consequence, they concerned themselves as much with the epistemology (and political implications) of the new sensibility as with literary specifics. Thus for Jan Sńiadecki, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Vilnius University, whose 1819 essay “O pismach klasycznych i romantycznych” (On Classicist and Romantic Writing) constitutes the fullest articulation of Polish neo-Classicist thinking on the subject, Romanticism in its German variant proffered nothing less than a total rejection of Rationalism and the scientific as well as artistic rules that inform it: “unfettering the imagination” in its pursuit of transcendence, Romanticism sought to destroy the very foundation of beauty, namely reason. Indeed, warns Sńiadecki, “to suggest to people that they practice the art of writing with an unbridled imagination without reins and rules is tantamount to prescribing dissolute passions as laws for moral life and making the world of both mind and society a place for tempests, violence, and devastation” (Kawyn 56). For all the objections that Sńiadecki may have had to German Romanticism on abstractly philosophical grounds, his greatest concern was its potential as a model specifically for Polish national culture. In its irrational exuberance, this foreign construct struck him as being at odds with what for his generation was a set of cultural strategies that had in effect saved Poland from oblivion. It is only in this context that one can truly understand the vehemence with which the neo-Classicists mocked Romanticism’s fascination with the supernatural, the common folk, and the Middle Ages. After all, with the third partition of Poland in 1795 and the concomitant abolition of institutions that define an independent state, Polish identity became a function of such ostensible intangibles as language and historical memory. It fell, then, to writers and scholars and their aristocratic patrons, all educated in the spirit of the Polish Enlightenment, to create alternative institutions that would at once preserve and codify those intangibles. Salons, periodicals, publishing houses, private repositories of national treasures, the National Theater, and, above all, The Society of Friends of Learning (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk) were all mobilized in the effort to maintain at least a spiritual Poland. Literature, of course, occupied a privileged position within this paradigm, constituting as it did the most potent and capacious carrier of language, history, and national values. In this respect, the second generation of Polish Classicists dutifully continued, in dire circumstances, the work of their pre-partition predecessors, which had laid the groundwork for a program of national enlightenment that had brought Poland out of the obscurantism of the Saxon period. A Romantic cultural model that seemed to call for a return to that very obscurantism was thus perceived as nothing less than a rebuke both to their conception of Polish nationhood and to their labors on its behalf. And herein lies the rub. When a nominally autonomous Kingdom of Poland was created in 1815 under the suzerainty of the Russian Tsar, those who strove to conserve that spiritual Poland started to believe that this plot of land, with those few national institutions that they managed to create, was reward enough for their efforts, and that, therefore, they should be grateful to those who deigned to bestow it. Not necessarily a complacency, but at least a belief emerged, all the more rigidly held under the circumstances, in the efficacy of their particular cultural strategy. It is not surprising, then, that in this situation the favored genres were tragedies, descriptive poems, fables, and satire — genres that were most conducive to explicitly articulating Polish

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Enlightenment ideology. Hence, too, the burgeoning of literary criticism in this period — exemplified in Warsaw by the group of neo-Classicist theater critics known as the Society of X’s (1815–19) — which more often than not served as an aggressively defensive vehicle against any ideas that might threaten the enlighteners’ model of Polish nationhood. A number of these works — Alojzy Felin´ski’s brilliant historical tragedy in verse Barbara Radziwiłłówna, which debuted in 1817 but was not published until his death in 1820; Koz´mian’s elegant descriptive poem Ziemian´stwo polskie with its praise of the aristocratic landowning way of life; Franciszek Morawski’s fables, which, aside from impressing typical Enlightenment values, also shrewdly commented on the political situation of the time; or, for that matter, Sńiadecki’s anti-Romantic diatribe, a model of pellucid discursive writing — undoubtedly represent some of the most outstanding achievements of Polish Classicism. Nevertheless, the neo-Classicists’ unyielding extremism in defense of their paradigm effectively signaled the decline of their hegemony over Polish cultural production (Z˙bikowski 292–93). To be sure, there were efforts on the part of certain figures in the cultural establishment to mitigate, as it were, this extremism. Kazimierz Brodzin´ski, one of the most influential and learned literati of the period, published his idyll Wiesław (1820) in order to put into practice his theoretical musings concerning a “third way” in Polish literature, which he had articulated two years earlier in the essay “O klasycznosći i romantycznosći” (On Classicism and Romanticism). Inspired by Herder and Madame de Stäel and armed with a solid knowledge of German aesthetics, Brodzin´ski understood Romanticism and Classicism to be not so much conflicting literary sensibilities but rather expressions of a particular national character, German and French respectively. Consequently, instead of slavishly imitating what he called the “sensual exteriority” of the French imagination or the “interiority” of the German one, with its transcendence of rules in pursuit of the “infinite,” the Polish imagination was to articulate its own national distinctiveness. This Brodzin´ski found in a love of the fatherland, admiration for noble deeds, moderation, “a free imagination, not terrifying [and] without fantastic notions, gentle tenderness, simplicity,” agricultural images of “rusticity and family life, morality in practical philosophy, non-tempestuous emotions, and modest manners” (Kawyn 41). With an undisguised nod to Herder and Schiller, Brodzin´ski singled out the idyll for best capturing these traits, a genre with an impeccable Polish Classicist pedigree. But Brodzin´ski deviated from the Classicist model of pastoral poetry in Wiesław by depicting the simple, harmonious life among Polish rustics against the background of recent historical events. Moreover, he gave voice to rustic values by extensively using folkloric elements, a gesture that was not so much Romantic in its intentions as it was a reflection of the author’s Herderian belief in the role that folklore played in articulating the specificity of a given national collective. Despite Brodzin´ski’s judicious treatment of German Romanticism in his 1818 essay, his undisguised sympathy for certain aspects of its ideology as well as his (no less judiciously expressed) doubts concerning Classicism had been enough to goad Sńiadecki into his 1819 critique of Romantic aesthetics and his concomitant defense of Classicist Rationalism. The socalled war between the Romantics and Classicists had begun, lasting in one form or another until the outbreak of the 1830 uprising and even beyond. One of the first to put in his two cents was Leon Borowski, Sńiadecki’s colleague at Vilnius University and Mickiewicz’s teacher of rhetoric and poetics, who came to Brodzin´ski’s defense with Uwagi nad poezjø i wymowø (Remarks on


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Poetry and Rhetoric; 1819–20). Deriding such basic precepts of French Classicist aesthetics as imitation, rules, and taste, he called for a literature that was inspired by ancient classical sources and by Polish folklore, even though he remained unconvinced by Brodzin´ski’s notion of what a Polish national literature should be. Indeed, with the eventual victory of the Romantics, Brodzin´ski’s idyllic “third way” became irrelevant. Some twelve years later, in his poetic drama Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve, Part 3, 1832), Mickiewicz would (rather unfairly) lump it together with Classicism when in a satiric depiction of a pre-insurrectionary Warsaw salon he mocked the latter for singing “in a thousand lines the planting of peas,” and the former for insisting that “Our nation takes pride in its simplicity and hospitality, / Our nation does not like scenes of horror and violence; / […] We Slavs like idylls” (Dzieła 3: 200, 208). But this was after 1830, when the entire Polish cultural system underwent a radical reconfiguration. For the early practices of Polish Romanticism, Brodzin´ski’s poetics would have a profound impact. What distinguishes Wiesław, in terms of style, emotions, and professed values, is its simplicity and programmatic accessibility. After all, as Brodzin´ski wrote in his essay “On Classicism and Romanticism,” literature “is not for a separate class that ascribes to itself good taste, but for the entire reading public” (Kawyn 45). He implicitly recognizes here that the audience for literature in Poland was undergoing a transformation, that it no longer consisted of a narrow, highly educated reading public whose tastes were at once met and shaped by an essentially elitist literary culture. The un-Classicist genre designation of Wiesław as “tale” (powiesć´) may in this sense be viewed as an awareness of a new type of reader — from among the growing bourgeoisie, the déclassé petty gentry, and women — who had an increasing predilection for novels and romances. While this new market was satisfied largely by translations from the French or English (or, in the case of elite readers, by originals), it was not long before Polish authors also tried their hand at romances and historical novels. When Maria Wirtemberska, a central figure in one of the Kingdom’s most exclusive aristocratic salons, published in 1816 Malwina, czyli domys´lnosć´ serca (Malwina or the Perspicacity of the Heart), she set the tone for a slew of similar romances that began appearing the following decade. Most of them were published in provincial journals, which is not surprising considering that the genre system of the capital’s Classicist literary elite marginalized the novel, especially its lowbrow sentimentalist variant. Indeed, such arbiters of taste as Sńiadecki wasted little time in decrying the novel’s emotional “exaltation,” which he considered no less threatening to his notion of a rational aesthetic and social order than, subsequently, Romanticism. Despite these criticisms, Wirtemberska’s circle, with its intensified emotions, its dissections of the psychology of love, and its concern with expressing that psychology in elegant Polish, produced Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Józef Lipin´ski, Ludwik Kropin´ski, and others who turned to the novel as a vehicle for expressing this sensibility. Among them was Feliks Bernatowicz, the author of Nierozsødne s´luby, who apparently styled his own life on that of Goethe’s Werther. Unlike Wirtemberska, but certainly in the spirit of Goethe, Rousseau, and Richardson, Bernatowicz chose the epistolary form for his tale of star-crossed lovers, which allowed for both a greater degree of individualization and a more “sincere” expression of emotions and the language of love. At the same time, by dispensing with an omniscient narrator, Bernatowicz was able to present a view of love that was markedly more nuanced than that of the rather didactic Wirtemberska. For Władysław and Klara, the heroes of Nierozsødne s´luby, love

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becomes a kind of existential statement, continually tested by twists of fortune; it is a metaphor for the human condition in that it constitutes the essence of their beings. In conflict with the conventions of class, wealth, and religion, love must necessarily be ill-fated: unable to bear Klara’s forced marriage to another, Władysław commits suicide; Klara, in turn, dies on his grave and is then buried by his side. Both expect spiritual union in another world. By its very nature, their kind of love cannot be consummated on earth. For all of his use of contemporary novelistic conventions, Bernatowicz stretched the boundaries of the genre. By situating the action of Nierozsødne s´luby in the sixteenth century, he evoked an epoch in Polish history considered to be a golden age. After the disappearance of the Polish state, it was precisely this epoch that was featured in a number of Classicist tragedies, foremost among them, Felin´ski’s Barbara Radziwiłłówna. It also became the subject of historical novels that were just beginning to come into vogue. Bernatowicz would contribute with his own Pojata, córka Lezdejki, albo Litwini w XIV wieku (Pojata, Daughter of Lezdejko, or Lithuanians in the Fourteenth Century; 1826) and Nałe˛cz (The Kerchief; 1828); but the writer associated most closely with the rise of the historical novel in Poland is Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz. If, arguably, Brodzin´ski popularized German Romantic aesthetics, in however attenuated a form, Niemcewicz was in large part responsible for introducing certain aspects of English Romanticism. Thanks to his command of the language, he had direct access to the novels of Walter Scott years before the latter’s work achieved popularity in Poland. While his first historical novel, Dwaj panowie Sieciechowie (Two Gentlemen called Sieciech; 1815), was still largely didactic, his second one, Jan z Te˛czyna (Jan of Te˛czyn), begun in 1821, was very much an exercize in the manner of Walter Scott. Woven into its antiquarian evocation of sixteenthcentury Poland (albeit not without glaring anachronisms) is a relatively well-crafted plot that is informed by Niemcewicz’s expectations for the historical novel, namely to depict “the society of a given people […] in detail too minute for a historian”; but also to “transport us into those times” and thus “allow us to live and associate with our own selves” (Te˛czyna, 3–4). However, Niemcewicz’s literary presence at the time must be measured in terms that transcend his Scottism, just as, again, Brodzin´ski’s overshadows his notion of a “third way” between Classicism and Romanticism. Indeed, the work of both men must be viewed as a critical juncture between sensibility, which since at least the beginning of the century had contested the Polish Enlightenment paradigm, and Romanticism, which at once reconfigured and hyperbolized that sensibility into an explicitly anti-Classicist program. In this respect, the literary practices of Polish Romantics in 1820 were indebted as much to Niemcewicz’s historical imagination as they were to Brodzin´ski’s Herderian insistence on a nationally distinct literature informed by its folklore and “sensitive heart.” More moderate and open to innovative trends than their neo-Classicist contemporaries, both Niemcewicz and Brodzin´ski were nonetheless members of the same elite that made Warsaw the cultural capital of partitioned Poland. Polish Romanticism, for its part, was a distinctly regional phenomenon, arising, significantly enough, in lands where the “folk” was almost exclusively non-Polish. To be sure, both Vilnius University and the Krzemieniec Lyceum in the Ukraine, the two institutions of higher learning whence Romantic tendencies largely emanated, were cultural centers in their own right. As the figure of Sńiadecki attests, they were intellectually on a par with the capital, and more often than not in accord with its cultural concerns. It is telling,


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though, that Goszczyn´ski, Zaleski, and Grabowski, members of the first generation of Polish Romantics, all chose to seek their literary fortunes in Warsaw after receiving their secondary education in provincial Ukraine. But by the same token, for someone like Kajetan Koz´mian the presence of these interlopers in Warsaw simply underscored the view, expressed with a condescension that only an inhabitant of a cultural center can muster, that Romanticism was a product of the backward and ignorant provinces (Kawyn 446). While the Ukrainian provinces would produce their share of early Romantics, it was in Vilnius that the new sensibility was first articulated, and from where, thanks to the figure of Mickiewicz, it would eventually triumph. In 1820 Mickiewicz was a schoolteacher in the provincial Lithuanian town of Kaunas/Kowno, having completed studies at Vilnius University the previous year. Although separated from his friends — and already beginning to somewhat distance himself from them intellectually — he continued to play an active role in the student fraternity he helped organize at the university in 1817. Known as the Philomaths (something on the order of German Burschenschaften), it was founded at a time when Lithuania experienced a belated Enlightenment. The group was thus initially conceived as a vehicle for propagating such progressive and more or less explicitly patriotic values as Rationalism (Voltaire was a favorite), education, respect for the native land, its history, language and traditions, moral rectitude, loyalty, friendship, while embracing also a distinctly Schillerian cult of youth as an engine of change in the face of the patriarchal status quo. In practice it was to be “a republic of the young,” a kind of utopian microcosm in which these values were to be lived (Witkowska, Rówiesńicy 70–127). While the Philomaths were very careful about maintaining their secrecy, the fraternity was not conspiratorial in any political sense. Their insistence on secrecy, however, as well as their desire to inculcate wider circles of Vilnius’s youth with their program, would soon enough be viewed as dangerous by the increasingly more reactionary regime in St. Petersburg. With its Classicist form and Masonic symbols, its paeans to friendship and the potential of youth, and its all too clear allusions to national liberation, Mickiewicz’s “Ode to Youth” is thus a fitting summation of the Philomath enterprise, and also a signal of what was to come. It was among the Philomaths, too, with their strong interest in native traditions, that the literary form most closely associated with the birth of Romanticism in Poland made an explosive entry on the scene. What drew the Vilnius students as well as their somewhat younger contemporaries from the Ukraine to the ballad (or, as Zaleski preferred, the dumka) was perhaps not so much musings of a deeper theoretical nature, but rather the presence everywhere around them of a Slavic folklore to which Herder had effectively opened their eyes. Indeed, it was Schiller and the Polonized Herder, to some extent exemplified by Brodzin´ski, who provided the young Romantics with a prism through which to view the culture of the “folk” as a storehouse of traditional Polish/Slavic mores and beliefs; as an alternative but no less legitimate “Polish” source of history and language; but also as a vehicle for expressing an epistemology that had little to do with “the folk” as such. Both Niemcewicz and Brodzin´ski set a precedent, the first as the author of patriotic “historical songs” and proto-ballads (dumy), collected in the volume S´piewy historyczne (1816), the second as the proponent of a post-Classicist Polish idyll and author of Wiesław. But by admitting the supernatural, with its elements of gothic horror and trepidation, Mickiewicz and

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his cohort moved the form into a realm that transcended pastoral “simplicity” and knocked on the doors of the irrational. It was, in the end, in the ostensible form of the ballad “Romantycznosć´” (Romanticism), in which the ravings of a simple village girl are brought up against the “lens and eye” of a rationalist scholar, that Mickiewicz would programmatically, and decisively, answer his neoclassicist nemesis at Vilnius University in 1821. With the publication of Mickiewicz’s Ballady i romanse (Ballads and Romances) in 1822, Romantic sensibility became, for better or worse, the defining fact of Polish life — culturally as well as sociopolitically — and it would remain so for at least another four decades. Indeed, it can well be argued that it constitutes a paradigm for Polish culture to this very day.

From modernization to modernist literature Péter Krasztev In this article, we give an overview of the various literary and artistic currents that emerged in East-Central Europe towards the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Though most of these currents were imported from Western Europe, they acquired different meanings in the region, partly because they met there the waning but still powerful currents of nationalism and National Revival, partly because of other local and regional aesthetic and social values. In the spirit of our history’s subtitle, we shall identify disjunctures as much as junctures, both within the region and with respect to Western Europe.

Nationalism and Modernity in East-Central Europe The national movements of the nineteenth century took two main forms in East-Central Europe. Those peoples who had no statehood (among them the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, and Slovaks) fought against the Russian and German/Hungarian repression, while those who had already achieved statehood, among them Hungarians, attempted to strengthen and cultivate their cultural ideology. Both forms of nationalism were basically hostile to cosmopolitanism and tended to look inward. The elites strove to purge the nation from alien elements and to protect the national achievements against external influences. Each ethnic group constructed national myths to forge a cultural identity: these included an ancient BulgarianThracian-Slavic league of nations, an Albanian, Serbian, and Croatian Illyria, a Daco-Romania, a brotherhood of Huns and Hungarians, a Great Moravian Empire clad in Slovakian mist, and a Polish Sarmatism. Since the public tended to accept these nineteenth-century myth-constructions as historical verities, they resisted demythologizing and scholarly refutation, and survived

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the decline of the sociopolitical conditions that engendered them. The national myths continued to live on, alongside the new ideas and artistic currents that fostered individualism and cosmopolitanism. This persistence of national myths explains in part the emergence of strong chauvinistic and racist trends in the 1930s and the disturbing reemergence of nationalist movements in the 1980s and 90s. But the developing nineteenth-century middle classes also opted for Western or Eastern paradigms for their social, political, and economic development. Bulgaria adopted a GreekRussian influence until the 1880s and then followed the French; Romania hoped to connect with the nations of the Romance languages, but also with German culture; the Slovaks and Slovenes looked towards Vienna, though the second coronation of the Russophile Miloš Obrenovic´ in Serbia (1858) and the popularity of Russophile ideas in post-1867 Slovakia (Sziklay 25) indicate that some Slav elites associated with Russia. Influenced by Count Széchenyi’s ideas on industrialization and commerce, the Hungarian reforms sought models in England.

Notions of the Modern and Modernity in Literature Seeking a common platform for all modern literary trends around the turn of the century, Aleksandar Flaker suggested that all of them, from Symbolism to Dadaism, rejected to varying degrees the principles of imitation (formacije 82). Flaker follows here Viktor Zhirmunskii, who defined Modernism as the most comprehensive and objective term for all rejections of Realism in literature after the 1880s (145). Miklós Szabolcsi skeptically responded that Modernism was meaningless as a universal period concept of world literature (38), and Czesław Miłosz suggests that Modernism inaugurates a universal cultural flow (History 322). Those who cherished their fatherland resisted this “globalizing effect of modernity” (Giddens 63). Thus, addressing his contemporary Westerners in “Cosmopolitan Poetry” (1877), János Arany reaffirmed his poetic attachment to his homeland: Be, if you can, “world-awakener”! Rouse the drowsy West: Sacred to me is still the cradle That raised me a Hungarian; Starting from there a thousand bonds Tie me to my homeland strong: With but a mere abstract ideal I’d rather silence my song. (Összes 399–400)

In East-Central Europe, the modern attitude generally meant self-analysis and opening up to the world. This variant of “reflexive modernity” (Giddens 36) emerged here in response to the inward-looking tendencies of the national movements. In the last third of the nineteenth century we may regard all opposition to the national-populist demand that art must help build and preserve the nation as modern. This intellectual rather than artistic attitude managed to bring together artists and thinkers who sought an individual and cultural renewal that was distinct from social and institutional modernization.

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Early Modernism in East-Central Europe Cosmopolitan modernity infiltrated East-Central European nationalism only slowly. Due to the persistence of nationalism and a delayed arrival, the modern Western literary and artistic currents did not follow upon each other in East-Central Europe but tended to exist side-by-side, often resulting in new and strange amalgams with occultism, socialism, nationalism, and theosophy. If, as Flaker writes, modern East-European literature emerged from the disintegration of national-populist art and Realism (formacije 77–92), and the newer trends from the West clashed not so much with the previous imports but with the national tradition, we may explain, for instance, why and how East- and West-European Symbolism differed. In the East, Symbolism was not so much a reaction to Parnassism, Naturalism, and Positivism, but a contemporary of these, as well as of other, currents. Karol Wyka has suggested that two conceptions of literature existed in the last third of the nineteenth century: one, wherein literature had to serve politics and national emancipation, and the other, the “normal” state, wherein works of art were judged according to aesthetic criteria (201 ff). In East-Central Europe, literature tended to be “abnormal,” since it all too often entered into partnership with nationalism. Foreign trends and ideas started to infiltrate in the 1880s, but they came to question the national perspective seriously only in the early twentieth century. One may distinguish between two types of infiltration: one grouped around theoreticians and periodicals, the other around key artists who engendered a group of followers. We find the first in the circle around the Bulgarian Misa˘l, the Slovene Dom in Svet, the Czech Lumír, the Romanian Contemporanul, the Polish Z˙ycie (Life), the Hungarian Hét (The Week), and the Latvian Dienas Lapa; the second is represented by the Serbian “first Westerner” Vojislav Ilic´, the Croatians Ksaver Šandor alski, Ivo Vojnovic´, and Milan Begovic´, the Ukrainian Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukraiinka, the Romanian Alexandru Macedonski, and the Estonian Juhan Liiv. The first publications of Nikolla Migjeni in Albania, Ivan Krasko in Slovakia, and Juozapas Herbacˇiauskas in Lithuania herald both cosmopolitanism and Symbolism. The Polish poet Cyprian Norwid typifies early modern attitudes in East-Central Europe. As an exile, he was alienated from his native public and he maintained a strained relationship with other exiled authors. Perhaps this helped him to overcome the revolutionary-romantic but sentimental nationalism of his contemporaries and to turn into a modern poet and thinker of considerable originality. Norwid shunned the public because he thought that his generation, “born between the past and the future,” could not do otherwise. Hence his poetry was discovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century and started to make an impact on Polish poetry only when it became evident that the questions of his Christian personalism resembled those that the Symbolists had to face in their search for the Absolute. Miłosz compares Norwid to the American Transcendentalists Emerson and Melville (History 272), while Bojtár likens him to Baudelaire, the Hungarian János Vajda, the Latvian Janis Esenbergis, the Estonian Juhan Liiv, and other early poets of resignation (Az ember 161). The East-Central European transition to modernism is perhaps most revealing in the circle around the Bulgarian periodical Misa˘l (1892–1907). Its editor-in-chief and theoretician, Kra˘styu Kra˘stev (called Doctor Kra˘stev), wrote a doctorate under Wilhelm Wundt. Eclectic German ideas animated also his associates, among them the poets Pencho Slaveikov and Petko Yurdanov


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Todorov, and the theoreticians Ivan S. Andreichin and Boyan Penev, who were less nationalist and conservative than the populists. The mood of Misa˘l is apparent in Todorov’s play, Zidari (Masons; 1902), which openly started to challenge the patriarchal values in the name of individual freedom. The Misa˘l-circle wanted to integrate Bulgaria into European culture, yet it also defended the spirit of Slavic and Bulgarian folk culture. Following the Russian Vestnik Evropy and Russkaya Mysl, Misa˘l published Western and Russian authors at a furious pace for fifteen years, as if wanting to make up for centuries of Bulgarian provincialism. Bulgarian literature had to be brought up to European standards, before it could reveal itself to Europe. New aesthetic criteria were devised to compare Bulgarian works to the achievements of world literature rather than to domestic standards. In Serbian literature, Parnassism functioned as a bridge to “the great tradition of European modernist culture” (W. Kot 96). But the Western connotations of the term may be misleading, for the Serbian conservatives were hostile to artists, groups, or periodicals with a European orientation. Independent Serbia’s first generation of intellectuals was strongly under Russian influence. Even Vojislav Ilic´, the first “Westerner,” approached French poetry via Russian, for he read no other foreign language (Živkovic´ 344–45). The elite adopted the state-myth that the Serbs had a mission to liberate their Slav brothers from under Austrian and Turkish rule, which led to the fiasco of November 1885: Serbia’s attempt to annex Bulgaria was defeated in less than two weeks. The dominant Serbian aesthetic principle was Realism. Its chief promulgator was Jovan Skerlic´, a professor, editor, founder of Serbian literary history, cultural dictator, and a sworn enemy of modernity and the West. For a long time he struggled against a phantom of modernity rather than against any of its concrete expressions. Ljubomir Nedic´, also a student of Wundt, was the first to apply in the 1890s aesthetic criteria to literature in his theoretical and critical contributions to the periodical Srpski pregled. Vojislav Ilic´’s “Parnassist,” but actually rather romantic-elegiac, poetry broke with the national tradition. His Pesme (Poems), published in 1887, still bear traits of national Romanticism, but he discarded the stylistic and thematic stereotypes of folk poetry in his publications between 1892 and 1894. Jovan Ducˇic´ called Ilic´ a “teacher of form” (240), which rings true if we remember that Tomo Maretic´’s first codified grammar of Serbian appeared, after long debates, only in 1899. Ilic´’s style became the norm for later poets. Croatian (and Dalmatian) literature had numerous ties to European trends in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque. Nineteenth-century Croatia became more provincial, though European thought and art still penetrated more easily here than in Serbia. Ksaver Šandor alski, Ivo Vojnovic´, Milan Begovic´, and other Croatian intellectuals came from the urban bourgeoisie, were educated abroad, and spoke foreign languages. The Romantic poetry of Silvije Kranjcˇevic´, or the Turgenevian prose of Janko Leskovar, which experimented with Impressionism and sought “thoughts for eternity” (Stamac´ 155), were not yet genuinely Western inspired. Vojnovic´’s Psyche (1889) is considered the first overture to modern Western literature (Bobrownicka 12), and his play Ekvinocij (Equinox), which broke with national-populist Romanticism in 1895, may be regarded as initiating a Croatian renewal. But the event that led to a more general opening to the West was, strangely enough, the ousting of anti-Hungarian students from the University of Zagreb in 1895. Continuing their studies in

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Vienna and Prague they formed two artistic groups that shaped Croatian literature in the next decades: the Vienna group advocated cosmopolitanism and a metaphysical poetry, while the group in Prague patriotism and social dedication. In Slovenia, Modernism made its appearance in two literary-social periodicals, the Catholicconservative Dom in svet (Home and World) and the liberal pro-Western Ljubljanski zvon (Ljubljana Bells). The clear-cut distinction between liberal and conservative was striking and uncharacteristic of the region. The editors of Dom in svet steadily opposed the loosening of literary form and insisted on Christian-national and Pan-Slavic values. They mocked Western Decadence and Anton Aškerc, allegedly its domestic representative (1899: 12–13), and they regarded the Czech Jaroslav Vrchlický a black sheep among the Slavs: “God save the Slavs from such poets,” exclaimed the journal (1890/1). Yet, for all its bias, Dom in svet conscientiously reported on the foreign culture and literature, including l’art pour l’art (1889), Schopenhauer (1890), and Tolstoy (1892). Evgen Lampe, its editor-in-chief, gave a detailed account of the European literatures in the preceding two decades (1901). Dom in svet may have criticized Modernist works and authors, but did not ignore them. Ljubljanski zvon, despite the provincial aura of its title, became the organ of Slovene Naturalism from the very outset (1881). In contrast to Dom in svet, it regarded Vrchlický and the second Czech cosmopolitan generation of his Lumír as an example. From the mid-nineties onward, Ljubljanski zvon debated in its pages how Slovene literature could link up with Europe. Antun Aškerc published here in 1899 his criticism of the two most prominent figures of Slovene Symbolism, Ivan Cankar and Oton Župancˇicˇ. If Ljubljanski zvon also opposed cosmopolitan modernity from a national perspective, its standards were closer to the West. In Hungary, modern thought was discussed relatively early, in the “cosmopolitanism debate” of 1878 between János Arany and Gyula Reviczky, who was perhaps the first in the region to declare that the greatest poets were most national “but most universal and individual as well” (Vegyes 487). Reviczky’s words echo in the 1895 Manifesto of the Czech Modernists: “be thyself and you’ll be Czech.” Reviczky wanted to exclude sentimentality and politics from art — “art does not emote; replacing editorials and parliamentary speeches cannot be its mission” (Vegyes 475). Arany’s earlier quoted lines from “Cosmopolitan Poetry” seem to hold on to a sentimental national aesthetics that was already outmoded then, yet they also display a ˝ szikék” (Autumn Leaves) a dominant, certain self-reflectivity that was to become in the cycle “O and emphatically modern feature of his poetry. At the time of Reviczky’s beginnings two periodicals also attempted to widen the horizons: Aladár Benedek’s Új Világ (New World; 1869–70) and Tamás Szana’s and Lajos Abafi’s Figyelo˝ (Observer; 1871–76). But it was only in 1890 that József Kiss launched A Hét (The Week), which is generally seen as a forerunner of Nyugat (West; 1908–). The new spirit was not yet the modernity depicted above, but it played an important mediating role (Béla Németh 83) and broadened the literary horizon of the public. János Asbóth, Frigyes Riedl, and, above all, Jeno˝ Péterfy tried to establish independent aesthetic criteria for Hungarian literary criticism. The pre-Symbolist works of Reviczky and Jeno˝ Komjáthy did not reach Western Europe, but their world-view and poetics strikingly anticipate two kinds of Symbolist attitudes in EastCentral Europe. Reviczky’s resigned and decadent, but socially concerned, lyric poetry anticipates similar combinations in the poetry of the Bulgarian Dimita˘r Boyadzhiev, the Serbian


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Sima Pandurovic´, the Croatian Antun Gustav Matoš, the Slovene Dragotin Kette, the Czech Karel Hlavácˇek, the Slovak Krasko, the Romanian George Bacovia, the Polish Jan Kasprowicz, the Ukrainian Agafangel Kryms’kyi, the Lithuanian Balys Sruoga and the Estonian Liiv. Komjáthy, on the other hand, was inspired by the mystic poetic vision of Theosophy and Rosicrucianism, which links him to the (early works of the) Bulgarian Hristo Yasenov, the Czech Jirˇí Karásek ze Lvovic, the Romanian Alexandru Macedonski, the Polish Tadeusz Micin´ski and the Estonian Ernst Enno. In Bohemia, modernity may be said to start with Tomáš G. Masaryk and Jaroslav Vrchlický. In the mid-1880s, Masaryk’s work in the social sciences and Vrchlický’s in aesthetics put the Czechs in the forefront of progressive Slavs. Masaryk’s “political realism” tried to rid the public mind of deceptive national myths. One of his great achievements was to demonstrate that a glorified national document, the “old-Czech manuscripts” that Hanka “discovered,” was forged. The manuscripts were “a favorite source of romantic national self-glorification” (Bibó 47). Masaryk’s unique exposure of Hanka was a courageous act against what Bibó (46f) calls the “national materialism” of the East European countries. Though Masaryk persistently sought realist rather than imaginary explanations for the social, economic, and political problems of his age, he too succumbed to the utopia of individual self-realization through faith, which he found in Hussitism and the Czech brotherhood. Like many other East-Central Europeans, he definitely broke in the early twentieth century with national myths but envisaged a social utopia, the return of a golden age. In this he may be compared to Dimitar Blagoev, founder of the Bulgarian social-democratic movement, who thought that the Bogumils were the first democrats in Bulgarian history. Similarly, the Romanian Alexandru Macedonski held a pseudo-Roscicrucian ideal; the German-Hungarian Henrik Jeno˝ Schmitt followed a “Gnostic anarchism”; and one finds a Russian “mystic anarchism” in Vyacheslav Ivanov and Georgi Chulkov. Czech literary historians usually locate the emergence of literary Modernism in the second half of the 1880s, when Vrchlický and the German, French, and Jewish Julius Zeyer joined the circle around the periodical Lumír, the organ of Czech national Romanticism earlier. As Jirˇí Karásek ze Lvovic put it, as late as 1940, “we are all offsprings of Vrchlický and Zeyer” (Haman 76). Vrchlický, a professor of comparative literature, poet, author, and theoretician, was in touch with the literary currents abroad and used them in his work. Zeyer, the “man from far way,” had no ties to the national-populist literature. Vrchlický’s now largely dated oeuvre was in its own days the object of heated attacks and admiration (Meˇštˇan 103–104). As we saw, the two leading periodicals of Slovenia totally disagreed on his modernity; Vrchlický’s Russian translator, Konstantin Balmont, thought that his poetry touched the brightest and most tender part of the soul that would eternally remain Slavic (604). Vrchlický’s mediating role in the history of Czech literature was comparable to that of Vojislav Ilic´ in Serbia, Silvije Kranjcˇevic´ in Croatia, József Kiss in Hungary, Lesia Ukraiinka and Ivan Franko in the Ukraine, and Ja¯nis Rainis in Latvia. His most kindred soul was perhaps the Bulgarian Pencho Slaveikov, who also demanded that literature be freed from didactic missions and be judged solely by aesthetic criteria. As political and stylistic conservatives, both Vrchlický and Slaveikov refrained from joining the political left and rejected the radical formal innovations of the next generation. Modernism definitely emerged in Czech culture, as elsewhere, when an artist went beyond the ambiguous conservatism of the first western-oriented theoreticians. This

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was Josef Svatopluk Machar, who lived in Vienna until 1917. He began with the poetry volumes Confiteor (1887) and Bez názvu (Untitled; 1889) — later to be merged with a third volume under the joint title Confiteor I–III) — and went on to break definitely with the aesthetic conservatism of Lumír. Still later he became a believer in Masaryk’s political realism and an enemy of sentimental nationalism. Modernism came late to Slovak literature. The Slovak artistic elite stubbornly remained within the romantic national tradition, doing all it could to resist modernization and “opening up.” In Slovakia, according to László Sziklay, “conserving the tradition” meant “to resist all modern attempts, to oppose all who struggle against worn-out forms; to declare as ‘unholy’ all that did not comply with the quasi-religious Puritanism of Štúr’s heritage” (27). Until the emergence of Krasko and the “Slovakian Youth” in 1909, Hviezdoslav (originally Pavol Országh) was the most modern figure in Slovak literature. He shocked his contemporaries by experimenting with erotic poetry, but his patriotic and poetic depictions of the landscape are filled with a romantic longing to get away from the world. In Romanian literature, Modernism arrived in a different way. In Péter Zirkuli’s view, the paucity of a literary tradition and the late discovery of folklore made the import of traditions from new sources around 1830 seem radical, and other Neo-Latin literatures became part of the Romanian literary tradition (“felvilágosodás” 35). The importation of literary traditions was followed by the arrival of social and aesthetic ideas from the conservative and disillusioned Germany of the 1850s. This was the spirit of the literary society Junimea, founded by the critic, scholar, and statesman Titu Maiorescu in 1865. All Romanian national-populist views of the early twentieth century were first formulated in this circle (Zirkuli, “lírai én” 102), even though Maiorescu himself favored l’art pour l’art and followed the French Parnassian poets by applying primarily aesthetic rather than didactic criteria to art. The role of the Junimea periodicals in Romania — Convorbiri Literare (1867-) and Contemporanul (1881-) — was comparable to that of the Misa˘l in Bulgaria, the Dom in svet in Slovenia and the Lumír in Prague. Junimea (Youth) was a descendant of Junges Deutschland, and, above all, of Jeune France, an early Eastern member of the large family of European young artists. Following also the example of Young Scandinavia and Young Austria, the young societies soon cropped up everywhere in the region: witness Artur Grado Benko’s manifesto Mlada Hrvatska (Young Croatia), published in the Viennese Mladost (Youth) in 1898; the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement starting in 1898; the Symbolist Moloda Muza (Young Muse) group of poets operating in Lviv from 1906 onward; the Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia) movement founded in 1905 and led by Gustav Suits; and the Slovak Sborník slovenskej mládeže (Anthology of Slovak Youth) in 1909. The new movements tried both to go beyond national emancipation and to emancipate art from politics — though not consistently. Junimea upheld social conservatism and official national-populist literary policies yet it pioneered the idea of pure art and provided space and expert criticism for young poets and fiction writers, foremost among them Mihai Eminescu. The real change occurred when the young Macedonski began to edit Literatorul in 1881. Though even this journal did not transcend nationalist social concepts (Zirkuli, “lírai én” 118), it later became the conduit for an early introduction of Modernism and Symbolism in Romania. In contrast to most other countries, Poland seems to have followed the successive trends of


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Western literature. Positivism and Realism followed Romanticism, and the “Young Poles” emerged in the early 1890s. But this simple scheme excludes the most significant Polish writers, who were forced to live in exile until the turn of the century (the “repatriation” of Polish literature started with the return of Stanisław Przybyszewski in 1898), and hardly contributed to the mediation of foreign literatures to Poland. This was undertaken rather by Miriam [Zenon Przesmycki], editor of the Warsaw journal Z˙ycie, who published foreign authors, especially translations from Poe, Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. In this respect, Miriam’s role in Polish literary life compares with that of the Hungarian Ignotus and the Czech Machar, both of whom also introduced Western currents to their countries. Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukraiinka modernized Ukrainian literature with their poetry as well as their editorial and translating activities. The poetic career of Franko started in the tracks of Taras Shevchenko’s Romanticism. Under the influence of the Russian revolutionary democrats, his poetry moved from national pathos to a social commitment that got Franko interested in German literature, especially Heine’s poetry and the spirit of Börne’s Junges Deutschland. Indeed, Heine played a key role in East-Central European literary modernization. The Ábrányi brothers regarded him as a cosmopolitan par excellence and gave him a prominent role in their anthology Költemények Európa költo˝ibo˝l (Poems by Europe’s Poets; 1868). His progressive views were alive in the Jauna¯ Strava¯ (New Trend), which started Latvian literary modernization in the second half of the 1880s; Ukraiinka translated his poetry in the early 1890s. In the Ukraine, Franko edited the periodical Zhitie i slovo (Life and Word) between 1894 and 1897, frequently including in it foreign authors. After publishing in 1896 the somber volume Ziviale lystia (Withered Leaves; 2: 119–75), and especially after his periodical LiteraturnoNaukovi Vistnik (Literary-Scientific Journal) carried Mikola Voronyi’s first Modernist manifesto (1901), Franko was charged with being decadent, though he himself passionately attacked the Modernists and “rootless decadents” in his later theoretical articles. Like Slaveikov, Kiss, and Vrchlický, his contemporaries, Franko saw himself between past and future. In the 1878 visionary poem “Kameniary” (Stone Breakers; 1: 66–68), the speaker appears, together with thousands of other brotherly captives, chipping away with a sledge hammer at a vast granite mountain, literally paving the way towards a future that will come by the time his bones will already be bleached. Franko’s ties to Lesia Ukraiinka were based on the compatibility of their worldviews. Both felt a kinship to Heine, though Ukraiinka was more attracted to his romantic and mythologizing voice than to his social views. Her Lisova pisina (Forest Song), published in 1912, makes use of symbolic forms, but its thematic concern with the relationship between poet and society, and the limits of freedom hark back to Romanticism. Franko’s patriotically heated poetry elaborated on national myths and biblical parables but after 1902 he became more interested in comprehensive and abstract thoughts. According to Vytautas Kubilius, the charactristic scenes and linguistic norms of the rural typology were replaced in the Baltic literatures around 1900 by “an individual spiritual world and its individualized language” (603). But compared to the rest of East-Central Europe these changes came relatively late in the three Baltic countries and their course was by no means straightforward. The question of adaptations from Western literature was raised in Lithuania only in the 1900s. When Sofija Kymantaite˙-Cˇiurlioniene˙ suggested that Baudelaire’s works could fill

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an important role in Lithuanian cultural life, Gabriele˙ Petkevicˇaite˙-Bite˙, the authoritative public voice, responded with the odd simile that this would be equivalen to “growing southern plants in our forests” (Kubilius 603). The tropical plant becomes here an emblem of a Modernism that disturbs the national ecology. In contrast, Reviczky’s “Pálma a Hortobágyon” (Palm Tree on the Hortobágy; Versek 190–91), Mihovil Nikolic´’s “Prologue,” (Pjesme 1), Stevan Lukovic´’s “Cvetala breskva” (The Apricot Tree Blossomed; Pesme 36), Krasko’s “Ja” (I; dielo 92) and Kryms’kyi’s Pal’move hillia (Palm Branches) use the tropical plant in harsh climate to emblematize the artist’s isolation. The diametrically opposed meanings of the same metaphor neatly express the contrast between nationalist and Symbolist conceptions of poetry. Juozapas Herbacˇiauskas declared in 1908 that the time of Realism was over (Erške˙cˇiu˛ 62), and Cˇiurlioniene˙ proposed a year later that Lithuanian literature be liberated from the dictates of the struggle for independence: art should deal with the universal problems of life (Kubilius 605). The demands that art be judged according to aesthetic criteria and Lithuanian literature be measured against world-literature anticipated the 1915 publication of the first Symbolist almanac, Pirmasai baras (First Landmarks). In Latvia and Estonia the first Modernist thoughts appeared earlier than in Lithuania, perhaps because the Russian government allowed here greater cultural freedom. In Latvia, the national awakening followed the familiar East-Central European pattern. The movement of the Young Latvians started in the 1850s. At the end of the 1880s, the intellectual circle Jauna¯ Strava¯ (New Trend) emerged, together with its periodical, the Dienas Lapa (Daily Leaflet), which regularly reported on contemporary Western trends. The circle drew on the same Hegelian left as the Russian revolutionary democrats and Franko or Ukraiinka; Aı¯da Niedra, a Marxist, and the poet Ja¯nis Rainis offered a more complete picture of Western culture. In this, Dienas Lapa went beyond the other pioneering Modernist periodicals of the region (Misa˘l, Mladost, A Hét, Lumír, Z˙ycie, and Contemporanul), which refrained from publishing social-democratic, socialist, or anarchist texts and became wary of the leftist orientation of the next Symbolist generation. Dienas Lapa developed a markedly socialist, democratic, feminist, and even Marxist orientation when Ja¯nis Rainis became its editor-in-chief in 1891. Like Franko and Norwid, Rainis considered himself a precursor preparing the road to a better future. “Šk¸irti cel¸i kopa¯” (Let the Parting Roads Meet) published in 1905, expresses this hope but inverts the International by warning that more battles are to be fought: You’ll have your merry feast tomorrow, While struggles and work await us, for us this battle’s not the last. (Kopoti raksti 1: 204)

Rainis and his wife Aspazija emigrated to Switzerland after the failure of the 1905 Russian revolution, and they returned only in 1920, when Latvia became independent. Juhan Liiv, who remained almost unnoticed during the national awakening, represented a Modernism akin to that of Norwid and Komjáthy. Liiv also began writing in the dominant patriotic style, but he gradually abandoned the norms of national Romanticism, writing selfreflective poetry that focused on mankind’s union with nature — a topic dear to the Symbolists. He was diagnosed schizophrenic in the 1890s and spent the rest of his life in the countryside as something of a village fool. He produced his most important work in total solitude, and when


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the young Symbolists of the Noor-Eesti published his poems in 1910 under the title Luuletused (Poems) he all but ignored it.

Secession and decadence a. Decadence The Western notion of Decadence arrived with some delay in East-Central Europe, and its meaning underwent at least as many changes and deformations as did Modernism and Symbolism. Only in Czech culture (see Pynsent’s article below) was Decadence a literary trend. Elsewhere, it characterized poets that wrote about solitude, death, or other “dismal topics.” Nietzsche’s and Verlaine’s notions of Decadence became important, though unlike Verlaine (“Langueur”, Oeuvres 370), the writers of the region could never consider themselves as part of a declining hegemonic empire. For many Modernists of the region, history was not a succession of ages but still a myth about a past national greatness, a product of a national-populist Romanticism and its later variants. Similarly, Decadence did not mean a sense of genuinely deteriorating social and cultural conditions but rather a premonition that something new and revolutionary will have to come. When the Hungarian symbolist painter Lajos Gulácsy declared that “We must, once more, be born anew” (125), he revealed a yearning for rebirth and reincarnation: the redundant “again” after “once more” suggests a cyclical view of history. b. Secession Representations of the artist as an outcast were typical of Secession rather than of Decadence. From the 1880s onward, Modernist East-Central European artists recognized in Nietzsche and Marx, Bakunin and Herbert Spencer, Madame Blavatsky and Schopenhauer prophets of a new dawn and “synthetic age.” As Milivoj Ivanov-Dežman grandly remarked in the art nouveau journal Hrvatski Salon of 1898, the modern thinker does not reject any feeling or idea, though he struggles exclusively for individual rights, demanding from the individual merely that he be himself (qtd. in Marjanovic´ 94). Since Western thought usually arrived with considerable delay, East-Central European theoreticians and artists tended to believe that “over there,” in the West, progress had reached its zenith. Since everything worth saying had already been said, only synthesizing, finding a common denominator, was left. A striving for synthesis motivated Dimo Kiorchev’s “Ta˘gite ni” (Our Sorrows), Béla Balázs’s early Halálesztétika (Aesthetics of Death; 1908), the writings of the Czech Ladislav Klíma, the Polish Stanisław Przybyszewski, and the Lithuanian Vincas Mykolaitis-Putı¯nas. The hierarchy of genres and the arts would have collapsed in this envisaged synthesis. Like Symbolism, Secessionism held that, in the absence of final ordering principles, we cannot decide which propositions are true and must choose between them on pragmatic grounds. The Secessionists no longer reached for transcendence and did not use motifs and words as allusions, emblems, or symbols. The Hungarian Endre Kiss rightly calls Secession “the program of those without a program” (281): secession (exodus) meant an opposition to normative concepts of literature. Instead of a “new life,” Secession sought to create a comfortable and

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aesthetically pleasing “mundane paradise.” Understood this way, Secession prepared the way for Postmodernism, or, more generally, for trends that define themselves via prefixes like “post-” and “trans-.” Like some late-twentiethcentury currents, Secession sought to eliminate metaphysics from the language of its predecessors (Epshtein 385). It consistently tried to erase the hierarchy of the genres, as well as of poetic, aesthetic, and philosophic systems, though in contradistinction to Postmodernism it also attempted to create a common language for the literary and artistic canons, schools, and trends of all ages. The emergence of Postmodern art and thought in East-Central Europe rekindled interest in Secessionist authors. When Péter Hajnóczy named the Secessionist authors Géza Csáth and László Cholnoky (375) among his favorites already in the 1970s, their works were republished. Lajos Grendel, a Hungarian Postmodern fiction-writer living in Bratislava, mentions the same authors on the blurb of his 1987 book Bo˝röndök tartalma (The Contents of Suitcases). The first independent Czechoslovak publishers reprinted the Secessionist works of Ladislav Klíma and Jirˇí Karásek ze Lvovic. In Bulgaria, the publication of the oeuvre of Nikolai Rainov began in 1989, the year the first samizdat Postmodern anthology appeared. Like other intellectual and literary trends, East-Central European Secessionism has been constantly reinterpreted. Henryk Markiewicz has even suggested that the term could be used for all the beautiful but empty poetry of turn-of-the-century Poland (237). Though surely not all literature of the region was Secessionist in this negative sense, elements of Secession cropped up almost everywhere. Where Symbolism went beyond its Western counterpart, the differences may usually be attributed to a Secessionist philosophical slackness. East-Central European Secessionism is thematically broad: social problems and national independence remained its subjects; national and universal myths were reused and stylized; eroticism was explored with new excitement. Secessionism manifested itself also in typography: the Bulgarian Nash zhivot (Our Life), the Croatian Hrvatski Salon, the Hungarian Szerda (Wednesday) and Nyugat, the Czech Moderní revue, the Romanian Viat¸a Noua˘ (New Life), the Polish Z˙ycie, the Ukranian Svit (Light/World), the Estonian Noor-Eesti and other periodicals used Secessionist ornaments. Iványi Grünwald Béla’s Secessionist illustrations to József Kiss’ 1897 cycle, “Keletiek” (Easteners), preceded the emergence of literary Symbolism by several years. Secessionist forms were well established already in the fine arts when East-Central European Symbolism emerged. The new stylistic motives in literature could capitalize on trends in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Broadly speaking, Gnosticism is a belief that revelations of mystical knowledge are key to salvation. The search for such revelations is a characteristic feature of many artistic and intellectual currents in turn-of-the century East-Central European literature, perhaps first and foremost of Secessionism. Dimcho Debelyanov and Hristo Yasenov stylized medieval Gnostic legends, Rainov adopted in his lyrical prose and theosophist poetry Near- and Far-Eastern tales and myths. Eroticism, often presented as a mystic insight through the body, is evident in Kiril Hristov’s poems, which shocked the public but seem rather Anacreontic today, in the poetry of the Serbian Milan Cúrcˇin, who had ties with the Viennese Secession, in Cankar’s first collection of poetry, Erotika, and in Oton Župancˇicˇ’s Cˇaša opojnosti (Cup of Ecstasy), both published in 1899. The artistic poses of Rakic´ and Ducˇic´, and the death-cult of Vladislav Petkovic´-Dis may be classified both decadent and Secessionist. In Croatian culture, Secession played a significant part since the first exhibition of Secessionist painters in 1898. The term has become practically


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synonymous there with Modernism, and Ante Stamac´ even prefers it to Modernism as well as to Symbolism (151–61). Vojnovic´’s aforementioned Ekvinocijo shows the influence of Maeterlink, Hauptmann, and other contemporary Western playwrights who used Gnostic and esoteric legends. Vladimir Nazor’s penchant for legend making is evident from his early Slavenske legende (Slavic Legends; 1900) all the way through to his Legende o drugu Titu (Legends about Comrade Tito) in 1946, where Secessionist eclecticism gives way to ideology. In Hungary, Secessionist elements are present in the work of the first Nyugat generation, notably in the deliberately shocking associations and bizarre images of Endre Ady’s Léda poems. The relation of Secession to Symbolism is perhaps most problematic in Hungarian literature. Aladár Komlós remarks that Mihály Babits’s poetry could well be termed anti-Symbolist because of its striving towards objectivity and its attachment both to the material world and to tradition (96). Komlós perceptively suggests that Babits’ eclectic worldview was a result of his yearning for metaphysical knowledge and his simultaneous distaste for vacuous thinking. Indeed, except for the young Béla Balázs, hardly any Hungarian poet would devote his art and life to the construction of a “new transcendence,” as Symbolists elsewhere did. Géza Csáth, Gyula Szini, Viktor Cholnoky, and other prose writers also refrained from seeking a new transcendence to replace antiquated values. Dezso˝ Kosztolányi’s first collection of poems, Négy fal között (Between Four Walls; 1907), adopted Oscar Wilde’s poses and fashionable thoughts to express solitude and isolation, but as mere dress and intellectual game rather than expression of a metaphysical anguish. These artists, like the Symbolists, experienced a Nietzschean loss of God, but used different artistic means to deal with it. The Prague Almanach secese of 1896, regarded as the initiator of Czech Modernism, was the joint publication of the Symbolists Stanislav Kostka Neuman, Jirˇí Karásek ze Lvovic, Arnošt Procházka, and others around the Moderní Revue. The title is misleading, for secese is used here in its original sense of “withdrawal” rather than as a stylistic marker for a new trend. But Secessionist elements dominate the erotic fantasies of Karásek ze Lvovic and Hlavácˇek’s stylizations of medieval legends and urban tales (see Pynsent’s article below). The early poetry of Macedonski used, even before the emergence of Western Secession, a poetic “persona” to write in the name of another, usually imagined, author from remote epochs. Macedonski mixes mysticism with social concern, tries to adjust his art to the humdrum of everyday, and cultivates artificiality. In Poland, Secessionism manifested itself in the first generation of Młoda Polska: we find it in Stanisław Przybyszewski’s philosophical gnosticism and erotic poetry, in Antoni Lange’s and Wacław Rolicz-Lieder’s affinity with exotic Eastern cultures, and the consistent masks of Kazimierz Przerwa Tetmajer. The Ukranian Vasily Pachov’skyi tried to synthesize the arts in plays constructed on musical principles. In Estonia, Secessionist traits appear in Liiv’s aforementioned poetry, as well as in the free verse of the young Suits, which fills Symbolist and Romantic images with ecstatic love themes, Nietzschean ideas, and a sense that transient life is nevertheless holy. The sensuality of Viktors Eglı¯tis’ Elegijas (Elegies; 1907) as well as the eclecticism of themes and ideals in Rainis’ Ta¯las noskan¸as zila¯ vakara¯ (Distant Echoes in the Blue Evening; 1904) may also be called Secessionist.

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Attempts to define East-Central-Europe symbolism French, Russian, Bulgarian, and Romanian groups unambiguously defined themselves as Symbolist, but few others did. According to René Wellek, Symbolism, like other period terms, “is not a unitary quality which spreads like an infection or a plague, nor is it a mere verbal label: it is rather a historical category, or, to use a Kantian term, a ‘regulative idea’ (or, rather, a set of ideas) with the help of which we can interpret the historical process” (“Symbolism” 18). Short of claiming that Symbolism is a regulative idea for a whole age in East-Central European literature, we shall try to show that around 1900 a host of writers from the region were engaged in a common search for a “redemptive utopia.” In most East-Central European literatures Symbolism was a variant of “decadent,” “Modernist,” “neo-Romantic,” and other related terms. The Bulgarian Ivan S. Andreichin equated Decadence with Symbolism (52–59); the Czech Bohuslav Chaloupka confused matters even further when in “Bodoucí umeˇní” he included Symbolism under the more general terms of “Decadentism,” Impressionism, Instrumentalism, Neo-Romanticism, Occultism, and Harmonism (a term he probably invented), and other mysterious “-isms.” In turn, the Slovene Izidor Cankar declared in 1912 that “it is perfectly correct to call Symbolism modern Romanticism” (“Symbolizem” 241). The Ukrainian Mikola Voronyi found the most generous solution in 1903, by claiming that all significant non-realist artists from Gorki to Ibsen had been Symbolists (introduction to the almanac Z nad khmar…). Later scholars of Symbolism approached the matter more theoretically and introduced academic terms, but they often adopted, unwittingly, the stereotypes of fin-de-siècle criticism. Flaker claims, for instance, that no Symbolism existed in East-Central European literature: in Croatia it denoted certain works of Matoš, while in other literatures Symbolist representations of a “world beyond” count as exceptions (formacije 79–80, 86). Flaker thus generalizes Chaloupka view that Symbolism is a subcategory of Modernism. Eva Strohsová proposed, in turn, that Symbolism be replaced with “decorative Symbolism” or “Ornamentalism” (14–15). Later theoreticians tend to echo, however, Voronyi’s “universalist” argument, by claiming that all “metaphysical literature” is Symbolist because it draws on mythical-mystical traditions and its content can only be expressed by way of symbols. According to the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Symbolism taken in its widest sense comprises “almost the whole development of civilization” (129). Hence Wellek’s resigned conclusion: “The Symbolist symbol has its special character: simple replacement and the suggestion of the mystery” (27).

Modified consciousness and search for values Stanisław Brzozowski, perhaps the most significant theoretician of East-Central European Symbolism, distanced himself in 1909 from his former Symbolist colleagues in Legenda Młodej Polski (The Legend of Young Poland), by asserting that Modernism was a romantic malady that split the world into external and internal spaces and forced artists to become solitary creators of personal values. According to Brzozowski: “Whoever is a creator and inventor of value, whoever conceives the future not as a stream carrying strengthless human puppets but as a task, connects


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everything with value” (qtd. in Miłosz, History 377–78). In Miłosz’s reading, the central myth of “Young Poland” was that the artist “enters into contact with the ineffable essence of reality and, in a certain sense, redeems all those who do not dare reach deeper than the superficiality of the daily grind” (History 327). Mutatis mutandis, Miłosz’s characterization of “Young Poland” applies also to Symbolism. In East-Central Europe, the modern opening gave rise to a Symbolism that significantly deviated from its Western counterpart. In the West, Symbolism emerged and declined mostly in conflict with other modernist currents. In the East, Symbolism confronted not so much the other modernist movements, but enduring national and social traditions that found their way into Symbolism’s own bloodstream. Hence later Modernists followed the first ones by combining Modernism with conservatism and social involvement with l’art pour l’art. They would call upon art to solve the problems of national existence and social justice. It is hard to say whether social concern or aesthetics dominated the manifestoes of the East-Central European Symbolist movements, but they unquestionably aimed both at a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and at a synthesis of the individual, communal, and cultural spheres.

Belatedness Next to its conflictual commitment to art, society, and nation, East-Central European Symbolism may also be characterized by its sense of belatedness. The traditional commitments to social and national issues delayed and weakened the receptivity to artistic innovation, diminishing the differences that existed in the West between Parnassism, Naturalism, Decadence, Secession, Symbolism, and other currents. This is perhaps the most important obstacle in defining properly these movements in East-Central Europe. Macedonski saw little conflict between Naturalism and Symbolism when he planned to write a Naturalist novel (Zirkuli, “lírai én” 120). Ilic´, Slaveikov, Vrchlický, or Maiorescu may be regarded as the Parnassists of their national literary histories, yet they are closer to their national Romantics than to Théophile Gautier, J. Maria Herédia, Leconte de Lisle, and other French Parnassists. There was no East-Central European Impressionism, though the poetry of Dušan Markovic´, Kette, Gyual Juhász, Bacovia, Eglı¯tis, and others often contained Impressionist perspectives and styles. Neo-Romanticism, a term frequently used to characterize certain Modernists, is of little use in East-Central European literatures, for Romanticism stretched as far as the turn of the century in the works of Ivan Vazov, Mór Jókai, Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukraiinka. Instead of distinguishing between original and neo-Romanticisms, we may speak rather of a continuous trend that repeatedly accommodated conservative, nationalist, and populist perspectives. In the West, Symbolism was a specifically aesthetic current within Modernism that seldom concerned itself with social and political modernization. In East-Central Europe Symbolist poetry articulated an ideology that sought a radical transformation of all mankind, a salvation that was both individual and social.

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Utopia, redemption, and mundane transcendence The East-Central-European Symbolists and their interwar descendants formulated individual and communal strategies of redemption. They wrote narratives on arresting the march of history, bringing time to a standstill at a redemptive moment. This regional utopia simultaneously sought individual, social, and national redemption. Krasko wrote poetry volumes about his anguished lonely search for God; his patriotic verses, written in a folksong style, he left for publication in newspapers. Endre Ady identified himself with the nation, and, vice versa, he transformed his patriotism into a personal metaphysical anxiety. What ethical values survive once, as Nietzsche declared, God was dead? The Bulgarian Debelyanov, the Czech Antonín Sova, the Lithuanian Sruoga and the Romanian Macedonski (save in his late poetry), sought a new absolute. Others — Dimita˘r Boyadzhiev, Vladislav Petkovic´ Dis, Milan Rakic´, Fran Galovic´, Kette, Josip Murn, Gyula Juhász, and Hlavácˇek — wrote about death as the occasion to unite with the universe. Death was for them not merely redemption from worldly suffering, but, as in many religions, a rebirth. Their poetry was not a quest for transcendence but a search to escape matter’s prison house and a preparation for release in death. In spite of its “Satanism,” Przybyszewski’s “naked soul” theory advocated a redemption strategy, for it held that the “innermost human essence” is capable of fusing with the “world spirit.” Artists who rejected the world inevitably became embroiled in a metaphysical conflict with the creator of this “faulty construction.” They denied him, quarreled with him, or they constructed a utopian new God, possibly envisaging a recreation of the world in Nietzsche’s sense again and again. These various forms of redemption were brought together in the work of Tadeusz Micin´ski. His God was neither Catholic nor an absolute only revealed to himself. He broke with all institutional faith and adopted the occult Christianity of the Russian theosophical “Brotherhood of Labor.” Micin´ski exemplified a certain East-Central European Messianism that sought to fuse mysticism and socialism, two strategic forces that the poet considered capable of ordering the universe and achieving inner and outer freedom. Socialism featured in his novel Nietota as a faith comparable to Theosophy. His W mroku gwiazd (In the Twilight of Stars), published in 1902, anticipates a clash between the forces of good and evil, a battle between Christ and Lucifer. Apart from Miłosz, few interpreters have noticed that the two principles are faces of the same divinity or absolute for Micin´ski: Lucifer is Prometheus, the producer of light, and hence a prototype of Christ. Micin´ski’s themes exhibit numerous parallels with those of the Debelyanov, Yasenov, and Karásek ze Lvovic: his “Przed burzø” (Before the Storm; Poezje 100–101) deals with the battle between good and evil in terms of a tempest, just as Debelyanov’s “Kra˘stopat na ba˘deshteto” (The Crossroads of the Future) does; his “Zamek duszy” (The Castle of the Soul; Poezje 89–92) speaks of a hopelessly “imprisoned soul,” just as Yasenov’s cycle “Ricarski zama˘k” (Knight’s Castle) does; Karásek’s “Zazdeˇná okna” (Bricked-up Windows) in the eponymous volume also block the view of “the other world.” Pavlo Tychyna sought transcendence by trying to evoke the interdependency of sound, light, objects, and emotions, the music of the spheres, and the harmony of the universe. Among the lyric poets of the region, Rakic´, Hlavácˇek and the Bulgarian Nikolai Liliev had comparable musical programs to cleanse poetry of all the dead-weight of thought. Tychyna represents no


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inner landscapes and does not seek a hidden connection between the material and the ideal worlds. Nor does he portray the torment of such a quest. Instead, he offers mystical experience: I looked at the sky, I saw the star flock burning there. And already I knew: You are not anger — But the Sunlit Clarinets […] I awoke and I am You now: Above me and below Worlds shine, the light buzzes now In a musical deluge. (“Neither Zeus nor Pan”; Zibrannia tvoriv 1: 37)

As in Yavorov, Micin´ski, Bely and many other Symbolists, the organizing principle of the world is light and music here. In Tychyna’s poem God sings of His creations and the speaker experiences himself as incorporated in the musical and luminous emanation of “Sunlit Clarinets.” He espies the secret of rendering the earth habitable through the poetic act — a popular theosophical view most probably originating from the Jewish Zohar. Once more, transcendence is also a revolutionary social utopia, expressed in apocalyptic visions: In the trunks of trees sunlight tingles Doves slam onto stone-ledges — And rise red in the sky A new psalm for iron (“Psalm for Iron”; Zibrannia tvoriv 1: 112–15)

Many Symbolist works speak of moments of arrest when time ceases to exist. Past events appear, as they often did in Romantic poetry, as images of a former golden age projected into a radiant future. This utopian fusion of temporally distant perspectives is present also in Sruoga’s poetry. Like Tychyna, Sruoga listens in “Supasi, supasi, lapai” (The Startled Leaves Float Away, Float Away”) to the music of the spheres, a call of the world beyond that quivers and rustles in all things: Peace to you, my sorrow, be ever more silent! It’s not you who float the secrets of forever! Kissed away by the wind, alighting above earth, The startled leaves float away, float away

This speaker neither descends into his own soul nor broods over his own boundless interior space. He contemplates the interdependence of external impressions, waits for intimations, and seeks cues that could open a new life for him: They carry tidings of the new life to us, Take away the dust, the earth and sky from us, And they unfurl new paths in front of us — They carry tidings of the new life to us (Bangu˛ virš u¯ne˙s 40)

Sruoga’s “There is No Time in my Castle” brings together two key motifs in East-Central European Symbolism, timelessness and the imprisonment of the soul. The arrest of time figures

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in Krasko’s time motifs, in Kosztolányi’s, “Megállt az óra” (The Watch Has Stopped; Összes 38–39), in Ion Pillat’s “Casa amintirii” (House of Memories) and Macedonski’s “arrested time.” The castle metaphor of the body, to be found in Yasenov and others, functions here in a Symbolist fashion: the soul’s release into transcendental space requires a transformation of the ordinary space-time relations. During the interwar years, East-Central European Symbolism and its search for redemption faded. But Symbolism remained active in the wonderful prose of the dilettante Czech philosopher Ladislav Klíma, the lonely Bulgarian poets Liliev and Teodor Trayanov, as well as in the poetry of Bolesław Les´mian, Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Tin Ujevic´, Momcˇilo Nastasijevic´, Lasgush Poradeci, and Ernst Enno. Some of them were silenced and excluded from the canon by the Communist regimes. But the new custodians of East-Central European literature must have sensed, perhaps without fully realizing it, that they themselves had turned into state ideology the utopian visions of Symbolism.

Czech Decadence Robert B. Pynsent Czech Decadence was and was not like any other Decadence. It shared the chief characteristics of French, British, and Austrian-German Decadence: experimentation in verse and verse forms, from unsonnetesque themes and lexis in sonnets to a tendency to vers libre and the poème en prose; the poem as a form of autostylization couched in a paysage de l’âme; in fiction, a predominance of episodic short-stories and novels whose overall theme consisted in the portrayal of dying, often based on “spiritual adventures,” an alignment of physical and mental traveling, where the experience of traveling leads eventually to disintegration, the death of the main character or his or her derangement; a sensualization of the material world, often expressed in terms of a morbid psychology of Nature (for example, autumnal decay or the sinking of a human being into an animal state of terminal erotic frenzy); an awareness of the unconscious, of inherited memory, of an essential “humanness” lying in sex and violence that one must endeavor to aestheticize or, especially if female, to which one must necessarily submit; the foregrounding of lexis and the search for a language to express extreme mental states; the mocking of all these elements, combined with an aesthetic self-centeredness which brings with it contempt for the masses — where the “masses” are not conceived of in class terms, but in terms of sensitivity. All this the Czech Decadents shared with other Decadents. The Czech Decadents, who, when they bothered about it, preferred to call themselves “synthetists” or “dilettantists,” differed from their “Western” counterparts chiefly in their approach to their own literary forebears; in contrast to earlier nineteenth-century Czech literature,

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they lacked any sense either of inferiority to their counterparts or of some special qualities derived from “oppression” or Slavness. In the West, especially in France, the Decadent trend or style consistently evolved from Romanticism (the term maladie du siècle derived from Musset; Baudelaire was, as the cliché goes, the last Romantic and first Decadent; Gautier more or less defined Decadence before it existed — and the Swiss diarist Amiel dissected landscapes of the soul and the decay of civilization). In Britain there was Byron and then the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne, and, thanks to Baudelaire’s interpretation, the American Poe; even in German literature, the impact of Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was perceptible, though the Germans primarily provided philosophical models, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Nietzsche, and probably Hartmann. Czech Decadence grew out of what the writers themselves appear to have considered a local literary vacuum. They acknowledged the Romantic Karel Hynek Mácha and were the first to notice his ironic morbidity, and they had some regard for the realist psychological analytical mystery tales of Jakub Arbes. The case of Julius Zeyer, who, like Arbes, belonged to the “generation” preceding the Decadents, is special, since in some works he became one of them (Pynsent Zeyer). The late Decadent, Miloš Marten, considered the mainstream development of “modern” Czech literature to lie in Mácha, Zeyer, and the one Czech Decadent almost always labeled Symbolist, Otokar Brˇezina (Marten, Akkord passim). The first critic unassociated with the Decadents to attempt an analysis of Czech Decadence was the hard-line Marxist Fedor Soldan, who considered, not altogether unwisely, that the Decadents had come closer to socialist committed literature certainly than Karel Cˇapek and his coevals, but also than the majority of the card-carrying Communist interwar Avant-garde. His first work on Decadence concentrated on the greatest Czech Decadent poet, Karel Hlavácˇek; his second imitated Marten in tracing the mainstream development of modern Czech literature in three writers, in this case Hlavácˇek, Cˇapek and Víteˇzslav Nezval. In the latter work, Soldan makes the tenable point that the “Decadent generation was the first truly unified generation in [postBaroque] Czech literature” (Trˇi generace 19). More importantly, he points out that the Decadents were “the first generation in the life of Czech culture to act as a unit in considering the relationship of the individual to society.” Previously the individual’s relationship to society had been treated indirectly, “mediated by God, the nation, personified freedom and the like.” The Decadents had been the first to be fully aware of their “difference from previous generations, to the extent that they felt alien in the environment in which they lived” (29–30). They had also been the first to “catch up with Europe in lyric verse” (50). In fact, they did much the same for prose. It is not so much that they had caught up with Western Europe as that they perceived no need to catch up. By the time the Decadents appeared on the Czech scene as a unit with the first issue of their journal Moderní revue (1894), the Czechs were no longer self-conscious about the possibility of the Czech language expressing everything a Western language could express (a self-consciousness artificially imposed on Czech writers by National Revival ideology at the beginning of the century), and Czech literature had already been liberated from its nineteenthcentury peasant and public-house “national” tradition by the Parnassians and Zeyer. The Decadents rejected the work of the leading Parnassian, Jaroslav Vrchlický, although during the early years of the twentieth century they began to accept his importance for Czech literature as a whole. Certainly, due more to his numerous imitators than to his own work, Vrchlický’s style — he had created a new poetic vocabulary for Czech — had become

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somewhat mechanical and over-decorative, and his eroticism rather too predictable and lushly mastological (except in his most intimate verse). Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that the Czech Decadents could have entered the scene with such self-confidence without Vrchlický’s translations from Western and Oriental literature, and in particular his translations from, and introductory essays to, modern French poets. Furthermore, Vrchlický’s own writing sometimes manifested the Decadent style, several years before the founding of Moderní revue by the critic Arnošt Procházka, with the help of Jirˇí Karásek. In the collection Hudba v duši (Music in the Soul; 1886), for example, Vrchlický not only indulges in his normal erotic sensualism, but also expresses a love of art as intoxication, and is as effusive about the hashish-like qualities of art as any Decadent adulator of paradis artificiels. As early as his Symfonie (1878), he is also suggesting the élite nature of the artist (Decadent spiritual aristocracy). Another poet, linguistically dependent on Vrchlický, who contributed to the construction of the Czech Decadent code before the Decadents, was Irma Geisslová. (The Czechs may not have had a Rachilde like the French or a Zinaida Gippius like the Russians, but women writers made an original contribution to Czech Decadence, especially in the 1900s.) Though her Immortelly (1879) is dominated by Romantic nature-poetry and conventional patriotism, she sometimes moves beyond stale Weltschmerz to Decadent world-weariness, fin-de-siècle pessimistic disillusion. Indeed she employs a Decadent lexis of faintness, tiredness and monotony in the poem “Pod oblohou” (Beneath the Sky; Immortelly 113) and of suffocation in “Spi, oh jen spi” (Sleep, Oh Do Sleep; Immortelly 38). In “Prázdno vu˚kol — temno nade mnou” (Emptiness All Around — Darkness above Me; Immortelly 107), horror, denaturalized Nature, and a mist-covered desert make for an ˇ ernokveˇt” (Flower of Darkness; Immortelly 106) utterly Decadent paysage de l’âme, and in “C she has the joys of Satan in her heart. Another, younger writer who began as a disciple of Vrchlický, was Jaroslav Kvapil. Especially in Básníku˚v denník (A Poet’s Diary; 1890), the fusion of morbidity with vitalism foreshadows the Decadent ambivalence of life-affirmation and lifenegation embodied particularly in Karásek later in the 1890s and in the 1900s. “Sneˇní” (Dreaming; Básníku˚v denník 23–24) constitutes a morbid study of a femme enfant, such as we associate perhaps more with Decadent painting than literature. Examples of Decadent Catastrophism are to be found in the “hymn” to Ludwig of Bavaria (Básníku˚v denník 8–9) and “Rˇeka ve skalách” (River in the Rocks; Básníku˚v denník 63). Otakar Aurˇednícˇek’s collection, Verše (1889), demonstrates even more clearly a trend to exploit Parnassist imagery in order to pursue Decadent themes. While the poet remains as transfixed as Vrchlický by the refuge of moon-like breasts, mastophilia also drives one of his personae to fondle the breast of a drowned young woman, only to find that his hand sinks into it as if it were mud. One can, then, give no clear date for the beginning of Czech Decadence — or indeed for its end. For convenience’s sake, one may take 1894 as the beginning simply because Moderní revue congregated the majority of Czech Decadents in one periodical — though Decadent writing continued to be published especially in Rozhledy by such as Otokar Brˇezina, Jan Opolský or Karel Sezima. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Moderní revue gradually became less and less exclusive and increasingly more, usually minor, writers showed the influence of Decadence in their writing, but still one might say that the trend did not cease much before Marten’s publication of his high Decadent short story, Cortigiana (1911). Even after that, however, strong Decadent elements continued to be evident especially in the writers of occult

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novels (for example, Jirˇí Karásek or Josef Šimánek) until well after the end of World War I. In the 1920s and 30s especially some women writers manifest strong elements of Decadence in their works. Simultaneously, Decadent lexical, thematic (including occult) and tropological elements were strong in the Avant-garde (in Poetism and Surrealism). During the Communist period, except for the brief Party-Reform period of the late 1960s, Decadent writing remained a subject of discussion chiefly underground and a few writers of the 1950s literary underground adopted Decadent poses. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, however, neo-Decadence became a strong trend among young poets and fiction-writers. To give some impression of the variety of Czech Decadent writing and to bring out the dominant techniques and themes of Czech Decadence, I shall now very briefly discuss a few works characteristic of the trend. Zeyer’s short story, “Inultus” (1892), set a few years after the quelling of the Protestant Estates’ rebellion at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, constitutes a tale of nationalist sadomasochism. Nationalist motifs, albeit of types and expression alien to mainstream nationalist literature, abound in Czech Decadents — not that nationalism is entirely alien to Western Decadence (for example, in Barrès or D’Annunzio, though here one could argue that their nationalism constituted simply a shift in the way they dealt with degenerationist philosophy; without degenerationism, especially post-Darwinian degenerationism, the Decadents are unlikely to have become such a strong literary force in Central Europe). Sadomasochism, as a manifestation of erethism or, indeed, an intermediate state between love and hatred also constitutes a frequent theme, from Zeyer and Karásek to Sezima’s novel Passiflora (1903). Zeyer’s sadist here is the femme literally fatale, the Milanese sculptress donna Flavia Santiti, who settled in Prague during the influx of Italian and Spanish priests and nobles at the time of the post-White Mountain Counter-Reformation. The eponymous hero is the masochist Inultus: he is the last of a long noble line (like many European Decadent heroes) and impoverished (as the Czech Decadent hero tended to be). Flavia encounters Inultus by chance and is captivated by his looks, as he is captivated by hers, however significantly cold her artist’s hands are; she asks him to act as a model for the Crucifixion she is hewing. As he hangs on the cross, he adopts an ever more intense messianic conviction that in his suffering there he is preparing the redemption of his nation. For most of the time, Inultus is for Flavia merely an aesthetic object and a tool that will serve to ensure her superiority to her rival sculptress, Prosperzia. Unfortunately for her, given that she had sworn never to love a man, the sight of his blood and his increasing physical anguish drives her to fall in love with him. She considers this unforgivable personal weakness and after his death she kills herself. For Flavia the only true aristocracy is that of the soul of the artist (a Decadent theme). She could not achieve that aristocracy without killing her beloved (echoes of Wilde, but also of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s notion of bonheur dans le crime), for, in Zeyer’s version of the Decadent theme, great art is always the product of love — never of envy like Flavia’s. Furthermore, Flavia had lacked imagination, had been a materialist, something alien to the Czech’s (and the Czechs’) humble spirituality. The statue she creates is miraculous, moving from the grand setting in which her Spanish commissioner had placed it to a church habituated by the enserfed Czech poor. The action of “Inultus” represents a key manifestation of the Decadent macrotopos, whereby a cycle of poems or work of fiction has as its plot the process of dying. Dying or decaying constitutes the central “intermediate state” in a trend that concentrates on intermediate states in its psychology and settings from anxiety and expectancy

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to fog and moonlight (Pynsent, “Essay” 196–211). Furthermore, the story may be understood as a fictional representation of the Czech “martyr complex” (Pynsent, Identity 190–210). Another work of Zeyer’s, generally considered the bible of a specifically Czech Decadence, though it appeared a trifle too late ever actually to have been a bible, also constitutes an example of the dying macrotopos. This was Du˚m “U tonoucí hveˇzdy” (The House at the Sign of a Sinking Star), which appeared in a periodical in 1894, but in book form not until 1897. The sinking star in the title is a complex symbol typical of the period; among its connotations are the occult fusion of fire and water, the astral self of the main character, and the Marian stars of the coat of arms of Paris, where the novel’s action is set — with the exception of the analeptic passages, which are set chiefly in Upper Hungary, Germany, and Great Britain. In fact, one may only take the novel as a manifestation of the macrotopos if one reads it as a straightforward narration: the Czech physician narrator, Severin, recounting the main character’s life, beginning as a radical Slovak nationalist, then turning to acting in a German company, subsequently becoming the famulus of a British occultist aristocrat and failing as occultist and lover by falling in love with the noblewoman Edita and bringing about the death of her beloved by deliberately not delivering a letter. He leaves Britain for Paris where he works as a menial clerk, and lives in the house at the sign of the sinking star on the edge of the Marais. He dies when one of the four women he shares the house with sets fire to her room while trying to kill herself with coal gas. Severin first meets the main character, whose name, Rojko, denotes “dreamer” in Slovak, after the latter is run over by an omnibus and brought to the hospital where he works. His health is undermined as the result of that accident, but also by his ever-clearer vision of his parting astral self. Even in a straightforward reading, the theme of the novel is the fusion of the main strands in late nineteenth-century thinking: Positivism represented here by medicine, and religious or spiritual sensibilities represented by the failed occultist who has regained his occult, if not his physical, powers. Much of the narrative of the novel may be seen as constituting Rojko’s induction of Severin into Spiritist thinking — mainly with the help of a De Quincey essay. Zeyer had first become interested in French Spiritism in the 1870s, and during the Fin de siècle this doctrine that sought an accommodation of Positivism in spirituality had a wideranging impact in Eastern Europe (Carlson 136–39). This interest in Spiritism itself reflects a sense of the failure of religion that imbued Czech Decadent literature (for its European dimensions, see Griffiths, Revolution). A second, slightly less straightforward, reading of Du˚m “U tonoucí hveˇzdy” probably makes the Spiritist theme even clearer. Severin had been attracted to the mysterious house at the sign of the sinking star even before his encounter with the delirious Rojko in hospital. The house may be interpreted as something like the vessel that conceals Severin’s soul or his hidden spiritual self. Severin, then, is a split self, his (Positivist) physical self embodied in the narrator and his soul in Rojko; the period influences on his soul may be represented by the four women who inhabit the house. The burning down of the house, accompanied by Rojko’s diabolical laughter (itself representing the laughter that accompanies the achievement of divine knowledge, as for example in the thought of Amiel), signifies the welding of Severin into a complete single self. The four women in the house represent conventional Roman Catholic Christianity (Celestína), a materialist misunderstanding of love, and Vanity (Antonie), the degenerate nobility and thwarted maternity (Honorina) and sullied erotic idealism (the virgin whore Virginie). The four women also represent four classes, Celestína, the working

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class, Antonie, the (lower) bourgeoisie, Honorina the upper classes, and Virginie the lumpenproletariat. All four may also represent the decay of Western civilization (a theme of Decadence), and the dénouement of the novel may represent a constructive version of the Verlainean White Barbarian redemption for the West as suggested in the poem “Langueur,” redemption through the fusion of science and spirituality. The sinking star of the novel’s title may, then, also symbolize the imminent end of the discordant fin-de-siècle civilization that writers despaired at or aestheticized. Like Rojko, the four women all suffer from thwarted love, though Celestína’s Christianity saves her from frustration. Frustration serves as the most common motive for action and motif for description in Czech Decadent writing. (Frustration is, naturally, an intermediate state, a psychological state between actual or vicarious experience and the fulfillment of the desire either to achieve that experience again or to find another means of quenching desire.) Jirˇí Karásek (who began assuming the noble agnomen ze Lvovic in the 1900s) was, perhaps, the most consistent artistic exponent of frustration in his verse, prose, and drama in the 1890s and early 1900s. Karásek was also the first Czech poet openly to express homosexual love in print, from his first collection of verse, Zazdeˇná okna (Bricked-up Windows; 1894) onwards. In his 1890s verse, Karásek strives primarily to explore extreme emotional states, and does not restrict himself to homosexual passion. His settings vary from the decaying buildings of northern cities to Mediterranean climes — sometimes also Classical times. Inherited memories, containing scenes of armed violence and of orgies, mingle with quasi-threnodes for a deceased lover. In general one may characterize his 1890s verse as statements of erethist autostylization. Karásek’s novel, Gothická duše (A Gothic Soul; 1900), grew out of his own brief prose work describing the mind of a Prague intellectual as he wanders about nocturnal streets, Stojaté vody (Stagnant Waters; 1895), and out of Huysmans’s À rebours. Whereas at the end of the latter des Esseintes appears to be ready to accept Christianity as a release from his aesthete’s isolation, Karásek’s anonymous hero, also the last of a long line, falls into religious mania, the sickness that had recently bedeviled his family. He will die in a lunatic asylum. Gothická duše constitutes a more or less chronologically consecutive series of paysages de l’âme, a voyage through the main character’s brain as he visits parts of Prague and goes on a railway journey. The highpoints of the novel are the growth of his homosexual love for Christ and a patriotic divagation on Czech history and Czechness, inspired by the sounds of the bells of Prague. Bells connote alarm at impending disaster (including the end of Western civilization), a music of communication between God and human beings, and a link with past ages (inherited memory embodied in sound — one thinks also of Hauptmann’s Die versunkene Glocke or the bells of Bruges in Rodenbach). Karásek’s “hero” is impoverished like Zeyer’s Inultus or Rojko. Wildean aphorisms and the anesthetization of life dominate Karásek’s Legenda o melancholickém princi (Legend of a Melancholy Prince; 1897), while painterly descriptions of exotic landscapes and townscapes set the scenes for mythological tales of frustration and religious and erotic ecstasy in the short-story collection, Posvátné ohneˇ (Sacred Fires; 1911). The first of Karásek’s occultist novels, Román Manfreda Macmillena (The Romance of Manfred Macmillen; 1907), has a homosexual hero who believes he is the reincarnation of the eighteenth-century scholar of hermetics, Cagliostro — and here one remembers that both Mme Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley believed they were reincarnations of Cagliostro. In this novel,

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too, Karásek is concerned with approaching a definition of the dandy, something already touched on in Legenda o melancholickém princi. The second of Karásek’s occultist novels, Scarabaeus (1909), is set in Venice, a city beloved by Czech and Western Decadents as representative of the sinking, decaying glory of Western civilization (see Schenk). Apart from an exploration of homosexual eroticism, this novel also constitutes a study in Evil. Evil also concerned another Czech Decadent, Arthur Breisky, though his studies bristled with irony, and Josef Karel Šlejhar, a Naturalist with Decadent mystical qualities. This fin-de-siècle theme was to be taken up by the psychological analytical novelists of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly Egon Hostovský and Václav Rˇezácˇ, and then in the 1960s by the esoteric novelist Ladislav Fuks, who wrote chiefly about the Czech Jews’ fate under German occupation. For all his thematic innovation, Karásek’s influence on the development of Czech literature was minor compared to that of Karel Hlavácˇek. Though the exploitation of intermediate states more fruitfully characterizes the distinguishing marks of Decadence than certain types of stylization (Merhaut) or the paradox (Riffaterre), Hlavácˇek’s life and works certainly embody period stylization and paradoxicality in his life and works. His practice as a teacher in the Sokol patriotic gymnastics association, and writer of exercise manuals, while simultaneously producing magnificently sculpted Decadent verse in fact constitutes a real-life example of the blend of lifeaffirmation (vitalism) and life-negation (luxuriance in decay and the abnormal) that is typical of Zeyer, Karásek, and most of the rest. Furthermore, one cannot but be reminded of the Bohemian German Franz Kafka and his combination of naturism and sport with morbid comedy and ironic stylizations not dissimilar to Hlavácˇek’s (see particularly Mark Anderson 14, 75, 76). Athleticism, patriotism and Decadence are evident in his first collection, Sokolské sonety (Sokol Sonnets; 1895), but his second collection, with the intermediate-state title Pozdeˇ k ránu (In the Small Hours; 1896), presents mainly a series of exquisite, often ironic, often experimental autostylizations. The influence of French writers, especially Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, is evident, yet each poem (some are poèmes en prose) constitutes an essay in expanding the semantic and lexical potential of the Czech language. “Upír” (The Vampire; Dílo 2: 45–47) presents the essence of Decadence as the poet’s Self transforms in the evening into an aristocratic vampire. Having orgiastically sucked a great deal of blood from the breasts of nymphomaniac virgins, the Self returns in the small hours to insipid, suffocatingly feeble everyday life. The poem expresses not only Decadent oneiric passion incorporated in an aristocratic soul, but also the lot of the typical Czech Decadent, a petty clerk or official escaping in the evening the ochlocratic norm to practice aesthetic aristocratism. Pozdeˇ k ránu presents a panoply of Decadent paysages de l’âme, a submarine landscape, a frustrated aristocrat waiting at a window, a portrait of the man-made Nature of a park, the captivity of the bourgeoisie expressed in a dandyesque communication between a mediaeval prisoner and a spider. The dominant mood is of ironic melancholy. Hlavácˇek has intensified and variegated that mood in Mstivá kantiléna (Cantilena of Revenge; 1898), his chief work, whose title would appear to support Michael Riffaterre’s contention, and whose pilot copy the poet saw on his deathbed. Fedor Soldan follows the Nineties sociologist, T. G. Masaryk, and critic, F. V. Krejcˇí, in interpreting this cycle of twelve poems as primarily expressing social rebellion (Pynsent, “Desire”). One cannot deny that a sense of quasi-anarchist rebellion obtains in the cycle, but to see in the rebellion described much more

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than the ironic fabula that binds the individual poems into a whole may easily create a barrier to interpretation. Yet conceiving of Mstivá kantiléna as primarily concerning hopeless rebellion has been productive. Víteˇzslav Nezval, for example, used Hlavácˇek’s cycle as the verbal framework for his emotionally powerful anti-Nazi work, Historický obraz (Historical Picture; 1939). Nezval appears to have concurred with Soldan’s view on the essential statement of the cycle: “it is better to pay for revenge with one’s life than to abandon the revenge itself” (Trˇi generace 59). Hlavácˇek makes the rebellion of the Gueux and the Gueux de mer against Spanish colonial rule and the crushing of the Anabaptist “kingdom” of John of Münster the framework to his series of picture-poems. He ensures that the cycle may not be interpreted only as a statement of political or social rebellion by paralleling the conflation of two historical events with a conflation of two literary figures in the person of the narrator, that is the author the Abbé Prévost, and the main male character the Chevalier des Grieux of Manon Lescaut. This latter conflation epitomizes the Decadent artistic design. Des Grieux represents frustration and the abbé, who sings the “cantilena” to an intermediate-state viola, represents artistic control, the aesthetic instrumentalization of frustration. The futile rebellion of the Gueux itself becomes only artifice: hence the fact that they cast lots to decide who should first raise his fist in a revolutionary gesture at the gates of one of the Towns. Thus, too, when the narrator shows Manon the phosphorescent, putrefying corpses of the last Gueux, Hlavácˇek is implicitly referring to Manon’s literary death in coitu in the American desert. The sole successful rebel in the cycle finds his achievement in art. This artist is doubly surrounded by convention. First, the narrator makes him red-haired, which links him to the villains and Jews of Romanticism and Realism, but which also links him to the narrator of the prose-poem interlude, where red hair is conceived of again as an intermediate state, inherent in the “mystical” Titian-headed subjects of PreRaphaelite paintings. Secondly, his hirsute hands accustomed to diurnal brawling produce exquisite nocturnal music on the organ, encompassed by the mendacious candles and pictures in the church and the mendacious fragrance of sweet-scented stock outside the church; the candles and pictures of suffering saints represent (the failure of) conventional religion, the fragrance the (failure of the) Romantic perception of Nature. The apparent tension between mendacity and aesthetic distinction can be resolved if one sees that his musician’s fingers (and mane of red hair) are also mendacious. According to the Decadent code, (i) the highest form of art is the lie, the total fiction; (ii) the lie, like the dandy’s mask, constitutes the one existential quality that ensures one’s command, control over reality, one’s exclusivity: truth is always banal and uninventive, for it is by nature shared and thus threatens the uniqueness of the individual. The angry frustration of the organist (expressed, for example by his tears) produces true art. One figure in the cycle lacks frustration, but also has red hair, and that is the rat-merchant who appears (little is transparent in Hlavácˇek’s work) to buy rats from the Towns and sell them to the starving Gueux. The rat-merchant expresses his satisfaction with the “meaningless” words (da, da-danou) he utters to soothe his sweating, jaded nag. These words, however, represent art, poetry; a poetry derived from taking elements both from the conventional and the outcast (the outcast having been previously represented by young outsiders who color their eyes with aesthetic and existential experience in the form of the scent of poisonous flowers, which are distinguished from the banal flowers like ragged-robin that conventional insiders pluck). In the figure of a

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repulsive middleman, Hlavácˇek has incarnated the notion that the intermediate state is the wellspring of art. Two images embody Hlavácˇek’s view, subsequently suggested by the poem on the organist, that both the Romantic perception of Nature and religion have failed modern man. On Nature he alludes to Karel Hynek Mácha’s Máj (Spring; 1836); the Romantic Mácha has also rejected the standard Romantic view — his moon is narcissistic, and dies of love for itself as it gazes in the looking-glass of a lake. Hlavácˇek’s moon exhausts itself and weeps (like the organist). On the basis of an as yet unpublished earlier poem, “Puberta” (in Chirico 169–170), one may verify what would have previously been only an impression, that this exhaustion is derived from masturbation — Modernist narcissism. The failure of religion is embodied chiefly in the image of the tired bells that are no longer able to ring; musical communication between the Godhead and humanity has broken down. Hlavácˇek’s fragmentary final collection of verse, Žalmy (Psalms; posth. 1934), manifests the poet’s attempt to find communication with the Godhead after all. The Godhead slowly becomes only one element in the monadic universe of the poet and essayist, Otokar Brˇezina. Although a signatory of the Realist Czech Moderne manifesto of 1895, he published his verse, especially his later poems, chiefly in Moderní revue. Under the influence of the main philosophical teachers of the Czech Decadents, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (see Heftrich), Mme Blavatsky, and Indian philosophy, he gradually distilled his Decadent lexis and imagery, including especially in his first two collections, extensive use of mysticizing oxymora. He distilled them into a sparse, less arcane lyrical statement on the spiritual brotherhood of humanity with all Nature and the universe. Brˇezina, like Karásek, was fascinated by the unconscious and the inherited memory it implied, but he expanded that notion into the concept of inherited prophetic knowledge of the future. Past, present, and future are all equally immanent within us. So too, the mystical blacksmith Vulcan is still at work in modern factories as he will be in future places of work. Though this is not evident in his first collection, Tajemné dálky (Mysterious Distances; 1895), his second, Svítání na západeˇ (Dawn in the West; 1896), begins to reveal that he has a solution to modern anxiety, to Decadent Catastrophism — mystical faith in the eternal sameness of all experience, whether of human beings, stones, or stars. Strictly speaking, Decadents do not provide solutions, other than the solution of art itself. In Brˇezina’s second collection we nevertheless find a hymn to his fellow Decadent artists, and he manifests such topoi of the Decadence as the sexualization of Nature and Death in all his verse. The complexity of Brˇezina’s syntax and the acoustic majesty of his lines lend his work the oneiric quality of expressing the inexpressible which one associates not only with Mallarmé, but also with Hlavácˇek. If one sets aside the barely original thought of Brˇezina’s verse and concentrates on his language (to which its very complexity leads the reader in any case) one will see a poet converting reality and irreality into art more or less for art’s sake, a major goal of the Decadents. The cultural critic Franz Blei appears to have understood Brˇezina thus. He summarized Brˇezina’s verse work with the following ironic equation: 2 2 ⎛ dσ ⎞ τ ⎛ d σ ⎞ BRˇEZINA = 2 × 2 = τ ⎜ ⎟ + ⎜ 2 ⎟ + K( dσ 1 + dσ 2 ) = 4 " (Blei 27) ⎝ dτ ⎠ 2 ⎝ dτ ⎠

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In other words, in Blei’s view, Brˇezina writes about simple ideas in a methodically complex way. In his essays, Hudba pramenu˚ (The Music of the Wellsprings; 1903), Brˇezina abandons the Decadent code in that he stipulates an external goal for art and artists, the transmission of sacred mysteries, and in that he denies Decadent “existential anxiety,” replacing it with an anxiety deriving from the human being’s “mystical responsibilities” (33). Vladimír Houdek’s only two collections of verse, Vykvetly blíny (Henbane Now Flowering; 1899) and V pavucˇinách nervu˚ (In Nerves’ Gossamer; 1901), manifest something of the pantheism of Brˇezina (and Vrchlický), the same fascination for eyes with which Hlavácˇek had replaced Vrchlický and Aurˇednícˇek’s fascination for breasts or Zeyer’s for women’s hair, the standard Decadent association of Eros with Thanatos, Karásek’s skepticism about conventional eroticism, a sense of the failure of religion combined with admiration for Christ as rebel, and fairly straightforward patriotism. One may understand Houdek both as a culmination of the Czech Decadent trend or as the first spasm in its death agony (the second spasm reached by Breisky, the final by Marten). Unlike his predecessors, Houdek expresses in verse an anti-lyrical pain (all women really were potentially prostitutes, and the one lasting product of love was syphilis); Houdek does not wear a mask of “stylization,” any mask he might have assumed has become part of him. What he may have assumed from other writers, for example Baudelaire (the rutting frogs sarcastically subverting sentimentality), Jean Richepin (low-life lyricism), Karásek (the portrayal of convulsive passion), Zeyer (the portrayal of sadomasochism), becomes part of the unmasking of his real self, at least of his self as he perceived it. Hlavácˇek seemed to epitomize Austrian fin-de-siècle man by combining Czech patriotic gymnastics with tuberculosis. Houdek seems to epitomize that same man in that he was an anti-monarchist, anti-militarist army officer who spent the last six years of his life in a lunatic asylum. Houdek’s verse has a stronger social note than that of the earlier Decadents. Clearly inspired by Hlavácˇek’s Gueux, Houdek’s the Strong have an explicitly anarchist revolution in mind, in which they are destined to be exterminated like the Gueux. The nobility are parasites whose corpses will not even be useful as manure like the corpses of the lower classes. The working-class men of Vykvetly blíny represent Hlavácˇek’s Gueux. Where the latter cursed God for making their wives become barren and lose their hair, the wives of Houdek’s workers are frightened by their men’s sickly passion. Where Hlavácˇek’s Manon Lescaut coldly watches the death of men, the women of Houdek’s verse still wear an orgasmic grin in their graves. Hlavácˇek imagined in the poem “Rekonvalescence” (Dílo 2: 122–23) a pale vision from a hospital bed as the paysage de l’âme in the convalescent with his heightened sensitivity. Houdek’s hospital paysages are somewhat more brutal: pus drips from wounds, and beneath the surface of the surrounding earth the roots of poisonous flowers have poisoned the subterranean waters that nourish humanity. If Czech Decadence is nourished primarily by frustration, nowhere is that frustration more evident than in Houdek, a soldier longing for an end to wars, a distruster of women longing for woman, a despiser of the Church longing for primal Christ. In Vykvetly blíny he imagines his creative faculties as a black bird pecking its way out of his skull (see Pynsent “Misfortune”). Where Houdek represented a spasm of brutality, Breisky represents a spasm of sheer elegance. In an essay reacting to Baudelaire’s Mon Coeur mis à nu, “Quintessence dandysmu” (The Quintessence of Dandyism; 1909), Breisky wrote a far wittier and intellectually more

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sophisticated study on the nature of dandyism than his predecessors, Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire himself (Pynsent, “Dandy”). Breisky’s chief literary work is Triumf zla (The Triumph of Evil; 1910), a collection of “imaginary portraits” or “vies imaginaires” that he labels “essays.” The personalities dissected in seven sketches here are Tiberius, Nero (a fin-de-siècle favorite), Michelangelo with pot-companions, Watteau, Byron, Baudelaire, and Wilde. It is, perhaps, intriguing that another writer, Josef Svatopluk Machar, an expressly anti-Decadent Realist, produced a very similar analysis of Tiberius in a sketch written more or less at the same time, published in Pod sluncem italským (Under Italian Sun; 1918). Houdek unmasks himself in his works and Breisky is more or less unmasking himself in Triumf zla, as a recent critic suggests: “the mystificationary reconstruction of selected fates here is motivated by the endeavor to intimate [Breisky’s] own social vision, to make sense of his own world-view, to construct or reaffirm his own tradition of dandyism” (Merhaut 161). The evil that triumphs in these sketches, which approach the status of psychological analytical short stories, is the bourgeois or conventional historian’s conception of the evil inherent in or around Breisky’s subjects. It can only triumph when his subjects lift their masks. Yet the triumph of evil is the triumph of these historical dandies over what the bourgeois labels evil. This subtle ambiguity is typical of Breisky. One must further take into consideration that Breisky’s dandy is beyond good and evil. The only sin for a dandy is to do something against his own will. Where Houdek suffered by his vision of every woman as inherently a prostitute (except his mother, with whom he desired coitus), Breisky despises woman as a base annihilatrix of the dandy’s impervious self; if a dandy is threatened by sexual desire he should go to a prostitute like des Esseintes. Breisky’s death was as decently macabre as Hlavácˇek’s or Houdek’s: in 1910, he escaped the constrictions of Austria and Czechness by sailing to America. He secured the post of hospital porter in New York and was soon crushed to death by a hospital lift. The third spasm is Miloš Marten, who died as a consequence of psychological rather than physical wounds sustained on the Eastern front. Before Marten, the chief Decadent critics had been the apodictic, polemical, often cantankerous Arnošt Procházka and Karásek, who combined psychological impressionism with mild Decadent ideologizing. Marten had something in common with Karásek and, in his late criticism, with F. X. Šalda; the latter was a technically accomplished, somewhat logorrheic self-appointed arbiter elegentiae of Czech literature and French literary theory, who was later well nigh deified. Marten, however, came under the spell not only of French criticism, but also of Walter Pater. His Decadent defense of style and appreciation of fin-de-siècle art mostly as embodied in Beardsley, Styl a stylisace (Style and Stylization; 1906), is an essay in dialogue form à la Oscar Wilde. The language of the dialogue is Decadent in its sensuality, its accumulations of nouns and adjectives, and in much of its imagery; Marten also employs the concept “singing Barbarian” as a development of Verlaine and Hlavácˇek’s White Barbarians. Marten’s Barbarian is, however, a hallucinatory Symbolist. In this essay he introduces his concept of the strong artist, the person who produces fine art in Walter Pater’s sense. Strong artists, typified by Munch and Przybyszewski (the only Slav Decadent to have any impact on Czech Decadence), shackle their passion — and their horror at Evil — in order to build artistic evaluations of their emotions and sensations. Such writers “stylize” in order to strip their material of any inherent coincidental or episodic attributes and thus create a work that is uniquely theirs. Marten follows Pater in declaring that “stylization” leads all strong

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art to tend towards the ideal of music. Such art teaches its beholder to gaze into the green, that is, knowing, spiritual, eyes of the chimera in an ecstasy of rapture and horror. (The chimera as an artistic ideal and a spiritual ideal had been introduced into Czech Decadent literature by Zeyer, who had borrowed and adapted it from Nerval.) Like Breisky, Marten conceives of life as art; the will to stylize life is an instinct of the artistic élite, and in stylizing life they worship in a religion of rapture and death. Marten further develops his notion of strong art in Kniha silných (Book of the Strong; 1909) where, in an essay on Lautréamont, he writes of an instinct of Pain and Evil. Such late Decadent theorizing imbues his first, cold, often long-winded collection of short stories, Cyklus rozkoše a smrti (Cycle of Rapture and Death; 1907). The characters of these almost melodramatic erotic tales combine a neo-Classical rigidity with fin-de-siècle neurasthenia. His lovers, male and female, are often experimenters; calculated passion and the lust to kill the erotic object alternates with frenetic frustration. Murder is, of course, a fine art. The olfactory sensuality that pervades these stories looks like a pastiche of Decadent sensualism. The trilogy Dravci (Wild Animals; 1913) is just as verbose. The work by Marten that had the most lasting impact on a broader public was his dialogue study on the nature of Czechness, and the importance of Baroque Catholicism for modern Czechness, Nad meˇstem (Looking over the City; 1917). As Hlavácˇek’s Mstivá kantiléna found new form in Nezval’s Historický obraz and Marten’s own Akkord found new form in Soldan’s Trˇi generace, so Nad meˇstem found new, topically politicized form in the philosopher Jirˇina Popelová’s Rozjímání o cˇeských deˇjinách (A Meditation on Czech History; 1948), a dialogue on what fundamental interpretation post-World War II Czechs should give to their history. Most important of Marten’s fictional works, the story that constituted that third spasm, was Cortigiana (1911). True to period fashion, it was printed in just 300 copies, richly decorated and unpaginated. Unlike the other works selected for the present survey of Czech Decadence, it has been neglected by critics and literary historians even though it constitutes a culmination of Czech Decadence in its exploitation and interpretation of topoi. The main character, Isotta, has features of Zeyer’s donna Flavia and Hlavácˇek’s Manon, but also of Breisky’s dandy. Set during the Renaissance, the story reflects the period’s concern with what Burckhardt and John Adington Symonds had presented as a glorious age for manifesting the aristocracy of the artist. Among Czech Decadents it attracted Zeyer, Karásek, Breisky and Jaroslav Maria. Isotta’s father is an intellectual from Alexandria and Isotta herself is copying out commentaries on Plotinus before her teens (the Neo-Platonists were particularly popular in the fin-de-siècle), but in one of the city wars, her parents are killed, and Isotta, aged thirteen, is raped and sold into concubinage. She then becomes a famous Rome courtesan, but has soon had a surfeit of male sexcentricity and moves away to Florence in order to pursue a career as a poet. Her reputation, however, soon catches up with her and she becomes the most soughtafter courtesan in that city. During her time in Florence she also works as the model for a painting of Judith and Holofernes: a Renaissance version of the biblical tale in which coition is involved. The novella begins with an amber early morning shining down on a fountain statue of Leda and the Swan, where the Swan seems to be bleeding to death on Leda’s lap. The readers are then led into Isotta’s house, where they first encounter a version of the Dame à Licorne tapestry (the virgin subduing the phallic horn), then to the painting of Isotta as Judith,

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the avenger. Only then does Isotta enter; she has had a restless night and soon recognizes that she is a new woman. She has the plague. The tale continues with her assessment of her new condition and her eventual conclusion that she has acquired a new power she should use. Having first hoped that before her death she could experience the emotional love she had never known and having failed to find that chance in the beautiful Febo, she determines to enjoy the coming evening’s orgy with all the young nobles of Florence; she goes to the palazzo where they are banqueting and, having dipped her amber nipple in amber wine, sets about inviting them one by one to a chamber upstairs. The staircase represents a passage into the underworld. This simple tale reflects the fin-de-siècle interest in the plague one finds, for instance, in Hofmannsthal, Mann, and Šlejhar. This possibly reflects the contemporary fear of syphilis, but also echoes two Zeyer novelle where a woman infects her (ex-)lover with the plague. Naturally, one may interpret Isotta as a hyperbolic femme fatale, but she is also a virgin whore like Zeyer’s Virginie. The tale is, however, linked with late mediaeval (and earlier folk) mythology. Given the fountain at the beginning, and even possibly the forest in the Dame à Licorne tapestry, given also Isotta’s natural beauty and natural courtly elegance, we might interpret Cortigiana as a fairy tale. In the normal course of events one meets one’s fairy in a forest by a fountain or spring. Isotta (like her Celtic namesake, Yseult of the White Hands) is not fecund, unlike the other type of fairy, Mélusine. So she is a variety of Morgan, the type of fairy that takes her man into the other world and entertains him forever with sexual bliss. Yet another interpretation would be that Isotta is a New Woman, an intellectual who avenges womanhood on the male for his sexcentricity and his denying of learning to women (for details, see Pynsent “Intertextualita”). It is all too obvious that the femme fatale in male fin-de-siècle writing may embody a notional male fear of the New Woman. With Cortigiana, Marten has constructed a period piece with the pen of a literary critic. The novella constitutes an analysis of the possibilities of Decadent iconography and simultaneously a Decadent work in its own right. The Decadent code is notoriously misogynist (which Marten never was), and yet a few women writers did contribute to Czech Decadence. None of these women Decadents was a great writer. It could be said that the prolific Ru˚žena Jesenská (aunt of Kafka’s Milena) only really found her feet in the 1900s, when she belatedly joined the Moderní revue circle. Hitherto she had been an indifferent, more or less Parnassian intimate poet, then neo-Revivalist poet, and novelist for girls. Her collection of lyric verse, Rudé západy (Crimson Sunsets; 1904), was notably published at her own expense because it was too passionate for women’s verse, however well established the author. It brims with Decadently lush sunsets over passionately embracing waves; Jesenská’s sensualism fuses with frustration, and death-longing. Her drama, Estera (1909), is one of the few examples of Symbolist drama in Czech literature; set in Renaissance Bohemia, it tells another tale of frustration and retreat to occult forces. Whether the occult forces existed in real life or in a dream remains unclear. Occult eroticism suffuses her novel, Nocturno morˇe (Marine Nocturn; 1910), and with her collection of short stories, Mimo sveˇt (Beyond the World; 1909), she becomes the first woman to introduce lesbianism into “high” literature. The view she expresses on lesbianism here is negative; two male Decadents, Jaroslav Maria and Miroslav Rutte, had introduced it into their dramas in a positive light. Jesenská broke new paths and other women writers began to imitate her style and her imagery of sexual desire and frustration. The two most serious were Eva Jurcˇinová and Maryša Šárecká. Although once read

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for her steamy psychological analytical short stories, Jurcˇinová is remembered only for her artistic biography (with strong fictional elements) of Julius Zeyer (1941). Šárecká was more original, though her pictures of passionate copulation tended to demonize sexuality; she had a tendency to moralize, as much on social and political matters as on the threat of sexuality, but still her style, for example in Bettina (1921), remained essentially Decadent into the 1920s Louisa Ziková, who died of tuberculosis even younger than Hlavácˇek and who was the mistress of the minor Decadent fiction-writer and dramatist, Karel Kamínek, published one volume of short stories, Spodní proudy (Undercurrents; 1896). In the first piece, “Síla života” (The Force of Life; 9–29), the main character is a female aristocrat of the soul, searching like most decent Decadents for the “New” because she is suffering from cultural excess, ennui. All the stories abound in visual sensuality. As far as her style is concerned, the strong role of verbs in descriptions suggests she is moving towards Realism, away from the Decadent stylistic code that is dominated by nouns and adjectives. Merhaut suggests that Spodní proudy manifests “exclusivity, but is also a polemic with imposed Decadence and hyperindividuality” (105). Vladimíra Jedlicˇková also published only one book, Povídky o nicˇem (Stories about Nothing; 1903), under the name Eduard Klas. (Among her various other pseudonyms she once used the delectably Decadent “Helena Ropsová.”) Most of these stories are Impressionistic prose poems manifesting a grand capacity for sensualizing Nature. Only “O paní Irideˇ” (Concerning Mme Iris) conforms to the Decadent norm with its detailed analysis of frustration, and its association of Eros with Thanatos. A friend of Otokar Brˇezina, the recluse Anna Pammrová, may be considered the only representative of a specifically women’s Decadence. In her apodictic essay(s), O Materˇství a Pamaterˇství. Podivné úvahy (On Motherhood and Pseudo-Motherhood. Strange Essays), written 1910 and published 1919, she combines Indian philosophy and Otto Weininger, St Cyprian and Nietzsche, to form an “anti-philosophy” of semi-mystical female dandyism. She self-consciously turns the Decadent code upside down. Misogyny becomes misandry. The male Decadent spurning of the Romantically natural becomes a desire to return to primal Nature. She preaches elitism and aristocracy of the soul, but only of the female soul. Autostylization is taken to an extreme, to (female) “self-metamorphosis.” She shares with the earlier Decadents a predilection for aphorisms, anti-materialism (anti-Positivism) and a desire to épater le bourgeois just as fruitful as Karásek’s or Breisky’s. And she shares with Mallarmé the desire to return the word to its earlier sacred nature. In Pammrová’s view, however, the word had originally been an expression of pseudo-motherhood. She rejects civilization, for hitherto all forms of civilization had been based on Phallicism and perverted sexuality. The present civilization is leading to the end of humanity as we know it (Decadent Catastrophism); the answer is to exploit this state of affairs with women’s autoeroticism. She turns on its head the male Decadent view, as expressed in Hlavácˇek’s art criticism, that woman can think only with her vagina. In returning to primal Nature, woman will find that her sex organs function like a superbly developed brain. Phallicism must be replaced by Eve-ism. Woman’s supraphysical sexuality has no place in the world of men: men represent the physical, women the metaphysical. In the end, she agrees with Breisky that “Eros” and “erosion” come to the same thing (113). After World War I, two writers strove to create a women’s Decadence that was in the end little more than an imitation of the male fin-de-siècle. Both these writers, Anna Saliysko and

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Beˇla Vicˇarová, are completely forgotten. In her Saphino zrcadlo (Sappho’s Looking-glass; 1926), Saliysko employs Decadent lexis and imagery and makes a fin-de-siècle selection of Greek and Near-Eastern heroes, demigods, and gods. Sappho’s looking-glass transports anyone who gazes into it to an Island of Friends, an Ancient red-light area peopled by hetaeras, cynics, dandies, female flautists, and slave-girls. In “Teˇlo” (The Body; Saphino zrcadlo 9–12), the author-narrator describes the contents of the whole collection as consisting of nothing but false dreams, diseased surrogate loves produced by an over-erotic imagination. One piece, for example, describes a young prostitute’s luxuriant lesbian love for her sister, another the necrophilic rape of Adonis by a gang of maidens, and yet another a woman literally swallowing the body and the memories of Hector. Although Vicˇarová declares her literary faith by dedicating her work to two leading Decadents, her cycle of verse autostylizations portraying woman’s sexual desire and fulfillment, Erotické zrcadlo (Erotic Looking-Glass”; 1934), manifests fewer Decadent qualities than Saliysko’s collection. To be sure, Vicˇarová does indulge in a little mild Satanism and sometimes successfully imitates Beardsleyesque decorativeness, but her skills as a writer manifest themselves only in the simply written passages declaring her enjoyment of foreplay or her desire to become pregnant by her lover. Her fervent longing for the pleasure given by the salacious lips of Nero reads like gimmicky, primitive autostylization. The Decadent code had no place in sanctioned Czech literature from the second half of World War II onwards or during the Communist period. That is not the case with underground literature. Indeed, Decadence was assumed as an anti-revolutionary and anti-bourgeois mode by underground writers immediately after the Communist take-over of 1948; it more or less disappeared from underground writing around 1963, but reappeared as neo-Decadence in young underground writers of the 1980s, and after the changes of 1989 became part of mainstream Czech literature in the 1990s (see Pilarˇ 27, 51–52, 95). The most Decadent of the underground writers of the Stalinist period was Jana (Honza) Krejcarová, daughter of Franz Kafka’s journalist mistress Milena Jesenská and her husband, the architect Jaromír Krejcar; Krejcarová liked to believe she was actually Kafka’s child, and she became best known for her memoir of her mother, where Jesenská’s affair with Kafka dominates (she used the name Jana Cˇerná for sanctioned publications). For most of her postwar life she was destitute, though she married four times and had children; indeed, having earlier spent time in custody for theft, she had an extended spell (1963–64) in prison for neglect of her children; she died in a motoring accident. In anticipation of the neo-Decadents, Krejcarová expresses a Decadent amorality, and the Decadent determination to épater le bourgeois, in a style that actualizes fin-de-siècle Decadence by replacing a lexis founded in the arcane and exotic with a lexis founded in the vulgar. Thus, for example, in a poem from her brief cycle of verse autostylizations “V zahrádce mého otce” (In My Father’s Little Garden) from 1948, she writes: “Flying in an airplane / Flying in a bed // I don’t like shagging in the countryside / I can’t open my legs wide there // And bugs creep over them” (Krejcarová 37). She opens the self-referential short story from 1951, “Clarissa,” with the claim that she is writing out of nostalgia, “or, if you like, out of boredom, which is actually the same thing” (17). In her new anti-establishment (anti-Communist and anti Masaryk-loving émigrés) Decadent prose, her “finger-nails are too long for revolution” and she has “too few talents and too many inclinations to realize bourgeois dreams” (19). In this work, Krejcarová’s imagery lies on the cusps between Decadence and Expressionism: “Into Clarissa’s lap fall plastic

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roses under the electric moon on the outskirts of the inner city” (24). In “Dopis” (A letter; c. 1962) we find what amounts to a personal Decadent manifesto: “If I have ever in my life done anything I feel ashamed of, it was always something done out of common sense. No, thank you; save me from the plague, typhus, and common sense. Common sense means anti-drink posters and command states; common sense means condoms and television-sets; common sense means sterile poetry serving a good cause; for God’s sake save me from common sense” (47). She also rejects the conventional bourgeois notion of truth (58). Her lengthy portrayal of sexual japes in “Dopis” manifest a “shocking” sensualism analogous to Karásek’s sensualism in Posvátné ohneˇ. Karásek’s morbidity rather than his sensualism constitutes one of the inspirations of the leading 1980s underground neo-Decadent, J. H. Krchovský (i.e., Jirˇí Hašek); his pseudonym derives from krchov, graveyard. His chief autostylization lies in self-hatred, and the recurrent image of looking into a mirror echoes Breisky’s short story “Mors syphilitica,” but also manifests his concern with the Decadent fluid self, perhaps most fully expressed in “I am not me. And I am no one else either” (130). Krchovský’s irony, and self-irony, is very much of the Hlavácˇek brand, and in the poem “Sedím proti otevrˇenému oknu” (I am Sitting Opposite an Open Window) he appears to be both inspired by and parodying poems about waiting (an intermediate state) by Hlavácˇek and Brˇezina. The poem ends: “I am sitting waiting … / (s)he must be coming! / must be coming any minute now / someone must be coming any minute / to cleave my skull from behind!” (38). Only a little of Krejcarová’s vulgar language is evident in Krchovský’s version of épater le bourgeois, say in the following line from “Je konec rˇíjna…” (It Is the End of October…): “You’re cold, I whisper to the soil, as I shag my grave” (121). In the 1990s, neo-Decadent verse was not restricted to former members of the underground, nor was the employment of vulgar lexis necessary. Jaroslav Pížl, for example, writes sophisticated impressionistic, more or less intimate verse, sprinkled with verbal and mental echoes of Karásek, but also the Poetist Nezval. In his Manévry (Maneuvers; 1992), he employs autostylization like a Decadent. The most highly regarded neo-Decadent prose-writer is Václav Kahuda (i.e., Petr Kratochvíl); his pseudonym was taken from a particularly unpopular Communist politician. In both the short novel Veselá bída (Merry Penury; 1997) and the very long novel Houština (Thicket; 1999), Kahuda portrays a Self finally emerging from the cess-pit of contemporary life. This Self has used its experience of chiefly urban filth and debased sexuality to become a man who can create his own spiritual and aesthetic world like the “hero” of fin-de-siècle literature. The manner in which Kahuda examines this Self’s sexuality recalls Krejcarová, but also the late Decadents Petr Kles and Houdek; his portrayal of the filth of nocturnal Prague recalls elements of the prose of Hlavácˇek and Šlejhar. Kahuda’s vast vocabulary, his word-play and his sensualism make for a new fin-de-siècle style, though thus far neo-Decadent narcissism seems to be drawing him to a dead end. The Decadent trend of the 1890s inspired Czech writers for a hundred years. Underground and 1990s neo-Decadence appears, however, to be running out of steam.

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The Avant-garde in East-Central European literature Endre Bojtár The origins of the literary Avant-garde can be traced back to about 1910, when certain trends began to supplant Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Junge Bewegung, Decadence, and Modernism. In the East-Central European literatures, as in the English-American, the Spanish, the Brazilian ones, the Avant-garde is the second, more radical wave of Modernism. Sometimes, for example in the poetry of Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams, the two are inseparable. A much more debated question is just when the trend yielded to the Catastrophism (Bojtár, “Katastrophismus”) and Socialist Realism that followed it. What emerged during and after World War II undoubtedly belongs chiefly to a new Avant-garde, and it would be preferable to group these phenomena under a name that makes no reference to it. When did the Avant-garde end? By the 1930s it had played itself out except for the Third World. In the Francophone Surrealism of Western Africa it extended into the mid-thirties. This shows that language plays a decisive though no exclusive role in literature: Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aimé Césaire write in French but do not deal with European concerns. They simply borrow Surrealism for their own purposes. That the Avant-garde was alive well into the 1930s is demonstrated by a sequence of changes common to every artistic trend: after dissolving, its individual components, chiefly the morphological ones, became common property, combining with sociological and historical factors to form other trends that were often far from progressive. Czech, Slovak, Spanish, and Romanian Surrealism are good examples, but we can also cite French Surrealism or German Expressionism of the thirties. By then, Gottfried Benn, for example, stood much closer to Catastrophism than to his former Avant-garde self. Proponents of the erroneous view that the Avant-garde extended beyond 1930 argue sometimes that at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties the Polish Kwadryga (Four-in-Hand) and Z˙agary (Embers), the Lithuanian Trecˇias Frontas (Third Front), the Swedish Fem unga (Five Youths), and other groups (generally called the Second Avant-garde, Middle Generation, etc) emerged, espousing programs similar to that of the Avant-garde. But these ephemeral groups were mere associations; they lacked a definite profile, their poetic practice did not agree with the goals manifested in their programs, and no model can be constructed from their work. Of the writers that began their careers at the end of the twenties, none succeeded in establishing an Avant-garde reputation. Geographical distinctions are difficult, chiefly because some “program groups” responsible for creating the trend, for instance Czech Poetism and Russian Imagism, had individual names, while in other cases identical or similar groups, for instance Hungarian Activism and Czech Poetry of Civilization, performed under different names. Here, as in all reconstruction, the literary historian must select those ideas that will best demonstrate regularity and conformity. I have classified the groups of the Avant-garde under five subheadings or currents: Dadaism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Originating movements such as German and French Dadaism, German Expressionism, Italian Futurism, and French Surrealism variously affected other national literatures, and their effects ranged from sharp

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opposition (in Russian and Italian Futurism for example) all the way to simple adoption. Without trying to account for what exactly was inherited from the Avant-garde, we may sketch its history roughly as follows: Expressionism

Surrealism

Dadaism Futurism

Construcivism

East-Central Europe had no specific Dadaist group, though Dadaist elements were anticipated in and associated with other trends (see below). Futurism and Expressionism were parallel phenomena, and not only in time: Hungarian and Slovene Activism, both forms of Expressionism, were related phenomena. About 1922 or 1923, Constructivism and Surrealism started to supplant Expressionism and Futurism, and not just directly. The activist branch of Expressionism (complementary to Surrealism) continued in Constructivism, which included Hungarian, Latvian, Estonian, and Romanian Activism, proletarian literature, South-Slav Zenitism; the “metaphysical” branch of Expressionism, which opposed Constructivism, developed into Surrealism. Futurism also branched off in two directions: into Surrealism, whether complementary to Constructivism or opposed to it (Czech Poetry of Civilization, Polish Formism) and into a Constructivism complementary to Surrealism (Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian, and other forms of Futurism).

Dadaism Arp and the other original Swiss Dadaists were the only independent Dadaist group. Dadaism appeared later as an accompaniment and stimulus to other Avant-garde trends. Since opposition to art was a chief tenet of Dadaism — the Dadaists preferred the unique facts of life to a fixed work of art — it is understandably difficult to link their conceptions to specific works. Dadaist elements were important in the Romanian language poems of Tristan Tzara and the work of Urmuz, the leading figure in the Romanian Avant-garde, as well as in Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian Futurism, the Futurist Constructivism of the Latvian Trauksme (Alarm) group, Imagism, Latvian Activism, Croatian Zenitism, Czech Poetism, and Serbian Surrealism. A second wave of Dadaism, preceding and later accompanying Constructivism, was especially strong in Hungarian literature, where the suppression of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 led to such a shattering of social conventions and expectations that Dadaism came to be influential, even in proletarian literature. In East-Central Europe, as in Western Europe, Dadaism’s chief contribution was to destroy completely the image that art previously had of itself, of the world, and of man. Art, which had gradually become more and more specialized and isolated since the Renaissance, was forced to recognize in the heroic period of the Avant-garde that its position had become untenable. Having gradually lost its mythological, religious, decorative, and re-creative functions, it suddenly found itself superfluous, hated, and

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socially ostracized. It was Dadaism that drew from this situation the most radical conclusion by proclaiming the demise of art, or rather the complete blending of art with life. To ensure that art was completely indistinguishable from life, it had to be demythologized. To this end, the Dadaists exposed all their tricks and artistic devices to lay bare the intentions and aims of artistic creation. And since every real phenomenon can be taken as intentional, the Avant-garde believed that its trick reconquered an allegedly lost reality. The Dadaists demonstrated the identity of life and art not only by reducing their art to a “lifelike” roughness and emptiness but also by depriving their lives, in an artistic fashion, of function and sense. Hence their many scandals and extravagances, their desire to shock their audience. The Russian Futurists walked the streets with painted faces, the Danish Emil Bönnelycke accompanied his readings with revolver shots, and Rafael Alberti, with a pigeon in one hand and an umbrella in the other, recited his poems in front of the students of a girls’ school. Dadaism not only reduced art to life, it also reduced the artist to a clown strutting on the ruins of the values of the modern world. If all assertions about the self are uncertain, then nothing remains but chance, stuttering, and senselessness. However, this nothingness, this silence, was not the dark eschatology of Catastrophism. On the contrary, it brought the liberation of life and art from all rigidity; it authorized jest, masquerade, self-irony, grotesque visions, and the gaiety of “it’s all the same.” Dadaism believed in one thing only, namely making life still stranger, wilder, more animated and joyful by means of ever-newer ideas, and the rule of fantasy. In East-Central Europe, where Dadaism was a silent partner in other trends, this often “ecstatic” program of gaiety worked its way into other, socially quite substantial concepts, such as Futurism, where it bolstered optimism. This, apart from its role in clearing the ground and exposing the artist’s intention, was what made Dadaism significant. The Avant-garde also signified optimism, a revolutionary and international outlook.

Futurism The following East-Central European groups may be listed under Futurism: the Ukrainian Flamingo, Komkosmos, Aspanfut, and Komunkult; the Czech Poetry of Civilization, a transition into Constructivism; Polish Futurism and Formism, the latter a mixture of Futurism and Expressionism; and the Lithuanian Four Winds group. As in the West, Futurism in these EastCentral European literatures characterized only phases in artistic careers, and smoothly merged later into Constructivism and Constructivist-Surrealist ideas. The Futurists, without exception from poor countries, were well aware that the history of Europe had taken a decisive turn in the early twentieth century. They held that both life and art had assumed profoundly new forms, demanding a complete rejection and destruction of the bourgeois tradition. It soon became apparent that “negating everything” referred chiefly to the nineteenth century, the first era actually to have produced a fully bourgeois society. With the eighteenth century, Futurism had much in common. In Western Europe, the scandals and provocations of the rebellion against the bourgeois traditions were distinctly Dadaist; in EastCentral Europe they came to accompany the activities of the Futurists.


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The Futurist concept of the future as naturalness resembled the Expressionist idea of essence — yet was different from it. For the Futurists, “natural” was not something independent of humanity; it referred both to the social and the personal world, the way in which these were perceived. The naturalness of the envisioned future gave rise to the Futurists’ cult of the machine, their worship of speed, and their love of the city. Modern industrial civilization, they held, was becoming the natural environment of the individual in the twentieth-century. In Futurist poetry, the cityscape seems as unchanging and eternal as nature in folk songs. With respect to personality, Futurist naturalness meant three things. Chiefly, it meant the male or female “object,” which would exist in the coming machine age as simply and as spiritless as a machine, though free and unrestrained life would bring these objects to an almost ecstatic state of unclouded joy. Futurism (particularly the Ego-Futurism that developed into Imagism and Surrealism) also inclined towards the more decadent, destructive pleasures that the bourgeoisie had suppressed but the Futurists regarded also as natural. Indeed, the Russian Velimir Khlebnikov and other Futurists also tried to liberate in the name of naturalness certain irrational forces, going so far as to uniting mysticism with numerology and a universal language (zaum). The characteristic nationalism of all Central and Eastern European Futurism must be understood in this context. It was not a geographical nationalism (thus not accompanied, as in Italian Futurism, by reactionary political activism), but rather a kind of “racial” nationalism — one that tried to shed light on the racial determinants of human nature. Hence the Futurists wanted to penetrate into the primeval and primitive levels of the soul, and since they believed they could find these in peasant life and thinking, their paths, for instance in Polish literature, often veered off eventually towards a strange modern populism. As for reality, naturalness meant to fuse individual and world in a “primeval” monism. Hence the materiality of Futurist art, its hard objectivity, and its hostility to psychology. Constructing images and metaphors that blended into one another, “liberating” words to express the dynamic simultaneity of reality, and disregarding syntax and its external marker, punctuation, embodied the concept of naturalness. In the Slavic and Baltic languages, the liberation of words as emphatic units brought into temporary or permanent use new systems of versification, whose sound structure was based on stress. As a way of perceiving and interpreting the world, naturalness stressed intuition, implying no hostility to rationality, just the sweeping inspiration of an élan vital, reality seen as unity in flux. The Futurist concept of naturalness reveals itself most clearly in ideas on language and the artistic sign in general. Like the artists of the Enlightenment (another link to the eighteenth century), the Futurists wanted to draw closer to the natural condition of things. But in contrast to their predecessors, who rejected the sign in favor of the thing and language in favor of reality, the Futurists wanted to make words into things, to objectify and strip them of the irrelevancies that had been superimposed upon them, in order to arrive at a felicitous unity between the signifier and the signified. When projected unto cosmic dimensions, this objectification of language could be imagined as creating a language of the universe, though it led to extremes of subjectivity: Futurist neologisms were based on “natural” word derivations, onomatopoeia, and the use of etymology, so as to return to the more primitive, more robust, and less symmetrically organized language of the period prior to the language renewals. But since these “discoveries”

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always bore the stamp of their inventor, a broad area of “incomprehensibility” opened. The idea of “created naturalness” gave rise to similar paradoxes on every level of Futurist theory. Like Surrealism, but unlike Expressionism and Constructivism, Futurism centered on the individual. The Futurists were unable to imagine the future as anything but the free, joyful future of the individual. Their hero was the poet, the harbinger of that future. Their emphasis on the “cult of the masses” should not be misconstrued, for the masses were for them only the context that served to liberate and lift the individual to ecstasy. With its completely unambiguous political position, its jubilantly optimistic view of the world, and the freshness of its forms, Futurism represented a powerful force of renewal within East-Central European poetry. But its naive, somewhat vague and anarchistic appeal to the future often sounds empty today. Futurism achieved its greatest artistic results when naturalness was not simplified into something shrill and free of problems but designated rather a threatened human and social naturalness. The concept is best expressed in the poetry of Khlebnikov as interplay of naturalness and alienation. Others sounded this note as well, but only infrequently, and the rarity of that occurrence explains perhaps why Futurism was the only Avant-garde without succesors. Expressionism In East-Central Europe, Expressionism manifested itself chiefly in poetry and drama. Like the other Avant-garde trends, it could be found most often in groups that called themselves differently. The question of when it began is debatable, if only because Expressionism was so closely related to the previous artistic period of Art Nouveau and Symbolism that a long list of writers who moved on the borderline between late Symbolism and early Expressionism ought to be grouped under the heading of post-Symbolism. The list includes Endre Ady, Otokar Brˇezina, the Cˇapek brothers, Bołesław Les´mian, the Polish Scamandrites, Ja¯nis Rainis, Miroslav Krleža, Ivan Cankar, and Tudor Arghezi. Proletarian literature, by far the largest and most important in East-Central Europe, also belongs here. In terms of literary-aesthetic merit, Expressionism may be said to have been the least fruitful of all the Avant-garde currents. Post-Symbolist or other non-Expressionist branches of the Avant-garde that it “helped along” in one way or another were far more significant. Expressionism came to an end around 1922–23, and the writers who appeared at the end of the twenties calling themselves “new proletarian writers,” or “the secondgeneration worker poets,” must, for their talent and innovation, be considered secondary Expressionists. East-Central European Expressionism, not yet fully studied, may generally be characterized as a separate current within the Avant-garde. It may be divided into three periods, although no national literature contains all three of them: the metaphysical-moralistic (Art Nouveau) one; the political-social revolutionary one; and the one that represented a reaction to Constructivism. The writers of the last period appealed to human naturalness and tended toward Surrealism. There were numerous groups, apart from the exponents of proletarian literature, that called themselves Expressionist: the Yugoslav Zenitists; the groups centered on the Polish Zdrój; Hungarian Activists; the Czech Literární skupina; the Bulgarian Plamak (Geo Milev); Latvian Activists


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(Andreijs Kurcijs); the Estonian group called Poetry of Time; and the Slovak DaV. In Romania, German-influenced (metaphysical) Expressionism is associated with the name of Lucian Blaga. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of East-Central European Expressionism is its shallowness. In Western Europe, extraordinarily strong ties bound Expressionism to phenomenology, Freud, Bergson, and other systems of thought. But in East-Central Europe spiritual monism resulted in a kind of whispering of private secrets, which immediately lost its bearings when confronted with the demands and potentials of the new Russian social order, the revolutionary waves, and the new independent states. As it happened so often in the past, the absolutes of history stepped in to replace the absolutes of metaphysics. In the shadow side of Expressionism, its anti-psychologism and its attraction to abstract generalization, lurked the danger of an illustrative schematism. Its anti-intellectualism resulted in the dissolution of form, whereas its prophetic vision of a coming of fraternity and love led in most cases to empty pathos and often to graphomaniac prolixity, despite of its emphasis on a “thick” expressive style. Of course, Expressionism in East-Central Europe also had achievements that left their stamp on all twentieth-century art: hostility to aestheticism, cult of “ugliness,” “barbarization” of language, a direct search for truth, social activism, and an attraction to monumental forms. Constructivism It is chiefly in lyric poetry that Constructivism manifested itself. Its stimulus, and often its theoretical foundation, derived from architecture and the fine arts. Although only a single Russian literary group expressly called itself Constructivist, the movement was most fruitful and its influence still survives, despite the fact that Constructivism did not distinguish itself through works of aesthetic value. This is the movement that most broadly differentiates the whole of the Central and Eastern European Avant-garde from the Western European one. Elements of Constructivism can be found in the work of earlier Avant-garde movements: in Hungarian, Estonian and Latvian Activism, in proletarian poetry, and particularly in the work of two groups: the Czech Poets of Civilization and the Polish Formalists. By about 1922–23 Constructivism became so much a complement to Surrealism that it is almost impossible to discuss them separately. Common were the forces that brought them about, common, or at least similar, were the results in their works. The differences between them appear chiefly in theory and poetics. Artists who claimed to be strict Constructivists could suddenly, and for no apparent reason, come forward with Surrealist works: witness Igor Selvinski’s “Zapiski poeta” (A Poet’s Diary) or Adam Waz˙yk’s and Jan Brze˛kowski’s poems of the twenties. In addition, both movements avowed the unity of constructive awareness and subconscious passion. Constructivism, which produced the finest works of the East-Central European Avant-garde, emerged at the end of the twenties from this symbiosis. Not counting the Russian Constructionists, the major groups were the Ukrainian Nova Heneracija, Avanhard, and Technomistecka hrupa “A”; the Polish Nowa Sztuka, and Cracow Avant-garde; the Latvian Trauksme; the Hungarian Kassák group; and Romanian Activism (Integralism). Constructivism did not restrict itself to art, but was rather a general study of civilization. Its followers attempted to gain socio-political recognition in many places, most specifically in the Soviet Union. The movement’s chief tenet was that human civilization, including art, was, in

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contrast to the incomprehensible chaos of nature, a disciplined order harnessed by creativity. This explains the strange phenomenon that the Constructivists, who preached sober precision and orderliness, were just as subjective, turbid, and incomprehensible in their works as other Avantgarde artists. Since they regarded works of art as distinct, individually created worlds, their aesthetic value lay partly in their novelty, in the poet’s ingenuity and ability to enrich nature with new objects. According to their theory of functions, division of labor in modern society had reached a stage at which art could lay down its former educational and political functions. Artists were now allowed to step out of the roles they had to perform, so that either art would cease to exist or exist only in the form of pure art: the artist himself, the “maker of beauty,” would remain. In Constructivist theory, art thus finds its true place in the world and acquires a rank equal to other areas of human activity. No longer the privilege of the initiated, art would become production that demanded ingenuity, and the poet “a maker of beautiful sentences.” In the words of the Hungarian Gyula Illyés: “The poet does not sing of rain, he makes rain” (“Sub specie” 5). Since the subject of Constructivist art is often the process of artistic creation itself, the method whereby the writer makes the work, one should to examine closely those formaliststructuralist trends in art theory that focus on the making of artworks. Constructivist artists define their task as solving technical questions, for instance in prosody. Although the theory of functions assigned art a new place in the modern world and justified its independent standing, it also imposed limitations. Division of labor meant raising barriers, locking human beings into the prison of their activities, and isolating them from each other and the world. To overcome this problem, the Constructivists simply projected their art into the future. To simplify, they asserted that division of labor depended on the forces of production and that the alienation caused by the division would become greater and greater as the forces of production increase. But the final stage was Communism, the society of plenty, wherein the mature forces of production would produce so much wealth that no division of labor would be needed, and people would do what they preferred according to their talents. Once absorbed into life, art would cease as an independent activity. Authentic, undivided, and fully developed individuals would live in a harmonious world free of a1ienation. The strikingly dogmatic opposition this idea sets up between “necessity and freedom,” “ways and aims,” “present and future,” shows how impoverished it was. The Constructivist “work discipline” and Surrealist “principle of delight” are ultimately opposed to each other. Fortunately, the Constructivists believed that artists could ignore the limitations of the present and create works that anticipated the future, thereby influencing social development. Constructionism promoted the same vulgarized “shortcut” between art and society as in the theory of proletarian art, but in the latter working-class art was a part of existing society, whereas in Constructivism it belonged to a future society. The difference is not to be underestimated in view of its artistic consequences. Constructivism/Surrealism thus posited in East-Central Europe an art of the future. This “conscious future,” this world of “constructed harmony,” differed considerably from the moral paradise of the Expressionist future or the thoughtless rush of the Futurists toward the future. Of course, full emphasis on the future carried with it the danger that the work might reflect an incorrect or false totality, either by losing contact with the present or by deducing the present directly from the future (Konrad 70–71). As a result, the Constructivists/Surrealists wrote no


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dramatic and prose works (since these are in need of a present), and many of their works in the lyric mode were empty and schematic. Constructivism and Surrealism each developed its own version for attaining future authenticity. One aimed at the means, the other at the goal; one at order and discipline, the other at the happiness to which this discipline would lead. Within the double metaphor individual/world, the Constructivists emphasized the world, reality, and the truth of facts, whereas Surrealism emphasized the human dimension. Here again, the difference in emphasis is essential: while Constructivism was interested in the humanized world, including the individual, Surrealism was interested in the world as a whole, including individuals as they open themselves to the surreal. On the one side is the machine endowed with human characteristics, on the other the “psychic automaton” of Surrealism, the mechanically creating person. Surrealism’s “stream of consciousness” was countered with Constructivism’s “stream of things” (Sławin´ski 172). Since Constructivism took the human out of the metaphor and put it into the world, it “dehumanized art” (Mathauser 74); the traditional “I” became free for other, chiefly social but also formal-morphological functions, such as play on words. This displacement gave Constructivist art its characteristic objectivity, rigor, and impersonality, enabling it even to write poster verses and speaking on behalf of the masses. At first glance, the future-centeredness of Constructivism seems to contradict its frequent emphasis, most clearly in the Soviet Union, on “up-to-dateness” and relevance to twentiethcentury reality. This did not affect, however, the larger artistic perspective. It meant only that, as a result of the poet’s identification with the worker (and that of art with production), Constructivism found a model for art in the rational organization of the modern world and structurally identified the poem with the symbol of the new world, the machine. Historically, this was the period of large-scale industrialization in East-Central Europe. In general, the twenties were the years of consolidation and construction. For the Constructivists, the machine embodied construction, for the Expressionist proletarian poets it was an instrument of exploitation that represented the rank ugliness of the world, and for the Futurists it meant power and speed. Surrealism Significant primarily in lyrical poetry, East-Central European Surrealism is difficult to define for several reasons. Of all the Avant-garde trends, Surrealism is still most alive, not only in terms of influence but also in organizations and groups that have either survived from the past or have been created in our time. Furthermore, some groups of the twenties, for instance Poetism, did not call themselves Surrealist, although they represented a particular version of East-Central European Surrealism that differed from the French one. These groups later turned away from their earlier work and began to proclaim themselves Surrealists. In accordance with the changed historical circumstances of the thirties, they created a Surrealism that was closer to that of André Breton. They adopted from the twenties socio-historical possibilities that had become common property, but integrated them into different aesthetic, social, and historical artistic structures. The most characteristic example of this development was the Surrealism that began in Slovakia in 1935 and counted among its members such Catholic figures as Pavol Hlbina and Rudolf Dilong. This was closer to Catastrophism than Poetism and other East-Central European forms of

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Surrealism of the twenties, in spite of similarities in poetics. Since the Surrealism of the thirties had much in common with Existentialist poetry (with the aid of psychic automatism it often tried to mobilize the same occult forces as Catastrophism) we exclude Czech, Slovak, and Romanian Surrealism of the thirties from Surrealism proper. The Surrealism of the twenties is also difficult to define. Its most striking peculiarity in East-Central Europe was probably that it came very close to Constructivism. We discuss the Polish Nowa Sztuka under Constructivism and Poetism under Surrealism only because of slight differences in emphasis. The intertwining of Constructivism and Surrealism is shown by the “unexpected” Surrealist works of the L. E. F.-ist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and by frequent characterizations of the Hungarian Lajos Kassák as a leading figure of Surrealism, though he was an avowed Constructivist. The major groups included the Polish Integralism, Czech Poetism, Romanian Suprarealism, and Serbian Nadrealizam. East-Central European Surrealism was formed in the early twenties, when the revolutionary waves were followed by stabilization and consolidation, and art turned from “the building of the social structure through revolution to the revolutionary building of man” (Sus 101). Surrealism wanted to be more than just an artistic trend; it wanted to find the individual’s place in modern society. While proletarian literature and Constructivism (and its supplement, the philosophy of personality) gave little attention to social studies of civilization, Surrealism was a cultural anthropology that enriched Marxism. It formed past and future images of completely individualized, authentic human beings. Most East-Central European Surrealists clearly saw what threatened humanity, and they countered the danger of a future with human machines, by attempting to create a counter pole to constructed order. They sought to build happy persons of extraordinary sensibility not a rational society, whose phalansterianism would make it unbearable. Their ideological and political ideal was the cheerful and self-confident individual, inhabiting a classless society that the world revolution would bring about. Dadaist humor enhanced the Surrealist authentic self in the world. It established new correlations between meanings and took cognizance of irrational correlations on a concrete, rational level. This concreteness differed from the hard objectivity of Constructivism: the structures of the latter connect things often without the poetic “I,” which in Surrealism is always the center of the associative circles. The Constructivist structure breaks down if we omit one element in an image, whereas the Surrealist series of images does not become unintelligible, only poorer. Breton’s theory of psychic automatism was nowhere accepted in East-Central Europe before 1934, because no one, not even the Imagists, wanted to reduce personality to a biologicalpsychological automaton without socio-historical determinants. Here it was always created consciousness that mattered. Yet these artists were reluctant to renounce the irrational energy of the soul. Karel Teige expresses best this idea of a complex correlation between cool harmony and occult forces: “Whenever we speak of mathematical intuition, whenever we explain the beauty of the machine — and the beauty of the machine is the irrational value of a rational product — we recognize that irrational existence and function stand behind rational evaluation” (367–68). Since Surrealism was interested not just in art but art blended into life, it boldly transgressed the boundaries of artistic forms, genres, and types. By assuming simultaneously the identity of the worker and the poet, the Surrealists thought they had resolved the Romantic


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dichotomy of reality and art, of living the experience and expressing it, of experiencing time’s flow and fixing it in artistic forms. They did not succeed, of course, nor could they, but one thing they did attain: freeing the poem of all didactic explanation and symbolic duality, making it as raw as experience. They assumed that art and reality are identical in kind, and concluded that words and images had to be as real as objects: the phonetic character of a word could evoke associations in the same way as any actual phenomenon, thus shedding light on new and distant correlations between meanings. Surrealist works were “subjective” because they related everything to the lyrical “I,” as if the authentic personality had come to own the world. In order to blend the individual and the world, it was necessary to go beyond Futurism’s word-centrality and Expressionism’s striving for essence. Constructivism and Surrealism found meaning not in isolated words or ideas but in the relationships between them. Hence the basic poetic unit of Constructivism was the sentence and of Surrealism the image.

Shifting genres

Literary reportage: Between and beyond art and fact Diana Kuprel “Reportage is as old as human speech.[…] The Latin ‘reporto’ means to relate. To relate some event to the consciousness of those who didn’t see it.” (Wan´kowicz, Karafka 22)

In “The Author as Producer,” his 1934 address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, Walter Benjamin discusses the need to reexamine how literary genres are defined, in order to identify the distinctive forms in which contemporary literary energies were being expressed: “We are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force” (223–24). His polemical example of a writer whose work was representative of this destabilization of generic boundaries is Sergei Tretiakov. As a collaborator in L. E. F. (Left Front of Art, 1923–25) and the New L. E. F. (1927–28), this avant-garde Russian poet, dramatist, and literary theoretician was also one of the day’s leading practitioners and proponents of the “literature of fact.” One incarnation of the “literature of fact” was reportage, a genre that could lean either towards the documentaryjournalistic or towards the artistic literary pole. In Benjamin’s view, reportage pre-eminently demonstrated the obliteration of established polarities between “imaginative” literature and factbased journalism that could be observed from post-revolutionary Soviet Union to postwar Weimar Germany. Reportage became a literary form. Egon Erwin Kisch, one of Tretiakov’s professional colleagues (Segel 36–37; Tretiakov, Strana 315), sought to stretch the conventions of journalistic practice by importing techniques traditionally reserved for fiction, investing it with artistic form while still presenting accurate truths (Kisch, Literaturgattung 397). His explicit mission was to elevate a generally undervalued genre to an acknowledged art form (Hofmann 579). Kisch was born in 1885 into the German, Czech, and Jewish cultures of Habsburg Prague; after almost six years in Mexican exile, he returned to a communist-controlled Prague and died there in 1948. Early in his career, while covering crimes in the back alleys of Prague as a local reporter for the German-language Bohemia (1906–13) and writing for the Berliner Tageszeitung (1913), Kisch penned poems, short stories, Prague’s first “naturalistic” novel (Der Mädchenhirt), and plays, before devoting himself entirely to journalism. He helped pave the way for the revaluation of the journalistic genres by publishing in 1923 Klassischer Journalismus, an anthology that was to serve as “a manual and a postulate” (Hofmann 574). First, it presented exemplary texts in an array of journalistic genres, from ancient times to his own, by writers not primarily or necessarily recognized for their journalism (e.g., St. Augustine, Balzac, Dickens, Luther, Zola; Karel Havlicˇek-Borovský is the only true journalist in the list). Second, it set the direction for the future evolution of reportage.

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In 1924 Kisch followed this anthology with the sensational investigative report Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl. Never swaying from his aspirations, his subsequent journeys through Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Africa, Australia, and Mexico yielded collections of lively crime and travel reportage. One of these collections, Marktplatz der Sensationen (1942), opens with a metadiscursive gloss on his mission. Discussing the art of the balladeer Blind Methodius, whose “repertory belonged entirely to the realm of fact, to events that either were or would become history. In short, ballads” (Sensationen 5), Kisch critiques the contemporary attitude towards, and the subversive power of, fact-based literature, including his own work: “why are naïveté, archaism, lack of form brought up as reproaches? […] The answer is that even in belles-lettres concrete expression is dangerous, for every truth contains potential criticism and revolt” (5). This piece, intentionally composed to instruct and construct Kisch’s audience, is thus an allegory championing reportage: “Naturally this little excursus is not being undertaken for the sake of Blind Methodius, who probably never heard of literary form and content and to whom the question of whether his repertory belonged to Literature or not was of no importance whatsoever” (5). For his accomplishments in producing animated and captious reportage, for his tireless efforts towards achieving realism and unvarnished truth and advancing the genre, Kisch was hailed by his peers as the “father,” “master,” and “poet” of contemporary reportage; see, for example, the comments by Klemens Krzyz˙agórski, Theodor Balk, Lion Feuchtwanger, and György Lukács, collected in a 1978 issue of Kontrasty (11.3: 26–46), a Polish magazine devoted to reportage. He even became the inspiration for, and hero of, Reportáz psaná na oprátce (1943), the death-row work of the Czech writer and publicist Julius Fucík: his “Kisch” strives to become the Cinderella-figure of journalism, incarnating thus the real Kisch’s aspirations for the art. After Kisch, reportage was rarely practiced in most of East-Central Europe, except for Poland, and Romania, where Geo Bogza similarly reinvented and launched the genre in the late 1930s, mixing a focus on banal everyday realities with fantastic-lyrical insertions and epic reconstructions. Critics charge that Kisch, an anti-fascist, anti-militarist, and pro-communist who sacrificed literariness for politics, is to blame for the ultimate failure of literary journalism in the German-speaking world. Hilmar Schmundt, for instance, criticizes Kisch’s Spanish Civil War article about a bullfight, in which Kisch adopts the bull’s perspective, only to make it into a metaphor of “the people,” taunted by a (social democratic) red flag before a bloodthirsty bourgeois audience. In East-Central Europe, strong ties have existed among the professions of journalist, writer, and politician — not to mention propagandist. Arthur Koestler, for example, wrote in 1938 his Spanish Testament, a propaganda piece about the Spanish Civil War that contains his account of his incarceration by the nationalists, Dialogue with Death, the only part of the original text to be republished. In the Monarchy, journalism served as a school for literary and political engagement. First, it was a way to learn the craft and make a living in the early stages of a writing career. Second, as Johnson has shown, newspapers and journals provided a forum for the creation and preservation of national identity in countries embraced by multi-national empires, for battling censorship, and for reflecting the current political situation (5–40). This intersection of journalism, belles-lettres, and politics was particularly manifest in Poland, which developed a strong tradition of reportage: the press preserved the language, provided a source of employment

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for the intelligentsia and the gentry, and fostered opposition to the regime during its partitioning. Adam Michnik is a good contemporary example of this conjunction: he was an activist in KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers) and the Solidarity opposition, as well as a member of the first non-Communist Parliament from 1989 to 1991; he is currently editor-in-chief of the Gazeta Wyborcza and author of Z dziejów honoru w Polsce, Diabeł naszego czasu: publicystyka z lat 1985–1994, and many other publications. Poland had one of the most consistently open media systems among the East European countries under Communist rule. Although the openness did depend on the degree of control exercised by the particular partitioning power or, in the postwar period, by the Communist regime (e.g., the thaw in the 1970s resulted in a robust production of reportage), topics that were taboo elsewhere in East-Central Europe were vigorously discussed in the Polish media (Johnson 11, 28). When Ryszard Kapusćin´ski published “Wszyscy sø zwyczajni” in 1955, his career-launching investigative report about the scandalous living conditions of workers and about administrative abuses and corruption in the steelworks foundry Nowa Huta, he was at first censured severely and banned from journalism; but the reportage provoked a government investigation and he was eventually awarded the Golden Cross of Merit for his exposé. Furthermore, Poland served as a land-bridge whereby Western culture and ideas could filter through to other Eastern-block countries via translations and journals like Forum, Ameryka, Nowy wyraz (New Expression), Odra, Literatura na s´wiecie (Literature in the World). This openness to the West was crucial, historically, to the evolution of the Polish press. At its inception, it was strongly influenced by the literary-academic tradition of the English press and then by the presses of the partitioning powers; later it modeled itself on the French press and, at the end of the nineteenth century, on the German press (Sztachelska 9). It was perhaps even more important for the development of a robust genre at the intersection of journalism, literature, and the social sciences that some of Poland’s best nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers reacted against the conventions and martyr-ideology of Romanticism and came under the sobering influence of Naturalism and Positivism. Answering the imperative to respond to the most pressing questions of the day, they started to look objectively, even scientifically, at the surrounding world, and adapted rules of veristic fiction or factography. In doing so, they laid the foundations for and prototypes of twentieth-century literary reportage — even though critics before Melchior Wan´kowicz may not have known quite how to categorize this multitude of strange forms. As Jolanta Sztachelska has shown in her excellent study of the documentary tradition in Polish prose, in some cases the journalism-oriented work of writers proved formative for the evolution of their fiction. Thus, historical novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski advised that artists be attentive to the world around them and maintain a “cool” attitude in telling the story. He founded a new genre in fiction that used documents as the basis for the faithful presentation of epochs. Novelist Bolesław Prus’s weekly chronicles, written over a forty-year period, are characteristic of the beginning of Warsaw reportage, which was dominated by the feuilleton. In the 1870s, Adolf Dygasin´ski wrote Listy z Brazylii, in which a reporter’s adventure is presented parallel to a not-so-rosy description of Polish emigration; the inclusion of the reporter as eye witness within the narration, makes this work a precursor to modern reportage. Maria Konopnicka’s poems on prisons, “Za kratø” (Behind Bars; 1886), is a sociological study of the “characteristics of the prison world, the laws regulating human behavior, and the mechanisms limiting the spontaneity of collective reactions,” as well as a

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psychological examination of the individual “in extreme situations of force and debasement.” She places this faithful account of observable subjects, objects, and processes within a narration that employs comparison, contrast, and symbol as literary techniques (Sztachelska 70). In Listy z podróz˙y do Ameryki (1878), a work that was to prove both ideologically and artistically pivotal for its author (Najder, 5–27), Henryk Sienkiewicz blended an objective account of sociological and economic aspects of America with poetic impressions, lyrical declarations, and vivid description. Finally, Wladysław Reymont created in 1894 “Piełgrzymka do Jasnej Góry,” a psychological literary document (the memoir of a spiritual journey by a skeptical, turn-ofcentury, Polish intellectual) within a reportage on an authentic event, the facts of which were generally known to the readers. Reymont’s novelistic-reportage, Sztachelska argues, was “the essential link between the strong nineteenth-century current of Realism, with its emphasis on documentary values, and the greatest products of Polish reportage in the twentieth century by writers from Melchior Wan´kowicz, Zbigniew Uniłowski, and Ksawery Pruszyn´ski, to Ryszard Kapusćin´ski, Krzysztof Køkolewski, and Hanna Krall” (186). In the first half of the twentieth century, historical and political events gave East-Central European reportage and other fact-based literary forms a fresh impetus. The world was dramatically transformed by the First and Second World Wars, with the defeat of Germany, the overturning of old social order throughout Europe and Russia, and the redrawing of national borders. The trauma inflicted by the wars incited writers from Germany to the Soviet Union to look for new approaches dealing with it, and to record the profound social and economic changes their world was undergoing. Some questioned whether the “rotten bourgeois novel” could adequately represent the world or whether imaginative works were even relevant in the postwar period. In the Soviet Union, post-revolutionary art was supposed to shape “real life” by raising the social consciousness of the people. Factography or factual reporting (topical sketches, biographies and “bio-interviews,” travel accounts, documentaries) emerged as a significant trend in literature. Indeed, ocherk (a special type of reportage leaning either towards the documentaryjournalistic or towards the artistic-literary pole), which had been practiced earlier by Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy, came to the fore and would continue to evolve and transform in the hands of Soviet writers like Maxim Gorki, Sergei Esenin, and Valentin Ovechkin, and Ukrainian prose writer Serhii Plachynda (Krawczyk and Kusiba 40–43). Collaborating with the avant-garde of the L. E. F. and New L. E. F. (whose members included Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Brik, and Victor Shklovsky), Tretiakov vigorously championed “factual realism” against subjectivism, fiction, psychological literature, and “bourgeois art,” and he formulated a theory of literature’s social imperative and destiny. Accomplishing this transformation in literature required, in Tretiakov’s view, two things: that literature be replaced by new forms created by a merger with journalism; and that writers be “de-individualized” and “deprofessionalized.” Writers, in other words, were to be replaced by a collective, whose members were doctors, engineers, technicians, politicians, and other professionals (front gauche 103–10). Postwar Weimar Germany, where Tretiakov and Kisch gravitated, produced its own response to the war and the political and social upheavals, exemplified by Bertold Brecht’s Lehrstücke, the dramatic writing of Ödön von Horváth, the documentary theater of Erwin Piscator, and the feuilletons of Joseph Roth. Gustav Hartlaub, Director of the municipal gallery

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in Mannheim, coined the term Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity or Sobriety) to prescribe an alternative to Expressionism. The new attitude embraced “the cult of the objective, the hard fact, the predilection for functional work, professional conscientiousness, and usefulness”; it called for the artist to “look with a clear and steady eye at the commonplace and trivial things of everyday life, and […] present objects precisely and unsentimentally in all their details” (Crockett 2, 146). As Roth declared, “only by observing the minutiae of reality can one approach truth” (Werke 2: 825). Kisch also promoted this new attitude towards valuing precise depictions of the milieu, the idioms, and the present time. He profited in large measure from his experience on the Serbian front in the War, where he had observed a huge discrepancy between the reality of the battlefield and the fabricated “reality” produced by the War Office press corps. He recorded both in a diary he started in 1914 while fighting in the trenches (Sensationen 346–47). A year before the expanded edition of the diary, “Schreib das auf, Kisch!” appeared in 1930, he explained in a piece how “pure reportage” was born in the wake of the war as the most appropriate method by which to respond to it: After the war, all of the plots of novels became trivial and insignificant in the face of the impressions with which the World War overwhelmed us. What cruel fairy tales did each family experience during the war! Each of us had to solve problems more difficult than those he had once read about in novels. In short, each person lived through his own novel, and sometimes a whole series of novels. This is how the peculiar reportorial activity which I would call pure reportage arose. (PowieÁsc´ i Reportaz˙ 27)

Another writer who participated in this discussion on the historical context and place of reportage was the “father” of modern Polish reportage, Melchior Wan´kowicz. His tomes on the First and Second World Wars vividly capture history in the making, and became historical sources in themselves because they are based on material the author gathered from leaders, soldiers, and other participants while he served himself as a soldier-war correspondent. He wrote in Strze˛py epopei (1923) about the battles of the legionnaires and troop movements on the eastern terrain of the Polish Republic during World War I. World War II is the subject of Westerplatte (1959) and Bitwa o Monte Cassino (1945–47), where Wan´kowicz composes the life of a great battle, writing precisely about each episode while, at the same time, keeping an eye on the whole. He writes in his mini-treatise on reportage, Prosto od krowy: The Treaty of Versailles created twenty-eight border conflicts, Russia proclaimed a new order, and in each country, within the masses who had been mobilized by the war, came a regrouping of social classes — all of this had to be learned. The First World War brought such an avalanche of facts that people began to look around for those who could help to record them. With this came a revaluation of whether [reportage] belongs to the realm of literature or whether it — and factomontage in particular — should be accorded only a small corner. (8–9)

When World War II broke out, Wan´kowicz continues, the “debate over the locus of reportage was arrested and reportage was given a new, powerful impulse. Once again so much took place in the world that needed to be learned — but this time it was a question of one’s own existence” (10). This impact on the writer’s existential state is expressed by Polish novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Zofia Nałkowska. Her wartime diaries record what she personally experienced and witnessed during the occupation of Poland: “The dead. The dead. The solemn

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march-pasts of the resigned. The leaps into the flames. The leaps into the abyss. The woman in the garden listening to the trickling droplets. The boy in the window. The children clasped. I cannot bear these thoughts. I am changing because of them” (April 28, 1943). This change, which can be charted in the diaries, involved her developing an awareness that, as a writer, she was obliged to bear witness to what was going on around her, and to record in writing all that was being wiped from the earth so as to prevent it from vanishing without a trace. At the end of the war, the raw material and the sheer magnitude of the crimes that confronted her during the 1945 hearings before the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes Committed on Polish Soil demanded that she take an innovative approach to representation and adopt a perspective distinct from her typical egocentric one: so she wrote Medaliony (Medallions), her collection of factual stories about the Nazi genocide in Poland. Fact-based literature seemed to her to be the adequate method of response. The collection’s formal testimonials, private interviews, chance conversations, and other witness reports allow Nałkowska’s protagonists the opportunity to speak on their own behalf, from their own limited understanding of the events. They justify their own actions in “Człowiek jest mocny,” implicate themselves in “Professor Spanner” and “Kobieta Cmentarna,” and maintain the ambiguity of their motivation in “Przy torze kolejowym.” The author’s objective commentary interrupts the testimonies only rarely, and she saves for the end an analysis of the Nazi genocidal machinery, its impact on, and exploitation of, human behavior. She then places this content within the fictional frame of a short story, employing metonymy, synecdoche, and foreshadowing, and jarringly juxtaposing lyrically represented, even romantically described landscapes with human-scapes of death. She is able thus to render the individual experience as universal, so that each “medallion” becomes an exemplification of the book’s principal theme and the author’s thesis incorporated in the text’s epigraph: “People dealt this fate to people.” Ewa Pien´kowska accurately sums up Nałkowska’s accomplishment in effectively merging the journalistic and literary arts: Preserving the authenticity of facts and the deeply personal character of individual experiences, true to documentary prose and the memoir, […] she goes beyond ordinary reportage. […S]he imports intellectual and literary constructions that allow her to generalize individual experiences and bestow an objectivity on them. The moral theme, the vigilance and protest against the devastation that fascism wrought on the psyches of people subjugated to its will […] are inscribed in the fact-based accounts simultaneously with […] the marked conviction […] that there are experiences that time does not erase, that memory preserves. (qtd. in Medaliony 5; see also p. 163)

Literary reportage, as exemplified by Nałkowska’s Medallions, is preeminently a hybrid or borderland genre. Formed at the intersection of imaginative literature, journalism, and the social sciences, it borrows from, and negotiates among, all three. It strives for synthesis, searches for a means of compensating for the tight corset of the daily newspapers. It imitates, therefore, the short story or novella: it borrows narrative techniques and descriptive modes from literature; it tries invention. […However,] in the final analysis, it remains always something in-between, “in between research and storytelling,” as Maxim Gorki stated. In addition to elements of literature, every ambitious reportage contains essayistic and journalistic sections, moments of self-reflection, and even quasi-academic thoughts. (Krawczyk and Kusiba 37)

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Literary reportage, then, is a type of documentary narrative that uses selection, arrangement, emphasis, and other literary devices to go beyond the portrayal of the factual event as event, the end of which is accuracy or verisimilitude, to explore the event as meaning or interpretation (Pizer 207–19). Facts are the main element, the differentiae specifica of reportage as a branch of literature; however, they are only the raw material, the “stones” (to use Wan´kowicz’s metaphor) that serve as the catalyst for the writer’s imagination. According to Wan´kowicz, the creative imagination composes these facts into a “factomontage” that exposes and conveys the “meaning” or the “truth” of the event in such a way as to affect the reader emotionally, intellectually, visually, and/or imaginatively (Prosto 47). For his part, Kisch considers the fact to be merely the “compass” or the “telescope” of “logical fantasy” in the reporter’s journey. The reporter brings into view the circumstances in which the facts or events occurred, and focuses on causality and on the association between the facts in order to determine the most effective arrangement (Wesen 207–08). Reportage, in short, is a type of “non-fiction writing with a selfconscious literary purpose, or documentary narrative as art,” in which the writer “tries to draw together the conflicting roles of observer and maker, journalist and artist” (Weber 3) — and sometimes the role of the activist, the politician, and the social commentator, as well. How, then, can the various twentieth-century incarnations of literary reportage in EastCentral Europe be defined, situated, and described? We can identify six interrelated aspects, whose combination gives reportage in East-Central Europe its unique identity as a literary form. First, East-Central European reportage has, in contrast to journalism’s aspirations to objectivity, a strong element of “creative subjectivity” (Marek Miller 28). While the subject matter of the reportage may be an actual event, writers often make themselves the subject of the reportage: the hero is the author’s unique “I” that tries to grasp, understand, order, and then explain that which is to be related (Jasin´ska 13). As Krystyna Goldberg remarks, Kisch, for example, was always present in his works: he “described not only the events to which he was the witness, but also his own experiences, observations, reflections, and his relationship to the matters discussed” (46). Indeed, in Landung in Australien (1937), the author appears as the protagonist, referred to as “our man.” Similarly, Elias Canetti’s philosophical travel book, Voices of Marrakech, is not a mere record of the Arab, European, and Jewish voices of the city’s inhabitants, but also a profoundly eloquent register of the author’s own mental voyage from a state of ignorance ostensibly to a state of knowledge, but in actuality to a condition of knowing ignorance that accepts the unbridgeable otherness of the foreign culture. It is this unbridgeable otherness that Canetti intended to translate for his audience. As he writes illuminatingly in one of the many reflective passages that interrupt the description of Marrakech: Here I am, trying to give an account of something, and as soon as I pause I realize that I have not yet said anything at all. A marvelously luminous, viscid substance is left behind in me, defying words. Is it the language I did not understand there, and that must now gradually find its translation in me? There were incidents, images, sounds, the meaning of which is only now emerging; that words neither recorded nor edited; that are beyond words, deeper and more equivocal than words. What is there in language? What does it conceal? What does it rob one of? During the weeks I spent in Morocco I made no attempt to acquire either Arabic or any of the Berber languages. I wanted to lose none of the force of those foreign-sounding cries. I wanted sounds

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Ryszard Kapusćin´ski discusses this subjective element in similar terms. He views his role as a cultural translator and mediator, a contemporary Hermes whose mission it is to shuttle between worlds that “nowhere come into contact” (Dregs 196). In doing so, he very neatly synthesizes the major theme running through his body of work: communication between alien worlds of diverse racial, geographical, historical, and generational contours, and the obligation of the reporter to build bridges of understanding between them — even if, ultimately, this is impossible to achieve (Soccer 229–34). In Lapidaria (210) he writes: I consider myself to be an explorer of Otherness: other cultures, other ways of thinking, other types of behavior. I want to come into contact with strangeness in order to understand. It is a question of how one can describe reality adequately, but anew. Sometimes this kind of writing is called nonfiction writing. I would call it creative nonfiction writing. Personal presence is crucial. Sometimes I’m asked who the hero of my books is. “I am,” I respond, “because these books describe a person who travels, looks around, reads, reflects, and writes about all of this.”

When the consciousness of the reporter determines the angle of vision, the reportage can be interpreted as borrowing from the first-person novel, as well as from the diary and the autobiography. The second aspect concerns truth claims, an especially thorny issue for literary reportage. The early innovators of reportage sought to stretch the conventions of journalism by using imagination and fictional techniques in order to foreground specific features without falsifying the probability, or compromising the documentary value, of the final picture (Geisler 74). Kisch, as a reporter and an artist, would often use fictional means to pursue truth (Geisler 74); on occasion, as in “Fire at the Schittkauer Mills” and “On Truth and Falsehood” in Sensation Fair, even downright fabrications. There is no simple and straightforward choice between fiction and documentary. Wan´kowicz, for his part, aspired not to a “documentary truth” (the minute registration of a literal truth), but rather to a “synthetic” one that would show the essence of the problem. Achieving this synthetic truth required that the specific and the individual be sacrificed in favor of the collective. Wan´kowicz’s hero (he invokes Sienkiewicz as an exemplum) was the “epoch,” and his body of work as a whole creates a “portrait” of the first half of the twentieth century. He explains his method in an interview with fellow reporter Krzysztof Køkolewski: “From each fate, I take what is particular in it, what is ‘exceptional,’ ‘thick,’ ‘powerful’; otherwise it would be grey, so-so, and we would have to get yet another description. […] There is no one person to whom all that I require has happened” (Wan´kowicz krzepi 22–23). Tworzywo (1954) provides concrete examples of Wan´kowicz’s ideal of achieving a “synthetic truth” by means of “factomontage”: the hero, Old Pasik, whose name refers to the seventeenth-century non-fiction writer, Jan Chryzostom Pasek, is drawn from seven real people; his son is an amalgamation of five. Wan´kowicz’s borderland compatriot, Ksawery Pruszyn´ski, was also not adverse to a bit of artistic license in his forays into new journalism: he would meld details and events from diverse climes and times to achieve the desired, and truthful, effect. According to

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Wan´kowicz, in Trzynasćie opowiesći Pruszyn´ski saw the tomb stone of “Człowiek z rokokowego kosćioła” not in the rococo church of Wiessen, but elsewhere; he did not have the reported conversation in a hospital in Narvik (in whose campaign he fought with distinction) in 1940, but rather in 1944, when he was recovering in a hospital after being burned; furthermore, most of that conversation was overheard when he was a correspondent for Wiadomosći Literackie, during the Spanish Civil War (Prosto 108). The picture may be glued together from bits and pieces of facts, but the truth, according to Wan´kowicz, stands as a coherent whole. The third feature of reportage is participation, an integral part of the primary reportorial act of describing. According to Kapusćin´ski in “Wszyscy sa zwyczajni,” to write about a particular event means “to take part in it — to take a greater role than has been done before” (165). Participation implies some degree of presence. Køkolewski lists four degrees in “Estetyka reportaz˙u” (Marek Miller 288–305). The first degree of participation is absence, the reportage being based on witness reports and documents. Examples would be most of Nałkowska’s Medallions, Wan´kowicz’s Westerplatte, and Hanna Krall’s wywiad-rzeka (long interview) with Marek Edelman (see p. 154). The second degree is presence during the event as, for instance, in Wojna futbolowa, Kapusćin´ski’s firsthand chronicle of the war between Honduras and El Salvador, which was ignited by the 1970 World Cup Soccer Tournament in Mexico City. The third degree is participatory observation of the event, as in Kisch’s “Schreib das auf, Kisch!” and Wan´kowicz’s Bitwa o Monte Cassino. The final degree of presence is the invocation of the events. Like Kisch in Landung in Australien, the reporter invokes the facts, or creates the situations, in order to describe them. As several practitioners of reportage acknowledge, participation is essential to fulfill the hermeneutic function of reporters for it allows them to identify with the otherness they relate. As Kapusćin´ski sums this belief up: “Words are incomprehensible if one has not lived through that about which one writes. If it hasn’t penetrated through to the blood” (“Dregs” 196). Reportage’s fourth distinguishing feature is the explicit implication of the audience. With one foot in journalism, reportage is written so as to be read by the broadest possible circle of readers, to invoke a popular consciousness (Marek Miller 14). The audience is not merely passively implicated but is often called upon to take an active, critical role with respect to the teller or the tale told. As Schlendstedt explains in his afterword to Kisch’s Paradies Amerika: “One of the attractions of Kisch’s reports about America, of the grand reportage, as contemporaries called the form, is that it was not the [immigration] officials but rather we, the readers, who are provoked to observe the observer, to adopt a critical stance toward his ways and conclusions” (304). Nałkowska’s Medallions also involves actively the audience through its objective, multifaceted observation, by consciously and thematically engaging the reader to detect the distortions, assumptions, discrepancies, and misperceptions of the witnesses. A brilliant storyteller in his own right and heir to a vibrant borderland tradition, Wan´kowicz was very aware that the reader (also in the collective) co-creates works of art: “A well-written reportage grows in the reader’s soul. A book matures and takes on a certain form, not when it is being written, not when it is being published, not when it is being sold, but a long time afterward, when it has been assimilated by readers; it is their collective judgment that bestows on the book its final form” (Prosto 33).

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The fifth aspect concerns reportage’s hybrid style. Marek Miller likens reportage to “hyperrealistic pop art” (14), by which he means that it is an aggregate composed of different materials mounted on a canvas, namely the newspaper. Reportage does not just blend techniques and conventions from fact-based journalism, the social sciences, and imaginative literature, drawing on autobiography, the short story, the diary, the chronicle, the essay, the detective novel, and other genres. Practitioners of the genre even renovated outmoded forms, melding the old with the new to create an innovative form. This collage technique of composition manifests the writer’s “creative subjectivity” and the reporter’s integrity to faithfully present. It expresses the author’s desire to locate a form — and style and language — most appropriate for the topic. When in Na tropach Sme˛tka Wan´kowicz reported, by way of a kayak trip through the Mazury, about the struggle of the Polish minority to preserve its identity in Eastern Prussia, he married factomontage with the gawe˛da, a traditional genre practiced by writers from Jan Chryzostom Pasek in the seventeenth century to Witold Gombrowicz in the twentieth. In doing so, he injected the performative, historico-anecdotal, and loquacious qualities of the gawe˛da into the reportage, and modernized the gawe˛da by eliminating its characteristic digressions (Prosto 76). For his part, Køkolewski, who began his career as a crime reporter, blended the documentary and the fable to create a basńia udokumentowana (documented fable) in Jak umierajø nies´miertelni, his reportage about the grim story of Roman Polanski and the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. The final and salient aspect of Polish and East-Central European reportage is its allusiveness. Although Poland had during Communism one of the most consistently open media systems in East-Central Europe, it still had to contend with censorship and periods of repression. Writers and editors always experimented with methods that would allow them to discuss scandalous economic and political issues, or to depict the bleak, day-to-day life under the Communist regime, without attacking the system directly, for then they would be silenced — as it happened with Kontrasty, which was effectively shut down in 1979 when all the editorial and writing staff were fired. One solution was to write, as Kapusćin´ski did in “Wszyscy,” exposés about lower-level officials and municipal administrations, or about the lives of “gray,” ordinary people. On occasion, as in the case of Marek Kusiba’s “Ludzie mówiø, kto ich słucha” (1980), these pieces were appropriated by the regime in order to get rid of “uncomfortable” people. Early in his career, Kapusćin´ski went into the Polish “bush” to relate the perspectives of forgotten, invisible, marginal people and so to record a living history of those seldom deemed worthy to enter the annals of official history. The fruits of those peregrinations appear in Busz po polsku (1962). He portrays two elderly German ladies who escape from a Polish nursing home to reclaim their houses, taken over by the Poles after national borders were redrawn at the end of World War II. He tags along with young men who have been cast out of their villages and forced into a state of constant migration in search of employment. He learns the story of a destitute woman who is stricken with tuberculosis and awakens the village nightly with her mournful wailing for an only daughter “kidnapped” by the Church. He trains with young army recruits who ponder the absurdity of traditional military training for trench warfare in a nuclear age. Without explicitly attacking the political system Kapusćin´ski thus presents an unusual sociological portrait of a country rent by deep-seated insecurity, living under the constant threat of a convulsion that could disrupt the stability achieved so tenuously.

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Another strategy for getting around censorship was to become a foreign correspondent and report on faraway places. Reporters would use exotic subject matters to write about the home situation; conversely, the home audience would “read” the reportage about some distant land as an allusion to its own situation. In the 1970s and early 80s, Wojciech Giełz˙yn´ski wrote a number of books about the ideological systems in Cambodia and Vietnam, which his Polish audience automatically read as a critique of the Gomułka era. On the other end of the world, Wiesław Górnicki penned under the ironic title Zanim zacznø rzødzic´ maszyny (Before the Machines Begin to Rule) a positive analysis of American capitalism and the development of the humanities; for attentive Polish readers, the book contained an exposé of how the Communist system failed to function. The best and most eloquent example of taking the foreign route is perhaps Kapusćin´ski. Quite early in his career he became a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency and wrote several important books that documented the collapse of colonialism in the Third World and the resultant monumental transformation of the world order. Kapusćin´ski takes great pains to stress that Poland is not his subject though he did write one of the best, and most trenchant, analyses of the 1980 strike at the Gdan´sk shipyard, available in Lapidaria (29–33). However, as often as not, when writing about Latin America or Africa, he makes a covert reference to the political situation in Communist Poland, or, more generally, in Eastern Europe, something that would be understood by Poles who had become adept at deciphering Aesopian language. This allusiveness is nowhere more in evidence than in the mentioned Cesarz, or in “Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu” (The Rifle-Carrying Christ) from the 1975 collection of the same title. When the retired general speaks to the reporter about the rise of Bolivia as an independent nation and the discussions going on around the division of Bolivia among its more powerful neighboring countries, the allusion is clearly to the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795 by Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary, and by the Soviet Union and Germany again in 1939. Kapusćin´ski explains this method of dual-referential reading: We read each text as an allusion; each described situation, even the most distant in time and space, is immediately, as a reflex, translated into the Polish situation. Thus, each of our texts is a dual text. Between the lines of type one searches for a transmission written in friendly ink, while this secret transmission is treated as the more important and, above all, the only true one. The reason for this is not only the difficulty of speaking openly, in the language of truth, but also because our country has known all possible experiences and is still faced with trials so diverse that all history that is not of our own will, naturally, for us, refers to our own history. (Lapidaria 36)

In the totalitarian system that governed postwar East-Central Europe, reporters had to employ in their reportage sophisticated strategies of encoding in order to pass censorship, and readers had to deploy a highly developed critical sensibility to decipher the language of allegory and metaphor. Reporters, borrowing techniques from imaginative literature and approaches from the social sciences (many actually had history and law degrees), would write about anything but the contemporary Communist system.

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Gardens of the mind, places for doubt: Fictionalized autobiography in East-Central Europe Guido Snel A tomb for Danilo Kiš The entire March 1998 issue of Rowohlt Literaturmagazin was devoted to the legacy of Danilo Kiš. Friends and kindred spirits presented necrologies, remembering the person and the work of an author who had died in 1989. Kiš’s German translator, the poetess Ilma Rakusa, reflected on the author’s penchant for long lists; Claudio Magris, author of the Danube travelogue, described his last encounter with Kiš. After the disappearance of Yugoslav multinational culture all necrologies wanted to resituate Kiš’s biography and work. György Konrád had called him already earlier “one of us, a Central European,” István Eörsi named him now “the last Yugoslav writer.” It was almost as if the restless spirit of Eduard Sam, the wandering father in Kiš’s family trilogy, had taken possession of the author and denied him a final resting place. One can speculate about Kiš’s geographical and historical preferences, but in view of his ambivalent stance toward concepts like belonging, kinship, and origin we should remain cautious. Kiš himself had in 1987 described Central Europe in “Variations on Central European Themes” as “the Dragon of Alca in Book II of Anatole France’s Penguin Island, the beast with which people used to compare the Symbolist movement: no one who claimed to have seen it could say what it looked like” (“Varijacije” 35). Kiš had rejected Jewish writing as another “minority literature” at an earlier stage of his career, and he had written in the early seventies a collection of such fierce anti-nationalist essays that he could not have taken seriously the posthumous Serbian and Montenegrin claims on him. One piece stands apart among the memoirs and personal recollections for its lack of nostalgia and its unusual title: “The I-narrator as a Provocation of the Mimetic in the Discourse of the Fantastic. Péter Esterházy Reads Danilo Kiš and Péter Esterházy.” What is this? Impersonal academic discourse? No. The author, Esterházy, frequently joined Kiš at the CentralEuropean table: “First I learned about the legend of Danilo Kiš, then I read him and then we met. One could say, I have spent (thus) a whole lifetime with him” (171). The literary form of Esterházy’s necrology, what he calls “genre-less Danilo writing,” was prompted by the impossibility to distinguish between reading, writing, and personal acquaintance. His reading had started with Kiš’s “Slavno je za otadžbinu mreti” (It Is Glorious to Die for the Fatherland), a short story from Enciklopedija Mrtvih (Encyclopedia of the Dead; 123–31): While reading I knew immediately that this was my text, it was mine, let Kiš have the royalties, the text belonged to me. Me-e. This was a story that I had to write, moreover: it was I who had to write it, but it was also a story that I was unable to write in this form. Not just because my talent was different from his, but also because there was one word in the text that confused things for me — that confused everything. (172)

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Esterházy refers to his own surname, which belongs in the story to one of his ancestors that had been sentenced to death for high treason by the Habsburgs. Kiš, Esterházy continues, “had written the story for me because I, precisely because I am who I am, could not have written it. This feeling was made even stronger because I (often) have this childish, romantic conception of literature, of a world where there are only books and texts which speak to each other, discuss, help another, dwell together and relate to one another” (172). Esterházy appropriated the story, he even read it once at a literary soirée in Eisenstadt, “where, as the saying goes, the family nest is.” The audience welcomed the story as a kind of autobiography, in accordance with his intention. Esterházy concluded the obituary with a passage on his acquaintance with Kiš that he included in 1991 in his novel Hahn-Hahn grófno˝ Pillantása (The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn — also entitled Down the Danube). Esterházy’s self-proclaimed “genre-less” writing actually combines and contrasts autobiography and fictional autobiography, biography and fictional biography. Its designation could be faction (a fusion of fact and fiction), autofiction, or, highlighting the autobiographical moment, even autofaction. Whatever one calls it, Esterházy rightly claimed that the necrology’s “hazardous undertaking” was in the spirit of Kiš’s art (174), for the latter is marked by generic disorientations: his family trilogy saddles autobiography and fictional autobiography, his Grobnica za Borisa Davidovicˇa (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich) biography and fictional biography. Esterházy’s later intertextual excursions go beyond Kiš and also show strong affinity with other authors from East-Central Europe, for instance with the Czech Bohumil Hrabal, who figures already in the title of Esterházy’s 1990 novel Hrabal Könyve (Hrabal’s Book). Beyond Esterházy, one finds in East-Central Europe a number of other texts that combine autobiography and fictional autobiography in creating a hybrid genre centered on the appearance of author figures. They all are what Dorrit Cohn has aptly called narratological borderline cases. In addition to Esterházy’s Down the Danube and Hrabal’s Book, and Kiš’s family trilogy Rani Jadi (1969), Bašta, pepeo (1965), and Pešcˇanik (Early Sorrows; Garden, Ashes; and Hourglass), they include György Konrád’s Kerti mulatság (A Feast in the Garden; 1985) and Witold Gombrowicz’s novels Pornografia (1960), Trans-Atlantyk (1953), and Kosmos (1965). The genre is anticipated with the appearance of the author figure at the end of Dezso˝ Kosztolányi’s Édes Anna (1926), and is extended with the presentation of author figures in Mircea Ca˘rta˘rescu’s Orbitor (Dazzling; 1996) and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno (2000). Hemon links up the common central theme of all these works, the search for literary notions of home in response to linguistic, temporal, and geographical dislocation, with the decline of Yugoslavia. The intertextuality of these works, notably the dialogues initiated by Esterházy’s writings, establishes a kinship among them. The case is, of course, not unique. Jeanette den Toonder analyzed a number of hybrid “autofictional” texts by authors from the Tel Quel group, and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák presented in “The Life and Times of the Autobiographical Novel” (1986) similar examples of a “hybrid genre.” He defines the genre from a mostly formal perspective as a “wide range of possibilities between two ideal types. In one of these hypothetically extreme cases the reader is aware of composition as a separate act of reflection, whereas in the other case, no distance is felt between narrated and narrating self” (83). Szegedy-Maszák’s examples are mostly Hungarian and Anglo-American: Péter Nádas, the early Esterházy, and Raymond Federman. We attribute to our texts a genre kinship because the close ties between the

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work, the figure of the author, and their place in their specific context. Ours are borderline cases not only from a narratological and genre point of view, but also because they represent figures on the margins of history: exiles and inner exiles, forgotten or persecuted under twentiethcentury nationalism and Communism. These narratives self-consciously designate their site of writing as located between the East and the West. We shall call them fictionalized autobiographies.

Fictions in life; fiction in literature At the end of his life, Kiš returned to the central obsession of his family trilogy: childhood. “Life, Literature” was intended as “a genre very close to classical essayist dialogues, with a system of free association, and yet clearly defined themes and comments” (Život, literatura 239). What he completed, only twenty pages long, reveals Kiš’s latest literary-geographical preference: he typed on a sheet of paper, in English, a sort of title page: “Danilo Kiš, LIFE, LITERATURE, A Central European Encounter, Confidential Talk with Gabi Gleichmann.” The latter was Kiš’s dialogue partner, a Swedish journalist (Life Literature 231). Kiš’s main concern seems to have been to reexamine images and memories from his childhood and, as Gleichmann suggested at the outset of the dialogue, “to delineate the part played by autobiographical material in your work on the one hand and imagination and illusion on the other” (231). Kiš presents this at the very beginning of “Life, Literature” not just to express the autobiographer’s anxiety but because it is typical of Central Europe. Other instances of blending the real and the imaginary are readily apparent in Kiš’s and Konrád’s writings on the destruction of the family in the Holocaust, in Gombrowicz’s exile and troubled Polish identity, in portrayals of grueling life under socialism in Konrád, Hrabal, and Esterházy. As Czesław Miłosz wrote, the Central-European experiences “surpassed the most daring and the most macabre imagination” (Captive Mind 87). Many autobiographical and other factual writings portray these historical events as unimaginable, and sometimes as unrepresentable: Zofia Nałkowska remarks in her writing about the Nazi camps in Poland that one can bear reality “only when it is not entirely known” (Medaliony 34). Likewise, Karlo Štajner (Kiš’s personal acquaintance, whose work he used in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich) opens his account of his detention in the Soviet Gulag, 7000 dana u Siberiji (7000 Days in Siberia; 1972), by expressing his fear that his experiences will seem to many “unlikely and tendentious” (7). Both Nałkowska and Štajner attempted to describe historical events as precisely as possible, and both of them tried hard to exclude fiction that would have undermined their intention to report accurately. The unimaginability and unspeakability of the events led to what has been called the “documentary imperative”: whatever was not based on personal experience in the fiction on the Holocaust and the Gulag had to be grounded on historical documents. Readers confused by the status of characters and events in Kiš’s works may sympathize with his intention to clarify matters in “Life, Literature.” In this text, author and reader share an autobiographical endeavor, both are concerned with the historically exact emplotment of real events in the author’s life. Readers of Kiš’s family trilogy get confused in an entirely different way, even though the author might have been haunted by the insecurity he addressed in “Life,


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Literature.” The narrative strategies of the family trilogy and of the other texts discussed in this chapter are meticulously worked out. All these borderline cases focus on traumatic historical experiences and on their effects, and all of them deliberately blend factual and fictional narration. In The Distinction of Fiction, Dorrit Cohn sets up narratological parameters meant to distinguish between fictional and factual narrative modes and two types of confusion between them. Her parameters by no means exclude the skepticism that Nałkowska and Štajner addressed and that Miłosz designated as the unique historical experience of Central Europe, the “scepsis of modern thinkers on the notion of stable identity, truthful introspection, unified selfhood, authentic memory, the translatability of experience into language, and the narratability of life” (Cohn 31). It is tempting and historically defensible to relate the generic confusion in EastCentral European autobiographies to Miłosz’ observation that “it was once thought obvious that a man bears the same name and surname throughout his entire life; now it proves wiser for many reasons to change them and to memorize a new and fabricated biography” (Captive 28). But is the deliberate confusion of auto- and fictional biography an instance of this profound confusion of events, experience, and memory? We have to examine how genre works in these borderline cases before we can specify the relation between these two phenomena, one existential and historical, the other purely literary. Philippe Lejeune has proposed that readers engage either in a fictional or an autobiographical pact with the author. Cohn elaborates on this by taking the proper name of first-person (internal or homodiegetic) narration as “the principal criterion for differentiating between real and fictional self-narration,” for establishing the “ontological status” of the speaker, i.e., “his identity or nonidentity with the author in whose name the narrative has been published” (125). Whether the author and narrator carry the same name or not provides a clue for distinguishing fictional from factual self-narration. Thus, in Cohn’s reading Karlo Štajner’s 7000 Days in Siberia asks for a factual reading because the narrator carries the name of the author and it is of vital importance that he narrates his own experiences. Lejeune has, moreover, pointed out that the autobiographical pact is not restricted to homodiegetic (first-person) narratives. Third-person narration may also enforce an autobiographical pact, provided that the name of the protagonist is identical with that of the author. In third-person narration, the fictional pact is enforced when the speaker has insight into the consciousness of characters (narrative omniscience). Factual narration cannot do this: when, for instance, Nałkowska asks in Medallions what kind of people the Nazi executioners were (66), she takes recourse to eyewitness responses, for her short biographies of victims in reportage form do not allow direct insight into the psyche of the executioners. In most cases, these two signposts decisively establish the text’s genre. Confusion may arise in first-person texts. Lejeune distinguishes two possibilities here. If a text does not explicitly enforce an autobiographical or a fictional pact, it can be either indeterminate (mostly texts with an anonymous internal narrator who does not provide explicit markers, leaving ground for speculation) or contradictory (in texts that provide markers that are explicit but ask for opposed reading modes). Lejeune recommends that readers look in such cases at the paratexts, to generic designations like “novel” on the front page, or to interviews. This recommendation overstates, however, the importance and the reconstructibility of the authorial intention, and it disregards the truism that, once a text is published, authors are no privileged interpreters of their own texts.

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Kiš’s anxiety in “Life, Literature” is a case in point. Fiction’s distinctiveness has also a historical dimension. As Thomas Pavel has pointed out, the generic meanings of literary texts undergo historical shifts; Dominick LaCapra has shown in Madame Bovary on Trial that the court deliberation concerned a new narrative device, free indirect discourse, which mediates between the author’s alleged intentions and the thoughts expressed by fictional characters. In the late 1970s, a Belgrade court charged Kiš with plagiarism. At stake was the double generic affiliation of A Tomb: as fictional autobiography it was not obliged to reveal its sources, but as biography it should have. Kiš’s stories on the Gulag in A Tomb are not fictionalized autobiographies for they do not relate historical and biographical events that the author had experienced, but they too have a contradictory status. The result is a conflation of biographical and fictional biographical narration. The accusation of plagiarism implied that fiction may not use a factual style and factual writing may not resort to fictional means. If Flaubert’s trial concerned free indirect discourse, Kiš’s trial showed that certain Belgrade critics were nervous about generic contradiction and intertextuality. Autobiography assumes that author and narrator or author and protagonist are identical. In what follows, we shall analyze, however, autobiographies that employ exclusively fictional devices.

Four cases of contradictory generic markers 1. Gombrowicz It might seem strange to locate the beginning of a contradictory genre in an unquestionably autobiographical work, Witold Gombrowicz’s Dziennik (Diary), written between 1953 and 1969. It is what its title suggests, but it manipulates its narrative voices, as well as the chronology, the experiences, and their emplotment. The work is seminal, for in response to exile it refuses victimization or, for that matter, any role that locates the author in a realm outside literature itself. We have chosen it, apart from its thematic importance (celebrated, for instance, in István Eörsi’s Days with Gombrowicz) for its refusal to accept the laws and conventions of autobiography. We shall contrast it to Pornografia, a fictional autobiography by Gombrowicz, in order to exemplify the push and pull between autobiography and fictional autobiography, and to indicate the way fictionalized autobiography combines the two modes. The central voice of the Diary is the first person pronoun. This “I” assumes many roles: that of a Polish exile who writes in Argentina but lives also among the Polish émigrés that publish the magazine Kultura in Paris; that of the author Gombrowicz who comments upon his own writings in response to readers and critics; and that of the pseudo-philosopher who invents a peculiar theory of Form that is both distilled from and tested by the author’s fiction. All these voices follow the events in the author’s life. As a diary, directly concerned with the daily life of an exiled writer in Argentina (later Berlin and France), the text cannot but respect the autobiographical sequence of events. Initially, the generic conventions of diary writing are instrumental in breaking through the silence of exile. Reflecting in 1964 on the first years of his Argentinean exile, Gombrowicz writes in Berlin:


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Alone, lost, cut off, alien, unknown, a drowned man. My eardrums were still being assailed by the feverish din of European radio speakers, I was still being assaulted by the wartime roar of newspapers and already I was immersing myself in an incomprehensible speech and in a life quite remote from my former one. Which is what is called an uncommon moment. A silence like that in a forest, a silence such that one hears even the drone of a tiny fly after the commotion of the previous years, makes a strange music — and in this ripe and overwhelming silence, two exceptional, singular, specific words began to make themselves audible: Witold Gombrowicz, Witold Gombrowicz. (Dziennik 3: 141)

But the relation between the first person and the author’s memories and experiences gradually gets blurred. Another voice, in the first-person plural and marked by italics, makes its appearance. The discourse soon becomes biographical, apparently to avert the threat of soliloquy. The text now issues both from the figure of “Witold Gombrowicz” and from this impersonal biographer, whose discourse “Gombrowicz” re-enters in the third person singular: The only thing he could manage for the time being was the introduction of “a second voice” into the Diary — the voice of a commentator and biographer — which allowed him to speak of himself as “Gombrowicz,” through someone else’s lips. This was, in his opinion, an important discovery, intensifying the immeasurably cold artificiality of his admissions, which also allowed for greater honesty and passion. And this was something new, which he had never encountered in any of the diaries he had read. (Dziennik 3: 157)

The autobiographical pact is still effective: the biographer is just one among Gombrowicz’s voices and has no privilege over the first person. He can ridicule the “I” for its naiveté but he is bound by the autobiographical rules and is in the end led to one of the classic topoi of diary writing, the acceptance of real life, temporality, and death. When Gombrowicz returns to Europe in 1964 the biographer’s voice disappears. Gombrowicz’s novel Pornografia opens with the narrator’s “experience”: “I shall tell you about another experience I had, undoubtedly the most fatal of all. In those days, I was staying in former Poland, in former Warsaw at the depths of the fait accompli” (13). Thus begins the narrator, who calls himself later “I, Witold Gombrowicz, the writer.” The plot of this text, designated as a novel, is set in Nazi-occupied Poland. This time-space constellation would pass unnoticed, were it not for the narrator, who is said to be also the main character and the author of the novel. We know from the Diary that the author was not in Poland during World War II; in fact he never returned to Poland after his departure in 1939. Yet the author-narrator plays a crucial role in this strange tale of manipulation and betrayal. He and his friend Fryderyk, two aging men, travel to the countryside to visit friends and are erotically obsessed with a young boy and girl. A second story line treats the themes of resistance and heroism. One member of the resistance, Siemian, becomes unreliable and has to be executed. When no adult is willing to perform the deed, it is finally carried out by the two youngsters, manipulated by the narrator and his friend. Though the narrator, the author, and the protagonist are all called Gombrowicz, knowledge of the author’s life prevents us from reading the text as an autobiography. And yet, the narrator takes every opportunity to make the author responsible for what happens. Thus Siemian, about to be executed, addresses “Witold Gombrowicz”:

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Guido Snel It’s my last chance. I’ve come straight to you because a man in my position has no choice. […] I can only get out by taking a leap and that’s why I’ve come to you in the middle of the night, although we don’t know each other… You’re an intelligent man, a writer, try to understand, give me a hand, help me out. (Pornografia 118, 143)

Siemian’s insistence that the narrator is the author prevents us from reading the text as a fictional autobiography. How are we to read it then? Gombrowicz surely chose the form deliberately: by the time Pornografia was published, Kultura regularly printed his Diary, covering in detail the facts of the author’s life. “Gombrowicz’s” fictional return to Poland in Pornography seems in the first place a provocation; indeed, much of the author’s work was read by the Polish exiled community as such. But much more is at stake. In spite of Siemian’s desperate request, there is no metafictional moment, the author Gombrowicz does not intervene in the fictional events as a deus ex machina. He is bound by the rules of the game. “All situations in the world are figures,” (57) the “I” says, suggesting that someone somewhere holds the key. But his search for a hidden truth makes him an accessory to crime, becomes subjected to the “pornographic” rules of this fictional universe. The novel thus prompts the reader to shift the author towards the narrator, without collapsing them and turning the text into an autobiography. The result is a fictionalized autobiography that explores the distinction between the two and allows the reader to share the disorientation of the character Gombrowicz, created by the author Gombrowicz. The enigma of the tale lies then in the protagonist’s uncertain ontological status that clouds the reader’s perception of the events. When the distance between author and narrator is minimal, one seems to be reading the author’s dream-like return to Poland; when maximal, the text relates a fictional autobiographer’s fictional journey. No indication is given as to which reading should prevail. The following scene beautifully illustrates this ambivalence. Prior to Siemian’s execution, the “I” enters at night the garden, this locus amoenus, which is, together with the house, the novel’s dominant narrative space: I went into the garden […]; guessing at the alleys rather than seeing them, treading them with the audacity of unconsciousness, and only the occasional familiar silhouette of a tree or a bush told me all was in order and that I really was where I thought I was. At the same time I realized that I was not expecting this immutability of the garden and that it amazed me… I would not have been surprised if the garden had been turned upside down in the dark. This thought made me pitch like a skiff on the high seas, and I realized land was already out of sight. […] Every bush, every tree appearing on my path was an assault of fantasy — because although they were as they were, they could have been different. (Pornografia 144–45)

The “I” is spatially disoriented here. Read as fictional autobiography, the passage describes his effort to orient himself in the fictional Polish universe of the novel; the simile, “like a ship at open sea,” is a self-reflection of the fictional “I”; read as an autobiography, evoking the earlier quoted diary passage that speaks of the silence of the “forest” in Argentina, the simile can be read, however, as the author’s metaphor for his own displacement. 2. Kiš Bašta pepeo (Garden Ashes; 1965), Rani jadi (Early Sorrows; 1969), and Pešcˇanik (Hourglass; 1972) relate the story of the fictitious Sam family right before, during, and shortly after World


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War II, somewhere in “Pannonia,” the borderland of Yugoslavia and Hungary. Some images, places, and events re-occur but are narrated differently. As readers proceed in the trilogy, they face increasingly complex narrative forms: plain fictional autobiography, narrated in the first person in Garden, Ashes, a mix of first and third person narration in Early Sorrows, a combination of fictional autobiography and fictional biography in Hourglass. Moreover, each part reflects on the previous ones and rewrites them. The stylistic differences seem to be carefully planned: the son takes the reader in each new text closer to the tragicomical figure of the father, the neurasthenic and visionary Luftmensch Eduard Sam, who believes, in his growing insanity, that he is the next prophet, the incarnation of Ahasveros, the Wandering Jew. Finally, throughout the trilogy, the proper names of the protagonists prevent us from to choosing between fictional and factual reading. The first part, Garden, Ashes, opens as a fictional autobiography. The adult narrator, who continues in the first person and the past tense, evokes the impression that his proper name made on him when he was a child: Astonished and frightened, I had suddenly come to understand that I was a boy by the name of Andreas Sam, called Andi by my mother, that I was the only one with that particular name, with that nose, with the taste of honey and cod-liver oil in his mouth, the only one in the world whose uncle had died of tuberculosis the previous day, the only boy who had a sister named Ana and a father named Eduard Sam, the only one in the world who was thinking at that particular moment that he was the only boy named Andreas Sam, whom his mother called by the pet-name Andi. (16)

The name, presented here as the foundation of the narrator’s self, dissolves when the father is said to re-appear several times after having disappeared in the Holocaust. On the last occasion, after twenty years and at the moment when the text is written, he returns as “the head of a delegation of former camp detainees, survivors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald” and denies the narrator’s paternity: “Even if it would be true what you are claiming, young man, that is that I am indeed your father, then I still have the right not to remember. […] I am Eduard Kohn, from Germany, and I have nothing to do with you” (140–41). With this re-appearance, the novel either takes refuge in the fantastic, or, what is more likely, the narrator’s memory proves unreliable. The son attempts to tell the father’s life, but his biography seems to be based on two documents authored by his father. One is the “Timetable for Buses, Trains and Airplanes,” which the father wrote as a railway official and the son interprets as an “apocryphal, sacred bible” an “anarchist and esoteric New Testament” (43–44). The other is a letter that will be included as the closing chapter of Hourglass under the title “Letter, or Synopsis.” Following an intangible father and his surviving texts, the son looses grip on his own narrative. In Early Sorrows, which is a collection of short stories (possibly echoing “Junge Leiden” in Heine’s Buch der Lieder), Garden, Ashes is mentioned as “one of my books in which the Timetable shall undergo another miraculous metamorphosis” (Rani Jadi 88). The internal narrator opens with the doubts about proper names that concluded Garden, Ashes: “Let’s keep this in the third person. Perhaps, after all those years, I am no longer Andreas Sam” (40). This change of personality repeats itself as the story proceeds: the shift from first to third person is followed by the new designation “a boy named Andreas Sam.” Finally, we are left with “a boy” and “the

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father,” characters whose thoughts we can no longer enter. When the family leaves the scene of these stories without the father, the perspective shifts to the boy’s dog, which stays behind with a reproachful expression as if it were the boy. Hourglass, the third and last part on the Sam family, starts with this emptiness. The narrator can no longer be identified with the son; it is more appropriate to speak of an impersonal narrating instance. The name of the father has been reduced to “E. S.” First and third person, present and past tense alternate between four registers, each of which takes a different approach to the father’s consciousness. “Travel Scenes,” the first register, picks up the impersonal mode that concludes Early Sorrows. The third-person narration presents the family members without identifying them by name. The second register, “Notes of a Madman,” is E. S.’s first-person account of his state of mind. The third register, “Criminal Investigation,” the only one to use the past tense, is a sequence of questions about E. S. by an anonymous interrogator to an interlocutor who has access to E. S.’s psyche (and may be regarded as a hidden omniscient narrator), though he, too, uses this dialogue to reconstruct exactly E. S.’s actions, thoughts, and opinions. E. S.’s destination is pinpointed exactly: “He arrived at the East Station in Budapest at 5:20 p.m. (Central European Time), all of two hours late” (Pešcˇanik 245). The fourth register, “A Witness Interrogated,” is an extremely long and painful interrogation of E. S. by an anonymous instance that summoned him (152). The interrogation first seems a hostile investigation of E. S.’s alleged reluctance to convert to Christianity. But, like “Criminal Investigation,” this last register shows also a fascination with the facts of E. S.’s life. The last two registers are extreme forms of fictional biography: the events in the life of this fictional character are verified over and over again to minimize doubts about their accuracy. Since the son is disengaged from the narrating instance in Hourglass, the fictional pact hinges on the name of the father. “E. S.” is a reduced version, a shade of the once glorious visionary Eduard Sam — a name that was already too unstable in Garden, Ashes to safeguard the family’s identity. Hourglass pushes this indeterminacy further. E. S. encounters historical figures, some of whom are obviously figments of his imagination. In “Criminal Investigation,” for instance, Freud, Kafka, Marx, and Proust respond to E. S.’s vision of his own funeral (Pešcˇanik 118–19). And what about the appearance of “Karlo Štajner from Zagreb, who in 1937 had disappeared without trace, somewhere in the USSR” (81)? This figure, who is said to be an “acquaintance” of E. S., throws an ironic light on the interrogators’ search for precise historical facts in both registers. Štajner, “cast” (as Esterházy would say) into E. S.’s fictional realm, disturbs the fictional pact and turns the text into a hybrid of fictional and factual biography: the life of this imaginary figure is interwoven with, and made up of historical events, which include, apart from the real writer Štajner, the author’s father, Eduard Kiš. A letter by the real Eduard Kiš, signed “Eduard,” concludes Hourglass. One is tempted to see in the inclusion of this historical document a final rewriting of the trilogy: by replacing in conclusion the unstable proper names by the unequivocal “Kiš,” it seems to impose an autobiographical (and biographical) pact. Yet the numerous fictitious events (including the invented acquaintance of E. S. and Karlo Štajner) and the use of fictional stylistic means do not allow this. Kiš’s trilogy explores through fictional means a possible biography and a factual one. It brings together two different ways of narrating a life.


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3. Konrád The central first-person voice in Konrád’s A Feast in the Garden speaks from a garden, where dead ancestors assemble around a stone table. Konrád evoked this topos in his obituary for Danilo Kiš, first published in Dutch under the title “Danilo Kiš”: “When I turn to the right, sitting at my table, I see Danilo in the high armchair. The expression of his face is unpredictably serious” (Clown 93). The garden is, according to Kundera, also the locus of inner exile (“gardens of the mind”) for Central-European intellectuals (Matejka 127). Indeed, Konrád’s novel first appeared in 1985 as a Hungarist samizdat edition; the American edition of 1992 (=G) generally follows the drastically revised 1989 Hungarian version (=K). Revisions are a hallmark of Konrád, but also of East-Central Europe, whose shifting historical-political situations often exact rewriting. Witness the case of Esterházy’s Harmonica caelestis. The textual shifts of A Feast in the Garden are anticipated by the twin narrators of the samizdat edition. The first narrator wants to establish his identity by writing his autobiography. Unsure as to what he can unearth “from his subterranean life,” he starts with a classical invocation: “Lord, give me the grace of veracity and enlarge (tágítsd ki) my memory” (K 9, G 5). In the samizdat version this narrator is an author figure, for what he tells about himself covers Konrád’s childhood, persecution as a Jew, and his 1956 experience, as we know them from essays and autobiographical writings. In the revised versions, these autobiographical stories (largely in chapters 2 and 4) are told by an alter ego of the narrator, David Cobra, who fulfills other functions in the samizdat version. He is “an extension of the author; he is, in fact, the author’s nightmare […] Thus he will be the innocent author’s tempter” (K 13; G 8). Kobra forthwith declares: “As of today the author may speak only through me” (K 13; G 8). Indeed the line between the autobiographical and fictional narrators gradually vanishes, above all in the samizdat version. There, Kobra’s story line overlaps more and more with the autobiography: the authorial self and Kobra come from the same village; they both barely escape being shot into the Danube in Budapest; they are both writers contending with censorship; suicide preoccupies the author and is a leitmotiv in Kobra’s family. The biographies finally merge when Regina appears in the autobiographical story, raising doubts as to whether she is Kobra’s or Konrád’s partner. The revised versions somewhat disentangle this doublet, and they introduce the new characters Dragomán and Melinda, and their conventionally told stories. The essayistic register of A Feast in the Garden consists mainly of aphorisms, maxims, and short reflections on the author’s doubt and uncertainty, his poetics of the novel, and his political situation. In the samizdat version these notes constitute separate sections; in the revised versions they become even more important, as the new subtitle, “Novel and Working Diary,” indicates. Doubt and uncertainty underlie the other themes because they touch all of them: the primary narrative voice doubts the possibility of narration, doubts that one can explain why and how his life occurred as it did and not otherwise, and he has no explanation for the horrible historical events of his age. This systematic epistemological uncertainty frames Konrád’s poetics of a multi-voiced and multi-genre novel, which is actually neither a novel, nor a scholarly work, nor indeed a diary or an autobiography. The author/essayist of the samizdat version dislikes fictitious characters and events because of their improbability and artificiality, and he actually associates this opposition to fiction with his resistance to emigrate: only by staying at home can he remain true to the idea of Central Europe and turn his text into fiction. The author’s

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biography, the formlessness of his novel, and the political conflicts somehow find their ironic, suicidal central locus in the Budapest garden: “I am neither Easterner nor Westerner. Here, in the middle, I think, life is a drawn-out suicide” (G 34). The metafictional dimension of A Feast in the Garden links its own indistinct form to the chaos of cultural-history. But whereas historical events cannot be changed once they happen, their account in fiction or historical writing can be endlessly revised. The samizdat version concludes with images of death, associated with a terminal form of the text. But these final pages are inserted in the revised version into a brief chapter entitled “The Ram’s Horn is Sounded” (G 32–36). Here, as there, the narrator finds it ludicrous that he has been the bearer of the same name all these years, and he thereby renounces “ownership of this biography” (K 53; G 35). The Hungarian revised version (though not the English one) even repeats the samizdat version’s consoling final sentence, “The story need not be understood; I don’t understand it either” (K 55). But these words have a different function now that they appear at the outset of the actual fictional story. Indeed, Konrád’s not all-too profund metafictional reflections consistently undermine the remaining rudimentary narration. 4. Esterházy All of Péter Esterházy’s novels from the 1990s belong to the genre here outlined. His Harmonia caelestis (2000), which carries the game with the author’s surname over more than eight-hundred pages, continues to use devices that were introduced in The Book of Hrabal and in Esterházy’s necrology for Kiš. One of these is the abundant use of intertextuality. Thus all of Kiš’s aforementioned short story “It Is Glorious to Die for the Fatherland” is quoted in Esterházy’s novel, as is the opening scene of Kosztolányi’s Édes Anna that describes Béla Kun’s flight from Budapest. We shall focus on The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (1991), which conflates autobiography and fictional autobiography — fictional and autobiographical chapters from the Esterházy family history. In addition, this parodistic tale about an imaginary journey down the Danube thematizes, like Konrád’s A Feast in the Garden, the dialogue on Central Europe and its participants: Kiš, Konrád, Kundera, Timothy Garton Ash, and Claudio Magris. It satirizes not only the idea of Central Europe, but also fictionalized autobiographies and their alleged regional specificity. Parody and satire, the central tropes of this novelistic reflection, are maintained up to the final exchange: the narrator’s desperate question to Magris, how to finish “a Danube-novel like this” and Magris’s frivolous response, “one should pump out the water from the Danube” (Könyvek 389). As announced in his necrology, Esterházy casts Kiš “into fiction” here. But Kiš appears only toward the end, when confusion reigns and one can no longer speak of plain “fiction.” He enters through an encounter with a character called Rentee, who is commissioned by a Renter to report about his travels in telegrams. The year is 1989 — or thereabout — after the death of Kiš. Rentee travels down the Danube but the cultural space of his travels is mainly Central European: he reads and quotes famous earlier Danube travelers and he reflects on the idea of a Central European culture. Rentee is originally from Budapest and is presented as a European, Renter, a nonEuropean, sends directives from the United States. Their opinions about culture differ. When the journey reaches Budapest, it reveals itself as a mere bookish one, as the imaginary journey of a writer who sits in his Budapest room and reads books about the Danube and Danubian culture.


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The extensive chapter on Budapest, called “Le città invisibili” turns the two characters into variations of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s novel of that title. Esterházy’s novel initially asks for an autobiographical pact, but this is never confirmed. An internal narrator recalls how he traveled in the fifties from Hungary to Austria. The ecstatic as well as humble responses to his unnamed surname suggest that we are dealing here with an heir of the illustrious Esterházy family. This in contrast with the father’s fading name in Kiš: a family name may be so familiar that it need not be mentioned. “To me, everything is family history” (12), laments the protagonist. Accompanied by an uncle called Roberto who seems to be involved in some espionage activities, the protagonist is led through meetings with obscure figures, all of whom turn out to be fictitious, or, rather, metafictional like Renter and Rentee. According to the narrator they are all invented. The internal narrator finally also appears behind the Rentee, whose whereabouts are narrated both in the first and the third person: “I am he who drags his feet between buffet and telephone booth, more precisely: he, whose name is ‘I,’ and that is all you know about him” (97). This he/I comes sometimes close to being the author: I could say, I am Madame Bovary, I could say, calling for attention, P. E. — c’est moi, or I could say, this I is not a fictitious character, but the novelist, an erudite, bitter, disappointed man, I — but none of these makes my heart beat faster, and I do not cross my fingers for “him” to wish him well. (138–39)

The text scoffs at the device of casting author figures into fiction, and it questions the genre’s regional character. The key chapter in this respect, “Le città invisibili,” inverts Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this classic of Postmodernism that celebrates the replacement of a historical urban space by an imaginary one. Esterházy adopts Calvino’s structure, but his Budapests are crowded with historical persons, concrete stories, and anecdotes, mostly from the recent past. The narrative thus maintains the Danube travelogue until the traveler’s homecoming, but Central Europe explodes then into a multitude of spaces, framed by means of an extra-regional work. Hence fictionalized autobiography and the discourse on Central Europe do not coincide: a literary discourse with an alleged regional specificity of form cannot resort to extra-regional models. Family is a third plot model. The illustrious Esterházy family contrasts with Kiš’s marginal Sam family, but both families are victims of history since the Esterházy possessions were expropriated by the Communist government. The two writers are alternatives for the family of East-Central Europe: Kiš is called “the brother” of Rentee when he enters Esterházy’s novel, and for Konrád, who called Kiš “one of us, a brother” in his necrology, East-Central Europe is a family. Fictionalized autobiography and Central Europe seem both enmeshed in family ties, relations of kinship. But in Konrád’s notion of kinship irony hardly seems to have any function, whereas Esterházy seems to play with the notions of family, the Danube model, Central Europe, and even with the stylistic devices of fictionalized autobiography. By diagnosing randomness at the heart of fictionalized autobiography, Esterházy’s novel poses questions about the genre: to what extent do the historical and geographical specificities of personal experience shape literary form, and to what extent can formal inventions project local experiences unto a universal plane? The answer seems twofold: historically, the genre marks and even fortifies an increasing regional self-awareness. But no rules bind the author’s personal experience of history to his use of a

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specific style and narrative form. Esterházy’s later works continued to explore this paradox of fictionalized autobiography.

Fictionalized autobiography and the documentary imperative If, as we have suggested, fictionalized autobiography responds to a documentary imperative, how is its generic contradiction related to the ontological confusion that permeates, according to Miłosz, the experience of East-Central-European history? The two aspects frequently recur in the dialogue that Miłosz and Gombrowicz conducted in letters, essays, and personal meetings, and also appears in Gombrowicz’s Diary, which he started when both writers regularly contributed to Kultura. Miłosz and Gombrowicz are at the cradle of the genre, though they see it differently. Gombrowicz’s novels initiated fictionalized autobiography by casting author figures into fiction. Miłosz tried to distinguish the Polish experience from the “Eastern” one with unflagging zeal. When Kundera joined Miłosz in reviving the idea of Central Europe in the 1980s, he became — to extend Esterházy’s family metaphor — the “father” of the discourse community on Central Europe. Kiš, Konrád, Esterházy, and Hrabal participated in this community in spite of their differences and occasional objections. Konrád’s necrology for Kiš calls Miłosz with a smile “the head of the Central European clan” (Clown 91). The genre of fictionalized autobiography seems to be accompanied by a shared discourse on Central Europe’s politics and cultural history. But then, there is a discrepancy, perhaps even contradiction, between Miłosz’s founding role in the discourse community and his opposition to the blurring of facts and fiction in fictionalized autobiography. History, individual experience, and genre were central to the discussions of Miłosz and Gombrowicz. Our tentative conclusions on fictionalized autobiography may be formulated in terms of their dialogue. First Miłosz on Gombrowicz: My blood runs cold when I pronounce the words: the twentieth century. Vast territories of silence. In the din of language, in the millions of words per minute, in the excrescence of press, film, and television, there looms another, unmediated reality; and the first, which is mediated, cannot keep pace with the second, even less so than in the last century. The matter of which I speak is known to all who have felt awed by the passing of historical moments, situations, climates; of people and even of whole nations; and I was one of the many who, having lived it firsthand, regret they were able to capture so little of it. Its intractable nature (by now engrained in us) destroyed the idea of the novel as a “mirror in the roadway”; and instead of pursuing the truth of our epoch in a horde of “realistic” novels, which somehow repel by their falsity, we have recourse to the fable, poetic distillation, metonymy, or we shun art and literature altogether in favor of memories and nonfiction. […] Gombrowicz, who was nurtured in the decades between the wars, would have plodded away at the realistic or psychological novel had he not vaulted into the realm of clowning. And, as in the case of Witkiewicz, that clowning act proved closer — even if unfaithful, abstract — to reality. […] This may explain why I prefer his Diaries to his novels and plays, because there, in the Diaries, he reveals himself at his most imperious, his most openly and cheerfully pugnacious. (The Land of Ulro 41)

For Miłosz, the documentary imperative emerges from a failure of realist fiction and its


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replacement by historical documents and testimonies. From the work of Gombrowicz, who escaped realism via buffoonery, he prefers the Diary, for there he fights with “an open helmet.” But Gombrowicz questions the literary value of historical testimony, as the following attack in his Diary on Rudnicki, a survivor of the Nazi extermination camps indicates: These writers, among others and most of all Rudnicki, got busy working on the bodies of the tortured thinking that the astronomical level of suffering would furnish them with some sort of truth, morality, or at least some new knowledge about our limitations. They found little that turned out to be fertile and creative. […] Proust found more in his cookie, servant and counts than they found in years of smoking crematoria. (1: 206) [T]hey have not experienced their lives. Yes, this is why I am so haughty toward them, so conceited and indifferent. I simply cannot acknowledge that these are people on my level. Behold, considering that not a tenth of what befell them has befallen me and that, while they bled, I was making the rounds of Buenos Aires cafés, a feeling like this — I admit — is not really in order. Humility and admiration would be more appropriate. This cold indifference is so strong in me, however, that I cannot conceal it in this diary, where I would not want to lie too much. (1: 211)

Gombrowicz doesn’t just exclude testimony from literature proper; he sees no necessary correlation between an author’s experience of the horrors of the twentieth century and the quality of a literary work that tries to capture it. For him, quality depends on how the author “experienced his own life.” The expression is rather vague, but Gombrowicz makes his point clear: a literary work (Miłosz’s novel) should not be measured against history. It emerges from an author’s perception of his individual experience and this determines what Gombrowicz calls “fertile and creative literature.” The thought is provocative and, applied to Gombrowicz’s own case, it explains how and why he could write about Poland during World War II, a historical moment he never witnessed. This view denies grounds for Miłosz’s documentary imperative. Gombrowicz presumably considered his own fiction’s response to his own personal experience as an alternative to the documentary imperative: Pornografia, a fantasy of physical participation in World War II, thematizes absence. The dialogue with Miłosz has come full circle: Miłosz speaks of the failure of Realism to address the extreme traumas of World War II, Gombrowicz does not believe that testimonial literature is the proper aesthetic answer to the historical situation, he seeks (as in Pornografia) to violate the documentary imperative by blurring factual and fictional narration and playing with the author figure. For Miłosz, this is neither scandalous nor offensive, merely play: Gombrowicz’s Diary, with the “sovereign” presence of its author, is preferable to the buffooneries of his novels. Yet, in a way Gombrowicz’s Pornografia also approves of the documentary imperative. The author’s fantasy of participating in the war tracks the boundaries of fiction but does not transgress them, since events of the novel are obviously fictitious. We know that Gombrowicz was not actually in Poland as the protagonist of his novel. Miłosz believes in the possibility of authentic testimony, though the last sentence quoted from the Diary may not provide him with the best of examples. To be sure, Miłosz’s preoccupation with the means of expressing his own experience, his hovering between poetry, autobiography, and even the fictional novel, furnishes ample evidence that he knew about the perils of testimonial writing.

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How does fictionalized autobiography modify autobiographical writing if it is first and foremost a departure from it? Like autobiography itself, it acknowledges the author’s responsibility for representing historical facts, but it signals the limitations of purely testimonial treatments. It can explore conjectural biographies that go beyond the data of a historical life, and it can add to autobiographical narration a multi-perspectival presentation in which the historical events are not solely filtered through the autobiographer’s mind. This pluralist representation can broaden personal experience. The experience of being marginal, as in the case of Kiš’s father, or of being absent altogether, as in Gombrowicz, is narrated as if it took place in the epicenter of history, avoiding the menace of being qualified as minority literature. The history of these “marginal” protagonists is very much at the center of fictionalized autobiography. Being both in the center and on the margin (and the discrepancy between the two) accords with the genre’s double reading pact. The answer to the complementary question, how fictionalized autobiography modifies fiction, is that it limits the freedom of fiction and thus supports the documentary imperative. In Konrád and Esterházy, narration often shifts smoothly from first to third person, but always returns, through metafictional devices, to the first person. Where the two modes are not reconciled but strictly separated, as in Hourglass, the contrast is significant: the impersonal thirdperson narration balances the interrogatory style that gives access to the thoughts of the fictional character. E. S. expresses himself, no narrator or narrating instance can access his psyche. In this instance, the fictional character is treated as a historical figure, as if he were the protagonist of a biography. Fictionalized autobiography thus generates a carefully orchestrated confusion, a “buffoonery” in Miłosz’s theatrical metaphor. The use of an author figure in fiction is frivolous (“P. E. c’est moi”), as Esterházy concludes in The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (138–139). But whereas Miłosz writes an essay, Esterházy constructs a fictionalized autobiography, which leaves open the question of who the clown actually is. Our inability to answer the question might also indicate why Esterházy continues to write such autobiographies after having criticized their frivolousness. Miłosz, though critical of Gombrowicz’s inventions, may have pointed to a deeper impact of the genre. In a memoir written in the 1990s, he calls Gombrowicz “disturbing” and feels like “a polite little boy who believes in a dear little God, who tries to avoid sin, encounters an uncivilized rapscallion who sticks out his tongue and thumbs his nose at the authorities of two millennia” (Hunter 213). Fictionalized autobiography may be a roguery, but it can create space for ambiguity or, as Danilo Kiš once put it, “a place for doubt.”

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Subversion and self-assertion

Subversion and self-assertion: The role of Kotliarevshchyna in Russian-Ukrainian literary relations George G. Grabowicz Kotliarevshchyna, the burlesque style or mode named after Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi, popularly known as the “father” of modern Ukrainian literature, should be viewed as the first and most enduring frame for Russian-Ukrainian literary relations in the modern period. As a historical term in Ukrainian criticism, kotliarevshchyna continues to have a decidedly pejorative connotation and applies primarily to Kotliarevs’kyi’s epigones and sundry second- and third-rate writers. From the perspective of the evolving discourse of Ukrainian literature, however, it should be taken as a generic and non-evaluative term designating the nuanced and broadly ramified narrative style initiated by Kotliarevs’kyi’s travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Eneiida, whose unauthorized appearance in St. Petersburg in 1798 ushered in the new Ukrainian literature in the vernacular. The issues that kotliarevshchyna illustrates are indeed broad: ethnicity in literature (or national identity in the political sphere), populism (Ukr.: narodnytstvo), and canon-formation. The style or mode itself runs deeper than has been assumed — it animates not only the period preceding the leading Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, that is the period up to the 1840s, but much of nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature, albeit in modified form. Its traces remain clearly visible in the twentieth century, particularly in Ukrainian Socialist Realist literature. Most importantly, this is the mode that encodes and sets the terms for the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian literature in the initial phase between Kotliarevs’kyi’s Eneiida of 1798 and the appearance of Shevchenko’s first collection of poetry, the Kobzar of 1840. It has remained a model that affects mutual perceptions, particularly Russian perceptions of Ukrainian culture, to this day. Kotliarevshchyna also dramatically illustrates that literary expression can be a basic vehicle for forming ethnic and then national identity. This is generally true of nineteenth-century Ukrainian as well as Russian society, where literature was the privileged cultural medium, and, in the absence of empowered institutions or forums, the surrogate for political discourse. In the Ukrainian case, what appeared to be a literary style was actually a basic model of self-identification. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian literature existed within the Russian Empire largely if not exclusively as a regional addendum to an imperial all-Russian literature (see Grabowicz, “Relations”). The literature of western Ukraine was part of a different context under Austria — also imperial but less totalizing — and evolved different strategies. In effect, just as the discussion of kotliarevshchyna entails a reconsideration of literary and historical data, texts, and historiographic formulas, so also the larger issue of what “Ukrainian” and “Russian” mean requires a reconsideration of basic terms, whose meanings are continually evolving. The problem is compounded by the fact that the literary, cultural, and historical relationships between Russia and the Ukraine have only recently become the subject of dispassionate and comprehensive analyses. Both in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, these issues were held hostage to ideological constraints and to imperialist as well as nationalist passions.

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Traditional perceptions: Kotliarevshchyna as a “literary disease” and epigonal expression At first glance, the traditional definition of kotliarevshchyna is unambiguous. The term was introduced by Panteleimon Kulish, who applied it not to the epigones, but to Kotliarevs’kyi himself — in a clearly negative sense. Soon, however, it came to be applied exclusively to the imitators of Kotliarevs’kyi, various minor writers — Pavlo Bilets’kyi-Nosenko, Porfiryi Korynec’kyi, Stepan Oleksandriv, Kostjantyn Puzyna, and others, some of them anonymous — who according to an earlier and more generous terminology would have been called a “school.” At the turn of the twentieth century, Serhii Iefremov’s influential, and populist, history of Ukrainian literature asserted that this “school of Kotliarevs’kyi” consisted of bad students, or bad “sons”: Their ties to Kotliarevs’kyi, and to all of Ukrainian literature, are only formal; not having understood the spirit and direction of the Eneiida, not having literary talent, but only an itch for writing, they copied only the surface of Kotliarevs’kyi’s poem and threw themselves into remarkable excess and mindless caricature. The only thing that these writers achieved through their failed efforts was that there soon came to exist an attitude that saw all of Ukrainian writing as crude babble, as half-witted play, as a sanctuary of “little Russian jokes,” and genuine writers had to prove in all earnestness that the Ukrainian language was fit for serious creativity and meaningful works. These heedless imitators ultimately threw a dark shadow on Kotliarevs’kyi himself, although he himself was least responsible for this mindless “kotliarevshchyna” that his self-appointed and witless students let loose under his name. (374)

Note that Iefremov suggests in passing the potentially useful notion that a broader context was involved in his definition — the “attitude” or “opinion of others,” which was in effect the allRussian critical response. Valid or not, his definition of the term became canonical: it was utilized by later, highly authoritative scholars, such as Mykola Zerov or Dmytro Chyzhevs’kyi, who in all other respects were far removed from Iefremov. For the former, kotliarevshchyna is a specifically literary disease; for the latter, it becomes a symptom of a national disorder (Zerov 98; Chyzhevs’kyj 371–73). The reasons for the diagnosis differed. Iefremov, who valued the liberation of the narod (the “people,” the “folk”) as perhaps the sole criterion of literary progress, rejected kotliarevshchyna as a betrayal of this ideal. Under the implied esthetic norms of Zerov and Chyzhevs’kyj, kotliarevshchyna was first and foremost the incarnation of bad taste. Both approaches made further examination of this phenomenon difficult in that they tended to obscure its psychological and structural features and did not acknowledge that this was, after all, the first broadly disseminated style of a new Ukrainian literature. If one dismissed it as a “disease,” all of Ukrainian literature could be dismissed, in the manner of the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky, who repeatedly stressed its provincial and “unprogressive” character. Ieremiia Aizenshtok’s lengthy introduction to the first volume of the anthology Kotliarevshchyna presents an important corrective to the normative tendencies of his predecessors. While stressing the social role and nature of kotliarevshchyna, he treats it as a normal product of popular literature, which he, like Iefremov and Zerov before him, calls a “literature of the middle-class reader.” But while Aizenshtok emphasizes the formal influence of Kotliarevs’kyi, and concretely illustrates how authors are “readers with pen in hand,” he still confines himself


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to Kotliarevs’kyi’s imitators and ultimately blurs and underestimates the range and true nature of the phenomenon. By separating kotliarevshchyna from Kotliarevs’kyi and the important writers that will subsequently modify it, Aizenshtok continues to marginalize it. In the final analysis he does not seem to notice that kotliarevshchyna is defined by deeper social and cultural moments rather than by generic and stylistic features. In effect, the real issue is kotliarevshchyna’s broadly representative narrative modality. The specific imitators of Kotliarevs’kyi, from Biletskyi-Nosenko to Puzyna, are secondary to this issue. There is no real paradox here: the epigones are unambiguous, and the essence of the cultural phenomenon is best conveyed through semantic complexity. For its part, the narrow understanding of kotliarevshchyna epitomized by Iefremov had far-reaching, largely negative consequences for further studies, particularly in literary history. On the one hand, it justified a normative-evaluative approach to a major cultural phenomenon, impeding a deeper understanding. The notion of a “literary disease” fetishized this style’s “coarseness” and “vulgarity,” while ignoring its underlying cultural and psychological dynamics. On the other hand, this narrow view distorted the literary process, since it left uncertain when exactly style was replaced by stylization. Literary historians who perceived kotliarevshchyna first and foremost as a generator of epigones were necessarily dealing with something presumably peripheral. They overlooked the fact that the mainstream of the new Ukrainian literature was drawing from the deep well of Kotliarevs’kyi’s style. His importance becomes fully apparent when we recognize how his style was absorbed by Hryhorii Kvitka, Shevchenko, Kulish and other important Ukrainian writers and, most prominently, by Gogol’ in Russian.

The question of functions: Kotliarevshchyna as ethnic self-assertion Kotliarevshchyna must be defined as a broadly resonant style and mode that plays both conscious and unconscious roles. The first, historical, or in the widest sense “ideological” role manifests itself at once internally and externally. The “external” function of this verbal style is to further separate Ukrainian from all-Russian literature through the choice of linguistic code. When Kotliarevs’kyi chose the vernacular Ukrainian language, he made the text to some extent inaccessible to all-Russian readers and privileged the Ukrainian-speaking readers, in effect shaping a Ukrainian audience. The first, unauthorized edition of the Eneiida had a small dictionary of “little Russian [Ukrainian] words,” which is as telling as it is ambiguous. It admits that some translation is presumably necessary, but it supplies only a select number of words. The question whether the text is “native” or somehow “foreign” is left open. The choice of language differentiates voice, thematics, and audience; it sets the emotional and cultural register. The selfreferential concern with language, with the “inner code” it projects, resonates also in HulakArtemovs’kyi’s “Deshcho pro toho Haras’ka” (A Few Words About That Fellow Horace; 1819), in Kvitka’s “Suplika do Pana Izdatelia” (An Appeal to the Honorable Publisher; 1833), or in Hrebinka’s almanach Lastivka (The Swallow; 1841) — especially in its Foreword, “Tak sobi do zemliakiv” (Some Words to My Countrymen), and Afterword, “Do zobachennia” (Good-bye). The coining of an alternative terminology, particularly of genre names, has a striking effect: various Russian terms that are known under their canonic Greek, Latin or Church-Slavonic

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names (ode, anecdote, epistle etc.) are given their vernacular (and purposefully comic, “low”) Ukrainian equivalent. Kvitka’s short cycle, “Little Pinpricks, or What in Russian Are Called ‘Epigrams,’” is a characteristic example (Grabowicz, History 57–58). The internal differentiating function of this style, i.e., kotliarevshchyna’s role within Ukrainian literature, is also complex: it separates — again primarily by linguistic code — the new Ukrainian literature from earlier, baroque literary forms, although, at the same time, it retains various Baroque devices and topoi, principally the burlesque. For Zerov, Chyzhevs’kyi, George Luckyj and other critics, in effect for the whole non-Soviet tradition of literary history, this style denotes a pre-modern and pre-national mindset. Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, Dmytro Dontsov, Ievhen Malaniuk, and other writers and publicists were impelled in the 1920s to call this “malorosiistvo” (“Little Russianness” or the Little Russian mindset). For them, this style reflected a mentality anchored in the national “somnolence” or “semi-awareness” of the eighteenth century, a state of lethargy that was dispelled by Shevchenko. In effect, all of kotliarevshchyna — from its appearance in the travesty of the Aeneid to its hazy continuation in the Soviet period — was for these critics a style that expressed sui generis regression; it represented the immature phase of national consciousness and the “national idea.” These premises and conclusions are basically ahistorical, but they do reflect the inordinately long presence of kotliarevshchyna on the Ukrainian scene. Kotliarevshchyna is most often defined on the basis of its generic and formal features, as a form of the burlesque. This traditional and canonic designation is in and of itself correct. The humor that underlies this burlesque is largely crude and earthy, but it is organic and effective, and this applies to the Eneiida as well as to its epigones. Since the burlesque does not always involve earthy humor, its presence in this case is specific. Indeed, an earthy burlesque mode did play a central role in Ukrainian literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries already. While the nineteenth-century linguistic code introduced a major break in poetics (by shifting from an earlier bookish Ukrainian to the vernacular), the earthy mode provided continuity. As noted by Iatsenko, Sverstiuk and others, one major function of this humor is to assert life and identity. Clearly, this could provide the momentum to brave the social and conventional risk of separating oneself from the system of Russian (all-Russian) literature. In some measure, such separation was like slipping anchor and setting out without charts. In turn, the sanction for such release could be ridicule — and this is precisely what occurred as the Russian critics, beginning with Belinsky, proceeded to identify all of Ukrainian literature with provincial, crude humor. Although the Ukrainian burlesque parodied all-Russian literature, this subversive aspect was commented on very gingerly, or most frequently ignored; in Soviet scholarship an unambiguous taboo was placed on it. Yet the basic function of kotliarevshchyna was to mock the inflated, self-important, artificial, and ultimately “inhuman” world of imperial society and normative canonic literature. This parodic function informs all of kotliarevshchyna, whether unconsciously, as for Kotliarevs’kyi and his imitators, or consciously, as for later writers. We see this most clearly in Shevchenko’s various poetic works and, most programmatically, in the 1847 introduction to Kobzar he did not publish (Povne zibrannia 6: 312–15). In Kulish’s “homestead philosophy,” to juxtapose the native and human with the foreign and normative becomes a systemic and ideological form.


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However, the parodic subversiveness of kotliarevshchyna also has a double bottom. On a barely concealed level, this is a mode that mocks imperial reality and canonic poetics. On a deeper latent level it continually reveals that this Russian reality is precisely the measure of all things. In effect, kotliarevshchyna is totally dependent on a colonial relationship (actual or spiritual) to the literature of the “center.” Without that center it becomes dysfunctional and irrelevant — or mere stylization, archaism. To the extent that kotliarevshchyna was the basic mode of Ukrainian writing prior to the appearance of the pre-Romantics and the programmatic sentimentalism of Kvitka in the 1830s, Ukrainian literature was then largely structured around a single style and set of themes. In itself this was probably not a unique development, but for Ukrainian literature it subtended the formative stage of both literary and national consciousness. Kotliarevs’kyi’s style thus left (with genetic coding and imprinting) a lasting mark on the entire literary process, certainly on its first stages. Furthermore, the model of a literature grounded in one popular style and set of themes became a legacy that would reappear in later versions: witness Nechui-Levytskyi’s appeals at the turn of the century for a monolithic Ukrainian literature focused exclusively on the narod and reflecting its speech and idiom, all the way to the ideologically essentialist and no less populist doctrines of Soviet Ukrainian Socialist Realism. The kotliarevshchyna style also provided a practical benefit for the new Ukrainian literature: a ready voice, and with it, a literary persona. In the beginning phase of any literature the search for a voice and an effective narrative strategy is a first priority for the individual writer as well as for the process in general. Romantic poetics sanctioned the voice and persona of a “simple” narrator (Gogol’s Rudyi Pan’ko, Pushkin’s Belkin, Henryk Rzewuski’s Soplica) as well as the narrative genre of the skaz or gawe˛da as fictive articulations of the people’s collective voice. Kotliarevshchyna clearly falls within this paradigm but equally clearly it sets up a context that differs from those of Gogol’, Pushkin, and Rzewuski. The singular style of the kotliarevshchyna blurred the boundary between the writer and his literary-generic persona. Whereas in Russian or Polish literature the boundary between the writer’s social and literary embodiments was clear, and combinations like Pushkin-Belkin or Rzewuski-Soplica would have seemed absurd, the combination of Kvitka-Osnov’lianenko (the latter being Kvitka’s pen name) was not only possible but actually became canonic. The model that kotliarevshchyna inscribed in Ukrainian literature — this fusion of the social persona, the real author, and his literary projection of a popular voice — remained a norm in Ukrainian literature long after kotliarevshchyna ceased to be a vital presence. Direct evidence of this is found in the rich range of canonic literary pseudonyms spanning the entire nineteenth and much of the twentieth century: Marko Vovchok, Panas Myrnyi, Karpenko-Karii, Lesia Ukraiinka, Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, Vasyl’ Barka, and so on. In the formal, linguistic, and stylistic sense, kotliarevshchyna articulated not only an abstract (narodnist) populism, but also something much more concrete, the voice of the common man (the prostoliudin). Iurii Shevelov has recently provided a concise overview of the features of this voice. While he focuses on the epistolary genre, he is actually describing the modality as such: Stylistically speaking, the epistolary genre (and belletristic narrative prose in general) of nineteenth-century Ukrainian was born of an imitation of the peasant or muzhik narrative,

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George G. Grabowicz through a stylized monologue or dialogue endowed with an exaggerated literary expression. Features of this narrative à la mouzhik are well known in connection with the prose of KvitkaOsnov’lianenko or Hulak-Artemovs’kyi, or Ievhen Hrebinka […]. Such features include dialogisms, an excess of vulgarisms and diminutives, a circling around the same word, coordinate syntax and catalogues, avoidance of foreign words and their substitution by descriptive locutions or approximate ad hoc inventions, or through a folk phonetics and folk etymology, the use of purely local facts with the presumption that they are universally well known, an excess of exclamations, proverbs, interruptions, etc. All of this taken together creates an image-mask of a simple and dimwitted provincial narrator (21).

Next to these linguistic functions, then, kotliarevshchyna’s function was psychological: it served as a mask or shield that allowed the author to assume without direct risk a subversive stance. His “native” emotional-cultural code enabled him to mock the “foreign” and to emphasize his own separateness from it. The author, in short, appeared as a masked player. As in a play, the mask enabled him to face a truth that could not be stated directly at the time. As Ivan Franko argues in another context, the necessary consequence of this was that the mask would adhere to the face and become part of it (30: 127). Moreover, “foreigners” perceived no difference between the player and his mask, as Iefremov noted: “there soon came to exist an attitude which saw all of Ukrainian writing as crude babble, as half-witted play, as a sanctuary for ‘little Russian jokes’” (374). In this sense, kotliarevshchyna’s self-imposed stereotype came to play a key role in the formation of Russian-Ukrainian literary relations. In this context, too, we can see a peculiar double bottom in kotliarevshchyna: its role of separating Ukrainian literature from Russian imperial literature appears to be mostly relative, indeed illusory. At issue is not only that, for example, the Eneiida was modeled on a Russian travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid, or that its small dictionary for the Russian speaker suggests an implicit orientation to an all-Russian audience. The key moment in this pseudo-separation is the basic paradigm that sees Ukrainian literature as essentially and exclusively of and for the common people, as narodna. According to the formula that Mykola Kostomarov would use with regard to Shevchenko, this Ukrainian literature says what the common people would say if they could so speak (160). Such a reading clearly did not accord with reality, even then. For at that stage, and for much of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian literature was part of the imperial, allRussian literature. To be sure, persecution by mid-century was marked by the suppression of the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood in 1847, but especially by the Ems ukaz of 1876 that banned the use of Ukrainian in publications, prohibiting the importation of Ukrainian books, and much more. Until the Ems ukaz, however, all the Ukrainian writers in Russian Ukraine took part in the general all-Russian literary process. The crystallization of national distinctions, as signaled by Mykhailo Drahomanov’s groundbreaking study, “Russian, Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Galician Literature, (1873),” was precisely against this background. Moreover, for the entire nineteenth century, the Ukrainian literature that served Ukrainian society was practically speaking bilingual, perhaps even more reliant on Russian than on Ukrainian. Ukrainian readers of that time surely did not perceive Kvitka’s novels in Russian, Hrebinka’s Russian stories, Kotliarevs’kyi’s “Oda Sapho” in Russian or the Russian language articles in “Osnova” as something “foreign,” something “Russian” in the contemporary sense of the term, namely as Great Russian.


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What was kotliarevshchyna’s role in this context? While projecting subversion and parody it also functioned as a mask of sincerity and solidarity with the narod; This pose masked the hybridity of the Ukrainian literary process (its colonial profile) and implied that there was a continuous integrity in Ukrainian cultural discourse, as well as in the incipient political discourse. In its early stages, kotliarevshchyna was a prime measure of Ukrainian literary identity. For the writer who wrote in this style and convention was eo ipso a Ukrainian writer, that is, a true friend of the narod; and his use of this style concealed — for his audience, and no doubt for himself — much of social reality, i.e., the whole gamut of manifest, hierarchical connections, differentiations, and compromises. In short, kotliarevshchyna created a magic space, an objective correlative of an ideal community. It foreshadowed what politically committed Ukrainian writers of the twentieth century would call derzhava slova (the word as State).

The canon of anticanonicity Kotliarevshchyna’s subversion was directed against canonic and normative literature, against authority and authoritarianism, against all that was “foreign,” i.e., distant, artificial, and somehow not entirely human. We are not speaking, of course, about some abstract idea of kotliarevshchyna but about concrete texts, and the patterns and structures they projected. Examining these elements in various texts we can demonstrate that kotliarevshchyna was much more substantial than may have been assumed: in the first decades of the nineteenth century it constituted one of the two main tendencies of the Ukrainian literary process. If we look at this choice between addressing “the world at large” and focusing on the “native audience,” then the latter, exemplified by kotliarevshchyna, was clearly dominant. When did its hegemony wane? With the appearance of Shevchenko already? The writings in the St. Petersburg UkrainianRussian “thick” journal Osnova (The Foundation; 1861–1862)? The émigré activities of Drahomanov, and his “students” Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukraiinka? These questions require further investigation. But it is clear that kotliarevshchyna determined the identity and consciousness of Ukrainian literature already at that first stage. If we accept the proposition that “nativism,” responding to the realities of political history and colonial status, characterized in large measure Ukrainian culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then kotliarevshchyna assumes its significance as a fundamental nativist archetype. Its distant echoes will be perceptible in the Ukrainian provincialism and populism that was officially nurtured by Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet cultural policy, and in the search for an “organic national style” to be found in the post-World War II emigration as a response to the fetishization of “Europe” and “Europeanism.” Kotliarevshchyna’s most complex function was to model the Russian-Ukrainian literary relations, at the very least up to the middle of the nineteenth century, but surely beyond it as well. The topic is as broad as it is interesting, and we can only sketch its outline. From the perspective of Russian literature, kotliarevshchyna became for a long time synonymous with all of Ukrainian literature. Following in the footsteps of Belinsky, Russian criticism saw Ukrainian literature only as burlesque and parody, losing under the influence of this paradigm the ability to distinguish meaning and quality. For most Russian critics there was

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simply no difference then between a Shevchenko and various second or third-rate writers. At the same time, neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians seemed to realize that kotliarevshchyna managed to deeply penetrate Russian literature in the person and the works of Gogol’. In effect Gogol’ injected this modality into the literature of the “center”: through him, the literature of the canon became informed (or “infected” as another perspective would have it) by the literature of the anti-canon. At issue is not only the question of linguistic level that was analyzed by Eikhenbaum (135) and Luckyj (107). In fact, a whole gamut of Gogolian features and strategies — parody, subversion, épatage, ambiguity, and decentering — have their source in the archetypal model created by Kotliarevs’kyi, which Gogol overtly acknowledges in the epigraphs to his “Sorochinskaia iarmarka” (Sorochintsy Fair; Sobranie Sochinennii 1: 16–40). As always with Gogol’, his introduction of Ukraine into Russian consciousness had, however, a double or triple layer. On the one hand, he “discovered” Ukraine, made it interesting and attractive; this stimulated a massive Ukrainian (more than Russian) emotional involvement with it and its pathos. But he exoticized it (which is inevitable in a colonial context) and propagated a myth about its death. That myth did not fully do its work because it was so quickly supplanted in the Ukrainian collective mind by Shevchenko’s different version. Finally, Gogol’ introduced his Ukraine with striking notes of parody and burlesque. It is enough to compare the tonality of his “Taras Bul’ba” to Shevchenko’s Haidamaky (1841), let alone the high pathos of the Istoriia Rusov (1846). The cardinal difference was obvious already to Shevchenko himself and Kulish. A specific metamorphosis of kotliarevshchyna is visible in Soviet Ukrainian literature. Behind the official goals of consonance and “unification,” the same underlying strictures apply. But now the Ukrainian-Russian literary relationship was regulated not only by the hierarchy of “center” and “periphery,” but by rigorous political control, and, in the Stalinist period, by terror as well. Under such circumstances the devices of kotliarevshchyna became highly functional, especially the concealment of the ego behind the persona of the narrator, the flight into seeming simplicity, the self-protection through devices creating intimacy, and the voice of the collective. Not only functional, but expedient. In the Stalinist period the preeminent Ukrainian poet, Pavlo Tychyna, defended himself against Party attacks precisely through such devices. His poetic collections Chernihiv (Zibrannia 1: 225–37) from 1930 and Partija vede (The Party Leads) from 1934 reveal this tactical repertoire as well as the strategic moment of parody — particularly in the paradigmatic poem “Partija vede,” which functions as both an assertion of a new Stalinist/neo-kotliarevskian canon and as its subtly parodic debunking (Grabowicz, “Tychyna”). Even more revealing of this stance, pushing parody and subversion to the very brink but successfully masking them precisely by the sanctioned modalities of epic sweep and ideology, is Tychyna’s still unacknowledged masterpiece from 1938, “Shablja Kotovs’koho” (Kotovsky’s Sword; Zibrannia 2: 54–92). A similar poetics is revealed in the Soviet Ukrainian prose writer and humorist Ostap Vyshnia, especially in such works as “Chukhraiintsi.” In fact, one can argue that the real poetics (not the official, Marxist-Leninist, but the structural poetics) of the specifically Ukrainian rather than Russian Socialist-Realism draws its sustenance from the traditions and archetypes of kotliarevshchyna and the legacy of populism that animates it.

Poeticizing prose in Croatian and Serbian Modernism

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Poeticizing prose in Croatian and Serbian Modernism Miro Mašek Lyrical prose has no precise historical location for the techniques of poetry are present in various prose genres in different literary epochs. Ralph Freedman has shown in The Lyrical Novel what functions the interweaving of lyrical and narrative procedures can have. He found that a combination of narrative-syntagmatic and poetic-paradigmatic processes lends narrative coherence to lyrical novels. They retain the pragmatics of the sjuzhet but constructively transform it by means of poetic techniques. This combination of two procedures enriches both levels of meaning, for the poetic combinations make new aspects and relations visible between figures, actions, and narrated situations. Yet the textual elements remain embedded here in a narrative context, and they are subjected to perspectival shortening and psychological motivation. Such a technique is especially suited for portraying interiority in a chaotic, elemental, and uncontrollable world. It allows a constant variation and transformation of the relation between widely separated external levels, and a foregrounding of particular elements. The resultant hybrid form is above all associative and synthetic. As in poems, the drive towards unity is evident only when all narrative elements are retroactively ordered into a whole. Lyrical prose transforms conventional narration: the world is no longer the fictional space in which protagonists act, and no longer something external set against the author and the reader, but the poetic vision of the protagonist. The distance between the author and the fictional figures becomes minimal; the author drops the mask of a disinterested narrator and identifies with the hero. Their point of view crystallizes in protagonists who transform their perceptions into a network of images. This new correlation between the represented world, the protagonists, and the author, allows lyrical prose to shift easily between various temporal levels, figures, events, and narrated situations. Hence poetic prose frequently uses the form of a diary, which lends plausibility to the transitions from one level of reality to another. Finally, poetic prose usually deals with the inner lives of passive heroes. Although poeticized prose had existed in earlier literary epochs, it became typical for literary Modernism, which rejected as rationalist reductions the scientific verisimilitude of Realism and the portrayal of rational subjects. The passive heroes of late-nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century prose regarded the world mainly as a pretext for self-reflection; fictionalnarrative shifted to imaginative-poetic modes. Radicalizing certain romantic poetic procedures, these Central- and South-East European literary developments were most heavily indebted to Aestheticism and French Symbolism. As Robert Pynsent has shown, the passive hero of prose lost himself in egocentric aestheticism or occult fantasies, as if in a dream (“Conclusory” 172 ff.). We shall exemplify these new modes of expression with Croatian and Serbian prose that foregrounds the aesthetic rather than the communicative function of language. The Symbolism that reached Croatian and Serbian literature with a delay at the end of the nineteenth century ought to be seen against the background of specific literary and social developments. First, it partially rejected the role that the national awakening had ascribed to the

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author as the keeper of national health and the moral energy of the people. The first Symbolists in Serbian Modernism upheld the autonomy of the poetic word. The poets withdrew into contemplative isolation, serving beauty rather than the people, regarding art itself as the goal of artistic production. Their desire for a new artistic language pushed them beyond the weak realist paradigm and led them to reject the folkloristic and utilitarian traditions that had shaped narrative prose during the development of the national literatures throughout the nineteenth century. But, in contrast to lyric poetry, which quickly embraced Modernism, Serbian turn-of-the-century prose retained for some time its folkloristic character and epic mode. The various turn-of-the-century literary movements, schools, and currents were slow to emerge and too diverse for a common literary program. Hence we cannot give a simple definition of the thematic and formal changes in turn-of-the century Serbian prose; its modernization becomes evident only once we have described the partial changes in great many, stylistically and thematically heterogeneous, literary texts. We can generally say, however, that the accent of representation shifted from external, general, and common elements to the inner lives of individuals. The modernist thematic shift from village to city, understood within a general social restructuring, introduced new literary heroes. The traditional hero of the people, portrayed as representative of a national community, was replaced in Serbian Modernism by the “decadent intellectual,” a figure that had become alienated from his “natural” environment. In Serbian prose this is often a peasant who comes to the city and disdains all things plebeian (Pekovic´, Srpska 13). The hero’s resignation in these texts, observable already in late-Serbian Realism, differs from those of heroes in Central-European urban settings (Pynsent, “Conclusory” 120 ff.). The typical figure in fin-de-siècle Viennese literature is a passive, tired, and aimless, if rich, bourgeois son, who compensates for his exclusion from aristocratic society and for his inability to lead an active life. In South-Eastern European literature we encounter well-educated but poor young men, for whom neither the patriarchal home, nor the quickly developing big cities, can offer a viable environment. Furthermore, as soon as they leave their immediate surroundings they have to confront the problem of their national identity. Resignation and hopelessness are evident already in the title of Veljko Milicévic´’s “Mrtvi život” (Dead Life; 1903–04) and of his short novel Bespucé (Hopelessness; 1912). Deretic´ has characterized the latter as a “postrealist” text and “the first modern lyrical-associative novel” of Serbian literature (Istorija 479–90); according to Vucˇkovic´ (450) it was the model for avantgarde Serbian novels after World War I. While it still relied on classical narration (Pekovic´, Književno 129–39), it was an important step towards avant-garde prose: elements related to events were minimized and given in summary fashion only; episodes were eliminated; objects and events were transformed into metaphors and symbols. The fragmented parts, in which description outweighs narration, were connected mostly via associations and leitmotifs (Vucˇkovic´ 447). Spiritual disintegration, resignation, and aestheticism, as well as departures from realist techniques and the traditional forms of orality, appeared already in late-Serbian Realism. The realist Svetolik Rankovic´ was the first Serbian author to take a significant step towards the emancipation of prose from the laws of event-centered narration (Grcˇevic´, simbolisticˇke 516 ff). “Jesenje slike” (Images of Fall; 1892) fragmented the composition but used sound repetitions and structured the sentences rhythmically. The authors of “lyrical Realism” further poeticized


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´ ipiko used realist narrative techniques but playfully embellished them by focusing prose: Ivo C mainly on the protagonist’s inner life. Petar Kocˇic´ poeticized prose less radically, by holding on to satirical and didactic representations of society. Classical narrative techniques still dominated this first phase of poeticizing prose. Yet the most important late Serbian realist, Borisav Stankovic´, interconnected poetic and narrative procedures in a complex way and departed so significantly from the realist canon that his prose is regarded as transitional (Grcˇevic´, simbolisticˇke 516). The stories “Iz starog jevandjelja” (From the Old Gospel) and “Stari dani” (Times Past), and his most important work, the novel Necˇista krv (Impure Blood), brought the poetological line of Serbian Realism to a close and opened the way for Modernism. The publication of Necˇista krv in 1910 is often seen, therefore, as the most important fault line in newer Serbian literature. A similar transformation of prose narratives occurred in Croatian fin-de-siècle literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, writers abandoned epic narration and historical themes. New lyrical narratives thematized above all psychological and intimate spaces, replacing the novels of national history that had dominated Croatian literature in the 1880s. These changes appeared already in realist writers (Grcˇevic´, “Aspekti” 49ff.), but the lyrically narrated novel became significant only in Croatian Modernism. As in Serbian prose, the new Croatian literary hero appeared around the turn-of-the century. Ivo Vojnovic´ situated the figures of his early novellas in Perom i olovkom (With Pen and Pencil; 1884) in the ambiance of the great European metropolitan centers. They are hedonistic dreamers, passionate lovers of music, and seekers of aesthetic experiences in nature. In contrast to the figures of Huysmans and Wilde, they are no social cynics, for their compassion and resignation are strongly motivated by national feelings. Ivan Kozarac is interesting for opposite reasons: his novel Djuka Begovic´ (1911) completely abandons the social and national determinism that was so dominant in the character portrayals of Croatian realist prose. Yet his passive hero is no resigned urbanite for he remains attached to the conservative village community. Not the social setting but his own weak hedonism leads to his failure. Early twentieth-century Serbian and Croatian writers poeticized novellas, novels, and other traditional genres, but they also created hybrid lyrical-epical forms, above all short, often fragmentary and strongly personal texts, like the “poetic travel narrative” (poetski putopis), the “poetic essay,” and the “poem in prose.” These new forms, which Serbian literary histories often call lirska proza, both expanded the arsenal of poetic techniques and de-hierarchized the literary genres. Ivo Andric´’s Ex ponto (1918) and Nemiri (Restlessness; 1920), and Isidora Sekulic´’s impressionist collections Saputnici (Travel Companions; 1913) and Pisma iz Norveške (Letters from Norway), published in 1914, were particularly important. In Croatian literature, where these fragmentary texts were called crtica, the genre was practiced by almost all turn-of-the-century authors, including Milan Begovic´, Antun Gustav Matoš, and Fran Galovic´. The pretext of this literary form was Fran Mazuranic´’s 1887 collection of lyrical-associative prose, Lišcé (Foliage). Since Croatian lyrical prose of the interwar years is of lesser significance, we shall concentrate on Serbian literature, especially on Miloš Crnjanski’s avant-garde transformation of traditional literary procedures. Crnjanski, next to Rastko Petrovic´, was the most important Serbian author of poetic prose between the wars. The experience of Austro-Hungarian art and culture was decisive for his early works, which include one of the most important poetic novels

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of Serbian Modernism, Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevicú (Diary about Cˇarnojevic´), published in 1921. Like other Slavic artists of the period, Crnjanski came in direct contact with the artistic currents of his day via the great cultural centers of the Monarchy. His early works abandoned already the prewar dream-world of decadence. As Klaus Vondung suggests, the doomsday mood of the young Expressionists, which strongly influenced Crnjanski, was not a passive dream. The new generation looked for apocalyptic events, and neither the outbreak of World War I nor suffering and death could dampen their mood (258 ff). In the artistic debates about an apocalyptic redemption, which flared up during and immediately after the war, the Expressionists often stylized themselves as martyrs. The old world was for the new literary generation irrevocably destroyed; its achievements had to be replaced by archaic vitality. Death and resurrection, suffering and messianic visions of a new paradise were central elements in this young art. Writers cultivated anti-civilizational passions and searched for a primal power. The disintegration of the external order was accompanied by a loss of sense and a fragmentation of the subject. Yet, as Thomas Anz suggests, artistic concepts were developed at the same time to satisfy the desire for wholeness and unity; old ideas were reinserted into literary contexts (280). Influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, Crnjanski postulated already during World War I the principles of an avant-garde program, for which he introduced the term Sumatraism in 1920. His concept covered the most important topoi of contemporary avant-garde art: primal force, the conflict between civilization and nature, and the hope for a new beginning. Sumatraism was based on a vision of cosmic harmony. Global chaos was to be overcome through an illumination, a mythical ecstasy that would allow the subject to melt into the phenomena. Trying to realize in a new literary context Baudelaire’s notion of a universal analogy, Crnjanski, like so many of his avant-garde contemporaries, tried to compensate the epochal loss of sense and faith through art. He sought a new harmony, a poetic vision that would reflect the indivisibility of the spirit and the universe, mankind and the world. His attempt to merge the self into the world was indebted to the empirical idealism of the eighteenth, and the transcendental idealism of the nineteenth century. It represented the most important theoretical foundation for poeticizing prose (Bohrer; Horn; Freedman 16 ff), and endowed Crnjanski’s avant-garde texts with a new artistic expression. As Lešic´ (19) rightly says, what matters is not Crnjanski’s belief that everything is part of a unified whole, but his realization of another unity that is more relevant to poetry: the unity of various textual elements and various levels of structure, the harmony of form and ideas, motifs and rhythms, images and sounds, and the combination of everything with everything else — not just in poetic vision but also in its poetic expression. In contrast to those Serbian prose writers who emancipated themselves only slowly and laboriously from traditional narration, Crnjanski broke with it radically. His very first stories from the 1920s can already be understood as examples of lyrical prose. The six stories of Pricˇe o muškom (Stories about Man), as well as the simultaneously written but only later published stories “Raj” (Paradise) and “Tri krsta” (Three Crosses), contain already all the important elements of poetic prose: they largely dispense with a subject and replace it with the typically fragmentary structure of lyrical prose. Above all, they are distinguished by their language, whose complex syntax, as well as rhythmic, acoustic, and semantic organization, is closer to that of lyrical poems than to prose. Crnjanski’s rejection of continuous time, space, and subject (the constitutive elements of traditional representation) was so radical in Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevicú that


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it made a firm delineation of sjuzhet practically impossible. This extraordinarily fragmented text is held together primarily by non-temporal procedures of interconnection. It functions as a poem with anaphorically interrelated strophes. These connections, which consist of parallelism rather than causal or temporal conjunction, are reinforced through other repetitions. The reader has the sense of repeatedly returning to the same point of departure; the individual episodes break off abruptly instead of moving towards a closure as in traditional prose. Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevicú is distinguished by a complex interaction between an avant-garde program and a series of innovative literary procedures. The idea of Sumatraism that all phenomena are interconnected and correspond to each other within an endless horizon of peace, is intimately related to the principles of avant-garde language, in which nothing exists for itself for every element points towards a unity. The crucial difference between the poeticizing of realist prose and the avantgarde verbal art of Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevicú lies neither in the frequency of lyrical passages nor in their privileged position within the textual hierarchy, but in the new style’s deeper penetration into structure. Traditional narration had used iteration only as a special procedure; avant-garde verbal art turned it into a principle of construction (Burkhart). Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevicú allows for a fruitful interpenetration of these two levels, making it the “icon” of an artistic vision (Schmid) that offers a mythic image for the indivisibility of spirit, the universe, mankind, and the world. In spite of their heterogeneity, all thematic levels of the text merge into a unity, for the cohesion of the represented world is not determined by social, geographic, or historical criteria. All empirical events, all irresolvable conflicts of humanity, are transcended by means of a different context. They correspond in a “sumatraistic” (and poetic) harmony to each other. In this worldview, the universe regains its lost integrity as a kind of mythic totality. Crnjanski’s artistic innovations, their difference from the aesthetic principles of the pre-war generation, are, however, only one aspect of a complex phenomenon. Above all, he wanted to solve the problem of cultural and national identity by seeking to master through art the epochal events of his day, namely the war and the South Slavic state formation. Escaping into the primitivism, exoticism, and orientalist fantasies of his artistic programs, Crnjanski, like many European authors in the first quarter of the century, first sought to find a way out of an anaemic disorientation (Brenneke 62–101). Soon after the war, Crnjanski switched sides in the civilization vs. nature conflict: instead of seeking to redefine his individual identity as an exoticist, he now sought a new collective identity by being a “noble savage.” Disgust and cultural pessimism drove him now not towards exoticism but towards a search for his national roots: his yearning for transcendence suggested him now a national metaphysics instead of Sumatra and corral reefs. The discrepancy between his earlier artistic visions and his later political engagement was sharply criticized already by some of his contemporaries in the thirties. By the thirties, Crnjanski sought a new totality, namely a totalitarian political one, though he claimed to be a Sumatraist even in the fifties. His literary and Avant-garde drive to expansion became wholly political, and we can detect in him that close relationship between Avant-garde literary consciousness and affinity with fascism that Eva Hesse (Achse), Ludwig, and Wertheimer found in right-wing Modernism. Posing as a spiritual leader, as a new spiritual aristocrat, allowed Crnjanski to preach the cult of power in the thirties. Politically transforming his former literary pose as a poet-messiah, he claimed he was unique and exceptional. He created

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an arsenal of images in the grey area between poetry and political action. How effective he was is evident in Zoran Avramovic´’s recent attempt to make Crnjanski’s reactionary phase once more presentable. Crnjanski’s political-journalistic texts from the twenties and thirties are so extremely “poetic” that it is possible to characterize their style and their Symbolism as partially Sumatraist. Serbian modernist prose reached its pinnacle with Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevicú. The post-WorldWar-I Serbian avant-garde is frequently seen as its second phase. Although Crnjanski’s second novel, Seobe (Migrations; 1929), and his later prose continue to use avant-garde aesthetic innovations, he gradually gave up his program. The aesthetization of politics ran parallel with the politicizing of the aesthetic. One observes that Crnjanski, like other leading right-wing modernists, resettled in the mid-twenties in the bourgeois enclave of high art (with all of its aesthetic, institutional, and cultural-political consequences), as if the avant-garde rebellion had never occurred. In Druga knjiga Seobe (Second Book of Migrations) — published only in 1962, though Crnjanski started writing it immediately after the publication of Seobe — elements of traditional sjuzhet-forming prose reappear: event-centeredness, authorial narration, and traditional concepts of character. The de-hierarchization of literature in the avant-garde allowed for a mutual interaction between author and reader, a role for readers in metafictional texts (Hutcheon Narcissistic Narrative), a playful multiplication of points of view, a surrender of a fixed narratorial instance, as well as for a meaning-producing integral subject. All these were replaced between the wars by “authoritarian” literature (Hesse, “Reproduktion” 485). Authors no longer placed the verbal material in the foreground “to allow the objects to speak for themselves,” they employed once more omniscient narrators. As our article on collective identities in Crnjanski’s prose (in vol. 4 of this History) shows, these changes reflected his conservative political reorientation. His later prose attempted to shape a homogeneous collective rather than a mythopoetic exoticism.

Stanislav Vinaver: Subversion of, or intervention in literary history? Svetlana Slapšak Vinaver was a unique and versatile Serbian and Yugoslav writer. A hero of World War I in Serbia, witness to the October revolution, student of Ferdinand de Saussure, musician, translator of Rabelais, Lewis Carol, and several less challenging authors, poet, essayist, polyglot, avantgarde leader, flâneur and causeur in the best Paris-Belgrade tradition, founder of several journals and many short-lived movements, guide of Rebecca West during her journey in Yugoslavia (called Constantin in her book), Vinaver, a Jew, survived the German concentration camps thanks to his Yugoslav RA officer status. His post-war journal Republika was regarded with suspicion by the new authorities, and Vinaver cared little about carving a position for himself. He remained a sharp critic of ignorance and stupidity until his death.

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Vinaver published in 1920 the Pantologija novije srpske pelengirike (The Pantology of New Serbian Peasant Trousers), a parodistic anthology of Serbian and Yugoslav authors, aimed at Bogdan Popovic´’s much reproduced Antologija novije srpske lirike (Anthology of New Serbian Lyrics; 1911), which was based on a conservative aesthetics. The parodies were not just a game of virtuosity; they challenged the accepted literary chronologies, genre schemes, and value systems, and mocked not only the authorities, but also the Avant-garde, Vinaver’s friends and allies, and even, quite mercilessly, himself. The first edition of the Pantology contains sections on three historical “Ages” and a new one, but the arrangement is not chronological and many authors appear in several different sections. Neither does the division follow genres or literary movements. The First Age refers to those “innocent” poetics that do not problematize the notion of the text and naively believe in the “spontaneity” of literary creation. The Second Age signals an awareness of a competing poetics and the discovery of the lonely subject. The Third Age inaugurates the manipulation and transformation of poetics, as manifested, for instance, in the Avant-garde movements. The New Age institutionalizes and historicizes literature: earlier literary productions are discovered and reinterpreted. The oral tradition is embedded in its philological interpretation, and literary texts are generally accompanied by historical and critical texts. Vinaver’s “immanent poetics” implies that all literary texts have meta-texts and literature can, therefore, only exist as a system. This concept was new in the literary historiography and criticism of Vinaver’s time, new even in later Serbian or Yugoslav literary studies. It may be read as an early structuralist attempt at organizing literary history, and in this sense it could be best understood as a fragmented system and re-organization in Roland Barthes’s sense of the terms, or as a rhizome model in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense (Plateaus 7–8). The Pantology also contains questions for high-school finals, parodistic biographies, and hilarious literary ads. Its immediate popularity in the intellectual circles led to an expanded version in 1922 and to a yet more encompassing edition in 1938. Vinaver preferred the burlesque mode, for in his view a perfectly imitated form debased high meanings. He excelled in metrics and prosody and was capable of writing a pastiche of any poetic form, though he went beyond the pastiche by deliberately slipping into the carnivalesque or even into nonsense. He liked to use nonsense to ridicule academic discourse, by exposing non-sequiturs and techniques of camouflaging the lack of logic. Nonsense could reveal also the emptiness of avant-garde experiments. Patriotism and nationalism were among his favorite targets. Vinaver kept his parodistic disposition even after World War II and his concentration camp experience. Indeed, he felt even more compelled to ridicule when the new ideological discourse and the new games of power and authority emerged, introducing more rules and unpredictable strategies. But his situation became more difficult now than before. He became more marginal than ever, and several serious attempts were made to silence him. Vinaver wrote a few new parodies in Windmills, a short-lived humoristic magazine, but was unable to publish more of them. When in 1966 the distinguished author and critic Jovan Hristic´ managed to republish the old Pantology in Belgrade, he concluded that the post-war parodies were “far less successful,” though still highly risky. Several years later, Vinaver’s “Alaj-begova slama” (Alay-Bey’s Hey) appeared in samizdat form, and was sold discreetly in student clubs and in cafés around the School of Philosophy and the College of Philology in Belgrade. The text shocked the privileged

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readers: Vinaver parodied the new ideological discourse without constraints, destroying the new authorities and the new values. Fresh and precise as before, his parodies could be used immediately against a literary establishment that did not undergo any radical changes for more than a decade. Vinaver’s devastating parodies often predicted the transformation of some writers who were still alive, but he no longer ridiculed the institutions of the intelligentsia, the Avantgarde, academia, and bohemia, for they had lost all their independence and ceased to exist in their former incarnations. Once more, Vinaver’s parodies diagnosed the sickness but innovative responses were impossible. Vinaver’s parodies were counter-perspectives of the literary cultures in Yugoslavia.

The birth of modern literary theory in East-Central Europe Galin Tihanov What were the cultural coordinates at the birth of literary theory? The waning dominance of literary theory today makes it possible to contemplate the subject historically, establishing more securely its dynamic and its chronotope. Chronotope suggests that the location of ideas in particular temporal and spatial configurations reflects particular cultural conditions. I submit that modern literary theory was born in the decades between World War I and World War II in East-Central Europe, in Russia, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, within a set of intersecting cultural determinations. The contribution of East-Central Europe to later developments in literary theory cannot be overstated. It could be claimed that the second “golden age” of literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s was an elaboration and a variation on themes, problems, and solutions played out in the interwar period in East-Central Europe. French Structuralism, however refined and reluctant to acknowledge its predecessors, was made possible through the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle and the formulation of the principles of phonology by Nikolai Trubetskoi and Roman Jakobson in the 1930s; narratology in all its critical responses and modifications (Eberhard Lämmert, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, Doritt Cohn, and Mieke Bal) developed the legacy of Vladimir Propp, whose Morfologiia skazki (Morphology of the Folktale) appeared as early as 1928; the continental version of reception theory in the 1970s was anticipated by the Prague Linguistic Circle, above all by Felix Vodicˇka, who borrowed somewhat freely from Roman Ingarden to make a case for the inherent need to “concretize” works of literature in the process of reading and social appropriation; finally, Marxist literary theory was deeply influenced by Georg (György) Lukács’s work in the 1930s and the later contributions of the Romanian-born Lucien Goldmann. There are, of course, trends in modern literary theory that evolved away from East-Central European theory. A particularly good case

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in point is hermeneutics, which was widely used in German humanities before being put to use in literary theory by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. in the US. In Germany, hermeneutics was slower to become literary theory as such, for it has always been more than that: nurtured by its deep roots in German theology and philosophy, its status was that of philosophy of culture and cultural history (even in the case of works more consciously orientated toward literary analysis, such as Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung), a fact best established by reading HansGeorg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. It was only with the work of Peter Szondi on Hölderlin and literary hermeneutics, along with the explorations of Hans Robert Jauß, that German hermeneutics assumed the more distinct profile of a particular literary theory that had already come to be felt in the work of Emil Staiger in the earlier postwar decades. The emergence of literary theory was conditioned by the disintegration and modification of monolithic philosophical approaches on the eve of and immediately after World War I. Though hermeneutics did not yet develop into a literary theory during the 1920s and 1930s, other philosophical paradigms were transformed to generate theoretical approaches specific to literature, especially Marxism and Husserlian phenomenology. The former was most seminally achieved by the Hungarian Lukács, the latter by the Pole Ingarden. The second venue we have to explore is exemplified by the collective — and for a number of years also joint — efforts of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Literary theory followed a different path in Russia and Czechoslovakia from that of Lukács and Ingarden, for it did not start with the modification of an overarching philosophical paradigm. Rather, it reflected a growing discontent with scholarly positivism, as well as — most crucially — a need to confront, make sense of, and give support to fresh and radical modes of creative writing, which were making themselves felt in the literature of the Futurists in Russia and of the Czech, largely surrealist, Avant-garde. The engine of change behind literary studies, then, was located in the immanent evolution of philosophy and the dissatisfaction with traditional methodologies of literary scholarship, and in the challenges stemming from the artistic practices of the Avant-garde that fed on the legacy of Romanticism, its most important precursor. Thinking about literature shifted because of changes in literature itself and alterations in European philosophy, most readily identifiable in the proliferation and differentiation of meta-discourses, such as Marxism and phenomenology, into subsidiary discourses that ventured into literary theory, aesthetics, and other fields. The separation of these two sets of factors is, of course, only an abstraction that distills the plethora of historic circumstances and intersections into patterns. Let me underline a vital point before I comment on these two dissimilar scenarios for the birth of modern literary theory. The Russian Formalists, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and Ingarden worked in a cultural situation marked by a resurgence of creative freedom in the aftermath of radical historical events. In both Czechoslovakia and Poland, though certainly not in Horthy’s Hungary, the interwar years were a period of a secondary national revival after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both Russian Formalism and, even more straightforwardly, the Prague Linguistic Circle were inherently linked to the processes of constructing a new state with a new political identity. There was a certain neo-Romantic pride in belonging to the vanguard of these novel trends in the humanities, thus participating, however indirectly, in the transformation of the inherited social and cultural order. Jakobson’s and Brik’s close association with Mayakovsky, as well as the gravitation of a considerable number of the

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most distinguished Formalists to the Left Front of Art and its journals Lef and Novyi Lef, furnish evidence for this. Furthermore, both the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle decided to address in some of their scholarship political figures of the highest profile. The Russian Formalists published in 1924 a number of interconnected articles devoted to Lenin’s style and language. Although this action may appear as merely pragmatic, if not ironical or cynical (Any 90), the Formalists’ engagement with Constructivism, the literature of the fact, and other developments in Left art was much more than a perfunctory demonstration of loyalty or a ploy designed to gain tactical advantages. Similarly, the Prague Linguistic Circle decided in 1930 to honor the eightieth birthday of Czechoslovakia’s President (and philosopher) Thomas Masaryk with a volume entitled Masaryk a rˇecˇ (Masaryk and Language), featuring contributions by Jan Mukarˇovský and Roman Jakobson. Thus both Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle were significant players on the cultural scene and eager participants in the construction of the new societies taking shape after the October Revolution and in the wake of World War I. In hindsight, their attitude to political power, even in the case of the Formalists, whose attempts to find a contributory modus vivendi with the regime were eventually frustrated, ought to be re-evaluated in the light of what was undoubtedly an active engagement with the cultural agendas of the two newly established states. Yet the shaping force of the environment in which both Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle originated and unfolded should not be overstated. For these two formations would have been unimaginable without the intersection between a national enthusiasm and a cultural cosmopolitanism that transcended local encapsulation and monoglossia. For a number of years the activities of the Russian Formalists were taking place in a climate of enhanced mobility and an exchange of ideas between the metropolitan and the émigré Russian culture. The most gifted ambassadors among the Formalists were Shklovsky, during the time he spent in Berlin, and Jakobson, while in Czechoslovakia. In equal measure, the very foundations of Formalism were laid by scholars, many of them Jewish, who were steeped in more than one cultural tradition, thus feeling at ease with the ethnic and cultural diversity of imperial St Petersburg and Moscow: the Polish linguist of French descent Baudouin de Courtenay, Boris Eikhenbaum, Osip Brik, and, most notably, Roman Jakobson, to name but a few. Jakobson is a particularly important example: his subsequent emigration to Prague, his co-operation with Peter Bogatyrev and the Vienna based émigré scholar Nikolai Trubetskoi, his connections with Jurij Tynianov, who stayed in Russia but was involved in the work of his Prague colleagues, were all crucial in making the Prague Linguistic Circle a truly international body of scholars. Both Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle became possible through intellectual exchange that benefited from the crossing of national boundaries, more often than not under the duress of exile. Furthermore, the Prague Linguistic Circle worked in a veritable heteroglossia, which stimulated the freedom of expression and rendered narrow nationalistic concerns anachronistic. Here is a telling piece of testimony contained in the memoirs of a contemporary: “The language of the meetings was another characteristic of the Circle. Seldom was a Czech without an accent heard. Even those who hardly knew how to speak any other language but their native Czech acquired a kind of queer pronunciation after some time. The guests from abroad added to this linguistic confusion. There would be, for example, a guest speaker from Denmark. He had to speak in French or German, or in a Slavic language, and this


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he did with an accent, of course” (Soucˇková 2). We should also remember that Jakobson, Trubetskoi and Bogatyrev were writing in at least two languages, as were Lukács and Ingarden, who availed themselves of German alongside their native tongues, Hungarian and Polish. Lukács himself spent more than two decades in emigration in Vienna, Berlin, and Moscow. The lives of Lukács, Jakobson, Trubetskoi, Bogatyrev, Shklovsky, and also of Wellek, urge us to consider the enormous importance of exile and emigration for the birth of modern literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe. Exile and emigration were the extreme embodiment of heterotopia and polyglossia, triggered by drastic historical changes that brought about the traumas of dislocation, but also, as part of this, the productive insecurity of having to face and make use of more than one language and culture. This pattern became productive once again in the post-war decades, when the center of theoretical thought gradually shifted towards France and the French speaking countries: the Romanian-Jewish Lucien Goldmann, the Lithuanian-born Algirdas Greimas, and — on the crest of another wave of emigration — the Bulgarian-born Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva significantly enriched Marxist literary theory, semiotics, narratology, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Yet exile and emigration in the 1920s and the 1930s differed in their cultural status from the experience after World War II. While Greimas, Todorov, and Kristeva have all received their doctorates from French universities, the prominent figures of the generation active in the 1920s and the 1930s were educated and had matured mainly in their countries and cultures of origin. While Greimas, Todorov, and Kristeva, to a lesser extent also Goldmann, became culturally quite well assimilated, Lukács, Jakobson, Bogatyrev, and Trubetskoi never adjusted to their host culture in the most productive stages of their careers. More exiles than established émigrés, they were all immersed in a genuinely heterocultural environment and, more importantly, they all made a point of preserving a truly bilingual intellectual existence. It is precisely the uniqueness of the language situation that brings us closer to the dialectics of the emergence of modern literary theory between the two World Wars in the lands of EastCentral Europe. Exile is undoubtedly of overwhelming importance, but its impact, often inextricably bound to the personal aspects of one’s life and career, would fail to produce an explanation that goes beyond these personal circumstances to address the irreducible variety of historical experience. Being the most dramatic — and most readily recognizable — outward manifestation of deeper structural reasons, the argument of exile would leave out of the picture outstanding theorists such as Ingarden, Mukarˇovský, and Vodicˇka. An explanation that highlights the interpenetration and overlap of languages and cultures appears to furnish a more inclusive account, one that goes a long way towards explaining the conditions which shaped the work of both the exiles and those who stayed behind in the newly formed independent states that emerged on the political map of Europe in the wake of World War I. Although these countries gained independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in Poland’s case, also from Germany and Russia), national pride and zealous labor for the new states did not mean a break away from the German cultural orbit. In Prague, a German University continued its activities; intellectuals educated in Germany remained leading authorities in various spheres of Hungarian and Polish social life. German periodicals and bilingual editions were freely printed and circulated. The Hungarian German language newspaper Pester Lloyd, in which the young Lukács published several texts, appeared in Budapest for eight decades, from

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the 1850s until World War II. Gaining firmer ground and stability, as well as enjoying support from the young independent states, the Czech and Polish intelligentsia was now eyeing German cultural presence with less anxiety. In Czechoslovakia the Prague Linguistic Circle distanced itself in no uncertain terms from the parochialism of anti-German purism; the Circle also recognized the existence of Slovak as a separate language even though the constitution spoke of ˇ urovicˇ 54). It was no a single “Czechoslovak” nation and a single “Czechoslovak” language (D accident that the new Czechoslovak departures in linguistics and literary theory should have originated in Prague rather than in Bratislava, whose scholarly community feared lest the Slovak language is overwhelmed by the Czech influence. More reassured of its own strength and possessing a more stable position in society, Czech academia was better placed to mediate between its own heritage and the new developments in European, including German, thought. Thus Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary (in Hungary’s case, admittedly, for very different political reasons) all followed attentively German — and in the case of the Prague Linguistic Circle also Russian — intellectual developments. While drawing on Western and Russian humanities, these countries were also enjoying the freedom of creative modification from their perspective of non-identity with either Western or Russian culture. In other words, after the First World War Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary shared the cultural identity of countries that, due to their German legacy, were more than mere nation states and less than empires. This unique intermediate status meant that they all found themselves neither too close (with the exception of Horthy’s Hungary) nor too far from German (and Russian) culture, and this seems to have presented propitious ground for the rise and cultivation of new directions of thought in them. The possibility to “estrange” the sanctified naturalness of one’s own literature by analyzing it in another language or by refracting it through the prism of another culture seems to me to have been a factor of paramount significance for the emergence of modern literary theory in the interwar period. This process was rather uneven, though. Under the authoritarian regimes in Hungary, and also in Poland under Piłsudski, this process was hampered by monological and chauvinistic trends (in Hungary, for example, there was a strong populist, anti-Romanian, anti-Slovak, and anti-Semitic current). Appropriating literature theoretically meant, after all, being able to transcend its (and one’s) national embeddedness by electing to position oneself as an outsider contemplating its abstract laws: and that was not always feasible in a non-democratic political environment. In an article entitled “About the Premises of the Prague Linguistic School” (1934), Roman Jakobson presented somewhat idealistically the strengths of Czech and Central European interwar intellectual life, while electing to disregard the harsh reality of cultural oppression, competition, and frequent conflict, in the region: “Czechoslovakia lies at the crossroads of various cultures and its distinctive cultural character throughout history […] has consisted in the creative merging of streams whose sources are at some distance from one another. The great charm of Czech art and social ideology during the most productive periods of its history stems from the masterful crossing of diverse, at times even contradictory, currents” (qtd. in Galan xii). Central Europe was emerging, in a process beset with difficulties and often countered by adverse political conditions, as neither a metropolitan area nor a province but rather a subcontinent with its own distinct if somewhat self-enclosed culture (the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle remained on the whole poorly known in Europe, except perhaps among


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Slavists, right until the 1960s). Its new quality of intellectual life was nevertheless of enormous historical significance. It meant that the impulses of the dominant Western philosophical traditions could now be bent and transformed without facile irreverence, but also without timidity and imitative self-negation. This is very much true of both Lukács’s and Ingarden’s work. They both set out to make a contribution to Continental philosophy only to end up practicing literary theory and aesthetics. In fact, in both cases, and even more so in Lukács’s, literary theory never entirely managed to emancipate itself from aesthetics, a trend we can also observe in Mukarˇovský’s work from the mid-1930s onwards. Ingarden characteristically proclaimed in the preface to the first edition of The Literary Work of Art: “although the main subject of my investigations is the literary work, or the literary work of art, the ultimate motives for my work on this subject are of a general philosophical nature, and they far transcend this particular subject” (lxxii). Phenomenology was indeed the guiding star of Ingarden’s investigations, yet in a critical appropriation and alteration of Husserl’s premises. When discussing the gradual disintegration of philosophical meta-discourses such as phenomenology and Marxism, we need to capture their traces in the subsequently emancipated theoretical narratives of aesthetics and/or literary theory. The weight of phenomenology varies from environment to environment. Its impact was less systematic and powerful in Russian Formalism and in the Prague Linguistic Circle (Sus, “On the Genetic” 30). In the former, Gustav Shpet was the main link to German phenomenology; in the latter, Jakobson was a clear exception, for his theory of rhythm and verse was underwritten by a phenomenological understanding of “poetical time” as Erwartungszeit, “time of expectation” (Jakobson, O cheshskom stikhe 19), a concept forged on the frontier of phenomenology and gestalt psychology. Phenomenology was also of tremendous importance for Ingarden, as were neo-Kantianism, philosophy-of-life, and Marxism for Lukács. The early Lukács, much like the mature Ingarden, did not think of himself as a literary theorist, for the intellectual traditions he inherited and adopted through his Hungarian-JewishGerman milieu in the first two decades of the twentieth century were those of philosophy of culture and aesthetics. Lukács’s later attention to literary theory in the 1930s, in particular to the theory of genre and the novel — and indeed his self-definition at the time as a literary theorist — were the result of frustrated hopes to accommodate the specificity of art in a larger philosophical framework. Indeed, Lukács’s early career, his attempts to fit in the Heidelberg environment of systematic, predominantly neo-Kantian, philosophy of culture and art, ended up in embittered disillusionment with the metropolitan German tradition of scholarship. He abandoned his attempts at a systematic philosophy of art (to which he would return, from a Marxist point of view, only in the 1960s) in favor of an interest in the social aspects of literature (Tihanov 39–43). Both Lukács and Ingarden, in their own ways, sought to break free from the predicament of neo-Kantian philosophy of art. Ingarden did so by embracing a modified Husserlian approach, which allowed him to include in his account of the literary work of art the layer of “represented objects,” to which he, unlike neo-Kantian aesthetics, gave due prominence. Lukács followed a different path. He drew on his earlier work on genre, in particular on his a modern dráma Fejlo˝désének története (History of the Development of Modern Drama; 1911), which was better written and more successful in Budapest than the essays of Die Seele und die Formen (Nyíri 250). In 1910 Lukács also wrote an article with the telling title “Zur Theorie der

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Literaturgeschichte,” in which he posed, albeit in a fairly compromised fashion, the question of the social nature of form. But the fact remains that Lukács’s significant contribution to literary theory — his theories of realism and the novel in the 1930s — followed his engagement, in a rather unorthodox fashion, with Marxism as a philosophical metadiscourse that needed further “concretization.” His History and Class Consciousness (1923) laid the foundation for an understanding of Marxism that was compatible with more holistic and culture-based approaches, which challenged crude materialism. It is this “revisionist” strain in Lukács’s Marxism that enabled him to claim that the new (socialist and proletarian) novel should try to emulate the classical examples of the nineteenth century bourgeois novel. Lukács’s work on Realism and the novel, written mostly during his emigration in Moscow, placed him directly in an internationally constituted field of literary theory, in which he had not belonged before so fully. This field was shaped by the Prague Linguistic Circle’s deliberations on Realism, most notably Jakobson’s article of 1921 “O realismu v umeˇní” (On Realism in Art), by the lingering presence of a fatigued Russian Formalism in the 1930s (above all Shklovsky, who polemicized openly and covertly with Lukács), and by Mikhail Bakhtin’s powerful responses to Lukács’s theory, which remained unpublished at the time. Lukács’s theory of the novel was, in John Neubauer’s apt phrasing, an “inscription of homelessness” (Neubauer 531), cultural, social, and — one could add — methodological. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Moscow, Stalinist orthodoxy made the promotion of unsanctioned disciplines such as Marxist aesthetics, let alone literary theory, as autonomous branches of scholarship extremely difficult. With Lukács’s articles on Realism and the historical novel, Left literary theory was finally gaining firmer ground and respectable standing: it joined an established field of inquiry that was pursued on a wider international scene beyond the level of sheer political expedience. Characteristically, Lukács’s concept of Realism was much more than just a weapon in the political struggles of the Left in the 1930s. It was a renewed response to Hegel’s notion of totality, which had featured prominently in History and Class Consciousness. It was in equal measure a belated reply to the (neo-)Kantian juxtaposition of essence and appearance and to the feeble attempts of Lebensphilosophie to reconcile form and life, a problem central to Lukács’s theorizing from early on. Lukács’s passion for Realism is to be understood as the passion for a literary form that cancels itself — in a paradoxically creative fashion, according to Engels — to give way to the vigor and richness of life. Realism provides the ideal situation in which the writer neither imitates reality (thus avoiding the bogus dilemma “Narrate or Describe,” as the title of one of Lukács’s key essays has it), nor departs from it. Realistic works of literature remain loyal to the versatility of life without abdicating their essence as works of art. Thus Realism is about the reconciliation of culture and life through literary forms, which do not claim any significance of their own, but seem instead to surrender voluntarily their specificity as forms in the transparency of reflection. Let us turn now to the other premise of this essay, namely that the spectacular emergence of modern literary theory in East-Central Europe responded to radical changes in literature that necessitated new theoretical approaches. The history of the interaction between literary theory and literature among the Russian Formalists and in the Prague Linguistic Circle is well known by now (Hansen-Löve, Steiner, Toman, Winner, Illing), but we must concentrate on a resilient


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misapprehension. It has become customary among students of this period to claim that both Russian Formalism and the Prague Circle were born out of Avant-garde experiments with form in literature and the visual arts that demanded scholarly rationalization. It has not been sufficiently acknowledged, however, that the programs and ideas of the two formations were reaching back to preoccupations emblematic of the Romantic literary and critical tradition. In Russia, the keen interest of the Symbolists in metrics and the theory of verse was a mediating link. As Jakobson reminisced in his conversations with Pomorska, Andrei Bely’s “idea of verse as the immediate object of analysis made an indelible mark on me” (Jakobson and Pomorska 5). More importantly, Jakobson saw a perhaps much more traditional Russian scholar, and through him the legacy of Romanticism, as an inspiration for the essential ideas and theoretical principles of the Formalists: “The tradition of tying the study of language closely to that of literature was established at the University of Moscow in the eighteenth century, and was particularly cultivated by one of the greatest Slavicists of the last century, Fedor Ivanovich Buslaev, who had inherited from Romanticism the idea of the existence of an intimate link between linguistics and the study of literature [emphasis G. T.] in both its aspects, written and oral” (Jakobson and Pomorska 10). In this light we may begin to understand why Jakobson and Mukarˇovský criticized Saussure, especially his exclusive opposition between synchrony and diachrony. By making room for the historical modifications that language and literature undergo in the process of their dissemination and appropriation, the Prague Linguistic Circle attempted to explain language from the dialectical perspectives of identity and change, static and dynamic, product and function. This way it took up and fleshed out Wilhelm von Humboldt’s idea of language as always both ergon and energeia. Yet this theoretical baggage could be “borrowed” from Romanticism and rendered relevant only by means of a parallel engagement with Romantic poetry and prose. A significant number of the key Formalists’ studies dealt with Pushkin and Lermontov, and the Prague Linguistic Circle rediscovered the Romantics Karel Hynek Mácha and Karel Erben (Jakobson and Pomorska 143), the former being the object of important studies by both Mukarˇovský and Jakobson. Mukarˇovský also devoted a major treatise in 1934 to the poem “Vznešenost prˇírody” (The Sublimity of Nature) by the Czech Romantic poet Milota Zdirad Polák (see “Polákova”), who is not regarded so highly as a poet today (Galan 45). This persistent interest in Romanticism, both amongst the Russian and the Czechoslovak theorists, may have been grounded in the intrinsic links between Romanticism and the Avant-garde, whose experiments the Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle held in high esteem. It also serves as a reminder of the connection, often mediated and thus overlooked, between modern literary theory and the regime and agenda of Romantic art and philosophy of culture. This connection can clearly be observed in the genesis of the modern German discourse on literature, which was shaped in no small measure through impulses originating in the creative writing of authors such as Novalis and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The two streams — the home tradition and that of German (and English) Romanticism — converged in a seminal way in Russia, where the ground for the Formalist idea of autonomous literary art was prepared not without the important mediation of Viktor Zhirmunskyi. His expertise on German Romanticism and, above all, his early work on the composition of lyric poems (Kompozitsiia 1921) helped set the scene of Formalist enquiry in the

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years before his interest in the comparative history of Romanticism (Byron and Pushkin) began to be perceived as insufficiently radical by his former fellow-Formalists. Furthermore, the intimate link between the inception of modern literary theory in EastCentral Europe and Romantic literature and criticism is once more suggestive of the dialectic between national and cosmopolitan tendencies that we have already referred to in this essay from a somewhat different angle. In all these countries, Romanticism (and the various strains of postRomanticism) was the chief provider of literary texts for the national canons. Promoting the virtues of national independence and uniqueness while also advocating interest in perennial human passions, independent of historical settings and landscape, Romanticism, like no other literary movement, was able to institute a better diet of local pride, national enthusiasm, and universal human values. The Romantic text was thus cognate with the foundational paradox inherent in some of the best examples of early literary theory. Romanticism’s key place in the analytical repertoire of the Prague Linguistic Circle indicated that the very enterprise of literary theory at this early stage rested on a dual premise: that literature ought to be considered beyond its national constraints, as literature per se, but should also validate its quality (its worthiness for theorizing and distilling its “universal laws”) by holding up well established texts, texts that were canonized, more often than not, in the act of constructing new nation states. The birth of modern literary theory thus ensued from the interplay of a number of historical, epistemological, and intra-literary factors in the unique cultural environment of EastCentral Europe during the interwar period. Today we seem to be moving past literary theory, leaving it behind as the anxiety of a swiftly vanishing world of private concentration on, and privileged treatment of, the literary text. A different culture of communication, the enhanced commodification of the private sphere, of leisure and entertainment, as well as the struggles for wider social representation through the establishment of parallel canons, mean that the time of literary theory as an autonomous field of inquiry may have gone for good. Without the dramatic and rich intellectual experiences of East-Central Europe in the first third of the twentieth century, this time would have never arrived.

The Ironic Moralism of Polish poetry in the twentieth century Arent van Nieukerken The importance that Polish poetry acquired in the last two decades of the twentieth century can hardly be exaggerated. Its international impact is mainly due to three great poets, representatives of a school of poetry that Stanisław Baranćzak, a poet of the next generation, called Ironic Moralism: Czesław Miłosz (Nobel Prize 1980), Wisława Szymborska (Nobel Prize 1996), and Zbigniew Herbert. These two decades marked the accelerating disintegration of communist rule

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and a chaotic transition to democracy. Literature played an important part in this process by its very refusal to become overtly committed. Politics, culture, and nationality, each of which has attained a measure of autonomy in the West, have coexisted in the traditional Central- and Eastern European societies, converging in the essentially romantic role of the national bard (wieszcz in Poland). After receiving the Nobel Prize, Miłosz involuntarily became the “unacknowledged legislator of his nation,” a status against which it proved difficult to rebel. Still, his paradoxical blend of pathos, irony, religious faith, and metaphysical doubt belies this role. Miłosz, the heir of a Modernism that emphasized impersonality and autonomy in literature, acquired a status comparable to the role of the great romantic poets of the nineteenth century. It is more than a coincidence that the romantic poets spent a large part of their lives as émigrés in France, while Miłosz emigrated from Stalinist Poland in 1951 to France and later to the USA. Miłosz was, of course, conscious of this similarity and went on to exploit its poetic potential. He set himself the task of integrating the looser structures of the Eliot-brand of Modernism with the traditional narrative and lyrical devices that allowed his fellow Lithuanian and greatest Polish Romantic, Adam Mickiewicz, to create in his best poetry, including the epic Pan Tadeusz (1834; Dzieła 4), an objective correlative for the “music of time.” Miłosz has felt himself very much the heir of the Polish national poet, and this feeling of congeniality has not been related to the similar social status of both poets (against which Miłosz rebelled). It concerns above all Miłosz’s way of perceiving and representing the world. Mickiewicz has been his poetic inspiration. The central role of irony in Miłosz’s poetry is much indebted to another major nineteenthcentury poet, Cyprian Kamil Norwid. It is not merely a question of seeing reality in an essentially ironic way. Existence, the self, as well as the experience of flux in history, present themselves to him as “another,” as somebody else, and something different. Ironic in this sense is a famous cycle of short and seemingly artless poems that Miłosz wrote during the darkest days of Poland’s German occupation: “S´wiat poema naiwne” (The World [A Naive Poem]; Selected 32–71, 438–46). This cycle shows the universe from the point of view of a child who has an unshakeable confidence in his father and the essential goodness of existence. This sophisticated “naive poem,” which alludes to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and certain tenets of Thomist philosophy, can be adequately interpreted only with reference to the conditions under which it was written. Miłosz’s second major work of the World War II years is the cycle “Głosy biednych ludzi” (The Voices of Poor People; Selected 72–97), which presents unbearable individual suffering by means of an impersonal poetic voice. Yet, the raison d’être of Miłosz’s poetic project consists in showing the wholeness of existence. His effort to create an ampler form destined him to try his hand at larger genres that would embody many elements of life and tradition. Hence his attempt in “Traktat moralny” (A Treatise on Morals; Wiersze 2: 85–100) to renew didactic poetry in the years immediately after World War II. However, by taking up an eighteenth-century genre and under the influence of W. H. Auden, he created an ironic distance again. His next major work, “Traktat poetycki” (A Treatise on Poetry; Wiersze 2: 165–251) succeeded in merging didacticism with the personal voice of the author as a witness of history. It did so by recapitulating the course of twentiethcentury poetry, ruminating on the fate of the individual facing an unresponsive and impassible nature, and by the voice’s identification with its other in ecstatic union. Like Kafavy, Miłosz

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wrote much lyrical poetry under the masks of personae. He tuned his voice to various styles of the past but avoided the dangers of poetical pastiche. These examples of lyrical poetry are to be understood in the context of a developing, potentially infinite, whole, as an existential transformation of Mallarmé’s Livre. Starting with the long poem “Gdzie wschodzi słonće i ke˛dy zapada” (Where the Sun Rises and Where it Sets; Wiersze 3: 93–179), Milosz’s later poetry became fragmentary. Yet his diverse but premeditated reminiscences, confessions, visual descriptions, and stylizations of a fragmentary autobiography amount to a dynamic whole. He presents himself as a keen witness and actor of important events, assessing and reassessing his own involvement in history and attempting to uncover the most intimate and often unconscious causes of his behavior. Finally, Miłosz’s poetry of old age reflects on the modes and mechanics of the experience that it attempts to embody, transforming the author’s morbid selfconsciousness into a means of attaining poetic truth. Trying to sum up the creative achievement of the mature Miłosz, one is tempted to paraphrase Yeats’s famous lines that there is more art “in going naked.” Miłosz started his literary career in the thirties as a “catastrophist” poet with left-wing sympathies. His later poetic programs and ideological positions underwent many changes. Miłosz could become the main figure of twentieth-century Polish poetry precisely because of this capacity to come to terms with the ever-changing “music of time.” He was not only the first representative of Ironic Moralism, but also the poet to sum up the tendencies of the interwar period. Miłosz’ poetic oeuvre offers an excellent introduction to the major issues of Polish twentieth-century poetry and we may take the vantage point of his “Treatise on Poetry” to start our general historical overview, even if Milosz’s critical opinions are highly subjective. The “Treatise on Poetry” tends to belittle, for instance, the artistic significance of the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) at the beginning of the century and treats the life of these “poets in capes” (peleryna) as a sociological curiosity, without denying that there “lies our beginning.” But one must agree with his judgment that Polish neo-Romanticism was not particularly original when compared to French and Russian symbolism. Its lack of unity had been pointed out already by the most important critic of that age, Stanisław Brzozowski. Neo-Romantic poetry was decadent in the style of the forbidden pieces of Les Fleurs du Mal, melodious in the manner of Verlaine, and “impassible,” like the poetry of Leconte de Lisle and Hérédia. Sometimes it celebrated human creativity in reaction to the loss of transcendence, the death of God. At other moments it attempted to revive the religious faith of a bygone age, treating the rites of Catholicism as a source of creative inspiration. Even the messianistic pathos of the great Romantic predecessors became an aesthetic impulse. Kazimierz Przerwa Tetmajer and Tadeusz Micin´ski, the major poets of “Young Poland,” did not succeed in creating out of these incoherent tendencies an artistically viable style. They had an affinity with the finer shades of Symbolism and they still regarded words as representations of sensations in the soul. Conceptions of autonomous art were beyond their horizon. Yet, just because of their inclination to treat the soul as an absolute, they also failed to see the objectivity of society and history. The protagonists of neo-Romantic poetry were neither actors in, nor witnesses of history. The creative act remained a question of feeling sensations, of presenting representations, as if they were unquestionable properties of a self.


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Few poets of this generation attempted to take advantage of the explosive forces slumbering under the cover of stylistic extravaganza, a fact which still gives pejorative connotations to młodopolszczyzna (Young Polishness). Tetmajer’s poetry did not evolve and became quickly outdated. Jan Kasprowicz, son of an illiterate peasant, showed himself more sensitive to the trends of the age. First he tried to infuse naturalism into traditional poetical models, but the tone and form of his poetry changed radically at the beginning of the twentieth century. His famous Hymns — “Dies Irae” (220–43) and “S´wie˛ty Boz˙e, S´wie˛ty Mocny” (Holy God, Holy Strength; 244–58) — expressed a dualistic world view in visionary images and rhythm reminiscent of Catholic liturgical poetry, while the poems of his last creative period attempt folkloric stylization. Leopold Staff, a much younger poet of the second wave of Młoda Polska, wrote his first volume of poetry under the influence of Nietzsche’s concept that power was continuous self-creation. Later he became the main representative of a “Franciscan” poetry that linked the sensual with the religious. His verse became more transparent and his language more colloquial. Opposing the stylistic excesses of neo-Romanticism, Staff initiated a neoclassicist counter movement. He showed the ability of renewing his poetic sensibility time and again, and many younger poets, including Miłosz, were for a time his apprentices. He himself remained open to new tendencies, without becoming the apprentice of his apprentices. Even more important was Bolesław Les´mian, indubitably one of the greatest Polish poets, even if his influence remained very limited. Unlike Staff, Les´mian did not essentially change his style. His importance lay in his capacity of drawing extreme consequences from his conception of poetic language. Les´mian decidedly rejected the notions that literature was mimesis or an expression of sensations. In his opinion, language, rhythm, and the other elements of poetry possessed a materiality of their own. As poetic matter, they were the substance of autonomous poetic utterances. Thanks to rhythm, words create entirely new configurations, whose meanings go beyond the reality they seem to refer to. The magic of poetic language conjures up and names the most elusive aspects of being. Poetry is an infinite quest facing absence; it gives meaning to what must remain unknown. Creating a new poetic language, Les´mian made good use of many traditional devices and genres. His most revolutionary achievement was to rehabilitate the ballad by using its narrative structure as a means of meditating on the relationship between existence and poetic creation. Les´mian’s most famous ballad, “Dziewczyna” (The Maiden), tries to break through the wall of the finite world in order to free a sobbing girl on the other side (Les´mian 187–89). The crumbling wall reveals, however, that there is no such “living soul, no maiden.” Real existence has only a voice, to be understood as the voice, or rather the music, of poetry. If this holds true, outside and inside, world and poetry collapse. Even absence can be named, can acquire a paradoxical existence of its own: Les´mian’s poetry avoids all abstraction. In “Łøka” (The Meadow), another example of his rich poetic imagination, the meadow’s voice curiously precedes the voice of the self; the poet becomes involved in a dialogue with the “real presences” of the sensuous world (Les´mian 158–66). Les´mian’s influence was felt only in the thirties, when the poetry of “Young Poland” seemed a relic of times more distant than the Polish Renaissance. Poland’s regained independence in 1918 was regarded as a fresh start in literature as well. The widespread feeling was that Poland had at last become a normal European country, in which literature would perform its

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normal aesthetic function. The notion that poets as prophets and leaders upheld national identity during a loss of statehood, which had fueled the greatness and misery of Polish Romanticism, seemed finally without meaning. As Jan Lechon´ said in “Herostrates,” it became possible to perceive spring simply as a season of merriment without cryptic allusions to the future liberation of an enslaved nation (25). Poets could finally concentrate on their craft without worrying about national or social responsibilities. 1918 showed that Polish literary criticism was inclined to link revolutions in literary sensibility to major political or social upheavals. The poets of the periodical Skamander, who quickly became the favorite of the Polish intelligentsia, were certainly aware of this new beginning. They tried to make the most of it, writing in a colloquial language and in traditional, though occasionally irregular, meter about modern life, the hustle and bustle of the cities, the achievements of technical progress, sports, and the cult of youth. From the sober perspective of the outgoing twentieth century much of this poetry seems slightly overdone. Julian Tuwim’s “Socrates tanćzøcy” (Dancing Socrates; Wiersze 1: 351–53) and Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski’s “Wiosna i wino” (Spring and Wine; Wybor poezji 1: 104), their first major collections of poetry, aptly express the vitalism of the first post-war years. So do the Dyonisian dythirambs (1: 85–133) of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, otherwise an heir of the aestheticism in the belle époque. But this first exultation did not last long. In the second half of the twenties, the Skamandrites started to write in a more classical idiom, adapting, under the influence of Staff, as well as the poetry of Jan Kochanowski and other Renaissance models, to the exigencies of an altogether different epoch. Tuwim, for instance, published a collection entitled Rzecz Czarnoleska (Matter of Czarnolas; Wiersze 2: 57–147), referring to Kochanowski’s home. Everyday life continued to furnish themes, but the tone of Skamandrite poetry became more sober and the poets less eager to engage in formal experiments. The Skamandrites rebelled in 1918 against the Polish Romantic notion that poetry ought to preserve the continuity of nationhood, yet they remained fascinated by the creative achievement of the major Romantic poets. In 1917–18, Lechon´ reinterpreted the most important themes of Polish history in the poetic cycle Karmazynowy poemat (The Crimson Poem; 23–43). But the attempt to conjure up and finally harness the spirits of a troublesome past actually reaffirmed its poetic force. As the threat of war gradually increased in the thirties, the Skamandrites discovered their affinity with Polish Romanticism. The destiny of Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Norwid to uphold in emigration the culture of an enslaved nation seemed to prefigure their own future. After the outbreak of World War II and the downfall of the Polish state, the major Skamandrites were forced to emigrate. Their poetry of exile proved to be Romantic in inspiration. While Tuwim attempted to come to terms with Romantic sensibility in Kwiaty polskie (Polish Flowers) by way of certain formal innovations, Lechon´ and Wierzyn´ski developed a poetics of repetition by creating protagonists that follow in the footsteps of the heroes of Polish Romanticism, sharing their experience of despair and homelessness amidst alternating victories and defeats. They offered archetypal images, showing modern Polish history as an endless and hopeless struggle for survival. History repeated itself and seemed to complete a circle. Two of the Skamandrites, Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski, returned to Poland after the war but felt alienated in the Communist world, and their poetic development came to an end. Lechon´ and Wierzyn´ski chose to stay in exile. The former went on to write poetry that linked


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the great emigrants of the suppressed November 1830 Uprising to the post-war émigrés. He also wrote some very private poems of despair about homelessness and a mysterious metaphysical “defect” that prevents the self from adapting to society, which was probably related to the homosexual inclination that Lechon´ had to conceal. Wierzyn´ski developed a more modern poetic style using the vers libre. 1918 marked also the beginnings of the Polish Avant-garde. Expressionism and Futurism were not very important in Polish literature, but the Cracow Avant-garde, grouped around the periodical Zwrotnica, became very influential. Its main theoretician, Tadeusz Peiper, advocated a poetry that would cope with the social and cultural transformations of modern industrial society by counterbalancing through art its depersonalizing and socializing tendencies. Poetry was not to express emotions, was not even to be impersonal, just devoid of personality. The poet was to become a craftsman in a technology that produced aesthetic effects in a predictable manner. Peiper, an enthusiast of technical progress, wanted to transplant it to poetry. Poetic language was neither a description of the world nor a register of sensations; its task was to find “pseudonyms” for things or states of mind. Peiper lived in Spain during World War I when Gongora and Spanish Baroque poetry were rediscovered; he created a rhetorical system of strictly regulated metaphors, syntax, and versification. Julian Przybos´, the second major poet of the Polish Avant-garde, originally shared Peiper’s fascination with technical progress and urban life. Individual emotions were to be subjugated to the working class, engineers, and other collectives. The poets were to shape language, become engineers of words, just as workers were building a new society by shaping matter. The functionality of poetry was to be attained by an economy of means. Alternating rhythm (rather than regular meter) as well as a discrete use of rhyme and ellipsis were expected to organize everyday life so as to produce unique aesthetic effects. Essential for Przybos´ were also mixed metaphors, catachresis, and other alienating devices that underlined the artificiality of the poetic act. Though Przybos´ hardly changed his poetic technique during his long career, he came to recognize in the thirties that nature and the inner self were as worthy of poetry as the products of technical civilization. The Cracow Avant-garde stopped functioning as an organized movement in the thirties. But the younger poets who refused to follow the Skamander did not forget its lessons. They tried to combine the technical innovations of the Avant-garde with lyrical moods reminiscent of Symbolist and even Romantic poetry. It is hardly an accident that Surrealism emerged then. Józef Czechowicz, for instance, used mixed metaphors in the style of the Cracow Avant-garde and Symbolism to create poetic equivalents to the melancholy landscape and the dreamy towns and villages of the Polish countryside. The alter ego in this poetry suffers from nightmares that foretell the destruction of an idyllic world. The technical discipline of Peiper and Przybos´ served here a poetry of the unconscious and of a prophetic voice. The later Czechowicz became a Catastrophist poet and the patron of the Second AvantGarde. The Catastrophist literary movements heatedly debated the nature and function of poetry, but in retrospect their differences are dwarfed by essential similarities in poetic tone and mood in facing the approach of some irresistible and unknown disaster. From this point of view the Skamandrite Tuwim’s “Bal w operze” (The Ball at the Opera; 1946) and Wierzyn´ski’s “Gorzkie z˙niwo” (Bitter Harvest; 1: 112–19) have much in common with the poetry of Kwadryga (Four-

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in-Hand) and Z˙agary (Embers), which attempted to reconcile social commitment with the resources of Avant-garde poetic techniques. But the resulting poetry revealed real tensions between left-wing ideology, which put great hopes on a Marxist revolution, and a sense of imminent catastrophe. Almost all literary movements of the thirties were influenced by the painter, philosopher, and playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), author of the important novels Poz˙egnanie jesieni (A Farewell to Autumn) and Nienasycenie (Insatiability), which linked the decline and fall of Western civilization to the disintegration of personality. The two leading poets of the Warsaw-based Kwadryga were Władysław Sebyła, and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyn´ski. Sebyła’s longer poems, “Młyny. Sonata nieludzka” (Mills, An Inhuman Sonata; Poezje zebrane 97–110) and “Koncert egotyczny. Poemat refleksyjny” (An Egotistic Concert. A Reflective Poem; 119–32), curiously mix Les´mian’s melodiousness with a discursiveness reminiscent of Norwid. Gałczyn´ski cast his metaphysical anxieties and premonitions of disaster in the grotesque forms of “Bal u Salomona” (The Ball at Salomon’s; Dzieła 1: 236–61). This master of stylization who tried his hand at a great number of genres had even less stable political convictions: after being a right-wing nationalist he became a sycophant of the new rulers in Communist Poland. Still, he was one of the most important poets of the later thirties and forties. Z˙agary was centered in Wilno, the capital of ancient Lithuania. Its members, including the young Czesław Miłosz, were very much aware of the vicinity of the Soviet border. In spite of their left-wing sympathies they were inclined to identify Bolshevik Russia with the Asiatic and destructive forces of history that threatened to destroy the enlightened but somewhat decadent European civilization. But their fear was coupled with fascination; furthermore, they believed that the struggle between these opposing historical forces exemplified primal aspects of life that also sustained poetic creativity. Their poetic reflection on the secrets of history and civilization acquired thus a broader metaphysical meaning. Most typical of Catastrophist historical speculations is Jerzy Zagórski’s long poem, Przyjsćie wroga (The Coming of the Enemy; 1934). The existential claims of this both historicizing and prophesizing current are most fully realized in Miłosz’s poem “Bramy arsenału” (The Gates of the Arsenal; Wiersze 1: 70–72), written in Paris in 1934. Catastrophist poetry culminated during World War II. The pre-war forebodings came true, poetry seemed indeed to predict the future but it had no power to avert the catastrophe that presented itself. Suffering acquired a moral sense, reminiscent of Romantic Messianism. It became the poet’s role to dignify the inevitable martyrdom and testify to an apparent order in face of violence. This task was taken up by the generation that had grown up during Polish independence. The poetry of its main exponent, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyn´ski, exploited many technical resources of Romantic and Avant-garde poetics in attempting to embody an experience on the brink of the abyss. But art had to be authenticated by life: Baczyn´ski participated in the Warsaw Uprising and was killed in action. When the German occupation came to an end in 1944/45 and the Soviet “liberators” imposed a Communist rule, Catastrophism’s Romantic tendency of inflating the personality of the author became completely obsolete. Life in the ruined country reverted to basics and a poetic style had to be developed that expressed this experience of bare-bones existence. Yet the confrontation with the hothouse climate of pre-war poetry also demanded a form that indicated


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an inner distance from the superseded self. Poetry had to become ironic. As mentioned, the former catastrophist Miłosz succeeded in creating this inner distance in the cycles “World, a Naive Poem” and “The Voices of Poor People.” His example was followed by the surviving members of Baczyn´ski’s generation. It has been customary to link the different post-war literary movements and generations to political upheavals. The final overcoming of Stalinism and the relaxing of censorship in 1956 seems especially important. But the major poets that made their debut that year did not share the same poetical ideals. The irony of Zbigniew Herbert had little in common with Turpism, the aesthetics of ugliness in the poetry of Stanisław Grochowiak that exploited objects and situations usually considered low, base, and unseemly. The latter remained an episode in the development of post-war Polish poetry, though its protest against the conflation of the Good and the Beautiful in earlier poetical styles had ethical roots. The conflation seemed to devalue the common objects, ordinary people, and “real” situations that became the subject of postwar-poetry. Herbert’s notion of irony was key to an Ironic Moralism that remained aware of the fact that the appeal to “real presences” and “objective” values was always related to the speaker’s own fragmentary and limited existence here and now. The mainstream of Polish poetry pursued three goals: to find a way to represent reality in spite of the deficiencies of language, to create contexts in which the choice between good and evil would be self-evident, and, finally, to rescue the “music of time” from oblivion. The last goal found its fullest realization in the poetry of Miłosz. The first two seem to be realizable in conjunction only, and presuppose a transparent poetic language. Ironic Moralism’s idiom was a far cry from the metaphoric excesses of the Avant-garde. Still, the status of language itself remained ambiguous, giving rise to aporetic situations. Tadeusz Róz˙ewicz attempted to reveal the bare materiality of common objects with unembellished poetry, but discovered that the ambiguity of poetry was rooted in the nature of language. Metaphors are constitutive in perceptions of the world and poets should use them consciously in order to decompose the surface. The referential functions of everyday discourse and poetic language do not differ that much. One must make the effort to do without the omnipresent metaphors: “a woman is not like a flower, but a woman; a flower is a flower; put that beautiful old comparison aside” (Róz˙ewicz 544). According to Róz˙ewicz, tautology was a poetic ideal, even though it had no function in everyday language and could not be achieved by imitating it. Tautology had to be the outcome of a premeditated effort to construct a poetic context. Hence Róz˙ewicz’s poems attempt to become self-sufficient as poetry by revealing two opposite fallacies: the artificiality of the traditional poetic language and the illusion of transparence in the language of Realism. Even in his most nihilistic mood, as in the poem “Et in Arcadia ego” (535–56), Róz˙ewicz remained a maker, a constructor of a world that was not just a naive reflection of reality. His alienated anti-hero was still a poetic hero. Róz˙ewicz wrote poetry even when he affirmed that there was nothing under “the magical cloak of Prospero” (575). Nevertheless, poetry was for him more than a trick of imagination. Language gave names to different aspects of the world, names that were meaningless in themselves, yet necessary if the world was to be experienced as real. Miron Białoszewski, the major representative of “linguistic” poetry, seems to have adopted a creative stance that resembles the poetics of Róz˙ewicz. The subject matter of his poetry was language. He deconstructed its conventional forms, distorted the structures that facilitate

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everyday communication and replaced them with an idiosyncratic private speech. Sentences and even words were broken up to show their opaque nakedness, drawing attention to the birth of meaning. The situations that he used to illustrate the discontinuous nature of language were often drawn from the periphery of society. Białoszewski, like the Turpists, was fascinated by ugliness and decay, and his poetic strategy was dictated by his effort of exploring them. Yet it seems also akin to linguistic deconstruction. Herbert’s Studium przedmiotu (Study of an Object; Poezje 228–303) shows that linguistic ambiguity in naming things was a main theme of his poetry. But Herbert, who tried to rescue the values of Western civilization from the wreck of twentieth-century barbarism, gave a new direction to the distrust in language. Following Eliot, Kavafy, and Miłosz, his mature poetry shows a preference for dramatic monologues that create distances between the speaker and the author’s point of view. His dramatic irony allows villains, for instance the advocates of totalitarianism, to speak their mind. Their discourse ultimately backfires, yet they make penetrating comments on society, culture, philosophy, religion, and other key topics, even when they justify morally questionable values. These agents of evil are sometimes intellectually superior to those defenders of the Western ethos who followed classical culture in equating the Good with Truth and Beauty. Herbert’s famous “Tren Fortynbrasa” (An Elegy of Fortinbras; Poezje 265–66) exemplifies this rhetorical strategy by ostensibly criticizing Hamlet’s scrupulousness and indecision from the perspective of a modern totalitarian technocrat. Fortinbras’s arguments seem convincing but lack good faith since the murdered Hamlet cannot respond to them. He makes clear that virtue does not follow intelligence (which Fortinbras certainly has) but rather decorum, or good breeding, which can only be acquired by adherence to tradition. But Fortinbras understands the craft of the ruler as the ability to plan, mold, and remold individuals and society. Herbert ransacked history and mythology in search of themes and motives that would embody the fundamental conflict between power and morality. In the famous poem “Apollo and Marsyas” (Poezje 241–43), the God tortures his wretched opponent, who lost a music contest against him. While he flails his victim alive, it occurs to him that the monotonous shriek of Marsyas could generate a “new, let’s say, concrete art.” Such an art, born of despair and suffering, cannot be discarded a priori, but Apollo, who generates it with torture, has no right to apply aesthetic categories to it. Only the oppressed and dispossessed can authenticate a poetry of suffering. Yet Herbert did not idealize the victims of totalitarianism. He knew too well that their resistance to despotism is weakened by their desire to lead a “normal” life, even at the cost of sacrificing moral principles. The anti-hero of Herbert’s “The Return of the Proconsul” is not a greedy Roman dignitary but simply an exile, longing for the capital of the empire that had to submit to a totalitarian ruler. In order to justify his desire to return he feverishly tries to convince himself that the tyrant is much better than his reputation: “the emperor likes Zivilcourage, that is to say within certain limits, certain reasonable limits.” But when the proconsul relates that the sycophants are omnipotent, and disgrace almost certainly means death by poisoning at the emperor’s court, the reader cannot but conclude that the court is to be avoided by people who want to preserve their moral integrity. The speaker himself seems unaware of this, but unconsciously he fears as well as desires to return to his homeland. Thrice he states that he decided to return to the emperor’s court, but his qualification, “I really hope


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that it will work out,” leaves the execution of his decision open. The poem’s real theme is the infinite human potential for self-delusion (Poezje 263–64). Herbert also felt the urgency of speaking out directly on the danger threatening Western culture. Realizing that the traditional voice of lyrical poetry (the sentimental “I”) could not sustain the weight of this struggle, he created an alter ego, Mister Cogito, who is in many respects the spokesman of the poet himself, for he shares all the virtues and weaknesses of the East-Central European intellectual. Herbert’s tautologies are not, as in the case of Róz˙ewicz, ontological but bear a moral import. The famous lines from his poem “A Knocker” became the credo of the intellectual opposition to the Communist régime during the seventies and eighties: “My imagination / is a piece of wood / my only instrument / a wooden stick […] I strike the board / it answers / the dry poem of a moralist/ yes — yes/ no — no” (100–101). His attachment to ethics proved unshakeable even when facing disaster. Herbert’s famous poem, “Raport z oble˛z˙onego miasta” (Report from the Besieged City; Poezje 521–23), published after general Jaruzelski’s coup d’état in 1981, proclaimed that though the siege of Western Culture’s City may be permanent, the will of resistance would survive as long as a single defender stayed alive. Herbert’s dramatic irony was to make palatable the unpopular moral lessons that he would have preferred to inculcate outright. Miłosz, who created his alter ego as a witness to the “music of time,” accomplished this task successfully. Existential irony, they say, remained alien to Herbert’s poetry. But are we not dealing with just this sort of irony when morality itself becomes suspect and the moralist is forced to hide behind personae? Wisława Szymborska created in her mature poetry a speaker who is even more elusive than the personae of Herbert’s dramatic monologues. This alter ego is neither the “I” of traditional lyrical poetry nor the “we” of a particular community, but an entity wavering between the singular and plural first person yet totally different from them. It can unmask lyrical egotism, and it successfully opposes the tendency of modern scientism of reducing particularity to the statistic law of the Great Number (the title of one of Szymborska’s best poetry volume). The speaker of this poetry could be defined as an “I” that transcends its isolation by ceaselessly engaging in discussions with others, who are as autonomous as the “I” and share its essential openness to the Other. Szymborska tries to show the inexhaustible variety of being. In “Woda” (Water) a single drop of rain that falls on the hand of the speaker is the result of infinitely many unique situations that involve others in their irreducible selfhood: A drop of water fell on my hand drawn from the Ganges and the Nile, from hoarfrost ascended to heaven off a seal’s whiskers, from jugs broken in the cities of Ys and Tyre. On my index finger the Caspian Sea isn’t landlocked, and the Pacific is the Rudawa’s meek tributary, the same stream that floated in a little cloud over Paris in the year seven hundred and sixty-four on the seventh of May at three a.m. there are not enough months to utter all your fleeting names, O water (49).

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These situations are written on the “Water of Bable” (50). Szymborska presents multifarious situations in wide contexts. Her poetry does not concentrate on isolated objects, but establishes the conditions under which language can embody their mode of being. In “Ludzie na mosćie” (People on a Bridge; 311–12), she deals with particular beings against a larger horizon. The poem is a poetic representation of, and a metaphysical meditation on, a drawing of a “rebel, a certain Hiroshige Utagawa” (311). The lack of perspective makes it impossible at first to discern any tangible details, but a closer scrutiny opens our eyes to the variety and interwovenness of being: water, the banks of the river, a bridge, people on the bridge. The human capacity to transcend individual perspectives, the feeling of sympathy and compassion, expresses itself in an inclination to identify with these other people and, generally, with other articulations of being. Thus, the speaker “hears the sound of the rain and feels the drops on their necks and shoulders,” sharing in their suffering and, at other times, experiencing their joy. This capacity of sympathy, of putting oneself in the place of the other is a miracle. It is so ordinary that it is no longer perceived as a miracle, but poetry should remain its continual witness. Róz˙ewicz, Białoszewski, Herbert, Szymborska, and, especially, Miłosz have dominated Polish poetry since the sixties to such an extent that they have left little room for developing alternatives to Ironic Moralism. But this moralism is no poetic movement with a concrete program, only a common denominator that allows a general characterization of these poets. All other Polish poetry had to respond to their views on the nature and function of poetic creation. Yet other poets could also claim the attention of the general public, for instance the poets who died in their prime: Andrzej Bursa, Halina Pos´wiatowska, and Rafał Wojaczek, and the major Polish representative of counter culture, Edward Stachura. These poets, who preferred an egotistic stance counter to the impersonality of Ironic Moralism, did not reach artistic maturity. Equally ambiguous is the attempt of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz to create a new classicism based on T. S. Eliot’s theories about the relationship between literature and civilization. Rymkiewicz’s avowedly metaphysical poetry attempts to reshape Baroque and Romantic models to embody the existential doubts of modern man. Of more import is the poetry of Urszula Kozioł, which broods, not unlike Szymborska’s, on the tension between the finiteness of individual existence and the infinity of being. The Cracow poetess Ewa Lipska took up another aspect of Ironic Moralism by unmasking the falsehood of social and political conventions but accepting that conventions are an inevitable consequence of historicity. The ambiguities of conventional existence and language lay at the heart of the Nowa Fala (New Wave), the major literary movement of the early seventies, which drew attention to the ways in which insidious forms of political propaganda degrade language. But the common poetic program soon fell apart, and the poets of the New Wave went their own way, trying to come to terms with the overbearing presence of Ironic Moralism. Stanisław Baranćzak, who immigrated in 1980 to the USA, translated English seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, and this left traces in his own style. His mature poetry attempts to discover the presence of God in everyday life. Some of his poems take the form of a dramatic dispute between God and man. The inequality of the partners seems to prevent real contact, but Baranćzak insists that the ironic speaker of modern poetry can “justify the ways of God to men” precisely because he is aware of the metaphysical gap that severs him from God’s transcendent being.


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Adam Zagajewski tries to describe, in a manner reminiscent of Miłosz, the variety and mutability of being, in preparation for the timeless moment when history’s manifold world reveals its true nature. His poetry is metaphysical because it praises the beauty and the abundance of the visible world in expectation of this final revelation. The sense of the world “here and now” depends on a gift. The act of giving takes place in the world, but reaches beyond it. The world becomes, for a fleeting moment, the receptacle of the transcendent. These moments of sense, usually called epiphanies, precede the final moment when the temporal world will be redeemed and time will vanish (apokatastasis). The idea echoes Neoplatonism, but Zagajewski’s “cessation” of time should not be confused with the return of the many into the One. The variety of the visible world is valuable in itself. Each particular being, every concrete situation, will be saved. The poetics of epiphany played an important role in the poetry of the late 1980s and the 90s. The attempt to represent epiphany forced the poets to extreme condensation, leading to a sudden popularity of short forms reminiscent of the haiku. Metaphysical in this way was the mature poetry of the third representative of the New Wave, Ryszard Krynicki, who strove for succinct expressions from the very start. The shorter forms were popularized also by Miłosz, who, always searching to enrich his repertoire, published in 1992 a collection of original and translated poetry entitled Haiku. Polish poetry has exploited the resources of irony, impersonality and metaphysics to its limits. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the latest generation of Polish poets, led by Marcin S´wietlicki, attempts a new beginning by reducing the multiplicity of personae in Ironic Moralism, and by setting itself the task of simply expressing states of being. Future will show whether this fresh start will produce poetry that is worthy of its illustrious predecessors.

Polish-Jewish literature: An outline Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Antony Polonsky Jews started contributing to Polish literature in the second part of the nineteenth century, although some critics point out that Adam Mickiewicz, the “national bard,” indirectly admits of having a “Jewish mother” (Maurer). Some Jews made their literary debut by writing poetry in Hebrew but soon abandoned it for the Polish language. Since this was the time of strong assimilationist tendencies, Jews who left what was perceived as the cultural ghetto aspired to become Polish writers. One of the characteristic features of the assimilation of Jews in Poland was that they absorbed values of the Polish nobility as they entered the ranks of the Polish intelligentsia. The main organ of the assimilationist camp was the weekly Izraelita (1866–1913). The editors and contributors of this weekly believed that antagonism towards the Jews would

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diminish if they adapted themselves to the rest of society. Under its long-serving first editor, Samuel Tzvi Peltyn, Izraelita identified itself with the Warsaw Positivists and the principles of the European Enlightenment, opening its pages both to Jewish integrationists and to Polish writers engaged in the Jewish cause, such as Eliza Orzeszkowa and Maria Konopnicka. The uniquely Polish phenomenon of Polish language daily newspapers for Jews reemerged at the end of World War I, strengthened by the appearance of the Jewish dailies Nowy Dziennik, Nasz Przeglød, and Chwila. The Polish Jewish press constituted a basis for the emergence of Polish Jewish literature. The first call for a literature written by Jews in Poland came from Adolf Jakub Cohn, a graduate of the Warsaw Rabbinical School, who appealed to Jewish writers in the introduction to his translation of the German-Jewish novel Zbawca (The Savior; 1862) to emulate the achievements in Germany and make Polish society better acquainted with the Jewish world. According to him, this would pave the way for a Polish Jewish understanding. In the period around the uprising of 1863, the main writers included Julian Klaczko, poet, writer, journalist, and historian, whom some consider the first outstanding Polish writer of Jewish origin; Wilhelm Feldman, a literary critic, novelist, and editor; and Aleksander Kraushar, a literary critic and historian, author of a pioneering study on Jacob Frank and his followers. This tendency continued after Poland regained independence in 1918, until World War II. Jews continued to make substantial contributions to Polish publishing, the press (the most influential literary weekly of the interwar period Wiadomosći Literackie was founded, edited and had contributors mainly from among assimilated Jews), as well as to the translation of foreign literature into Polish, especially through Wanda Kragen, Irena Tuwim, and other women. At that time, the most talented artists of Jewish descent rather avoided Jewish themes in their works, as they wanted to enter the literary mainstream. Thus a number of major Polish writers of the interwar years were Jews who either did not particularly care about their Jewishness or consciously avoided references to it. Among them were Bruno Schulz, noted for his Avant-garde writers prose, as well as poets, critics and translators like Julian Tuwim, Adam Waz˙yk, Antoni Słonimski, Józef Wittlin, Bolesław Les´mian, Antoni Lange, Aleksander Wat, Franciszka Arnsztajnowa, Marian Hemar, Tadeusz Peiper, Mieczysław Jastrun, and Bruno Jasien´ski. To various degrees they considered themselves to be Poles and definitely Polish writers, yet they were often attacked by both Polish and Jewish nationalists — by the former for polluting Polish culture and language with “Semitic sensuality,” and by the latter for betraying their tradition. Even if they occasionally touched upon Jewish topics, they tended to see them from a liberal or universalist point of view, which led them to echo some Polish criticisms of Jewish society. According to Aleksander Hertz, author of a pioneering study on the role of Jews, Polish culture would have been more fortunate had authors of Jewish origin brought more specifically Jewish values with them, had they truly attempted to “Jewify” it, as the nationalists accused them (Hertz 230). And yet, for personal as well as artistic reasons, they rather deliberately chose not to speak of their roots. As Artur Sandauer notes, total assimilation was not really possible in Poland even for those who converted to Catholicism, since the burden of Jewishness was so heavy that one could not be indifferent towards it. One could either deny or emphasize it. The first way led, according to Sandauer, to a lack of authenticity, the other, most obviously in Tuwim’s case, to self-hatred and self-demonization (O sytuacji 97).

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In the interwar period a number of writers appeared — most of them not of the highest talent — who considered themselves Polish Jewish authors, meaning that they wrote in Polish about predominantly Jewish topics. Roman Brandstaetter, one of their main representatives, made clear that: We express our own Jewish longings in the Polish language, we set the pain of a Jewish heart to the sound of Kochanowski’s words for the first time on Polish lands, we associate the words of Mickiewicz with the holy words of the Bible […] The soul of the Polish Jew speaks through us for the first time. (qtd. in Prokop-Janiec, “Sabbath Motif” 417)

It should be remembered that Jewish culture in Poland was at that time trilingual (Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish) and the choice often posed an ideological dilemma (Shmeruk 285–86). The Polish Jewish authors were most concerned with the problem of having both Poland and Eretz Israel as motherlands, Zionist ideology, attitudes towards the Jewish tradition, shtetl life, and transformations of the Jewish family under the influence of acculturation and secularization. This type of writing developed above all in Cracow, Warsaw, and Lviv. Next to Brandstaetter, the main representatives included Jakub Appenszlak, Salomon Dykman, Anda Eker, Stefan Pomer, Władysław Szlengel, and Maurycy Szymel, all of whom contributed to the Polish Jewish press that flourished in the interwar period: the already-mentioned Chwila, Nowy Dziennik, and Nasz Przeglød, as well as Opinia. Some well-known Polish critics greeted this group as a new phenomenon in Polish literature, but the readers were mainly linguistically assimilated Jews, and the authors tried to address a broad Polish readership. The gap between Jews writing in Polish and Yiddish was enormous; so was the gap between their respective readerships. Polish Gentile readers were not familiar with the Polish Jewish writers who published in the Polish Jewish press, and even less with their works in Yiddish or Hebrew, whereas assimilated writers and most of their readers knew nothing about the Jewish Writers’ and Journalists’ Club in Warsaw’s Tłomackie Street where Yiddish literati would gather. Those familiar with them would not visit cafés, which were centers of Polish literary life in the interwar period. No wonder that Isaac Bashevis Singer discovered Bruno Schulz only in 1963, when reviewing for the New York Yiddish daily Forverts an English edition of his prose He criticized Schulz after the discovery: had he written in Yiddish he would have been closer to his roots and become a greater writer. Bashevis was even more skeptical about Słonimski, Tuwim and Wittlin, admitting that they were talented but not special in any way. An exploration of the vast possibilities of Yiddish would have benefited both the language and the writers (Adamczyk-Garbowska, Polska 41–42). We will never know what could have emerged from the rich cultural mix of Jewish Poland. Had World War II not taken place, Polish Jewish literature could have developed like American Jewish literature (Błon´ski 63). In the twenties and thirties few Jewish-American writers touched upon Jewish topics; it was only later, mainly after World War II, that major figures appeared. In Poland, linguistic Polonization would have probably continued at a rapid pace, and Yiddish culture and schools in Yiddish would have given way to Jewish schools in the Polish language. Polish Jewish literature would most likely have chosen topics similar to those in Jewish-American fiction, including problems of identity, assimilation, anti-Semitism,

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and self-hatred. The Holocaust prevented such an evolution and gave a different turn to the writings of Polish Jews. By what criteria should a writer be called Polish Jewish? Sandauer regards literary selfdefinition as the determining factor; for him, Polish Jewish writers raise the question of their origin in their work (O sytuacji 5–7). Yet this criterion can find different expressions: it can be stated explicitly or by implication, it can appear from the very beginning or only at a certain stage of the writer’s career, be suppressed permanently or only at times and for various reasons. Sandauer coined the term allosemitism to define attitudes to Jewish separateness in a negative (anti-Semitic) or positive (philo-Semitic) sense. Eugenia Prokop-Janiec established two main criteria for Polish Jewish interwar literature: (1) the thematic criterion specifies that the texts written in the Polish language ought to concern Jewish subjects; and (2) the biographical criterion of national and cultural self-identification requires that the authors define themselves as Jews and display their ties with Jewish culture (Prokop-Janiec, Mie˛dzywojenna 19). This convincing definition can also be applied to later periods. Kazimierz Brandys, who touched upon Jewish topics only sporadically, would accordingly be called a Polish rather than a Polish Jewish writer, while Julian Stryjkowski and Henryk Grynberg would undoubtedly have a Polish Jewish profile. Of the few Polish Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust some continued to live in Poland (Brandstaetter converted to Catholicism as a result of the Holocaust and became a predominantly Christian writer), while others emigrated to Israel and other countries. In general, the Polish Jewish writers who survived the war as adults either decided to devote part of their work to Jewish topics, or they became writers in response to the Holocaust. The best example of the first group is Adolf Rudnicki, who devoted his postwar writings almost exclusively to “the epoch of crematoria” and frequently expressed his regret that he had not paid enough attention to Jewish themes before the war. The second group is exemplified by Julian Stryjkowski, whom many critics consider the most important Polish Jewish writer. Some authors became more aware of (or attached to) their Jewishness during the war but continued to work on their earlier topics (e.g., Julian Tuwim wrote in 1944 the moving manifesto We, Polish Jews), others like Mieczysław Jastrun and Kazimierz Brandys became more silent about their origin. Immediately following the war Jewish survivors in Poland developed a rich literature, mostly in the memoir form. After 1949, however, the oppressive censorship of the Stalinist regime imposed a general silence, and the publication of Jewish topics had to wait for the so-called October thaw of 1956. Most of what appeared then had been written earlier, waiting in the authors’ or publishers’ desk. In the late sixties a new generation came of age, but their works were usually published only in the late eighties, abroad, or in underground publications. In one of the most shocking cases of censorship, an anthology of Yiddish poetry prepared in 1967 could be published only in 1983. It seems to border on the miraculous that parts of Hanna Krall’s interview with Marek Edelman, a leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, was allowed to appear in the monthly Odra in 1975. Two years later the complete text appeared under the title Zdøz˙yc´ przed Panem Bogiem, published in English first as Shielding the Flames and then as To Outwit God. This was the achievement of Zbigniew Kubikowski, the editor-in-chief of Odra, who waged a long war with the censors to publish the book.


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Stryjkowski attracted much critical attention when his masterpiece Głosy w ciemnosći (Voices in the Darkness), written in 1943–46, was published in 1956. The novel treats inner conflicts within the Jewish community, struggles that were gaining momentum at the time the novel takes place, although those who tend to read all Jewish literature from a post-Holocaust perspective will find in it the voices of the decimated people. In this respect the book resembles Bashevis Singer’s novella Satan in Goray, which is often read as a parable of the situation of the Jewish community in the interwar period. Singer, to whom Stryjkowski is often compared, mostly portrays Jewish life in the Russian partition, while Stryjkowski focuses on Galicia, the former Austrian partition, but his scope is much wider because he also documents the vicissitudes of Jewish life from biblical times, through the Inquisition, up to the Jewish Diaspora in North America. The two writers speak in different voices but both want to record all the details of Jewish existence in Poland. Although both of them avoid speaking about the Holocaust directly, perceptive readers always sense its presence (Adamczyk-Garbowska, “Julian Stryjkowski”). Both may avoid the Holocaust because they personally did not live through it in Poland. Yet Stryjkowski’s writing recalls the Shoah: (1) by referring to his earlier tragedies like Przybysz z Narbony (A Visitor from Narbonne; 1978), which he dedicated to the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto; (2) by documenting the presence of Jews in Poland in his Galician tetralogy, which consists, in addition to the aforementioned Głosy w ciemnosći, of Austeria (The Inn), Sen Azrila (Azril’s Dream), and Echo (Echo); and (3) in memories of the survivors. All these modes are encapsulated in his oft-quoted remark in the introduction of Juda Makabi on the origin of his tetralogy: “And I went back to my childhood years, to the days that perished under the slime of forgetfulness. With a tremendous effort on the part of my memory I raised the Atlantis that seemed to have been lost and drowned for ever” (Polonsky, Contemporary 55). Stanisław Wygodzki is best remembered for his poetry, a series of lamentations devoted to his murdered relatives. Sandauer, recognized mainly as a critic, wrote also a number of short stories that portray the collapse of middle-class values when facing the Holocaust. Ida Fink, a master of the short story, gained international reputation with her volume A Scrap of Time. Next to those who survived the war as adults we can distinguish a second major group in postwar Polish Jewish literature, which includes Bogdan Wojdowski, Henryk Grynberg, and Hanna Krall. They were children during the Holocaust and came of age in the late fifties or early sixties. Wojdowski is best known for his novel about the Warsaw ghetto, Chleb rzucony umarłym (Bread Tossed to the Dead — not Bread for the Departed as the English translation euphemistically puts it). A sentence in the preface to the Polish edition captures the whole satanic idea behind the creation of the Warsaw ghetto and other ones that are less sharply etched in collective and artistic memory: “The wall divided people and that’s why it was erected; I cannot express it more briefly.” The preface concludes that the mission of the writer is to see the world sharply and clearly since “each look may be the last one” (Polonsky, Contemporary xxi). The two passages capture Wojdowski’s writing, most of which deals with the insecurity of existence and with walls, in a physical as well as metaphorical sense. Wojdowski created sharp and clear visions of the apocalypse; he tried to penetrate to the core of cruelty and degradation with restrained, non-judgmental analyses of behavior in extreme conditions. He finally committed suicide.

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In Henryk Grynberg’s poetry and prose the Holocaust is an ever-recurrent topic. His strongly autobiographical works cover his wartime experiences, travels after the war, the Stalinist period, the years spent working in the Jewish theater of Warsaw, his emigration to America and problems of adaptation there, as well as his returns to Poland to face the murderer of his father. In recent years he has turned more and more to documentary prose for he considers it more truly epic than long fictional novels. According to Grynberg, the Holocaust is a crucial lesson and warning for our civilization, the supreme topic, for Polish writers and readers who were witnesses as well as for readers in general (Grynberg, Nazwaz˙niejsky18). Though he treats the topic very seriously, his works, especially the autobiographical ones, leave space for selfdistancing and irony. Hanna Krall made her name as a journalist and talented reporter before turning to Jewish themes in the late seventies, marked especially by the publication of the aforementioned interview with Marek Edelman. She focuses on the paradoxical vicissitudes of her characters, most of them based on real people, a number of them children during the Holocaust. Many Polish Jewish writers emigrated from Poland around 1968, just before or after the so called anti-Zionist campaign: Grynberg, Wilhelm Dichter, and Anna Frailich-Zajøc went to the United States, Wygodzki and Janina Bauman to Great Britain. Ida Fink resides in Israel, where the Polish Jewish critic Ryszard Loew edits the Polish language yearbook Kontury. After the end of Communism in 1989 a number of books appeared by authors who were earlier silent about their Jewish descent. They include one of the most prominent literary critics, Michał Głowin´ski, author of Czarne sezony (Black Seasons), as well as some who recently emerged, like Wilhelm Dichter, author of Kon´ Pana Boga (God’s Horse) and Szkoła bezboz˙ników (The School of Heretics). The main themes of interwar Polish Jewish literature were the two homelands and the clash between tradition and modernity. Literature after the war turned to the Holocaust and the related problem of identity. It explored heroism, and the rapid maturation of children who sacrifice themselves for their parents or take over their roles while developing, as a result of their traumatic experiences, self-hatred or confused national and religious identities. The shtetl is present in this fiction, mostly without idealization; paradoxically, it appears idealized in works by Polish Gentile authors, for instance in Piotr Szewc’s Zagłada (Annihilation). Apart from memorializing and recording earlier Jewish life and the Holocaust, most Polish Jewish writers also struggle with the question of how to live on in a country where the tragedy took place and where the attitude of most of the population to the genocide raises difficult questions. Stryjkowski contrasts the Polish and the American Jewish experience; Janina Bauman establishes a similar contrast with Britain in her 1996 novel Powroty (Returns). Stanisław Benski, Krall, Stryjkowski, and others comment upon the American Jewish reception of the Holocaust. Paradoxically, only now do Polish readers get an inside view of Jewish life. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Eliza Orzeszkowa, and others tried their hand at it, but pre-war Polish-Gentile writers did not explore inner Jewish life, while writers of Jewish descent were not interested and avoided the topic. Some see the current interest in Jewish topics as a symptom of Polish guilt feelings, others as a sign of curiosity or convenience: it is agreable to read about Jews when they are not a

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“problem.” As Sandauer ironically pointed out, Jews became exotic after the war: if their appearance, customs, and accent were previously ridiculed, now they seem charming. Educated readers in particular show interest in the shtetl, the Bible, and other aspects of Jewish culture (O sytuacji 84). Is there a contemporary Jewish literature in Poland? Hardly so. Most of the writers are dead, others are old and usually focus on the past. References to the war are frequent, even if the setting is contemporary. This is hardly surprising. Jewish life in Poland was for many years considered to be dead. After 1968 there was hardly any Jewish community in Poland, and censorship imposed various restrictions on the publication of works devoted to Jewish topics. The younger Jewish authors who published in the nineties in Polish now live almost exclusively abroad: Viola Wein and Eli Barbur in Israel, Roman Gren in France. There is, however, a small Jewish revival in Poland, partly because more and more people discover that they were adopted by Christians during the war or that they are children of Jewish parents who chose to conceal their identity. One can hope that some of these discoveries will bear fruit in literature. With time, writers will perhaps attempt to describe what it means to be Jewish in Poland today. The Holocaust will undoubtedly remain an important theme, as indeed it is in the works of Jewish writers in America and elsewhere, but the present might move more in the foreground. Polish Jewish literature is distinct from Jewish literatures created in other linguistic and cultural milieus because of its relationship to the mainstream Polish literary tradition. When Polish Jewish writers use Polish, they draw from its multiple literary resources. They make frequent references, both by way of imitation and polemic, to Jan Kochanowski, the great Polish Renaissance poet, the Romantics (especially Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Norwid), and the poetic innovations of the interwar Skamander group. Contrary to non-Jewish writers, however, they present Jewish topics as intimate and familiar, rarely showing distance to and fascination with it as unknown and exotic. At the same time, Polish Jewish literature sustains a link with Jewish writings in other languages, by drawing on symbols and images of Judaism, Yiddish folklore, and humor, and by exploring such universal Jewish topics as the search for identity; the conflicts between tradition and secularization or urbanity and the shtetl existence; exile and alienation; and, more recently, the impact of the Shoah on survivors and their descendants.

Shifting perspectives and voices in the Romanian novel Marcel Cornis-Pope The term “Romanian (or Polish, or Hungarian, or Bulgarian…) novel” may mean two different things: 1) novels written anywhere on the earth in the Romanian language and 2)

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novels in any language written within the present (or historical) borders of Romania. This article will use the term in the first sense, though we shall make references to novels written in other languages, which will be treated in the regional contexts of vol. 2, in articles on the Banat, Transylvania, and Czernowicz. In Romanian literature, the novel was “one of the manifestations that the transition of the Romanian cultural mentality from traditional to modern took” (Cosma 8). The novel emerged when the traditional horizon of expectations, which encouraged the transmission of collective, mythic models, was converted into what Constantin Noica has called a “horizon of questioning” (Sentimentul 14) that promoted individual experience and mental mobility. This process took place towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the principalities of Transylvania, Walachia, and Moldavia assimilated the ideas of the Enlightenment. If the worldview of the early nineteenth century was medieval and village-centered, by the end it became bourgeois and city-centered. The Romanian novel emerged against this evolving background as a synthesis of local storytelling traditions and foreign influences. The rise of a national novel involved three parallel processes: the assimilation and the refinement of the novelistic form, the assertion of a modern concept of authorship, with a more sophisticated understanding of voice and perspective, and the creation of an adequate reading public. All three processes converged by the middle of the nineteenth century, generally regarded as the genesis of the modern Romanian novel. Since the first original Romanian comedy was produced in 1833, the first historical drama in 1837, the first novella in 1838, the publication of the first original Romanian novel in 1845 was a late arrival; but it could draw on similar processes of national awakening, showing responsiveness to historical change and emphasizing individual action and responsibility. Since the first original Romanian comedy was produced in 1833, the first historical drama in 1837, the first novella in 1838, the publication of the first original Romanian novel in 1845 was a late arrival; but it could draw on similar processes of national awakening, showing responsiveness to historical change and emphasizing individual action and responsibility. While the first novel translations at the end of the eighteenth century were all from the French, by the beginning of the next one Spanish, Italian, English, German, and some Central European writers were also translated. Ioan Slavici, for instance, was born at the southern edge of Transylvania, spoke Hungarian and German fluently, studied at the Universities in Budapest and Vienna, and translated Mór Jókai and Theodor Storm. The early Romanian novel assimilated models ranging from the picaresque mode, with its episodic structure and self-controverting narrators, to the ironic objectification of early Realism, and the engrossed subjective voice of the Romantic novel. The dominant mode of the nineenth-century Hungarian novel in Transylvania was historical (see Hites’s article pp. 467ff), and by the end of the century historical novels also emerged in the Saxon Transylvanian culture. The weakest component in the genesis of the Romanian novel was the reading public. As Slavici remarked in 1874, the limited readership discouraged Romanian writers from writing extensively; but since they had fewer novels to write, these pioneers could spend more time on producing quality works that would educate a reluctant reading public. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the reading public was composed still of landowners and clergy, whose reading tastes had been formed by religious and didactic literature. By mid-nineteenth century the reading public included also tradesmen, craftsmen, functionaries, officers, and middle-class women.

Shifting perspectives and voices in the Romanian novel

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The evolution of the Romanian novel followed roughly three stages, starting with mere imitations of foreign models at the beginning of the nineteenth century, continuing with more complex imitations that also valorized local traditions in the middle of that century (Filimon’s Ciocoi), and ending with the first truly modern Romanian novels, Slavici’s Mara and Duiliu Zamfirescu’s Viat¸a la ¸tara˘, both written in 1894. In Romania, the concept of modern authorship involved, at least in its early phase, the idea of the author as the founder of a new literary tradition, language, and even culture. The first half of the nineteenth century, which culminated with the revolutionary year 1848 and gave the Romanian principalities their national and panEuropean consciousness, also witnessed the emergence of the first Romanian “authors”: Ion Heliade Ra˘dulescu, Grigore Alexandrescu, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, and Vasile Alecsandri. Eclectic rather than specialized figures, these founding authors had little time for aesthetic or formal considerations. Authors in the modern sense of the word, with an educated artistic consciousness and an aesthetic program, emerged only in the latter half of the nineteenth century: poet Mihai Eminescu, playwright Ion Luca Caragiale, and novelists Ioan Slavici and Duiliu Zamfirescu. In contrast to the earlier imitators of romant¸uri (romances), Slavici and Zamfirescu wrote the first aesthetically-conscious romane (novels), building on — but also disentangling — the genre from older forms of storytelling such as oral tales, religious narratives, historical annals, travelogues, and “physiologies” (character sketches), widely circulated in the Balkans. These traditional narrative forms were never entirely banned from later East-Central European fiction: important twentieth-century novelists, from Karel Cˇapek to Danilo Kiš and Ismail Kadare, have integrated traditional storytelling (oral, mythic, historical) into their novelistic structures. In the case of Romanian fiction, the style, the techniques, and even the metaphors of the old historical chronicles can be found in the novels of Mihail Sadoveanu and Marin Preda; and traces of the allegorical tale, as in the use of a polarized typology of hero and villain, have lingered on in modern fiction from Nicolae Filimon to the recent political novel. Some older narrative forms already contained novelistic elements. In 1705 Prince Dimitrie Cantemir of Moldavia published an allegorical narrative entitled Istoria ieroglifica˘ (A History in Hieroglyphs), focused on the feud between the princely families of Moldavia and Walachia during the period 1688–1705. The title suggests an autobiographical “history,” but the book also qualifies as a philosophic dialogue or an allegorical chronicle that represents the princely feud under the guise of a struggle between the empire of the lion and that of the eagle. Its very hybridity has made of Cantemir’s work a model for later attempts to broaden the definition of the novel. The beginning of the nineteenth century offers another example of an unusual work that qualifies at least partially as a novel: the “heroic-comic-satirical” epic T¸iganiada (The Gypsiad, 1800–12) by Ioan Budai-Deleanu, an important representative of the Transylvanian Enlightenment. Belying its intention to contrast a heroic past with a decadent present, T¸iganiada’s most captivating sections are focused on the disputes inside the gypsy camp: expressed in a vivid contemporary language, they question ironically past myths and modes of social organization. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the production of fiction intensified significantly. Described as “romant¸uri” — which designates an uncertain cross between traditional romance and the modern novel — the new works of fiction that imitated primarily French models, sometimes in their East-Central European adaptations, fell into three categories:

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Dimitrie Bolintineanu’s Manoil (1855) and Elena (1862) are sentimental romances, George Baronzi’s Misterele Bucures¸tilor (The Mysteries of Bucharest; 1862–64) is an adventure romance; and Radu Ionescu’s Don Juanii din Bucures¸ti (The Don Juans of Bucharest; 1861–62) is a social romance with elements of moral satire. Subtitled a “national novel,” Bolintineanu’s Manoil made an effort to recast a foreign model in terms of local interests. Beyond its sentimental plot, which describes the tribulations of a romantic idealist turned social playboy, and the epistolary structure inspired by Goethe, one finds informative descriptions of everyday life in Moldavian villages and satirical portrayals of the fashionable circles in Bucharest. Bolintineanu’s second novel, Elena, focused on a refined and introspective female character, suggesting that women had an important role to play in the spiritual emancipation of Romania. The second phase in the evolution of Romanian fiction produced the first genuine social novel, Ciocoi vechi s¸i noi (Upstarts Old and New; 1863) by Nicolae Filimon. Labeled “romant¸” in the subtitle and “nuvela˘” (novella) in its dedication, this work marked a significant departure from the imitative romances of the previous phase. The author’s declared intention in the prologue was to advance from Stendhal’s study of isolated arrivistes to the “physiology” of an entire class of upstarts that included the Greek bureaucrats brought to govern Walachia at the end of the previous century and the local profiteers, “Bucharest upstarts and leaders in villainy,” memorably illustrated by Dinu Pa˘turica˘. In spite of its weaknesses at the level of characterization and narrative structure, Filimon’s novel offered an insightful representation of the transition of Romanian society from feudalism to capitalism. Only in the last decade of the nineteenth century did the novelists Ioan Slavici and Duiliu Zamfirescu write works that built on and surpassed Filimon. These writers introduced a number of elements indispensable to the modern novel: a focus on human interiority, a strong aestheticformal concern, and a phenomenological rather than merely historical description of reality. An important transitional figure towards the artistic novel was the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu. His unfinished novel, Geniu pustiu (Barren Genius), written in the late 1860s but published only posthumously, followed the example of Goethe’s Werther in structuring the narrative around an introspective figure with strong feelings, unsettling experiences, and heroic passions that found an outlet in the 1848 revolution in Transylvania. Eminescu’s novella Sa˘rmanul Dionis (Poor Dionis; 1872–73) introduced into Romanian fiction the romantic-fantastic tradition, violations of time and space, and the pursuit of new configurations “within a framework of the extraordinary” (Ciopraga 125). Eminescu’s integration of Romanian folklore with classic myths and Oriental initiatory doctrines paved the way for every important Romanian poetic-fantastic writer of the twentieth century, from Sadoveanu to Mircea Eliade. Like Eminescu, Ioan Slavici took inspiration from both oral storytelling and contemporary European fiction. Association with the literary-philosophic society Junimea (Youth) and studies in Vienna aroused Slavici’s interest in aesthetics and the novelistic form. His essays speak of the novelist’s need to articulate characters, arrange situations, and give sentiments a direction. Rejecting sentimentality, Slavici insisted that events and characters be true to the circumstances of a certain place. He also asked that every word contribute to a consistent narrative atmosphere. These working ideas emerged out of Slavici’s slow writing career, which took him through two botched novels and about 80 successful short stories before he wrote his masterpiece, Mara. Serialized in 1894, with the subtitle “roman” (novel) added to the book edition of 1904, Mara


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consolidated Romanian fiction, introducing well-rounded characters torn between an implacable destiny and what Slavici called a “predominant passion.” Slavici’s characters begin as average people, so that their subsequent effort to transcend their dull condition becomes even more impressive. Ghit¸a˘, the protagonist of Slavici’s novella Moara cu noroc (The Mill of Luck and Plenty; 1881), starts as a relatively happy cobbler and husband, but his new-found capitalistic ambitions push him into a dangerous partnership with outlaw Lica˘ Sa˘ma˘da˘ul. Mara, the first self-reliant character in Romanian literature, also begins as a humble, impoverished widow and mother of two, but turns into a resourceful businesswoman who escapes her condition and class. On a higher, ethical level, Slavici’s novel tries to find answers to old ethnic prejudices, portraying the passionate love of Mara’s daughter, Persida, for a German ethnic, Ignaz Huber. Slavici, who became cross-culturally sensitive during his childhood in the multi-ethnic town of Arad, ends the stormy affair with an interethnic marriage, without glossing over its lingering contradictions. Unlike Slavici, who developed his artistic consciousness instinctively, Zamfirescu arrived at an understanding of the potentialities of fiction through a study of already existing work by Flaubert, Zola, Filimon, and Slavici himself. After a false start with two youthful novels, Zamfirescu published Viat¸a la ¸tara˘ (Life in the Country; serialized 1894–95), which excelled in its presentation of characters with modern, contradictory psychologies. Viat¸a la ¸tara˘ inaugurated the first narrative cycle in Romanian literature. The immediate models available to Zamfirescu in constructing his saga of the gentrified Coma˘nes¸ti family were Balzac and Zola, but he ended up emphasizing character psychology and intellectual analysis more than realistic description. The last two decades of the nineteenth century also consolidated the aesthetic understanding of the genre. Previous discussions had been primarily concerned with the morality of the novel or with its place among the genres. The term romant¸ (romance), understood as an invented history or the narration of a real event adorned with imagined ones, competed for quite a while with that of roman (novel), which D. Gusti defined in Ritorica româna˘ pentru tinerime (1852) as an instructive narrative whose purpose was to improve social mores through the castigation of vices and uncontrolled passions. The term nuvela˘ (novella) was also used in alternation with roman, suggesting that the latter term was perceived to be still too close to the term romant¸, which was associated initially with imitations after foreign models. Beginning in 1860, Romanian writers felt an increasing need to move beyond foreign models, stretching them to accommodate Romanian realities. The articulation of the first Romanian theories of the novel went hand in hand with the plea for an original Romanian Realism. Thus Radu Ionescu, after conceding apropos of his own Don Juanii din Bucures¸ti that the Romanian novelist could not emulate the spacious genius of Balzac, set before Romanian writers the task of representing individual facets of their society. In time these partial representations would constitute a veritable “Social Comedy” reflecting Romania’s transition from the “misery, backwardness, and difficulties of a primitive society” to “the luxury, the tastes, and the life of a civilized society” (Cosma 77). This idea was reconceptualized later in terms of a specific national typology: the influential critic Titu Maiorescu argued in 1882 for an original novel focused on representative national characters (“Literatura româna˘” 23–45), whereas the naturalist writer Constantin Mille defended in 1887 his right to represent in an unadorned way the “blurred, contradictory features of everyday people” (2). Accepting that the novel was a comprehensive and eclectic genre, other

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critics emphasized the need for a cohesive structure, purged of superfluous detail. Nicolae Iorga’s “Tehnica romanului” (The Technique of the Novel; 1890) laid the foundation for a poetics of the novel grounded in the principles of selection and concentration. Art is “choice,” not indiscriminate reproduction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Romanian literature went through a brief period of stagnation. “The great achievements of Romanticism and realism in poetry, prose, and drama — as illustrated by Mihai Eminescu, Ion Creanga˘, Ion Luca Caragiale, and Ioan Slavici — lay behind, and the great critical-intellectual mentors, the aestheticist Titu Maiorescu and the Marxist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea were long past their prime” (Nemoianu, “Romanian Literature” 79). The first decade was dominated by the ethnographic and moralist literature promoted by the magazine Sa˘ma˘na˘torul (The Sower; 1901–10). The chief advocate of rural traditionalism was Nicolae Iorga. Two other critics associated with this populist and anti-urban trend, Garabet Ibra˘ileanu and Constantin Stere, wrote novels themselves that actually anticipate the psychological novel and the political satire that were established only after World War I. If during the nineteenth century the Romanian novel still represented a “minority” production, both by comparison to other genres like poetry and drama and in terms of the political context that inspired it, with the Romanian principalities under Turkish control until 1871 and Romanians in Transylvania and the Banat treated as a minority by Austro-Hungary, after World War I the novel was stimulated by the rapid modernization undergone by Romanian society, which in 1918 had been increased and diversified through the integration of the provinces of Transylvania, Banat, Bessarabia and northern Bucovina. Confronted suddenly with a much richer sociocultural scene, writers turned to the novel, dramatically expanding its possibilities. If at the beginning of the century, Romanian fiction still reflected the ornamented, slow-paced style of oriental storytelling and historical chronicles, by the end of the interwar period it became a species of “total novel” (Munteanu 193), using an expanded range of narrative techniques to reflect not only the rural world (Mihail Sadoveanu and Liviu Rebreanu), but also the middle-class provinces (Gib I. Miha˘escu and Ionel Teodoreanu), the suburbs (George Mihail Zamfirescu), and the metropolis (Camil Petrescu, Cezar Petrescu, George Ca˘linescu, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu). According to Romul Munteanu (188), the centripetal pull from the provinces to the center was counterbalanced by a lingering centrifugal pull towards the new margins: consider the slums and suburbs of the capital city in Mateiu Caragiale, the wild Danubian plains in Panait Istrati, or the Moldavian steppes in Sadoveanu. The opposing, centrifugal pull towards the provinces benefited, as the articles on Transylvania and Timis¸oara/Banat in vol. 2 will show, Romanian and Hungarian, as well as German, Serbian, or Yiddish writers. In the early nineteenth century, Dositej Obradovic´, the great figure of Serbian literature, lived for a while in Temesvár/Timis¸oara; the center of the Hungarian culture in the nineenth century was Kolozsvár/Cluj, while the German writers, journals, and publishers were concentrated at Hermannstadt/Nagyszeben/Sibiu and Kronstadt/Brassó/Bras¸ov. In the 1920s and 30s, Timis¸oara, became a center of the arts in various cultures: Camil Petrescu, Romania’s premier psychological novelist, published there a literary magazine in three languages in the 1920s; the city was the home of the painter Oskar Suchanek, the sculptor Nándor Gallasz, the poet Zoltán Franyó, and the prose fiction writer Anis¸oara Odeanu. The flowering Hungarian and German culture of the interwar years (to be described in


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vol. 2) brought about an impressive body of prose fiction by Károly Kós, Irén Gulácsy, Sándor Makkai, and Áron Tamási, on the one hand, and Adolf Meschendörfer and Heinrich Zillich, on the other. The most important novels, Tamási’s Ábel trilogy and Zillich’s Zwischen Grenzen und Zeiten (Between Borders and Times), achieved international recognition, especially, of course, in the mother countries, Hungary and Germany respectively. The Hungarian journals Erdélyi Helikon, Pásztortu˝z, and Korunk and Zillich’s German language Klingsor published both essays and fiction. The history of Transylvania and the Banat was in the interwar years a frequent subject of novelists living outside these regions. The most important of these was, undoubtedly Zsigmond Móricz’s trilogy Erdély (Transylvania; 1922–35). The two most important novelists of the first half of the twentieth-century, Mihail Sadoveanu and Liviu Rebreanu, began to publish before World War I but brought out their major work after 1920. Both were also mediating figures between the cultures and literatures of the region. In 1935, Sadoveanu joined the Hungarian Gyula Illyés in pleading in the magazine Familia for the successful continuation of intercultural cooperation, and Rebreanu, who started writing in Hungarian, was concerned with alternatives to the fratricidal wars between the small nations of East-Central Europe. But while Sadoveanu brought to culmination the national narrative begun by Filimon, Slavici, and Zamfirescu, merging oral and written storytelling traditions in a panoramic representation of Romanian culture, Rebreanu radicalized the novel, questioning traditional Realism and its smooth identification with the national theme, replacing it with psychological analysis, Naturalism, and interethnic concerns. A prolific writer, Sadoveanu alternated between ample historical narratives that spanned Romanian history from its ancient roots, as in Creanga de aur (The Golden Bough; 1933), through the medieval period of anti-Turkish struggle, as in Frat¸ii Jderi (The Jderi Brothers; 1935–42), to modern history, as in Venea o moara˘ pe Siret (A Mill Was Floating Down the Siret; 1925), and shorter mythic-poetic narratives that explored the relationship between man and nature, body and soul, guilt and punishment. The latter category includes Sadoveanu’s masterpiece, Baltagul (The Hatchet; 1930), which restated the theme of crime and punishment through its memorable female character Vitoria Lipan, the novel’s sturdy, illiterate heroine who avenges the killing of her husband by fellow shepherds. If Sadoveanu, primarily a great storyteller, illustrated the possibilities of lyrical-mythic fiction, Rebreanu exemplified a species of unadulterated, stripped down Realism. Believing that “the foundation of all writing is expression as a means not as an aim in itself,” Rebreanu avoided “beautiful writing” (Amalgam 11, 12), keeping his style unadorned and his narrative presentation impersonal, quasi-cinematic in its directness. His work covers a variety of subjects and social environments, from the elementary rituals of peasant life in Ion (1920) to the complex conflicts of city life in Gorila (Gorilla; 1938); and from the 1907 peasant uprising in Ra˘scoala (The Uprising; 1932), to the predicament of the Romanian ethnics in pre-1918 Transylvania in Pa˘durea spânzurat¸ilor (The Forest of the Hanged; 1922). Building on the rural tradition inaugurated by Slavici and brought to full fruition by the Polish writer Władisław S. Reymont in The Peasants, Rebreanu raised it to the level of classic art in Ion, which he described as a “spheroid object that ends just as it began.” The quasi-Aeschylean tragedy caused by Ion Glanetas¸u’s uncontrolled desire for more farming land shakes a Transylvanian village community, leaving several characters dead; but in the end the turmoil of life is erased by indifferent

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time, which restores the village to its original image, “as if nothing had changed in it.” Ra˘scoala also has a symmetrical structure, alternating between descriptions of the impoverished life led by peasants in the Arges¸ county (Walachia) and the narcissistic life of landowners, leaseholders, and politicians in Bucharest and on their properties. Finally, Pa˘durea spânzurat¸ilor blends elements of classic tragedy with modern psychological analysis, as it focuses on the effects of World War I on the tormented souls of two Transylvanian officers (the Romanian Apostol Bologa and the Czech Otto Klapka) forced by the Austro-Hungarian army to fight against their ethnic brethren outside the borders of the empire. Rebreanu’s exploration of an elementary human universe was continued by Panait Istrati, a Romanian writer with a distinguished career in France. His novels, some of which he himself translated into Romanian, won him the reputation of the “Gorki of the Balkans.” Kyra Kyralina (1924) showed not only a knack for strong unconventional characters, but also a cinematic skill in handling the temporal and spatial shifts of narration. The motley origins and social status of his Romanian, Turkish, Greek, and Gypsy characters suggest a utopian multicultural social space along the Danube, whose fluid boundaries and uninhibited ways of life contrasted with the increasing division of Europe. His later novels Codine (1925) and Les Chardons du Baragan (The Thistles of the Baragan; 1928) added other memorable characters to his Danubian gallery of liminal heroes who travel frequently, run away, and even commit suicide in a desperate effort to affirm their freedom. Rebreanu’s preoccupation with the psychology and politics of city life was continued by Ion Ca˘luga˘ru, who portrayed Jewish life in provincial Moldavian towns, and George Mihail Zamfirescu who represented in Maidanul cu dragoste (The Lovers’ Back Alley; 1933) life in the shanty-towns around Bucharest. But the most important urban novelist of the first half of the twentieth century was Cezar Petrescu, who explored the shifts in the culture of big cities during and after World War I in Întunecare (Gathering Clouds; 1927–28) and Calea Victoriei (Victory Avenue; 1930). Radu Coms¸a, the hero of Întunecare, inaugurated a concern with Romania’s own lost generation of disenchanted war heroes. Cezar Petrescu modernized the novelistic techniques, resorting to simultaneous presentation, cinematic splicing, and blending of document, essay, and fiction. Another important contribution to the architecture of the novel came from the critic George Ca˘linescu, who regarded fiction both as an imaginative order and as a social “document” that evolved larger patterns from historical contingencies and “eternal human” features from idiosyncratic behavior. His Enigma Otiliei (Otilia’s Riddle; 1938) focused on the decadent upper middle class, pitting the pretentious Giurgiuveanus against bewildered young idealists like Felix Sima, cynical upstarts like Fa˘nica˘ Rat¸iu, and a rare vestige of the landed aristocracy embodied in Leonida Pascalopol. The momentous changes brought about by the end of World War I, from the increase in territory and population to major modernizing reforms in all areas, created conditions for the emergence of modernist Romanian fiction — urban-oriented, anti-traditionalist, and cosmopolitan (i.e., anti-nationalist at least by implication). The chief promoter of Modernism was critic and novelist Eugen Lovinescu and his influential magazine Sbura˘torul (The Incubus; 1919–27). Lovinescu’s impressive critical syntheses of modern Romanian literature and civilization encouraged synchronization with the urban-liberal cultures of the West and innovation in literature. In fiction, Lovinescu advocated a distinct “mixture of analytic lucidity and passion,”


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a focus on “the poetry of the urban environment,” and a psychological “deepening of the object” (Istoria literaturii române 4: 282). Lovinescu’s own cycle of psychological novels, starting with Bizu (1932) and brought to partial resolution in Acord final (Final Chord; 1938–39), revived themes of nineteenth-century fiction but broke with the conventions of form by mixing confession, psychological analysis, and discussion, as well as pursuing authenticity of feeling rather than narrative verisimilitude. Lovinescu’s theoretical aspirations for the novel were more persuasively carried out by Camil Petrescu, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Anton Holban, Gib I. Miha˘escu, and Marcel Blecher. Their “novels of analysis” built on Rebreanu’s exploration of the subconscious drives of his characters. They also resorted to a range of subject-oriented techniques (epistolary confession, interior monologue, digressive structure), moving the Romanian novel decisively from storytelling to observation, confession, and analysis — the three components attributed to modern fiction by René-Maril Albérès (8–9). Intimately acquainted with European analytic fiction from Proust to Kafka, Camil Petrescu proposed in his 1935 essay “Noua structura˘ s¸i Marcel Proust” (The New Structure and Marcel Proust) that a flexible phenomenology of events be substituted for positivistic causality, and authenticity of experience for the classical rules of fiction. In his desire to represent life dans toute vérité (in all its truth), Camil Petrescu chose personal forms of narration (diaries, letters, and confessions) to emphasize the process of writing without “composition or style.” His novels, however did not lack discipline: Ladima’s drama of betrayed idealism and love in Patul lui Procust (Procrustes’ Bed; 1933) is reconstructed by the author with the scrupulousness of a historian-detective from Ladima’s diaries and articles, the memoir written by his pilot friend Fred Vasilescu, now dead, a few letters written by Mrs. T., the recollections of his friends and lover Emilia, and the prosecutor’s conclusions concerning the causes of Ladima’s suicide. Ultima noapte de dragoste, întîia noapte de ra˘zboi (Last Night of Love, First Night of War; 1930) shifts from an introspective first volume, centered on S¸tefan Gheorghidiu’s obsessive jealousy of his wife, to a more detached World War I diary in the second volume, which mixes Gheorghidiu’s observations and reflections with quotes from documentary memoirs by Ernest Jünger and Jean Norton Cru. In Petrescu’s view, such multiperspectival approaches could better render the “stream of spiritual becoming,” turning static psychologies into dynamic processes (“Proust” 18). Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, also an admirer of Proust, wrote a series of novels that replace external plotting with inner analysis and a stable narrative center with a mosaic of perceptive focalizing characters, as in Concert din muzica˘ de Bach (A Concert of Music by Bach; 1927). Papadat-Bengescu was also interested in exploring liminal psychological states, triggered by malady, handicap, or a social-moral crisis. Her preoccupation with morbid moods was shared by the younger Gib I. Miha˘escu, who described himself as a “diver into the subconscious.” His Donna Alba (1935) offered a curious mix of sensationalism and analytic insight, psychopathology, and romance. But the exploration of liminal subconscious states did more than evince interest in psychopathology. By blurring the boundary between reality and fantasy in Întîmpla˘ri în irealitatea imediata˘ (Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality; 1930), Marcel Blecher also expanded the world as we know it in a manner that reminds of Kafka. In Anton Holban’s fiction first person introspection combines with moral reflection. His actionless narratives O moarte care nu dovedes¸te nimic (A Death that Proves Nothing; 1931) and Ioana (1934)

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record the minute disruptions that the imponderables of love, sickness, and death create in the lives of the male character-narrators. More serious political concerns are to be found in Mihail Sebastian’s novel De doua˘ mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years; 1934), in which a Jewish protagonist tries to defend his personal and intellectual identity against the growing anti-Semitism of 1923. The shift from epic (national) recreation to analysis, from rural traditionalism to urban Modernism, and from panoramic Realism to minute psychological exploration was countered partly by writers who returned fiction to lyricism, myth, and Balkanic décor. In addition to George Mihail Zamfirescu and Istrati, Mateiu I. Caragiale, son of the prominent nineteenthcentury playwright Ion Luca Caragiale, deserves special mention. His Craii de curtea veche (Old Court Libertines; 1929) recreates the sumptuous fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Bucharest suburbs, ruled over by Pas¸adia and Pantazi, two “old court philanderers” who mix oriental hedonism with Western ambitions. By contrast to these “Danubian Don Quixotes,” Gore Pirgu is a depraved upstart who indicates Caragiale’s antipathy for the rising suburban class, recruited from the “brawlers and cutthroats” of the slums. The mythic-fantastic element also reemerged in the fiction of Vasile Voiculescu and Mircea Eliade. Voiculescu’s posthumously published Zahei Orbul (Blind Zahei; 1970) traces the dramatic experiences of the title character in an apocalyptic world that includes a “court of thieves” and a salt mine for forced labor. A similar mixture of myth and gothic tension can be found in Mircea Eliade’s early fiction, including his two successful novels of (self-)analysis. S¸antier (Building Site; 1935), subtitled “indirect novel,” records the struggle between the narrator’s passion for science and his attraction to adventure. Maitreyi (Bengal Nights; 1933) relocates the struggle for self-definition to the Orient, focusing on Eliade’s spiritual adventure in India and his effort to reconcile a conflict of cultures through “an integrative consciousness.” Eliade’s diary-like “indirect novels” have offered a model for the “autofiction” of writers like Radu Petrescu, Costache Ola˘reanu, and Livius Ciocârlie. In 1941, at the end of a most productive literary period, Romanian fiction had come of age. Multiformed and thematically varied, reflecting conflicting aspirations (national and cosmopolitan, traditional and innovative), the novel functioned as a “resonating chamber of all the individual and collective struggles” (Cioculescu 82); and there were quite a few such struggles in the 1920a and 1930s as East-Central Europe underwent a process of modernization but also of political realignments. The novel seemed to thrive on such conflicts, at least until the early 1940s when critics noticed signs of devitalization, as newer writers mimicked the successful techniques of analytic fiction. The signs of exhaustion were aggravated during the period 1948–60, when Stalinization radically disrupted Romania’s culture and civil society. The doyen of fiction, Sadoveanu, produced Mitrea Cocor (1949), a dubious work about an opportunist who turns the Soviet occupation to his advantage. Most popular at the time was Zaharia Stancu, who wrote rhapsodic, structurally digressive novels such as Descult¸ (Barefoot; 1948) and the cycle Ra˘da˘cinile sînt amare (Bitter Roots; 1958–59), concerned with the life of the peasants and small tradesmen in the southern plains during the first half of the twentieth century. Ca˘linescu’s Scrinul negru (The Black Chest; 1960) exemplified a more rigorous form of social fiction that mixed classic narrative with documents, letters, and even excerpts from Ca˘linescu’s own magazine columns to represent the dissolution of the former landed aristocracy and professional class during the 1950s. Ca˘linescu’s baroque narrative of a crumbling class was followed by Petru Dumitriu in Bijuterii de familie (Family Jewels; 1949), published before the writer’s self-


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imposed exile to France. The younger Titus Popovici contributed two successful novels in the 1950s, Stra˘inul (The Stranger; 1955), portraying a provincial milieu as experienced by an adolescent hero during the traumatic years of World War II, and Setea (Thirst; 1958), which honed in on the ancestral peasant mentalities about to be disrupted by the Communist socialization of agriculture. The writer who contributed most to the rehabilitation of Romanian literature from the mid1950s onwards was Marin Preda. His early masterpiece, Moromet¸ii (The Moromete Clan; vol. 1, 1955), represented a traditional rural society enjoying its last days of freedom before the Communist takeover. Preda’s subsequent novels, from Risipitorii (The Squanderers; 1962) to the three-volume Cel mai iubit dintre pa˘mînteni (Most Beloved Man on Earth; 1980), spearheaded the revival of Romanian fiction by contributing to the emergence of two new narrative types: the analytic novel of the Stalinist fifties, and the novel of ideological debate. In the former, characters from various environments scrutinize themselves and ask pointed questions about the moral failures of the socialist revolution; in Cel mai iubit basic ideological questions are raised about the suppression of intellectual and civic freedoms under Communism. During the 1960s, novelists challenged the Communist monopoly over truth, first by rediscovering the power of symbolic imagination, then by expanding their horizon from documentary reconstruction to cultural analysis. Both trends had political as well as aesthetic consequences: by injecting an element of subjective fantasy in their fiction, novelists like A. E. Baconsky, S¸tefan Ba˘nulescu, Fa˘nus¸ Neagu, and Sorin Titel, violated the prescriptions of Socialist Realism. Likewise, the political novels of Alexandru Ivasiuc, Dumitru Radu Popescu, Paul Goma, Norman Manea, Bujor Nedelcovici, and Augustin Buzura called into question official representations of postwar history (especially of the Stalinist 1950s), gaining new insights into the relationship between historical necessity and individual freedom. Both trends reconnected with Romanian fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. Fa˘nus¸ Neagu’s mythic-realistic portrayal in Îngerul a strigat (The Angel Has Cried; 1968) of a rural community disrupted by World War II recalled Sadoveanu and Istrati, while the political novel about the Stalinistic 1950s borrowed techniques from the interwar analytic novel and the “end of a world” fiction of Cezar Petrescu, Mateiu Caragiale, and George Ca˘linescu. An apocalyptic representation of history dominates Dumitru Radu Popescu’s Vîna˘toarea regala˘ (The Royal Hunt; 1973). Its central episode opens with a parody of a “royal hunt” organized by the new communist masters of a Romanian village. The villagers enjoy momentary control over dogs named Caesar, Napoleon, Peter, Franz Joseph, Hitler, and Joseph (Stalin). This hunting scene is followed by the outbreak of a mysterious epidemic of rabies, shrewdly manipulated by the party bosses. At their instigation, the whole village lapses into forms of social cannibalism and sacrifices dissenters like Da˘nila˘, the village doctor and amateur investigator of party abuses. Popescu’s multi-plotted novel invites comparison with Mircea Eliade’s political-philosophic novel, Pe strada Mântuleasa (The Old Man and the Bureaucrats; 1968). Begun in the fifties in Paris and completed later in Chicago, Eliade’s short novel has as protagonist an old man named Zaharia Fa˘rîma˘ (Fa˘rîma˘ = Crumb), who mesmerizes his communist interrogators with labyrinthine stories of the past. The “Arabian Nights in a Stalinist world” ensure the storyteller’s survival, while also creating important disturbances in the power machinery of Communist Romania.

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Marcel Cornis-Pope

Eliade’s search for a mythopoetic narrative that would redeem history was echoed in novels published in Romania during the mid 1970s. Ba˘nulescu’s Cartea de la Metopolis (The Book of Metopolis; 1977) pitted an imaginative tailor-writer, Polydor, against half-demented revolutionaries like Bazacopol, who make the future of the Danubian city of Metopolis uncertain. Few Romanian readers missed the hint at Ceaus¸escu’s demolishing of historical Bucharest in the late 1970s, or at the collective dream of salvation through an improvised hero figure. The analytic methods of Camil Petrescu were carried to an extreme by Alexandru Ivasiuc. Cunoas¸tere de noapte (Night Knowledge; 1969) uses the imminent death of the protagonist’s wife to trigger a process of reexamination that turns a “professional of total understanding” (a party executive) into a skeptic. Ivasiuc’s later Pa˘sa˘rile (The Birds; 1970) explores the moral failures of the communist revolution, while Racul (The Crab; 1976) illustrates the dangers of totalitarian power against a Conradian background (an invented Latin-American republic). Norman Manea also oscillated between straightforward political novels like Anii de ucenicie ai lui August prostul (The Apprentice Years of August the Dull-Witted; 1979) and allegoricalmythic narratives. Plicul negru (The Black Envelope; 1986), the last novel Manea published before he emigrated from Romania, combined approaches, recording the somber details of daily life in Ceaus¸escu’s Romania and their allegorical significance. An unrelenting focus on the minutest aspects of Romanian social experience can be found in Augustin Buzura’s fiction beginning with Absent¸ii (Absentees; 1970). Even though his later novels like Vocile nopt¸ii (Voices of Night; 1980) envisioned history as a formidable labyrinth through which individual characters move defeated in search of an elusive truth, Buzura’s ambition throughout his pre-1989 career was to record the quotiodian details of (post-)Stalinist Romania. Buzura’s single-minded concentration on the truth of history was matched only by Paul Goma. But while Buzura’s novels were published in Romania after he made certain concessions to the censors, Goma’s novel-essays could appear only abroad, mainly in translation. Ostinato, retitled in French as La cellule des libérables (The Cell of Those who Can be Liberated; 1971), În cerc (In the Circle; 1977), and Patimile dupa˘ Pites¸ti (The Passions According to the Pites¸ti Prison), published in France in 1981 as Les Chiens de mort (The Dogs of Death), expose in brutally honest details, which remind one of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the treatment of political prisoners in the Romanian Communist gulag. Of the younger writers, Petru Popescu deserves to be mentioned, for focusing the fiction published in Romania on the disgruntled generation of the 1970s. Popescu’s Dulce ca mierea e glont¸ul patriei (Sweet as Honey are Motherland’s Bullets; 1971) reconstructs in quick-paced cinematic sequences the author’s autobiographical experience in the army and the bureaucratic culture of Bucharest. Afer his defection to the United States, Popescu published a number of successful novels that combine the techniques of the thriller with anthropological-historical themes (Almost Adam; 1996) or revalorize narrative formulas, for instance the vampire narrative (In Hot Blood; 1988). The role of criticism throughout the 1960s and 70s was to vigorously promote these new and uncomfortable works that challenged official expectations of form and content. Each review became implicitly a rereading of cultural contexts and a polemical engagement with the dogmatic tenets of Socialist Realism. A more theoretical analysis, interested in reconceptualizing the function and strategies of the novel, emerged only in the late 1970s, when the terminology


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of structuralist narratology, semiotics, and phenomenological criticism replaced the compromised discourse of officially-sanctioned Marxism. Newly emerging academic critics like Marian Papahagi, Al. Ca˘linescu, Livius Ciocârlie, and Mihai Zamfir, as well as well-established practical critics such as Nicolae Manolescu, Eugen Simion and Lucian Raicu, became interested in narrative poetics and typology. The political fiction of the previous two decades came under critical scrutiny because of its erratic narratives poetics. Participants in a 1983 debate on “Today’s Romanian Fiction” agreed that the political novel of the so-called obsessive decade (the Stalinist fifties) had exhausted its thematic possibilities; aesthetically “it has had been exhausted from the start” (Manolescu, “Problemele” 9). The erosion of the appeal and credibility of the political novel made the rise of alternative modes of fiction — self-reflexive, psychological, feminist — finally possible (for the emergence of a feminist novel in Romania, see my article on women’s literature in vol. 4 of this History). The first innovative trend to emerge during the late 1960s was the short-lived “oneiric” group (Dumitru T¸epeneag, Florin Gabrea, and Sorin Titel), which explored states of psychological and social liminality with surrealistic imagery reminiscent of Kafka and the French nouveau roman. Because of the political implications of experimental works such as Titel’s Lunga ca˘la˘torie a prizonierului (The Prisoner’s Long Journey; 1971), the oneiric trend was vehemently denounced by Ceaus¸escu in 1971. Titel’s later fiction, from T¸ara îndepa˘rtata˘ (Remote Country; 1974) to Femeie, iata˘ fiul ta˘u (Woman, Behold Your Son; 1983), problematized the very concept of reality and dramatized the narrator’s effort to bring back the buried continent of memory, engaging a rich dialogue of narrating voices and texts. In these later novels, Titel revealed a kinship with other East-Central European writers, from Ivan Klíma to Danilo Kiš and Andrzej Kusńiewicz, dramatizing the collapse of a multicultural regional culture in mid-twentieth century’s sharply polarized world. The “Tîrgovis¸te school” of self-reflexive fiction, belatedly discovered during the late 1970s, was the first manifestation of Romanian postmodernism. Drawing on both the East-Central European Avant-garde traditions (Urmuz, Tristan Tzara, and Eugen Ionescu) and on Latin American experiments, writers such as Mircea Horia Simionescu, Radu Petrescu, Costache Ola˘reanu, and Al. George produced deconstructive-ironic texts that questioned traditional modes of representation. The most spectacular example was offered by Simionescu’s Ingeniosul bine temperat (The Well-Tempered Ingenious; 1969–83). Composed of a pseudo-“onomastic dictionary,” a “general bibliography” of themes and myths, a “breviary” of the century’s real or imagined catastrophes, and an autobiographical “toxicology,” this four-volume work subverts almost every procedure in the realist repertory. Its comic inventory of types and clichés depicts a real-fictive world, “sick with inertia and stereotypes.” In spite of its radical departure from basic novelistic expectations, Ingeniosul bine temperat is no more unusual than other texts published by the members of the Tîrgovis¸te group. Written in some cases ten to fifteen years prior to their publication, these “anti-fictions” contrasted with the dominant trend of classic or documentary Realism, challenging its naïve poetics. The Tîrgovis¸te school influenced even political novelists such as George Ba˘la˘it¸a˘ and Constatin T¸oiu. Ba˘la˘it¸a˘’s Lumea în doua˘ zile (The World in Two Days; 1975) and T¸oiu’s Galeria cu vit¸a˘ sa˘lbatica˘ (A Gallery of Wild Vine; 1976) shifted from the historical “recitation” of events to a self-conscious evaluation of narration’s role in constructing history. T¸oiu’s narrator busily

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assembles testimonies and documents about a typical victim of the 1950s, hoping that these texts will shed some light on the Stalinist period. But his texts mainly highlight the mysterious, coded nature of history and its players, so that what begins as an investigation of historical facts turns into an exploration of the limits of narrative representation itself. T¸oiu’s subsequent novel, Însot¸itorul (The Companion; 1981), focused more directly on the figure of a chronicler-scribe (the novel’s ubiquitous “companion” Rînzei), whose role remains appropriately ambiguous, recording and at the same time challenging the deeds of the mighty. As a repository of individual and collective memory, Rînzei helps the inhabitants of a Romanian village resist the radical restructuring plans of power-hungry utopianists like Megaclide (a Ceaus¸escu look-alike). But Rînzei’s ambition to record and control history also turns him into a petty autocrat. Through him, T¸oiu’s novel mocks the affectations of the kind of writing that purports to explain history. The inventive strategies of the “Tîrgovis¸te school” and other metafictional novelists were transposed in a stronger political key by the writers of the 1980s. Emerging at the height of Ceaus¸escu’s rule, this “new wave” of innovative writers exposed the regime’s totalitarian and ethnocentric mentalities. Their novels scrutinized the present, which was in many ways more dramatic than the Stalinist fifties. In the process, narration was demystified, brought down into the “street,” as suggested by titles like Viat¸a la margine de s¸osea (Life on the Roadside; 1975) by the older Mihai Sin, Aventuri într-o curte interioara˘ (Adventures in an Inner Courtyard; 1979) by Mircea Nedelciu, and Povestiri cu strada depozitului (Stories on the Warehouse Street; 1985) by Daniel Vighi. Much of this fiction written by novelists in their twenties and thirties is candidly autobiographical, a narrative shorthand of sorts that wishes to convey a sense of unadulterated truth. But the reality they recover is an ironic anthology of cultural clichés and prepackaged discourses. To exemplify, the two soldier friends in Mircea Nedelciu’s Zmeura de cîmpie (Wild Berries; 1984) seek to bring representation closer to history’s “soul of facts.” One has ambitions to become a historian, the other fancies a career as a film director, but they discover that reality cannot be extricated from the public fictions that masquerade as truths. Constantin Stan’s Nopt¸i de trecere (Nights of Passage; 1984) presents its young reporter with the difficult task of making some sense of a socially and psychologically disarticulated world that leaves even the hero’s paternity open. The protagonist is helped in his endeavor by his lover and amateur reporter, Cristina, and a magic typewriter that records the story of his experience between the lines. These experimental works suggest that the novelists’ response to the loss of cultural grounding was appropriately dialogic. They submitted reality to what Nedelciu called in a subsequent novel Tratament fabulatoriu (Fabulational Treatment; 1986), a process of imaginative rearticulation. The literature of minority writers played an important role in this process of rearticulation that challenged both conventional narrative forms and officially-sanctioned contents. The ethnic German writers who joined in the “Aktionsgruppe Banat” (Herta Müller, Richard Wagner, William Totok, Rolf Bossert), and Werner Söllner, who was born near Arad and worked for the multicultural student journal Echinox in Cluj, confronted in the early 1970s the issue of what it meant to write German language literature in “the cities of the East” (see the article on Timis¸oara in vol. 2 of this History). If the Romanian-German novel constituted a culturally marginal enclave, an island inside two Romanian literary provinces (Banat and Southern Transylvania), aesthetically it was a true hybrid, bridging the Western and East European


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practices of (post)modern fiction. These writers read the unofficially circulated German, Austrian, and American literature, as well as dissident East European writings. They wanted to disassociate themselves from communist literature as well as from the literature of their predecessors, and this further complicated their minority status. The Aktionsgruppe Banat was officially banned after 1975 in Romania and most of its members emigrated to Germany in the 1980s, without, however, integrating there fully. The suicide of Rolf Bossert in 1986 tragically manifested a homelessness that takes a prominent role also in the writings of the two most successful Banat-German writers, Herta Müller and Richard Wagner, which are weighed down by the burden of the past. The present of Wagner’s Miss Bukarest (2001) is Germany in the 1990s, but the Romanian past is present both through flashbacks and the long arm and shadow of the Securitate in the post-1989 years. Herta Müller, a leading writer in the German language today, obsessively creates fictional, almost mythic variants of her childhood experiences. Her first fiction, Niederungen (Nadirs; 1980), is not so much a protest against totalitarianism as a dark and rather unkind but linguistically brilliant portrayal of a dying Banat-Swabian village. Inspired by this new self-reflexive trend in fiction, criticism revisited in the 1980s the issue of narrative representation, seeking alternatives to the mimetic tradition that had dominated the Romanian novel since its inception. Despite successive attempts to challenge the realistic canon (the fantastic prose of Eminescu and Mircea Eliade, the oneirists of the mid 1960s, the Tîrgovis¸te school in the 1970s, the postmodern self-reflexive writers of the 1980s), Realism continued to control critical conversations, and was regarded as a sine qua non of the national novel. A revisionist and experimental concept of representation emerged only in the postmodern criticism of the 1980s. In Viat¸a s¸i opiniile personajelor (The Life and Opinions of Characters; 1983) Radu G. T¸eposu set up “imaginative novels” that rely on the self-questioning perspective of a character-focalizer, against classic “representational” novels that employ omniscient narrators and narrated characters endowed with the illusion of life, and against the “reflective” novel, grounded in the consciousness of a character-narrator who still retains the illusion of life (82, 86). This third category subverts successfully the official ideology of Realism, challenging what another critic called “artistic illiteracy, the reduction of art to faithful copies of nature” (Crohma˘lniceanu 4). The full ideological import of the self-problematized, oppositional discourse of postmodern fiction was recognized only in the freer, post-Ceaus¸escu political climate (see the introduction to the 1989 node in this volume). The two most important gains brought by the so-called postcommunist phase were the diversification of narrative production, with unpredictable hybrid works that called into questions the pre-1989 fictional categories, and the reintegration of expatriated novelists and theorists (Matei Calinescu, Norman Manea, Herta Müller, Gheorghe Astalos¸, Thomas Pavel, Mihai Spariosu, etc.) in the discourse about the novel produced today in Romania. The reintegration of expatriated writers into the theoretical reflection on the novel allowed post-1989 criticism to confront with sharper concepts the tensions between aesthetics and cultural politics in the novel, or the limitations of Realism and nationalism as narrative paradigms.

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Boyko Penchev

Forms of the Bulgarian novel Boyko Penchev Until recently, critics and scholars agreed that the novel was a latecomer among the genres of Bulgarian literature and did not become robust until the 1950s. But this view used the “epic novel” as the exemplar of the genre, which resulted in a distorted perception of how different novelistic genres actually developed. A brief outline of the basic types of the Bulgarian novel should illuminate the way ideological assumptions were inscribed in the production and reception of it. 1.

Luben Karavelov and the tradition of the historical novel

The birth of the Bulgarian historical novel is linked to the nineteenth-century Bulgarian Revival. The emerging literature of the time sought material for the national agenda and turned to the past as a repository of characters carrying national values such as pride, hatred of the enemies, and insistence on independence. Censorship was a second reason for using a fictionalized past in dealing with contemporary ideological matters: since books printed and spread in the Ottoman Empire could not represent Turks as oppressors, “the bad guys” were chosen from enemies of the past. In one of the first Bulgarian fictional narratives, Vasil Drumev’s novelette Neshtastna familia (Unhappy Family) published in 1860, the action takes place at the end of the eighteenth century, a time of unrest in the Ottoman Empire. Hence the villains of the plot are the Tatars of yore, not the Turks now. Lyuben Karavelov’s trilogy Otmashtenie (Revenge), Posle otmashtenieto (After Revenge), and Tuka mou e kraiat (This is the End), published in his newspaper Nezavissimost (Independence) in 1873–74, is usually regarded as the first genuine Bulgarian historical novel. Karavelov was one of the leaders of the radical wing in the Bulgarian Revival, and his views on literature were predominantly utilitarian. The action of the trilogy is set in the second half of the fourteenth century, after the Ottoman invasion, in the years immediately preceding the collapse of the independent Bulgarian state. Karavelov used this setting to illustrate the slogan “We against the others,” which was at the heart of the nationalist discourse then. His novels display a basic ideological division between Bulgarians and the Others. The Others include the Turkish “external enemy” and the internal enemies consisting of the Greeks and traitors from the Bulgarian aristocracy who adhere to foreign mores. The patriotic aristocracy and the tormented lower strata of society share the view that “our land” should be purged of the Greeks. The division between “us” and “them” is rendered in terms of the opposition between culture and nature: the simple Bulgarian souls, untouched by the malaises of civilization, stand for nature, while the Greeks and the corrupted aristocracy are seen as bearers of all the selfishness, greed, and cowardice that characterizes sick and unnatural civilizations. Despite his materialist Weltanschauung and his love for “positive science,” Karavelov adopted his literary technique from Eugène Sue rather than from the naturalists in France or from the naturalists in Russian

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literature that Karavelov learned about while attending lectures at Moscow University. His trilogy is organized as an adventure novel, a genre that served for about fifty years as a model for almost all Bulgarian historical novels. Both Karavelov’s subject matter and narrative pattern found many imitators. The trilogy launched the “Crisis and End” fiction about the independent medieval Bulgarian state, which became popular with Bulgarian writers because it offered an opportunity to thematize the nation’s integrity. Ivan Vazov’s novelette Ivan Alexander (1907), Stoyan Zagorchinov’s Den posleden, den gospoden (Last Day, God’s Day; 1931–34), and Emilian Stanev’s Antichrist (1970) all follow Karavelov’s model in asking how and why the crisis and disintegration came about. For many years Bulgarian literature was preoccupied with the question of why the country was not united. Karavelov blamed foreign, mainly Greek, ethnic influences; Vazov scorned the national leaders for abandoning patriotism and the old ideals; Zagorchinov thought that the problem involved the whole social fabric: high or low, people were tragically guilty, since their personal choices could not resolve the general social problems. Stanev, finally, focused on the clash between searching for God and caring for society, turning the historical problem into a philosophic debate between vita contemplativa and vita activa. Zagorchinov was the first to do away with the anachronisms of the Bulgarian historical novel by carefully reconstructing the material world and the medieval views in order to present a past that was different. Yet Last Day, God’s Day remains an adventure story: Zagorchinov followed Karavelov and Vazov, as well as Walter Scott. The great formal and structural innovations entered the Bulgarian novel only in the 1960s, when the possibilities of internal narration, chronicle, diary, and witness narration were discovered. In 1964 Anton Donchev published one of the most successful Bulgarian novels abroad, Vreme razdelno (Times of Change), in which Father Aligorko’s chronicles and the account of a Venetian retell how the Muslim faith was violently introduced in the Rhodope mountains. The same year, Gencho Stoev published his multi-perspectival and self-consciously modern Tsenata na zlatoto (The Price of Gold). Three years later, Vera Mutafchieva constructed a fictional court of history in Sluchaiat Dzhem (The Dzhem Case), in which many witnesses are called to tell their part in the life of Dzhem Sultan, a fifteenth-century exiled heir to the Ottoman Throne. In all of these novels the limitations imposed on the external narrator are related to the literary taste of the period, which sought to represent the “common people” and their “natural” responses to moral and ideological questions. The hostility to “high-brow” intellectual positions was, paradoxically, related to the opposition against the Stalinism of the 1950s. Stanev’s short novel, Legenda za Sibin, Preslavskia kniaz (Legend of Sibin, Prince of Preslav; 1968) exemplifies how clashes between “the people” and the sectarian ideologues shape history: the “bogomils” (religious heretics) are portrayed as Stalinist dogmatists, full of hatred against differing opinions, while paganism is portrayed as a more natural, humanistic religion that is more responsive to bodily and spiritual needs. The Bulgarian historical novel, initially permeated with nationalist ideology, became therefore in the1960s a historical stage on which the conflict between the Bulgarian “people” and narrowminded, dogmatic Communists was played out in costumes. Yet most of these novels merely tried to locate the nationalist ideology at the level of the popular mentality. The fragmented narration in Stoev’s Tsenata na zlatoto, for instance, leaves the values of the nineteenth-century Bulgarian Revival unquestioned.

458 2.

Boyko Penchev The Bildungsroman

Until the 1960s Bulgarian novels were more interested in society than in the individual, which explains the paucity of Bildungsromans. In Karavelov’s and Vazov’s sensationalist adventure novels and historical novelettes the characters are ready made and the narrative reconfirms their loyalty to the national idea. Elements of the educational novel first appeared in the family novel, but within the dominant ideology: the early Bildungsromans showed how individuals gradually accepted national values, and how protagonists moved from self and family to identification with the national community. These are the issues in Konstantin Petkanov’s Reaping Time series and Dimitar Talev’s Zhelezniat svetilnik (Iron Chandelier 1952), as well as in Donchev’s Vreme razdelno, Stoev’s Tsenata na zlatoto, and Stanev’s Antichrist. Earlier works had shown how patriarchal Bulgarians came to adopt the new national values. The later novels used allegorical means to depict the difficult and winding road that intelligent modern individuals had to walk in order to embrace the comforting and redeeming collective values. Some of the most representative novels of the 1960s, among them Stanev’s Ivan Kondarev (1958–64) and Pavel Vezhinov’s Zvezdite nad nas (The Stars Above Us; 1966), show how returning to “folk wisdom” resolved the problems. The typical novels under totalitarianism portrayed how lost individuals found their way to the truth, the intuitive understanding of human existence of “the people.” 3.

The Modernist novel

Two versions of this least-developed sub-genre of the Bulgarian novel existed. The Bulgarian Modernist mode between 1907 and 1919 manifested itself, for instance, in Chavdar Mutafov’s Secessionist and Symbolist language. Mutafov’s Diletant (1926) as well as Konstantin Konstantinov’s and Svetoslav Minkov’s Sartseto v kartonenate kutiya (Heart in a Paper Box; 1933) are such stylized, half-parodistic works. The other, “Expressionist” version dealt with the terror of unprecedented events and turned the common image of the world upside down. Such stories of catastrophe can be found in Anton Strashimirov’s Horo (Folk Dance; 1926), in which the national crisis of the violent Bulgarian Civil War of 1923–25 occasions representations of chaos, transgression, and the dark side of the self. Petkanov’s Morava zvezda ka˘rvava (Purple Star, Bloody Star; 1934) showed how the world of Bulgarian peasants fell apart during World War I. These Modernist novels were not popular in Bulgaria because they used the techniques of shifting the central point of view, of overlapping and melting temporal planes, and of interior monologues conveyed in undifferentiated direct speech — techniques that blurred the border between narrator and characters. In the interwar years, Bulgarian Modernist prose was almost exclusively concerned with crisis, terror, and transgression, not with the aesthetization of the “banal” or a search for epiphany in everyday-life.

4.

The family novel

The adventure novel, as used by Karavelov, dominated Bulgarian fiction in the second half of nineteenth century and impeded the development of the family novel. Furthermore Bulgarian


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literature was preoccupied in the 1880s and 90s with the patriarchal “golden age,” describing either an imaginary realm of past harmony or the collapse of the patriarchal family in the modern world. The imagined harmony of a nostalgically recalled patriarchal idyll was unsuited for novelistic treatment and led to static, ahistorical narratives. Petkanov, the first to try to historicize the patriarchal idyll in the Reaping Time trilogy: Staroto vreme (The Old Time; 1930), Haiduti (Haiduks; 1931), and Viatar echi (The Wind Whistles; 1933), faced the problem of showing the onset of change and the emergence of a national-historical consciousness in a static world of patriarchal values. Critics and public alike prefer Petkanov’s cycle to Talev’s tetralogy of both historical and family novels: Zhelezniat svetilnik (1952), Prespanskite kambani (The Bells of Prespa; 1954), Ilinden (St. Ilia’s Day; 1953), and Glasovete vi chouvam (Four Voices I Hear; 1966).

5.

The idea of the epic novel

If genre is not a stable set of rules but rather an instance that mediates between text and public, we may trace what critics considered a good novel through modern history. The most important Bulgarian critical principle was that the novel had to be subordinated to the epic mode and its “epic qualities.” From the end of the nineteenth century to the 1970s, both critics and representatives of the repressive state followed, perhaps unknowingly, Hegel’s idea that the epic was a “folk Bible,” a Book that represented the spirit of the nation in its development and its struggle with alien principles. Both critics and officials sought in the novel a consolidating discourse on the “spirit” of the people, on the nation, or on a class. The terms of this view were set already in the discussions surrounding Ivan Vazov’s Pod igoto (Under the Yoke; 1888), the first Bulgarian novel that became popular both at home and abroad, and was canonized as an image of the most marvelous “Bulgarian time,” the national struggle for freedom. But Vazov’s novel challenged for a long time historians of the novel, for it combines disparate modes of genre and discourse: descriptive scenes, essayistic digressions, psychological analyses of “feverish” states of the soul, echoes of exotic, adventurous, and gothic narrative models. This heterogeneity was unacceptable for its first and later critics. Ilia Milarov, one of the early ones, denied in 1896 that the novel had unity, regretting that a material so full of tension did not inspire a “real epic.” Vazov’s novel became over time accepted as an epic and started to function for the public and for generations of literary scholars exactly as a “folk Bible.” Only in the 1990s did studies on Pod igoto start to appear that concentrated on the novel itself and its various hidden novelistic models. In her important reinterpretation, Inna Peleva sees Vazov as The Ideologue of the Nation. Pavel Vezhinov’s Siniat zalez (Blue Sunset) experienced similar difficulties even as late as 1947: it was excluded from the Bulgarian canon for bringing together in a hybrid form naturalist, crime, philosophical, and family novelistic patterns. Traditional interpretations have appropriated these novels in the service of class- or national ideology for propagation in schools, universities, and the media. Bulgarian interest in the “safe” values of the local and, especially, the patriarchal world intensified after World War I. The epic was no longer associated only with heroic struggles but also with a world in which society was still “natural.” Epic became the wholesome and harmonious world of the past that contrasted with the social cataclysms and conflicts of the present. Vladimir

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Vasilev, the most influential critic of the interwar years, called Iordan Iovkov, who dominated Bulgarian prose during the postwar decades, “a perfect epic writer.” Although Iovkov was popular mainly with his short stories and plays and not his novels, the “epic” quality ascribed to his writing became an important norm for “good writing” in the decades to come. The epic elements in Iovkov’s writing were supposedly the transparency of his language (opposed to the “mannerisms” and the “artificial” complexity of Modernism) and his construction of an idealized image of what was Bulgarian, suitable for mass consumption. According to Vasilev, Iovkov’s characters were “primordially beautiful” Bulgarians associated with the Mountain (the space of heroism) and the Plain (the space of labor). Their leading qualities were purity and virginity. These “big, healthy, and beautiful” heroes held original, i.e., natural morals and worldviews. The soul of such natural people “is open, simple and clear. Their feelings, which have a vast range, are expressed in a dignified manner. Exposed to them, we transcend ourselves, we are liberated from within” (Vasilev 96). In the interwar years, “epic” means precisely this masking of the human and the social as harmonic naturalness. Stanev was said to herald a new notion of the epic because the narrator receded in Ivan Kondarev, leaving description in the foreground. He was “the perfect epic writer,” because “life is represented by its very forms” in his novels (Igov 2). Literary scholars have claimed until recently that once the Communist regime was firmly in power in the 1950s, the “epic wave” of the epic novel provided new ideas on humanity’s place in history. For these scholars, the epic was an instrument of ideological manipulation to represent class struggle as a national matter. The highly overrated September 9, 1944 “Revolution” was declared as a key event that revealed to the writers the laws of history; the Bulgarian novel’s epic spirit was carried forward by the tidal turn in the destiny of the people. Such grandiose notions of national and human destiny turned all events into mere fragments, episodes, and details in a monolithic history completely determined by laws. Accordingly, the novels of the period became monistic, holistic, and solid. History creates individuals; what people do in history recedes into the background. In the totalitarian period, in contrast to the pre-1944 one, novels were constantly discussed, but the epic novel became the norm that defined according to Marxist ideology literature’s relation to reality. It was canonized as the leading literary genre in the first decades of the totalitarian regime for manifesting Socialist Realism, the only acceptable method for representing reality. Tsanev defined already in the 1930s what Realism was and why it was not to fall prey to Naturalism: “Realism does not mean describing everything that our five senses can register, but only what is artistically necessary. […] Remarks such as “Draganka scratched her armpit” or “Sister-in-law Stoina probed her ear with a stick” would be meaningful only if they pointed to certain features of character” (255). Critics from the 1950s onward distinguished the epic novel in a similar way from Naturalist interest in physiology, and also from the Modernist interest in stream-of-consciousness. Plot and language of the epic novel were to resemble those one finds in the works of “the perfect epic writer,” Iordan Iovkov, from the 1930s. What narrative technique corresponds to this notion of the epic novel, and how did writers respond to the expectations? We exemplify this with Dimitar Dimov’s Tyutyun (Tobacco; 1951), which had certain artistic pretensions, unlike many now forgotten novels of the epic wave that smoothly responded to the expectations. Dimov wanted to represent the decline of the “historically hopeless” bourgeois world. This suited the state ideology, which expected novels that


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demonstrated the historically and logically necessary transition from bourgeois society to a new, socialist order, whose moral norms become manifest in the protagonists. Dimov’s plot and figurative matrix indicated social disintegration and even biological degradation: the bourgeois family is torn apart by the self-destructive powers of greed, egotism, and lust. The novel showed the “decline of the bourgeois world” from inside; the social revolution appears only in the background, though it remains the only possible solution. Dimov exercised authorial power by employing a narrator who takes sides. Remarking, for instance, that “the hungry and battered country boy had become a powerful dictator of the tobacco world” (Dimov 1: 151), the narrator abandons the impersonal third-person form characteristic of the novels of the 1930s. Dimov exchanges Iovkov’s narrator, who has no distinct voice, for a narrator who incessantly comments on the events, though in a discreet manner. History defines personal destiny in Tobacco. Its development moves everything according to its own laws, disregarding the will of individuals. Dimov foregrounds this dictatorship of history through explicatory passages that locate the specific situations within the great historical events of the time: the focus alternates between character experiences and the flow of grand history. The narrative voice is transparent and monologic, allowing only incidentally other voices. Historical meaning is conveyed by means of selecting events to be portrayed, with the details subordinated to the central idea. Clothing is always used as a mark of character trait or social standing. Faces express the essence of a character. Boris Morev, the capitalist of Tobacco, “wore an elegant dark coat, a colorful scarf and a fashionable narrow-rimmed hat” (Dimov 1: 150); his eyes “had become even sharper, colder and inexplicably evil. Their pupils were trembling nervously as in a beast who is stalking his prey, ready to attack it” (Dimov 1: 151). In sum, the epic norm controls the macro and the micro levels, the selection of characters and situations, as well as the figures of speech. The public debate around Tobacco showed, however, that this monologic structure did not yet ensure ideological acceptance. Subjected to a series of tragi-comic discussions at the Union of Bulgarian Writers, the novel was finally branded as unsuccessful. But the discussion was continued in the official newspaper Rabotnichesko delo, which published letters of former resistance-fighters, peasants, and workers in the tobacco industry, who testified to the novel’s historical accuracy. The polemic ended with an acerbic anonymous article in the Rabotnichesko delo, attributed to Valko Chervenkov, the omnipotent leader of the Communist Party, which “pardoned” Tobacco and attacked its critics. Nevertheless, Dimov accepted most of the criticism and adjusted the novel to conform to the ideological precepts. The debate instigated by Tobacco showed the omnipresence of ideology in totalitarian culture. Critics constantly appealed to a common taste, demanded that details be merged into the big picture, and demanded “correctness” in plot, character, and language. In this sense, the criticism was inevitably also genre-biased, for features of an unacceptable genre, such as the Naturalist novel, were condemned. Dimov’s over-enthusiastic interest in bourgeois lifestyles was considered a source of cheap carnality and sloth, and, above all, disproportionate compared to his interest in the proletarian world. Why, critics asked, were readers not spared the stink of a dead body? And why had Dimov depicted a Communist with just one eye? The language was found inadequate because of its “psychologism” that dealt with petty and insignificant matters, “Freudianism,” which dwelt on the subconscious and sex, elite “culturalism,” employing metaphors

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asking for a certain cultural competence slowed down the reading, and “naturalism” with its keen portrayals of sensuality. Critics wanted to cleanse Tobacco of traces of the bourgeois novel, specifically naming Louis Bromfield and Somerset Maugham as undesirable influences on Dimov. He was expected to launch a clean genre — the socialist epic novel. At the end of the 1960s and the early 70s, a rising interest in the local and the organic led Igov, Boian Nichev, and others to look for the “Bulgarian way of the novel.” They sought for a model free of foreign influences, a native narrative and organic tradition rooted in the “Bulgarian mind.” The wellhead of such an organic genre could only be oral culture and the socalled skaz. These critics focused on works that seemed to have escaped Western European genre typology and could thus be viewed as exemplifications of the “Bulgarian novel”: memoirs, such as Zahari Stoyanov’s Notes, or loose anecdotal works such as Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganju. Encho Mutafov followed the same critical strategy in the 1990s. We can judge the normative power of the epic model by reactions to novels that did not satisfy its horizon of expectations. Ever since the 1920s, Bulgarian novels have been incriminated for their “inappropriate” themes, for throwing a generally “incorrect” light on events and society, and for imitating “improper” Modernist methods of narration. Strashimirov’s Horo was forbidden by the Civil Court of Sofia, Petkanov’s Morava zvezda ka˘rvava was withdrawn and destroyed by government order, and Vezhinov’s Siniat zalez was destroyed in the press and withdrawn from the bookstores. In certain periods officials determine how novels should NOT look.

The historical novel

Introduction John Neubauer If we want to become a nation, it will not be sufficient to have a history, but we shall need representative men in the world of literature. At present, a single Walter Scott would be more valuable to us than five Žižkas.

Our motto, taken from František Palacký’s 1852 letter to the banished Karel Havlicˇek, exemplifies the significance of the historical novel for East-Central Europe. To Palacký, father of Czech historiography, a Czech writer of historical novels seemed more important than a military commander who would assume the modern role of the fifteenth-century Hussite leader Jan Žižka. It was logical but also ironic that Alois Jirásek, the immensely popular Czech writer of historical fiction in the decades around 1900, should adopt Palacký’s (and Masaryk’s) view that the religious movement of Jan Hus and Jan Žižka was a national uprising (Lettenbauer in Meˇštˇan 28) and devote most of his works to the Hussite period. One of the earliest Hungarian historical novels, Miklós Jósika’s The Czechs in Hungary (1839), took a more negative view of the Hussite uprising. Jósika and Jírásek represent not only different national perceptions of a historical event, but, as we shall see, also different relationships with respect to historiography. East-Central Europe had, as Palacký notes with regret, no Walter Scott. But if the region could not claim for itself this father of the historical novel, it had plenty of his sons and even some of his daughters: Miklós Jósika, Zsigmond Kemény, and Mór Jókai in Hungary; Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, and Henryk Sienkiewicz, Eliza Orzeszkowa in Poland; Josef Kajetán Tyl and Alois Jirásek in Bohemia; Panteleimon Kulish in the Ukraine; August Šenoa in Croatia; Ivan Vazov in Bulgaria; Eduard Bornhöhe in Estonia; and Vincas Pietaris in Lithuania — all these, and many more, writers cultivated the historical novel, sometimes with great success and sometimes with high artistry. The genre, as so many other literary forms, was imported into East-Central Europe, but it was there that it manifested itself perhaps most powerfully during the nineteenth century, and this was among all the literary genre perhaps the most popular in the region. Georg Lukács, who wrote the first comprehensive overview of the genre, was also from the region, though The Historical Novel (1937), written and published in Moscow, ironically fails to make any reference to East-Central European literature. Ignoring the region, Lukács writes about the English Scott and Dickens; the Italian Manzoni; the French Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert; the German Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Fontane, Stifter, the brothers Mann, and Feuchtwanger; the Russian Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy, and even the Dane Jacobsen, but

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mentions nobody from Poland (not even the Nobel-prize winner Sienkiewicz), Czechoslovakia, Romania, or, for that matter, his native Hungary. His unfamiliarity with the languages of the region cannot be an excuse, for by his own admission he was equally unfamiliar with Russian, and many of the historical novels would have been available to him in translation. As Lukács’s other studies show, the literature of East-Central Europe was simply not in his literary canon. In the case of historical novels, an added reason for the exclusion may have been that inasmuch as he knew about them, he ascribed them to a retrograde romantic tradition. It may be useful to clarify what Lukács meant by romantic and reactionary historical novels before we consider similar charges raised against the genre more recently and from different quarters. In fact, Lukács did not reject or ignore historical novels for their nationalism or chauvinism. In his view, ancient epic poems had already an “all-national character” that asked for “world-historical” individuals as protagonists and heroes. Historical novels portrayed, of course, “a much more differentiated social world than the ancient epos. And with the increasing class divisions and class oppositions the representative role of the “world-historical individual,” who concentrates the most important features of a society, takes on quite a different significance” (46). Hence nationalism remains marginal to Lukács’s treatment of historical fiction: history is, for him, a matter of class struggle, not a clash between nations. When nationalism appears in Scott’s historical novels (36, 53) and, more prominently, in Gogol’s Taras Bulba (74), Lukács approves of it, but only as a subordinate theme. The great historical novels use “minor characters” as protagonists (45). The principal figures in Scott’s novels are typical national characters, “but in the sense of the decent and average, rather than the eminent and all-embracing” (36). Scott never explains the age from the perspectives of its great representatives (39). What Lukács calls the “classical form of the historical novel” portrays “bottom up,” in contrast to the romantic historical novels that engage in “hero worshipping” (33, 63 ff.). Hence Lukács demands that the past be portrayed realistically, meaning that the figures and events must not only be credible but also representative for the historical moment and historical laws in operation. This demand for Realism is an unchanging constant; the historicity of the genre, its gradual decline from the highpoint reached in Scott, reflects the social and historical decline of the bourgeoisie. As Lukács writes in his original foreword, he wanted to show “how the historical novel in its origin, development, rise and decline follows inevitably upon the great social transformations of modern times; to demonstrate that its different problems of form are but artistic reflections of these social-historical transformations” (17). A short section in Endre Bojtár’s 1983 article on Romanticism in Eastern Europe (“A romantika” 123–27) seems to be one of the few treatments of the genre that tries to fill the regional gap in Lukács’s study. As Sándor Hites notes, Bojtár applies Lukács’s negative view of the romantic historical novel to its East-European exemplars, by foregrounding nationalism as its dangerous weakness: “exerting, as it were, the strongest influence on the nation’s unconscious,” the East-European historical novels “block our self-knowledge, and they disturb co-existence with our neighbors, the East-European small nations” (“A romantika” 127). The charge is serious, and surely applicable to many regional historical novels, but by assigning permanent meanings to these texts, implicitly assuming that this meaning is determined by the author’s intentions, it denies to historical novels a historicity of meaning (in contrast to content),

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which is constantly shifting, due to changes in the reading public. Could we not argue that the retrograde and chauvinist meanings were read into the novels by generations of nationalistic and chauvinistic readers that repressed those textual elements that did not fit their ideology? And may we as new readers not find in these texts language and form that breaks the straightjacket of monolithic meaning — even if that straightjacket was imposed on the text by the author’s own comments? The outline that Boyko Penchev’s article on Bulgarian novels offers (see the preceding section) of the changing perceptions of Ivan Vazov’s classic (romantic) novel Pod igoto (Under the Yoke; 1888) on the April 1876 Bulgarian Uprising, suggests a positive answer to these questions. Vazov scorned the national leaders for abandoning patriotism and the “old ideals,” and his best-known novel became canonized as an image of “the most Bulgarian time,” the national struggle for freedom. But critics had problems with its form from the very beginning, for it was conceived as an adventure novel à la Eugene Sue and because it combines disparate discourses, including description, essayistic detours, psychological analyses of “feverish” states of the soul, and exotic-adventurous passages. This heterogeneity was unacceptable for critics, both when the novel was published and later. Penchev quotes Ilia Milarov, one of Vazov’s early critics, who claimed that the book had no artistic and moral qualities, and regretted that such rich material did not inspire a “real epic.” As time went on, the allegedly nationalistic Pod igoto was canonized at the price of suppressing not only its generic heterogeneity but also its irony. Only after the political changeover in 1989 did scholars pay attention to the novel’s internal structure and its subversive novelistic patterns. Sándor Hites’s article below is a similar attempt to reconsider, and perhaps rehabilitate, Miklós Jósika’s and Zsigmond Kemény’s Hungarian historical novels, which were also appropriated for more than a century for nationalistic purposes. Here, as in the case of Vazov, innovative readings may discover meanings that nationalist interpretations (whether supported by the author or not) have overlooked or suppressed. A strict positivist concept of historical Realism must necessarily reject not only such hermeneutic and deconstructive reinterpretations of historical novels but also hermeneutic reinterpretations of the past in the novels themselves. The latter are evident, for instance, in Lukács’s threefold critique of the romantic historical novel. First, characters in the romantic historical novels tend to have the “psychology of a tormented Romantic,” even if extreme care is taken to be faithful to the historical details (60). Second, romantic historical novels, e.g., those of Vigny, show “marked subjectivism” by looking at the past from the perspective of the French revolution as a sequence of errors (75–76). Third, Victor Hugo is wrong when he transforms history “into a series of moral lessons for the present” (77). Bojtár further sharpens Lukács’s rejection of the romantic mode by calling its history merely “stage costume” and accusing the writers of “simply placing into the past the worn-out ideals of the present” (Bojtár, “A romantika” 125). But ideals are not “worn-out” permanently, and they may and do come back at a later stage in the form of a renaissance. If, as Bojtár claims (125), Sienkiewicz projected in Krzyz˙acy (The Teutonic Knights; 1900) his fin-de-siècle notion of “growth without revolution” back into the fifteenth century (a proof, incidentally, that historical novels often do not deal explicitly with the national past), this may indeed have been seen by twentienth-century revolutionaries as “worn out,” but with the experience of the twentieth-century revolutions

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behind us most of us would see it differently, and we may even excuse Sienkewicz for not giving us a “faithful” portrayal of the fifteenth century, especially since we no longer have Lukács’s faith in “objective” portrayals of the past. Last but not least, we must ask what implications the recent narrative reconsiderations of historiography have for studies of the historical novel. Those ongoing theoretical debates cannot be summarized here, but considered only from a historical angle: what were in East-Central Europe the historical relations between historiography proper and the historical novel? Studies of the region can rely here on recent studies by Lionel Gossman, Stephen Bann, and, above all, Ann Rigney, who sees no hierarchy among the discourses of history for all of them are “imperfect histories.” Though historiography emerged in the nineteenth century from under the cape of literature, it also had its (ideological and other) shortcomings. For Lukács, such a competition hardly existed, the division of labor was simple: “What matters […] in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events” (42). Thus historical novelists should produce “histories from below,” portraying those that history forgot, filling the gaps that professional historians cannot cover for lack of documentation (recent narrative case studies by historians have filled those gaps within historiography itself — thereby bringing closer the two fields). Turning to nineteenth-century East-Central Europe with these questions in mind, we actually discover several patterns. Sándor Hites finds that in Hungary the historical novelists (mainly Jósika) were so to speak ahead of the professional historians in the 1830s and 1840s, but that by the 1860s historians organized themselves in professional organizations and came out with great professional histories that henceforth claimed for themselves the authentic interpretation of the past. To what extent they really were more “objective” than their romantic literary predecessors is open to question, for, without admitting it publicly, most of them were no less swayed by the national myths than their literary counterparts, certainly in the years leading up to the millennial celebrations, during which a great number of nationalist historical research programs were launched. Almost two decades had to pass before the young historian Gyula Szekfu˝ began to demolish some of the national myths that his colleagues constructed under the banner of objectivity. The relation between historiography and literature was significantly different in nineteenthcentury Czech culture. Historiography, embodied in the figure of František Palacký, spearheaded here the National Renaissance and it took a generation or so until writers would assume a leading role in the struggle for independence. But putting matters this way is perhaps not quite accurate, for Palacký was in many respects a historian with literary taste and inclination, as the motto of this introduction also suggests. Though he was a prodigious scholar, he did not yet engage in a painstaking sifting through archival evidence, and this explains, for instance, why he insisted to the end of his life that Václav Hanka’s literary forgeries were authentic. Historiography and constructing a national myth of the past went hand in hand in his work. As mentioned, the first really important Czech historical novelist, Alois Jírásek, followed Palacký in believing that the Hussite movement was a national rather than religious movement, and he dedicated a significant portion of his work to it. But it is indicative of the Czech conditions that Jírásek’s burst of historical novels came only in the 1880s (Josef Kajetán Tyl, a generation earlier, was a much less respected figure; Karl Havlicˇek, a follower of Palacký,

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severely criticized him). If in Hungary the upcoming historians tried to crowd out the writers of historical novels, in Bohemia the historical novel was launched, so to speak, by the older historian Palacký. Jírásek was in some respects comparable to Jósika, but he was more a contemporary of the Hungarian Géza Gárdonyi. The more scholarly group around the journal Ruch approached the historical novel differently, namely “by means of a systematic, expert study of sources and literary documents, contemporary language, material remains and life forms of the past. […] Many of these authors were professional historians. Not a few of their literary themes were inspired by their renowned university professor, Václav Vladivoj Tomek, official historian of the city of Prague, who in contrast to the ideological interests of Palacký, cultivated an extreme concern for facts and reliable detail” (Arne Novák 197). This more careful use of the historical material corresponds to the sober work of Masaryk and others that finally demonstrated that Hanka’s manuscripts were spurious. While Masaryk in this sense contributed, like Szekfu˝, to the demythologizing of the national past, he held on to Palacký’s idealizing of the Hussite movement, which explains why Jírásek could also be his follower (Plaschka 18). The Communist regimes made ample use of the historical novel to gain support by appealing to nationalism and to generate a combative and “heroic” mentality. What Penchev describes in his article on the Bulgarian novel as the “epic pressure,” the expectation that writers portray heroic models that could be followed, existed in all East-European countries under Communism. Lukács’s book on the history of the historical novel, indeed his whole theory of the novel, is based on its difference from the epos, but he was forced to envisage a return of the epic in the novels of Socialism. As we saw, he excused himself on grounds of linguistic inability for not writing on the new heroes of Soviet literature, but it was a weak excuse and he was often attacked for it. But his hints at the “return of the epic” played an important role in the rehabilitation of historical novels that glorified “heroic” patriotic deeds. Such a glorification of heroes went hand in hand with the rejection of the psychological (modernist) novel on the one hand and Naturalism on the other. That the Communist “heroic” view of (exemplary figures of) the past should have recently led to a backlash against the romantic historical novel is understandable. But the reception history of historical fiction, including family chronicles and genealogical narratives, has not come to an end. The genre will surely continue to live on, for it inevitably forces us to approach it through bifocal lenses that read not just the age described but also the age of writing that, for most readers, has also become history.

The Hungarian historical novel in regional context Sándor Hites Endre Bojtár has suggested that the nineteenth-century historical novels of East-Central Europe lack realistic representation, use naïve poetical devices, and have undesirable political

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implications in that they support nationalism (Keresztirányok 124). Our revaluation of the historical novel within the Hungarian context will show that the rhetorical skills manifested in the genre allow a new approach that undermines its apparent ideological investments. Such a revaluation should ultimately map out how the genre has interacted with articulations of historical sensibility in such other cultural manifestations as historical painting and drama, film, art, museum, and opera. Our following account will restrict itself to the interaction between historiography and the historical novel, but will widen the horizon by arguing that features of recent metafiction, such as self-conscious fictionality and self-reflexive narrative devices, were already present in the nineteenth-century historical novel. Both nineteenth-century historiography and recent historiographical metafiction tended to devalue the romantic historical novel. Nineteenth-century historians applied to the historical novel their scholarly standards and found it an immature and, in the final instance, an harmful mode of representing history, while postmodern irony perceives it as conservative and points out a lack of playfulness on the textual level.

I. Mutuality and rivalry Separating historical knowledge from historical writing has become more difficult. The growing awareness of the textual or figural dimensions in historical narratives led to modifications in the theory of history, rearrangements not only in the way we read historiography but also in the perspective from which we interpret the historical novel. The insight that historical studies cannot be separated from their mode of writing, that rhetorical and fictional patterns prefigure the field in which historians develop their argument, and that the will to persuasion determines the historian’s rhetorical devices, offer opportunities to reopen discussion on the historical novel. If, according to Hayden White, the works of professional historians are also to be considered as literary artifacts, one should also reconsider the poetic achievements of historical fiction, even if its objectivity is often questionable. Histories and historical novels deeply implicate each other as they are rivals in competition for discursive power. They are different means of gaining control over the interpretation of the past, over the making and remaking of national history, national memory and identity, over politics and hopes for the future. The historical sensibility that emerged in the 1820s was devoted to the discovery of the national past. As Ferenc Kölcsey noted in his National Traditions (1826), the absence of an organic literary and historical tradition functioned as a stimulation to reconstitute what had been lost. This generated in the first place expectations for a national epic. In East-Central Europe, the attempts to develop coherent national historical narratives not only strengthened national identity but also legitimated discursive power and political goals. Historical novels played a significant and sometimes double role in these processes. The first works of the genre, published in the 1830s, contributed to a reconstitution of the national past, sometimes even satisfying the hopes for a national epic, whose modernity had been disputed. Nevertheless, when professional historians emerged, they dismissed the literary versions of history. Interpreting the past became a scholarly matter with its own standards of accuracy and coherence. Opposition between fact and fiction, representation and figure, beauty and truth started to dominate the reception of the

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historical novel. The genre had to deal with the shifting boundaries between fictionality and factuality. As the notion of reality changed during the nineteenth century, the genre’s place in the canon weakened. According to LaCapra, historians and novelists shared an interest in experimental literature until the professionalization of historiography towards the end of the nineteenth century (8). Thomas Carlyle‘s Sartor Resartus may serve as an example. LaCapra adds that the mutual interest waned when later historiography failed to catch up with the poetic changes of the novel. Mutuality, one may suggest, turned into rivalry and East-Central Europe staged a peculiar competition between them. Two recent studies of the relations between literature and historiography suggest that their temporal diversity may be reduced to two unproblematic phases. Lionel Gossman argues that the relation had been unproblematic before the nineteenth century, for history had been considered a branch of literature (Gossman 227). Ann Rigney follows this line of argument, claiming that it remained unproblematic until history and literature became distinct disciplines in the nineteenth century (ix). Gossman and Rigney appear to deal with a harmoniously structured historical process: though the stages contradict each other, they are internally unproblematic. They pay less attention to the breaking point in the story. We shall focus on this very moment, actually some thirty years, during which, according to Gossman and Rigney, the two discourses turned antagonistic. Rivalry became typical for the second half of the nineteenth century. The rivalry that developed in mid-century shows that the historical novel had a subversive power well before recent historiographic metafiction has challenged the ways historians had understood and represented the past. To revaluate nineteenth-century historical fiction is not merely to show that fictionality or literariness has always been a problematic aspect of historical discourse. It also reveals how important the structure of mutual supplementation between the two discourses might be for politics in East-Central Europe. The nineteenth-century historical novel is usually presented here as a culprit for generating xenophobic tendencies: the genre had a key role in shaping those popular images of the past that often endanger the cooperation among the region’s nations (Keresztirányok 120). But the meaning of the historical novels in their original time and place ought to be distinguished from their later exploitation for political purposes. Literary texts seldom have intrinsic political messages; they are interpreted politically in particular historical situations and from ideological premises. We suggest that from the 1860s onward the narratives of historiography were more monological and nationalistic than the historical novels, which were more heterogeneous. Of course, historical fiction did not always revise political biases but it undoubtedly also produced multivocal discourses. Surveying certain stages of the rivalry, we shall first focus on the way experts of history tried to eliminate literary devices, reduce diversity, and regain or maintain control over the public.

II. A professional closure Early Hungarian theories of the novel defined the Román (the novel) as the opposite of Historia. In 1824 Sámuel Balogh claimed that history deals with events as they actually happened, while

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the novel focuses on the self: history relates the external stories of the world, while the novel concerns itself with feelings and ideas (“Románokról” 72). Emotion and imagination are for the novel and should be excluded from historical writing. József Bajza followed him in 1833 by stating that history should tell what really happened (“A Románköltésro˝l” 79). Yet the social tasks attributed to each of the disciplines and genres were not distributed as clearly as these definitions suggest. From the 1830s onward, the historical novel was seen as carrier of a cultural mission: it was to enlarge the reading public in the vernacular, contribute to the development of criticism, and stimulate historical memory. When Miklós Jósika published Abafi in 1836, his first historical novel, critics erroneously considered it as the first Hungarian novel in general. Abafi, written in Walter Scott’s style, erased the memory of eighteenth- and the early-nineteenth-century novels, it even overshadowed three novels, one by Jósika himself, published in the same year. Calling it a “founding” act, labeling Jósika “the founder of Hungarian novel,” was a way for critics to found and legitimate their own practice. When historiography proper emerged and the national novel seemed to be firmly established, Jósika’s founding fame lost his luster. Ferenc Toldy, the leading literary historian and critic, tried to convince Jósika in the 1840s that he should abandon contemporary topics in favor of writing about national icons of the past such as Miklós Zrinyi. By that time, however, the cultural role Toldy attributed to the genre was already questioned and challenged. Lázár Petrichevich-Horváth, a failed novelist, claimed that the historical novel was a very dangerous “hermaphrodite” genre that added fiction to facts and threatened truth (332). Hoping that historiography would take the place of the historical novel and recover a demarcation line between imagination and truth, he claimed that the historical novel usurped the duties and functions of historiography; its existence and popularity was due only to the absence of historiographical institutions. József Eötvös made a twofold statement on the relation of novel and historiography in the Preface to his novel Hungary in 1514 (1847), constituting thus, as it were, the conceptual framework for the coming debates about the division of labor among the historical discourses. Historical novels should rely on scholarly research and need not erase its traces (e.g. quotations from historians). At the same time, they should support historians by propagating and popularizing historical studies among lay readers. Eötvös believed that these goals could be reached in a single work, but this view proved quite problematic later. Zsigmond Kemény, Eötvös’s contemporary, saw history as a form of literary memory, claiming that historical writing should strike a balance between resurrecting and projecting or creating the past. Kemény was as sensitive to style as to the scholarly problems of historical representation. He furthered the republication of seventeenth-century Hungarian memoirs that came to inspire and influence the historical novel from the 1850s onward and became themselves canonized as literary achievements (Kemény, “Élet” 127). Kemény’s highly influential biographical essays on Széchenyi and Wesselényi, written in the manner of Macaulay, served both as artistic examples and as sources for future historians. The farewell of historiography to literature in the 1850s assigned different social roles to historians and novelists. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire, Hume, or Bessenyei in Hungary produced significant work in the divergent fields of philosophy, history, and literature. In the nineteenth century, it became increasingly more difficult to excel in several disciplines.


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Nevertheless, the novelists Jósika and Mór Jókai both produced histories, Zsigmond Kemény was a novelist, an essayist, and a historian, and Eötvös was equally influential as a politician, a novelist, and a social philosopher. However, as history became a discipline practiced by professionals at universities or research institutes, taste shifted. Kemény’s novels and historical studies attracted few readers but were accepted by professionals. Mihály Horváth, one of the great historians of the age, admitted that his biography of Martinuzzi was largely indebted to Kemény’s novel, Zord ido˝, whereas Jósika’s and Jókai’s popular works scandalized those who entertained different norms of objective representation. These issues were most exhaustively played out in Jósika’s A Magyarok O˝störténelme (Ancient History of the Hungarians; 1861). Written before historiography became institutionalized in the late 1860s, it represented a transition that could not have been published a decade later. The preface interprets the relation between historiography and historical novel as a triple supplementation. Jósika first considers his own history (written by one of Hungary’s most successful novelists) a “stairway” leading to scholarly history. He subsequently speaks of a “bridge.” The third, proper, supplementation occurs when a novelist uses literary techniques and writes about events inaccessible to professional historians. These three ways of supplementation use diverse spatial metaphors to establish a triple relation between historiography and the historical novel: Jósika’s work is a “stairway” to reach the “higher” field of historiography proper; a “bridge” that connects equally ranked disciplines; and a supplement that completes the historians’ work from inside, exploiting devices that they cannot use. Moreover, it involves different modes of writing, more than one discipline, and professional as well as amateur audiences. Jósika believed that his historical novels had prepared his own historical study, which, to borrow his architectural metaphor, was to arch over the gulf between historiography and literature. Although Jósika respected historiography, he was conscious of the power that popular novelistic techniques offered him. When, for instance, he depicts the ninth-century treaty among the Hungarian tribes, he invents fictional speeches that rely on the rhetorical standards of his own age; he emplots the event so that it strongly recalls the events of the March 15, 1848 revolution. This is inauthentic but offers a striking symbolic parallel between the two events. Instead of an objective representation, Jósika aimed at an allegory of the revolutionary days, and he defended this by claiming that Hungarian readers familiar with their own tradition will approve his representation of the treaty, even if historians should question it. Hungarians readers, he says, would know that it could not have happened otherwise. Does this mean that a national bias may legitimate an ahistorical representation? How are we to account for Jósika’s disregard for the protocol of historical scholarship? Jósika’s work fails the scholarly test but achieves relevance within the post-1848 context, exploiting an implicit contract that binds an audience to his voice. The contract allows him to legitimize a fictional representation by means of a figurative meaning that makes history intelligible for the interpretative community of his readers. The most important publisher of the time, Gustave Heckenast, knew that the second edition of László Szalay’s more professional six-volume History of Hungary, and a similar work by the leading historian Mihály Horváth were soon to be published. Apparently he made no distinction as yet between Jósika’s work and studies by professional historians, for he wrote to Jósika that there may be no need for his Ancient History. As a publisher he sensed what readers wanted; he

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only asked whether Jósika’s work could compete with the others and sell. History writing depended on popularity as well as on professional skills. The prevailing institutional conditions changed by the late 1860s. When professionals started to legitimize themselves institutionally, new voices emerged. When amnesty was given to the participants of the 1848–49 revolution in 1867, Mihály Horváth returned from exile and immediately became a member of the Kisfaludy Társaság, the leading Literary Society. Toldy, its secretary, stressed in his laudatio that Horváth’s artistic abilities raised Hungarian historiography to a national art; for Toldy, Horváth had the stylistic skills of a poet. But Horváth’s inaugural speech, “Why Is Art Barren Today and Why Is History Writing More Fruitful in Producing Masterpieces?” announced the coming of scholarly history (472). The contrast between the two speeches indicates a conceptual division rather than a misunderstanding. Horváth’s notion of history writing marks a new relationship between history and the arts, signaling a fundamental shift from views dominant until the late 1860s to those that came to dominate historiographic thinking from the 1870s onward. Toldy‘s concept of literature still included history and other forms of writing. Horváth considered historiography a scholarship rather than an art, although his path-breaking Twenty-five Years of Hungary’s History set an example by mixing political and economic studies with literary history. Moreover, Horváth borrowed his influential master trope, “reform” (still the designation for the period 1820–1848), from the literary movement of the 1810s and 1820s. The split was reinforced on an institutional level. Toldy was the chairman of the History Department at the Academy, while Horváth was active in the Hungarian Historical Society (Magyar Történelmi Társulat), a new independent organization that acquired an official status in the Monarchy after 1867. At the first meeting of the Society president Imre Mikó declared that the task of dealing with the past belonged to the historians; they had exclusive right to define “reality” and to use this knowledge to establish proper models for political thought and activity. Horváth added that history, written by historians, had to turn itself into a science of national self-knowledge (untitled speech in Horváth, Századok 5). These declarations clearly aimed at a professional closure, though they did not set up a firm line of demarcation between historiography and literature. They were to protect professional interests, motivated perhaps by a sense of insecurity rather than superiority. Institutionalized historiography sought to appropriate the sole right to produce and govern images of national history. As a result, the use of imagination and of rhetorical and poetic devices was now perceived as inappropriate. Decisions on proper objects of inquiry and ways of depicting them were based on underlying notions about reality. When historians arrogated the power to decide what (historical) reality was, literary critics started to abandon representations of history, now considered to be a matter of cognition. In the early 1860s, Ferenc Salamon could still claim that the emergence of the historical novel had positively influenced not merely the novel but historiography as well (495). But for the critics of the 1870s and 1880s historical novels could no longer be read as histories, for they were not scientific. According to them, history could be transformed into a romance by telling it imaginatively, but only cognitive inquiries could give access to the past, and those were entrusted to historiographers. Selfconscious methodological insistence on the new historical paradigm contributed thus to the


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separation of history from literature. Footnotes, which had been widely used by historical novelists, now became suspicious in fictional texts. In order to reconceptualize these issues, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences asked literary critics in the 1870s to participate in an essay-competition about the relations between the literary and the scientific ways of writing history. Károly Szász’s prize-winning essay relied on the familiar concept that historical fiction had to popularize historiography: it could neither contradict popular sentiment nor ignore the new information provided by historians (42–61). But mediation could imply different temporal relations between historiography and the historical novel. According to Eötvös, the novel should follow historical research, should profit from its findings and make them available to a wide public. According to Petrichevich-Horváth, the novel represented an earlier stage in historical discourse and became illegitimate as soon as institutionalized historiography emerged. Szász claimed that historical novels had to make plausible to the public historiographic information that undermined popular beliefs. The novel could thus precede or follow historiography. Literary critics and historians noted the dissociation of the discourses more readily than novelists and readers. At the Historical Society’s 1855 Conference, historians warned once more the audience (and themselves) that reading “senseless, stupid novels” could not reveal the past, only historiography could (Rómer 119). Similarly, a letter addressed to the editor of Budapesti Szemle rhetorically asked: “Is the poet or the writer of a historical novel allowed […] to construct stories contrary to the given historical record […] and spread incorrect knowledge and views?” (479). Frigyes Pongrátz, author of the letter, appeals to ethical, perhaps even legal, measures against non-professional historical discourses, though his question shows he was aware of the power that writers had on the public’s notion of what in history was plausible and attractive. Historians recognized that in the popular mind national history remained the domain of historical novelists, even after their reliability became questionable. Public opinion remained skeptical of historical research, even when it learned to recognize the difference between scientific and artistic approaches. Thus the 1885 Congress of the Hungarian Historical Society made an attempt to co-opt the widely popular literary representations by demanding historical credibility and pedagogical skills from them. National mythology received validity in public schools. The Congress considered popular beliefs a necessary preliminary stage in the educational process. This attempt to reconcile scientific objectivity and the continuous education of the masses was challenged, however, by Gyula Szekfu˝’s Rákóczi in Exile (1913), in which the young historian demythologized a national icon on the basis of documents. The protests that followed revealed that even experts were reluctant to face unpalatable but valid pictures of the past.

III. Romanticism and metafiction Literary historians use two models to account for the origin and the development of historical novels in East-Central Europe. The first traces the evolution of the genre to its origins in Walter Scott. The antiquarian sensibility that offered representations of customs and manners, emphasizing the external appearance of characters and objects, moved later towards depictions of processes in consciousnesses of the past, offering psychological realism and greater fidelity

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to historical data. The second model emphasizes regional features and argues that the Romantic historical novel replaced the heroic epic but continued to glorify the national past (László Imre 137–55). Both epic and historical fiction idealize their heroes, they both manipulate historical data to serve present goals and account only for those facts that legitimize the national narrative (Bojtár, “A romantika” 124). This view deprives the historical novel of the critical and the selfcritical edge that distinguishes the novel from the epic. Both views regard the romantic historical novel as a product of antiquarianism, a romance with superficial modes of representation that soon became outdated. It is in this sense that a two-year debate (1967–69) in the literary journal Tiszatáj concluded that the twentieth-century return of the romantic historical novel as youth literature or adventure fiction in the work of Géza Gárdonyi and Jókai’s followers was trash. From Georg Lukács’ Marxist perspective, the historical novel played a role in the development of high-realism but lacked the potential for renewal. Marxists devalued the EastCentral European tradition of the genre as “reactionary Romanticism” — a notion that covered everything that did not fit into orthodox Marxist teleology. The works of Zsigmond Kemény, for instance, were not published between 1947 and the late 1960s because of his doubt in progress, his distrust of mass movements, and his general irony and skepticism. Jókai was said to offer unrealistic nationalist models by developing a peculiar “happy-heroic consciousness” of history in his popular historical romances. These views survive in the post-communist era. According to Bojtár, the genre had a major role in blocking the emergence of self-analyses in the national memories of the region (“A romantika” 127), an idea that updates the Marxist charge that the genre was politically incorrect for opposing progress. But reading these novels as political allegories disregards the fact that content and form often have different political implications: radical or progressive political messages may be cast in conventional poetic form, while conservative views may be articulated by means of experimental language (Berkhoffer 238). The Hungarian historical novels were not politically incorrect on the thematic level and we ought to explore the politics of their poetic and rhetorical structures. We must recognize that novels informed by national biases may acquire different meanings in different cultures. For example, while Jósika‘s early novel, A csehek Magyarországban (The Czechs in Hungary) inspired debates and protest after its publication in 1837, when some Czech critics read it in German translation; his Eszther (1853), which deals with a young Jewish lady’s fortune in fourteenth-century Poland, was very well received in that country. Events portrayed through a national bias may allow for different interpretations. To expect from historical accounts “objective representations” of a “social reality” is an epistemological delusion. To claim that conflicting vantage points make the historical novel unreliable is to adopt one of Lukács’s oversimplifications that are questioned today even by Marxist critics (Foley 77–79). A conflict of interpretations is politically desirable. Jósika’s The Czechs and other historical novels represent cultural and temporal relativity in sophisticated ways. The short preface to The Czechs announces that the work will be successfully read if male readers compare themselves to the hero and female ones see the heroine as a moral example. This sounds rather didactic, but reading the novel it becomes quite unclear how to carry out the preface’s instructions. The chivalrous ideals of Elemér, the hero, are considered anachronistic by most of the characters in the novel. Readers are therefore supposed to identify with a figure whose values are not in


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accord with those of his fictional contemporaries. The Christian birth of the young Jewish heroine, Aminha, is revealed only at the end of the novel. To the lords and high priests who want her to reconvert she declares that she will keep the belief in which she grew up, because “time is a gap between us […]. We believe in things-to-come that our eyes see as past” (675). If she is a moral example then different notions of temporality can legitimize different cultural and religious values. The novel ultimately avoids didacticism because the expectations of its preface impose no moral codes on readers: reading may also lead to an understanding of the relativity of culture and history. Further examples also show that the nineteenth-century historical novel offers more than narrow-minded notions of history in naive representational forms. In Zsigmond Kemény‘s novel, A rajongók (The Fanatics), from 1858, the thirty-year War appears as a struggle over the interpretation of history’s ultimate meaning. At the center are the attempts of the Unitarians (who were tolerated only in Transylvania during the early seventeenth century) to gain legal acceptance and equal rights among the Protestant beliefs. The religious debate that leads to the novel’s tragic collision shows how different beliefs imply different conceptions of time and history. The Unitarian belief differs from the official state and protestant church ideology because it is based on a different notion of historicity. In Karl Löwith‘s terms (235–315), the Unitarians look at history form the perspective of eternity (Ewigkeit) while the official ideology seeks temporality (Zeitlichkeit). Kemény‘s novel treats the institutionalization of Calvinism as a shift from a divine order to a temporal experience of history. One can even say that A rajongók represents the very moment when history sheds its sacral meaning and becomes secularized. Kemény’s Zord ido˝ (Grim Time) establishes a network of prophecies and historical prognoses. The story occurs in 1541, the year the Turks took the royal town of Buda. Forecasts made in the novel destabilize linear ways of experiencing history. Debating how to respond to the Turkish army at the walls of Buda, the Hungarian lords use past examples, but the readers who know the future of that past moment see the futility of such deductions from the past. The multiple perspectives of the discussions in the novel replay earlier and anticipate later voices. The present, a moment that is about to reach historical significance, represents a radical rupture between intentions and projected consequences. Interpretations of the past and the present constantly change because experience keeps rearranging the structures within which history can be told. Nevertheless, readers can verify by hindsight the prognosis that one of the lords, Frangepán, offers for the next two centuries. This helps future readers in rethinking their own temporality, not because they now know what “truth” is but because Frangepán’s prophecy ironically claims that one cannot help imposing meanings on history, even if by the very act of forecasting the interpretation detaches itself from reality. In its rhetorical form, prophecy has no power to resolve things because it can only become true in subsequent narrative. Written from the author’s nineteenth-century perspective, this account promises no reconciliation but offers an allegorical structure for an always-uncertain future. These examples should indicate that nineteenth-century historical novels are capable of dealing with metahistorical aspects, and contain no inherent “self-destructing nationalism” (Bojtár, “A romantika” 127). Far from being impediments in the regional interchange between different ethnic groups and cultures, they may facilitate exchange if we recognize their poetic modality. The best exemplars contain a wide variety of voices that remind the readers how

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contingent historical meanings are. Even where they fail to address other cultures they expose the prevailing prejudices. In the 1990s Hungarian novelists resurrected the genre in works that are usually classified as “historiographic metafiction.” They do not claim to offer objective depictions and judgments of past events, but to reflect upon the genre’s traditional strategies and to rewrite them ironically. János Háy adopts Jókai‘s heritage by citing him in the title, Dzsigerdilen. He repeatedly alludes to the literary devices of the romantic author, and he constantly recalls and rejects the Romantic genre, occasionally through intertextual references. For instance, some of Háy’s historical characters interpret the events as if they knew Gárdonyi‘s 1901 historical novel Az egri csillagok (The Stars above Eger) and the interwar poetry of Attila József, pretending thus to be aware of their own fictionality. László Márton’s Jacob Wunschwitz igaz története (The True Story of Jacob Wunschwitz) rewrites the story of Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, in order to explore the integrity of a story and the possibility of telling lives. The first volume of Zsolt Láng‘s Bestiarium Transylvaniae, takes place in seventeenth-century Hungary, a setting favored by the romantic writers. Láng revives a long-forgotten form, the manual of fictional-mythical beasts, to play with the representational techniques of the historical novel and push them toward the fantastic. László Darvasi‘s A könnymutatványosok legendája (Legend of the Tear-Exhibitioners) attempts to carry out a literary plan of the deceased Miklós Mészöly (to whom the novel is dedicated) by expanding one of his short texts (Mészöly 12–17). But Darvasi’s novel reworks also Milorad Pavic´‘s Dictionary of the Khazars by abandoning chronology and constructing such an arbitrary plot in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that no causal-teleological order can be extracted from it. The dechronologizing is enhanced by setting the plot in a rich and inherently fictional space of East-Central Europe. It has been claimed that the metafictional novels of the 1990s lay bare the poetical and political failures of traditional novels without always succeeding in overcoming them. In fact they reinforced the view that the nineteenth-century historical novel was a vehicle of intolerance and national bias that mistakenly sought neutral and immediate representations rather than linguistically and figuratively sophisticated ones. But, as Linda Hutcheon notes, historiographic metafiction “inscribes and only then subverts its mimetic engagement” (A Poetics 20). Hungarian metafiction should have radically questioned the teleological pattern that increasingly sought authenticity in the genre’s development, for the new novels alluded to the romances of Gárdonyi, Jókai and others and sought no “reality-effect.” The revival of the historical novel in historical metafictions also can be seen as a symptom that Romanticism and Postmodernism “asymmetrically” mirror each other (Levinson). Recent historiographic metafiction reads romantic historical novels ironically, but the latter can also serve as a lens to read the former. If metafictional devices are inherent in the tradition of writing novels (Waugh 5), historical metafiction cannot assume a poetically or politically superior vantage point over the historical novel. The recent exemplars do not only subvert but also imitate the earlier form and ask for familiarity with it. Since the metafictional components are in a dialogue with the representations and devices of the tradition, they endow them with new meanings. The destabilization of omniscient narrators and homogeneous structures did not start with metafiction; even the most authoritarian texts contain elements that work against simple readings (Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions 236–243). Nineteenth-century critics often chastised the


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historical novels of their day for absence of chronology, obscurity, fictionality, invention, deviation from the historical data, and heterogeneity — aspects that critics today value in novels. In turn, didacticism and ideology are present in historiographic metafiction as well (Waugh 11). A revision should start from the cracks in the unfolding of the traditional narratives, from elements that work against their totalizing claims. If it seems that we have made a sudden leap from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, it is partly because recent historical novels, in their attempts to revise the genre’s early stages, have marginalized the texts written during the intermediate period. If less attention is paid today to the most highly praised Hungarian historical novels of the first half of the twentieth century, for instance Zsigmond Móricz’s magnificent Erdély-trilogy, this indicates that the recent novels, by ironically alluding to the genre’s nineteenth-century tradition, also produce a rupture. These texts don’t experience the genre’s heritage as linear. Historical novels that are poetically as divergent as Kosztolányi’s Nero, a véres költo˝ (Nero, the Bloody Poet; 1922) and Ferenc Herczeg’s Az élet kapuja (Gate of Life; 1919) are at the moment alien and far removed from the genre’s contemporary discourse, while Ignácz Mészáros’ Kártigám (1772), actually a translation of a third-rate German Baroque novel that lost all its appeal during the first half of the nineteenth century, reappeared in László Márton’s trilogy Testvériség (Brotherhood; 2001–03) as a fictional starting point for Márton’s reconsideration of the whole Hungarian storytelling tradition. The revival of forgotten or outdated traditions inevitably overshadows recent more vivid ones.

IV. A short genealogy of genealogy in novels Let us examine in conclusion the continuities between the Romantic and the Postmodern versions of the genre by comparing a recent Hungarian historical fiction with the Romantic one, focusing on genealogy as a subject matter and poetic structure. Synthesizing an orientation towards the quotidian with metahistorical approaches, Péter Esterházy’s Harmonia caelestis (2000) uses the devices of the historical and the family novel to write both personal and national histories. In contrast to important recent studies on family histories, Harmonia caelestis focuses on family stories, taken from the Esterházys, one of the most prominent Hungarian aristocratic families still around. Esterházy employs narratives about or by his once powerful ancestors to connect the narrator’s personal life-story with that of Hungary. The second part of the book, “Confessions of an Esterházy-family,” depicts its twentieth-century history, characterized by its now gradual now sudden diminishing of its former power and influence. Esterházy’s penchant for silent quoting undermines the authenticity of this novel. His enormous intertextual network mediates between history and fiction without reducing one to the other. It does not validate the documentary sources; it merely interlinks different worlds via different languages. By inserting historical elements into fictional worlds it effaces the difference between original and “borrowed” texts, between verifiable and forged historical writings. In one scene, which also reveals the novel’s regional links, a young Esterházy waits for his execution in Danilo Kiš’s Encyclopedia of the Dead. The abundance of reconstituted

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historical material directs attention to what has been lost, focusing on the import that possession has for the possessor or inheritor. Esterházy transforms the regional experience of discontinuity, the impossibility of bequeathing values, and the recurrent annihilation of traditions into an idiosyncratic historical fiction: “here nothing ever continues, everything ought to be started over and over again” (694). In “Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy Family,” the first part, “my father” stands for a whole range of characters, including some historical family members. The short pieces, ranging from a paragraph to a few pages, form a figurative rather than chronological sequence. By describing himself as “my father’s son,” the narrator gains a blurred and multiple identity that is linked to the changing fortunes of Hungary. His provisional identities are linked to an (unnamed) family that undergoes endless imaginary mutations, signaled also in the frequently employed expression, “And then, here came my father’s name, the highly honorable.” The key term may stand for a particular father, for a universal notion of all the fathers, and for the very absence of the father. Since a name can only be “proper” if it has one meaning, the genealogical mutations erase the proper name and turn it into a plurality of signs pointing to the past. The ceaseless displacements, the transformations that subvert the identity of the central trope, the father, make a linear following of the genealogy impossible. The second part, written in a slightly more traditional narrative form, reintroduces temporal sequences and recurrent motifs; its main concern is to settle the inheritance of the unstable “biographical” father. But the son’s relation to the father unfolds in textual imagery rather than on thematic and psychological levels. Harmonia caelestis transforms the past by evoking and effacing historical referents and memories, by following diverse elements in a constant play of substitutions rather than a preestablished historical order. However, it does not erase the difference between fact and fiction: delicately oscillating between the two, it creates, instead of erasing, several centers of meaning by constantly recomposing the historical contexts, in the first part even in single sentences. Ambiguous yet recognizable identifications displace the father and the narrator. In Harmonia caelestis, the overburdened historical meaning of “Esterházy” leads to contingency and arbitrariness. Was genealogy treated and used differently in Romanticism? Miklós Jósika was himself born into a family of historical significance and also wrote a biographical novel about one of his ancestors: Jósika István (1847). But Az utolsó Bátori (1837) lends itself better to comparison for it deals with the important historical name Báthory. At first sight, The Last Bátori appears to be an ordinary historical biography of the reigning prince of Transylvania in the early 1600s. The first analogy to Harmonia caelestis is that Gábor Bátori’s actions and self-understanding are also burdened by the weight of a family name. Gábor’s unsubstantial figure is totally determined by his sixteenth-century ancestors Zsigmond Bátori, István Bátori, and Erzsébet Bátori. To insist upon the name, particularly a historical name, as signifier is to violate realistic expectations. The first name of the individual ancestors represent different values, features, principles, events, fates, and actions; the last name, Bátori, refers to all of its holders and alludes to all of the meanings they ever represented. The ancestors define the last Bátori; he is less defined by his title. Responding to an insult he remarks at one point: “He offended me not merely as a prince but also as a Bátori, which, for a Bátori, is worse” (2: 56).


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Gaining familiarity with the genealogy in the unfolding narrative undercuts the identity of the hero, since he is constantly compared to and interpreted by his exemplary predecessors. In Jósika’s romantic novel this genealogical perspective is articulated by the historical characters, not by the narrator: “I don’t particularly care for the prince; admittedly, he is young and may, depending on fortune, turn into anything, an István or a Zsigmond” (1: 100). The narrator describes the last Bátori as a degenerate final product of an organic family tree: “This is how he became a gnarled bush instead of a beautiful plant-king” (1: 151). Heritage is not an asset but a threat to the inheritor. At the end, the Prince’s minion turns out to be an illegitimate Bátori, so that it becomes uncertain who the “last Bátori” actually is. Does the narrative of the title end when Gábor dies at the end of the novel? Jósika’s genealogical vision in The Last Bátori portrays the decline of a powerful family, but the figure of the minion shows that the name has no firm boundaries: the text questions the validity and intelligibility of the genealogical treatment of the past. Both Jósika’s and Esterházy’s text systematically subvert genealogical identification, both of them create history with words and names. But while the narrator of The Last Bátori does not play with names, the speaker of Harmonia caelestis does: “I am not related to my family, I am a member of it, I am it, it is me” (616). Jósika questions neither the identity of the narrator nor the authority of the tradition, which he evokes to shed light on the last inheritor. The last member of the family, Gábor, cannot revise his heritage. As we move within the genealogical repertory the hero is seen under changing aspects, but the repertoire itself is fixed, the elements of the substitutions keep their meanings. There is play with the meanings within the tradition, but no play with the tradition itself. The individual manifestations of the family are taken for granted, cannot be rearranged, not even retrospectively. In Harmonia caelestis the genealogical heritage is exposed to arbitrary substitutions: Esterházy’s narrator increases, supplements, and renews the possible meanings of the genealogical network, all of it is transformable. Nevertheless, when the narrator says, “the name is so powerful that it covers me,” his words also apply to Jósika’s Bátory. The name invites and rejects content: in The Last Bátori the name’s meaning fills the space, prevents the last descendant from acquiring a genuine identity. If inheritance is a threat in this romantic text, disinheritance is acutely felt in Esterházy’s recent one. Genealogy, according to Nietzsche and Foucault, undermines historical telos and the cult of origin. In Jósika’s text, the romantic search for beginning lays bare the problematics of origincentered thinking. It reveals the fact that the descendents are incapable of founding themselves; it alsoreveals heterogeneity in what seemed unified and identical. This undermining of the integrated form becomes in Esterházy a deliberate manipulation of genealogy.

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Recent historical novels and historiographic metafiction in the Balkans Jasmina Lukic´ A history of literary forms and narrative strategies in East-Central European literatures will have to take into account their comprehensive ideologization in the second half of the twentieth century, not only through Socialist Realism, the doctrine under the Communist regimes, but also through other ideologies before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We shall examine the historical novel and historiographic metafiction (in Linda Hutcheon’s sense), which display thematic similarities but differ in their poetics because they conceptualize history and reality differently. The poetics of many traditional historical novels resembles that of Socialist Realism for both rely upon realist narrative strategies and display an unquestioned trust in history. Historiographic metafictions, in turn, question both reality and history. Historical novels and historiographic metafiction respond differently to totalizing ideologies. Recent revivals of the traditional historical novel in the South Slavic literatures often treat national history uncritically, thus supporting the nationalism reawakened in many postsocialist countries, while historiographic metafiction tends to question and destabilize nationalist ideologies. We will illustrate this with examples from the South Slavic literatures, giving special attention to Borislav Pekic´’s historiographic metafiction Zlatno runo (The Golden Fleece).

The historical novel and the narrative strategies of realism The traditional historical novel is a realistic genre; a fantastic historical fiction is an “anomaly” (McHale Postmodernist 88). Georg Lukács claimed already in 1932 that the only appropriate method for “progressive” literature was Realism (“Tendenz”). Lukács rejected Brecht’s ideas on new theatre, small forms, techniques of assemblage, and the active involvement of the audience, and held up against them traditional nineteenth-century Realism and the third person narrator. Lukács role in developing and promoting Socialist Realism has been neglected as he came to be seen as a figure of resistance against Stalinist policies in the arts (Gallas 13). Lukács was well aware of the controlling, even manipulative features of Realism. His study on the historical novel emphasizes that formal questions must be interpreted in their ideological context, that purely formal matters “conceal ideological and political problems of the highest importance” (Historical Novel 332). Accordingly, Lukács envisions in his final chapter a new historical novel in which new perspectives on the future enable writers to gain an understanding of the past: This perspective of the real and permanent liberation of the people alters the perspective which historical novels have of the future; it gives quite a different emotional accent to their illumination of the past from that which we find, and inevitably find, in the classical historical novel; it is able to discover entirely new tendencies and features in the past, of which the classical historical novel was not and could not be aware. (347)

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Some key features of this “new historical novel” correspond to Socialist Realism. The “new” form is to revive the epic tradition, narrate in a realist way, and use “types” as main characters. These are the principles that the elder historical novelist Mihail Sadoveanu accepted after World War II, in the classic example of Socialist Realism, Mitrea Cocor (1949). Although Mitrea Cocor is not exactly a historical novel, it fulfills Lukács’s basic requirements and thus demonstrates the closeness between traditional and socialist-realist historical novels. The main character, Mitrea, is an ordinary person from a peasant family, easily taken as an ideal hero of a historical novel, which, according to Lukács, should not be a great historical figure. Mitrea is a true literary “type” in Lukács’ sense, representing the Romanian people; he is poor but honest, brave, and highly sensitive to injustices that rich boyars and kulaks do to his countrymen. His story can be easily seen as a fairy tale: a poor peasant boy starts as a servant and has to face injustice; he goes off to war, learns much, and comes back gloriously, marrying the girl he loves. The setting is framed by the advance of the Soviet army and the subsequent end of World War II, but also through a vision of the future with equality and happiness for all. The story of Mitrea is told as a true history of a possibly true person, and this plausibility is supposed to endow the vision of life in Socialism and Communism with a similar plausibility. Mitrea Cocor, as a socialist realist novel, resembles historical novels because both genres reconstruct and reinterpret the world from a future perspective. Both genres sustain the totalizing work of ideology by retaining an unquestionable trust in the Marxist reading of History. History is ever present in the works of Socialist Realism according to an official Communist determinist doctrine that cannot be questioned. Many novelists are convinced that we can have a reliable knowledge of the past, based on facts established by historiography. Brian McHale identifies three main constraints on traditional historical fiction: Historical realemes — persons, events, specific objects, and so on — can only be introduced on the condition that the properties and actions attributed to them in the text do not actually contradict the “official” historical record. […] 2. The constraint of contradictions of the “official” historical record extends beyond specific realemes (persons, events) to the entire system of realemes that constitutes a historical culture. […] 3. Finally, the most diffuse yet at the same time most profound constraint of all: the logic and physics of the fictional world must be compatible with those of reality if historical realemes are to be transferred from one realm to the other; otherwise the text will be at radical variance with the norms of “classic” historical fiction. (Postmodernist 87–88)

The “official record” may, of course, change over time, but then novels need to replace only one set with another without losing confidence in History’s stability. This is what happened in Communist reinterpretations of “bourgeois history,” and, later, in post-Communist reconstructions of both the Communist past and official Communist historiography. It is a totally different matter, as we shall see, if one and the same historical novel offers competing readings of past events, thus destabilizing History.

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History and ideology Trust in History made in the 1980s and 1990s many southeast-European historical novels vulnerable to ideological manipulation. The turnover in 1989 often meant simply exchanging Communism for a similar totalitarian nationalist ideology. Many Serbian and Croatian historical novels adopted the changeover this way. Nationalist historical novels were revived here already in the 1980s to express a growing nationalist sentiment, as the case of the Serbian Dobrica Cósic´ illustrates. The young Cósic´ promoted the Communist ideology and immersed himself in the politics of the early Tito years. His Daleko je sunce (Far is the Sun) heavily relied on the clichés of Socialist Realism, though — interestingly — it came to be interpreted later as an important step away from it. Predrag Palavestra finds in the book “less schematism and blackand-white clichés in constructing the fable, as well as in depicting secondary characters” (Posleratna 224, my italics). Socialist Realism had relatively little influence in the Yugoslav literatures, for it was abandoned soon after the political break with the Soviet Union in 1948. Miroslav Krleža’s speech at the 1952 congress of the Association of Yugoslav Writers is generally considered as the formal Yugoslav abandonment of Socialist Realism as a state-promoted aesthetics. This indicates Krleža’s status: recognized as the most significant Croatian writer of the twentieth century, he was a pro-Communist from the 1920s onward but had vehement conflicts and public polemics with the Yugoslav Communist Party in the late 1930s. After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union in 1948, Krleža became Tito’s close ally who shaped Yugoslavia’s cultural policies, and thus the best authority to proclaim that the dogma of Socialist Realism was to be abandoned. Krleža started after World War II a huge, deeply historical novel project entitled Zastave (The Flags), which was to offer a multifaceted insight into late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury culture in Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia. In the five published volumes of this unfinished work, Krleža created a gallery of intellectuals from that region and he followed their personal destinies, political ideals, and projects during those turbulent decades that finally led to the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the foundation of the first Yugoslavia in 1918. The Flags is more than a historical novel. Since the intellectual and emotional development of the main character, Kamilo, has a special role in it, The Flags has also been called a Bildungsroman. Some critics emphasize the novel’s autobiographical aspects because Krleža extensively used material from his diaries. Krleža’s highly ironical attitude towards history had no impact on those writers of the 1980s that reaffirmed the traditional historical novel, but became important for Borislav Pekic´, who published exemplary pieces of historiographic metafiction in the 1980s. Ivo Andric´, whose work was also rooted in history, offered another model of narration. The Nobel-prize winner became famous for his novels about Bosnian history, Na Drini cúprija (The Bridge on the Drina), and Travnicˇka hronika (The Chronicle of Travnik), published immediately after World War II, which are both certain types of historical novels because of their topics and of Andric´’s style. He usually presented himself as a realist writer employing omniscient narrators, and he extensively used historical documents for his settings. But historical events and setting were not of primary importance to him, merely specific environments in which to


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investigate cases of cultural coexistence, particularly the cohabitation of different cultural traditions in Bosnia during the Ottoman Empire. In Bosnia, Muslims, Catholic Orthodox Christians, and Jews traditionally lived together in clusters of communities that were both multicultural and careful in preserving their own traditions. This unmerged cohabitation was of particular interest to Andric´. He carefully investigated the communal strategies to keep differences alive while maintaining cross-confessional communication in the public spaces. From Andric´’s perspective, such a life produced unhappiness, forcing individuals to conform to their confessional communities. He also notes that different communities perceive the same experiences differently. Although this multiperspectivism undermines Andric´’s coherent presentation of historical events, he does not question historiography. Andric´’s novels did not become a model during the revival of historical fiction in 1980s, in spite of unanimous agreement about their exceptional value and importance. Dobrica Cósic´’s simpler but “nationally conscious” novels assumed that role. In the 1960s, Cósic´ turned from Socialist Realism to a more modern style with new narrative techniques, and he assumed the task of reinterpreting Serbian history, revealing its heroic past and special historical destiny. From the 1970s onward, he adopted the historical novel with traditional realist strategies, as his novel on the Serbian participation in World War I, Vreme smrti (A Time of Death), shows most clearly. Cósic´’s final step was to renounce the Communist ideology and to “reveal” the secrets of Stalinism in his trilogy Vreme zla (A Time of Evil). Significantly, these critical novels appeared in the late 1980s, after many key books on the topic, and his “revelations” had little to offer to anyone informed on the subject. Why this late act of courage? Since Dobrica Cósic´ became one of the leaders of Serbia’s new nationalism, one may surmise that the novels were intended to serve the revival of Serbian national consciousness, as a proof that the Serbian ´ osic´’s case demonstrates how Realism and people had unquestionably abandoned Communism. C traditional historical novels lived on in the national ideology of the new historical novel, Similarly, the Croatian writer Ivan Aralica wrote several historical novels in the the 1980s with the aim of reviving certain episodes from Croatian national history. Aralica wanted to promote “national” values that were forgotten, as he saw it, in the modern corruption. His writing thus displays the dual symptom of the nationalist project: fear of modernity coupled with a rejection of Communist ideology. Both modernity and communism have to be rejected. Hence Aralica creates idylls of pre-modern society, when people were humble, honest, and noble, to urge Croatians to return to the patriarchal life he describes in his novels on the Dalmatian Zagora: Duše robova (Souls of Slaves) and Graditelj svratišta (Builder of Retreats). Not surprisingly, Aralica soon became an official representative of the xenophobic nationalist ideology, and remained Tu0man’s favorite writer till the end of his rule. His views also illustrate the rather widespread tendency during the Yugoslav wars to oppose rural and urban ways of life. Many nationalists among Serbs as well as Croats shared Aralica’s deep suspicions of urban culture and values.

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Historiographic metafiction and the rereading history While traditional historical novels tend to minimize the gap between the historical and the fictional worlds, historiographic metafiction deliberately points to their constructed nature, as Linda Hutcheon makes clear: In most of the critical work on postmodernism, it is narrative — be it in literature, history or theory — that has usually been the major focus of attention. Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking of the forms and contents of the past. (Postmodernism 5)

Thus historiographic metafiction questions the very mechanism by which histories claim to arrive at reliable historical knowledge, recalling the past in order to examine it. Hutcheon believes that it consciously explores the similarities between history and fiction: “Both historians and novelists constitute their subjects as possible objects of narrative representation” (111–12). The heroes of historical metafiction are neither great nor typical, but rather marginalized and excentric. They suggest that the gap with respect to the past is unbridgeable: “Historical fiction (pace Lukács) usually incorporates and assimilates these data in order to lend a feeling of verifiability (or an air of dense specificity and particularity) to the fictional world. Historiographic metafiction incorporates, but rarely assimilates such data. More often, the process of attempting to assimilate is what is foregrounded. […] Historiographic metafiction acknowledges the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today” (114). The “textuality of history” (Louis Montrose) implies that any historical knowledge or any attempt to return to the past inevitably reinterprets it by subjecting it to narrative representation. Historiographic metafiction as a narrative genre plays with this correspondence between literature and history. Narrative frames in The Golden Fleece Radical doubt as to the reliability of historical knowledge characterizes Borislav Pekic´’s sevenvolume historiographic metafiction, The Golden Fleece, one of the most remarkable examples of the genre in East-Central Europe. Encompassing several centuries, it is rooted in history, but only to show how questionable the “objectivity” of past accounts is. History is a highly personalized and mythologized story here. The Golden Fleece tells the story of the Njegovan family that lived by trading for generations in the extended region of Southeast Europe, traversing borders and developing its merchandize. The novel is not a family saga even though it shows some traits of it. Nor is it a traditional historical novel, though it is based on unusually rich historical data and covers an extremely long time. Combining realist narration and fantastic fiction within both a linear and a circular time frame, Pekic´ “uses and abuses” history and myth as sources, in Hutcheon’s sense (Postmodernism 3), combining thus paradox with a high level of self-reflexivity. Features of this complex form were visible already in the first two volumes of The Golden Fleece (1978). The introductory volume establishes the basic frame of the narration and


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introduces the key narrative strategies. The second volume starts the story of the Njegovan family. Simeon Njegovan, an old wealthy merchant from Belgrade, who serves as the narrator for most of the novel, indicates the exact time of the opening: the night of January 6, 1941. The Njegovans gathers to celebrate Christmas Eve (according to the old calendar) at the family property in the small Slovenian town of Turjak, which was then part of the first Yugoslavia. That night Simeon Njegovan has strange, phantasmagoric dreams about crucial events in his family history. The Christmas night leads thus far back into history. In the disturbed mind of the dying Simeon thoughts follow strange and unpredictable patterns; they weave back and forth in time, and events often unfold on different time planes simultaneously. The first volume also introduces dozens of other characters on various levels and points of time. Some of them people the immediate world of Turjak, many others Simeon’s visions. The first narrative voice is not that of Simeon but of an external author-narrator (according to the definition of Chatman [147–48] and Rimmon-Kenan [94]) who claims that as a child he witnessed all the events at the Njegovans’ gathering on January 6, 1941 — which makes him also an internal narrator. But he limits his narrative competency by introducing another external narrative agent, the Spirit of the Story, named also the Spirit of the Family. This fantastic creature initiates and partly governs the narration. Addressing directly the reader at the beginning, the author-narrator explains that the Spirit of the Family is his own invention but based on Balkan folklore. It used to appear in earlier times whenever the existence of a family was in danger, in order to guard it and help it through its difficult moments. On January 6, 1941, in the shadow of the war, the Spirit of the Family comes to the Njegovan reunion to give them a last chance to escape impending misfortunes. The family could save itself if its chosen representative gave a correct answer to the Spirit’s question. It is Simeon, known also as Simeon the Master, who has to explain the long family search for their “golden fleece,” the material possessions that the Njegovans considered most important in life. Simeon Njegovan then becomes the narrator. While recounting events in Turjak he is an intradiegetic homodiegetic narrator; while remembering his own past he is an extradiegetic homodiegetic one. When he goes further back into family history, he often allows an ancestor of his phantasmagoric visions to assume the narration (intra-intra diegetic homodiegetic narrators). By the rule of the first-born son they also bear the name Simeon; the continuity of the Njegovan tradition is established and confirmed by naming. The internal unity of the family is confirmed by Simeon the Master’s peculiar claim that the Simeons do not die but continue to live a strange life in the minds of their descendants. This is not merely a patriarchal family tradition, which favors the firstborn son; it is also part of the novel’s fantastic realm next to the actual one in Turjak. The fantastic, as Brian McHale argues, has been co-opted in Postmodernism “as one of a number of strategies of an ontological poetics that multiplies the ‘real’ and thus problematizes representation” (Postmodernist 75). The story of The Golden Fleece develops both in a realist and a fantastic frame, carefully articulated as two sides of the same story that sometimes tend to merge but retain their initial dichotomy.

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The realist frame of The Golden Fleece January 6, 1941 locates the novel in history, and the documentary material of the first six volumes reinforces a historical reading. A set of random quotations, taken from the first six 1941 issues of the Belgrade right-wing newspaper Vreme precede the story. According to the short quotations, both Vreme’s journalists and their readers believed that the ongoing catastrophe of World War II would somehow bypass their country; the Njegovans share this belief. But at the end of the sixth volume, the novel offers another set of quotations from the May 16–22, 1941 issues of Vreme, showing that the country is occupied and the war had impinged upon Yugoslavia. The general news, excerpts from German military speeches, and classified ads testify to everyday life in a ruined, occupied city. They indicate what the Njegovans can expect, and set the stage for the family’s final destruction. The Njegovan family history represents a microcosm of the Serbian/Balkan bourgeoisie from the earliest, gradual formation until the moment that its very existence is put in jeopardy by the profound social changes in the region during the second half of the twentieth century. The novel follows four generations of Njegovans running the family affairs for over two centuries, starting in 1739, when they leave the small Albanian town of Moschopolis to head towards Kragujevac and Belgrade in search of their golden fleece. These two centuries form the regional bourgeoisie. But the novel occasionally goes further back, even as far as the battle of Adrianopolis in 1205, evoking the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the battle for Sziget in 1566. The history of the Njegovans is the history of trading in the region. Moreover, in the novel’s interpretive perspective, trading was a secret force that invisibly governed public history. Hence the Njegovans become active participants, even main agents in historical events: Pekic´ ascribes to Kir-Simeon Njegovan and his son Simeon Lupus active roles in the first and second Serbian uprisings against the Turks (1804, 1815); Simeon Lupus and his grandson Simeon the Master assume important roles in the dynastic fights over the Serbian throne between the Obrenovic´ and Kara0or0evic´ families, and in articulating Serbia’s first constitution. As one of the wealthiest persons in the country, Simeon the Master is said to be involved in building the first railroad in Serbia during the 1880s (initiated by one of Europe’s biggest financial scandals), in the killing of king Aleksandar Obrenovic´ in 1903, and in negotiations with the Austrians during Belgrade’s occupation in World War I. Even at this level, Pekic´ obviously intends to subvert official historiography by creating an alternative, apocryphal history of the region. The apocryphal history contradicts the official version either by supplementing the historical record, claiming to restore what has been lost or suppressed, or by displacing official history altogether (McHale, Postmodernist 90). Pekic´ uses here mainly the method of supplementing well-known historical data with another set that subverts their accepted interpretation. In the sense defined by Hutcheon, his postmodern narration “reinstalls historical context as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge” (Postmodernism 89). The case of the sixteenth-century Simeon Njago, a peddler trading medical herbs and cosmetics is a good illustration of this narrative method. As a peddler he followed the campaign of the Turkish army to Sziget in 1566. Historians tell us that when Sultan Suleiman II died in the midst of the siege, his death was concealed from the army. According to Pekic´, Simeon was


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given the task of painting his head to make it look alive until his successor assumed the throne. Thus he becomes a key player at this dramatic junction of history, holding literally the destiny of the empire in his hands. But Simeon faces a terrible dilemma: if he did his job properly, he would prove that he is an artist of extraordinary talent but he would also help the Turks consolidate their power, which as a Greek patriot he was loath to do. If he failed, he might help the Christians but would go amiss as an artist. Are aesthetic values more important than political goals? Simeon seeks to answer this question in long, sophisticated but also ironic discussions with the sultan’s physician, also of Greek origin, who carefully oversees Simeon’s work. The episode that occupies the greatest part of the third book adds a significant metatextual level to The Golden Fleece. Two examples should illustrate Pekic´ ‘s mistrust in history. The title story in his collection Novi Jerusalim is set in 2999, when a future archaeologist investigates Siberia. When he finds there a mixture of human and rat skeletons from Soviet times that testify to dramatic life conditions, he comes to the “revolutionary” conclusion that some sect was in search there for a more humane life style. He praises the unknown sect for leading a rebellion against hightechnology civilization, seeing a proof of highest humanity in their alleged attempt to make friends with rats, men’s eternal enemies. What an ironic view of the human (in)ability to learn from the past! Pekic´’s autobiographical novel Godine koje su pojeli skakavci (Years Eaten by Grasshoppers) provides the second example. Still as a high-school student, Pekic´ was sentenced to 15 years of prison for founding an illegal political organization called “Alliance of Democratic Youths in Yugoslavia,” and he was indeed imprisoned between 1948 and 1953. The documentary Godine returns to those events, reconstructing in the first two volumes the investigation and the trial, while dedicating the third volume to his years in prison. Although Godine was to document the events, Pekic´ deeply mistrusted even his own notes from prison. He compared his diaries with archaeological findings from Sutton How in England, where traces of life from the fifth century, found in the form of silhouettes in sand, were filled with a special chemical that made it possible to retrieve the original three-dimensional figures. Diaries should be taken as the figures of people from Sutton How, says Pekic´: “Already dead for a long time, buried in dates as their sandy graves, those truths putrefied, disintegrated, lost their consistence and shape, turning into unreadable marks, in which it is most often impossible to recognize even a shape of some event” (Godine 14).

The fantastic frame of The Golden Fleece “Historical fictions must be realist fictions; a fantastic historical fiction is an anomaly” (McHale, Postmodernist 88). The Golden Flees is an “anomaly,” its use of the fantastic is a way of destabilizing historiography and the traditional historical novel. The fantastic provides here a second narrative frame, allowing for a double reading of crucial events. The Spirit of the Family gives a concrete meaning to the phantasmatic dreams of the moribund Simeon the Master by asking for an answer to the question upon which the destiny of the family may depend. The fourth volume contains an important scene from 1856, concerning a strange vision that the more than eighty-year old Simeon Lupus, grandfather of Simeon the Master, has of himself

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in a Vienna ballroom. Discussing the future Austrian policies towards the Kara0or0evic´ dynasty with a few influential diplomats he sees his much younger wife dancing with some officers. In the midst of the discussion, Lupus suddenly catches a glimpse of a reflection of the ballroom in a nearby mirror: “while the right part of the polished amalgam was shadowed by the black back of the Minister, in the left corner — which by all law of God and men should have been covered by his own dark Roman figure — the ball went on, in full force. HE, SIMEON LUPUS, WAS NOT THERE IN STO KATOPROTO TIS ZOIS, IN THAT SHINY MIRROR OF LIFE” (Pekic´, Zlatno runo 4: 383). A moment later the reflection of Simeon’s body is back in the mirror, but the experience makes him muse on strange stories about the post-mortem existence of some of his ancestors. The scene itself can be interpreted as a strange vision of an old, disturbed mind, but it hangs together with numerous elements of the novel that strongly support an alternative reading. Many Simeons doubt their existence. The Simeon who survived the fall of Constantinople at the cost of being raped and thrown with dead bodies into a city cistern, felt subsequently that he lived an unreal life after death. Simeon the artist of Sziget, Simeon from Moschopolis, and others occasionally feel the same way. The main narrator, Simeon the Master, also senses several times that he is living a life after death, which may be interpreted as a manifestation of his anguish over the death of his wife, Tomanija, that makes him withdraw from the family business. He talks to her in his fantasies, trespassing constantly the border between the living and the dead. His uncertainty about his own existence is related to his notion that all his Simeon ancestors continue to live in him some secondary, post-mortem existence. He is in constant dialogue with them, calling up their voices whenever he needs advice or has to make a decision. Thus he both accepts and radically questions the logic of reason. The seventh and final book, situated in mythical time, reconfirms from another perspective many of Simeon’s doubts about the logic of reason by introducing another world with a logic that differs from the one that governs the material reality of the Njegovans. In retrospect, the opening moment of January 6, 1941, like the scene at the Vienna ballroom, turns out to be one of numerous junctures between the two worlds. A historically insignificant date, January 6, 1941, links the novel’s events to a precise historical setting, but in the old orthodox calendar it is also Christmas Eve, the night when the spirits of the ancestors are supposed to return to see how the family is doing. This motivates the appearance of the Spirit of the Family in Turjak. The novel’s two distinct modes of logic yield two different closures. Within the realist frame, Simeon the Master dies on Christmas Eve, letting his family fight the house fire that symbolically foreshadows the coming war and revolution. His death at the end of the sixth volume is followed by the excerpts from Vreme’s war issues. With his death, the historical line of the Negovans symbolically ends, and the question asked by the Spirit of the Family remains unanswered. No reason can be offered for the family’s continued search for its golden fleece of material wealth. But Simeon the Master remains alive in the fantastic realm, for at the end of volume seven he turns into a perfect black horse named Arion that, according to the authornarrator, was the progenitor of the mythic centaurs. The circle of events closes now because centaur Hiron was a mythical ancestor of the Simeons.


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The two closures belong to different time frames, the linear time of history and the circular time of myth. The often-interrupted narration of linear time shuttles back and forth along the main axis but can be reconstructed by means of the crucial historical events. The mythical level reveals a constant circular motion, even within historical time: different members of the Njegovan family experience similar things, indicating an order behind the linear one, governed by repetition and mutual reflection. This mise en abyme (to borrow Dällenbach’s concept, 15–19) endlessly reproduces the initial structural duplicity. The most general level juxtaposes the family history of the Njegovans and the ancient search for the Golden Fleece. The first six volumes of the novel deal with the “Argonautica” of the Njegovans, while the seventh reinterprets the Argonauts’ ancient search for the Golden Fleece in a highly ironic manner. Pekic´ offers parodic reinterpretations for well-known episodes from the voyage of Argo. In his version, the ship’s Argonauts include a centaur named Noemis (who had already acquired human form), the mythical ancestor of the Njegovans. Noemis joined the Argonauts to acquire the immense wealth of the Golden Fleece for himself, but his presence on the ship is a source of conflict. At one point he, instead of Jason, is given the leading role on Argo. Pekic´’s mythic hero, like the historical Negovans, assumes an active role. Introducing Noemis on Argo, Pekic´ repeats the paradoxical turn he performed at the outset when he brought the Spirit of the Family to Turjak. Noemis is governed by reason and does not believe in gods. He feels odd among his fellow mythical heroes and semi-gods, finding their behavior odd and often funny. He features as the myth’s Other, just the as the Njegovans feature as history’s Others. The apparently omniscient narrator of the seventh volume closely follows Noemi’s focalization and often accepts his reasoning, so that the mythical world is constantly mocked and destabilized. Joining the crew of Argo, Noemis puts the whole enterprise in danger. He lets his companions be killed, and he kills as well, only to get the gold from the fleece. When recognized as an intruder, he is expelled from the ship and sent to trial in Hades, where the god of the underworld and his wife Proserpine banish him as punishment from the world of myth. He passes Lethe and enters history in 1206 as the first historical Simeon near Adrianopolis. Thus Noemis/Simeon literally crosses the gate between the two worlds and continues to live a new life in history, a life after death for him since he came from the realm of death. Noemis’s transformation into Simeon is mirrored by Simeon the Master’s turn into the mythical black horse Arion. The circle thus closes, including both history and myth. Descending from centaurs, who descended from Arion, the Simeons enter their search for their golden fleece in history, finding wealth and power as well as suffering and misery. Without finding a reason for the journey they return at the end to myth; history and myth remain two separate possible worlds. Displaying a paradoxical unity of two distinct elements in a common shape, the centaur image emblematizes (or “centaurizes”) the novel. The ancestral relation to the centaurs is indeed kept alive in the Njegovan family through the strange urge of many Simeons to turn into horses. Although they live by trading, which demands a highly rational attitude, many Simeons cherish secret wishes that run against the profit logic. They often display a talent for painting, acting, or performing that leads them to doubt that earning money is the highest value. Their intense wish to change their lives may merely be the result of dissatisfaction within “reality,” but their

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yearning for another body can only be explained within the logic of myth — of which only the readers are aware. The mythical world of The Golden Fleece also undergoes a process of “centaurization,” and Noemis participates in it as the agent that introduces the logic of profit to Argo, which was until then “non-profit.” For Noemis, material wealth represents civilization, whereas the Argonauts do not care about earthly values. They see themselves as the chosen ones who carry out the will of the gods. The novel treats both the “profit” and “non-profit” options with utmost irony. The ruthless Noemis, who does not care that his presence endangers his companions, is even ready to kill. The Argonauts, heroes and demigods, are similar, for their cruel heroism is also indifferent to the damage caused to others. These brutal, simple-minded warriors speak with pathos and constantly praise their own heroic deeds. Noemis endangers their mentality by ascribing monetary value to everything and literally teaching them to count. Responding to the Argonauts’ manner of speaking, Noemis addresses them in rhymes, which parody their pathos, making it sound like bad poetry. Pekic´ displaces language norms. When characters deviate form standard language in the first six volumes, this can be explained by changes undergone by the Serbian language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the language distortions of the Njegovans are also related to their Tzinzar origin. The Tzinzars, a small ethnic community in the south of the Balkans, were capable merchants and had an important role in developing regional trade. The Njegovans are thus associated with an ethnic minority, and they themselves often emphasize their feeling of Otherness. This imposed and chosen Otherness is reflected in their speech: many of them speak an unstable mixture of languages that adapts itself to the circumstances. The older generations, which rely mainly on their native Greek and Tzintzar, learn Serbian with difficulty. Simeon Lupus deliberately speaks a mixture of Serbian and Greek and alienates himself from all the others. Even the Belgradeborn Simeon the Master has problems with pronunciation and often shifts between languages. Such distortions have humorous effects but also a metatextual function that Hutcheon calls “linguistic narcissism” (Narcissistic 28–29). In The Golden Fleece, “linguistic narcissism” is a form of self-reflexivity that signals the unreliability of language and indicates that meanings are constructed. Language distortions, together with other narrative strategies, problematize the notion of reality and the reliability of historical knowledge. As Hutcheon remarks: Postmodernist reference, then, differs from modernist reference in its overt acknowledgement of the existence, if relative inaccessibility, of the past real (except through discourse). It differs from realist reference in its — again — over assertion that the relative inaccessibility of any reality that might exist objectively and prior to our knowledge of it. […] Historiographic metafiction, while teasing us with the existence of the past as real, also suggests that there is no direct access to that real which would be unmediated by the structures of our various discourses about it. Semioticians have recently questioned whether even the most direct of facts used by historians can be assumed to refer directly and unproblematically to a real past world. (Postmodernism 146)


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The 1990s We have attempted to show that Pekic´ mistrusts historical knowledge. The Golden Fleece is founded upon the assumption that reconstructions of the past are always partial, subjective, and contextualized by the writer’s own time. Hence Pekic´’s detailed and complex reconstruction of Balkan history does not attempt to tell the truth. By destabilizing historical reference The Golden Fleece had in the 1980s, still under Communist rule, a radical impact on the Serbian horizon of expectations concerning historical representation. In the late 1980s the softened form of this ideology was gradually replaced by a rigid form of nationalism that assumed power in Serbian political and cultural life during the 1990s. In literature, this ideological shift was announced and supported in a number of historical novels that attempted to raise national consciousness. Similar kinds of nationalist historical novels were produced in other SouthSlavic literatures in the 1980s and 1990s, but Serbian literature proved to be particularly important because of the conjunction between the power structure and the new/old literary practice. The new historical novels of Dobrica Cósic´ and others were highly popular then but failed to provide a genuinely new departure. The declining impact of the new historical novels was due partly to the strong presence of authors who took an ironic distance from the dominant ideologies. David Albahari, for instance, ignored the new passion for history, as the short stories in Words Are Something Else show. These self-reflexive stories remain within very private worlds of the present, worlds far away from national political debates. Their refusal to deal with ideological discourses allows them to create alternative spaces, in which the problems of narration remain central. Others have chosen to confront the challenges of the time. Radoslav Petkovic´ constructs in Sudbina i komentari (Destiny and Comments) an alternative political history for the first half of the nineteenth century, centered on the destiny of a Russian officer stationed as a spy in Trieste during Napoleon’s invasion of Istria and the northern parts of Italy. Pavel Volkov is Serbian by origin and knows several languages; based on his services and believing that he can play a power game in turbulent times, he hopes for a brilliant career. After falling in love with a strange woman he realizes that he has been manipulated and that the story he entered has rules unknown and unintelligible to him. Failing completely in his ambition to become an agent of history, he learns that one occasionally gets a chance to change one’s life story. Entering a circle in the sand of a strange garden one can, for instance, leave behind space and time. In reality, as in dream, gates may open and one has to decide whether to enter, not knowing what story one enters. Another alternative story for Volkov proves to be a life in the equally turbulent times of Communism. In 1948 the Yugoslav Pavle Vukovic´ falls in love with a Hungarian girl in Dubrovnik, but the political break between his country and the Soviet block separate them. They meet again in 1956 during the Hungarian revolution and the Soviet invasion but are then separated for good. Pavle, a historian who attempts to understand past events in a logical way, must learn, like Pavel Volkov, that our knowledge of the past and our own reality merely amounts to stories we manage to tell. His notes on his past are, significantly, “exercises in remembrance” after a strong attack of amnesia. Dragan Velikic´ takes a similar attitude towards history in his short novel Hamsin 51, set in Belgrade in the summer 1991, when the war in Croatia starts to intensify. For his hero, the poet

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Nikola Gavric´, this is just one of the possible worlds. In his poetry, he creates the alternative spaces of Pannonia, a kind of postmodern “zone” (to borrow McHale’s concept from Postmodernist 44) that simultaneously includes Belgrade, Istria, the Hungarian plains and the bay of Venice. He also lives with the ancestral voices he hears, in the world of his father’s unfinished manuscript “Knots,” and, most importantly, in the worlds of his own potential destinies. As the narrator says upon introducing a chapter of ten invented years in Nikola’s life: “Since the time of his high school, Nikola had the habit of remembering from the safety of some future day the past which never happened” (Velikic´ 67). Nikola does not simply escape from the ugly war that is destroying his real country and life. He does participate in alternative realities, turning his actual existence into “a real dream of a shadow” (93). Confronting the possible worlds within “Pannonia,” Nikola refuses to accept as avoidable a war that others have chosen and imposed on him. Petkovic´’s and Velikic´’s novels, published both in 1993, responded to the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In both cases, actual worlds were being created and destroyed, revealing the fragility of “reality.” Milica Micíc´-Dimovska wrote Poslednji zanosi MSS (The Last Ecstasies of MSS) against the background of the same wars, though with a more explicit intent to taunt the dominant discourses of patriotism and nationhood. Telling the fate of the first Serbian woman poet, Milica Stojadinovic Srpkinja, she presents a writer who wants to serve as “voice” of her nation. Following the pathos-filled nineteenth-century concept that writers are servants of their nation, Milica betrayed her talent and creativity to write “as people sing.” But her songs remained worthless and she ended up as a street beggar in Belgrade, rejected by all social circles as a “weird” spinster. The novel’s gendered perspective strongly contributes to its inverted view of Serbian literary history. Our final example is from contemporary Macedonian literature, in which Alexander the Great has become a popular topic since the country has gained independence. Alexander’s politically and ideologically motivated popularity has generated heated debates on Macedonian identity. Many believe that Alexander, one of the greatest rulers of the world, shaped a unique Macedonian identity that developed its own way over the centuries. But Slobodan Mickovik’s historiographic metafiction Alexander i smrtta (Alexander and Death) treats ironically history, glory, and human limitations. Noting that we do not know where Alexander the Great was buried, Mickovik offers an apocryphal history of his burial, in which this great ruler of the world becomes so unimportant immediately after his death that his body could get lost in the desert. Mickovik’s ironic image of Alexander’s unlimited power is his shrunken corpse, placed in his now oversized best armor. The apocryphal story of his burial undermines Macedonian glorifications of the national myth. Speaking of the “normalizing” effect of realist conventions, Patricia Waugh points out the problem that post-modernist novelists have in identifying and then representing the object of “opposition,” and she claims that writers of metafiction have found a strategy of overcoming it by turning inwards to their own medium of expression, in order to examine the relationship between fictional form and social reality: They have come to focus on the notion that “everyday” language endorses and sustains such power structures through a continuous process of naturalization whereby forms of oppression are constructed in apparently “innocent” representations. The literary-fictional equivalent to this “everyday” language of “commons sense” is the language of the traditional novel: the


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conventions of Realism. Metafiction sets up an opposition, not to ostensibly “objective” facts in the “real” world, but to the language of the realistic novel which has sustained and endorsed such a view of reality. (11)

In the twentieth century, many East-Central European literatures adopted the language of Realism, primarily (after World War II) that of Socialist Realism, and became part of this continuous “process of naturalization.” In the Yugoslavia of the late 1980s and 1990s the historical novel returned to realist narrative strategies, as highly powerful tools in the ideological project of rediscovering a national past. The historical novel adopted a convenient form to instrumentalize ideology, a form that greatly resembles that of Socialist Realism. Having served the party and the working classes, literature is now to serve the nation. The new nationalist writers often see themselves as guardians of the “national spirit” instead of the “revolution,” as previously. Once again, literature is to be truthful to reality, though differently true to a different reality in a different context. The role of historiographic metafiction in contemporary East-Central European literatures has been, on the contrary, to destabilize history and the subject, forcing us to reread critically all histories and notions of “reality.” In a region where competing version of history still tend to impose themselves as grand national narratives, metafiction can offer a much-needed distance from the totalizing projects of the ideologies in power.

The historical novel in Slovenian literature Igor Grdina In the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the historical novel helped define, articulate, and formulate Slovenian collective images of the past. As elsewhere, these differed considerably from the images that professional historiography had established. Collective notions of the past are part of a tradition that members of a national community acknowledge as an essential part of their identity. They usually identify with it affirmatively; only rarely do they try to reject or overcome it. This is the source of both idealizing and actualizing the past. Both tendencies are distinctive “trademarks” of a romantic approach to history that is dissatisfied with the descriptions of professional historiography. Seeking identifications with the past by means of its imaginative re-living, it rejects “aseptic” attitudes. Impartiality and critical distance do not belong to its ideals. Slovenians do not find their tradition and identity in a glorious past or the “immortal deeds” of their ancestors. The Hungarians speak of St. Stephen’s idea, the Czechs hold on to St. Vaclav, the Croats venerate the Croatian national law, and the Serbs perpetuate the Kosovo myth in order to inspire action and determine goals for the future. The core of the Slovenian national tradition is, in contrast, consciousness of linguistic originality. Its oldest traces date back to the

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Early Middle Ages, although its continual development can be demonstrated since the sixteenth century: the first book in Slovenian was published in 1550, a complete translation of the Bible in 1584, the first Slovenian grammar also in 1584, and the first dictionary in 1592. This original linguistic culture has been the main symbol and expression of Slovenian identity since the end of the eighteenth century. The political borders of United Slovenia or the Slovenian kingdom, desired but never realized in 1848, were determined by linguistic borders. Slovenians have a relatively modest national history to identify with. At the end of the eighteenth century, the goals set by the Slovenian national movement were still largely cultural. The movement gained a political dimension immediately before 1848, but it had only a thin tradition to rely on. Slovenians did not have their own independent state before becoming part of the Eastern-Alpine and Adriatic area of the Frankish Empire in the seventh and eighth centuries, nor were they ever united into one administrative unit. In the Middle Ages and the modern era they lived scattered over several countries and large multi-ethnic empires (the Frankish and East-Frankish State, the Romano-German Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy). In the nineteenth century, Slovenians were considered “non-historical” par excellence. They themselves largely accepted the label; they referred to natural, not historical laws when struggling to emancipate themselves from the Austrian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Only certain “chapters” of Slovenians history were considered worthy of literary treatment, those relating especially to origins: the settlement of the Slavonic nation in the AlpsAdriatic region; life in the independent princedom of Carinthia; the era of the “Slavonic” apostles Constantin and Methodius (two monks who encountered the predecessors of the Slovenians in the Lower Pannonian region); the enthroning of Carinthian dukes (who “ruled” in the Slovenian language until 1414), and on to some great personalities whose actions could be interpreted as “integrative” (ideologically or politically uniting the Slovenians with their Slavonic “brothers”). However, literary works would be successful also when readers could directly identify with the textual setting of certain historical events in which their “people” distinguished themselves. The Slovenians, for example, liked reading tales of Turkish raids at the end of the Middle Ages, and of the swift rise and fall of the Counts of Celje in the fifteenth century. Works portraying the bloody peasant uprisings (fifteenth to eighteenth century) and the clashes between the Catholics and Protestants in then Carniola, Styria, and Carinthia (sixteenth century) also received attention. The novel as a metaphor also became prominent: readers, occasionally at least, “recognized” themselves in characters from the pre-Slavonic past of the East-Alpine and Adriatic region, and in “heroes” from the history of exotic and colorful foreign lands. Less successful — aimed mainly to provoke controversy — were the novel of ideas and the roman à thèse, which depicted “the old days.” Thus the clashes between progressive liberals and populist “clericals,” particularly fierce at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, were depicted in numerous trivial novels or tales that functioned as allegorical images of the present. They were meant to meet daily political and ideological needs and had a rather brief shelf life. Their authors, led by Miroslav Malovrh, a sharp anti-clerical journalist and extremely skilled writer, remained on the fringes of Slovenian literary history and Slovenian consciousness. The most legitimate predecessor to the Slovenian historical novel is France Prešeren’s “tale in verse” Krst pri Savici (Baptism at the Savica) of 1836, one of the important poems of

The historical novel in Slovenian literature

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European Romanticism, which portrays how the Slovenians lost their political independence and simultaneously converted in the second half of the eighth century. It foregrounds a drama of a politically impossible love, a unique variation on Abelard and Hèloise. The protagonist, the pagan leader Cˇrtomir who has many traits of Prešeren, finally becomes a resigned herald of Christianity. Later historical novels often repeat the narrative formula of Baptism at the Savica, by depicting a turning point in history, when a nation’s faith is in the balance and the circumstances are stronger than the “heroes” who get tragically destroyed or surrender without will to “the flow of events.” The will of foreigners prevails over the powerless local people. The rarity of happy or optimistic endings reflects in part the tension, the dissatisfaction, and the frustration of Slovenians. The early tale Jurij Kozjak, Slovenski Janicˇar (Jurij Kozjak, Slovene Janissary; 1864) of the first Slovenian novelist, Josip Jurcˇicˇ, shows considerable skill in giving rich narrative portrayals of the past. A leading liberal of his time, Jurcˇicˇ created with extraordinary enthusiasm a respectable literary opus (six completed and two unfinished novels, two tragedies, a comedy, several tales, and many short stories). He was familiar with the works of contemporary European writers, but skillfully “homologized” instead of blindly imitating them. Jurcˇicˇ, an admirer of Scott’s historical novels, adapted the genre to the ideological needs of his own progressive thinking: his works on the past of the nobility usually end tragically, while his contemporary novels, optimistic at least at the beginning, describe the Slovenian transition from a rural to an urban way of life, especially via the “intellectual” professions. Jurcˇicˇ’s first historical novel, Ivan Erazem Tattenbach (1873), deals with the tragic failure of the conspiracy of the Zrinski and Frangepan families against the Habsburgs in Slovenia. The writer interprets the attempted coup in the second half of the seventeenth century as aimed at creating a southern Slavonic state, although it was actually a plot devised by rich supporters of the Hungarian crown and their few followers in neighboring countries against the German “intruders.” It apparently failed because of the flaws and clumsiness of brave people with “good intentions.” One of them, Tattenbach, was a German aristocrat from Styria who sympathized with the Slovenians. Although he led a debauched life and belonged to a world destined for historical decline, Jurcˇicˇ portrays him with a certain degree of sympathy. Tattenbach’s “national engagement” is, therefore, merely a curiosity that could not serve as a model with which nineteenth-century Slovenians could identify. A similar message can be found in Jurcˇicˇ’s unfinished historical novel, Slovenski svetec in ucˇitelj (A Slovenian Saint and Teacher), which is set in the time of the missionary brothers, Cyril and Methodius, when feudal aristocrats, full of shortcomings, made the life of their people miserable. Jurcˇicˇ had a clear vision: salvation for the Slovenians had to come through modern middle-class society. The romantic nostalgia for the “good old days” is not a feature of his fiction. Just three years after Jurcˇicˇ’s novel, a priest, Alojzij Carli, portrayed in his historical novel Zadnji dnevi v Ogleju (Last Days in Aquileia) the victorious rise of Christianity and the decline of paganism during Attila the Hun’s reign of terror in the fifth century. Carli’s novel was regarded for a long time beyond the pale because its main theme was considered to be profane sexual love. The heavily dogmatic Catholic wing of Slovenian culture and politics bore a strange grudge against the novel as a genre, though Last Days in Aquileia was not actually in conflict with church doctrines. Only around 1900 did Catholic writers in Slovenia come to realize that no

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genre is a priori liberal or freethinking. The historical novel was then adopted by the clerical wing. Especially successful was Fran Saleški Finžgar’s Pod svobodnim soncem (Under the Free Sun; 1906–07), an epic story about the arrival of the Slavonic peoples in Central Europe and later the Balkans. Finžgar had modern Christian-socialist views and took the Polish Henryk Sienkiewicz as his model. Based on intensive study of historical documents (Procopius from Caesarea), the novel shows the clash of two worlds: the decadent and intriguing Byzantium, ruled by the mighty Justinian and his conniving wife, a former “artist” Theodora, is set against an unspoiled and modest Slavonic community. The latter inevitably triumphs at the end. Although Finžgar makes no secret of his political views, he does not force his message of patriotism, loyalty, morality, justice, and courage on the text and the reader. The novel went through several printings and was translated into several foreign languages, but later Catholic writers who tried to follow Finžgar’s rich storytelling technique and varied settings, were less successful. One exception is Janez Jalen’s trilogy Bobri (Beavers), published during World War II (1942–43), about a pre-historic culture in the Ljubljana Marshes, which is linked to the myth of the Argonauts. It quickly became popular and the success proved to be enduring. In the second half of the twentieth century Finžgar’s and Jalen’s books about the “forefathers” have joined the canon of Slovenian youth literature, which is rather unusual since both of them were priests. The Slovenian Communist regime showed some sensitivity to national tradition, especially after the dispute between Tito and Stalin in 1948. As the modernist Ivan Cankar put it, this was taken as the final affirmation and emancipation of this “nation of proletarians.” Next to Finžgar and Jalen, Ivan Pregelj also became prominent during the first half of the twentieth century as a Catholic author of historical novels that strongly influenced the development of the genre. His Plebanus Joannes and Bogovec Jernej represent a new type of historical novel, in which individuals with inner contradictions are at the center, not the destiny of a community. Sexuality and spirituality clash both in the Catholic Joannes and the Protestant Jernej — and this was not always received in a friendly way. Pregelj’s intellectualism and sumptuous secessionist (neo-romantic) stylizations have ensured for both novels a prominent place in Slovenian literature of the twentieth century, but their demanding linguistic and intellectual complexity makes them unpopular. Pregelj’s earlier novel, Tlacˇani (The Serfs; 1915–16) — drastically revised and republished later as Tolminci (The People of Tolmin) — became more popular. The author paid homage here to “the land where he was born,” along the Socˇa River, by describing in a great narrative sweep the violent outbreak and bloody suppression of the peasant uprising of 1713. Like Finžgar and Jalen, Pregelj had a tendency to create cycles of historical narratives; he also wrote short stories and tales that complete the description of a particular period and its heroes. His engaged treatment of the past in western Slovenia was his way of manifesting an intellectual resistance to the violent Italianizing of this area between 1918 and 1943/45 (the Italian Fascist regime suppressed Slovenian education and most Slovenian publishing; even personal names and surnames were changed). Pregelj’s “historical regionalism” was, therefore, also topical and not inspired by a nostalgic yearning for the “good old days.” Less dramatic, though still interesting, is the development of the historical novel in Slovenian liberalism. The main author at the turn of the nineteenth century, Ivan Tavcˇar, was a state assembly delegate, who became in 1918 a minister in the Ljubljana National government. His sharp and witty writing punctuated the period with numerous polemics and excellent


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narratives. He was by temperament a romantic and deeply religious Catholic, who strongly opposed the political misuse of religion. The main themes of Tavcˇar’s work are love and death, which are in some kind of causal relationship. His pessimism and his attention to the linguistic shaping of the text gradually moved him towards the aestheticism of the Central-European Secession, with which, however, he was not always in agreement. Tavcˇar did not exploit the past in order to settle ideological and political accounts — he left this to his “right hand,” the journalist Miroslav Malovrh — and so his historical novels are explicitly unengaged and nonactivist. He saw no “golden age” in the past; he turned to it because his imagination was more stimulated by characters in historical costumes. Nevertheless, his breach with Jurcˇicˇ’s paradigm was radical and explicit. Tavcˇar’s largest historical novel, Izza kongresa (Concealed at the Congress; 1905–08), is a “literary chronicle” of the 1821 Ljubljana Congress of the Holy Alliance. Written in feuilleton style, it attempts to give a cross-section of life and social reality, all the while avoiding extensive analytical digressions. This way Tavcˇar managed to create a Slovenian novel that focuses for the first time on a historical moment and a real setting instead of a particular character. At the end of his life Tavcˇar wrote another broad historical novel, the first part of the unfinished Visoška kronika (Visoko Chronicle; 1919). In this narrative — which contains some spectacular scenes, for instance one with the “judgment of God” — he describes life in the Kranjsko region during the seventeenth century. Visoška kronika is rightly regarded as Tavcˇar’s “opus perfectum.” Following Tavcˇar’s example, several other liberal writers assumed a role in Slovenian history. One of the most important ones was Fran Govekar, an advocate of Naturalism in his youth, who later developed less radical artistic views, embracing a kind of moralizing Realism. In 1921 he published the historical novel Svitanje (Dawning), which deals with the Slovenian national revival during the late Enlightenment and the early Romantic period. Govekar also refrained from projecting the cultural and political conflicts of his time into the past. Like Tavcˇar, he sought to establish a “literary historicism.” The tendency to moralize is evident in his choice of subjects: Tavcˇar preferred not to go beyond Protestantism, whereas Govekar turned to one of the most optimistic chapters in Slovenian history. A radical shift away from the ideal of “literary historicism” is evident in Vladimir Bartol’s work and his chef d’oeuvre, the novel Alamut (1938). For him, the historical novel serves merely as a narrative “shell,” for his prose is permeated with philosophy, toying with the adventure tale and alluding at the same time to twentieth-century totalitarianism, fanaticism, and Machiavellianism. Readers are captivated by the oriental milieu of his mysterious Arab-Persian Middle Ages, but they are also induced to reflect on parallels with its dictatorship. The militant Islamic characters of Bartol’s novel, which Slovenian reviewers and literary historians overlooked for a long time, have in recent decades met with considerable interest in France, Spain, and Germany. Bartol’s themes were picked up later in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s pendulum and Amin Maalouf’s Samarkand. Slovenian writers with socialist sympathies also tried their hand in the historical novel: influenced by the less constrained work of leading liberal authors, even advocates of “class politics” did not always adhere to notions of “historical materialism” about the past. Only the choice of subject disclosed discretely their ideological orientation. In Matija Gorjan (1940), Jože Pahor depicted the peasant uprising of 1515 in Carniola, Styria, and Carinthia; in Serenissima

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(1928–29), he portrayed in a fairly romantic style the suffering of a simple Slovene in the Venetian Republic of the sixteenth century. Parallels with Italy’s oppressive policies in the twentieth century suggested themselves. More overtly engaged was Prežihov Voranc [Lovro Kuhar], who wrote two important historical novels just before World War II: Požganica (1939) and Doberdob (1940). The first, a string of quasi-independent novellas, depicts the GermanSlovenian fighting in Carinthia between 1918 and 1920; the second represents the fighting on the Isonzo front and a rebellion of the “Carniolan troops” in Judenburg in 1918. Voranc was a senior official in the Yugoslav Communist Party and a propagandist for the Comintern in Western Europe, but his literary engagement on behalf of the “humiliated and affronted” bears few signs of “party bias.” The historical novel became quite popular during World War II, because, as in the case of Jalen’s Bobri, authors living in the area annexed by fascist Italy (1941) turned to the distant past to cement loyalty to “the native soil.” The opponents of the regime included even authors who did not support the partisans of the pro-Communist Liberation Front (which called for “cultural silence” in protest against the severe policies of assimilation and partial genocide of the German occupiers in the northern part of Slovenia). France Bevk, for instance, had lived and worked in difficult circumstances already before the war and opposed Italian fascist rule in the Goriško region (see his Umirajocˇi bog Triglav; 1930). After World War II and the establishment of a Marxist regime, the writing of historical novels was first highly encouraged, because the new authorities, following Soviet models, sought a literary “monumentalization” of “the national liberation struggle and the people’s revolution.” But after the 1948 exclusion of Yugoslavia from the Comintern, the more obvious political interventions in cultural matters were stopped. From the Ljubljana Congress of Yugoslav writers (1952) onwards, Socialist Realism was no longer the government’s prescribed or favored mode. Interventions in the “production of beauty” became less systematic and increasingly more arbitrary. Thus, it was after 1960 that the “agencies of order” confiscated part of Miško Kranjec’s four-volume novel, Za svetlimi obzorji (Beyond the Bright Horizons). Though he enthusiastically advocated Communist ideas, certain officials were dissatisfied with their portrayal in the national liberation war. As a further complication, the fairly numerous (and, as a rule, thick) novels on World War II have been considered as “historical” novels only recently, since the war was until the death of Marshall Tito in 1980 and the slow disintegration of the Communist regime considered part of the present. Alojz Rebula’s V Sibilinem vetru (In Sibila’s Wind), published in 1968, Drago Jancˇar’s Galjot (The Galley Slave), published in 1978, and some other Slovenian historical novels were read as works that allowed covert critical reflections on quasi-totalitarian and authoritarian modernity. Other historical novels dealt with the past of individual Slovenian territories. They include numerous works by France Bevk; Miško Kranjec’s trilogy Rdecˇi gardist (The Red Guard; 1964–67), which deals with the revolutionary years after World War I in Prekmurje; Saša Vuga’s trilogy on the Late Middle Ages in Slovenia, Erazem Predjamski (1978) and his Krtov kralj (The Mole King), published in 1987, on the fighting at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Posocˇje region. Various writers found that individual events and lives needed to be treated in a bolder, more critical manner. Many literary biographers returned to the historical novel: in Rebula’s Zeleno izgnanstvo (Green Exile), published in


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1981, the story of a heroic achievement, Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s years spent in Trieste, overshadows the scrupulous description of a “heroic” era. The Slovenian historical novel, which started with Jurcˇicˇ’s Ivan Erazem Tattenbach, is still very much alive after 130 years: Drago Jancˇar’s Katarina, pav in jezuit (Katarina, the Peacock, and the Jesuit), published in 2000, has met with great success.

The search for a modern, problematizing historical consciousness: Romanian historical fiction and family cycles Marcel Cornis-Pope 1.

Historical fiction

Romanian historical fiction has a “prehistory,” represented by two unusual, hybrid works written at the beginning and at the end of the eighteenth century. The first, Istoria ieroglifica˘ (A History in Hieroglyphs; 1705) is the work of Prince Dimitrie Cantemir of Moldavia, well-known statesman and pioneer historian, whose “History of the Ottoman Empire” was translated into English in 1734. Written against the background of a traditional literature composed of historical annals and religious homilaries, Istoria ieroglifica˘ recounted the feud between the princely families of Moldavia and Walachia under the guise of a struggle between the empire of the lion and that of the eagle. The book’s key of “names and words in hieroglyphics” disclosed the identity of the combatants (Cantemir features as the unicorn, plotter Mihail Racovit¸a˘ as the “ostrich-camel,” rival Prince Brâncoveanu as the chameleon, etc.), but beyond its allegorical apparatus Cantemir’s work excels in descriptions of cultural mores, turning political history into a spectacle. The second unusual work was the heroic-comic epic T¸iganiada (The Gypsiad; 1800–1812) written by Ioan Budai-Deleanu. T¸iganiada exploits the comic contrast between a heroic past represented by the exploits of Prince Vlad T¸epes¸ against the invading Turks, and a decayed present represented allegorically by the gypsy camp. The two series of events are glossed in extensive footnotes by a group of readers who question ironically both past myths and the mock-heroic present, looking for alternative modes of social and political organization. Romanian historical fiction burgeoned in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the new interest in national history instigated by Romanticism and the 1848 bourgeois revolution. Already in 1840, the magazine Dacia literara˘ (Literary Dacia, January–June 1840) published by historian and novelist Mihail Koga˘lniceanu, called for an original Romanian literature inspired by national history, folk culture, and local mores. That same year, Costache Negruzzi published “Alexandru La˘pus¸neanu,” a masterful historical novella set in the troubled sixteenth century, of which critic George Ca˘linescu said — with some exaggeration — “that it could have become as

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famous as Hamlet, had Romanian literature benefited from the support of a universal language” (Istoria 205). Three years later Koga˘lniceanu inaugurated the first course in Romanian history in Jas¸i / Jassy and wrote Tainele inimii (The Heart’s Mysteries; 1850), a novelistic fragment that grafted historical and social reflections upon a sentimental romance. Under the influence of Walter Scott, other writers moved after 1850 from romance to historical fiction. Of a host of historical novels published through the 1860s and 1870s, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu’s Copila˘riele lui Iancu Mot¸oc; Episodul I, Ursita (The Childhood of Iancu Mot¸oc; Episode I, The Fate; 1864) and N. D. Popescu’s Radu al III-lea cel Frumos (Radu III the Handsome; 1881) deserve to be mentioned. Richly documented and well-plotted, Hasdeu’s novelistic episode recounts the destiny of a political villain in medieval Romania, introducing “local color” as a narrative method. In the preface to his own reconstruction of sixteenth century history, Popescu argued that “original novella” was a better label for this type of work based on historical documents than “romant¸” (romance), which was primarily an imitative genre. Clearly, by the second half of the nineteenth century Romanian writers felt a need to move beyond “romances” and even when their work was inspired by foreign models, the model functioned as a catalyst for a locally relevant history. Thus Coliba Ma˘riuca˘i (Mariuca’s Cabin; 1855) by Vasile Alexandrescu-Urechia˘ followed loosely the main idea of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to describe the fate of gypsy slaves in the Romanian principalities before their emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emergence of a modern historical consciousness, which replaced the old metaphysical models of immobile or cyclic time with a pragmatic understanding of socio-historical development, was essential not only for historical fiction but also for the constitution of an original national novel. Not surprisingly, the first important social novel — Ciocoi vechi s¸i noi (Upstarts Old and New; 1863) by Nicolae Filimon — was also a successful historical novel that explored the evolution of a type, the old and new social climbers. Focused on the transition of Romanian society from feudalism to capitalism, Filimon’s novel treated its material with the documentary scrupulousness of a historical chronicle: important historical events (the reign of the last Greek prince Caragea, Tudor’s 1821 anti-Turkish revolution and the return of Romanian princes) are featured in separate chapters, interrupting the main plot. Modern historical fiction in Romania is to a great extent coextensive with the work of Mihail Sadoveanu. Author of more than a hundred volumes, Sadoveanu alternated between ample historical narratives, organized in cycles inspired by traditional legends and historical chronicles, and shorter mythic-poetic narratives that explored the ontology and symbolics of history. The first category spanned Romanian history from the medieval anti-Turkish struggle — S¸oimii (The Hawks; 1904), Zodia cancerului (Under the Sign of the Crab; 1929), and Frat¸ii Jderi (The Jderi Brothers; 1935–42) — to the dramatic events of the twentieth century in Strada La˘pus¸neanu. Cronica˘ din 1917 (La˘pus¸neanu Street: Chronicle from 1917; 1921). On Sadoveanu’s broad historical canvases, romantic pursuits blended with realistic descriptions of battles, and larger-than-life heroes vied with more complex portraits of a social class (the declining boyars). The second category in Sadoveanu’s corpus consists of mythic-allegorical narratives like Creanga de aur (The Golden Bough; 1933) and Divanul persian (The Persian Divan; 1940) that place history in a broader ontological-interpretive context. Written in the early 1930s but revised during World War II, Creanga de aur can be read both as an “archeological” novel, exploring

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through Professor Stamatin the Geto-Dacian substratum of Romanian culture, and as a political parable opposing an archaic peasant civilization to the growing threat of fascism. Likewise, under the pretext of rewriting the story of the philosopher-teacher Sindipa, Divanul persian offered a genuine cross-section of Oriental narrative lore (Turkish, Syrian, Arab, Mongolian), demonstrating the value of intercultural dialogue at a time of sharp political polarizations. Whether inspired by remote historical periods or by the more recent past, Sadoveanu’s novels are richly layered, moving between different historical moments and geographic locations, but also “between this world and the next” (Ciopraga 165). Chiding historians for their excess of factuality, Sadoveanu reminded them that reality is not constituted solely of buildings and documents: the soul of generations is preserved in myth. During the period of forced Stalinization of Romanian culture (1948–60), few novelists managed to write historical fiction that remained thematically and formally interesting. Even Sadoveanu produced mere variations upon older stories, such as Nicoara˘ Potcoava˘ (Nicoara˘ Horseshoe; 1952), a rewrite of Sadoveanu’s sixteenth century chronicle novel, S¸oimii, which turned a medieval fighter into a political philosopher who announces the rise of a “new world.” Camil Petrescu’s monumental fresco, Un om între oameni (A Man Amongst Men; 1953–57), devoted to the historian and leader of the 1848 Romanian revolution, Nicolae Ba˘lcescu, was painstakingly documented but predictable in its ideological conclusions and conventional in its psychologies. Bietul Ioanide (Wretched Ioanide; 1953), written by George Ca˘linescu, exemplified a more successful form of “documentary novel” that filtered the momentous events of the 1930s and 1940s through the skeptical consciousness of its title character, a disenchanted architect and “ageless faun.” The 1960s witnessed a revival of Romanian literature that in the course of a single decade managed to shake off the stereotypes of Socialist Realism. Not surprisingly, Romanian historiography and historical fiction returned to normality more slowly, having to ward off serious ideological pressures. The control of history remained a priority of party propaganda well into Ceaus¸escu’s post-Stalinistic regime. While historical novelists were allowed to experiment formally, their “rereading” of history was closely monitored by censorship. The epic novel Principele (The Prince; 1969), by Eugen Barbu, illustrated eloquently both the gains and the limitations of the new historical fiction. This richly documented chronicle of eighteenth century Walachia opposed an idealized local scholar, Ion Valahul, to the corrupt Greek princes who ruled the country for the Turks, aided by foreign adventurers like Ottaviano — astrologer and “inspired rascal.” Barbu’s vision of a Walachia fallen prey to foreign cabalistic practices fit well Ceaus¸escu’s rising xenophobia, Barbu himself becoming a staunch supporter of xenophobic nationalism after 1971. A more flexible understanding of history developed gradually in the political novel focused on what Marin Preda called the “obsessive decade,” the Stalinistic fifties. The fiction published in the 1970s often problematized history, calling into question official views about the unfolding of the “socialist revolution.” The plots promoted by the Manichaean imagination of Communist historians were challenged in a gallery of contradictory characters, in parodies of good vanquishing evil, or in bold reversals of the expected denouements. For example, Buzura’s Orgolii (Vanities; 1977), brought conflicting points of view to bear on the novel’s simple truth — that Dr. Ion Cristian was a victim of a repressive political apparatus — suggesting that

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history is continually distorted/rewritten by those in power. Marin Preda’s fiction anticipated and expanded this work of rethinking history both as a collection of events and as a representation. Disenchanted with the party’s “Byzantine moral of historical necessity,” which Preda himself refuted in his collection of essays Imposibila întoarcere (The Impossible Return; 1971), the protagonist of Marele singuratic (The Great Loner; 1972) withdraws from political life into a secluded garden where the politician turned horticulturist can meditate critically on the failures of the Communist utopia. Preda’s last published work, the trilogy Cel mai iubit dintre pa˘mînteni (Most Beloved Man on Earth; 1980), interrogated the Communist ideology more radically through Victor Petrini, an aspiring philosophy professor fired and imprisoned during the Stalinist purges. Petrini writes his memoirs, which invite comparison with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, in the hope of reaching some form of “spirital freedom” from everything he had experienced, gaining some perspective on history (Cel mai iubit 3: 332–33). Historical fiction benefited directly from such reconsiderations of the strengths and limitations of historical agency. Alexandru Ivasiuc, whose subtle analytic prose addressed the moral failures of the Communist revolution, also wrote a remarkable historical novella, “Corn de vîna˘toare” (“Hunting Horn”; 1972). Set in sixteenth-century Transylvania, this novella has obvious contemporary resonances through its main theme, which emphasizes the consolidation of power through violence. The main character, a sort of eastern philosopher vexed by the transience of all “fine things,” is nonetheless an expert stage-manager of local history. During a hunting party, he arranges the massacre of the deposed princely family so as to consolidate his master’s rule in northern Transylvania. After the murder, Mihai passes through moments of Macbeth-like anxiety that only reconfirm his political cynicism: The moment of great fear, now defeated, had scraped up a wild zest for life, so he dared look far ahead, and what he saw no longer looked perishable and unimportant. […] In order to be, it was now imperative simply to be above all others, irrespective of rank and titles, for survival is only possible above, where you feel deeply alive. (Ivasiuc 296–97)

This allegorical story set the tone for the later work of Dana Dumitriu, Eugen Uricaru, and Gabriela Adames¸teanu, who have radicalized historical fiction, introducing in it a contemporary critical dimension. Their historical novels read the past “retrogressively,” from the viewpoint of our present political understanding. These rereadings try to negotiate a better understanding of Romania’s historical journey — its progress, dramatic detours, and chances missed. The final assessment is in most cases pessimistic. For example, the nineteenth century revolutionary in Uricaru’s Rug s¸i flaca˘ra˘ (Stake and Fire; 1977) is trapped in an insidious network of political forces against which neither reason nor individual will can prevail. Likewise, Uricaru’s Vladia (1982) describes a half real, half imaginary pre-modern world sick with political inertia, from which people vainly seek escape (the resemblance with the Ceaus¸escu’s Romania was, of course, intentional). Other novels, however, leave some hope for the future. The routine journey to visit friends and relatives that Vica undertakes in Adames¸teanu’s Dimineat¸a pierduta˘ (Wasted Morning; 1984) occasions an exploration of the socio-historical scene of Romania from World War I to the present. Vica’s prodigious memory reconstructs the waning destiny of her middleclass family, whose ups and downs can be identified with the post-World War I destiny of


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Romania itself, moving from hope to disappointment, and from democracy to totalitarianism. The fact that this reconstruction is undertaken towards the end of the twentieth-century promises a potential recovery, a return to those energies of a “Wasted Morning” that can relaunch individual and collective history.

2.

Family cycles

The first attempt at writing a cyclic novel came at a time when the Romanian historical novel was slowly emerging from the historical romance. In 1864, Hasdeu published serially the already mentioned Copila˘riele lui Iancu Mot¸oc as part one of a never finished cyclic novel entitled the “Life of a Boyar.” Three decades later, Duiliu Zamfirescu developed the first narrative cycle in Romanian literature, comprised of Viat¸a la ¸tara˘ (serialized 1894–95; republished in book form in 1898), Ta˘nase Scatiu (1895–96; 1907), În ra˘zboi (In Time of War; 1897–98, 1902), Îndrepta˘ri (Restitutions; 1901–1902, 1908), and Ana, sau Ceea ce nu se poate (Anna, or What Cannot Be Done; 1906–10; 1911), all focused on the gentrified Coma˘nes¸ti family. Zamfirescu’s characters are modern people, with contradictory psychologies well exemplified by the protagonist of Viat¸a la ¸tara˘, who returns to his home village with dreams to reform it but never translates them into action. Like his characters, Zamfirescu wavered between Idealism and Realism, opposing an idealized landed aristocracy to the rising class of leaseholders memorably embodied in boorish Ta˘nase Scatiu. As Îndrepta˘ri suggested, a partial recovery of the rural aristocracy could begin with the marriage of the last Coma˘nes¸ti with a spirited middle-class woman from the province of Transylvania, but on the whole Zamfirescu’s Coma˘nes¸ti cycle reads like an elegy for the Romanian boyar class. Hortensia Papadat Bengescu also takes a modern psychological approach in the cycle of seven novels focused on the Halippa family — former leaseholders turned big-time capitalists. Papadat-Bengescu’s novels present characters not through a stable narrator but through other characters’ impressions of them. Many of these reflectors are unusually perceptive, seeing everything through a magnifying glass. Mini in Fecioarele despletite (Disheveled Virgins; 1926) can see even the “density” of her thoughts, and tries to do the same thing with other characters. Most often, however, the impressions of a character shift, or are contradicted by those of other characters, creating “spaces of uncertainty” through which the subconscious manifests itself. Papadat-Bengescu was interested in liminal psychological states, triggered by some malady, handicap, or social-moral crisis, such as the social disenchantment of the landowner Baldovin in Ra˘da˘cini (Roots; 1938), or the narcissistic self-absorption of Coca-Aimée, Doctor Walter, and Prince Maxent¸iu in Concert din muzica˘ de Bach (A Concert of Music by Bach; 1927). In 1935, Ion Marin Sadoveanu published the first volume of a loose family saga comprised of Sfîrs¸it de veac în Bucures¸ti (End of Century in Bucharest), Ion Sîntu (1957), and Desa˘vîrs¸irea lui Ion Sîntu (The Betterment of Ion Sîntu), left unfinished by the author’s death in 1964. The construction of these novels is more traditional, following Balzac and Romain Rolland on whose ten-volume cycle Ion Marin Sadoveanu published a monograph in 1955. These novels alternate between a collective focus on the gradual decline of the rural gentry and an individual focus on the intellectual formation and contradictory careers of Iancu Urmatecu in the first novel, and

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Matei and Ion Sîntu in the latter two. Panoramic narration and psychological analysis alternate, providing a detailed representation of the social and psychological changes in Romanian culture over the past century. After World War II and the Communist take over, the ideological privileging of collective over individual interests, of grand narratives over minute psychological analysis, and of the epic approach over the lyrical, explains the early popularity of chronicle novels, family sagas, and epic cycles. George Ca˘linescu’s Scrinul negru (The Black Chest of Drawers; 1960) suggests many of the strengths and weaknesses of the genre: simultaneously traditional and modern in form, blending Balzac’s panoramic approach with the techniques of a “documentary novel,” it explored the many changes brought by the historical events of the mid-twentieth century to bear on the former landed aristocracy and professional class. Focused on an entire class, exemplified through individuals and displaced families, this novel controls firmly chronology and characterization but mixes in a rather loose structure narrative with letters, diaries and even snatches from Ca˘linescu’s own magazine column on the state of the nation. The example of Ca˘linescu’s baroque narratives of a declining class was followed by Petru Dumitriu in the trilogy Cronica˘ de familie (Family Chronicle; 1955), completed after the writer’s self-imposed exile to France. A somewhat different approach, reinserting a subjective perspective in the family chronicle and panoramic fiction, can be found in the postwar work of Zaharia Stancu. A prolific writer, Stancu published a series of structurally digressive novels, begun with Descult¸ (Barefoot; 1948) and continued with the cycle of five books entitled Ra˘da˘cinile sînt amare (Bitter Are the Roots; 1958–59), and the trilogy Vîntul s¸i ploaia (The Wind and the Rain; 1969), focused on the life of peasants and small tradesmen in the Southern plains during the first half of the twentieth century. The digressiveness of much of the narration is explained by the fact that the entire cycle is filtered through the intensely subjective perspective of a young, partly autobiographical protagonist called Darie. The most important family cycle of the post-war period was published by Marin Preda. His novelistic masterpiece, Moromet¸ii (The Moromete Clan; 1955–1967) portrayed a traditional rural society enjoying its last days of political freedom in the interim between totalitarian regimes, comically debating the parliamentary speeches of the day. The family patriarch, Ilie Moromete, represents a symbol of a vanishing social order based on open dialogue but also on conservative family values. Without being strictly speaking a continuation of Moromet¸ii, Marele singuratic (The Great Loner; 1972) is concerned with the crisis of consciousness of a descendent of the Moromete family, party activist Niculae. Preda’s influence on other family sagas written after 1960 is evident, for example, in Ion La˘ncra˘jan’s Cordovanii (The Cordovan Family; 1963). Though far from the critical sharpness and clarity of Preda’s work, Cordovanii managed to represent the tribulations of peasantry under communism, forced to give up their ancestral traditions in order to embrace a dubious “new way of life.” The period after 1989 has produced few examples of family cycles or epic historical novels and for very good reasons. Writers emerging from the Ceaus¸escu’s peculiar brand of national communism, have understandably little faith in grand narratives — those of nationalism included. Their skeptical, problematizing approach to history, however, is not new. As we have seen, both the historical novel and the family narratives have moved well beyond their modest origins in the mid nineteenth century, gaining increasing sophistication at the level of ideology


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and narratology, problematizing our understanding of history and dialogizing the interpretive point of view.

The family novel in East-Central Europe: Illustrated with works by Isaac B. Singer and Włodzimierz Odojewski Zofia Mitosek Dictionaries of literary terms define the family novel as a prose genre in which the family appears as the main character. Presented against a background of customs and morals, its history embraces the changes taking place within a few generations, and its basic structural element is time. Understood in this way, the family novel has a wide and unclear range, since novels have been centered on the family practically from their inception. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it would be difficult to separate family novels from other types, although The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard, and Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann could be said to display those paradigmatic aspects of the genre that appear in other novels only at the outset or at the end of the story (e.g., marriage as the happy resolution in war- or adventure novels). Sigmund Freud introduced the term in Der Famielienroman der Neurotiker (The Family Novel of Neurotics; 1909). He found its archetype in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which features the protagonist’s unconscious desire, fulfilled through an unintended parricide and incest. Freud was concerned with children’s fantasies about their parents. Their source is usually the “Oedipal situation,” but in the daydreams of Freud’s text they significantly go beyond the family triangle, involving siblings’ ambitions, identity, and identifications, the figure of a foundling, and substitutional roles attributed to figures in the surroundings. Freud’s family novel is no literary text but a metaphoric term for imagined stories based on the possibilities that the family structure offers. In Freud’s imagination the family novel defines not only the subject but also the structure. It is a narrative in which family relationships are the source of conflict. Its archetypal situation is an anthropological knot at which signals from the world cross, deciding on the characters’ response to life’s challenges. The family as a novelistic subject and generator of plots allows us to compare works from geographically, historically, nationally, and religiously different literatures. It is not the embodiment of the “Oedipal triangle” but a narrative construction, in which this “conflict prone” group faces history and society, and a conjunction of personal and historical circumstances gives rise to intrigue. Like Greek tragedy, the novel allows us to understand situations that go far beyond life within the family. This is the case in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (a work analyzed by Freud), in Thomas Mann’s Der Erwählte, in nearly all works of William Faulkner,

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or in the novels of François Mauriac and René Bazin. Literature exploits the possibilities created by family relationships to build its own plots and models of the world. If family roles represent a relatively stable paradigm then various combinations of those roles, as well as the imposition of roles from other social paradigms, create infinite possibilities for fictional syntagmas.

The Polish tradition of the family novel In Polish realist literature nearly every epic work is a novel about a family. For example Eliza Orzeszkowa’s Nad Niemnem (On the Banks of the Niemen; 1888) tells the story of a family from the landed gentry whose financial position is threatened by agricultural reform and the abolishment of villeinage. Family conflicts arise because the national bondage of the historical situation imposes demands. The realistic saga moves forward slowly, just like the waters of the River Niemen, while the characters are linked not so much by family love as by love for their homeland. Chłopi (Peasants; 1904–09) by the Nobel-Prize winner Władysław Reymont, is another type of family novel. The story of rivalry between father and son over a woman, the wife and stepmother, offers a detailed study of peasant society. Freedom of nature clashes with the rules of the peasant community and finally leads to tragedy. When Poland regained independence in 1918, literature freed itself from national commitments and the family novel gained psychological depth. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s nostalgic short story Brzezina (Birch Wood; 1932) introduces the reader to an erotic rivalry between two brothers. Melancholy of death and the beauty of a last love collide with the family roles, which demand loyalty and friendship. Maria Døbrowska’s family saga Noce i dnie (Nights and Days; 1932–34) presents family life from the point of view of a neurotic wife, mother, intellectual, and patriot. This detailed study of femininity goes decidedly beyond the Familienroman, although form is essential for its plot. The situation is similar in Maria Kuncewiczowa’s Cudzoziemka (The Foreigner), which speaks of a woman’s permanent sense of strangeness and displeasure in motherhood, family, and homeland. Family is also the subject of Bruno Schulz’s Sklepy cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops; 1934) and Sanatorium pod klepsydrø (Sanatorium under the Hourglass) published in 1937. This great Polish-Jewish writer introduces us to a son who is overwhelmed by his own mythical fantasies of his parents. Although the family theme does not exhaust the richness of this surrealist prose, it seriously weakens the plot, as does its function in Witold Gombrowicz’s work, starting with Ferdydurke, and S´lub (The Marriage), the latter a parody of the family motif. Andrzej Kusńiewicz’s avant-garde novel Król Obojga Sycylii (The King of the Two Sicilies), published in 1970, contains not only historical motifs related to World War I and the fall of the monarchy, but also the motif of incestual love leading to death. Erotic perversion develops in a world of subtle symbolism. The protagonist assumes the roles of son, brother, lover, artist, and soldier, making this novel about the world’s decadence also a work on decadence in the family. The family dominates the work of Jewish novelists coming from lands that used to be part of the old Polish Kingdom, such as Sholem Aleichem’s Tevya, the Dairyman (1901), and Israel Joshua Singer’s Josie Kalb (1932). In Satan in Goray (1935), The Manor (1967), and The Estate

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(1967), the Nobel-Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer represents family-centered conflicts, faith, betrayal, and assimilation, as do nearly all his other works. Written in Yiddish, these novels portray a culture and civilization that is both Jewish and Polish. The Polish lands are presented here through the eyes of unassimilated Jews who continue to regard themselves as chosen people in exile. The novels tie together aspects of the Austrian, Russian, Jewish, and Polish cultures, creating, as it were, the historical reality of Milan Kundera’s Central Europe. Reading family novels of this area allows us to see historically and personally related people, nations, and religions. In what follows, we will discuss two family novels situated in the old Polish Lands: Isaac B. Singer’s The Manor and Włodzimierz Odojewski’s Zasypie wszystko, zawieje (Snow Will Cover Everything; 1973). The Manor Written between 1953 and 1955 in the US, Singer’s novel recounts the story of a Polish property leased to a Jewish corn merchant after the defeat of the 1863 anti-Russian Uprising. He makes a great deal of money by means of an accidentally discovered lime mine on lands bought from another ruined member of the Polish gentry. Calman Jacoby, the leaseholder, was brought up in the orthodox Judaic tradition, but is incapable of upholding it and the family breaks up: his wife dies, one of his daughters runs away with a non-Jew and thus, according to a religious rule, ceases to be his daughter. Drawn into a new marriage with an assimilated and financially irresponsible Jewish woman, Calman is forced to adopt social forms that are alien to him. He is unable to find a son in his new son and a simple faithful woman in his new wife. His long troubles end when he gives up the social and economic temptations of life and locks himself up in a kind of sanctuary he had built for prayer and meditation: “I’m going back to the Jews.” The novel’s somewhat weak plot follows the history of a family, presenting Jewish problems on Polish soil in the second half of the nineteenth century. The world of traditional values comes into conflict with industrial civilization, and the protagonist finds himself in internally contradictory situations. As a budding industrialist he is drawn towards assimilation, but his threatened tradition clashes with his modernizing drive. He partly breaks away from his roots but finds no new values to replace the old ones with. Since, furthermore, the emergence of Jewish fortunes is greeted in the gentile culture with disdain, leading to pogroms, returning to his original religious and moral identity seems his only chance for survival. The Manor develops four interconnected threads: Calman’s life story, the life of his assimilated daughter, the life of the Polish owners of the manor, and the story of Calman’s second son-in-law, a young emancipated Jew. The events are narrated by means of biographies, and the dominating order is time. The conflicts and unfavorable developments threaten Calman’s fate but his moral uprightness rests on faith and customs, not fantasies. History and society are for him subordinate to his existential history, and this assures the novel a logical and axiological coherence. The omniscient narrator, who enters the thoughts and motives of the characters, represents a raison d’être beyond personalities. He hovers over the novel like a good father who does not hesitate to reprimand his characters. The story seems to unfold, implicitly, from the later perspective of the Holocaust. The values and norms of this divine narrator have not survived in Poland, but Singer regards it as his duty to record them. From the perspective of this

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epic, hesitations and personal reasons do not count; the family functions against a background of ethnic and religious laws. The novel shows how a world that starts to get corroded still glows with a mythic light, like a lantern for those who have survived disaster, facilitating life in a new situation, under the sign of nostalgia. Snow Will Cover Everything Singer’s axiological simplicity and purity of narration may be contrasted with another EastCentral European family novel, Odojewski’s Zasypie wszystko, zawieje, a work that Communist censorship suppressed for twenty years. Singer wrote about events taking place in the nineteenth century, while Odojewski tells us about World War II in the Polish Ukrainian borderlands. His narrative about the defense and fall of a family home embodies paradigmatically the fictional possibilities inherent in family accounts, for the plot is based on family relationships. First, there is the sibling relationship between Paweł Woynowicz and his brother Aleksy, a Polish officer killed by the Russians in Katyn, whose body Paweł has been looking for in vain. Paweł, in love with Aleksy’s young widow, takes her body but competes with his brother’s phantom for her soul. Apart from Aleksy’s ghost, there is another pretender to Katarzyna’s body and soul: his cousin Piotr, who is a descendent of the Polish-Russian Czerestwienski family. These conflicts generate fast-moving events, but there appears yet another thread. Piotr has a half-brother, Semen Gawryluk, who was born illegitimately to a Ukrainian peasant and was not accepted by the family. The novel is primarily about killing. The plot follows pogroms and mass murders that devastate towns, estates, and their owners. The two main characters search the forests for enemies. Piotr looks for his bastard brother, who was on the side of the Ukrainian nationalists, and Paweł, a member of the Polish Home Army, fights the Germans. Neither of them is looking for Germans or Ukrainians. When they leave in the name of knightly honor their family to its fate, a mother, a grandfather, and a woman they both love are sentenced to death. The Czerestwienski estate is attacked by detachments whose political and national affiliations are never disclosed to the reader. Katarzyna disappears during a pogrom in the small town in which she sought shelter from Ukrainian bands. The Woynowicz estate is burned down by the inhabitants of a nearby Ukrainian village, while Paweł, after his unsuccessful partisan experiences, leaves for the West, carrying with him the corpse of his mother killed by local peasants. Odojewski’s family novel turns into a political narrative. The landowners from the Polish Borderlands try to resist invaders from both the Russian and the German side, but the biggest threat to the Woynowicz and the Czerestwienski families comes from within. The illegitimate son and the foundling play a key role in the plot. In the welter of nations, peoples, and religions, which made up the eastern lands of the Second Republic, the mixing of blood and nationalities was inevitable, but some ties were socially acceptable while others were considered shameful and pushed to the hidden fringes of family life. Just a few years earlier, when this part of the country was under Russian rule, a Polish-Russian marriage was regarded by Polish patriots as treasonous, but after Poland regained independence it lost its pejorative meaning, especially when both groups confronted a new common enemy: Bolshevik Russia. Piotr Czerestwienski, the fruit of such a mixed marriage, has features very close to those of a Polish knight. His half


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brother, Semen Gawryluk, on the other hand, is a thorn in the side of the family, and his Ukrainian origins are hidden from Piotr for quite a while. Illegitimate sons did not cause problems normally: the peasant mother was given a dowry and got married. But the situation is “abnormal” in Odojewski’s novel, and the bastard causes problems during World War II. Not being able to come to terms with the role ascribed to him by the lords of the manor, he joins the German-supported national movement in the Ukraine and mercilessly destroys the homes of the gentry, whatever their nationality, realizing violently his dream of belonging to the upper classes. Brotherhood assumes a symbolic value. The borderland gentry and the Ukrainian peasants have the same ethnic origins, but members of the higher social strata became assimilated Poles in historically distant times, receiving privileges that assured them power over the simple folk of the land. The protagonists of the novel are aware of this and experience inner conflict. As descendents of the higher people they claim the right to the lands, and they defend them against both the Russians and the Germans. They are not ashamed of their kinship with the Ukrainians when they fight for their common heritage. But this fight, like all family fights, involves not only symbolic values but also material ones, needed to uphold the ancient social division. Loyalty towards Poland becomes an issue, but the Ukrainians choose the Germans and kinship becomes blurred during the never-ending slaughter. The foundling performs another function in the work. The heroine, beautiful and desirable Katarzyna, has unclear origins: her Polish mother had a relationship with a Russian officer and then rejected her. The daughter without a surname finds a home with Piotr’s grandparents. Being an “orphan,” she regains honor and name only by means of her marriage to the rich Polish landowner, Aleksy Woynowicz. But this “intermixture,” accepted through the efforts of three families, falls apart at the most unexpected moment. According to an unwritten law, after the death of her husband she must marry his brother, Paweł, who is deeply in love with her. Inherited as she is, like other goods, she has no say in the matter. But she refuses, not only because of a fleeting affection for young Czerestwienski, but also because she insists that she is a human being rather than an object to be exchanged in marriage. Semen Gawryluk, the bastard, is a stronger enemy than the Germans and Russians, a driving force behind external action. Piotr and his half brother are driven by revenge; Katarzyna, the foundling, is motivated by love; Paweł Woynowicz, whose point of view dominates the narration, obsessively desires her. Centering the story on the young man in the Home Army seems to define the novel’s ideology. Paweł sees his fate in defending his homeland against the Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians, and he accepts this. The most painful problem in his worldview concerns the Ukrainian people. Woynowicz recalls that the quiet Ruthenian peasantry, seemingly accustomed to its Polish lords, has time and again rebelled and produced bloodbaths. This historical knowledge and present-day experience undermines the legend that Poland has been “a bulwark of faith and European culture in the borderlands of Europe” (Odojewski 228). Paweł regards such phrases as worn-out clichés that have long lost their sense. But he does not run away. He gets involved in further conflicts, not always knowing whom he is fighting and not seeing the reason for the battle very clearly. He automatically obeys the orders of his commanders: he kills, is injured, loses his comrades, all the while searching in vain for her traces — the real ones as well as those she has left in his memory. He may act solely out of love. But when he finds, instead of Katarzyna, the body of his mother, which Ukrainian peasants had thrown

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into a pile of dung, he acquires a goal — to take revenge on her murderers. Although he makes scrupulous plans, he loses hope, and, even worse, he loses his desire to act. The novel ends arbitrarily, at a moment of no special importance. The initial conflicts have no solutions. We do not know what has happened to Katarzyna, who attacked the Czerestwienski manor, and what has happened to Piotr. We do not know, because Paweł, the narrative center, has no insight. But there are other reasons as well. The novel loses plausibility because its notions of truth and sensible action have broken down. The initially introduced myths that the Polish family in the Ukraine is the “bulwark of Europe” and the “bridgehead of Polishness” disintegrate in the course of the fighting. Of the family novel only the mother’s grotesquely recovered dead body survives; of the traditional national plot we have only unfinished and unfinishable parts. The loss of reason is a loss of sense, and this breaks up the traditional story structure.

General implications 1. We examined two stories in the third person: Singer used an “omniscient” narrator, whereas Odojewski’s novel was focalized through a character. In the Jewish world, the narrator-God appeals to the main character to come to his senses by means of norms and values in the hero’s psyche. In Odojewski’s novel, Pawel Woynowicz is aware of family and social demands on him, but since the narrator’s insight does not go beyond this awareness, readers are given only a dark, muddled image that is deprived of rational justification and a clear system of values. The image offers merely the ruins of those values. An overabundance of “psychological” knowledge and a “rubbish bin of memory,” as Woynowicz puts it, muddle the story. Instead of facts we get speculations and interpretations, instead of solutions, doubts and questions. Zasypie wszystko, zawieje is, like Singer’s The Manor, a novel written after defeat, if that is what we call the loss of the Polish Borderlands. Singer’s epic vision is an attempt to uphold the values of a collapsing world. In Odojewski’s vision, the lost desire to defend the Borderlands is as grave as the loss of the land. No values emerge from this experience of domestic war. For those Polish readers of the sixties who wanted to know what their nation lost with the Borderlands and what the Ukraine lost with the loss of its Polishness, Odojewski’s work was a great dissappointment. 2. We may observe yet another essential difference. The Jewish writer tells us the history of a family, a saga similar to that of Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. Singer continued the saga with The Estate. To be sure, Zasypie wszystko, zawieje is also part of a larger whole, but apparently as a family novel in Freud’s sense. Singer’s plot presents the protagonist’s conflict with forces beyond the family circle. The heart of the story is the fate of a “problematic individual,” which confirms that one’s primary responsibility is towards one’s family that belongs to an ethnic and religious community. In Odojewski’s novel, the bastard, the foundling, and the fratricide determine the dramatic conflict of the family. Its characters come into two types of conflicts: those developing with people closest to them, and those imposed on them by ethnicity, war, and racism. The second type seems to extend the family only symbolically.


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Its structures break down, facilitated by external conditions, but, as in Oedipus, the source of decline remains within the family itself. 3. Concerning the sociology of literary forms, we see a further reason for the post-modern crisis of literary plot. Systems that offered a base for traditional plots now fall apart, and the crisis of fictionality and the post-World-War-II crisis of the values of family, nation and religion seem to converge. But textual practices do not know empty places: Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Miazga (Pulp), published in 1983, is about the fall of the family as well as that of the novel.

Histories of multimedia constructions

Introduction John Neubauer Literary cultures have always encompassed multimedial combinations with the other arts. Witness rituals and festivities of various kinds, Greek tragedy, folk festivals, the art of emblems — to name only a few. New technologies and media have opened up exciting possibilities whose range we can hardly glimpse as yet. Precisely the wealth of already existing combinations makes, however, a systematic treatment within this History impossible. All we can do here is to identify some of the main forms that this interplay of literature and other media have taken and to offer a few exemplary essays on them. Multimedial literary arts, in the sense used here, are combined and simultaneously displayed artforms in which literary texts function as one component. They include a large variety of performing arts, emblem literature, concrete poetry, graphic fiction, strips, hypertextual (electronic) literature, and many other combinations. The category of performing arts (where the text itself is performed rather than just available for reading) could be further broken down into combinations with visual arts (silent film, video performances, serial narrative art…) and with music or other configurations of sound (opera, lied…) or both (theater, film…). The criterion of simultaneity excludes artforms in which literature merely serves as a point of departure or inspiration but does not appear in the final form; similarly, it does not include the various forms of ekphrasis, i.e., literary descriptions of visual art objects, and verbal music, i.e., verbal representations of real or imaginary music. Under the circumstances, and given the specific historical focus of this volume with nineteenth and twentieth-century pre-digital genres, we have decided to limit ourselves to two genres, opera and film. Within these genres, we opted for a selective approach that highlights nineteenth-century national opera and postwar cinema, although the implications and conclusions we attach to these studies are broader. We note also that, with the broadening of the cultural scope, the spatial and temporal ordering (designation of movements and periods) become considerably more controversial. Thus, for instance, Dina Iordanova convincingly argues that literary periodizations do not work well with cinema, for its history is driven largely by technological development. More controversial perhaps is her claim that in cinema (and perhaps elsewhere) there is now a growing division between North and South, between Central Europe and the Balkans: Balkan film is acquiring (or has already acquired) an identity of its own. Had we focused on digital or new media art, we would have probably observed the contrary, namely the convergence of the new art forms in East-Central Europe towards a globalist poetics, influenced by worldwide technologies and messages.

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National operas in East-Central Europe John Neubauer I Opera histories have problems in accomodating national operas. A four-page section in the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, carrying the title “Slavonic and National Opera” (13: 599–603), claims that national operas satisfied the hunger for national heritage with folk music and libretti based on national history, myth, legend, peasant life, or history (599), but the subsections on “Russia” (599–601), the “Other east European countries” (601–603), and “Western Europe and the USA” (602) do not substantiate this claim in a satisfactory manner. The 2001 edition of The New Grove reduces the treatment to half-a-page on “National Traditions” but improves it conceptually by no longer suggesting an intrinsic relation between national operas and Slavonic cultures. The article contrasts the emergence of national operas with the homogenization of grand opera under Parisian hegemony, and it associates the genre with “a gathering sense of national cultural identity.” Not the use of folk music was crucial but the relation to political events and to powerful “musical and dramatic or literary motifs that could come to symbolize the nation.” National operas did not appropriate an already existing fund of national musical material; they “constructed the material, becoming ‘national’ through their cumulative reception” (18: 439). This approach, which originated with Carl Dahlhaus (19. Jahrhundert 180–87) and was adopted in Albert Gier’s book on libretti (185f), rightly stresses that national operas ought to be related to the cultural conditions of their creation and reception rather than defined on the basis of intrinsic musical or textual features. Nabucco and several other Verdi operas that were received in the spirit of the risorgimento are surely national operas even if they are not based on Italian history and Italian folk music. Yet the new approach is so vague that it loses all historical and cultural specificity. National operas did not pop up arbitrarily; they were an important element in the national awakening that swept much of Europe, especially its eastern and southern part, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As described in various parts of this project, national awakenings gave impetus and ideology for institutionalizing literature and philology; they led also to a reconsideration of opera that involved building new public opera houses in urban centers, creating national companies, and writing national operas in the vernacular. While national operas are diverse, we need not define them only on the basis of their reception. Indeed, their reception was primarily guided by a key “textual” feature, namely their use of the vernacular. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries opera was, in spite of national differences, basically international in its orientation, in good measure because of the long dominance of Italian. The introduction of the vernacular in the nineteenth century

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broadened the national bourgeois audience at the urban centers while it restricted opera’s international appeal. Mikola Lysenko, the founder of the Ukranian national opera with Natalka Poltavka (1889) and Taras Bul’ba (1903), forbade the performance of his operas in Russian out of national pride. In most other cases it was the libretto and the vernacular that made the exportation of national operas difficult. As a touching gesture of compensation, an enterprising Pole published in Paris an Esperanto translation of Włodzimierz Wolski’s libretto for Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Halka. Lysenko’s case indicates also why Russian national operas should not be lumped together with the East-Central European ones. The emergence of Russian and modern East-Central European literatures roughly coincided, but nineteenth-century Russia, a hegemonic power in the region, used national themes and national history for different purposes. The first Russian national opera, Glinka’s A Life for the Czar [Ivan Sussanin] contributed to the forming of Russian national identity by portraying how in 1612 the peasant Sussanin saved the Czar from the invading Polish troops, but in 1836, when the opera had its première, Russia was the invader and one of the three nations occupying divided Poland. In Poland, in the Baltic countries, in the Ukraine and in parts of Romania national awakening and national opera were directed against Russian, and German, cultural and political domination. The national awakening of the Slavs did have a pan-Slavic dimension, but this frequently clashed with the national aspirations of individual Slavic nationalities. Smetana’s experience is a case in point. While leading the Prague opera he conducted both Moniuszko’s Halka (on February 28 and May 1, 1868) and Glinka’s A Life for the Czar (on January 4, 1867). The relation with Moniuszko was cordial: Smetana satisfied Moniuszko’s wishes to see in Prague both a “truly Czech national opera” and a performance of his own Halka (Bartoš 130). But the Russian connections went sour. Balakirev was horrified that in the Prague staging of Glinka’s opera the peasants had Jewish and not Russian beards (Large 209), and “he accused Smetana of sabotaging the performances with a hissing party, led by a group of Poles well-known for their anti-Russian sympathies” (Large 210). In turn, Smetana held Balakirev responsible for the St. Petersburg failure of The Bartered Bride (1871) and he did not feel compensated by its success in Zagreb on April 18, 1873, its only other foreign performance during Smetana’s life.

II A cultural history of national opera should then be seen as a dimension of those national awakenings that we describe in several sections of our history of literary cultures in East-Central Europe. They were made possible by revivals of the vernacular, the cultivation of national literatures, and the literary turn to topics in national history. Of course, nationalism was not the only force that shaped the emergence of the national opera. The internal, artistic factors included, for instance, the shift from classical mythology, the bible, and quasi-historical antiquity to drame bourgeois, bürgerliches Trauerspiel, Singspiel and other plays featuring middle- and lower-class heroes. But we have to go beyond an “internist” history of libretti. Albert Gier’s chapter (172–90) on “Nationale Sonderwege (Frankreich, Italien, Rußland)” all but ignores, for instance, the turn to vernacular libretti and the close ties between composers and national poets

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that are so characteristic of national operas in East-Central Europe. Moniuszko was inspired to compose Halka after meeting the poet Włodzimierz Wolski in 1846 who became his librettist; Ferenc Erkel turned for his Bánk Bán (1861) to the eponymous tragedy of József Katona (1821), which, after a difficult start, became the national drama. Lysenko’s Natalka Poltavka and Taras Bul’ba were both based on stories by Gogol; the first Bulgarian national opera, Borislav (1911) by Georgi Atanasov, was based on a drama by Ivan Vazov, the leading Bulgarian writer; the first Slovak national opera, Detvan (1928) by Viliam Figuš-Bystrý uses a libretto by Emil Boleslav Lukácˇ, which in turn is based it on Andrej Sládkovicˇ’s “Detvan” (1853). Smetana’s relation to writers was particularly complex and interesting. When he returned from Sweden in 1861 he asked the distinguished poet J. J. Kolár to write a historical libretto for him, for he wanted to compete for one of the prizes that Count Jan Hrabe Harrach announced on February 10, 1861. Harrach wanted to encourage the composition of two Czech National Operas, the first of which was to be based “on the history of the Czech people; the second should be of gay content and taken from the national life of the people in Bohemia, Moravia or Silesia” (Large 141). His aim was “to produce a real national work that will glorify the Czechs!” (Large 142). When Kolár hesitated, Smetana turned to Karel Sabina, the radical poet from 1848/49, who was first condemned to death, then given sixteen years of prison, and finally granted amnesty in 1857. Sabina complied, and Smetana received in February 1862 the (rather weak) libretto for his first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia. Although he completed the score in 1863, the opera was only performed in January 1866, though to great acclaim. But the first version of the much superior Prodaná neveˇsta (The Bartered Bride) failed on May 30th, perhaps because of the threatening Austro-Prussion war. Indeed, on July 3 Prussia decisively won at Königgrätz / Hradec Králóvé (Sadowa), and Smetana briefly moved out of Prague for fear that the real Brandenburgers would not treat him kindly. Smetana’s operas were highly political. Jan Neruda hailed The Bartered Bride as the first Slavic opera, but its librettist, Sabina, suffered a deadly blow to his reputation a few years later, when it became known that he had been a police informant. Max Brod may be right in suggesting in his book on Sabina that the (apparent) selling and betrayal of the bride was already Sabina’s coded self-defense. Be it as it may, for Dalibor and Libuše, Smetana’s next two national operas, the librettist became Josef Wenzig, a German writer sympathetic to the Czech cause but who spoke no Czech. Ervin Špindler had to translate his German libretti. The librettist for Smetana’s last three operas became the prominent writer Eliška Krásnohorská, who taught him Czech prosody. The building an operatic infrastructure involved erecting opera houses and setting up companies. As opera performances moved from courts to cities and, increasingly, into national opera houses, national companies emerged and their staging of native operas often occasioned national self-celebrations. The successful première of Smetana’s Dalibor on May 16, 1868 was coupled with the ground-laying ceremonies for the permanent Czech National Theater in Prague, ceremonies that included processions with banners and colorful folkloric costumes, as well as speeches by Karel Sladkovský, the political leader of the Young Czech Party, and František Palacký, leader of the conservatives. Smetana exclaimed when depositing the cornerstone, “Music — the Life of the Czechs!” implying that the cornerstone was also to become a foundation for the nation’s future. His next opera, Libuše, provided a foundational myth for this


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anticipated event. Smetana wrote the opera in 1869–72 for a planned crowning of emperor Franz Josef as King of Bohemia, but since this never took place it finally opened the new permanent Czech theater on June 11, 1881 (the theater soon burned down, but Libuše was played at its reopening in 1883). Libuše, a festival play rather than a drama, celebrates the marriage of Queen Libuše with Prˇemysl von Staditz as the founding of the Bohemian dynasty. The final act contains Libuše’s vision of Bohemia’s glorious future (based on the manuscript forged by Hanka) and concludes with an apotheosis of the Czech nation. Wenzig wished to use for the occasion the Czech national hymn but Smetana rejected the idea. These East-Central European composers were, unlike Glinka, deeply involved in the development of a native opera culture. Beyond festive foundations and inaugurations they functioned for long periods as musical directors: Smetana was the musical director and conductor of the Provisional Czech Theater between 1866 and 1874; Ivan Zajc directed the Croatian opera between 1870 and 1889; Moniuszko was conductor of the Warsaw Grand Theater between 1858 and 1872; Ferenc Erkel, composer of the Hungarian national operas Hunyadi László and Bánk Bán, was conductor, and later general music director of the Hungarian theater of (Buda)Pest. At the end of his life he was Director of the Academy of Music (1875–88). In spite of these and other general features, the national awakening in opera was by no means homogeneous and indigenous. Many of the new opera houses, including the Croatian National Theater, were designed by the famous Austrian duo, Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer; others, whether built by Germans or by native architects, followed an international classicist style, with hardly a trace of distinguishing national features. Similar discrepancies, mutatis mutandis, become evident if we take a closer look at the national identity of the people, the music, and the libretti that were at the heart of the national musical awakening. Maciej Kamien´ski, who set to music the first Polish libretto (1778), was of Slovak origin. Ion Andrei Wachmann, the founder of Romanian national opera, Director of the National Theater in Bucharest (1852–58), and composer of the first Romanian national opera, Mihai Bravul în ajunul ba˘ta˘liei de la Ca˘luga˘reni (Michael the Brave on the Eve of the Battle of Calagureni), was Hungarian by birth but his librettist was the Romanian Ion Heliade Ra˘dulescu; Zajc worked in Zagreb but was of Czech origin. Smetana spoke German at home and in school, and was thirtytwo when he wrote his first Czech letter in 1856. He continued to have trouble with Czech prosody, which, to be sure, was not yet standardized. József Ruzitska, composer of the first Hungarian national opera, Béla futása (Béla’s Flight; 1822) was Slovak by birth, whereas the Slovak Viliam Figuš-Bystrý studied 1911–14 in Budapest. Ruzitska’s libretto, though written in Kolozsvár / Cluj by János Kótsi Patkó or Péter Cseri, based on a play by the popular German playwright August Kotzebue (the opera was actually commissioned for the opening of the German Theater in 1812, but suppressed by the censor). Semen Stepanovych HulakArtemovs’kyi wrote his own libretto for the first Ukranian national opera, Zaporozhec za Dunaem (A Cossack beyond the Danube; First Night’s Performance 1863) — but in Russian. Above all, the music of the national operas was by no means nationally or ethnically homogeneous, even if set to a vernacular text. Most composers, including Glinka, Erkel, Moniuszko, and Zajc wrote in the Italian style. True, each composer introduced some national elements, mostly dances: Halka contains not only krakowiak and kuhawiak rhythms, but also

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highland dances from the Tatra; Erkel made frequent use of the verbunkos style and of the choriambic, so called bokázó cadence; Zajc often used folk melodies, for instance in Jelena’s lullaby in Nicola Šubic´ Zrinski. But the national operas usually followed the Italian style, occasionally the French Grand Opera. Count Harrach’s mentioned competition stipulated “that the opera shall be based on a diligent study of the national songs of the Czech and Slovak peoples. The music must have a real national identity” (Large 141). But Smetana refused to simply incorporate folk songs into his opera, got into an angry argument on this with Rieger (Clapham 31), and almost missed getting Harrach’s prize because of it. Later he was accused of Wagnerism for his own way of using the leitmotive technique. Much of the folk music that nineteenth and early twentieth-century composers incorporated into their operas was, of course, far from genuine. Bartók’s critique of Brahms, Liszt and others is well known. So are the problems with his own notion of what constitutes genuine peasant music.

III How nationalism seized and fed on highly heterogeneous materials is best illustrated with Ivan Zajc’s opera Nicola Šubic´ Zrinski, which is based on a historical event, the defense of Szigetvár in 1566 against the overwhelming Turkish force of Suliman II. The siege ended with the heroic sally and death of all defenders on September 7. Péter Kraft’s painting, Zrinyi kirohanása (1825), now in the Hungarian National Gallery, is one of its many pictorial commemorations. Suliman II had died a natural death a few days earlier. What seems like an ideal subject to fire up Croatian patriotism turns out to have a highly impure pedigree. The hero’s family, originally from Dalmatia and called De Brebirio (Klaniczay 10f.), assumed its name when in 1347 King Lajos awarded them the Croatian fortress of Zrin. To this day, the family has a Croatian (Zrinski) as well as a Hungarian (Zrinyi) identity. Szigetvár lies in the southwest of today’s Hungary, and the Croatian hero of the opera is revered among Hungarians as Miklós Zrinyi. The Hungarian claim on him is bolstered by the hero’s great-grandson, also called Miklós and also a political and military leader, who commemorated the siege and his ancestor in 1645–46 with the great Hungarian epic poem Szigeti veszedelem (The Peril of Sziget) which he published in Vienna in 1651, as part of the volume Adriai tengernek Syrenája (The Siren of the Adriatic Sea). The epic is generally recognized as the highpoint of seventeenth-century Hungarian literature. Though only specialists read this heavy text from cover to cover, it has contributed enormously to the Hungarian fame of the Zrinyis and the siege, and it is largely responsible for the conviction of most Hungarians that the Zrinyis, Szigetvár, and its heroic defense belong to a purely Hungarian tradition. But Petar Zrinski, the poet’s brother, devoted several years to prepare a Croatian version of Miklós Zrinyi’s epic poem before he was executed by the Habsburgs on charges of treason (he collaborated with the French against the Habsburgs, see p. 495). Josip Voncˇina claims in his introduction to Petar’s translation that Miklós Zrinyi (Nicola Zrinski) excused himself for writing the epic in Hungarian, and that he explicitly claimed to be a Croat and a Zrinski (11), not a “rootless” person. Petar, the Croatian domesticator of his brother’s Hungarian poem, became a Croatian national hero for his own martyrdom, as well as for singing the praise of his great grandfather. Though this seems


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sufficient reason for turning the Croatian version of the epic poem into a libretto for a Croatian national opera, this is not what happened: as the title page of Nikola Šubic´ Zrinski proclaims (though the poster for the opera’s première conceals), Hugo Badalic´’s libretto is based on Theodor Körner’s German drama, Zriny (1812). Why did Badalic´, probably in cooperation with Zajc, use a German rather than Croatian text? The tenth of Friedrich Schlegel’s Vienna lectures that inaugurated a modern national view of literature devoted a few words to East-European literature, including the Russian, Czech, Polish, and, above all the Hungarian one. Friedrich had learned a smattering of Hungarian in 1809, when in the war against Napoleon he retreated with the Austrian troops to Hungarian territory and lived for several months in Pest and Buda. He used the opportunity to study Hungarian literature and history, and even attempted to translate a volume of plaintive love by Sándor Kisfaludy. The tenth Vienna lecture mentions, without naming Zrinyi, that Hungarians continued to cultivate the heroic epic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until a contemporary, Sándor Kisfaludy, revived “old national legends” (Schlegel, Ausgabe 6: 237). He refers to Kisfaludy’s Regék a magyar elo˝-ido˝kbo˝l (Legends from the Hungarian Past; 1807), which contained the romances “Csobánc” (1–24), “Tátika” (25–121), and “Somló” (123–264). Schlegel compared Mathias Corvinus’ cultivation of Italian and Latin with the French predilection of Frederick the Great: national culture and literature suffered in both cases. This made a great impression on young Theodor Körner when he arrived in Vienna on August 26, 1811 and quickly established his reputation with two comedies performed in the Burgtheater in January 1812. Known to Friedrich Schlegel already in his childhood as the son of Christian Gottfried Körner (an intimate friend of Schiller), Theodor became a frequent guest at the Schlegels and an eager listener to Friedrich’s lectures. Though Schlegel’s papism apparently irritated this young north-German (Werke 2: 449), his lectures converted him politically and culturally: he came to hate Napoleon and the French, and he fervently embraced the idea that literature must once more link up with the national present and past. Seeking for a dramatic subject that would fuel the national hatred against Napoleon in the crucial year of 1812, Körner came across Zrinyi, the “Hungarian Leonidas” as he called him (Werke 2: 443), perhaps on advice from Károly Kisfaludy, the brother of the poet mentioned by Schlegel and a friend of Körner’s in Vienna (Wurzbach 245). Since Zrinyi’s epic had not yet been translated then into German, Körner had to rely on historical and literary sources supplied by his father. His most important literary source seems to have been the play Niklas Zrini oder die Belagerung von Sigeth by the minor Swabian author Friedrich August Clemens Werthes, which he studied in the spring with the help of his father (Kade). By June 27 he finished Zriny; on July 3 he read from it to guests at the Schlegels (Werke 2: 459), and Friedrich was so impressed that he published the soliloquies of Suliman II and Zriny in his Deutsches Museum (2: 515–21), prior to the play’s performance on stage. But the text ran into problems with the censors, even though Zrinyi first seemed a clean enough hero from a Habsburg perspective to preempt objections (Stern 340): Körner reported on September 12 that Zriny had not yet passed Metternich; on September 19 that the approval of the play would drag out until the end of October. When he finally obtained the permission on October 31, he thought that the required cuts were not too extensive (Werke 2: 468), but this must have been a sigh of relief after fearing the worst. The success of the première in the Theater an der

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Wien on December 30, 1812 was so great that two theaters immediately offered Körner a post as resident dramatist, but — not unlike the poet Zrinyi — he preferred the sword to the pen and followed his dramatic character in his death: in March 1813 he volunteered for the army and was killed in action on August 26. The plot of Zriny is undramatic; the characters are fixed and transparently one-dimensional. The dying Soliman, in some respects the most interesting figure, is an archetypal oriental despot who yearns to crown his life with the capture of Vienna, whatever the cost in human lives, but he stumbles over Szigetvár on his way. Zriny is a more humane family man and comrade of his countrymen, but he is equally stubborn and inflexible. Following Schiller’s Wallenstein, Körner injected into the play a grim romance between Zriny’s daughter, Helene, and Lorenz Juranitsch. Lorenz’s superior bravery wins Zriny’s consent to marry her, but the same bravery consistently wins also over his great love. When it becomes evident that they must perish, Helene ecstatically demands of him: “So töte mich! Und küsse mir die Seele / Mit deinem Brautkuss von dem blassen Mund!” (“Kill me then! And kiss my soul off my pale mouth with your bridal kiss!” — Werke 2: 141); Lorenz complies before charging out into his own death. Körner’s political/patriotic message, together with his death in combat, catapulted to a huge success a play that was, by general admission, dramatically and aesthetically flawed. Zriny and Körner’s posthumous volume of patriotic songs, Leyer und Schwert (Lyre and Sword), became great German bestsellers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Körner’s personal and literary apotheosis came, of course, during World War I. (Prof. Dr.) SchmitzMancy, for instance, warmly recommended the play in 1916 for high-schools as a “Song of Songs on liberating the fatherland, with a thrilling glorification of patriotic love, selfless devotion to duty, and fearless bravery.” Spirit and character of Zriny were to help Germany to overcome its enemies whenever the existence of the fatherland was at stake, as in the World War just then raging (13–14). Yet this phenomenal popularity of Zriny is puzzling. Unlike Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht and other patriotic works against Napoleon, Zriny borrowed a foreign hero and a foreign national past to fan the flames of German patriotism. Körner imported and staged the Hungarian/Croatian resistance against the dying Suliman II as an allegorical exhortation to fight the waning power of Napoleon, appropriating thereby a foreign patriotic legend to fuel German hatred. Still worse, the play’s Hungarian/Croatian patriotism was politically dubious, for it could have also been directed against the Habsburgs, whose claim to the Hungarian throne was contested. As reported in the play itself, Emperor Maximilian had assembled a great army to defend Vienna against Suliman but made no effort to save Zrinyi. The great grandsons, Miklós and Petar, were no longer loyal subjects of the emperor, as the hero of Szigetvár apparently was, and Petar paid with his life for it. By 1812, Hungary was dominated by Austria rather than the Turks, and Hungarian language reform was already struggling against German cultural hegemony. Although the Hungarian nobility overwhelmingly rejected Napoleon’s proclamation that promised them a king of their own, the censors remained distrustful and apparently feared that allegorical readings of Zrinyi’s patriotism could easily become exhortations to fight the Habsburgs. According to Wurzbach, Károly Kisfaludy broke with Körner because he felt that the play did not do justice to the Hungarian perspective and Körner did not understand the difference between Austrian and Hungarian patriotism (244).


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This may explain why Zriny had trouble with the censors, in spite of its intent to fan Austrian/German patriotism. Indeed, the final text is all but cleansed of a specifically Hungarian patriotism: Körner’s Zrinyi fights for God, the Kaiser, and a vaguely defined fatherland, not for Hungary. The cleansing, whether due to self-censorship or censorship, is especially evident in the scene in which the loyal Zriny reprimands those who complain that the imperial army did not come to his rescue: “don’t speak irreverently about our good Emperor […] Life appears different from the throne […] The individual goes down in the general. / It is the Emperor’s hereditary right: / He can demand a sacrifice from thousands, / If the good of millions is at stake” (Werke 2: 114–15).

IV Körner’s play was surprisingly well received in Hungary, considering that it erased the antiHabsburg thrust of Hungarian patriotism just at the time when this was on the rise. Primarily those language reformers were interested in it who rejected populist nationalism and sought to refine the Hungarian language through high-quality translations and the integration of Hungarian literature into a European republic of letters. Pál Szemere, an associate of Ferenz Kazinczy, the leading language renewer, translated Zriny in 1818 for an amateur performance, establishing thereby the iambic pentameter as the dominant form of Hungarian tragedies. In 1821 another translation by Dániel Petrichevich-Horváth was performed at the opening of the Hungarian theater of Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca. Szemere’s translation was published in 1826 in Élet és literatúra (Life and Literature), together with a magisterial essay on the play and Szemere’s translation by Ferenc Kölcsey, author of the Hungarian national hymn and Kazinczy’s perhaps most important younger follower. The essay, a landmark in Hungarian theater criticism, had fundamental objections to Körner’s bombastic and sentimental language, his undramatic plot, and his clumsy characterizations, but praised Szemere for his eloquence, the poetic rhythm of his language, and for dropping the scene in which Lorenz kills Helene. In the matter of patriotism, Kölcsey merely remarks that Körner had no knowledge of Hungarian culture and history (134, 145): his Zrinyi is “German,” and the play’s patriotism has no specificity at all. Refusing to join those patriots who demand more ethnic color (138), Kölcsey does not even mention that Szemere Hungaricized some of the names (e.g. Ujlaki for Bilacky) and consistently refers to the ruler as the (Hungarian) king rather than the Austrian emperor. Indeed, the final battle cry of Szemere’s Zrinyi is victory for the hármas-halom (129), the “triple hill” in the Hungarian arms, while Körner’s dying Zriny sees a victorious Austrian eagle (Werke 2: 144).

V Thus Zajc and Badalic´ may have turned to Körner’s Zriny because it transmogrified and neutralized a Hungarian nationalism that remained in the foreground of the epic poem, even when translated into Croatian. Croatian nationalism sided with Austria against Hungary in 1848/49, and the 1867 Compromise established an Austro-Hungarian Monarchy much at the cost

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of the Croats and other Slavic minorities: Croatia was regarded as a Hungarian territory, though it did have a certain degree of self governance. Since a Croatian national opera had to fear both Hungarian and Austrian censorship in the 1870s, basing the libretto on Körner’s Zriny liberated the text from the controversies around the epic poem, and gave it an Austrian pedigree that the Hungarians, the junior partners in the Monarchy, could not easily challenge. Thus Nikola Šubic´ Zrinski could be premiered in Zagreb on November 4, 1876, and open the Croatian National Theater in 1895. That the libretto was based on Körner’s German drama was not mentioned, however, on the poster for the first night! Did the opera, like Körner’s play, stage a Zrinski dying for God, the Emperor, and a vaguely defined fatherland? So it must have seemed to censors and others that read the 1876 German version of the libretto, whose revised version is reprinted in the booklet that accompanies a recent Croatian CD recording of the opera. But passages of the vernacular text sung on stage differed from the German version precisely where Körner (or his censors) “neutralized” Hungarian patriotism. The Appendix below includes all the passages in which the Croatian version uses the words “Croatia” or the “Croatians.” In all but one of them the German version omits the Croatian reference; in the one remaining case the German speaks of brave Croatian loyalty, the Croatian version only of Croatian bravery! The short history here recounted involves then a series of textual recyclings, each growing out of a confrontation between nationalism and censorship. Körner washed out the Hungarian colors of a heroic story and infused his play with an anti-Napoleonic hatred that fed German and Austrian nationalism throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The national opera of Zajc and Badalic´ quietly “re-nationalized” this German nationalism, returning it to what they considered to be its native soil and reclaiming a hero they regarded as their own. The metamorphoses of the material acquire broader implications if we note that the (mis)appropriations were made possible by a fundamental vagueness at the heart of the historical story. While the Christian and anti-Turkish message of Szigetvár’s defense is clear enough, it is less obvious whether Hungarians or Croatians should get more credit for it, since the Zrinyis and many other defenders of the fortress had double ethnic affiliations. Zajc’s opera, like Körner’s play, reductively simplifies the hybridity of the historical actors by giving the “text” an allegorical reading. National awakenings claimed to be “natural” returns to native traditions, but, as our example shows, they often appropriated hybrid figures and ambiguous texts, whose full scope undermines the patriotic ideology and its intended public function. East-Central European national operas participated in the wave of nationalism that swept the region like a vulcanic outburst, indiscriminately picking up and incorporating into its glowing heat every object on its way. Zrinski, presented and received as a grand national opera, incorporated in its national lava a foreign libretto and a largely Italian musical idiom. But the lava flow in which national operas participated was neither natural nor inevitable.

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National operas in East-Central Europe Appendix Zajc / Badalic´, Nicola Šubic´ Zrinski (1876) A Comparison of Passages with “Hrvat” (Croat) or one of its Cognates Mehmed Scene 1 cd booklet p. 84

“Dok silni Hrvat taj / životom Siget brani, / uzet ga necéš, znaj, / ne, ti Sigeta se kani!”

“While that mighy Croat / defends the fort, / The battle will be fought / for naught.”

Jelena Scene 2 Cd booklet p. 90

“Tamo mlada duša rada / u [It’s to] “Croatia fair, / That “Wollt ich eilen, dort verHrvatsku leti sad.” my young soul / will fly on weilen, / In der Heimat teuwings of air” rem Schoß”

Zrinski Scene 2 Cd booklet p. 98

“Junaci moji vrijede, / Hrvati vijek su prvi”

“My men are brave, / Croats are always first”

“Des Türken Schwert und Keule / Soll unsern Arm erproben”

Chorus Scene 3 Cd booklet p. 104

“neka žive slavni vijek! / Hrvat umije sjec´”

“A Croat knows / how to make his sword flame

“Nie erbleiche euer Ruhm! / Mutig, wenn ihr im Krieg, Streitet furchtlos vor der feindlichen Stahl”

Zrinski Scene 3 Cd booklet 108

“Junaci, bracó! / Ma gdje se “Men! My brothers! / “Ihr Helden, Brüder! / Sooft Hrvat s Turci bije, / za dom Wherever a Croat takes on im Kampfe wir mit Türken, se bori svoj!” the Turkish flood, / It’s to / Es gilt dem Vaterland” defend his land, his home!”

Juranic´ & Zrinski Scene 5 Cd booklet p. 122

Juranic´: “A zašto kralj ne do e / junacom u pomoc´?” Zrinski: “Ne zbori tako, sinko! / Ustrajat’na tom mjestu valja, / pa nek se sruši cijeli svijet. / Za domovinu i za narod / rado znade Hrvat mrijet’!”

Juranic´: “Why doesn’t the King come to our aid?” Zrinski: “No, dear son! / Ours is not to reason, but to fight, / Even though the world crumbles under his might. / For his homeland, and for his people in strife, / A Croat will readily give his life!”

“Solange jener Held / In jener Feste waltet, / Bezwingst du leicht die Welt, / Bevor sein Mut erkaltet.”

Juranic´: “Doch weshalb läßt der König / In Not uns hilfelos?” Zrinski: “Nicht grolle, Sohn, dem König! / Die Ehre fordert uns, zu harren, / Und stürze auch die Erde ein. / Wie stets dem König treu wir waren, / Sterben wir in Treue rein!”

Mehmed Scene 5 Cd booklet 128

Mehmed: “ti kralj Hrvatâ budi” Zrinski: “Hrvatu ban je kralj, on mjesto kralja vlada”

Mehmed: “He’ll make you Mehmed: “als König sollst king!” Zrinski: “To the Croats, du thronen” / the Ban is their king. He is Zrinski: “Der Ban bleibt treu the king’s appointed Vice-Roy” dem Thron, / Als Ban ist er doch Herrscher!


“Nado e cˇas da kano Hrvat tvorim, / održim rodu sveti zavjet svoj!”


“Božanskim žarom njetimo / “Heavenly fire will all con- “In weihevoller Stimmung hrvatsku vjernu grud!” sume, / But Croats will their wir / Nach treu vollbrachter fight resume!” Pflicht!”

Officers and Soldiers Scene 8 Cd booklet p. 154

“Stijeg hrvatski visoko se vije!”

“Tis time for me to like a “Der Tag ist da, wo ich im Croat die; / My sacred oath I Schlachtgetümmel / Kroaten will not belie” Treu besiegle tapfer hier!”

“The Croatian banner is flying “Schwinget, Brüder, hoch high!” die Landesfahne”

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East-Central European cinema and literary history Dina Iordanova As in all other European countries, film was introduced across East-Central Europe shortly after its advent in 1895. Soon thereafter, during the early decades of the twentieth century, most nations in the region launched their own film industries (a process that developed even before some of them would gain political sovereignty). Ever since, maintaining an indigenous cinematic tradition has been seen as an intrinsic part of modern nation building. While this article will focus on films made after the end of World War II, it is important to mention that each country of East-Central Europe had a thriving film industry prior to the war, producing silent films initially and switching to talkies in the early 1930s. At that time, film production in the region was comparable in quality and quantity to the production in other similarly sized European countries. The links with the cinemas of Western Europe were particularly intense, including exchanges of actors, directors, and other creative personnel. And if the region’s cinema from the 1920s and 30s remains less-known today, this is not due to the lesser significance of its cinematic output. The post-World-War-II period saw growth in the film industries across the region: they were nationalized and received substantial financial injections, for the Communist states were keenly interested in the propaganda potential of this mass medium. The artistic output of this period was marked by a common set of themes, aesthetics, and genres, partly due to the postwar political constraints shared by the countries in the region. However differently applied by the respective national regimes, the subordination of cinema to the authority of state institutions was a common denominator across the region.

Fluctuating topography: The politics of place While literary history may sensibly be divided into nineteenth-century, early twentieth century, and postwar periods, the periodization of film will have to be somewhat different due to the very nature of the medium. Cinema established itself as an art form early in the twentieth century, and its development often depended on technological and industrial changes, such as the use of sound or the advent of television and video technologies. For film, periods marked by technological innovations in production and reception are as important as the ones marked by historical events. Once we combine politics and modes of production in the East-Central

East-Central European cinema and literary history

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European case, it seems most appropriate to speak of cinema before World War II, cinema under state socialism, and post-Communist cinema. The post-1989 period brought state interference in filmmaking to an end, but it also meant massive cuts and a withdrawal of centralized government funding. The shift to a market economy affected every level of the film industry, from its basic infrastructure to its mode of financing and administration. This change in basic operational premises, rather than the specifics of the artistic output, demands that we regard post-Communism as a new period. As far as politics of place is concerned, cultural topographies fluctuate, and so do ideas about belonging. The cinema of the GDR, for example, was ideologically, stylistically, and thematically part of the cinematic culture of Eastern Europe during the post-war decades. Less than ten years after the reunification of Germany, however, it is no longer within the range of East-Central European film studies and has been delegated to the Germanists. Similarly, the dissolution of what used to be Eastern Europe into East-Central Europe and the Balkans allows the rediscovery of stylistic and thematic features shared by the cinemas of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania on the one hand, and those of Greece and Turkey, on the other. A new concept of Balkan cinema, juxtaposed to Central-European cinema, is coming into being. In the post-Communist era, the familiar North-South distinction, previously deemed inapplicable, seems to emerge in the region: an orderly, well to do, and affluent North is contrasted to a disorderly, chaotic and poor South. Whether this reconfiguration of the region in literary scholarship and general cultural studies simply echoes current processes in politics and economics or is a lasting corrective to confining earlier paradigms is difficult to say. As earlier state entities of the region dissolved, the new nations claimed a territory of their own. But the division of artistic heritage cannot occur automatically along the new fault lines. The new states can only acquire cinematic traditions if we separate the earlier national film traditions into units that fit the new political entities — a fairly problematic and somewhat arbitrary undertaking, easily susceptible to disputes and disagreements. While, for example, it is difficult to claim that two articulate cinematic cultures existed side-by-side in Czechoslovakia, we are compelled to speak of Czech and Slovak cinemas from now on. In former Yugoslavia we used to recognize one, albeit diverse, national cinema, but now we distinguish Croatian, Slovene, Bosnian, Macedonian, Serb, and Montenegrin ones, and are confronted with difficult decisions on who and what belongs where (see the respective entries in Graffy et al., Companion). The rushed formation of distinct film traditions is particularly artificial now that the borders of national cinemas collapse, giving way to an increasingly transnational filmmaking: creating new theories of national cinemas is a lost cause today. Furthermore, we encounter cinemas within the East-Central European film tradition that have no clear-cut home: the Yiddish-language filmmaking that throve in the 1920s and 1930s in Poland under the Polish-born American Joseph Green, belongs not only to its place of production but also to the Hebrew cinematic heritage. The politics of place underscores those cinematic works that highlight sites of shared imagination or remembrance, as seen in the cinematic use of places like Transylvania or Terezin, in the Czech Republic, or in the numerous recent works on the martyr city of Sarajevo. The changing topo-temporal configurations also mean changing chances for filmmakers to approach unexplored cinematic plots. For example, it took over thirty years for Jerzy Hoffman to adapt Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical trilogy for the screen. Each part of the literary source is set

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during the eventful seventeenth century and deals with a different struggle of the Polish nobility against a foreign power. Political considerations, however, imposed an order of filming different from the sequence of the novels. Pan Wołodyjowski/Mr. Wołodyjowski, the third part published in 1888 that features the resistance against invading Ottomans, was made first (1969). Potop/The Deluge, set on the backdrop of a Swedish invasion and published in 1886, was second (1974). The actual first part of the trilogy, however, Ogniem i mieczem/With Fire and Sword, written in 1883, was adapted for the cinema only 25 years later (1999). Dealing with a Cossack uprising in the Ukraine, then under Polish rule, it focuses on the awkward subject of Polish-Ukrainian relations and could not possibly be filmed during the Soviet years. In discussing historical film as a corrective to “real history,” Robert Rosenstone distinguishes two main approaches. An explicit one dictated by the political and social concerns at the time of production, and an implicit one where a cinematic text is later judged by historical criteria (6). While many East-Central European films would fall under the category of “implicit” treatment of historical material, the treatment is “explicit” in numerous films made in response to immediate concerns. The stories told in these films vastly depend on the time a particular film is made. For example, the period of Stalinism, which for East-Central Europe falls between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s and coincided with the early years of state socialism, has received different treatments over time. Works from the 1950s glorified the construction of socialism while remaining oblivious of the repression, the staged trials, and the camps. In the late 1970s and 80s, an array of films attempted to tackle the overbearing moral crisis of this gloomy and compromising period. Prominent films about the period evolved around chronicling individual fates and explored the ways Stalinism affected the ordinary people’s state of mind. Pál Gábor’s Angi Vera (1978) offered a subtle study of personality formation in a society that demands conformism; Andrzej Wajda’s Człowiek z marmuru/Man of Marble (1976) reconstructed the rise and fall of a shock worker; Janusz Zaorski’s Matka królów/ Mother of Kings (1983) chronicled the lives of several brothers, each one of whom is affected by the gloomy political situation; Károly Makk’s Szerelem/Love (1971) looked at the impact of historical brutality on a fragile old protagonist whose son is jailed; István Szabó’s Apa/Father (1966) and Márta Mészáros’s autobiographical Diary Trilogy — Napló gyermekeimnek/Diary for My Children (1982), Napló szerelmeimnek/Diary for My Love[r]s (1987), Napló apámnak, anyámnak/Diary for My Father and Mother (1990) — approached the same period from a coming-of-age point of view, while Péter Bacsó’s A Tanú/The Witness (1969) was a subversive satire of totalitarianism that mocked the anti-intellectual and anti-individualist premises of the system. Though the trend was to rely on allegories rather than to engage in a direct indictment of the regime, many of these films were censored. In Ryszard Bugajski’s Przesłuchanie/The Interrogation (1982), a nightmarish allegory of the brutal police state, the protagonist is kept in jail for years without ever learning on what charges. The film was shelved and released only in 1989. The Yugoslav cinematic explorations of the period focused on the consequences of class-conscious behavior, whose demands were so overwhelming that its repercussions affected every single aspect of a person’s life — as seen in Rajko Grlic´’s Samo jednom se ljubi/You Love Only Once (1981) and in Emir Kusturica’s Otac na službenom putu/When Father Was Away on Business (1985). When given the chance to revisit the 1950s without parabolic plots, filmmakers felt compelled to tell the depressing stories of people whose lives were destroyed by Communist


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persecution. The late 1980s and early 90s saw a proliferation of films telling of camp experiences and of other aspects of deprivation and humiliation in the 1950s. Many of these films did not do much more than recycle and invert familiar socialist-realist plot-schemes depicting the fascists’ treatment of Communists, this time showing the Communists as the villains. They told of innocent and helpless people victimized by brutal and amoral men with political power, controlling all possible forms of redress. Gradually it became clear that such direct approach to correcting the historical record failed to provide remedies to current identity concerns, and this wave of films soon lost impetus. The portrayal of Russians in the cinemas of East-Central Europe reveals another aspect of fluctuating remembrance. Earlier, during the long decades of state socialism, the state of affairs in Eastern Europe depended very much on the predisposition of the Soviets. The adverse sentiments that their presence and intrusion evoked were not openly discussed, and uncensored views of the resentment against the Soviets were rarely allowed. Films that problematized the traumatic experiences associated with all matters related to the Soviet regime came into the mainstream of cinema only in the early 1980s, alongside with glasnost, which allowed public discussion on previously suppressed themes. The situation of the Russians kept, however, changing, and so did their international cinematic image. With the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from East-Central Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union the interest of filmmakers in the Russians intensified, and in the 1990s East-Central European films featuring plots or subplots involving Russians proliferated. However, instead of taking the chance to articulate long-standing resentment, the tendency was to humanize the image of the Russians. From an impersonal embodiment of an oppressive power, the Russian Homo Sovieticus was turned into an ordinary human being, subjected to demystifying scrutiny. No longer marked by straightforward resentment against the imposed Russian dominance, these new East-Central European films — Jan Sveˇrák’s Kolya (1996), Péter Gothár’s Haggyállógva Vászka/Vaska Easoff (1996), Ibolya Fekete’s Bolse Vita (1996), to name but a few — revealed a mixture of love-hate attraction, or even sympathy and bittersweet longing for the specific Russian kitsch and worn-out revolutionary symbolism. The subject of the disintegrating Soviet Union itself was treated with a mixture of curiosity and caution, the way one approaches a beast just killed — one knows it is dead, but there may be some unrevealed surprise. The tyrant had disappeared, leaving behind a nostalgia-filled void.

Europe: Location or destination? While the dominant perception of Russia remained as one of a constantly overbearing threatening force, the image of Europe was a revered topos of inherent affinity, showing that the bond with it had been continuously disturbed throughout history. The rush to emancipation from the status of a coerced satellite state of the Soviet sphere and the turn westwards was often supplemented by the assumption of a sycophant role in the “new Europe” that easily translated into the culturist terms of Huntington’s views on “kinship” and “clash of civilizations.” The discourse on “Europe” evolved around the vision of a vulnerably “inbetween” Central Europe, and the self-conceptualization of the Balkans as a “bridge” or

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“crossroads.” In this discourse, the concept of “Europe” was ambiguously employed as a geographical location and a symbolic destination. István Szabó’s Redl ezredes/Colonel Redl (1985) is set in the last years of the AustroHungarian empire and tells the life story of Redl, a career soldier of lower class origins who progresses in an army dominated by the aristocracy. When at military school, young Redl befriends von Kubiny, the heir of a rich aristocratic family, and they go to visit von Kubiny’s family estate. Here, surrounded by all these lackeys, porcelain dishes, and silver utensils, young Redl feels particularly inept. At the table, he carefully manipulates with fork and knife, trying to act as an equal as far as table manners are concerned. Yet there are so many subtle details that he cannot help feeling clumsy: the lady of the house addresses the Dalmatian in an unknown language (Sit Down!); then Redl is asked by the grandfather if he is a Pole. The question about his background triggers a jumbled explanation, according to which Redl’s father was a Ruthenian from the Ukraine, but also a descendant from impoverished German aristocrats. His mother, however, was Hungarian, and to prove this superior side of his pedigree Redl starts singing a Hungarian song that reverberates incongruously in the embarrassed silence of the room. Though in an awkward manner, he seems to have managed to establish some credentials and claim admittance to the higher social circle of his hosts. Admissibility — this is the subject of the film from this moment on. Admissibility in this case is based not on dress code, knowledge, and demeanor, but on presumptions about belonging to an ethnicity and a class. Yet Redl, in spite of his unacceptable background, lives in AustriaHungary, standing face to face with the “European.” Even though he is the son of a provincial stationmaster, he has an inborn European legitimacy, similar to the Europeanness of the marginal characters in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch (1932). And even though his situation is defined by subtle clashes and tense inequalities, Redl stands face to face with those from whom he is to claim admissibility. Further down South East, in the cinema of the Balkans, the encounter with the “European” looks different. It does not occur face to face but rather via a reflection on what Europe means to them. The events of a 1967 Bulgarian film, Privarzaniyat balon/The Attached Balloon are situated entirely in a remote Balkan village during World War II. The opening scene features a drummer who announces to the villagers that European time will be introduced in the Kingdom of Bulgaria and all inhabitants should promptly adjust their clocks in order to co-ordinate the local time with that of the Axis powers. Then the camera pans in a circular movement to show the early morning routine in the village — ducks and hens, goats and cows waking up, and a rooster crowing at dawn — it is 5 a.m. European time. Now that the crow of the rooster has reaffirmed admissibility to Europe, everything will take place within the small universe of the village. Another Bulgarian classic, Lachenite obuvki na neznayniya voin/The Patent Leather Shoes of the Unknown Soldier (1979) is also set in a small village, and also positions the whole story in relation to Europe: the director, Rangel Vulchanov, is shown in front of the Buckingham palace in London shooting the majestic change of the guard. Three minutes into this sequence, the footage of the Queen’s guards intercuts with scenes from Bulgarian peasant life, and the sound of a prolonged Bulgarian folk song gets mixed with the sounds of the British brass band. The images of the English beefeaters start overlapping with the images of Balkan peasants dancing at a wedding. The action gradually moves, and from now on the filmmaker tells a


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childhood story in his native Bulgarian village. Yet, for an opening, he also chooses Europe. Unlike Colonel Redl, these Balkan films do not show the relationship to Europe within the same cinematic frame; they construct it by means of juxtapositions, which automatically render the structure questionable. The whole “Balkan in relation to Europe” proposition heavily relies on the mediation of selected images. Nevertheless, the self-image of Balkans is always constructed within a conditional and elusive European framework. In the 1990s, when a “return to Europe” became a top priority for all Eastern European countries, “Europe proper” was still entrenched in attitudes confirming an enduring separation of “the West” from “the Rest.” Not only was the mental division of Europe not abolished; new ruptures came into effect. By the beginning of the new Millennium, the concept of Eastern Europe as a dreary, unpredictable outpost of the Soviet Empire had become obsolete, replaced by new fault-lines that severed Central Europe from the Balkans. “A return to Europe implies that Europe existed in the same form at the time of departure as it does today, on the eve of the return,” notes Misha Glenny in The Rebirth of History (216). A pre-condition for the “return” of the various Soviet bloc countries would be to restore a Europe in which they used to enjoy a favorable position. But it has become clear now that different countries had “departed” at different times, and seeking re-admission they need a restoration of different sets of factors. The assumption of many political scientists, who set a shared point of “departure” at the end of World War II, is misleading. While the creation of the Soviet bloc was a “package deal” that had suppressed differences, the justification for reentering Europe now varies from country to country, and the criteria that are applied in the race are often taken from the sphere of culturist discourse. It is now increasingly clear that reestablishing a Mitteleuropa with Central European countries now regarded as prodigal sons, is not the same as the “return” of the Balkans, now regarded as a volatile Orientalist fringe of the new Europe. Increasingly conscious of the ongoing marginalization, Balkan filmmaking has been producing works that use the symbolism of obstructed travel, in which the final destination (presumably Europe) cannot be reached. The runaway-train plot of a film like Iliya Kostov’s Traka-trak/Clickety-Clack (1996) provides a metaphor of a post-Communist Balkan country. Here, a group of passengers is entrapped in an accelerating train that goes out of control and takes off at full speed toward the West, leaving behind Croatia, and Hungary, to reach Paris and go even beyond it. But the train never arrives anywhere — an allusion to the continuously failing efforts to enter Europe. Some of the passengers try to sneak into the special car carrying a group of European Phare experts, but a UN blue helmet rudely pushes them out. Recent films portray the UN deployments in former Yugoslavia equally unfavorably. In a logical backlash against the allegedly hostile attitude of “the world,” the UN troops are depicted as a quasi alien presence (Pred dozhdot/ Before the Rain; 1994), as culturally inadequate (Lepa sela, lepo gore/Pretty Village, Pretty Flame; 1996), and even as war profiteers facilitating arms smuggling (Underground; 1995). Cinema continuously revisits “Europe” and its inherently ambiguous nature as a defined location and as an elusive destination, thereby continuously problematizing it.

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Messages for the masses: The industry behind the artistry Under state socialism, film production and distribution worked within a specific framework of cultural administration. Each country had a governmental agency in charge of filmmaking; film financing was centralized and came exclusively from the state. As with the general situation in the arts and literature, political leaders took personal interest in filmmaking. Membership in the national union of filmmakers was by election and considered quite prestigious, but the directors worked under close observation and guidance. Each country maintained a respective national film institute that engaged in education and research, and a cinematheque with an archive. There were at least two leading film periodicals, one academic the other targeting broader audiences. Film scholarship was not seen as a separate discipline but part of art history, and film scholars would often act as film critics. The specialized film schools included FAMU in Prague and the Łodz´ Film School (along with VGIK in Moscow); many of the filmmakers from the region learned here the nuts and bolts of the trade. Most state production companies were structured after the model of the Polish film units (zespoły filmowe). Under this system, introduced in the early 1960s, the film units within the studios of the East bloc functioned as the basic film production entities and had relative creative autonomy. The units, usually led by a well established director, included several other directors sharing artistic visions, as well as screenwriters, cameramen, set and costume designers, and sometimes even actors — all salaried employees who only received bonuses upon the completion and the release of a new film. The national TV companies were also involved in film production and often ran their own studios. The film studios had the capacity and the size of their West European counterparts. This allowed the East-Central European countries to have film outputs that were comparable to the ones of Western Europe. Most were built in the 1950s, but some, like Barrandov, the largest one, were in existence since the early 1930s. The studios were primarily meant to serve the national film industries. Film executives of the Communist era maintained, however, good contacts with the international film community, and still during the Cold War a number of international co-productions were shot on location in East-Central Europe, with a host of celebrities from Orson Welles to Jackie Chan. These studios were especially sought after when shooting historical epics, as large numbers of extras and cavalry were easy to find. The films produced in the first half of the century were meant, with few exceptions, to cater to local needs. They were rarely exported. International distribution networks came into being only in the post-World War II period, with the advent of the Soviet bloc. Under this system, films were picked up by state-run distribution organizations, were exhibited within a chain of state-owned theaters, and eventually screened on national television. Direct commercial criteria did not apply, and distribution was a highly subsidized activity, permitting vigorous noncommercial promotion. That attendance figures remained relatively low did not matter vastly. Films of mass appeal, such as the Polish television series Czterej pancerni i pies/Four Tank Soldiers and the Dog (1966) and Stawka wie˛ksza niz˙ z˙ycie/More Than Life at Stake (1969), the Czech 30 prˇípad°u majora Zemana / Thirty Cases of Major Zeman (1975), or the DEFA Karl May adaptations with Gojko Mitic´ enjoyed real popularity across East-Central Europe. Works of higher artistic quality, particularly from across the region, were exhibited in a system of arthouse theatres.


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An elaborate and well-developed system of cultural exchange by barter was in place, thus most films were getting at least some exposure abroad. A state-appointed commission decided which films would be sent to which international festival. Politically correct output from across Eastern Europe was traditionally sent to the festival in Moscow, while artistically significant films would compete at the festival in Karlovy Vary, in existence since the 1950s and still the most important venue for East-Central European cinema. The export of films was part of a promotional effort overseen by an appropriate body. Organizing film weeks abroad and, occasionally, selling films for commercial distribution in the West were all coordinated, politically very sensitive promotional activities. Thanks to the active distribution networks that included non-Western countries (the Soviet Union, India, the newly independent countries of the Third world) East-Central European productions enjoyed a truly international exposure. Domestically, international quotas mandated the import of numerous Soviet films, a practice often detested by ordinary viewers. Imports from the West were not as limited as widely believed, but were subjected to selection, effectively resulting in the distribution of quality Western films. The politics of national film festivals were a mirror of the political climate. Usually showcasing the entire annual production, the award distribution at these festivals often directly reflected the dominant political line or, as in Poland in the late 1970s and early 80s, signaled the first cracks in the system by giving awards to politically subversive films. The control over the film industry appeared to be a logical extension of state ownership. But there was an irony in the Communist censorship in East-Central Europe: rather than preventing the production of certain films, the Communist state would often commit production funds that could have easily been withheld, but then would shelve a completed film. Under the economic logic of Capitalism such waste of funds would not be allowable and the shelved films would never be made in the first place, let alone be censored. The paradoxical situation was largely due to the semi-autonomous standing of the film units within studios where most production decisions were taken, and where mechanisms to evade direct surveillance and interference were developed. Within the units, ideological supervision was fairly relaxed and sometimes ignored. The organizations committed to carrying out censorship differed from country to country. While Hungary did not have a dedicated censorship body, it was still believed to have had the most sophisticated and elusive censorship mechanisms in place. Poland, on the other hand, had a special body in charge of media censorship. In other countries the studios had artistic commissions that approved completed films under the close supervision of the Communist Party’s ideological department. The mechanisms of censorship differed, and while a film like Jan Neˇmec’s absurdist O slavnosti a hostech/Report on the Party and the Guests (1966) was “banned forever” in Czechoslovakia, many other films were never officially condemned but were only given a limited release, thus effectively ensuring they were only seen by a handful of spectators. While there are a number of well-known embarrassing examples of censorship from all the countries in Eastern Europe, censorship was often given a disproportionate attention in the ideologically tense atmosphere of the Cold War. The Golden Palm awarded at Cannes to the overrated Człowiek z z˙elaza/ Man of Iron (Andrzej Wajda, 1981) revealed the overtly ideological Western celebrations of censored art from Eastern Europe. Exiled filmmaker Dušan Makavejev,

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who left Yugoslavia after the controversy surrounding his subversive WR: Misterije organisma / WR: Mysteries of Organism (1971) experienced two types of censorship: the repressive one of Communism and the subtle one of Capitalism. Under the first he made films that were later shelved. Under the second, after emigration, nothing was shelved but many of his projects never materialized. Another Yugoslav, Želimir Žilnik, migrated to Germany in the early 1970s in search of artistic freedom once his subversive Rani radovi/Early Works (1969) and other films were censored and banned at home. There, he made independent leftist documentaries and was once again censored, so he opted for returning and trading the German control for the Yugoslav one. The subtle artistic conformity, sometimes defined as “self-censorship,” directly followed from the state’s preferential treatment of the intelligentsia as a highly prestigious social group. It is important to note that not all filmmakers with censored films were automatically prevented from making more. Witness the cases of the Czech Jirˇí Menzel and of the East German Kurt Maetzig. The Bulgarian Binka Zhelyazkova, of a dissident reputation, pursued a high-profile career and even attained the title “people’s artist.” In Poland, Andrzej Wajda both suffered from censorship and enjoyed a wide public recognition. As Jirˇí Trnka’s classic Czech animation Ruka/The Hand (1965) shows, filmmakers subtly and regularly brought up the bothersome issue of censorship in their films. Socialist Realism was the state-imposed stylistic paradigm for cinema. Its framework was mostly used as a critical measure when assessing completed films, but was not as strictly applied at the planning stage, when new film ideas were developed. In response to the official discouragement of far-reaching critical examination of society, even when in compliance with the socialist realist recipe, East-Central European films would substitute “socialist” for social realism and would more subtly explore the historical confines of an individual’s fate. Such films were usually honest accounts that commented, though in a fragmented and indirect manner, on the contradictions and limitations of social reality. The works of directors like Károly Makk, Péter Bacsó, Péter Gothár, Lyudmil Kirkov, Živojin Pavlovic´, Jaromil Jireš, Krzysztof Zanussi, Antoni Krauze, and others, formed the backbone of a strong tradition within socially critical filmmaking. Distinct film movements, at odds with the generally prescriptive context, developed and thrived nonetheless: the Czech New Wave (Chytilová, Menzel, Forman), Central-European surrealism (Has, Jakubisko, Neˇmec, Švankmajer), and Balkan magic realism (Vulchanov, Kusturica) are cases in point. Documentary filmmaking was an important part of the cinemas in all East-Central European countries during the years of Communism and proved to be one of the most popular genres after 1989. Documentaries were produced either by dedicated studios or by units attached to the respective national TV companies. There was also a well-developed network of amateur film clubs where grass-roots documentaries were produced and then showcased at special national meetings. Many of the leading feature-film directors, including Miloš Forman, Krzysztof Kies´lowski, Márta Mészáros, or Dušan Makavejev and Želimir Žilnik started as documentarians. Others, like Jan Neˇmec, Dušan Hanák, Mircea Daneliuc, and Lordan Zafranovic´, turned occasionally to the documentary format to make important films. Even though many documentaries glorified the construction of socialism, documentary filmmakers did not hesitate to explore the sores of their societies wherever possible and offered rather subversive commentaries on the


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affairs in the countries of state socialism. In post-Communist times, within overall financial crises, the genre of documentary has managed more than any other one to yield serious and meaningful works, chronicling all aspects of the transition or revisiting official history. Since 1989, the pattern of changes in the media economy and film industries has been similar throughout all East-Central Europe: abrupt decrease in state funding, disappearance of domestic films from the screens, and studios competing to attract foreign runaway productions. The concern over freedom of expression (now finally achieved) has been overshadowed by concerns over the emerging constraints of market economy. Financing for film production has been changing profoundly, moving from the unit-based studio system to producer-driven undertakings. State subsidies, competitive in some countries, automatic in others, have turned into a hotly contested territory. The involvement of national television networks in film production and exhibition is of vital importance, alongside with international co-production funding and the expanding sector of private financing. The number of movies produced dropped most significantly in the early 1990s. More recently, however, more features are being released. After the initial disarray, the production cycle is in the process of stabilization, along with the creation of new legislation and funding mechanisms. In some countries the levels of output have been restored within a decade, while in others the crisis persists. The centralized control over distribution and exhibition networks, as well as over the television medium, had made it easy to keep the audience compact: people were to be exposed to whatever was given to them; niches in cultural consumption did not seem to matter. In the early 1990s, however, viewers could no longer be taken for granted. Filmmakers had to face accelerating audience segmentation and, for a while, seemed to be losing their domestic audience. If they tried to appeal to the volatile mass taste they had to confront the overwhelming competition of imported mass culture. If they made art house-type films that addressed a sophisticated audience they were to encounter the indifference of distributors and exhibitors. The abolition of centralized cultural management divorced film production from exhibition and distribution, as earlier distribution networks were ruined before new ones had come into being. Most of the new private distributors that emerged subsequently chose to abide by market rules and to opt for Hollywood box-office winners rather than play the losing card of domestic productions. Although well received at festivals, productions carrying an East European label are considered hard sells at film markets. Film scholarship in Eastern Europe can be traced back to prominent theoreticians like Béla Balázs, Iván Hevesy, Roman Ingarden, and Karol Irzykowski, who analyzed film as an independent art early in the twentieth century. Film scholars who worked predominantly in their native countries, like Alicja Helman, Alina Madej, Maryla Hopfinger, Jan Bernard, and Dušan Stojanovic´, achieved prominence at home but remain less-known across the region, maybe due to language barriers. Those who emigrated, like Slavko Vorkapich, Vlada Petric´, Antonín Liehm, Yvette Bíró, and Bolesław Michałek, created a body of historiographical and theoretical texts that is still used as a main source for the study of East-Central European cinema. The small community of established East European film specialists in the West comprises scholars like Peter Hames, Herbert Eagle, Daniel Goulding, Graham Petrie, Catherine Portuges, Ronald Holloway, Paul Coates, and Andrew Horton. Well-known Western critical scholars, like Fredrick Jameson, David Bordwell, or Stuart Hall have occasionally written on select topics in East-

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Central European cinema. The appearance, for the first time, of critical studies that include sideby-side contributions by Western critics and scholars based in the countries of East-Central Europe is a positive trend since the 1990s. Unlike other areas of international cinema, writing on film in Eastern Europe has not picked up as substantially since 1989 as one would have expected. One possible reason may be that scholarship on film in East-Central Europe needs a mediatory language: only an insignificant part of the theoretical and critical work done there is translated into the other languages, and most of the scholarship has to pass through English before reaching readers in the other countries of the region. Writers of the younger generation have accused existing scholarship of insensitivity to general developments in film theory and cultural studies and of making no use of, or even being “hostile” to, the frameworks found within the discourses on post-modernism, post-colonialism, globalization, feminism, and queer studies (Anikó Imre 406). While I find such accusations too harsh, one has to acknowledge that many East Europeanists are not closely familiar with new theoretical writing on film, cultural, critical, and transnational studies, and that they regularly lack the exposure to new theoretical developments that is so important for fostering a continuous scholarly dialogue with other disciplines and areas of study. There is a chance, however, that a new generation of scholars may soon produce studies that will combine factual knowledge of East-Central European cinema with new theoretical insights.

Movements: Belonging and detachment As in literature, movements of creative talent through exile, diaspora, and participation in transnational projects have played a defining role in East-Central European cinema. Unlike literary studies, however, film studies have not yet acknowledged the multiple directions of these movements of people and visions that are cutting across national borders, geographic regions, time periods, linguistic systems, and cultural traditions. Film historiography is still to chronicle and conceptualize the various dimensions of these modes of creativity that have transcended the confines of the national. Some attention has been given to the transatlantic migrations during the first part of the century, when East-Central Europeans like actress Pola Negri (born Barbara Apollonia Chałupiec in Jahowa, Poland), director Michael Curtiz (born Mihály Kertész in Budapest), or director Jean Negulesco and screen-writer I. A. L. Diamond (Itek Domnici), both born in Romania, genuinely contributed to Hollywood’s prosperity. There were migrants to Western Europe as well, witness the case of the high-profile British producer Alexander Korda (born as Sándor Kellner in Pusztatúrpásztó, Hungary), or of the Czech actress Anny Ondra (born as Anna Sophia Ondráková in Tarnow, then in Austria-Hungary, now in Poland), who worked in Germany, Austria, and Britain. Some migrated first within Europe, then, after several years of work in Western European film capitals, migrated further to the USA: witness the Czech avant-garde filmmaker Alexander Hammid (born as Alexander Hackenschmied), who married the prominent avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren (born in the Ukraine), or actor Béla Lugosi, an ethnic Hungarian (born as Béla Ferenc Dezso˝ Blaskó in Lugosch, then in Austria-Hungary, today in Romania as Lugoj). Yet others moved restlessly around: the Czech Gustav Machatý, for


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instance, worked in Italy, Austria, and Germany, as well as on the West Coast in the USA. There were also filmmakers, however, who migrated but stayed firmly within the region. Leftist director Slatan Dudow, a Bulgarian, worked with Bertolt Brecht in Germany during the Weimar period and became a leading figure in the DEFA studios after the war. Filmmakers migrated mostly for political reasons. There has been migration of East-Central European intellectuals in response to all the major political shake-ups in the region, including the latest one, leading to the migration of scores of Yugoslav filmmakers in the 1990s. Some of those who migrated changed fields: for instance, the Romanian director Liviu Ciulei, who won the best director prize at Cannes in 1965 for his anti-war Forest of the Hanged (based on Liviu Rebreanu’s novel), turned to theatre since emigrating to the USA. The success of some émigrés, such as Miloš Forman or Frank Daniel (of FAMU, later of Columbia University and USC), enhanced the profile of their own national cinemas while others, like Ivan Passer and Ján Kadár, remained best known for films they had made before emigrating. By no means all émigré directors were involved in politics. While Dušan Makavejev, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Agnieszka Holland made films focusing on controversial social issues, many others, such as Roman Polanski, Andrzej Z˙uławski, or Walerian Borowczyk, rarely expressed interest in politics. Forman himself has been quite evasive in discussing his own motives for emigration; while mainstream film criticism persistently presented him as a typical post-1968 exile, the director himself has made sure not to make any public statements that would identify politics as the main reason of his migration to the West. The political gloom of the mid-1980s did not prevent him from returning to Prague to film Amadeus (1984). The opportunity to work in the West without necessarily emigrating proved of crucial importance to the careers of many filmmakers who remained based in the region. Andrzej Wajda, for example, would keep himself busy with various European-financed productions when conditions at home prevented him from working, but would always return to Poland; Krzysztof Kies´lowski only gained the visibility he deserved after he had the chance to work in France. While the migration of filmmakers to the West has been well documented, little attention has been paid to the movement of talent within East-Central Europe. Besides the numerous coproductions with the Soviet Union (even Albania made one, Velikij vojn Albanij Skanderbeg/ Skanderbeg, directed by Soviet veteran Sergei Yutkevich in 1953), a pattern of regional coproductions between most of the East-Central European countries existed, alongside with the respective industry agreements. While interactions with the West were controlled and often suppressed, many took advantage of the freedom of movement they enjoyed within Eastern Europe. Searching for a more relaxed creative climate, the Bulgarian Rangel Vulchanov made films in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s; times of duress at home took the politically inconvenient Romanian Lucian Pintilie to Yugoslavia, where he worked on an adaptation of Chekhov’s Paviljon broj VI/Ward Six (1978). Many filmmakers were educated at a film school in some other East-Central European country: the Yugoslav directors Goran Paskaljevic´, Srdjan Karanovic´, Rajko Grlic´, Emir Kusturica, and others, for example, were educated at FAMU and later came to be known as members of the so-called Prague group. Actors were crossing borders more than any other group: DEFA star Manfred Krug appeared in Peter Solan’s Slovak Holocaust feature Boxer a smrt/ Boxer and Death (1963); in the 1980s the Pole Jan Nowicki became a permanent presence in Márta Mészáros’s films; Yugoslav Gojko Mitic´ was a leading

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star in popular East German cinema; actors such as the Pole Jan Englert, the Slovak Jozef Króner, and the Russian Inokentii Smoktunovski, all appeared in leading roles in various Bulgarian films. The 1990s witnessed a number of border crossings in all spheres of cultural production, including filmmaking. Nowadays, movement of film professionals is more intense than ever, and international financing for film allows more and more of them to work internationally. The movement, however, has not been in one direction only. While many East Europeans rushed to the West, many young Westerners came to Central Europe and the Balkans in search for new territories in which to launch their cinema careers. A number of émigré directors, including the Romanian Lucian Pintilie, the Polish Ryszard Bugajski, and the Czech Vojtech Jasný returned after years in the West to make movies in their home countries. Yugoslav directors who settled in the West (Kusturica, Paskaljevic´) routinely return to film in the country they officially left. To the most successful young directors, like the Czech Jan Sveˇrák or the Macedonian Milcho Manchevski, securing international distribution has become as important as obtaining production financing at home. High-profile professionals, like film composers Zbigniew Preisner (bestknown for his work with Kies´lowski) and Goran Bregovic´ (best-known for his work with Kusturica), work on scores not only for productions in their home countries and the West, but also for films made in the South of Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Veteran cinematographers like Miroslav Ondrˇícek (best known for his work with Czech New Wave directors) and Slawomir Idziak (best known for his work with Kies´lowski), are in high demand internationally. Others who have never worked in the region and are employed exclusively in America, like Vilmos Zsigmond (cinematographer of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and John Boorman’s Deliverance) or Janusz Kaminski (cinematographer of everything shot by Stephen Spielberg since Schindler’s List in 1993), are considered to have brought a particular EastCentral European cinematic sensibility into mainstream American filmmaking. Émigré actors from Eastern Europe can be seen appearing concurrently in Hollywood, in American independent film, in European arthouse cinema, as well as in domestic productions. English-language cinema film found its quintessential East-European prototype in the former East German Armin MüllerStahl, who played an East-European immigrant in a range of films, including Costa-Gavras’ Music Box (1990), Jim Jarmush’s Night on Earth (1991), Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1991), and Scott Hicks’ Shine (1991). Former Yugoslav actor Rade Serbedzija is bound to establish himself as the man for all supporting roles in Hollywood requiring a discernible Slavic accent and suspicious demeanor. The seemingly erratic movements of this latest period, directly reflecting the intensification of migrations and the transnational and global nature of the contemporary film production, make it necessary to re-evaluate the clear-cut concepts of belonging and commitment to a national culture. Rather than turning a blind eye to the new supranational trends, scholarship has to create a new interpretative context for these important processes, even if such new framework entails breaking away from the East-Central European paradigm or re-evaluating its traditional frame of reference.


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The politics of generic modes Under state socialism, common experiences and trends brought about shared traits in a variety of nationally specific forms of cinematic expression. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, EastCentral European cinema supplied the state with scores of socialist-realist epics. Soon thereafter, in the late 1950s, it produced a number of socially conscious films that reflected the spirit of the “thaw” in politics. In the 1960s, it experienced a “new wave” of filmmaking, encouraged by reform-minded domestic political developments and influenced by Western experimentation with narrative and style. Realist drama, historical epic, and comedy, took a leading position among genres. Films concerned with the Holocaust, with the destruction of traditional village lifestyles, with urbanization, and with Gypsy plots, occupied a specific place in East-Central European cinema. Due to the mass appeal of their art, filmmakers often influence perceptions of the past as much as literary works; their filmed historical epics remain perhaps best known in the population at large. Some memorable films came out of government-sponsored efforts to film officially endorsed epics that focus on important episodes in the nation’s formation. The historical blockbusters of massive scale usually chronicled selected episodes of the glorious past and fulfilled the need for romanticized representations of national history. Notably, such historical films by far outnumbered the straightforward socialist propaganda pictures. The historical superproductions involved elaborate props and costumes, and thousands of extras engaged in massive battle scenes with cavalry and artillery. Within centralized film industries the directors of these blockbusters usually had the army at their disposal, an arrangement which kept under control the staggering production costs. Each country was engaged in adaptations of its own literary classics, and these productions to foster the national consciousness were used alongside other key texts within the educational system. To take just one example, Poland’s distinguished record in cultivating a national cinematic tradition, found expression in a consistent program of adaptations. Henryk Sienkiewicz’s epics were filmed by Aleksander Ford and Jerzy Hoffman. Wajda repeatedly revisited topics of Polish history, working on epic adaptations like Popioły/Ashes (1966), based on Stefan Z˙eromski’s novel with the same title, Ziemia obiecana/Promised Land (1974), based on Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s novel, and Pan Tadeusz (1999), based on Adam Mickiewicz. Interest in exploring philosophical aspects of history was articulated in films like Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Matka Joanna od aniołow/Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), based on a story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Tadeusz Konwicki’s screen adaptation of Bolesław Prus’s novel, Faraon/Pharaoh (1966), and Wojciech Has’s Re˛kopis znaleziony w Saragossie/The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), based on Jan Potocki. While the Polish case reveals a systematic program for the cinematic adaptation of the major literary classics, the case of Yugoslavia presents us with the opposite picture. Even though many directors have expressed interest in filming the novels of the Nobel laureate Ivo Andric´, his main works have not yet been filmed and only some short stories have made it into cinematic adaptations. Milos Crnjanski’s classic novel Seobe/Migrations (1929) was adapted for the cinema by veteran Aleksandar Petrovic´, but as it was made with French funding and actors, and legal complications prevented the release of the film. While in Poland Bruno Schulz’s “unadaptable” Sanatorium pod klepsydrø (Sanatorium under the Hourglass) was made into a film

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in 1973 by Wojciech Has, the work of Yugoslav authors with similar sensibility, like Danilo Kiš and David Albahari, has not been filmed. There is only Slobodan Pešic´’s The Harms’ Case (1988), loosely based on motives of the equally surreal and non-traditional work of the Russian Daniil Kharms. Even though film scholars tend to speak of Yugoslav cinema’s magic realist tendencies, the magic realist novels of Milorad Pavic´, for example, have not made it into film. Filmmakers have preferred to adapt novels marked by rough realism; hence Srdjan Karanovic´’s Petrijin Venac/Petria’s Wreath (1980), based on Dragoslav Mihajlovic´’s novel. Some highprofile literary figures in Yugoslavia, such as the Sarajevo poet Abdulah Sidran or the Belgrade playwright Dušan Kovacˇevic´, actively engaged in writing for the cinema. Central-European countries have shown a curious interest in adapting Russian literary texts: the works of Chekhov and Dostoyevski have served as a basis for a number of films made across the region, and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was adapted for cinema in Poland as well as in Yugoslavia. Historical events and periods were highlighted in the cinemas of the respective countries in accordance with their particular history. Hungarian cinema produced works about the uprising of 1848, Bulgarian cinema about the uprising of 1876, and Macedonian cinema about that in 1903. The Balkan screen epics include the Bulgarian Lyudmil Staykov’s Han Asparuh/Khan Asparukh (1981) and Vreme na nasilie/Time of Violence (1988), which was based on a work by Anton Donchev; Dacii/The Dacians (1966) and Mihai Viteazul/Michael the Brave (1971) by the Romanian Sergiu Nicolaescu; and many of Veljko Bulajic´’s and Branko Marjanovic´’s Yugoslav partisan sagas. The uneasy political and national tensions of the period immediately following World War I were addressed in Kazimierz Kutz’s Perla w koronie/Pearl in the Crown, 1972, Miklós Jancsó’s Csillagosok, katonák/The Red and the White (1967) and many other films. In different parts of Yugoslavia directors chose to confront and explore controversial moments of political violence in history. Hence Lubisa Georgievski’s Republikata vo plamen/Republic in Flames (1969) on the Ilinden uprising, Lordan Zafranovic´’s Okupacija u 26 slika/Occupation in 26 Scenes (1978) on the Ustasha terror, or Rajko Grlic´’s Cˇaruga/Charuga (1990) on the selfstyled anarcho-socialism of the early Yugoslav years. A seemingly minor historical episode, the 1902 abduction of an English missionary, Miss Helen Stone by Macedonian rebels, was the subject of both the Macedonian Mis Ston/Miss Stone (1958) and the Bulgarian Mera spored mera/Measure for Measure (part I, 1982). The heritage of village life has been a permanent subject for filmmaking in East-Central Europe: witness Jan Rybkowski’s adaptation of Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s Chłopi/The Peasants (1973), or Andrzej Wajda’s subtle explorations of village-city tensions in Brzezina/ Birch Wood (1970) and Wesele/Wedding (1973), based respectively on Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1932) and Stanisław Wyspian´ski (1901). Important Czech films by Vojtech Jasný and Jirˇí Menzel were set in small villages and dealt with the humorous intricacies of communal life there. While industrial development in Central Europe led to an early growth of cities, villages remained the predominant mode of communal organization in the Balkans until late into the twentieth century. This is why filmmakers from the Balkan countries continued to pay persistent attention to village life. A number of Balkan films deal with the difficult years of the village during and after the wars and with the period of forced collectivization in the 1950s. The industrialization of the 1960s and 1970s led to the desertion of villages and to massive migrations to the cities, which have been explored in many of the region’s masterpieces from the


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1970s, usually referred to as migration cycle films. The visually stunning films of the Montenegrin Živko Nikolic´’s Jovana Lukina (1979), the Serbian Srdjan Karanovic´’s Virdzina/Virgina (1991), or the Bulgarian adaptations of Nikolai Haitov’s short stories by Metodi Andonov (Koziyat rog/The Goat’s Horn; 1972), by Edward Zakhariev (Mazhki vremena/Manly Times; 1977), and by George Dyulgerov (Izpit/Test; 1971), tell tales of proud mountain dwellers but also reveal troubled gender relations, thus subverting long-standing patriarchal traditions. The Holocaust has been and still is one of the major themes of East-Central European filmmaking. The Holocaust films made in the region, ranging stylistically from gritty and grim realism to poetic and cathartic tragedy, and based on literary works by Arnošt Lustig, Tadeusz Borowski, and others, received scores of international film awards. Aleksander Ford’s Ulica Graniczna/Border Street (1948), Frank Beyer’s Jakob, der Lügner/Jakob the Liar (1974), and Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak (1991) looked at ghetto life; Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap/The Last Stage (1948) at camp experiences; Elmar Klos’s and Ján Kadár’s Obchod na korze/Shop on a Main Street (1965) at the moral ambiguity and indecisiveness of ordinary people who were forced to side against the Jews; and Jan Neˇmec’s Démanty noci/Diamonds of the Night (1963) at the doomed hopes of escapees to break loose from a grim fate. Numerous documentaries and feature films focused on other dimensions of the Jewish experience in the region, sometimes casting a nostalgic look at past examples of harmonious co-existence of diverse ethnicities, sometimes, as in Judit Elek’s Tutajosok/Raftsmen (1989), investigating earlier manifestations of anti-Semitism. A number of these remarkable works remains little known internationally. Not so the films about the Roma, which have repeatedly brought up charges that they are not authentic but stylize, patronize, and exoticize their lives. Even when sympathetic to the Romani predicament and even when it questions the social framework of minority policies, cinema has often exploited their excitingly non-conventional lifestyles. Cinematic representations of Gypsies have built on recurring themes such as their passionate and self-destructive infatuations, their feast-intimes-of-plague attitudes, their strikingly mature, street-wise teenagers, and their mistrust of outsiders. The combination of rough realism and excessive exoticism appears in a range of films by directors such as Aleksandar Petrovic´, Slobodan Šijan, and Emir Kusturica. Their cinematic celebrations of freewheeling Roma are best understood in the context of a broader preoccupation with marginality found across East-Central European films. Some of the finest East Central European films belong to the strong tradition of personalized interpretations of history. These personal films problematize the relationship between individual experience and national fate differently from conceptualizations of an officially sanctioned memory. Such is the case, for example, with Miklós Jancsó’s historical films. His Szegénylegények/Round Up (1965) features a minor episode of nineteenth century Hungarian history, which allows him to explore the relationship between the public and private domains and to examine betrayal, honor, power, humiliation, devotion, and guilt. The elliptic plot shows men in forced confinement, all engaged in continuous bargaining for their lives, and, sometimes, in brutal violence. The remarkable aesthetics of the film glorifies the barren landscape of the Hungarian puszta. The camerawork juxtaposes extremes of low and high angles in a context of persistent medium close. There are multiple visual and semantic layers in each frame, and an elaborate interplay of light and shadow — an approach that Jancsó brought to perfection in his further work, particularly in Csillagosok, katonák/The Red and the White (1967). László

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Lugossy’s Szirmok, virágok, koszorúk/Flowers of Reverie (1984), set in 1848 and starring György Cserhalmi, is another remarkable treatise on individual freedom colliding with historical coercion. The ironic intersection of individual fate with the flow of history is captured in István Szabó’s Mephisto (1981) and, most of all, in his Austro-Hungarian character study Colonel Redl (1985), both films starring Klaus-Maria Brandauer. Andrzej Wajda’s early Popiół i diament/Ashes and Diamonds (1958), the best-known film of the Polish screen icon Zbigniew Cybulski, is another classical treatise on individual limitations in confronting the turmoil of history. Manipulated remembrance and biased reconstruction of the past have often served passing political needs, and recycling historical myths has frequently been a feature of state sanctioned historical filmmaking. In such a context, fictional explorations of history have been particularly influential in shaping the intellectual discourse and attitudes. Personal cinematic accounts, which do not claim historical accuracy but choose to appeal to a shared historical imagination, have ultimately influenced public perceptions of history as strongly as officially endorsed versions. The study of mainstream historical film is an important tool for identifying the doctrines that shape the prevalent national discourse on history, but it is equally important to examine cinematic works that represent non-conventional cinematic approaches to historical material, found in a range of satirical, fantasy, science fiction, or animated features. The cinema of moral anxiety, yet another important aspect of East-Central European film, is usually associated with the names of Polish filmmakers: Zanussi, Holland, Kies´lowski, and Falk. But if one looks more closely, one finds a similar trend in the cinemas of all countries in the region during the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, or even earlier, for Yugoslavia’s “Black Wave” challenged political, moral, and aesthetic orthodoxies back in the 1960s. Concerns about blunted moral sensitivities, petty adjustments to the rules imposed by state socialism, depressive everyday lives controlled by an elaborate bureaucratic machinery found expression in these films. They represented a political opposition that encoded dissent in screen images of dull routines, they exposed the regime by showing the existential traumas of small people involved in petty maneuvering while struggling to secure a one bedroom apartment or a used Trabant car, or to overturn a demeaning intrigue at their work place. The work of Krzysztof Kies´lowski powerfully continued this cinema on a higher level. Around the time he worked on his TV series Dekalog/Decalogue (1988), the director underwent a period of self-reflexive reappraisal and gradually transformed himself from a filmmaker preoccupied with socialist politics into one concerned with universal ethics. He came to realize that the problems of people trapped in state socialism did not profoundly differ from the general moral anxiety he sensed when traveling across the West. In his own words, he “observed a general uncertainty in the world at large […] sensed mutual indifference behind polite smiles and had the overwhelming impression that, more and more frequently […] people didn’t really know why they were living” (Stok 143). After this insight, Kies´lowski continued his work, supplying his movies with a message that was now reaching much farther, beyond the straightforward social criticism of his earlier work. He gave up his interest in politics and ascended into the realms of apprehension and uncertainty, of destiny, transcendental affinities, and universal existential fears that govern the lives of people both in the East and the West. To claim that a new, profoundly different profile of East-Central European cinema is emerging after 1989 would be an overstatement. Rather, there is continuity in topics and style.


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Privately financed heritage blockbusters have come into the place of state-financed historical super-productions. Mafia action-adventures and post-totalitarian comedies have come to fill the void vacated by partisan action-adventures and the comedies of Communist times. Films focusing on the drab everyday life and moral frustration of post-Communism have replaced the dramas focusing on the depressing everyday life and moral discouragement under Communism. Even though commercialization inflicted a significant damage on art cinema, filmmakers continue making art films, and continue moving within the traditional themes of history and heritage, Stalinism, the Holocaust, and the experience of war. There is a proliferation of films focusing on the issues of ethnic minorities and the politics of ethnicity, reflected in the great numbers of films made in response to the Yugoslav break-up. Numerous festival awards for films from East-Central Europe counter-balance the widely held belief that Eastern European cinema is undergoing a major crisis. The traditions of lyric cinema, surrealism, magic realism, and experimental avant-garde animation are alive. New generations of filmmakers come to continue working on the exciting project of East-Central European film.

The silent tale of fury: Stalinism in Yugoslav cinema Nevena Dakovic´ I put my hand on my heart and say: I loved him the way someone loves God, or children or one’s mother. For me, Stalin was everything and everyone. (Kovacˇevic´, Spy 88)

Marshal Tito’s death set collective memory free in Yugoslavia, flooding the nation with remembrances of things past: in the 1980s, stories appeared in newspaper feuilletons, popular and pseudo-historical memoirs, on stage, and, finally, on film screen. In Rajko Grlic´’s mocking but romantic, media ironic, and incidental satire of feminism, U raljama života/In the Jaws of Life (1984), trendiness means to have read the “condemned” fictional book Boli me Otok (The Island Hurts Me), which, in spite of its polysemic title, mainly alludes to the literature of the eighties that revealed the awful truths about the prison island. The amnesic nation sensed a chance to recover its lost memory. For Eastern Europe, writes Dina Iordanova, “the period of Stalinism falls within the time frame between the late forties to the mid-fifties and coincides with the first years of state socialism. It is considered the darkest period in the newer history of these countries, associated with brutal repression, staged trials, unexplained disappearances, forced labor camps, cult of personality, and an overall moral crisis” (“Stalinism” 232). Although Yugoslavia basically fits the description, we ought to be aware of the differences. The Tito-Stalin split formally put the

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country in complete opposition to the rest of the block, but did not break with the Stalinist mentality. On contrary, it lead to a hypocritical acceptance and flourishing of the officially rejected model of absolute power, cult of personality, and rigorous state control. There were forced labor camps but very few trials; conflicts between the fractions of the Communist Party resulted in chistkes (cleansings) although few used the term then. Yugoslavia was neither in the East nor the West. The break with the Cominform continued to shape most of the subsequent political crises. Stalin’s shadow lingered, for instance, over the case of Milovan Ðilas. As one of the most prominent Communists and intellectuals of the early 1950s, Ðilas published a series of articles in the daily Borba, culminating in “Anatomija jednog morala” (Anatomy of the One Moral), a critique of the “new red bourgeoisie” and the opulent life style of the Communist elite that unleashed a ferocious polemic and terminated Ðilas’s political career. After a brief interlude, the rise and the fall of Aleksandar Rankovic´, Minister of Internal Affairs took place, which ended only in late sixties. Darko Bajic´’s film Balkanska pravila/Balkan Rules (1997) peripherally evokes the affair of the surveillance and wiring of all political officials, including Tito, but the the actual references are fairly difficult to recognize, due to a chaotic script and a mythic, a-historical, perspective. Traces of Stalinist heritage could still be found in the mid-60s, and only gradually replaced in the later crises of 1968, 71, and 74 by the spirit of the growing European Leftist Rebellion. I want to show that these successive crises coalesced in people’s memories and in artworks into a single gloomy picture of a continuous political repression, personal suppression, and state oppression. Vinko Brešan’s hilarious comedy Maršal/ Marshall Tito’s Spirit (1999) shows on a micro level an uncontrolled revival of Stalinist totalitarism. Yugoslavia’s cinematic reaction to the period strikingly resembles that of Hungary, but with a significant delay. Like Poland and Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia’s northern neighbor started and finished cleansing its psyche before Yugoslavia. A Tanú/The Witness, Péter Bacsó’s lucid satire of totalitarism in the fifties appeared in 1969, while its Yugoslav equivalent, Balkanski špijun/The Balkan Spy, came out only in 1984. In retrospect, a Yugoslavian should have made Bacsó’s film, or a Hungarian should have made a film about Yugoslavia before the natives got to it.

Yugoslavia’s timid awakening Credit for the cinematic interest in Stalinism goes to the inspired generation of the European film moderna, filmmakers influenced by the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism. Their films on Stalinism, which belong to their mature work, were nostalgic-embittered retrospectives at the years of political turmoil that made them grow up virtually overnight. The autobiographical films of Károly Makk, Márta Mészáros, Miloš Forman, István Szabó, and Andrzej Wajda are narrated in the first-person, imbuing the stories with a personal and confessional tone. Witness Szabó’s Apa/Father (1966) and Mészáros’s Diary Trilogy (1982–90). Similar melodramatic or tragic remembrances of the still unhealed wounds of Stalinism are found in Makk’s Szerelem/Love (1971) and Pál Gábor’s startling Angi Vera (1978). Péter Gárdos’s Szamárköhögés/Whooping Cough (1986) portrays the Budapest autumn from the

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perspective of children. Forman’s Horˇí, má panenko! / Fireman’s Ball, an allegory of ethically and politically dark times, was banned just before 1968 and ironically released in Czechoslovakia just before 1989. This story of a fireman who returns a stolen prize but is accused of placing honesty above the reputation of his brigade openly alludes “to the current debate within the party on the degree to which the political trials of the fifties should be revealed” (Goulding 176). The unspeakable historical moments became visible in the Yugoslav Black Wave or YU cinema Modernism, the art crest of the social demands for democratic changes in seventies (often called “second revolution”). The directors were among those who favored humanistic, democratic socialism and self-government to Stalinist positivism and bureaucratic statism. They”aligned themselves with Marx’s earlier notions of praxis over ideological dogmatism, conformity, elitism and cults of personality; who vigorously and critically confronted the founding myths” (Goulding 213). The first discreet and indirect comments were followed a decade later by more direct and focused stories. Živojin Pavlovic´, a director famous for his aesthetic of cruelty, and Slobodan Perovic´, an actor with a Chekhovian sensibility and the aura of a melancholy looser, tackled the topic in Budjenje pacova/Rat’s Awakening (1967), which vaguely suggests that the main character hibernated in the labor camp and now unsuccessfully attempts changing his life. Stalinism appears in two groups of films. The films in the first, rather small group, deal directly with the topic, showing socialist society in permanent crisis, and revealing its foundation in double morality, cult of personality, dogmatism, and absolute power. Their densely intertwined references to the political crises form a cinematic canvas with rich detail. Films in the second, larger category make scattered references and allusions to Stalinism, shifting narrative time metaphorically to the present. Vivid details of the period seem less relevant to the film’s overall political attitude or storyline. Zoran Maširevic´’s Granica/The Border (1990) depicts the life of the inhabitants in a village near the Hungarian border. Already strained by internal tensions and the forced collectivization, they come close to a nervous breakdown as a result of the frequent border incidents. Guns heard from the direction of Hungary, rumors, and the transportation of dead and wounded soldiers are all muffled by the persistent autumn mist and rain of the region. Predrag Antonijevic´’s O pokojniku sve najlepše/All the Best About the Deceased (1984) deals critically with the same post-war period within a comedy of situation and characters. The emerging working class and the double morality of the Serb villagers express the spirit of the fifties, characterized by careerism, plotting, and politicking. Emir Kusturica’s elaborate allegory Underground (1995) does not deal with the epoch, but his Marko and Petar are in their respective ways both epitomes of rulers and manipulators. These metaphorical and concrete representations of the underworld are related to two other EastCentral European films: Waldemar Krzystek’s W zawieszeniu/Suspended (1987) and Janusz Zaorski’s Matka królów/ Mother of Kings (1983). Subsidiary figures carry sometimes the burden of the past. Miroslav Lekic´’s neo-realistic Dogodilo se na današnji dan/It Happened Today (1987) is situated in the slums of Belgrade. A former prisoner of Goli Otok and the policeman who arrested him are neighbors in the 1970s and engage in the daily ritual of reenactment and repentance. The ex-prisoner gets drunk every day, while the policeman takes him home. The former is drinking to forget, the latter saves him

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out of remorse. Jovan Acin’s Bal na vodi/Bathing Beauty (1986) is a nostalgic film, lovingly patched together from stereotypical moments of urban life in the fifties. They show how the urban life style and tradition of the pre-war middle- and upper-classes decays and the Communist (red bourgeois) class emerges. The film is structured in terms of overlapping flashbacks as seen through the eyes of four friends, now scattered throughout the world. A young officer of the State Security Service is the epitome of evil that struck their families and destroyed the “Marianne of their youth” (their female friend nicknamed after Esther Williams in George Sidney’s Bathing Beauties, the first Hollywood film shown in post-war Belgrade, with unbelievable success). Thanks to his political correctness, zeal, and unscrupulousness, the officer made a great career move from the province to the capital. Stalin and Lenin, tattoed on his arms, had to be bandaged over once the idols were relegated to the past. Dejan Sorak’s Oficir s ružom/ Officer with the Rose (1987) and Rajko Grlic´’s Samo jednom se ljubi/The Melody that Haunts My Memory (1981) depict love affairs transcending class boundaries. In one of the last films of former Yugoslavia, Tito i ja/Tito and I (1991), Goran Markovic´ ironically comments on the “cult of the personality” in the 1950s through stylized usage of documentary footage. The docu-films enhance the realist portrayal of everyday life and the originality of a child’s perception. The accompanying music, Latin-American arrangements of Yugoslav folk melodies, has the double function of underlining the similarities between Tito and the Latin-American dictators, and of suggesting that Yugoslav socialism was a charade, a political carnival, where people (mostly the political elite) had “fun.” By indirectly addressing a sensitive topic, the film resembles Wajda’s Człowiek z Marmuru/Man of Marble (1976), which incorporated a “mock documentary about the protagonist, a model worker whose glorification is an epitome of the propaganda spirit of the fifties” (Iordanova, “Stalinism” 233). The other Markovic´ film, Déjà vu (1987), is a rare Yugoslav exercise in the horror genre that exploits bizarre and frightening characters: dishonored (or politely retired) policemen obsessively reliving their past while drinking. Their verbal and physical confrontations turn on the question, which side they took in the aforementioned Rankovic´ affair. Discreet and implicit references in these films indicate that filmmakers became skillful in writing between the lines. Indeed, audiences eagerly looked for hidden subtexts.

Elaborate stories None of the mentioned titles match the political directness of Nikita Mikhalkov’s Russian Utomlionnye solntsem/Burnt by the Sun (1994) and Tengiz Abuladze’s Georgian Monanieba/ Pokayanie/Repentance (1984). The former is a sad story of the fifties, told as a passionate family melodrama. Political division and a betrayal due to love-jealousy altogether destroy the idyll of the unfortunate family. The latter, which describes in tragic as well as lyrical tones the life of political prisoners, is best remembered for the magnificent scene where words carved into logs are released down the river and sent to the world outside. Equally shattering is Ryszard Bugajski’s brutal and transparent Przesluchanie/The Interrogation (1982), discussed above by Iordanova (see p. 526).


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In Yugoslav stories on Stalinism one usually finds a local policeman or politician at the edge of sanity, a small-time dictator with a Napoleon complex and a moustache (Stalin’s nickname was Brka, mustached man). Bozidar Nikolic´ chronicles in Tri karte za Holivud/Three Tickets to Hollywood (1993) a long hot summer in a provincial town that is shattered by two contrasting events: the preparations for welcoming the Tito train and the arrival of relatives from America who are suspected of Spying. An array of local mavericks enriches the panorama of political and human absurdity, while the emotional focus is on three boys trying to go to Hollywood and become famous. Ironically, they are unaware that a cinematic “bigger than life” story is happing near them. Kusturica’s award winning Otac na službenom putu/When Father Was Away on Business (1985) is to the tiniest detail about state oppression. The title is a colloquial expression used to explain the father’s absence to the children, as well as an encoded message to the adults that the father was sent to a labor camp. Kusturica shows at the end a visit to the labor camp, but without the details of life there. The family drama is presented through well-chosen key moments. The “victimized” Father is a feared and respected politician, a hypocrite leading a double life with a double moral standard: he is a patriarchal family man surrounded by children and a faithful wife, but also a womanizer, leading a life filled with sex, mistresses, and wild nights. Blinded by hate, his wife’s brother denounces him, unaware that this will hurt his own sister. The betrayal is due to a rivalry: Father appropriated uncle’s mistress, and uncle, equally hypocritical and patriarchal, takes his revenge, though he continues to look after his sister’s family. The demise is simple, naïve, and stupid: seeing in the politically correct newspaper Politika a caricature that shows Karl Marx writing the Capital with Stalin’s picture on the wall, Father exclaims at home: “too much is too much.” A closer look at the narrative reveals that Father’s arrest took place at the time of the Trieste crisis, which doesn’t quite fall within the Stalinist years. The slight temporal displacement indicates that the various crises are indistinguishable from each other. Their composite crystallized in memory as an eternal crisis. Dragan Kresoja’s Original falsifikata/Original of the Forgery (1991) moves a Balkan love story à la Jules and Jim into the Yugoslav revolution. The friendship of war comrades breaks down because of ideological differences and their love for the same woman. Her child grows up with an uncertain paternity and a problematic political identity. The ideological and parental choices finally crystallize in the question: “Who/What is the original and who/what is the forger?” No one can answer with certainty, not even when temporal distance offers new analytical perspectives and grounds for a moral revaluation. The two following films, like Original of the Forgery, were adapted from highly successful theater plays that unleashed passionate polemics; the regime tolerated the films as safety valves. Stole Popov’s melancholic, gloomy, and ironic Macedonian film Srecńa Nova 49/Happy New 1949 (1986) depicts an individual that is crucified and destroyed by the historical break. As 1948 ends with a huge confusion, friends and compatriots have every reason to bitterly wish each other a “Happy 1949.” Krsto Papic´’s Život sa stricem/Life With the Uncle (1988) resembles Kusturica in tone, and Hungarian cinema in reflecting history through personal tragedy. The main character, Martin, is victimized by the wounded pride of a young Communist leader, who sleeps with the school’s political official. His alleged guilt is confirmed when his uncle, a highly placed politician and his substitute father, denounces him for having written a personal, sincere,

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and morally just letter. The family split is explicitly related to the forced collectivization and harvest ransom. In a unique screen representation of a staged totalitarian trial at the boarding school (set in 1951–52 but evoking rather the Ðilas affair); Martin is dishonored, sentenced, humiliated, and almost killed (nearly castrated physically). The rest of his years are empty; the political condemnation is a symbolic and mental castration. The Uncle’s plea for forgiveness at Martin’s deathbed triggers the story in a flashback. WR: Misterije organizma / WR: Mysteries of Organism (1971) mixes in Makavejev’s inimical way Western modernism and Communist political orthodoxy, positioning the USA and the USSR as “sexuality misdirected into power politics and militarism” (Goulding 231). This multilayered fiction/faction story comments both on repression and on right-wing excesses by repeatedly intercutting the sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich with a politicized love affair between a Yugoslav girl and a Russian ice-skating champion called Vladimir Ilyich (after Lenin), “whose perfectly formed lips speak nothing but Socialist clichés” (Goulding 231). In 1993 Makavejev would return in Gorila se kupa u podne/Gorilla Bathes at Noon to his favorite theme that corrupt political power clashes with demands for freedom of mind and body. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the withdrawal of the Soviet Army, a pure, naïve, and innocent Slav soldier, who distantly resembles Vladimir, stays behind. His passionate clash with the new world is enhanced by docushots showing the dismantling of the Lenin’s statue and Stalin’s applause for The Fall of Berlin (1949). Alexandar Petrovic´ directed a screen version of Bulgakov’s celebrated cult novel The Master and Margarita (1972), which suggests that love and art offer the only lasting resistance to political oppression. Love is eternal while manuscripts do not burn concludes the Maestro. The story speaks metaphorically on three levels about an irrepressible spiritual freedom: it is a parable about the trial and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, a critical commentary of the Soviet thirties (depicted as the Devil’s action around Moscow), and a profoundly touching love story. Censorship, psychological strain, and physical threat — facets of the dictatorial posture toward art — finally force the Maestro to escape into a promised Neverland of artistic liberty and physical death.

Projecting the frustration The key Yugoslav film on Stalinism, Dušan Kovacˇevic´’s Balkanski špijun/The Balkan Spy (1984), is a bitter comedy with under- and overtones of tragedy and gloom. Kovacˇevic´ evinces a psychological and anthropological knowledge of his people by offering a multidimensional exposure of the traumatic Cominform confrontation. In his view, the collective experience became a destructive shock for individuals and families; a tormenting memory; an ongoing therapy of reliving; and an experience that history is inevitably repetitive. This correctly and neatly done film, co-directed by the writer and the director of photography, Bozidar Nikolic´, relies mainly on a static theatrical directing and a good cast. Even the unoriginal mise-en-scène could not spoil the brilliant text. A few inventive gags add fine touches. In one scene, for example, a group of punks allows to pass the angry Cvorovic´ family that is uniformly dressed in black suits, resembling John Landis’s Blues Brothers (1980) or Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Men


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in Black (1997). When Ilija Cvorovic´ completely flips out, the room is lit by a red “Communist” light, allegedly because there is a shortage of normal light bulbs. Ilija Cvorovic´ is an average lower-middle-class state employee with a housewife and an unemployed daughter who has a dentist diploma. Ilija’s unmentionable secret is that he was in jail for two years for being a devoted Stalinist. When he takes a new lodger to boost his modest income during one of the Yugoslav economic crises in the eighties, a routine police inquiry about the latter suffices to put him in a state of “red alert” and overzealously worry about the state’s interest. The nearly perfect fatherland seems seriously endangered by the arrival of a Parisian ex-couturier who nostalgically returns to Belgrade in order to turn back the clock and start a business. Ilija (name of a prophet) Cvorovic´ (hard to crack, because full of knots) has a different interpretation and develops the “Balkan spy” syndrome: he follows the lodger around town, draws conclusions, and believes that he, Ilija, is chosen “to serve and protect.” The register of his tone changes from comic, via “black comedy” or “hilarious tragedy,” to a classic case of paranoia about being followed and under surveillance. He feels pursued because of his role, function, and personal worth. His “prophet name” gives him a sense of self-importance. Ilija believes that he discovered the “enemies of the state” and his life is now endangered. But outwardly he conforms to the stereotype of common modesty. As an ordinary man, he modestly avoids speaking about his alleged personal importance and heroism. For him, this is just the right and necessary way of paying back the debts incurred in the past. He thanks the repressive apparatus for “sobering him up” and expects nothing in return. In Slavoj Žižek’s words, the subject first refuses to betray (and goes to prison for that) and afterwards voluntarily betrays, for “our betrayal counts only insofar as we renounce the object of our highest love and devotion. […] The ultimate example of this sacrifice, of course, is the Stalinist monster trials […]: the accused finds himself in an absolute void insofar as he is compelled to authenticate his devotion to the Communist case by confessing his betrayal” (168). On the surface, the Balkan spy syndrome reenacts the monster trial that was probably never held. The maverick Stalinist fan, apparently brought to reason, rises again as a dictator. At first, his ambitions are capricious; he functions as a generally benevolent family tyrant. But under the pressure, he reveals paranoid suspicion and aggressiveness. His informal chat about the lodger fortifies his ambition to become the defender and savior of the very instances that condemned him to everyday misery. The ordinary man who once threatened the stability of the regime is now burdened with a guilt complex, cracking under the self-imposed duty of protecting that regime. The wide array of perceived enemies includes a universal conspiracy (“CIA, it ruined half of the world”) as well as Ilija’s wife, who makes bitter and gossipy remarks. His paranoia doubles in a political and psychological charade: while he was prosecuted to prove his loyalty, he now prosecutes an innocent person. The plot thus involves mirror structures and symmetry: the past determines the present, Yugoslavia during Stalin is reflected in post-Tito Yugoslavia. Historical neuralgia proves to be incurable for it constantly extends history into present and future stories. When Ilija “decodes” the normal behavior of the lodger and his friends (“You even went to the opera!? — What one has to suffer because of those hoodlums!”) he reveals an inverted sense of reality. He is melodramatically and sadly torn between wishes and real possibilities, between what is ideologically right or wrong (for instance in his former renunciation of and hidden loyalty to Stalin). He hides in his cellar the dictator’s portrait and the guns

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he captured during the war, just as he buries his memories and beliefs in his subconscious. The film’s nightmarish vision of the present diagnoses a generation’s and a country’s state of mind. These political statements in Yugoslav films were based on the need to discover and honestly rewrite the past through a protective “historical distance.” They also test the comforting and dignifying belief that Yugoslavia always was somewhat different from the rest of the Socialist block. Discovering the underside of this belief destroys the very tradition that nurtured it and made it possible. The stories imprinted in collective memory are retold on the screen in a variety of generic tones. A tone of melodrama emerges from the pathetic helplessness of the victimized: innocent youngsters, women, and children caught in the “mill of history.” A tone of horror emerges from the stories about torture in the camps and physical oppression during the trials or before the arrest. In the Freudian way, cure for the trauma lies in its transformation into gallows humor. That the Yugoslav stories resemble those of the other East-Central European countries says, unintentionally, that Yugoslavia is part of a broader entity. Stalinism and its manifestations also tell us that the Yugoslav political dogmas recur. Tito and Slobodan Milosevic´ were, like Stalin, icons of absolute power during certain periods of their rule. With appropriate changes in time and place most Yugoslav narratives could be transferred to any East-Central European country. Although formally an antipode, Yugoslavia has always been part of a political East-Central Europe and the notoriously tormented Balkans. Films reveal a relation that life acknowledges only later.

Central Europe’s catastrophes on film: The case of István Szabó Katherine Arens Director of Mephisto, Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Film in 1982 (as Hungary’s entry), István Szabó is arguably the most visible Central-European film director since Miloš Forman, but one who takes up the region’s legacy within a more comprehensive European context, extending from the First World War, through Taking Sides, the story of Wilhelm Furtwängler (2001). Among Szabó’s recent creations is a noteworthy film with an unusual casting trick at its heart: British actor Ralph Fiennes played three generations of the fictional Sunshine/Sonnenschein/Sors family in Sunshine (1999), documenting a Jewish family’s rise from a peddler, to a patent-medicine entrepreneur, Olympic-level fencer, and functionary in post-World-War-II Hungary. This conceit is not new: Szabó seems to work consciously with actors in triple roles. His early films, Álmodozások kora / In the Age of Daydreaming (1964), Apa / Father (1966), and Szerelmesfilm / Love Film (1970) featured as main actor András Bálint. Szabó, who considers Father as his best and “closest to his heart” (Szabó 39), remarks about the early triplet that there

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is a relation between the characters, but they could have been played differently (Szabó 110). In the 1980s, he made a third trilogy of films with a single lead actor, the Austrian Klaus Maria Brandauer: Mephisto (1981), Oberst Redl (Colonel Redl; 1985), and Hanussen (1989). He considers Redl his “best in terms of the technique of directing and narration” (Szabó 39). In this trilogy, Brandauer plays historically-attested but heavily fictionalized characters from twentiethcentury Europe: Hendrik Höfgen, a fictionalized version of the life of Gustaf Gründgens (known as “Hitler’s ‘Faust’”), taken from Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (see Kaye 3); Colonel Alfred Redl, member of the Austrian General Staff, Austro-Hungarian spy-master and Europe’s most noted traitor before World War I; and Erik Jan Hanussen (born Herschel Steinschneider), a night-club psychic turned clairvoyant/astrologer murdered in April 1933, possibly because of his involvement with some of the more decadent elements in the SA (Levenda 102 ff.). Each of these films has had its detractors and supporters, but they have not received much systematic attention, particularly not in light of the director’s unusual use of his charismatic lead actors. Dagmar Lorenz and Hildegard Nabbe have outlined how sexuality plays along with nationalism to create the catastrophes in the Brandauer films, by noting that Gründgens and Redl were definitely homosexuals, closeted because of public opinion and legality. Yet Hanussen, whom neither discusses, was historically affiliated with the mystics and psychics in the Berlin circle around the Röhm SA, of whom many were also probably gay. Taking a parallel tack, Susan Rubin Suleiman has discussed in depth how the Sonnenschein family’s Jewish identity determines its political fates, but not how the casting would affect today’s audiences. The films’ structures create a kind of intertextuality of lives that manipulate some of the most cherished cultural artifacts of nations from Central Europe, from Germany, the one-time Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the successor states, whose fates were determined by imperial politics. As I will argue, Szabó aims at a very specific critique of the relations between governments and individuals when, through casting, he connects histories that current experience has preferred to hold apart. He provides examples of how an impossibly fragmented region has, despite the habits of national histories, created specific tactics for self-(re)presentation that do not entirely conform to contemporary norms. Szabó’s two sets of cinematic triplets — Brandauer’s and Fiennes’ characters — reveal an identity politics that belie simpler assumptions about individuals in the new Europe’s nation-states.

Mephisto through Redl: Political identities on shifting sand Mephisto appeared in 1981 as part of the very first wave of German-language films and media addressing the Nazi era. The trickle had begun with the broadcast of the US mini-series Holocaust, shown in Germany and Austria in 1977 and 1978 respectively, and followed by Volker Schlöndorff’s Blechtrommel (Tin Drum; 1979), from Günter Grass’ novel of the same name; Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lili Marleen (1981), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (The Desire of Veronika Voss; 1982); as well as Franz Antel’s Der Bockerer (Austria, 1981). Mephisto stood apart because of its source and references, since it took up not the “little people” in the street during and after World War II, but a novel outside the mainstream. This

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roman à clef portrayed Germany’s greatest post-war actor of Faust as a Nazi Mitläufer and probable homosexual. Klaus Mann’s Höfgen showed Germany an uncomfortable vision of its most cherished actor, still remembered for his classical roles, including a widely-distributed Faust audio recording. The novel also alluded to a less savory legacy of repressed homosexuality in Mann’s own family, making it a living act of lese majesté against the preferred post-war selfimage of Germany as a land of high culture. Szabó was thus taking on not only the German past but the heart of Germany’s culture. And casting a prominent stage actor to play a prior era’s most famous actor made the contemporaneous references unavoidable. No wonder then that the film’s final scenes play in the empty Berlin Olympic Stadium, where the “Prime Minister” has taken Höfgen and put him center stage with lights in this enormous empty space. Höfgen’s last words, “What do they want of me — I’m only an actor,” reinforces its underlay of historical continuity by alluding to the most famous Nazi-era film director, Leni Riefenstahl. Brandauer was not an unusual choice, since he had been a member of Vienna’s Burgtheater since 1971 (see Kaye), working up to lead roles and directing. Internationally he was largely unknown outside of theater circles, although that would change by the time Redl came out. Brandauer used the weight of his award-winning film to claim new international visibility: he became James Bond’s (Sean Connery’s) adversary in Never Say Never Again (1983) and he played Meryl Streep’s charming cad of a husband, Baron Bror Blixen, in Out of Africa (1985) in the company also of Robert Redford. Brandauer claims he was offered every heavy role in Hollywood after the Bond film, but refused them (see Hall). In Mephisto, though, he offered simply his charismatic screen presence, which would serve him and Szabó well in their subsequent work. They claim to have worked well together because they share a history (albeit from other sides), as Szabó took on his project of telling “a hundred years of history” (Gregory). Mephisto told the tale of a mediocre provincial actor who profited from the Nazi state by taking over roles from actors denounced as socialists or Jews, and by pandering to the decidedly middle-brow taste of the Nazi elite, just as he has always pandered to the better-connected. Yet (and contrary to the assumption of critics) Szabó has not just told the story of a sexual pervert marginalized by his need to hide his person and politics. He has, instead, told the story of a noone, of an actor created by the stage on which he played — the Nazi Germany that no longer exists, now a no-man’s land like the Berlin stadium in which the audience last sees him. He only has an identity as long as he has a system in which to exist (notably he gives precisely the same speech extolling art to a Communist-inspired workers’ group that he did to the Nazi art elite). Szabó has left it to his audience to supply subsequent history: that his Höfgen would live to play Faust after the war, that the actor’s Germany had, in fact, not disappeared. To have added more to this closing scene would have forced the film to ask about the Nazi legacy of post-war Europe rather than opening reflections about what happens to a creature of a system that has purportedly been vanquished. Szabó will reiterate this point in the third film of his trilogy, when Hanussen, equally a creature of the Nazi hierarchy, is shot alone in a forest because he threatens to emerge into independent agency rather than remaining a cog in the system. The echoes are even odder in real life: we last see “Höfgen” playing Hamlet, a role Braudauer subsequently took on at the Burgtheater. That two films about Nazi Germany are the bookends to Colonel Redl, itself about the start of the First World War and today’s Central Europe, initially seems surprising. But Szabó casts


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his Redl as another kind of actor, playing soldier under the auspices of the Austro-Hungarian state rather than playing actor/entertainer for the Nazis. And in this second film, Szabó uses Brandauer’s new-found visibility to good use, in selling material that is considerably less familiar to Western audiences than the Nazi era was. The Redl affair of 1913 had, after all, made huge headlines because of its theatricality and improbability. Using a mail-drop surveillance sting, the Austrian secret service was able to link Redl to payments coming from Russia and thus to unmask him as a spy. The revelation was particularly embarrassing, since Redl was Austro-Hungary’s spymaster, a member of the Austrian General Staff. What Redl really did remains somewhat of a mystery. Once trapped, he was put under house arrest by fellow officers; he requested a revolver, and committed suicide within twelve hours, before he could be interrogated. Publicity at the time allowed the Staff to attribute his treason to homosexuality: his apartment in Prague was broken open and revealed a stereotypical, perfumed, “womanly” décor that attested to his living far above his apparent means (he had lied about an inheritance). That locked apartment broke open the news to the public: the summoned locksmith missed his league soccer game for a team whose leader was Egon Erwin Kisch, “der rasende Reporter.” Kisch started to investigate why his star player was absent, and he soon pieced the outlines of the story together. Since Kisch and his editor were worried about censorship, the story was first broken in the negative: “The general staff denies that” (Markus 237) — but the scandal spread quickly. The Russian Imperial Archives that became accessible during glasnost reveal regular payments to Redl at a rate indicating that his shipments were highly valued, but not what Redl had actually sold. Subsequent reworkings of the material profited from the public’s hazy knowledge about Redl’s motivations, giving the authors ample space for speculation. He was born in Lemberg (Lvov) as the ninth of fourteen children, the son of a Ruthenian ex-soldier-turned railroad official who died young (Ruthenian, lost White Russian, is an ethnic designation of the Empire subsequently lost to world history). As orphan of an officer and civil servant, Redl was able to get a scholarship in the military academy and to turn into a talented, hard-working (and probably cutthroat) self-promoter. He did, indeed, establish in the Austrian service the modern science of spying, among the first in Europe to use wax cylinders to record audio surveillance and to employ photo-surveillance and graphology. Redl’s definite homosexuality — virtually ignored by Szabó in the film — is variously attributed to growing up in a household with too many sisters, to his experience being an underdog to aristocrats in school, or to a phobia of women originating in a bout of syphilis contracted from a prostitute. Whatever the “cause,” Redl tried to live an overly-rich lifestyle (including kept men), which led him into debt. At the time of his death, he was in love with a young cavalry officer from the Uhlans (a fashionable cavalry unit), to whom he provided clothes, a car, and a horse. It is unclear whether he volunteered to spy for Russia or had been recruited because of debt; it is also possible that he acted as a Ruthenian resisting the Habsburgs, or that he was being blackmailed because of his homosexuality. Not surprisingly, Kisch turned the material into a small book, Der Fall des GeneralStabchefs Redl (1924), which is credited as the source for a 1931 film of the same title, directed by Karl Anton. Kisch made Redl a criminal, not a traitor. A silent film, Oberst Redl, had already been made in 1925, to be joined in 1955 by Spionage, directed by Franz Antel, with a script by

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Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Kurt Nachmann (Georg Markus, 274). Several written versions are also widely known. Still in print is a comprehensive report, Robert Asprey’s The Panther’s Feast (1959), which is based solidly on the then known historical facts, but made into a docudrama with interpolated dialogue and inner monologue. Asprey sees Redl’s motivation as pure greed and opportunism, exacerbated by a need to avenge himself on a military elite reluctant to accept him. Asprey’s Redl is decadent: smart, unprincipled, calculating, tormented by his relations to women and by his carefully stage-managed homosexuality, and vulnerable to bribery. Redl falls when he overreaches in trying to control a lover, then is forced to accept Russia’s offer of money — he had long been targeted, given his financial situation and the expectations placed on officers in terms of marriage, lifestyle, and the like. The most famous version of Redl’s life story is found in John Osborne’s play A Patriot for Me (1965), which is credited as a source for Szabo’s screenplay (see Bas for a good discussion of that play). Yet the thrust of the story-telling is completely different from Szabó’s, since Osborne paints a Redl whose motivation is straight out of British spy history of the Burgess era (Macauly). He is gay and blackmailed, marginalized by the upper classes: “Patriot comes across as a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the sexual outsider” (Nightengale); Act II is notable for a full-length gay costume ball (see Nightengale, P. Taylor). Szabó changes the focus, and the new approach is adopted also in the novel version of his screenplay collaborator, Péter Dobai. Despite these notable sources, Redl was fading into historical (though not London theater) memory by the time Szabó made his film. He could thus create a new Redl, which he did. As he notes in an interview, he did not aim at a historical film but at a consciously fictitious story using an attested name and a sympathetic character. The spotty source material, including a very self-aware suicide note: “Passion and levity have destroyed me” allowed for this reinterpretation (Grenier). Thus, unable to find a suitable script, Szabó evolved his own interpretation of Redl: We thought through with Dobai what interests us today in this hero (Colonel Redl) and what it is that could have exemplary power. We found that identity disturbance is what basically excited us. This is a man who wants to establish his own sense of security by becoming somebody other than he is, and in the process loses himself, his self, and his identity. He does not want to lie or cheat when he presents himself as somebody else, for from the bottom of his soul he would like be somebody else. He has little esteem for himself, for his people; he even thinks they are to be looked down upon; he is ashamed, because they do not live up to social expectations; he would like to orient himself towards rising possibilities. His life is an eternal readiness for defense, for being demasked; his uniform is a [suit of] armour, his military behavior is a masque — he conceals behind his defense of forms all that he himself would like to forget. His path to become somebody else passes through betrayal; from the betrayals of his childhood, the betrayal of his family, his brothers and sisters, his past, his social group, then his comrades, and his superiors he is led to the betrayal of his own spirituality (szellemiség) and body — and in the end he becomes, of course, his own victim. This Redl values other things than those that could possibly be of value in himself, and driven into this crisis of value he loses everything. The story of the Redl figure offered thus the possibility of a psychologically interesting analysis of a character and of a social situation, of a personality and its relation to a social-political environment (Szabó 126 f. from an interview first published in Filmvilág in 1981 under the title “Egy azonosságzavar története”)


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Redl thus documents what Szabó calls “the meeting of a character and history” (132), allowing Szabó to speak as “a convinced Central European” (Spiegel 1991; Heti Magyarország Oct. 25, 1991). In this meeting, the director orchestrates a confrontation of Central Europe with itself, a need for the post-war period (152). In this sense, Szabó aligns himself with Central European film directors like Cukor, Korda, Lubitsch, Wilder, Forman, who “learned to live with people from other ethnic groups” (67). Szabó’s Redl is neither a suffering homosexual, nor a calculating criminal traitor, nor a classic Freudian case, as so many of his biographers would have it: he has been given a school friend, a Hungarian nobleman, Baron Kristof Kubinyi, and his sister, Katalin, whom Redl embrace at the same time in a homophilic, if not overtly homosexual, gesture. When one of Redl’s superiors asks through a third party if he is gay, he counters by taking a wife in the Stefansdom in a very proper society wedding. Most significantly, Szabó rewrote Redl’s politics: he is not “a Patriot for me,” a super-spy, but rather a dupe of the Crown Prince and thus a creature of the system. Note that this “Crown Prince,” as he is credited, is not biographically identical with any of the real archdukes. Critics have tended to assume that Arnim Müller-Stahl is playing Franz Ferdinand, though the character’s politics most closely resemble those of the deceased Rudolf. Szabó goes out of his way to make his Redl passive, a pawn of a political situation rather than its mover: [Szabó] re-creates the Archduke Franz Ferdinand as leader of a cabal seeking to provoke a ‘good little war’ and trying to involve Redl in the plot — - also all fictional. He reduces Redl’s homosexuality to one muted incident and makes his ‘treason’ not really treason at all but a senseless,, one-time-only blurting out of numbers of cavalry squadrons, infantry battalions and the like to a dazed listener who takes no notes. (Grenier)

No wonder, then, that Colonel Redl ends at the moment that ends the empire, with fakenewsreel footage of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, accompanied by Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March.” The choice of music for the opening and closing credits was Szabó’s conscious tribute to Joseph Roth’s novel of the same name. Roth, too, was a victim of political circumstance: he committed suicide (or was assassinated) in Paris when Hitler’s troops were poised to enter the city. For many Central-European viewers, the film’s use of the “Radetzky March” alludes to this connection. Despite such cross-references, the film was not universally recognized as important. Vincent Canby calls it “a cluttered, lifeless film” and claims that “Redl is such a pathetically uncomplicated, transparent character that it’s impossible to view his rise and fall with particular interest, much less awe.” Some of this criticism may be traced to differences between US and European films; in Szabós view, the former state a problem and then look for a solution to it (70). In this case, however, the film revolves around the recalcitrant problem that “a human being needs a sense of security” in order to live (Szabó 134). As the director remarked in a 1994 interview: When I reconsider all my films, I see now in retrospect that all the films I made are about the same thing: my films are different variations on the quotidian battle for a sense of security. Which is probably no accident, for it is Central Europe, Hungary that represent the experiences of my life, where I am at home, and in which I think. (136)

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Katherine Arens There are people who flee their fear, their uncertainty by entering communities … the heroes that become lonely — Mephisto, Redl, Hanussen — show this as it were in the reverse; there is too much of compromise, of betrayal in them, and thus they cannot win the battle for the security of their lives. (137)

He had already defined the same theme in 1992: “A sense of security is as important as air or a glass of water. And even though I love my country I have to say that I see it as my greatest problem, ever since I was born, that one has to fight for this sense of security every day” (147). At the same time, however, the viewer must take this theme of “needing security” as a general theme of the region, not as Szabó’s biographical need. Szabó is reluctant to speak about his life because he does not believe “in the autobiographical character of films” (106), preferring that they stand on their own. About his life he reveals only that his father, a surgeon, died in 1945, and that he himself considered for a while also to enter the medical profession (Szabó 93). Because Szabó’s need for “sense of security” seems to produce film stereotypes relating specifically to the Central-European context, Anglo-American critics take his focus on psychological states as an active identity politics, thereby displacing some of the films’ subtlety. In a typical exchange, Grenier notes: Mr Szabó admits that he is not primarily interested in either homosexuality or treason but rather in Redl’s “identity crisis.” [As Szabó said,] “people want to be something other than what they are. It’s the disease of the century…. Redl didn’t like himself. He wanted to be someone else. He was a poor Ukrainian and he wanted to be an Austrian nobleman. But it’s impossible to change identity! … Osborne thought homosexuality was the cause of Redl’s trouble. I think it was his identity crisis, as I say. But also — because there’s another lesson here — people are prejudiced against anything different: Jews, blacks, homosexuals, intellectuals, students. And when authorities want an enemy they look for a scapegoat.”

According to Echikson, Höfgen and Redl “want to be accepted”; according to Hume, Szabó turns Redl “into a victim offered by a cynical and corrupt regime as a warning to all factions”; the character “is too small for tragedy, too large for pity”; he is “a victim of his own ambition who gets caught up in a web of intrigue.” This is indeed the closing scene of Redl, in which Brandauer runs back and forth in his hotel room like a rat in a wheel before he shoots himself. Redl’s life was created in the image and likeness of the empire, but he was never one of its creator-gods, despite his position on the General Staff. He is not noble, and so he will never be what Tom Wolfe will a century later call “the Masters of the Universe,” nor would he want to. The very system that has given Redl security declares him important when the Crown Prince sets up a shadow cabinet that ultimately undercuts the legitimate government of the old Emperor (this cabinet existed historically, but it was the General Staff, not the Crown Prince, who thought that a preemptive war might justify Austria’s troops entering the Balkans). Redl’s new importance, however, is anything but active: The trouble with us, probably as a result of centuries-long feudal or dictatorial views, is that compromise is confused with opportunism. Opportunism means surrendering the goal, giving up what is essential. Compromise is the most beautiful road leading towards what is important. (Szabó 155)


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The politics in which Redl becomes enmeshed is an ethnic-national one, whereas his personal rise and fall related more to class issues, to the gap between talent and privilege. In the film, the catastrophe is precipitated by the Prince’s support for establishing a Slav Parliament. When he realizes that its implementation will require martial law and an excuse to send the Austrian Army into the Hungarian dominion in the Balkans, the Prince discusses with Redl, the spymaster, who might be blamed for a faked incident, set up to justify as a peacekeeping gesture Austrian military aggression into a nominally peaceful Serbia. The best candidate to play that role would be not an Austrian or a Hungarian, because they were in the political ascendency; not a Czech or a Serb, because those areas are too unstable, nor a Jew, because they were too much the outsiders in Austro-Hungary to provoke general crises — a Ruthenian would be perfect. Redl realizes that he, and he alone in the government, is that perfect candidate. In Szabó’s version, the Prince’s setup succeeds, and the General Staff secures both a war and a cover-up with Redl’s suicide “for reasons of honor.” The official set-up capitalizes on the ruins of Redl’s personal life, as his debts mount and he is forced into a forest under direct threat by a Russian. There, as his defense against an unacceptable reality, he recites a compendium of facts and figures about the front defenses, without reflection or analysis. This scene presages the political murder that ends Hanussen, perhaps an intentional intertextual link to the empty open spaces of Redl and Mephisto. The casting of Arnim Müller-Stahl as the Crown Prince is an even more overt political intertextuality because the actor was familiar to audiences for his roles as a Nazi. In Redl, as in Mephisto, Szabó has drawn a passive main character, an actor of some minor talent or focus, who receives a script from the powers that be in return for a sense of security. In so doing, he becomes a cog in evil systems, the systems overwriting Central Europe. The multiple personas of Brandauer in Szabó’s films as perpetrator-victims of authoritarian states are thus suggestive: the director very carefully paints all three as participatory in the state as a whole, yet without culpability or responsibility in other than psychological terms: each is working only for himself and under the illusion of his own agency. Their psychological sense of empowerment and entitlement is given to them, not earned, much as when Redl is told to work hard and exercise self-control. Moreover, the politics giving them their roles is one of strength and victimhood, not nation or ethnicity. They have only the identity of the masters they serve, not a permanent identity of any sort, at least until the current masters change, leaving them behind. Ruthenian or German, actor, soldier, or psychic — Brandauer’s characters mesmerize because they themselves are mesmerized by the powers of two German-speaking empires in the twentieth century.

Sunshine: New empires In spite of the association of this major trilogy with the German language, Szabó’s larger project does not originate in the German-speaking world, but rather in Hungary and its own film traditions. As he says in an interview from 1993, he long regretted, for example, the loss of the virágnyelv (speaking between the lines) that characterized Hungarian films in the 60s and 70s (74).

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A decade after the Brandauer trilogy, Szabó took up another eminent actor, to return in his own homeland to his considerations of security, identity, and historical catastrophe. In Sunshine (A Napfény íze; 1999), he will pull off a different triplet casting coup with Ralph Fiennes, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, familiar to English-speaking (and world) audiences from Quiz Show (1994), English Patient (1996), and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993): a patrician intellectual, an impossibly noble hero, and the most sadistic cinema Nazi since Josef von Sternberg. In Sunshine, cross-casting again comes into play: a heroic leading man who has played an overbearing Aryan and an equally overbearing patrician is cast to play three roles, three successive patriarchs of the assimilated Hungarian Jewish family Sonnenschein/Sors. Fiennes is thus his own Doppelgänger across three different political formations: AustroHungary, right-wing independent Hungary, and Soviet dominated Hungary. The Sonnenschein/Sors family — sors means “fate”, as in Imre Kertész’s Noble-Prizewinning novel Sorstalanság (Fatelessness) — like the Trottas from Joseph Roth’s novels, starts humbly in the country. The first Sonnenschein is a country peddler whose son opens a successful patent medicine factory in Budapest, and whose grandson comes to represent Hungary’s fencing establishment in the Olympic Games (to win), before being tortured to death when called up to serve as a forced laborer under a sadistic officer who considers Sors’ claim to a uniform to be an affront (this actually happened to the writer István Örkény, who survived; and Szabó may have adopted the episode from Örkény’s autobiographical remarks). Still, this Sors insists on identifying himself as Hungary’s fencing champion rather than as a Jew and pays with his life for it. Starting in the Cold War era, the last male child of the Sors family grows up and discovers his family’s lost history after the fall of the Soviet Union. He reclaims his family name after discovering that the family was Jewish, a gesture which underscores less a Jewish heritage than the willingness to question the region’s official fictions. Suleiman equates the reclaiming of the family name specifically as an affirmation of the family’s Jewish heritage: “by taking back his Jewish-sounding name, Ivan breaks the pattern of accommodation to authority, with its attendant alienation of self, that was begun by his grandfather” (180). Szabó’s emphasis on individuals’ security suggests that Sors-turnedSonnenschein may simply again be compromising, to fit in, especially given the surprising renaissance of Jewish identity in Budapest (which has the largest Jewish population in Eastern Europe). Whether the film is also a reaffirmation of a lost past in Szabó’s own life is unclear. The Sonnenschein-Fiennes patriarchs are not the marginalized creatures that Redl was in aristocratic Austria, or Hanussen in Nazi Germany; nor are they hidden behind the masks of Mephisto. To be sure, they are comparative new-comers seeking security under various conditions (such as their ability or inability to join a fencing club for officers, much less possible in Horthy’s Hungary than in Austro-Hungary). The last Sors-Sonnenschein finds a letter from his great-grandfather telling his descendents not just to be true to their heritage, but also to “exercise discipline.” No wonder, then, that the Sonnenscheins succeed — until they die, until they become the kinds of scapegoats that Szabó spoke of. The end of this film shows the Danube flowing through Budapest, as it does through Vienna, part of the flow of history through the region (as Claudio Magris would outline in his own Danube, and Péter Esterházy would satirize in his The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn: Down the Danube (1994).


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In this film, as in the Szabó-Brandauer trilogy, the cost of an individual’s compromise and security is high. On the surface, the Sonnenscheins seem, like Roth’s Trottas, to be a family of principled civil servants and professionals, made by their systems. Yet they enact violence on their wives and lovers, and experience violence from them (see Suleiman 177 f.), as they do from the various central administrations they experience. At moments, they are capable of great individual valor and of contributing to the whole — but their identities seem undermined by their compromises. Again like Roth’s Trottas, they have little humanity, no matter how successful they seem to be on the surface. The film’s casting here comes into play again, as it had in Brandauer’s case: Fiennes always projects an aura of masculine, forceful control, even in the midst of delusions about his own importance. His progeny will continue as nominal members of the state, but they do not possess the agency to change their masters. The salesmen want the right to trade; the fencer, to fence; the state orphan, a family. But they are considerably less than a lineage or a dynasty, since they exist only at the sufferance of whatever masters have allowed them to seem to prosper. Szabó’s three-part family thus tells another version of imperial Europe’s story (that “hundred years of history”): how individuals enter into the space of history, after having made a contract with an imperial or totalitarian governmental entity that grants them access to public life and to agency, but at clearly noted costs. They become civil servants or soldiers, with acknowledged roles in the public; if they are Jewish, they may even establish successful families under patronage of the Habsburgs; if otherwise ethnically marginalized, they establish careers; they enter a meritocracy; and they become vulnerable when they lose their roots, when they pretend to themselves that the empire’s periphery can become the center. Yet, like Szabó’s Redl, they can suddenly reemerge as Ruthenians or Jews, when the state reclassifies them. The historical Hanussen also shifted identities in post-World-War-I Central Europe to use politics to further his career. For example, he could fit into different protected categories of labor, when he changed passports (see Mel Gordon). Overall, Szabó refuses to denounce the states specifically, or make the films’ nominal heroes heroic: he acknowledges the potential for abuse in every state, in milder forms, when a Habsburg bureaucracy that manipulates its own, or in a Nazi or Soviet one. But in Sunshine as in his earlier films, he offers a more problematic vision of public space and the roles individuals play in it. There is individual achievement (or the appearance of it), a kind of civility, and much activity, but there is no state justice vis-à-vis individuals. Nor, perversely, are there individuals — only reincarnations of new Sonnenschein males or Brandauer-actors that occupy a space of state rationalization implemented by individuals’ beliefs that they are, in fact, living out individually-chosen destinies.

Szabó’s Central Europe Szabó’s triple (anti-)heroes demonstrate an alternate vision of European and Central European politics, one that examines the roles of what Julia Kristeva calls a “speaking subject” (13). As she outlines it, even if an individual is part of one of the groups acknowledged (positively or negatively) by the narratives of public space, that individual still belongs to that group (and to

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others) in multiple ways — as citizen, and voter, as social entity, as family member (11–13). Each of these multiple identities conditions that individual’s status and gives him or her the ability to tap the power, authority, censure, or security by which the group survives. That is, as part of the community, the individual subject is entering into a (symbolic) contract to be upheld by all parties, allowing multiple senses of agency — senses of security — but no identity apart from them. Individuals only have senses of agency as speaking subjects not any necessary power: their identity and agency only exist because of their faith in the system and their roles in it. In this sense, Szabó shows how states make individuals in their own images and likenesses, but that no state owes anything to them. There will be different types prevalent in different regimes, but individuals should never presume that they are in anything other than a temporary contract. Szabó’s Central Europe (including Budapest, Vienna, and a few nameless border cities) is thus as much a myth as his Nazi Germany was an act: it is a narrative of power that will persist to occupy all available space and script the lives of its inhabitants. It provides the security of home, but in the form of a fragile dream, an illusion that cannot survive too much light (as in the final scene of Redl, when floodlights in the Berlin Stadium herald Redl’s unmasking and downfall). What individuals have from these states and from their moments of history are balance sheets to guide their lives, each put in place by state forms: scripts that define them (not just constrain them) and guide them to new forms of perdition under the guise of security. Szabó frames his own project as asking what it means “to live in a country with a state ideology,” in which you can “go up if you know the rules,” but also “how to find your daily feeling of security” (Gregory). Redl, Höfgen, and Hanussen are first victimizers, then victims; the Sonnenscheins seem to be victors turned victims, but each clearly fails to use his nominal victories for anything but personal gain. No identity is permanent; neither exists without the group. They are, as Szabó summarizes, loyal to an ideology upheld by a “society not loyal to them” (Gregory), in which politics uses people, rather than people making politics. This filmmaker stops his narratives at the moments when regimes change — but we know, as he knows, that it will all begin again, as the river flows on to create new victims and new victimizers, new margins and new centers that simply all begin their deadly games again. Each regime functions simply as another regime, some better and some much worse than the ones before. Central Europe, like the Danube, will persist as history, and as story-making structures that script lives and grant individuals masks of personal identity actually dependent upon larger political entities. Survival, however, brings much hope and little joy to these characters, as the cycle of history begins again after the fall of the Soviet Union, repeating faces and living what they consider different lives. Szabó’s tripled heroes, however, underscore the power of repetition, as families never really go anywhere outside Central Europe as an on-going fate.

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Index of East-Central-European Names Volume 1

The following List includes only names from East-Central Europe. Contemporary scholars are not included. A Abafi, Lajos (1840–1940) 336 Abaffy, Ferencz (?–?) 313 Ábrányi, Emil (1851–1920) 339 Ábrányi, Kornél (1849–1913) 339 Acin, Jovan (1941–1991) 544 Aczél, György (1917–1991) 88 Aczél, Tamás (1921–1994) 84, 86, 109, 163 Adames¸teanu, Gabriela (b. 1942) 40, 44, 184, 502 Aderca, Felix [Zelicu Froim Adercu] (1891–1962) 183, 190 Ady, Endre (1877–1919) 184, 185, 186, 197, 202, 293, 313, 343, 346, 368 Agârbiceanu, Ion (1882–1963) 177 Aistis, Jonas (1904–1973) 159 Aizenshtok, Ieremiia (1900–1980) 402, 403 Albahari, David (b. 1950) 491 Alecsandri, Vasile (1818/1821–1890) 243, 283, 285, 290, 443 Alexander, Bernát (1850–1927) 250 Alexandrescu, Grigore (1810–1885) 285, 286, 443 Alexandrescu-Urechia˘, Vasile [V. Alessandresco] (1834–1901) 500 Alexandru, Ioan (1942–2000) 123 Alver, Betti [Elisabet Alver/Talvik] (1906–1989) 150 Anders, Władysław (1892–1970) 154, 160 Andonov, Metodi (1932–1974) 539 Andrássy, Gyula (1823–1890) 247 Andreev, Vesselin (1918–1991) 167 Andreichin, Ivan S. (1872–1934) 335, 344 Andric´, Ivo (1892–1975) 102, 178, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 311, 411, 422, 483, 537 Andrukhovych, Iurii (b. 1960) 81

Andrzejewski, Jerzy (1909–1983) 84, 86, 96, 145, 147, 152, 153, 158, 165, 511 Anielewicz, Mordechai (1919–1943) 154 Antemireanu, Alexandru (1877–1910) 290 Antonescu, Ion (1882–1946) 112, 113, 146, 148, 150, 159 Antonijevic´, Predrag (b. 1959) 543 Antonych, Bohdan-Ihor (1909–1937) 161 Appenszlak, Jakub (1894–1950) 437 Aralica, Ivan (b. 1930) 483 Arany, János (1817–1882) 250, 252, 253, 271, 333, 336 Arany, László (1844–1898) 250 Arbes, Jakub (1840–1914) 349 Arghezi, Tudor (1880–1967) 111, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 147, 148, 368 Arnaudov, Michail (1878–1978) 136 Arnsztajnowa, Franciszka (1865–1942) 436 Arsenijevic´, Vladimir (b. 1965) 81 Asachi, Gheorge (1788–1869) 283 Asbóth, János (1845–1911) 254, 336 Aškerc, Anton (1856–1912) 336 Astalos¸, Gheorghe (b. 1933) 174, 455 Atanasov, Georgi (1882–1931) 516 Auderska, Halina (1904–2000) 175 Aurˇednícˇek, Otakar (1868–1947) 350, 357 Ausländer, Rosa (1901–1988) 3 B Babits, Mihály (1883–1941) 13, 178 180, 184, 185, 186, 197, 199, 343 Bach, Josip (1874–1945) 188 Baconsky, A[natol] E[milian] (1925–1977) 119, 451 Bacovia, George (1881–1957) 148, 337, 345 Bacsó, Péter (b. 1928) 526, 532, 542 Baczyn´ski, Krzysztof Kamil (1921–1944) 146, 148, 157, 430, 431

624 Badalic´, Hugo (1851–1900) 519, 520, 521 Bahrianyi, Ivan (1907–1963) 159, 161 Bajamonti, Giulio [Julije] (1744–1800) 306 Bajic´, Darko (b. 1955) 542 Bajza, Jozef Ignác (1755–1836) 313 Bajza, József (1804–1858) 470 Bakalov, Georgi (1873–1939) 133, 134, 135 Bakoš, Mikuláš (1914–1972) 149 Bakulíny, Michal Miloslav (1819–1892) 290 Ba˘la˘it¸a˘, George (b. 1935) 43, 453 Balázs, Béla (1884–1949) 143, 184, 198, 341, 343, 533 Ba˘lcescu, Nicolae (1819–1852) 282, 283, 284, 285, 290, 291, 501 Ba˘leanu, Andrei (b. 1931) 116 Bálint, András (b. 1943) 548 Balk, Theodor (1900–1979) 376 Ballek, Ladislav (b. 1941) 93 Balogh, Sámuel (1796–1867) 469 Balota˘, Nicolae (b. 1925) 149 Baltag, Cezar (1939–1997) 123 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis (1873–1944) 348 Baltušis, Juozas (1909–1991) 110 Bánffy, Dezso˝ (1843–1911) 181 Banšell, Koloman (1850–1887) 257, 258 Banac, Ivo (b. 1947) 125, 126, 127 Ba˘nulescu, Stefan (1926–1998) 40, 92, 451 Baráni, Daniel (d. 1802) 313 Baranauskas, Antanas (1835–1902) 245 Baranćzak, Stanisław (b. 1946) 424, 434 Barbu, Eugen (1924–1993) 168 Barbu, Ion [Dan Barbilian] (1895–1961) 68, 501 Barbur, Eli (b. 1948) 441 Barcˇ-Ivan, Július (1909–1953) 109, 148, 149 Barit¸iu, George (1812–1893) 13 Barka, Vasyl’ Konstyantynovych (b. 1908) 108, 159, 161, 405 Baronzi, George A. (1828–1896) 444 Barski, Marian (1875–1931) 238 Bartelski Lesław M. (b. 1920) 147 Bartók, Béla (1881–1945) 11, 18, 518 Bartol, Vladimir (1903–1967) 497 Basanavicˇcius, Jonas (1851–1927) 244 Batsányi, János (1763–1845) 312 Batthyány, Lajos (1806–1849) 246, 264, 268, 269, 270

Index of East-Central-European Names Baudouin de Courteney, Jan Ignac (1845–1929) 418 Bauman, Janina (b. 1926) 440 Bazhans’kyi, Mykhailo (b. 1910) 161 Bec´kovic´, Matija (b. 1939) 209 Bednár, Alfonz (1914–1989) 84, 167 Begovic´, Milan (1876–1948) 334, 335, 411 Bem, Józef (1794–1850) 87, 263 Benador, Ury [Simion Moise Grinberg] (1895–1971) 151 Bence, György (b. 1941) 104 Benedek, Aladár (1843–1915) 336 Beniak, Valentín (1894–1973) 109, 149, 162 Beniuc, Mihai (1907–1988) 121 Benko, Artur Grado (1875–1946) 338 Benski, Stanisław (1922–1988) 440 Beöthy, Zsolt (1848–1922) 250, 252 Bernatowicz, Feliks (1786–1836) 325, 329 Bernolák, Anton (1762–1813) 275, 314 Beron, Petar (c. 1799–1871) 316 Bessenyei, György (1747–1811) 267, 470 Bevk, France (1890–1970) 498 Białoszewski, Miron (1922–1983) 86, 147, 158, 431, 432, 434 Bibescu, Gheorge (1804–1873) 281, 284, 285, 288, 290 Bibó, István (1911–1979) 4, 87, 88, 108, 337 Bilets’kyi-Nosenko, Pavlo (1774–1856) 402, 403 Billecocq, A[dolphe] (1800–1874) 285 Binkis, Kazys (1893–1942) 150 Bíró, Yvette (b. 1930) 533 Blaga, Lucian (1895–1961) 119, 121, 369 Blagoev, Dimitar (1856–1924) 133, 135, 337 Blandiana, Ana [Otilia Coman] (b. 1942) 92, 104, 123 Blaskov, Iliya (1839–1913) 261 Blavatsky, Elena Petrovna (1831–1891) 353, 356 Blažek, Michal (1753–1827) 313 Blažková, Jaroslava (b. 1933) 93 Blecher, Marcel (1909–1938) 449 Bloudek, Antonín Bedrˇich (1815–1875) 276 Bobkowski, Andrzej (1913–1961) 160 Bodenek, Ján (1911–1985) 164 Bodor, Ádám (b. 1936) 74, 81 Bogatyrev, P. G. Petr (1893–1971) 418, 419 Bogza, Geo (1908–1993) 123, 376 Bojarski, Wacław (1921–1943) 157

Index of East-Central-European Names Bolintineanu, Dimitrie (1819/1825–1872) 282, 283, 285, 286, 443, 444 Bor, J. E. [Ernest Žatko-Bor] (b. 1907) 162 Bor, Matej [Vladimir Pavšicˇ] (b. 1913) 148 Bornhöhe, Eduard (1862–1923) 463 Borowczyk, Walerian (b. 1923) 535 Borowski, Leon (1784–1846) 328 Borowski, Tadeusz (1922–1951) 147, 148, 160, 162, 163, 170, 175, 539 Boruta, Kazys (1905–1965) 110, 163 Borwicz, Michal M[aksymilian] (b. 1911) 153 Bossert, Rolf (1952–1986) 454, 455 Botev, Hristo (1848–1876) 10, 35, 111, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 259, 260, 317 Botto, Ján (1829–1881) 277 Boyadzhiev, Dimita˘r (1880–1911) 336, 346 Bra˘escu, Gheorghe (1871–1949) 179, 243 Brâncoveanu, Constantin, Prince of Walachia (1688–1714) 499 Brandstaetter, Roman (1906–1987) 437, 438 Bradu¯nas, Kazys (b. 1917) 159 Brandys, Kazimierz (b. 1916) 86, 164, 438 Bra˘tianu, Ion C. (1822–1891) 177, 282, 286 Bratny, Roman (b. 1921) 146, 147, 158 Brauner, František August (1810–1880) 272, 274 Brauner, Victor (1903–1966) 67 Brazdžionis, Bernardas (1907–2002) 151, 159 Breban, Nicolae (b. 1934) 92, 119, 123 Breisky, Arthur (1885–1910) 354, 357, 358, 359, 361, 363 Breiter, Emil (1886–1943) 239 Bregovic´, Goran (b. 1950) 536 Brešan Vinko (b. 1964) 542 Breslas¸u, Marcel (1903–1966) 121 Brˇezina, Otokar [Václav Ignác Jebavý] (1868–1929) 349, 350, 356, 357, 361, 363, 368 Brezoianu, Ion (1817–1883) 284 Brigadere, Anna (1861–1933) 197, 201 Brod, Max (1884–1968) 97, 143, 235, 516 Brodowski, Feliks (1864–1934) 238 Brodzin´ski, Kazimierz (1791–1835) 322, 325, 328, 329, 330, 331 Broniewski, Władysław (1897–1962) 157 Brtánˇ, Rudo (1907–1998) 149 Bryll, Ernest (b. 1935) 86, 172 Brze˛kowski, Jan (1903–1983) 369

625 Brzozowski, Stanisław (1878–1911) 344, 426 Buczkowski, Leopold (1905–1989) 174, 175, Budai-Deleanu, Ioan (c. 1760–1820) 283, 443, 499 Bugajski, Ryszard (b. 1943) 526, 536, 544 Bujak, Zbigniew (b. 1954) 45, Bulajic´, Veljko (b. 1928) 538 Bursa, Andrzej (1932–1957) 434 Butariu, Miron (1905–1992) 159, Buzura, Augustin (b. 1938) 40, 119, 451, 452, 499, 501 C ˇ abrinovic´, Nedeljko (1895–1916) 206, C Ca˘linescu, Al[exandru] (b. 1945) 48 Ca˘linescu, George (1899–1965) 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 181, 182, 446, 448, 450, 451, 499, 504 Ca˘linescu, Matei (b. 1934) 40, 46, 235, 318, 455 Ca˘luga˘ru, Ion (1902–1956) 448 Camilar, Eusebiu (1910–1965) 165, Canetti, Elias (1905–1994) 3, 381 Cankar, Ivan (1876–1918) 179, 336, 342, 368, Cankar, Izidor (1886–1958) 344 Cantemir, Prince Dimitrie of Moldavia (1673–1723) 443 499 ˇ apek, Josef (1887–1945) 147, 368 C ˇ apek, Karel (1890–1938) 232, 349, 368, 443 C Caragiale, Ion Luca (1852–1912) 243, 443, 446, 450 Caragiale, Mateiu I. (1885–1936) 446, 450, 451 Caraion, Ion [Stelian Diaconescu] (1923–1986) 108, 109, 148, 159 Carli, Alojzij (1846–1891) 495 Cârneci, Magda (b. 1955) 44, 45, 49 Carol II, King of Romania (1893–1953) 146 Ca˘rta˘rescu, Mircea (b. 1956) 42, 49, 76, 387, Cassian, Nina (b. 1924) 41, Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae (1918–1989) 12, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 74, 91, 103, 116, 124, 204, 452, 453, 454, 455, 501, 502, 504 ˇ ech, Svatopluk (1846–1908) 248 C Celan, Paul (1920–1970) 3 ˇ erný, Václav (1905–1987) 95 C Cesarec, August (1893–1941) 147 Chaloupka, Bohuslav (?–?) 344

626 Chalupka, Samo (1812–1883) 274, 275, 290 Chervenkov, Valko (1900–1980) 85, 138, 461 Chis¸inevski, Iosif (1905–1963) 90 Chmielowski, Piotr (1848–1904) 10, 254 Cholnoky, László (1880–1931) 342 Cholnoky, Viktor (1868–1912) 343 Choroman´ski, Leon (1872–1953) 238 Chorváth, Michal (1910–1982) 144, 149 Chulkov, Georgi (1875–1939) 337 Chytilová, Veˇra (b. 1929) 532 Chyzhevs’kyi, Dmytro [Tschizewskij, Dmitrij] (1894–1977) 402, 404 Cíger-Hronský, Jozef (1896–1960) 143, 162, 167 Ciobanu, Ion C[onstantin] (b. 1927) 175 Ciocârlie, Livius (b. 1935) 450, 453 Cioculescu, Serban (1902–1988) 121, 450 Cioran, Emil (1911–1995) 121, 143, 150 Ciora˘nescu, Alexandru (1911–1999) 159 ´ ipiko, Ivo (1869–1923) 411 C Ciulei, Liviu (b. 1923) 535 Clementis, Vladimir (1902–1952) 109, 143 Cohn, Jakub Adolf (1843–1906) 436 Comenius [Jan Amos Komenský] (1592–1670) 229 Conev, Benjo (1863–1926) 133 Constantinescu, Miron (1917–1974) 90 ´ opic´, Branko (1915–1984) 130, 172 C Cornea, Doina (b. 1929) 104 ´ osic´, Dobrica (b. 1921) 127, 146, 168, 209, C 482, 483, 491 Cosma, Mihail [Claude Sernet] (1902–1968) 143 Costenco, Nicolae (1913–1993) 108 Cotrus¸, Ovidiu (1926–1977) 149 Crainic, Nichifor (1889–1972) 121 Cra˘snaru, Daniela (b. 1950) 42 Creanga˘, Ion (1839–1889) 119, 243, 446 Crnjanski, Miloš (1893–1977) 143, 178, 179, 187, 411, 412, 413, 414, 537 Csáth, Géza (1887–1919) 342, 343 Cserhalmi, György (b. 1948) 540 Csurka, István (b. 1934) 47, 78 ˇ uic´, Stjepan (b. 1945) 131 C Cukor, George (1899–1983) 553 ´ urcˇin, Milan (1880–1960) 342 C Curtiz Michael [Mihály Kertész] (1888–1962) 534

Index of East-Central-European Names Cuza, Alexandru Ioan (1820–1870) 243, 290, 291 Cvirka, Petras (1909–1947) 110, 150 Cybulski, Zbigniew (1927–1967) 540 Czachorowski, Stanisław Swen (1920–1994) 155 Czapski, Józef (1896–1993) 176 Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy (1770–1861) 263, 265 Czechowicz, Józef (1903–1939) 429 Czekalski, Eustachy (1885–1970) 239 Czeszko, Bohdan (1923–1988) 147, 158 D Døbrowska, Maria (1889–1965) 506 Ðalski, Ksaver Šandor (1854–1935) 334, 335 Dan, Sergiu (1903–1976) 147, 164 Danchev, Pencho (1915–1989) 137, 139 Daneliuc, Mircea (b. 1943) 532 Daniel, Frank (1926–1996) 535 Darvas, József (1912–1973) 89 Darvasi, László (b. 1962) 81, 476 Davicˇo, Oskar (1909–1989) 166 David, Filip (b. 1940) 78 Daxner, Štefan Marko (1822–1892) 290 Deák, Ferenc (1803–1876) 246, 247, 268 Debelyanov, Dimcho (1887–1916) 134, 342, 346 De˛bicki, Zdzisław (1871–1931) 238 Dedijer, Vladimir (1914–1990) 131, 164, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 215 Delavrancea, Barbu [S¸tefa˘nescu] (1858–1918) 177 Dembin´sky, Henryk (1791–1864) 263 Demeter, Dimitrija (1811–1872) 279, 280 Depa˘ra˘¸teanu, Alexandru (1834–1865) 282 Deren, Maya (b. 1917) 534 Déry, Tibor (1894–1977) 86, 87, 88, 109 Des¸liu, Dan (1927–1992) 118, 122, 123 Dežman, Milivoj Ivanov- (1873–1940) 341 Dichev, Ivailo (b. 1955) 75, 76 Dichter, Wilhelm (b. 1935) 440 Ðilas, Milovan (1911–1995) 85, 130, 168, 206, 542, 546 Dilong, Rudolf (1905–1986) 162, 371 Dimitar, Hadji (1840–1868) 259 Dimitrov, Dimita˘r (1876–1902) 133 Dimov, Dimita˘r (1909–1966) 138, 460, 461, 462 Dinescu, Mircea (b. 1950) 39, 40, 42, 104

Index of East-Central-European Names Dobai, Péter (b. 1944) 552 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin (1855–1920) 114, 122, 446 Dobrovský, Josef (1753–1829) 9, 271 Dobrowolski, Stanisław Ryszard (b. 1907) 157 Dohnány, Mikuláš (1824–1852) 290 Doinas¸, S¸tefan Aug. [S¸tefan Popa] (1922–2002) 149 Doležal, Augustín (1737–1802) 313 Donchev, Anton (b. 1930) 457, 458 Dontsov, Dmytro (1883–1973) 159, 404 Dor, Milo [Milutin Doroslovac] (b. 1923) 216, 225, 226, 227 Doránsky, Ján (1911–1973) 162 Dovzhenko, Aleksander (1894–1956) 151 Drahomanov, Mykhailo Petrovych (1841–1895) 406, 407 Drda, Jan (1915–1970) 96, 164 Drinov, Marin (1838–1906) 250, 315 Drumev, Vasil (1840–1901) 260, 456 Drut¸a˘, Ion (b. 1928) 175 Dubcˇek, Alexander (1921–1992) 95, 96 Ducˇic´, Jovan (1871–1943) 143, 335, 342 Dudow, Slatan (1903–1963) 535 Dumitrescu, Geo [Gheorghe] (b. 1920) 118, 148 Dumitriu, Dana (1943–1987) 290, 502 Dumitriu, Petru (1924–2002) 117, 118, 122, 123, 447, 504 Dygasin´ski, Adolf (1839–1902) 377 Dygat, Stanisław (1914–1978) 147 Dykman, Salomon (1917–1965) 437 Dyulgerov, George (b. 1943) 539 E Ebert, Karl Egon (1801–1882) 272 Edelman, Marek (b. 1921) 153, 154, 381, 438, 440 Eftimiu, Victor (1889–1972) 121, 148 Eglı¯tis, Anšlavs (1906–1993) 159 Eglı¯tis, Viktors (1877–1942) 343, 345 Eker, Anda (1912–1936) 437 Elek, Judit (b. 1937) 539 Eliade, Mircea (1907–1986) 121, 143, 150, 183, 444, 450, 451, 455 Eminescu, Mihai (1850–1889) 10, 35, 123, 243, 289, 338, 443, 444, 446, 455 Englert, Jan (b. 1943) 536

627 Enno, Ernst (1875–1934) 337, 348 Eörsi, István (b. 1931) 88, 386, 390 Eötvös, József (1813–1871) 246, 247, 267, 268, 289, 470, 471, 473 Erben, Karel Jaromír (1811–1870) 423 Erdély, Miklós (1928–1986) 42 Erkel, Ferenc (1810–1893) 516, 517 Esenbergis, Janis (1862–1890) 334 Esterházy, Péter (b. 1950) 1, 5, 40, 42, 43, 50, 72, 73, 76, 79, 89, 90, 225, 386, 387, 388, 394, 396, 397, 398, 400, 477, 478, 479, 556 F Fándly, Juraj (1750–1811) 313, 314 Fabry, Rudolf (1915–1982) 109 Falk, Feliks (b. 1941) 540 Faludy, György (b. 1910) 108 Fehér, Ferenc (1933–1994) 104 Fekete, Ibolya (b. 1951) 527 Feldek, L’ubomír (b. 1936) 93 Feldman, Wilhelm (1868–1919) 436 Felin´ski, Alojzy (1771–1820) 328, 330 Felix, Jozef (1913–1977) 149 Fellner, Ferdinand (1847–1916) 517 Fenyo˝, Miksa (1877–1972) 185 Ferko, Milan (b. 1929) 109 Ficsku, Pál (b. 1967) 81 Figuli, Margita (1909–1995) 149 Figuš-Bystrý, Viliam (1875–1937) 516, 517 Fik, Ignacy (1904–1942) 156 Filimon, Nicolae (1819–1865) 289, 443, 444, 445, 447, 500 Fink, Ida (b. 1921) 439, 440 Finžgar, Fran Saleški (1871–1962) 496 Florin, Theo (1908–1973) 143 Ford, Aleksander (1908–1980) 537, 539 Forman, Miloš (b. 1932) 46, 532, 535, 542, 543, 548, 553 Frajlich-Zajøc, Anna (b. 1942) 440 Francisci, Ján (1822–1905) 290 Franicˇevic´ Plocˇar, Jure (1918–1994) 130 Franko, Ivan (1856–1916) 263, 334, 337, 339, 340, 345, 406, 407 Franyó, Zoltán (1887–1963) 446 Franzos, Karl Emil (1848–1904) 3 Fricˇ, Josef Václav (1829–1880) 266, 274

628 Fucˇík, Julius (1903–1943) 147, 376 Fuenn, Samuel (1818–1890) 244 Fuks, Ladislav (1923–1994) 354 Fulga, Laurent¸iu (1916–1984) 168 Funar Gheorghe (b. ?) 47 Fundoianu/Fondane [Wexler] Benjamin (1898–1944) 67, 143, 147 Füst, Milán (1888–1967) 108 G Gábor, Andor (1884–1953) 143 Gábor, Pál (1932–1987) 526, 542 Gabrea, Florin (b. 1943) 453 Gacínovic´, Vladimir (1890–1917) 215 Gailit, August (1891–1960) 159 Gaj, Ljudevit (1809–1872) 265, 279 Gajcy, Tadeusz (1922–1944) 146, 148, 157 Gałczyn´ski, Konstanty Ildefons (1905–1953) 145, 430 Galovic´, Fran (1887–1914) 346, 411 Garaczi, László (b. 1956) 79 Gavella, Branko (1885–1962) 188 Gárdonyi, Géza (1863–1922) 467, 474, 476 Gárdos, Péter (b. 1948) 542 Gašpar, Tido Jozef (1893–1972) 144, 162 Geisslová, Irma (1855–1914) 350 Gelléri, Andor Endre (1907–1945) 147, George, Al[exandru] (b. 1930) 453 Georgievski, Lubisa (b. 1937) 538 Geraldini, Koloman Kolomi (1908–1994) 162 Geremek, Bronisław (b. 1932) 104 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe (1901–1965) 90, 91, 118, 123 Ghica, Ion (1816–1897) 288, 290, 291 Giełz˙ yn´ski, Wojciech (b. 1930) 385 Gierek, Edward (1913–2001) 104 Ginchev, Tsani (1835–1894) 260 Gira, Liudas (1884–1946) 150 Glaser, Rudolf (1801–1868) 272 Glazarová, Jarmila (1901–1977) 96 Głowin´ski, Michał (b. 1934) 440 Godina, Ferdo (1912–1994) 131 Goga, Octavian (1891–1938) 177, 186 Gogol’, Nikolai Vasil’evich [Hohol’, Mykola] (1809–1852) 403, 405, 408, 463, 464, 516 Goldberg, Krystyna (b. 1930) 381

Index of East-Central-European Names Goldmann, Lucien (1913–1970) 416, 419 Goldstücker, Eduard (1913–2000) 94, 95, 109 Golescu, Dinicu (1777–1830) 284 Goma, Paul (b. 1935) 45, 104, 105, 108, 451, 452 Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–1969) 42, 50, 52, 53, 76, 92, 143, 384, 387, 388, 390, 391, 392, 398, 399, 400, 506 Gomułka, Władysław (1905–1982) 84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 96, 104, 109, 385 Göncz, Árpád (b. 1922) 34, 78 Görgei, Artúr (1818–1916) 269, 270 Górnicki, Wiesław (1931–1996) 385 Goszczyn´ski, Seweryn (1801–1876) 325, 331 Gothár, Péter (b. 1947) 527, 532 Govekar, Fran (1871–1949) 497 Gozsdu, Elek (1849–1919) 253 Grabovac, Filip (1697?–1749) 302, 303 Grabowski, Michał (1804–1863) 325, 331 Grade, Chaim (1910–1982) 151 Gráf, Stefan (1905–1989) 162 Green, Joseph (1900–1996) 525 Gregorová, Hana (1885–1958) 144 Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1917–1992) 44, 416, 419 Gren, Roman (b. ?) 441 Grendel, Lajos (b. 1948) 43, 76, 78, 342 Grlic´, Rajko (b. 1947) 101, 526, 535, 538, 541, 544 Grochowiak, Stanisław (1934–1976) 86, 431 Grünthal, Ivar (1924–1996) 162 Grynberg, Henryk (b. 1936) 153, 438, 439, 440 Gulácsy, Irén (1894–1945) 447 Gulácsy, Lajos (1882–1939) 341 Gusti, D[imitrie] (1818–1887) 443 Gyóni [Áchim], Géza (1884–1917) 178, 184, 185 Gyulai, Pál (1826–1909) 290 H Haitov, Nikolai (1919–2002) 93, 539 Hájek, Jirˇí (b. 1913) 96, 97, 104, 105 Hajnóczy, József (1750–1795) 312, 313 Hajnóczy, Péter (1942–1981) 72, 76, 342 Halas, František (1901–1949) 144, 159 Hamaliar, Martin (1750–1812) 314 Hammid, Alexander [Alexander Hackenschmied] (b. 1907) 534

629

Index of East-Central-European Names Hamvas, Béla (1897–1968) 108 Hanák, Dušan, (b. 1938) 247, 532 Hanka, Václav (1791–1861) 9, 272, 284, 337, 466, 467, 517 Harasymowicz, Jerzy (b. 1933) 86 Haraszti, Miklós (b. 1945) 104 Harrach, Jan Hrabe (1828–1899) 516, 518 Hartmann, Moritz (1821–1872) 272 Has, Wojciech, (1925–2000) 532, 537, 538 Hasdeu, Bogdan Petriceicu (1838–1907) 500, 503 Hašek, Jaroslav (1883–1923) 177, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235 Határ, Gyo˝zo˝ (b. 1914) 88, 108 Hattala, Martin (1821–1903) 277 Havel, Václav (b. 1936) 34, 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 95, 96, 97, 103, 104, 105, 129 Havlicˇek-Borovský, Karel (1821–1856) 13, 34, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 463, 466 Háy, Gyula (1900–1975) 86, 87, 88, 143 Háy, János (b. 1960) 476 Hazai, Attila (b. 1967) 79, 80, 81 Hebrang, Andrija (1899–1949) 129 Heckenast, Gustave (1816–1878) 471 Hecˇko, František (1905–1960) 109 Heliade Ra˘dulescu, Ion (1802–1872) 9, 281, 283, 285, 286, 287, 288, 443, 517 Heller, Ágnes (b. 1929) 104 Helmer, Hermann (1849–1919) 517 Hemar, Marian (1901–1972) 436 Hemon, Aleksandar (b. 1961) 202, 203, 205, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 387 Herbacˇiauskas, Juozapas (1876–1944) 334, 340 Herbert, Zbigniew (1924–1998) 86, 153, 4242, 431, 432, 433, 434 Herczeg, Ferenc (1863–1954) 477 Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw (1919–2000) 52, 92, 175 Hevesy, Iván (1893–1966) 533 Hillar, Małgorzata (b. 1930) 86 Hłasko, Marek (1934–1969) 86 Hlavácˇek, Karel (1874–1898) 337, 343, 346, 349, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 361, 363 Hlbina, Pavol Gašparovicˇ (1908–1977) 371 Hodža, Michal Miloslav (1785–1849) 23, 258, 273, 275, 276, 277 Hodjak, Franz (b. 1944) 46

Hoffman, Jerzy (b. 1932) 525, 537 Hofman, Branko (b. 1929) 131, 132 Holban, Anton (1902–1937) 449 Holka Jr., Matej (1757–1832) 314 Hollý, Ján (1785–1849) 275 Holland, Agnieszka (b. 1948) 535, 540 Holuby, Karol (1826–1848) 276 Horák, Jozef (1907–1974) 164 Horia, Vintila˘ [Vintila˘ Caftangioglu] (1915–1992) 159 Horov, Pavol (1914–1975) 109, 149 Horthy, Miklós (1868–1957) 417, 556 Horváth, Iván (1904–1960) 109 Horváth, Mihály (1809–1878) 471, 472 Horváth, Ödön von (1901–1938) 378 Hostovský, Egon (1908–1973) 354 Houdek, Vladimír (1869–1908) 357 358, 363 Hrabal, Bohumil (1914–1997) 40, 46, 72, 82, 91, 97, 170, 171, 174, 387, 388, 398 Hrebinka, Ievhen (1812–1848) 403, 406 Hristic´, Jovan (b. 1933) 415 Hristov, Kiril (1875–1945) 342 Hrobon, Samo Bohdan (1820–1894) 258 Hrtús, Jurina Pavol (1919–1994) 109 Hrúz, Pavel (b. 1941) 93 Hryniewiecki Ignacy (1855–1881) 257 Hulak-Artemovs’kyi, Semen Stepanovych (1813–1873) 403, 406, 517 Humnicki, Ignacy (1798–1864) 325 Hurban, Jozef Miloslav (1817–1888) 23, 246, 257, 258, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278, 290 Hurban-Vajanský, Svetozár (1847–1916) 258 Hus, Jan (c. 1370–1415) 463 Husák, Gustáv (1913–1991) 96 Hviezdoslav [Pál/Pavol Országh] (1849–1921) 149, 178, 258, 338 Hykisch, Anton (b. 1932) 93, 225 I I. A. L. Diamond [Itek Domnici] (1920–1988) 534 Ibra˘ileanu, Garabet (1871–1936) 446 Idziak, Slawomir (1945) 536 Iefremov, Serhii (1876–1939) 402, 403 Ierunca, Virgil (b. 1920) 159 Ignotus [Hugó Veigelsberg] (1869–1949) 185

630 Ignotus, Pál (1901–1978) 87, 339 Igov, Svetlozar (b. 1945) 460, 462 Ilic´, Vojislav (1860–1894) 334, 335, 337, 345 Illés, Béla (1895–1974) 143 Illyés, Gyula (1902–1983) 84, 87, 88, 90, 108, 370, 447 Ingarden, Roman (1893–1970) 416, 417, 419, 421, 533 Ioanid, Ion (b. 1926) 118 Ionescu, Eugen [Eugène Ionesco] (1909–1994) 66, 121, 143 Ionescu, Nae (1890–1940) 66, 282 Ionescu, Radu (1834–1872) 444, 445 Iorga, Nicolae (1871–1940) 13, 147, 446, 446 Iorgulescu, Mircea (b. 1943) 40 Iovkov, Iordan (1880–1937) 461 Irányi, Dániel (1822–1892) 268 Irínyi, József (1822–1859) 268, 270 Irzykowski, Karol (1873–1944) 42, 238, 239, 533 Isakovic´, Antonije (1923–2002) 127, 131, 132, 209 Istrati, Panait (1884–1935) 446, 448, 450, 451 Iva˘nescu, Mircea (b. 1931) 42 Ivanov, Jordan (1872–1947) 133 Iványi, Ödön (1854–1893) 253 Iványi-Grünwald, Béla (1867–1940) 342 Ivasiuc, Alexandru (1933–1977) 451, 452, 502 Ivšic´, Radovan (b. 1921) 131 Iwaniuk, Wacław (1912–2001) 160 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław (1894–1980) 86, 147, 172, 173, 428, 506, 537, 538 J Jakobson, Roman (1896–1982) 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423 Jakubisko, Juraj (b. 1938) 532 Jakubowska, Wanda (1907–1998) 539 Jalen, Janez (1891–1966) 496, 498 Jancˇar, Drago (b. 1948) 498, 499 Jancsó, Miklós (b. 1921) 538, 539 Janiczek, Jan Edward [S´wiadek] (1898–1944) 156 Jarník, Ioan Urban (1848–1923) 13 Jaroš, Peter (b. 1940) 93 Jaroszyn´ski, Tadeusz (1862–1917) 238 Jaruzelski, Wojciech (b. 1923) 104, 431 Jasien´ski, Bruno (1901–1939) 147, 436

Index of East-Central-European Names Jašík, Rudolf (1919–1960) 173 Jasin´ski, Zbigniew (1908–1984) 155, 156 Jasný, Vojtech (b. 1925) 536, 538 Jastrun, Mieczysław (1903–1983) 153, 436, 438 Jászi, Oszkár (1875–1957) 185 Jaunsudrabin¸š, Ja¯nis (1877–1962) 171 Jebeleanu, Eugen (1911–1991) 118, 122, 169 Jedlicˇková, Vladimíra [Eduard Klas, Helena Ropsová] (1878–1953) 361 Jelacˇic´, Josip (1801–1859) 265, 269, 276, 280, 281 Jellenta, Cezary (1861–1935) 238 Jeraj, Vida [Franziszka Vovk] (c. 1875–1932) 200, 201 Jesenská, Milena (1896–1944) 360, 362 Jesenská, Ru˚žena (1863–1940) 202, 233, 360 Jesenský, Janko (1874–1945) 144, 149, 178 Jilemnický, Peter (1901–1949) 144, 166 Jírásek, Alois (1851–1930) 291, 463, 466, 467 Jirecˇek, Hermengild (1827–1909) 272 Jirecˇek, Josef (1825–1888) 272 Jireš, Jaromil (1935–2001) 532 Johanides, Ján (b. 1934) 93 Jókai, Mór (1825–1904) 11, 268, 289, 345, 442, 463, 474, 476 Josic´-Višnjic´, Miroslav (b. 1946) 100 Jósika, Miklós (1794–1865) 463, 466, 467, 470, 471, 472, 478, 479 Jovanovic´, Biljana (1953–1996) 102 Jovanovic´, Dušan (b. 1939) 131 Jovanovic´, Vojislav (1884–1968) 207 József, Attila (1905–1937) 476 Juhász, Ferenc (b. 1928) 89 Juhász, Gyula (1883–1937) 345, 346 Jungmann, Josef (1773–1847) 271 Juodelis, Petras (1909–1975) 110 Jurcˇicˇ, Josip (1844–1881) 495, 497, 499 Jurcˇinová, Eva (1886–1969) 360, 361 K Kadár, Ján (1918–1979) 535, 539 Kádár, János (1912–1989) 83, 84, 88, 89, 96, 104, 109 Kadare, Ismail (b. 1936) 40, 73, 77, 146, 174, 443 Kaden-Bandrowski, Juliusz (1885–1944) 238, 239

Index of East-Central-European Names Kaffka, Margit (1880–1918) 180, 185, 187, 192, 198, 199, 200, 202 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924) 3, 83, 94, 95, 109, 143, 172, 233, 234, 235, 236, 354, 360, 362, 394, 449, 453 Kahuda, Václav [Petr Kratochvíl] (b. 1965) 363 Køkolewski, Krzysztof (b. 1930) 378, 382, 383, 384 Kaliský, Roman (b. 1922) 9, 34 Kamien´ski, Maciej (1734–1821) 517 Kamínek, Karel (1868–1915) 361 Kaminski, Janusz (b. 1959) 536 Kandiba, Oleh [Ol’zhych, Oleh] (1908–1944) 147, 161 Kangro, Bernard (1910–1994) 159 Kantor, Tadeusz (b. 1915) 43 Kapusćin´ski, Ryszard (b. 1932) 44, 377, 378, 382, 383, 384, 385 Karadja, Stefan (1840–1868) 259 Karadžic´, Vuk Stefanovic´ (1787–1864) 9, 309 Karanovic´, Srdjan (b. 1945) 535, 538, 539 Karásek ze Lvovic, Jirˇí (1871–1951) 337, 342, 343, 346, 350, 351, 353, 354, 356, 358, 359, 361, 363 Karavelov, Lyuben (1834–1879) 249, 317, 456, 457, 458 Karinthy, Ferenc (1921–1992) 165 Karinthy, Frigyes (1887–1938) 293, 313 Kármán, József (1769–1795) 267 Karolev, Stoyan (b. 1921) 137 Karpenko-Karii, Ivan [Ivan Tobilevych] (1845–1907) 405 Karvaš, Peter (b. 1920) 109, 166 Kasprowicz, Jan (1860–1926) 337, 427 Kassák, Lajos (1887–1967) 87, 89, 108, 178, 190, 372 Katilius, Viktoras (1910–1989) 110 Katona, József (1791–1830) 314 Kawalerowicz, Jerzy (b. 1922) 537 Kawecki, Zygmunt (1876–1955) 238 Kazinczy, Ferenc (1759–1831) 9, 267, 312, 521 Ke˙kštas, Juozas (1915–1981) 151 Kemény, Zsigmond (1814–1875) 253, 289, 463, 465, 470, 471, 474, 475 Kertész, Imre (b. 1929) 78, 82, 147, 170, 556 Kette, Dragotin (1876–1899) 337, 345

631 Kharms, Daniil [Daniel Ivanovich Iuvachev] (1905–1942) 103, 538 Khuen-Héderváry, Károly (1849–1918) 249 Khvyl’ovyi, Mykola [Mykola Fitilev] (1893–1933) 161, 404 Kies´lowski, Krzysztof (1941–1996) 532, 535, 536, 440 Kikic´, Hasan (1905–1942) 147 Kinsky, Nora (1888–1923) 195, 197 Kiorchev, Dimov (1884–1928) 341 Kirkor, Adam (1819–1886) 244 Kirkov, Georgi (1867–1919) 133 Kirkov, Lyudmil (1933–1995) 532 Kiš, Danilo (1935–1989) 5, 40, 43, 44, 46, 73, 76, 131, 173, 174, 203, 211, 213, 386, 387, 388, 390, 388, 392, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 400, 443, 453, 477, 538 Kis, János (b. 1943) 104 Kisch, Egon Erwin (1885–1948) 178, 179, 375, 376, 378, 379, 381, 382, 383, 551 Kisfaludy, Károly (1788–1830) 520 Kisfaludy, Sándor (1772–1844) 519 Kisielewski, Stefan (1911–1991) 145 Kiss, József (1843–1921) 336, 337, 339, 342 Klaczko, Julian (1825–1906) 436 Kleiner, Juliusz (1886–1957) 238 Klen, Iurii [Oswald Burghardt] (1891–1947) 159 Kles, Petr (1869–1916) 363 Klíma, Ivan (b. 1931) 96, 451 Klíma, Ladislav (1878–1928) 97, 341, 342, 3487 Kliment, Alexandr (b. 1929) 97, 105, 161 Klos, Elmar (1910–1993) 539 Kocbek, Edvard (1904–1981) 146, 168 Kochanowski, Jan (1530–1584) 428, 437, 441 Kocˇic´, Petar (1877–1916) 411 Koestler, Arthur (1905–1983) 376 Kofta, Krystyna (b. 1945) 44 Koga˘lniceanu, Mihail (1817–1891) 283, 284, 286, 499, 500 Kohout, Pavel (b. 1928) 91, 95, 96, 97 Koidula, Lydia (1843–1886) 64, 65 Kołakowski, Leszek (b. 1927) 91, 96, 104 Kolárˇ, Jirˇí (1914–2002) 43 Kolár, Josef Jirˇí (1812–1896) 42, 516 Kölcsey, Ferenc (1790–1838) 267, 468, 521 Kollár, Jan (1793–1852) 25, 257, 271, 275, 277

632 Kołłøtaj, Hugo (1750–1812) 305 Komjáthy, Jeno˝ (1858–1895) 336, 340 Kondrotas, Saulius Tomas (b. 1953) 73, 76 Konopnicka, Maria (1842–1910) 377, 436 Konrád, György (b. 1933) 1, 5, 40, 46, 104, 173, 386, 387, 388, 395, 396, 397, 398, 400 Konstantinov, Aleko (1863–1897) 462 Konstantinov, Georgi (1902–1970) 133, Konstantinov, Konstantin (1890–1970) 458 Konwicki, Tadeusz (b. 1926) 86, 172, 173, 5375 Kopitar, Jernej (1780–1844) 25 Kopta, Josef (1894–1963) 235 Korczak, Janusz (1878–1942) 147, 154 Korda, Alexander [Sándor László Kellner] (1893–1956) 534, 553 Korynec’kyi, Porfiryi (1815–1845) 402 Kós, Károly (1883–1977) 447 Kosćiuszko, Tadeusz (1746–1817) 295 Kosiakiewicz, Wincenty (1863–1918) 238 Kosík, Karel (1926–2003) 95, 231, 235, 236 Kosinski, Jerzy (1933–1991) 171 Kossuth, Lajos (1802–1894) 34, 89, 242, 245, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 313 Kostomarov, Mykola (1817–1885) 406 Kostov, Ilyia (b. 1954) 529 Kostra, Ján (1910–1975) 109, 149 Kosztolányi, Dezso˝ (1885–1936) 187, 343, 348, 387, 396, 477 Kot, Jozef (b. 1936) 93, 98 Kotliarevs’kyi, Ivan Petrovych (1769–1838) 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 408 Kótsi Patkó, János (1763–1842) 517 Kott, Jan (1914–2001) 86, 93, 98, 153, 160 Koubek, Jan Pravoslav (1805–1854) 272 Kovacˇevic´, Dušan (b. 1939) 541, 546 Kovacˇic´, Ivan Goran (1913–1943) 146, 147, 148 Koval, Vasyl [Vasyl Kuk] (1913–?) 161 Kozarac, Ivan (1885–1910) 411 Kozioł, Urszula (b. 1931) 86, 434 Kozlev, Nikola (1824–1902) 260 Koz´mian, Kajetan (1771–1856) 325, 326, 328, 331 Kraft, Péter (1780–1856) 518 Kragen, Wanda (1893–1982) 436 Král, Janko (1822–1876) 149, 275 Králik, Štefan (b. 1909) 109

Index of East-Central-European Names Krall, Hanna (b. 1937) 153, 154, 378, 383, 438, 439, 440 Kranjcˇevic´, Silvije Strahimir (1865–1908) 335, 337 Kranjec, Miško (1908–1983) 44, 498 Krasicki, Ignacy (1735–1801) 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306 Krasko, Ivan (1876–1958) 334, 337, 338, 340, 346, 348 Krásnohorská, Eliška (1847–1926) 516 Kra˘stev, Kra˘styu (1866–1919) 133, 134, 334 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy (1812–1887) 377, 440, 463 Kraushar, Aleksander (1843–1931) 436 Krauze Antoni (b. 1940) 532 Krchovský, J. H. [Jirˇí Hašek] (b. 1960) 363 Krcˇméry, Štefan (1892–1955) 190 Krejcar, Jaromír (1898–1949) 362 Krejcarová, Jana [Honza] (1928–1981) 362, 363 Krejcˇí, František Václav (1867–1941) 177, 354 Kresoja, Dragan (1946–1997) 545 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold (1803–1882) 64 Kre˙ve˙-Mickevicˇius, Vincas (1882–1954) 150, 159 Kristeva, Julia (b. 1941) 45, 191, 419, 557 Krleža, Miroslav (1893–1981) 130, 168, 178, 179, 187, 188, 189, 190, 293, 368, 482 Krno, Miloš (b. 1922) 164 Króner, Jozef (1924–1998) 536 Kropin´ski, Ludwik (1767–1844) 329 Kross, Jaan (b. 1920) 61, 62 Kruczkowski, Leon (1900–1962) 172 Kryms’kyi, Agafangel Efimovich (1871–1942) 337, 340 Krynicki, Ryszard (b. 1943) 435 Krzystek, Waldemar (b. 1953) 543 Krzyz˙agórski, Klemens (1930–1999) 376 Kubáni, Ludovít (1830–1869) 257, 258, 290 Kubikowski, Zbigniew (1929–1984) 438 Kukorelly, Endre (b. 1951) 42, 50 Kukuljevic´, Ivan (1816–1889) 273, 279, 280 Kulenovic´, Skender (1910–1978) 148 Kulish, Panteleimon (1819–1897) 402, 403, 404, 408, 463 Kún, Béla (1886–1938) 190 Kuncewiczowa, Maria (1897–1989) 506

Index of East-Central-European Names Kundera, Milan (b. 1929) 5, 40, 42, 43, 46, 73, 76, 91, 96, 97, 103, 108, 132, 228, 229, 230, 234, 235, 395, 396, 398, 507 Kurcijs, Andreijs (1884–1959) 369 Kuron´, Jacek (b. 1934) 104 Kusiba, Marek (b. 1951) 384 Kusńiewicz, Andrzej (1904–1993) 175, 453, 506 Kusturica, Emir (b. 1954) 526, 532, 535, 536, 539, 543, 545 Kutnik, Jerzy (b. 1953) 53 Kutz, Kazimierz (b. 1929) 538 Kuzmány, Karol (1806–1866) 275, 277 Kvapil, Jaroslav (1868–1950) 350 Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, Hryhorii (1778–1843) 403, 404, 405, 406 ˇ iurlioniene˙, Sofija (1885–1958) 339 Kymantaite˙-C L Laaban, Ilmaar (1921–2000) 161 Labis¸, Nicolae (1935–1956) 92, 123 Laczkovics, János (1750–1795) 312 Lada, Josef (1887–1957) 235 Lahola, Leopold [Leopold Arje Friedmann] (1918–1968) 109 Lainšcˇek, Feri (b. 1959) 74 Lajcˇiak, Milan (1926–1987) 109 Lalic´, Mihailo (1914–1992) 130, 172 Lamberg, Ferenc/Franz (1791–1848) 269 Lampe Evgen (1874–1918) 336 La˘ncra˘jan, Ion (b. 1928) 504 Láng, Zsolt (b. 1958) 476 Lange, Antoni (1861–1929) 343, 436 Langer, František (1888–1965) 143, 177, 235 Lányi, Sarolta (1891–1975) 198 Laucˇík, Ivan (b. 1944) 93 Laurian, August Treboniu (1810–1881) 284 Lazarová, Katarína (b. 1914) 166 Lechon´, Jan (1899–1956) 143, 428, 429 Lekic´, Miroslav (b. 1954) 543 Lepik, Kalyu (1920–1999) 159, 162 Leskovar, Janko (1861–1949) 335 Les´mian, Bolesław (1877–1937) 348, 368, 427, 430, 436 Lesznai, Anna (1885–1966) 198 Letz, Štefan (1900–1960) 109 Levchev, Lubomir (b. 1935) 93,

633 Levski, Vassil (1837–1873) 250, 259, 317 Lewin, Leopold (1910–1995) 156 Libelt, Karol (1808–1875) 264 Liehm, Antonín (b. 1924) 96, 533 Liiv, Juhan (1846–1913) 334, 337, 340 Liliev, Nikolai (1885–1960) 134, 346, 348 Limonov, Eduard (b. 1947) 77 Lipin´ski, Józef (1764–1828) 329 Lipska, Ewa (b. 1945) 434 Loew, Ryszard (b. 1931) 440 Lorentowicz, Jan (1868–1940) 238, 239 Lotman, Yuri M. (1922–1993) 45 Lovinescu, Eugen (1881–1943) 66, 114, 150, 165, 177, 187, 196, 448, 449 Lovinescu, Horia (1917–1983) 165 Lovinescu, Monica (b. 1923) 159 Lovrich, Giovanni [Ivan Lovric´] (c. 1754–1777) 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306 Luca, Gherasim [Salman Locker] (1913–1993) 159 Luckyj, George (1919–2001) 404, 408 Lugosi, Béla [Béla Ferenc Dezso˝ Blaskó] (1882–1956) 534 Lugossy, László (b. 1939) 540 Lukácˇ, Emil Boleslav (1900–1979) 109, 144, 149, 190, 516 Lukács, György (1885–1971) 83, 86, 94, 95, 104, 108, 109, 110, 135, 143, 374, 416, 417, 419, 421, 422, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 474, 480, 481, 484 Lukovic´, Stevan (1877–1902) 340 Łuskina, Stefan (1724–1793) 295 Lustig, Arnošt (b. 1926) 539 Lysenko, Mikola (1842–1912) 515, 516 M Macedonski, Alexandru (1854–1920) 334, 337, 338, 345 348 Maceina, Antanas (1908–1987) 150 Macˇernis, Vytautas (1921–1944) 151 Mácha, Karel Hynek (1810–1836) 10, 349, 356, 423 Machar, Josef Svatopluk (1864–1942) 338, 339, 358 Machatý, Gustav (1898–1963) 534 Maciejewska, Irena (1930–1994) 153, 175

634 Madách, Imre (1823–1864) 253, 289 Magheru, Gheorghe (1804–1880) 288 Maiorescu, Titu (1840–1917) 114, 122, 338, 345, 445, 446 Makavejev, Dušan (b. 1939) 102, 532, 535, 546 Makk, Károly (b. 1925) 526, 532, 542 Makkai, Sándor (1890–1952) 447 Malaniuk, Ievhen (1887–1968) 404 Mallý-Dusarov, Ján (1829–1902) 257 Malovrh, Miroslav (1861–1922) 494, 497 Malý, Jakub (1811–1885) 272 Manchevski, Milcho (b. 959) 536 Manea, Norman (b. 1936) 451, 452, 455 Manolescu, Nicolae (b. 1939) 453 Márai, Sándor (1900–1989) 88, 108, 159, 163, 171 Marcovici, Simeon (?–?) 284 Marek, Antonín (1785–1877) 272 Maretic´, Tomo (1854–1938) 335 Maria, Jaroslav [Jaroslav Mayer] (1870–1942) 359, 360 Máriássy, Félix (1919–1975) 166 Marinat, Alexei (b. 1924) 108, 175 Marjanovic´, Branko (b. 1923) 538 Markov, Georgi (1929–1978) 46 Markovic´, Danica (1879–1932) 200 Markovic´, Dragan (b. 1957) 125, 127, 130 Markovic´, Dušan (1879–1932) 345 Markovic´, Goran (b. 1946) 101, 544 Markovski, Venko (1915–1988) 135 Márkus, György (b. 1934) 104 Márkus, Mária (?–?) 104 Maróthy, Daniel (1825–1878) 290 Marten, Miloš (1883–1917) 349, 350, 357, 358, 359, 360 Martinovics, Ignác (1755–1795) 311, 312, 313 Martinuzzi, György [Utyeszenics] (1482–1551) 471 Márton, László (b. 1959) 476, 477 Martynets’, Volodymyr (1899–1960) 161 Masaryk, Jan (1886–1948) 95, 235 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue (1850–1937) 4, 9, 232, 337, 338, 354, 362, 418, 463, 467 Masleša, Veselin (1906–1943) 202, 203 Matoš, Antun Gustav (1873–1914) 337, 344, 411 Matthias [Mátyás] Corvinus, King (1443–1490) 519

Index of East-Central-European Names Matuška, Alexander (1910–1975) 149 Matuška, Janko (1821–1877) 274, 275 Matvejevic´, Predrag (b. 1932) 130, 131 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz (b. 1927) 104 Mažuranic´, Fran (1859–1928) 411 Mažuranic´, Ivan (1814–1890) 248, 249, 280 Mecˇiar, Stanislav (1910–1971) 144, 149, 158, 162 Medek, Rudolf (1890–1940) 177, 235 Mehmedinovic´, Semezdin (b. 1960) 214 Meißner, Alfred (1822–1885) 272 Meissner, Janusz (1901–1978) 160 Meschendörfer, Adolf (1877–1963) 447 Menzel, Jirˇí (b. 1938) 95, 172, 532, 538 Méray, Tibor (b. 1924) 84, 86 Meshekov, Ivan (1891–1970) 133, 134, 136 Mészáros, Ignácz (1729?–1800) 477 Mészáros, Márta (b. 1931) 526, 532, 535, 542 Mészöly, Miklós (1921–2001) 40, 476 Michael, King of Romania (b. 1921) 112, 117 Michieli-Vitturi, Rados (1752–1822) 306 Michnik, Adam (b. 1946) 1, 45, 103, 104, 377 Micíc´-Dimovska, Milica (b. 1947) 492 Micin´ski, Tadeusz (1873–1918) 238, 337, 346, 426 Mickiewicz, Adam (1798–1855) 10, 35, 263, 304, 322, 326, 328, 331, 332, 425, 428, 435, 437, 441, 537 Mickovik, Slobodan (1935–2002) 492 Micu, Dumitru (b. 1928) 117, 148 Mierosławski, Ludwik (1814–1878) 264, 274 Mieželaitis, Eduardas (1919–1997) 143 Migjeni, Nikolla [Millosh Gjergj Nikolla] (1911–1938) 334 Mihálik, Vojtech (b. 1926) 109 Miha˘escu, Gib [Gheorghe] I. (1894–1935) 446, 449 Mihailovic´, Dragoslav (b. 1930) 100, 101, 538 Mihailovski, Stojan (1856–1927) 133 Mihałek, Bołeslaw (1925–1977) 533 Mihalkovicˇ, Jozef (b. 1935) 93 Mikó, Imre (1805–1876) 472 Mikszáth, Kálmán (1847–1910) 35, 253 Milarov, Ilia (1859–1948) 459, 465 Milarov, Svetozlav (1850–1892) 317 Milev, Geo (1895–1925) 134 Milicévic´, Veljko (1886–1929) 300, 410

Index of East-Central-European Names Mille, Constantin (1861–1927) 445 Milosevic´, Slobodan (b. 1941) 39, 47, 548 Miłosz, Czesław (b. 1911) 1, 5, 6, 52, 92, 115, 118, 148, 151, 152, 153, 158, 160, 263, 333, 334, 345, 346, 388, 389, 398, 399, 400, 424, 425, 424, 426, 427, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435 Minácˇ, Vladimir (1922–1996) 166 Mindszenty, Cardinal József (1892–1975) 109 Minkov, Svetoslav (1902–1966) 458 Miriam [Zenon Przesmycki] (1868–1927) 339 Miškinis, Antanas (1905–1983) 110 Mitic´, Gojko (b. 1940) 530 Mitana, Dušan (b.1946) 93 Mnˇacˇko, Ladislav (1919–1994) 94, 173 Moczarski, Kazimierz (1907–1975) 153, 159, 166, 175 Modzelewski, Karol (b. 1937) 104 Molnár, Ferenc (1878–1952) 179 Moniuszko, Stanisław (1819–1872) 515, 517 Moraru, Nicolae (b. 1912) 113 Moravcˇík, Štefan (b. 1943) 93 Morawski, Franciszek (1783–1861) 328 Móricz, Zsigmond (1879–1942) 35, 151, 179, 185, 447, 477 Mošovský, Michal Institoris (1733–1803) 180, 313, 314 Mroz˙ek, Sławomir (b. 1930) 40, 43, 93 Mucha, Jirˇí (1915–1991) 95 Muhík, Ferid (b. 1943) 75 Mukarˇovský, Jan (1891–1975) 418, 419, 421, 423 Müller, Herta (b. 1953) 46, 51, 454, 455 Murn, Josip (1879–1901) 34 Mutafchieva, Vera (b. 1929) 315, 316, 457 Mutafov, Chavdar (1889–1954) 458 Mutafov, Encho (b. 1943) 462 Mykolaitis-Putı¯nas, Vincas (1893–1967) 151, 341 Myrnyi, Panas [Rudchenko, Panas] (1849–1920) 405 N Nádas, Péter (b. 1942) 40, 73, 81, 90, 387 Nagy, Imre (1896–1958) 83, 84, 86, 87, 105 Nagy, László (1925–1978) 89

635 Nałkowska, Zofia (1884–1954) 163, 197, 200, 236, 237, 239, 379, 380, 383, 388, 389 Nasta, Mihail (b. 1933) 122 Nastasijevic´, Momcˇilo (1894–1938) 348 Naum, Gellu (1915–2001) 121 Nazor, Vladimir (1876–1949) 146, 148, 164, 343 Neagu, Fa˘nus¸ (b. 1932) 172, 451 Nechui-Levyts’kyi, Ivan (1838–1918) 405 Nedelciu, Mircea (1950–1999) 40, 44, 76, 454 Nedelcovici, Bujor (b. 1936) 451 Nedic´, Ljubomir (1858–1902) 335 Negoit¸escu, Ion (1921–1993) 41, 149 Negri, Pola [Barbara Apollonia Chałupiec] (1884–1987) 534 Negruzzi, Costache (1808–1868) 499 Negulesco, Jean (1903–1993) 534 Neˇmec, Jan (b. 1936) 531, 532, 539 Németh, Gábor (b. 1956) 79 Németh, László (1901–1975) 87, 89, 90, 108 Nenadovic´, Matija (1777–1854) 309 Ne˙ris, Salome˙ja (1904–1945) 110, 143, 151 Neruda, Jan (1834–1891) 291, 516 Neumann, Stanislav Kostka (1875–1947) 343 Nezval, Víteˇzslav (1900–1958) 149, 349, 355, 359, 363 Nichev, Boian (1930–1997) 462 Nicolaescu, Sergiu (b. 1930) 538 Niedra, Aı¯da (1899–1972) 340 Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn (1758–1841) 297, 322, 329, 330, 331, 440, 463 Nikolic´, Bozidar (b. 1942) 545, 546 Nikolic´, Mihovil (1878–1951) 340 Nikolic´, Živko (1941–2001) 539 Nikoliš, Gojko (1911–1995) 126 Nit¸escu, Marin (1927–1989) 115 Njegoš, Petar Petrovic´ (1813–1851) 10, 309 Noica, Constantin (1909–1987) 45, 47, 122, 442 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil (1821–1883) 263, 264, 334, 340, 425, 428, 430, 441 Novak, Victor (1889–?) 164 Novomeský, Ladislav (1904–1976) 109, 144, 149 Novotný, Antonín (1904–1975) 95 Novy, Lily (1885–1958) 200 Nowak, Tadeusz (1930–1991) 86, 172 Nowczyn´ski, Adolf (?–?) 197 Nowicki, Jan (b. 1939) 535

636 Nowosiełska, Zofia (c. 1900–?) 193, 194, 201 Nyíro˝, József (1889–1953) 159 Nyka-Niliu¯nas, Alfonsas (b. 1919) 110, 159 O Obertyn´ska, Beata [Maria Rudzka] (1898–1980) 175 Obradovic´, Dositej (1740–1811) 309, 316, 446 Obrenovic´, King Aleksandar (1876–1903) 486 Obrenovic´, Miloš (1761–1860) 333 Odeanu, Anis¸oara [Doina Peteanu] (1912–1972) 446 Odojewski, Włodzimierz (b. 1930) 174, 175, 505, 507, 508, 509, 510 Ognyanovich, Konstantin (1798–1858) 316 Okáli, Daniel (b. 1903) 109 Okál’, Ján (1915–1990) 162 Ola˘reanu, Costache (1929–2000) 42, 450, 453 Oleksandriv, Stepan (1790–1850) 402 Olszewski, Krystyn (?–?) 60 Ondra, Anny [Anna Sophia Ondráková] (1902–1987) 534 Ondrˇícek Miroslav (b. 1934) 536 Ondruš, Ján (1932–2000) 93 Opolský, Jan (1875–1942) 350 Örkény, István (1912–1979) 147, 163, 168, 556 Orest, Mykhailo (1901–1963) 161 Orzeszkowa, Eliza (1841–1910) 255, 256, 257, 436, 440, 463, 506 Osherowitch, Hirsch (1908–1994) 110, 151 Os’machka, Teodosii (1895–1962) 161 Otcˇenášek, Jan (b. 1924) 91, 173 Ottlik, Géza (1912–1990) 40, 89 ˝ z, Pál (c. 1766–1795) 312 O P Pachovs’kyi, Vasily (1876–1942) 343 Pa˘curariu, Fracisc (1920–1998) 174 Pahor, Jože (1888–1964) 497 Paisii of Hilendar (c.1722–c.1773) 314, 316 Pajzderska, Helena (1862–1927) 238 Palach, Jan (1948–1969) 39 Palacký, František (1798–1876) 4, 33, 245, 247, 248, 265, 266, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 463, 466, 467, 516 Palárik, Ján (1822–1870) 257, 258 Paler, Octavian (b. 1926) 119

Index of East-Central-European Names Palkovic, Juraj (1769–1850) 314 Pammrová, Anna (1860–1975) 361 Pana˘, Sas¸a (1902–1981) 114 Pandurovic´, Sima (1883–1960) 337 Papánek, Juraj (1738–1802) 314 Papadat-Bengescu, Hortensia (1876–1955) 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 446, 449, 503 Papahagi, Marian (1948–1999) 453 Papic´, Krsto (b. 1933) 545 Páral, Vladimír (b. 1932) 91 Paraschivescu, Miron Radu (1911–1971) 123 Pasek, Jan Chryzostom (1636–1701) 382, 384 Pašic´, Nikola (1845?–1926) 204 Paskaljevic´, Goran (b. 1947) 101, 535, 536 Paskov, Victor (b. 1945) 74, 76, 81 Passer, Ivan (b. 1933) 535 Patocˇka, Jan (1907–1977) 104, 105 Paulíny-Tóth, Viliam (1826–1877) 290 Pavic´, Milorad (b. 1929) 43, 73, 77, 476, 538 Pavlicˇic´, Pavao (b. 1946) 102 Pavlov, Konstantin (b. 1933) 93 Pavlov, Todor (1890–1977) 111, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 143 Pavlovic´, Živojin (1933–1998) 101, 532, 543 Pavlovich, Hristaki (c.1804–1848) 316 Peev, Todor (1842–1904) 260 Peiper, Tadeusz (1891–1969) 429, 436 Pekic´, Borislav (1930–1992) 101, 480, 482, 484, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491 Peltyn, Samuel Tzvi (1831–1896) 436 Penev, Boyan (1882–1927) 133, 334 Perovic´, Slobodan (1926–1978) 543 Pešic´, Slobodan (b. 1956) 538 Petelei, István (1852–1910) 253 Péterfy, Jeno˝ (1850–1899) 252, 336 Petkanov, Konstantin (1891–1952) 458, 459, 462 Petkevicˇaite˙-Bite˙, Gabriele˙ (1861–1943) 340 Petkovic´, Radoslav (b. 1953) 491, 492 Petkovic´-Dis, Vladislav (1880–1917) 342, 346 Peto˝fi, Sándor (1823–1849) 10, 34, 86, 87, 88, 105, 190, 268, 270, 277 Petrescu, Camil (1894–1957) 121, 178, 182, 187, 290, 444, 447, 450, 499 Petrescu, Cezar (1892–1961) 182, 446, 448, 451 Petrescu, Radu (1927–1982) 42, 450, 453 Petreu, Marta (b. 1955) 42 Petric´, Vlada (b. 1928) 533

637

Index of East-Central-European Names Petrichevich-Horváth, Dániel (1760?–1842) 521 Petrichevich-Horváth, Lázár (1807–1851) 470, 473 Petrovic´ Aleksandar (1929–1994) 537, 539, 546 Petrovic´, Rastko (1898–1949) 143, 175, 411 Philippide, Al[exandru] (1900–1979) 121 Pidhainyi, Semen (b. 1907) 161 Pietaris, Vincas (1850–1902) 463 Pilinszky, János (1921–1981) 89, 169 Pillat, Dinu (1921–1975) 122 Pillat, Ion (1891–1945) 122, 348 Piłsudska, Alexandra Szczerbin´ska (1885–1963) 194 195, 197 Piłsudski, Józef (1867–1935) 193, 236, 239, 420 Pini, Tadeusz (1872–1937) 238 Pintilie, Lucian (b. 1933) 535, 536 Pížl, Jaroslav (b. 1961) 363 Plachynda, Serhii (b. 1928) 378 Plater, Emily (1806–1831) 193 Pohoska, Ewa [Halina Sosnowska] (1918–1944) 146 Polácˇek, Karel (1892–1945) 147 Polák, Milota Zdirad (1788–1856) 423 Polanski, Roman (b. 1933) 384, 535 Pollak, Seweryn (1907–1987) 157 Polyanov, Dimitar (1876–1953) 139, 140 Pomer, Stefan (?–1941) 437 Ponicˇan, Ján (1902–1978) 149 Popelová, Jirˇina (1904–1985) 359 Popescu, D[umitru] R[adu] (b. 1935) 92, 119, 174, 451 Popescu, N. D. (1843–1921) 500 Popescu, Petru (b. 1944) 452 Popov, Alek Vassilev (b. 1966) 81 Popov, Evgenii (b. 1946) 46, 74 Popov, Stole (b. 1950) 545 Popov, Vassil (1930–1980) 79, 93 Popovic´, Aleksandar (1929–1996) 131 Popovic´, Bogdan (1863–1945) 415 Popovich, Raino (c.1773–1885) 316 Popovici, Titus (1930–1994) 168 Poradeci, Lasgush (1899–1987) 348 Pos´wiatowska, Halina (1935–1967) 434 Potocki, Jan (1761–1815) 537 Potocki, Stanisław Kostka (1755–1821) 325 Preda, Marin (1922–1980) 40, 117, 118, 122, 174, 443, 451, 501, 502, 504

Pregelj, Ivan (1883–1960) 496 Preisner, Zbigniew (b. 1955) 536 Prešeren, France (1800–1849) 10, 494, 495 Princip, Gavrilo (1894–1918) 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 212, 213, 215, 225, 226, 227 Procházka, Arnošt (1869–1925) 343, 350, 358 Procházka, Jan (1929–1971) 95, 96 Prokopiev, Aleksandar (b. 1953) 75, 76 Prus, Bolesław [Aleksander Głowacki] (1847–1912) 241, 254, 256, 257, 263, 289, 377, 537 Pruszyn´ski, Ksawery (1907–1950) 160, 382, 383 Przybos´, Julian (1901–1970) 4297 Przybyszewski, Stanisław (1868–1927) 236, 237, 339, 341, 343, 346, 358 Pułaski, Kazimierz (1748?–1779) 295 Pulszky, Ferenc (1814–1897) 313 Pustowojt, Henryka (?–?) 193 Putrament, Jerzy (1910–1986) 143, 145 Puzyna, Kostjantyn (1790–1850) 402, 403 Q Qosja, Rexhep (b. 1936) 40, 73 R Racin, Kocˇo [Kocˇo Solev] (1908–1943) 147 Racovit¸a˘, Mihail (c.1715–c.1744) 499 Radauskas, Henrikas (1910–1970) 110, 159 Radichkov, Yordan (b. 1929) 93 Radnóti, Miklós (1909–1944) 147 Radoslavov, Ivan (1880–1969) 133, 134 Radu Negru, Prince [Basarab the First] (late 13th–early 14th century) 283, 284, 287 Raicu, Lucian [Lucian Leibovici] (b. 1934) 453 Raila, Bronys (1909–1997) 150 Rainis, Ja¯nis [Ja¯nis Pliekša¯ns] (1865–1929) 337, 340, 343, 368 Rainov, Nikolai (1889–1954) 342 Rajk, László (1909–1949) 85, 109 Rakic´, Milan (1876–1938) 342, 346 Rákosi, Jeno˝ (1842–1929) 184, 185, 252 Rákosi, Mátyás (1892–1972) 84, 85, 86, 87, 169 Rankovic´, Aleksandar (1909–1983) 542, 544 Rankovic´, Svetolik (1863–1899) 410 Raudam, Toomas (b. 1947) 40, 64

638 Rázus, Martin (1888–1937) 187, 190 Rázusová-Martáková, Mária (1905–1964) 148, 149 Rebreanu, Liviu (1885–1944) 168, 177, 178, 181, 182, 189, 446, 447, 448, 449, 535 Rebula, Alojz (b. 1924) 498 Redl, Alfred (1864–1913) 528, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 558 Regman, Cornel (1919–1999) 149 Reisel Vladimír (b. 1919) 149 Repka, Peter (b. 1944) 93 Révai, József (1898–1959) 88, 108, 109, 143 Reviczky, Gyula (1855–1889) 253, 336, 340 Reymont, Władysław Stanisław (1867–1925) 239, 378, 447, 506, 537, 538 ˇ ezácˇ, Václav (1901–1956) 354 R Richtman, Zvonimir (1901–1941) 135 Riedl, Frigyes (1856–1921) 252, 336 Rieger, František Ladislav (1818–1903) 265, 273, 274, 518 Ristic´, Marko (1902–1984) 130 Ristikivi, Karl (1912–1977) 159, 161, 162 Rodakowski, Henryk (1823–1894) 263 Rolicz-Lieder, Wacław (1866–1912) 343 Rosetti, C. A. (1816–1885) 282 Ros¸u, Nicolae (1907–1938) 282 Roth, Joseph (1894–1939) 3, 177, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 378, 379, 528, 553, 556, 557 Rõuk, Andrus (b. 1957) 61 Róz˙ewicz, Tadeusz (b. 1921) 43, 147, 172, 431, 433, 434 Rudas, László (1885–1950) 108 Rudnicki, Adolf (1912–1990) 153, 399, 438 Rumjancev, Sergei (1896–1925) 134 Runnel, Hando (b. 1938) 55 Rutte, Miroslav (1889–1954) 360 Ruzitska, József (c. 1775–1823) 517 Rybkowski, Jan (1912–1987) 538 Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek (b. 1935) 152, 434 Rzewuski, Henryk (1791–1866) 405 Rzewuski, Seweryn (1743–1811) 305 S Sabina, Karel (1813–1877) 266, 272, 274, 516 Sadoveanu, Ion Marin [Iancu Leonte Marinescu] (1893–1964) 503

Index of East-Central-European Names Sadoveanu, Mihail (1880–1961) 112, 121, 122, 179, 443, 444, 446, 447, 450, 451, 481, 500, 501 Šafarˇík, Josef (1795–1861) 271, 272, 273, 314 Salagi, István (1730–1796) 314 Salamon, Ferenc (1825–1892) 472 Šalda, F[rantišek] X[aver] (1867–1937) 358 Saliysko, Anna (1905–?) 361, 362 Sandauer, Artur (1913–1989) 153, 436, 438, 439, 441 Sánta, Ferenc (b. 1927) 173 S¸apca˘, Radu (1795–1876) 281 Sârbu, Ion D[ezideriu] (1919–1989) 119, 164 Šárecká, Maryša (1890–1958) 360, 361 Sarnecki, Tadeusz (?–?) 153 Savic´, Milislav (b. 1940) 100 Schmitt, Henrik Jeno˝ (1851–1916) 337 Schulz, Bruno (1892–1942) 42, 50, 53, 92, 103, 212, 436, 437, 506, 537 Schwartz, Gheorghe (b. 1945) 172 Sćibor-Rylski, Aleksander (1928–1983) 158, 176 Sebastian, Mihail [Iosif Hechter] (1907–1945) 121, 148, 164, 450 Sebyła, Władysław (1902–1940) 430 Sekulic´, Isidora (1877–1958) 411 Selimovic´, Meša (1910–1982) 102 Selvinski, Igor (1899–1968) 369 Šenoa, August (1838–1881) 463 Serbedzija, Rade (b. 1946) 536 Sever, Alexandru (b. 1921) 174 Sezima, Karel (1876–1949) 350, 351 Shehu, Bashkim (b. 1955) 73 Shevchenko, Taras (1814–1861) 339, 401, 403, 404, 406, 407, 408 Shishmanov, Ivan (1862–1928) 133 Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) 3, 506 Shpet, Gustav (1879–1937) 421 Sidran, Abdulah (b. 1944) 538 Siedlecki, Janusz nel (?–?) 160 Sienkiewicz, Henryk (1846–1916) 145, 378, 382, 463, 464, 465, 496, 5253, 5375 Sigray, Jakab (1750–1795) 312 Šijan, Slobodan (b. 1946) 539 Sikorski, Władysław (1881–1943) 154 Šikula, Vincent (b. 1936) 93 ˇ urka] (1914–1984) 109 Silan, Janko [Ján D Šimánek, Josef (1883–1959) 351

Index of East-Central-European Names Simion, Eugen (b. 1933) 453 Simionescu, Mircea Horia (b. 1928) 42, 43, 453 Šimonovicˇ, Jozef (1939–1994) 93 Simovic´, Dušan (1882–1962) 125, 146 Sin, Mihai (b. 1942) 454 Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–1991) 437, 439, 505, 507, 508, 510 Singer, Israel Joshua (1893–1944) 506 Šinko [Sinkó], Ervin [Franz Spitzer] (1898–1967) 130, 131, 146 Skalbe, Ka¯rlis (1879–1945) 159 Skalka, Ján (1900–1982) 109, 159 Ške˙ma, Antanas (1910–1961) 159, 160, 171 Skerlic´, Jovan (1877–1914) 335 Sklenár, Juraj (1746–1790) 314 Skolimowski, Jerzy (b. 1938) 535 Škultéty, Jozef (1853–1948) 258 Škvorecký, Josef (b. 1924) 40, 46, 91, 97, 103, 165, 166, 170, 231 Sládek, Josef Václav (1845–1912) 248 Sládkovic, Andrej (1820–1872) 257, 277, 516 Sladkovský, Karel (1828–1890) 274, 516 Slanský, Rudolf [Rudolf Salzmann] (1901–1952) 109 Slaveikov, Pencho (1866–1912) 92, 133, 259, 260, 337, 339, 345 Slaveikov, Petko (1827–1895) 134, 135, 138, 139, 260, 261, 317, 334 Slavici, Ioan (1848–1925) 178, 181, 243, 442, 443, 444, 445, 447 Šlejhar, Josef Karel (1864–1914) 354, 360, 363 Sloboda, Rudolf (1938–1995) 93 Słonimski, Antoni (1895–1976) 143, 144, 152, 156, 428, 436, 437 Słowacki, Juliusz (1809–1849) 263, 428, 441 Smetana, Bedrˇich (1824–1884) 515, 516, 517, 518 Smirnenski, Hristo (1898–1923) 134 Smrek, Ján (1898–1982) 109, 149 Sńiadecki, Jan (1756–1830) 327, 328, 329, 330 Sofronii of Vratsa, Bishop (1739–1813) 316 Solan, Peter (b. 1929) 535 Soldan, Fedor (1903–1979) 349, 354, 359 Söllner, Werner (b. 1951) 454 Sorak, Dejan (b. 1954) 544 Sorbul, Mihail [M. Smolsky] (1885–1966) 189 Sorescu, Marin (1936–1996) 42, 92

639 Sorge, Richard (1895–1944) 212, 213 Sorokin, Vladimir (b. 1955) 74 Sosiura, Volodymyr (1898–1965) 151 Šotola, Jirˇí (b. 1924) 97 Sova, Antonín (1864–1928) 346 Špindler, Ervin (1843–1918) 516 Šprinc, Mikuláš (1914–1986) 162 Šramko, Pavel (1743–1831) 313 Sruoga, Balys (1896–1947) 110, 147, 150, 163, 337, 346, 347 Stacho, Ján (1936–1995) 93 Stachura, Edward (1937–1979) 434 Staff, Leopold (1878–1957) 427, 428 Štajner, Karlo (1902–1992) 131, 388, 389, 394 Stambolov, Stefan (1854–1895) 260 Stan, Constantin (b. 1958) 44, 454 Stanca, Radu (1920–1962) 149 Stancu, Zaharia (1902–1974) 96, 117, 118, 122, 148, 169, 450, 504 Sta˘nescu, Nichita (1933–1983) 42, 92, 123, 123 Stanev, Emilian (1907–1979) 167, 457, 458, 460 Stanisław II Poniatowski, King (1732–1798) 305 Stankovic´, Borisav (1876–1927) 178, 411 Starzyn´ski, Stefan (1893–1943) 145 Staszic, Stanisław (1755–1826) 306 Stawin´ski, Jerzy S. (b. 1921) 145 Staykov, Lyudmil (b. 1942) 538 Štefánik, Milan Rastislav (1880–1919) 149 Steinhardt, Nicu (1912–1989) 118, 122 Stelaru, Dimitrie [Dumitru Petrescu] (1917–1971) 148 Stepovyi, Oleksa [Oleksa Voropai] (1913–1989) 161 Stere, Constantin (1865–1936) 446 Stevanovic´, Vidosav (b. 1942) 100, 132 Stodola, Ivan (1888–1977) 109, 148 Stoev, Gencho (b. 1925) 93, 457, 458 Stojanovic´, Dušan (1927–1994) 533 Stojanovic´, Lazar (b. 1945) 102 Stojanovic´, Svetozar (b. 1931) 125 Stoyanov, Zahari (1850–1898) 259, 317, 462 Strážay, Štefan (b. 1940) 93 Streinu, Vladimir (1902–1970) 121 Strmenˇ, Karol (1921–1994) 158, 162 Stroin´ski, Leon Zdzisław [Marek Chmura] (1921–1944) 146 Štrpka, Ivan (b. 1944) 93, 97

640 Strug, Andrzej (1871–1937) 236, 237, 238 Stryjkowski, Julian (1905–1996) 438, 439, 440 Sturdza, Dimitrie A. (1833–1914) 181 Štúr, Ludovít (1815–1856) 23, 149, 265, 271, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278, 338 Suits, Gustav (1883–1956) 338 Suleiman II (1496?–1566) 486, 518, 519 Šulek Bogoslav (1816–1895) 279 Šulek, Viliam (1825–1848) 276 Sutzkever, Abraham (b. 1913) 110, 151 Švankmajer, Jan (b. 1934) 532 Sveˇrák, Jan (b. 1965) 527, 536 Sviták, Ivan (1925–1994) 95, 96 S´wietlicki, Marcin (b. 1961) 435 S´wie˛tochowski, Aleksander (1849–1938) 254, 255, 256, 257 Syrokomla, Władysław Kondratowicz(1823–1862) 244 Szabó, István (b. 1938) 5, 526, 528, 540, 542, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558 Szabó, Lo˝rinc (1900–1957) 87 Szalay, László (1813–1864) 267, 471 Szana, Tamás (1844–1908) 336 Szász, Károly (1829–1905) 473 Szczepan´ski, Jan Józef (1919–2003) 145, 154 Szczypiorski, Andrzej (1924–2000) 172 Széchényi, Ferenc (1754–1820) 267 Széchenyi, István (1791–1860) 267, 268, 333, 470 Szekfu˝, Gyula (1883–1955) 466, 467, 473 Szemere, Bertalan (1812–1869) 269 Szemere, Pál (1785–1861) 521 Szentkuthy, Miklós (1908–1988) 108 Szentmarjay, Ferenc (1767–1795) 312 Szép, Erno˝ (1884–1953) 147 Szerb, Antal (1901–1945) 13, 147, 263 Szewc, Piotr (b. 1961) 40, 74, 440 Szilágyi, Ákos (b. 1950) 77 Szini, Gyula (1876–1932) 343 Szlengel, Władysław (1914–1943) 154, 437 Szolartsik, Sándor (1769–1795) 312 Szujski, Józef (1835–1883) 254 Szymborska, Wisława (b. 1923) 86, 153, 424, 433, 434 Szymel, Maurycy (1903–1942) 437

Index of East-Central-European Names T Tablic, Bohuslav (1769–1832) 314 Tajovský, Jozef Gregor (1874–1940) 177, 178 Talev, Dimita˘r (1898–1966) 458, 459 Talvik, Heiti (1904–1947) 147 Tamási, Áron (1897–1966) 87 Tarnowski, Stanisław (1837–1917) 254 Tatarka, Dominik (1913–1989) 105, 109, 110, 167 Tavcˇar, Ivan (1851–1923) 496, 497 Tˇažký, Ladislav (b. 1924) 173 Teliha, Olena (1907–1942) 147, 161 Teige, Karel (1900–1951) 372 Teleki, László (1811–1861) 246, 265 Tell, Christian (1808–1884) 291 Temesi, Ferenc (b. 1949) 43 Teodoreanu, Ionel (1897–1954) 446 Teodorov-Balan, Alexander (1859–1959) 9, 132 T¸epeneag, Dumitru (b. 1937) 123, 453 T¸eposu, Radu G. (1954–1999) 453 Terlecki, Władysław L. (1933–1999) 146 Tetmajer, Kazimierz Przerwa (1865–1940) 238, 343, 426, 427 Theodoroiu, Ecaterina (1894–1917) 193 Thun, Leo (1811–1888) 274 Tilvytis, Teofilis (1904–1969) 110 Timrava [Božena Slancˇíková] (1867–1951) 178, 190, 198 Tisza, Kálmán (1830–1902) 246, 247 Titel, Sorin (1935–1985) 92, 172, 184, 451, 453 Tito [Josip Broz] (1892–1980) 12, 47, 85, 91, 99, 100, 102, 110, 111, 125, 130, 131, 164, 167, 203, 205, 212, 482, 496, 498, 541, 545, 548 Todorov, Petko Yurdanov (1879–1916) 133, 335 Todorov, Vladislav (b. 1956) 75, 76 Todorov, Tzvetan (b. 1939) 45, 125, 129, 155, 232, 419 T¸oiu, Constantin (b. 1923) 119, 453, 454 Toldy [Schedel], Ferenc (1805–1875) 8, 9, 470, 472 Toldy, István (1844–1879) 253 Tolnai, Lajos (1837–1902) 253 Toma, Sorin (b. 1914) 119 Tomášik, Samo (1813–1887) 275 Tomek, Václav Vladivoj (1818–1905) 272, 467 Tomícˇek, Jan Slavomír (1806–1886) 272

Index of East-Central-European Names Tonegaru, Constant (1919–1952) 148 Topol, Jáchym (b. 1962) 81 Torkar, Igor [Boris Fakin] (b. 1913) 129 Tóth, Árpád (1886–1928) 187, 189 Totok, William (b. 1951) 454 Trayanov, Teodor (1882–1945) 134, 259, 348 Trefort, Ágoston (1817–1888) 267 Tribuson, Goran (b. 1948) 102 Trnka, Jirˇí (1912–1969) 532 Trúchly-Sytniansky, Andrej (1841–1916) 258 Trzebin´ski, Andrzej (1922–1943) 146 Tsanev, Stefan (b. 1936) 93, 460 Tu0man, Franjo (1922–1999) 483 Tudoran, Dorin (b. 1945) 39, 42, 104 Tuwim, Irena (1898–1987) 436 Tuwim, Julian (1894–1953) 143, 428, 429, 436, 437, 438 Tychyna, Pavlo (1891–1967) 346, 347 408 Tyl, Josef Kajetán (1808–1856) 271 272, 273, 274, 463, 466 Tzanev, Georgi (1895–1986) 133 Tzara, Tristan [Sami Rosenstock] (1896–1963) 67, 365, 453 Tzerkovski. Tzanko (1869–1926) 134 U Ubysz, Mieczysław (1915–1970) 155 Ugrešic´, Dubravka (b. 1949) 40, 43, 44, 76, 102 Ujejski, Kornel (1823–1897) 264 Ujevic´, Tin (1891–1955) 348 Ukraiinka, Lesia [Kosach, Larysa] (1871–1913) 334, 337, 339, 340, 345, 4053, 4075 Under, Marie (1883–1980) 150, 159, 198, 202 Uniłowski, Zbigniew (1909–1937) 378 Unt, Mati (b. 1944) 40, 59, 63, 64, 65 Upı¯ts, Andrejs (1877–1970) 143, 178 Urban, Milo (1904–1982) 144, 162 Uricaru, Eugen (b. 1946) 502 Urmuz [Demetru Demetrescu-Buza˘u] (1883–1923) 67, 365, 453 Urzidil, Johannes (1896–1970) 143 V Vaculík, Ludvík (b. 1926) 91, 95, 97, 105 Vaicˇiulaitis, Antanas (1906–1992) 143, 150 Vajanský, Svetozár Hurban (1847–1916) 258

641 Vajda, János (1827–1897) 253, 334 Vajda, Mihály (b. 1935) 104 Valancˇius, Motiejus (1801–1875) 245 Valchev, Yordan (1924–1998) 164 Válek, Miroslav (1927–1991) 94, 98 Valenta, Edvard (1901–1978) 86 Valton, Arvo (b. 1935) 62 Vasilev, Vladimir (1883–1963) 458 Vaskidovich, Emanouil (c. 1795–1875) 316 Vazov, Ivan Minchov (1850–1921) 133, 136, 139, 140, 141, 259, 260, 317, 345, 457, 458, 459, 463, 465, 516 Velichkov, Konstantin (1855–1907) 260 Velikic´, Dragan (b. 1953) 491, 492 Venclova, Antanas (1906–1971) 110 Veres, Péter (1897–1970) 87, 109 Verseghy, Ferenc (1757–1822) 312 Vetemaa, Enn (b. 1936) 40, 57, 64 Vezhinov, Pavel (1914–1983) 167, 459, 462 Vianu, Lidia (b. 1947) 41 Vianu, Tudor (1897–1964) 117, 124 Vicˇarová, Beˇla (?–?) 362 Viewegh, Michal (b. 1962) 74, 79, 80, 81 Vighi, Daniel (b. 1956) 454 Viktorin, Jozef Karol (1822–1874) 257, 276, 277 Vilikovský, Pavel (b. 1941) 43, 76, 93 Vinaver, Stanislav (1891–1955) 414, 415, 416 Vinea, Ion [Eugen I. Iovanaki] (1895–1964) 67 Vincenz, Stanisław (1888–1971) 4 Visnapuu, Henrik (1890–1951) 150, 159 Vis¸niec, Matei (b. 1956) 42 Vitner, Ion (1914–1991) 113, 119, 120 Vla˘descu, G[eorge] M. (1885–1952) 182 Vllasi, Azem (b. 1948) 39 Vocel, Jan Erazim (1802–1871) 272 Vodicˇka, Felix (1909–1974) 416, 419 Voiculescu, Vasile (1884–1963) 450 Voinikov, Dobri (1833–1878) 260 Voinovich, Vladimir (b. 1932) 41 Vojnovic´, Ivo (1857–1929) 334, 335, 343, 411 Voranc, Prežihov [Lovro Kuhar] (1893–1950) 498 Vorkapich, Slavko (1892–1976) 533 Voronca, Ilarie (1903–1946) 67, 143, 147 Voronyi, Mikola [Marcus Eduard] (1871–1942) 339, 344 Vörösmarty, Mihály (1800–1855) 267, 268, 270

642 Voutimski, Alexander (1919–1943) 92 Vovchok, Marko [Maria Vilinska] (1833–1907) 405 Vozár, Samo (1823–1850) 277 Vranyczany, Ambroz (1801–1870) 279 Vraz, Stanko (1810–1851) 279 Vrchlický, Jaroslav [Emil Frída] (1853–1912) 336, 337, 339, 345, 349, 350, 357 Vrchovský, Alexander B. (1812–1865) 274 Vuga, Saša (b. 1930) 498 Vukotinovic´ [Farkas], Ljudevit (1813–1893) 279, 280 Vulchanov, Rangel (b. 1928) 528, 532, 535 Vyshnia, Ostap [Pavlo Hubenko] (1889–1956) 408 W Wachmann, Ion Andrei (1807–1863) 517 Wagner, Richard (b. 1952) 46, 454, 455 Wajda, Andrzej (b. 1926) 154, 165, 526, 531, 532, 535, 538, 539, 540, 542, 544 Wałe˛sa, Lech (b. 1943) 104, Wan´kowicz, Melchior (1892–1974) 145, 160, 177, 179, 377, 378, 379, 381, 382, 383, 384 Wat, Aleksander (1900–1967) 436 Waz˙yk, Adam (1905–1982) 85, 143, 369, 436 We˛gierski, Kajetan (1756–1787) 295 Weil, Jirˇí (1900–1959) 165 Wein, Viola (?–?) 441 Weiner, Richard (1884–1937) 178 Weintraub, Jerzy Kamil (1916–1943) 146 Wellek, René (1903–1995) 235, 344, 419 Wenzig, Jozef (1807–1875) 516, 517 Weöres, Sándor (1913–1989) 42, 50, 89, 108 Werfel, Franz (1890–1945) 3 Wesselényi, Miklós (1796–1850) 270, 470 Wierzyn´ski, Kazimierz (1894–1969) 145, 152 Wiesel, Elie (b. 1928) 147, 170 Wilner, Jurek [Ari Wilner] (?–1943) 154 Wirtemberska, Maria (1768–1854) 329 Wis´lick, Adam (?–?) 254 Wyspian´ski, Stanisław (1869–1907) 538 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy (1885–1939) 42, 50, 53, 92, 146, 398, 430 Wittlin, Józef (1896–1976) 436, 437 Wojaczek, Rafał (1945–1971) 434

Index of East-Central-European Names Wojdowski, Bogdan (1930–1994) 153, 439 Wolski, Włodzimierz (1824–1882) 515, 516 Wygodzki, Stanisław (1907–1991) 439, 440 Y Yasenov, Hristo (1889–1925) 134, 337, 342, 346, 348 Yavorov Peyo [Kracholov] (1878–1914) 92, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 141, 347 Z Záborský, Jonáš (1812–1876) 258, 278 Zach, František (1807–1892) 276 Zafranovic´, Lordan (b. 1944) 532, 538 Zagajewski, Adam (b. 1945) 435 Zagorchinov, Stoyan (1889–1969) 457 Zagórski, Jerzy (1907–1984) 430 Zajc, Ivan (1832–1914) 517, 518, 519, 521, 522 Zakhariev, Edward (1938–1996) 539 Zaleski, Józef Bohdan (1802–1886) 325, 331 Zamfirescu, Duiliu (1858–1922) 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 503 Zamfirescu, George Mihail (1898–1939) 243, 448, 450 Zanussi, Krzysztof (b. 1939) 532, 540 Zaorski, Janusz (b. 1947) 526, 543 Zap, Karel František Vladislav (1812–1871) 272 Zarev, Pantelei (1911–1994) 137, 138 Žarnov, Andrej [František Šubík] (1903–1982) 109, 162 Zechenter-Laskomerský, Gustáv Kazimír (1824–1908) 35, 258, 277 Zelk, Zoltán (1906–1981) 87, 88, 169 Z˙eromski, Stefan (1864–1925) 236, 237, 239, 537 Zerov, Mykola (1890–1937) 402, 404 Zeyer, Julius (1841–1901) 337, 349, 351, 352, 353, 354, 357, 359, 360 Zhefarovich, Christophor (?–?) 315 Zhelev, Zhelyu Mitev (b. 1935) 39 Zhelyazkova, Binka (b. 1923) 532 Zhinzifov, Raiko (1839–1877) 260 Zhivkov, Todor Hristov (1911–1998) 85 Zielin´ski, Stanisław (1917–1995) 145 Ziherl, Boris (1910–1975) 130 Ziková, Louisa (1874–1846) 361 Zilahy, Lajos (1891–1974) 108

Index of East-Central-European Names Zillich, Heinrich (1898–1988) 447 Žilnik, Želimir (b. 1942) 532 Zinoviev, Aleksandr (b. 1922) 40, 41 Zı¯verts, Ma¯rtin¸š (1903–1990) 159, 160, 171 Žižek, Slavoj (b. 1949) 547 Žižka, Jan (c. 1370–1424) 463 Znaniecki, Florian (1882–1958) 238 Zogovic´, Radovan (1907–1986) 130, 167

643 Zrinski, Petar (1621–1671) 518, 520 Zrínyi, Miklós [Nikola Šubic´ Zrinski] (1508–1566) 470, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522 Zrínyi, Miklós (1620–1664) 518, 520 Zsigmond, Vilmos (b. 1930) 536 Žujovic´, Sreten (1899–1976) 127 Z˙uławski, Andrzej (b. 1940) 535 Zupan, Vitomil (1914–1987) 131, Župancˇicˇ, Oton (1878–1949) 336, 342, Z˙ukrowski, Wojciech (1916–2000) 145, Zvonický, Gorazd [Andrej Šándor] (1913–1995) 109

List of Contributors to Volume 1

Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Professor of American and Comparative Literature and Head of the Center for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland Veronika Ambros, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literature, University of Toronto, Canada Mircea Anghelescu, Professor of Romanian Literature, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania Epp Annus, Under & Tuglas Literary Center, Estonian Academy of Science, Tallinn, Estonia Katherine Arens, Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin, USA Vladimir Biti, Chair and Professor of Literary Theory, University of Zagreb, Croatia Endre Bojtár, Professor and Head of Department, Institute of Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary Włodimierz Bolecki, Professor, Institute of Literary Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Nikolai Chernokozhev, Associate Professor of Bulgarian literature, Faculty of Slavonic Studies, Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria Marcel Cornis-Pope, Professor of English and Chair, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA Mieczysław Døbrowski, Professor, Institute of Polish Literature, Dept. of Polish Philology, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland Nevena Dakovic´, Prof. of Film Studies and Head of the Dept. of Theory and History, University of Arts, Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro Gábor Gángó, Associate Professor, Dept. of Philosophy, Szeged University, Szeged, Hungary George Grabowicz, Professor of Ukrainian, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Igor Grdina, Prof. of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Letit¸ia Guran, Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literature, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Margaret Higgonet, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA Sándor Hites, Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literature, Eötvös Lóránt University, Budapest, Hungary Albena Hranova, Associate Professor, Department of Bulgarian Literature, Plovdiv University, Plovdiv, Bulgaria Robert Hughes, Assistant Professor, Languages and Literatures, Augusta State University, Augusta, GA, USA Dina Iordanova, Reader in Film Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom Nenad Ivic´, Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Zagreb

646


Renata Jambrešic´-Kirin, Research Associate, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia Jolanta Jastrz¸ebska, Associate Professor of Finougric Studies, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands Dorota Kielak, University of Białystok, Białystok, Poland Alexander Kiossev, Professor of History of Culture, College of Philosophy, Department for Cultural Studies, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Roman Koropeckyj, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles Péter Krasztev, Adjunct Professor, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Diana Kuprel, Independent Scholar, Toronto, Canada Tomislav Longinovic´, Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, University of WisconsinMadison, USA Jasmina Lukic´, Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Paul Robert Magocsi, Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto, Canada Miro Masek, Institute for Slavistics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany Kees Mercks, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic languages and Literatures, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Zofia Mitosek, Professor of Theory of Literature and Poetics, Department of Polish Philology, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland John Neubauer, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Arent van Nieukerken, Assistant Professor Polish Literature, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Ewa Paczoska, Chair of Positivism and Young Poland, Institute of Polish Literature, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland Inna Peleva, Associate Professor of Bulgarian Literature, Department of Bulgarian Literature, Plovdiv University, Plovdiv, Bulgaria Boyko Penchev, Assistant Professor of Literary Studies, Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria Sibila Petlevski, Professor of Drama Criticism, Academy of Dramatic Arts, Zagreb, Croatia Antony Polonsky, Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA Robert Pynsent, Professor in the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London, United Kingdom Dagmar Roberts, Assistant Professor in the Department of Slovak Literature and Literary Studies, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia Svetlana Slapšak, Gender Studies Program & Ancient Anthropology Program, Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana, Slovenia Guido Snel, Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Marzena Sokołowska-Paryz˙, Assistant Professor, Section of English Literature, Institute of English Studies, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland


647

Monica Spiridon, Professor, Department of Communication Theory, School of Letters, University of Bucharest, Romania Alexandru S¸tefan, Ph.D. candidate, School of Letters, University of Bucharest Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Professor of Central Eurasian Studies and Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA; Chair of Comparative Literature, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Alfred Thomas, Professor and Head of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Galin Tihanov, Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History, Lancaster University, United Kingdom Tomas Venclova, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, Yale, CT, USA Vilmos Voigt, Professor of Folklore, Director of Institute of Ethnography, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Larry Wolff, Professor of History, Boston College, Boston, USA Dinko Župan, Assistant Professor, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia.

In the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication:

I II

WEISSTEIN, Ulrich (ed.): Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. 1982. BALAKIAN, Anna (ed.): The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages. (Akadémia Kiado) 1984. 732 pp. III VAJDA, György M. † (réd.): Le Tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820. Les genres en vers des lumières au romantisme. (Akadémia Kiado) 1982. 684 pp. IV WEISGERBER, Jean (réd.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume I: Histoire. (Akadémia Kiado) 1986. 622 pp. V WEISGERBER, Jean (réd.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume II: Théorie. (Akadémia Kiado) 1986. 704 pp. VI GÉRARD, Albert (ed.): European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Akadémia Kiado) 1986. 1288 pp. 2 volumes. VII KLANICZAY, Tibor, Eva KUSHNER et André STEGMANN (réd.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Volume 1: L'avènement de l'esprit nouveau (1400–1480). (Akadémia Kiado) 1988. 594 pp. VIII GARBER, Frederick (ed.): Romantic Irony. (Akadémia Kiado) 1988. 395 pp. IX GILLESPIE, Gerald (ed.): Romantic Drama. 1993. xvi, 516 pp. X ARNOLD, A. James, Julio RODRIGUEZ-LUIS and J. Michael DASH (eds.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. 1994. xviii, 579 pp. XI BERTENS, Hans and Douwe W. FOKKEMA (eds.): International Postmodernism. Theory and literary practice. 1997. xvi, 581 pp. XII ARNOLD, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. 1997. xviii, 398 pp. XIII KLANICZAY, Tibor, Eva KUSHNER and Paul CHAVY (eds.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Tome IV: Crises et essors nouveaux (1560–1610). 2000. xiv, 817 pp. XIV GLASER, Horst Albert and György M. VAJDA † (eds.): Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760–1820. Epoche im Überblick. 2001. x, 760 pp. XV ARNOLD, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch-speaking regions. 2001. x, 672 pp. XVI KNABE, Peter-Eckhard, Roland MORTIER and François MOUREAU (eds.): L'Aube de la Modernité 1680-1760. 2002. viii, 554 pp. XVII ESTERHAMMER, Angela (ed.): Romantic Poetry. 2002. xii, 537 pp. XVIII SONDRUP, Steven P. and Virgil NEMOIANU (eds.): Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding borders. In collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. 2004. viii, 477 pp. XIX CORNIS-POPE, Marcel and John NEUBAUER (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. 2004. xx, 636 pp. (incl. index).

The series incorporates a subseries on Literary Cultures I.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume I (Vol. XIX in the main series) Volume II n.y.p. Volume III n.y.p. Volume IV n.y.p. (Eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer)

II.

Comparative Histories of Nordic Literary Cultures n.y.p.

III.

Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula n.y.p.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries: The Making And Remaking Of Literary Institutions

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Comparative History of Literature in European Languages)