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 Volume III: The making and remaking of literary institutions

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 2007 President/Président Randolph Pope (University of Virginia) Vice-President/Vice-Président Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston) Secretary/Secrétaire Margaret Higonnet (University of Connecticut) Treasurer/Trésorier Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp) Members/Membres assesseurs Jean Bessière, Inôcencia Mata, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Elrud Ibsch, Eva Kushner, Fridrun Rinner, Laura Calvacante Padilha, Franca Sinopoli, Steven Sondrup, Svend Eric Larsen, Cynthia Skenazi

Volume XXII (Volume III 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 III: The making and remaking of literary institutions Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope Virginia Commonwealth University

John Neubauer University of Amsterdam

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

8

TM

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. 22)  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 978 90 272 3455 1 (alk. paper) CIP © 2007 - 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

Table of contents

Preface List of Visual Materials General Introduction John Neubauer (with Inna Peleva, and Mihály Szegedy Maszák)

ix xiii 1

Part I. Publishing and censorship –

Introduction – John Neubauer (with Robert Pynsent, Vilmos Voigt, and Marcel Cornis-Pope)

1.

Publishing

– – – – – – –

The Cosmopolitanism of Moderní revue (1894–1925) – Neil Stewart The Uncompromising Standards of Nyugat (1908–1941) – József Szili A Contest within Romanian Modernism: Sburătorul vs. Gândirea – Marcel Cornis-Pope Krugovi: A Croatian Opening (1952–58) – Tomislav Brlek Underground Publishing in Estonia under Soviet Censorship – Kersti Unt Slovak Journals between Languages and against Censorship – Dagmar Roberts The National Role of the Albanian Literary Journals – Robert Elsie

2.

Censorship

– – – –

The Laws and Practices of Censorship in Bohemia – Jan Čulík Censorship: A Case Study of Bohumil Hrabal’s Jarmilka – Kees Mercks Religious and Political Censorship in Slovakia – Dagmar Roberts The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary: 1945–49 – Mihály Szegedy-Maszák Strategies against Censorship in Soviet Lithuania (1944–90) – Violeta Kelertas Getting around Polish Censorship: 1968–89 – Włodzimierz Bolecki Censorship after Independence: the Case of Aleksander Pelēcis – Karl Jirgens

– – –

39

63 71 80 84 86 89 92

95 101 111 114 125 135 138

Part II. Theater as a literary institution –

General Introduction – Dragan Klaić

1.

Professionalization and Institutionalization in the Service of a National Awakening

–

Introduction – Dragan Klaić

143

147

Table of contents

vi

– – – –

Building a(s) Theater: the Pesti Magyar Színház in 1837 – Zoltán Imre Slovenia: from Jesuit Performance to Opera – Lado Kralj Czech Theater: A Paradoxical Prop of the National Revival – Ondřej Hučín Slovakia: Theater Starts as an Amateur Endeavor – Dagmar Roberts Polish Drama Sustains Spiritual Unity in a Divided Country – Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska Lithuania: School, Court, and Clandestine Performances – Audronė Girdzijauskaitė Politics and Artistic Autonomy in Estonian Theater – Jaak Rähesoo Theater Speaks Many Languages in Romania – Marian Popescu From the Čitališta to the National Theater in Bulgaria – Joanna Spassova-Dikova

2.

Modernism: the Director Rules

– – – – –

– – – – – –

Introduction – Dragan Klaić The European Horizons of Stjepan Miletić – Nikola Batusić Reform within: the Thália Társaság 1904–1908 – Zoltán Imre Modernist Inroads into Czech Theater – Ondřej Hučín Fuzzy Borderlines: the Čapeks’ Robots, Insects, Women, and Men – Veronika Ambros The Interbellum Emancipation of the Slovak Stage – Dagmar Roberts Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Clash on the Romanian Stage – Marian Popescu with Marcel Cornis-Pope Institutionalization and Innovation in the Bulgarian Theater – Joanna Spassova-Dikova Polish Modernist Drama – Ewa Wąchocka Stage and Stage Design in Polish Modernist Theater – Eleonora Udalska and Violetta Sajkiewicz Popular Amusement and Avant-garde in the Polish Cabaret – Dorota Fox Yiddish Theater – Michael Steinlauf The Stage in Independent Lithuania – Audronė Girdzijauskaitė Kicking with Poetry: Female Trailblazers on the Latvian Stage – Banuta Rubess The Ebbs and Flows of Modernist Energy in Estonian Theater – Jaak Rähesoo Branko Gavella: The Director as Thinker – Sibila Petlevski

3.

Theater under Socialism

– – – – –

Introduction – Dragan Klaić The Short Interlude of a Liberal Czech Theater – Libor Vodička Slovak Drama: Reconciling the Absurd with Socialism – Dagmar Roberts Communism and After in Romanian Theater – Marian Popescu Mandatory Socialist Models vs. Stylist Eclecticism on the Bulgarian Stage – Joanna Spassova-Dikova Enver-Hoxha's Dictatorship Stifles Albanian Theater – Robert Elsie

– – – – –

– – – – –

–

149 153 154 158 159 162 163 166 167

171 173 176 178 183 189 191 192 196 199 203 205 210 211 213 215

217 221 226 227 228 231

Table of contents – – – – – – – – –

From Provincial Backwaters to Budapest and World Reputation – László Bérczes After Witkacy and Gombrowicz: Faces of Postwar-Polish Drama – Ewa Wąchocka Wyspiański’s Offsprings – Eleonora Udalska The Visual Richness of the Polish Stage – Violetta Sajkiewicz Independence Brings International Recognition to Lithuanian Directors – Audronė Girdzijauskaitė Estonian Theater Loosens the Soviet Straightjacket – Jaak Rähesoo Ideological Critique and Moral Rectitude in Slovene Dramas – Lado Kralj Ingenious Dramatic Strategies Reach across the Yugoslav Theater Space – Aleksandra Jovićević Epilogue: After Socialism – Dragan Klaić

vii 234 238 241 243 245 247 250 257 265

Part III. Forging primal pasts: The uses of folklore – – – – – – – – – – –

Introduction: Folklore and National Awakening – John Neubauer (with Marcel Cornis-Pope) Levels of Institutionalization in Estonian Folklore – Ülo Valk Mythologizing Contemporary Baltic Consciousness – Endre Bojtár National and International Traits in the Latvian Trickster Velns – Karl E. Jirgens The Ideal of Folk Culture in the Literature of the Czech National Rebirth – Tamás Berkes Folklore in the Making of Slovak Literature – Dagmar Roberts The Question of Folklore in Romanian Literary Culture – Marcel Cornis-Pope (with Otilia Hedeşan) The Heidenrösleinkrawall (The Row about the Wild Roses): an 1864 Debate on the Origins of Folk Ballads – Vilmos Voigt Folklore as a Means to Demonstrate a Nation’s Existence: The Bulgarian Case – Albena Hranova and Alexander Kiossev The Rediscovery of Folk Literature in Albania – Robert Elsie “Sons of Black Death”: The Semantics of Foreignness in Twentieth-Century Bulgarian and Macedonian Writings – Jolanta Sujecka

269 285 290 295 298 310 314 323 325 335 338

Part IV. Literary histories: Itineraries of national self-images – – – – –

Introduction – John Neubauer Shifting Ideologies in Estonia’s Literary Histories, Textbooks, and Anthologies – Epp Annus, Luule Epner, and Jüri Talvet Latvian Literary Histories and Textbooks – Agita Misāne Sorrows and Glories of a Nation’s Soul: Polish Literary Histories – Jolanta Jastrzebska Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts – Robert B. Pynsent

345 355 359 361 366

Table of contents

viii – – – – – – – –

Overcoming Czech and Hungarian Perspectives in Writing Slovak Literary Histories – Dagmar Roberts The Narrowing Scope of Hungarian Literary Histories – John Neubauer The Career of Latecomers: Romanian Literary Histories – Monica Spiridon Conceiving of a Croatian Literary Canon, 1900–50 – Nenad Ivić Serbia: the Widening Rift between Criticism and Literary Histories – Svetlana Slapšak, Guido Snel, and John Neubauer Albanian Literary History: A Communist Primeur – Robert Elsie National Identity and the Textbooks of Literary History: the Case of Bulgaria – Alexander Kiossev Pitfalls in Writing a Regional Literary History of East-Central Europe – Endre Bojtár

377 384 392 395 404 409 411 419

Works Cited

429

Appendix

491

List of Contributors

491

Table of Contents, Vol. 1

495

Table of Contents, Vol. 2

499

Gazetteer

503

Index of East-Central European Names

505

Preface

History is a series of ruptures and reconnections. One of the editors of this History, John Neubauer, has worked on this project for years in a building that reminds those passing by that at this site the Transylvanian Hungarian Miklós Tótfalussy Kis operated his internationally famous printing shop in the seventeenth century. The other editor, Marcel Cornis-Pope, completed editing work on this volume in a university building that once belonged to Colonel Henry Anderson, prominent Richmond lawyer and President of the American Red Cross, who traveled to the Eastern front of World War I, bringing support to the Romanian army caught between the assault of the combined forces of Germany and Austria and the raids of unruly Bolshevik units across the border. The manuscript of the present volume goes to an Amsterdam printer and publisher just a few days following the entry of Romania and Bulgaria into the European Union. Our History examines the intraregional connections and analogies within the literary cultures of East-Central Europe. East-West literary relations are not its primary focus. Yet the intraregional and the interregional relations are no more separable in the literary realm than they are in the political one. The reconciliation of Eastern and Western Europe, furthered by the current expansion of the European Union, depends vitally on the cooperation of the East-Central European nations and minorities among each other. It is this internal reconnection that we wish to further in a modest way with our project. I. The Idea of a Regional Literary History A transnational reconsideration of East-Central Europe’s national literary histories inevitably involves rethinking some general problems of writing literary histories today. The method we chose involves creating an elaborate structure of “multiple scanning” that occupies the middle ground between a traditional comprehensive narrative based on the fixities of dates, borders, and national identities, and more recent attempts, such as Dennis Hollier’s French literary history and its followers, to turn literary history into a series of independent articles, each attached to a particular date and literary event. Multiple scanning (mapping) entails going through the region’s last two-hundred years not once but several times, each time focusing on different dimensions of its literary cultures. Upon completion, the four volumes of this project will contain five parallel histories: a political history of literature, a history of literary genres and movements, a literary history of cities, regions, and transitional areas, a history of literary institutions, and, finally, a history of literary figures and types. By limiting ourselves to the history of “literary cultures” we also seek a middle ground between histories that treat only texts and their writers, and more recent cultural histories that no longer distinguish between specifically literary texts and other cultural texts based on verbal, visual, and other kinds of signs. While we have much sympathy for the latter approaches, we had to acknowledge pragmatically that a comprehensive cultural and multimedia history of the whole region would have become unattainable at this point. Furthermore, we believe that literature and

Preface

x

its culture possess a modicum of specificity, however difficult it may be to define their borders with other cultural phenomena. The contingency of borders is both our central argument against various national conceptions of literary history, and a key feature in our effort to define an East-Central European region. In the General Introduction to our first volume, we reviewed the history of such terms as Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe before arriving at the following notion East-Central Europe: 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. (ECE 1: 6)

This interstitial, dynamic concept of the region includes also a Turkish presence and influence, especially in the south. As we argued in vol. 1, the long Ottoman occupation also had a decisive impact on the East-Central European region, even if it occurred prior to the period we are covering and even if it directly affected only its southern part. Its living cultural legacy includes a sizable Muslim population, “oriental” motifs embedded in the literatures and cultures of the region, as well as a wealth of national myths, legends, and literary works on fighting the invaders that continues to shape the region’s notions of ethnicity and nationhood. Indeed, integrating the Muslim heritage and admitting Turkey into the European Union have meanwhile become major issues for Europe as a whole. II A History of Multiple Histories: Its Structure The first volume of our History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (published in 2004) consisted of two parts (see its Table of Content at the end of this volume: pp. 495–97). In the first part, we grouped the literary refractions of political history around select nodal points. The featured temporal nodes, 1989, 1968, 1956, 1948, 1945, 1918, 1867, 1848, and 1776, pursued in counter-chronological order from the immediate past towards older anticipatory evolutions, function as “crossroads,” at which national narrative strands come together, without forming an organic unit. At each nodal point we have considered both the participation of the writers in the events and the memory of these events in literary works. The second part of the first volume approaches literary periods, genres, and movements through a similarly differentiated perspective, offering paradigmatic studies that attempt to exemplify how such traditional national categories as Symbolism or the historical novel may be reconsidered within transnational approaches not based on an east-west dichotomy. Aware of the dangers of holistic and organicist periodization, we have minimized the use of such traditional blanket terms as Romanticism and Realism, preferring to highlight transitional and context-specific literary categories more relevant to the region.

Preface

xi

Our second volume (published in 2006) considered the topographic grounding of the region’s literary cultures by focusing on the literary histories of its specific cities, rivers, border areas, and sub-regions (see the Table of Contents pp. 499–501). In doing so, this volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever broader regional, European, and world literary histories. While the main focus remains on the literary culture of East-Central Europe, this volume foregrounds the non-national or hybrid traditions at the heart of the national and local ones. The present, third volume focuses on the making and remaking of those institutional structures that engender and regulate the creation, distribution, and reception of literature. We study here not so much shared institutions but rather such region-wide analogous institutional processes as the national awakening, the modernist opening, and the communist regimentation, canonization, and censorship of literature. While these processes took place in all of the region’s cultures, they were asynchronous and subjected to different local conditions. The volume’s premise is that within East-Central Europe national awakening and the institutionalization of literature were symbiotically interrelated. Indeed, at the heart of a national awakening we always find such institutional aspects literature as language renewal, the introduction of the vernacular and its literature in schools and universities, the building of an infrastructure for the publication of books and journals, clashes with censorship, the establishment of national academies, libraries, and theaters, the (re)construction of a national folklore, and writing histories of the vernacular literature. We focus on four main aspects of literature’s institutional history: (1) Publishing and Censorship, (2) Theater, (3) The Uses of Folk Poetry, and (4) Literary Histories. In the fourth and final volume (to be completed in 2007) we focus on historical and imaginary literary types and figures. The literary figures (national icons, figures of male and female identity, figures of the other) considered in this volume are not static but rather subjects that assume shifting positions in literary history as they are canonized or suppressed, ejected from or absorbed into the national and regional narratives. Acknowledgements We want to express, first of all, our deep gratitude to our contributors for the quality of their articles, for their enthusiasm for the project, and for their generous patience, both in responding to our many queries and in accepting the delay of the publication. We acknowledge with pleasure the continuing support of the Coordinating Committee of the ICLA, and the detailed suggestions and judicious recommendations of its external readers, Professors Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam) and Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (University of Western Ontario). László Boka (Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár, Budapest) and Kees Mercks (University of Amsterdam) have given us special help in tracing obscure items. We thank the Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár (Budapest) for providing us with the picture of Frigyes Karinthy, Otto Urban, for the reproductions from Moderní revue, and the Polish National Museum for a permission to reprint Stanisław Wyspiański’s Self-portrait. Initial funding for this four-volume project was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, the Netherlands Research Board, the University of Amsterdam, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

xii

Preface

The preparation of the present volume was supported with a grant from the Coordinating Committee of the ICLA for incidental expenses; with a travel-expense subsidy from Virginia Commonwealth University’s College of Humanities and Sciences and its English Department for Marcel Cornis Pope; and a fellowship from the Collegium Budapest for John Neubauer. We appreciate very much all the support we have received.. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer Editors

Visual Material

Frigyes Karinthy in a kávéház. Courtesy of the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (National Széchényi Library), Budapest, Hungary. [p. 21] 2. The First Budapest Cabaret: The Bonnbonière. [p. 23] 3. Members of the Romanian Avant-garde; the Drawings are by M. H. Maxy. From M. H. Maxy. Der integrale Künstler/Artist Integralist. Ed. Michael Ilk. Berlin: Günter Linke, 2003. p. 37. [p. 31] 4. Karel Hlaváček’s cover for Stanisław Przybyszewski’s journal Życie. Courtesy Otto M. Urban. [p. 66] 5. Karel Hlaváček’s cover for Moderní revue, 1896/97. Courtesy Otto M. Urban. [p. 67] 6. Stasys Krasauskas, Moters gimimas (The Birth of Woman). Courtesy Violeta Kelertas. [p. 129] 7. The Hungarian National Theater (A Nemzeti Színház). Franz Sandmann’s colored lithography, based on a drawing of Rudolf Alt. 1845. Courtesy of the Országos Színháztörténeti Múzeum és Intézet (State Museum and Institute for Theater History), Budapest, Hungary. [p. 146] 8. Stanisław Wyspiański, Self-portrait (1902). Courtesy of the Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (National Museum in Warsaw), Warsaw, Poland. [p. 161] 9. Karel Čapek’s Drawing of Dezső Kosztolányi, made in the Netherlands, on the Occasion of a PEN Club Congress. From Karel Čapek, Over Holland (On the Netherlands). Amsterdam: Van Holkema and Warendorf, 1933. p. 9. [p. 184] 10. From the performance of Zidari that opened the rebuilt National Theater. Dir. Hr. Zankov. Courtesy Joanna-Spassova-Dikova. [p. 194] 11. Georgi Raičev, Elenovo zarstvo (1929). Dir. Y. Yakovlev, décor A. Popov. Bulgarian National Theater, 1934. Courtesy Joanna-Spassova-Dikova. [p. 195] 12. Micaela Eleutheriade, Ana’s Immurement. 1949. [p. 274] 1.

General Introduction John Neubauer

(with Inna Peleva on Bulgaria and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák on Kölcsey and Széchenyi)

We divide the following introduction to the history of literary institutions in East-Central Europe into three broadly conceived periods that cover (1) the national awakenings and the institutionalization of literature (1800–1890), (2) the literary institutions of Modernism (1890–1945), and (3) the radical reform of the existing institutions under the communist regimes (1945–1989). The introduction offers regional perspectives for the national accounts that take up most of the volume; it fills the gaps left by the latter, and highlights certain key ideas, questions, and events. Our treatment is “transnational” rather than “comparative,” for we seldom compare different works or writers in the traditional manner of comparative literature. Instead, we describe and analyze common historical mechanisms that operated in the literatures of the region. Thus, the national awakenings that we describe below shared some common frameworks and a common historical mechanism. They followed a common pattern, even if they were called Ärkamisaeg (National Awakening) in Estonia, Rilindja (Rebirth) in Albania, Văzraždane (Revival) in Bulgaria, Obrození (Rebirth) in Bohemia, Redeşteptare culturală şi naţională (Cultural and National Awakening) in Romania, and Nemzeti Ébredés (National Awakening), or just Reform Kor (Age of Reform), in Hungary. The different terms refer to similar historical events. Admittedly, the analogous mechanisms were triggered at different moments in the various cultures, were propelled at different speeds, and were shaped by different local conditions. The chronology of their evolution cannot be represented in a simple pan-regional scheme, and even our above-mentioned broad tripartite division should be treated with caution. Estonian literary culture, for instance, was a Johnny-come-lately that leaped forward where others crept along: “Nowhere else in Europe have people rushed directly from folklore to modernity; the only bridges between these distant worlds were a Bible translation and a handful of purely practical or edifying tracts. Even the Balkan nations, which had lived for centuries under Ottoman rule, had some previous ‘high culture’” (Rähesoo, p. 164 below). Historically different literary phenomena coexisted, mingled, and formed hybrids within every national culture, and often even at a single geographical location. Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, and other imported terms from Western literary histories should be applied to the East-Central European literatures cautiously and after explaining their local meaning — even if the poets and scholars of the region have freely used them. As in the case of Modernism, we redefine them to suit the context and to reveal the specificity of the region.

John Neubauer

2 I National Awakenings and the Institutionalization of Literature

“Our profession emerges with the current of the national idea; it is not a scholarly observer but part of it” (János Horváth, fejlődéstörténete 58)

Literary scholarship was born in the decades around 1800. Its nineteenth-century institutionalization was deeply implicated in the formation and evolution of modern nationalism, especially in East-Central Europe. The story of how this Europe-wide process took place, how concepts of national literature crossed borders and reappeared under new guises has yet to be told. We offer here only an outline focused on our region. Around 1800, none of the people in East-Central Europe constituted an independent nation. The Baltic area was dominated by the Germans and the Russians; Poland was divided between Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire, which ruled also over the territories liberated from under Ottoman occupation further south; the rest of the Balkans was still under Ottoman rule. A long and turbulent prior history of migrations and ever-changing foreign dominations had already uniquely intermixed East-Central Europe’s various religions and ethnic groups. Two centuries later, the region is divided into independent nations whose number continues to grow even as we complete the writing of our History, yet most nations still include significant, though dwindling, minorities. The new nations, each claiming ancient ancestry, are products of various nineteenth-century national awakenings that reshaped the region’s stateless cultures. The emerging national ideologies clashed both with one another and with the former hegemonic powers that reasserted their rule via Nazism and Communism after most of the region’s people had achieved their political and cultural independence. The (re)birth of the East-Central European nations has produced some remarkable literary and cultural achievements, some of which acquired European, and even world-wide, fame. Yet the focus on national identity, national culture, and national literature has inevitably fostered also provincialism, as well as monolingualism and intolerance against those who did not belong to the presumed national body. As the histories of cities and regions in the second volume of our History show, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity gradually diminished and nearly disappeared in cities like Riga, Vilnius, Czernowitz, Pest, Trieste, or Plovdiv and in regions like Galicia, Bucovina, or Transylvania. What disappeared in some of these places were not only the suppressed, banished, or simply annihilated minorities, but also the possibility of having multiple ethnic and linguistic identities, such as they existed in early-nineteenth-century Bulgaria (ECE 2: 360) or Buda and Pest (ECE 2: 162). In the early nineteenth century, several bona-fide Hungarian aristocrats (e.g., Alajos Mednyánszky, János Majláth, and János Csaplovics) would write in German as well as Hungarian, as did the great early scholar of the university, Lajos Schedius, leader of the German community in Pest. The Serbian Jovan Muškatirović wrote in Serb, Hungarian, and Latin; Mihály Vitkovics (Mihailo Vitković) could regard himself as both a Hungarian and a Serb and write in both languages; for Jakov Ignjatović a generation later, such a double loyalty became already a source of painful self-reflections (ECE 2: 229–30). In early-twentieth-century Vilnius many Lithuanian writers, artists, and scholars would still write also in Polish, but the different language cultures moved by then towards isolation in this Polish-Lithuanian city, which was also the birthplace of the Belorussian literary language (ECE 2: 22–23). The Pole Stanisław Przybyszewski

General Introduction

3

started to write in German, the Slovak Pavel Hviezdoslav and the Romanian Liviu Rebreanu in Hungarian; but they all reverted to their native tongue, in the case of Hviezdoslav with a strong ressentiment against Hungarian and the Hungarians. The champions of Yiddish and Hebrew spoke and often wrote still in Polish, Russian, or German, but Yiddish died out and Hebrew had to find a new home in Israel. After 1945, only a handful minority writers, among them Danilo Kiš, were able to write in more than one language; bi- and multilingualism survived mostly among writers in exile or emigration, but, as in the case of Tristan Tzara, Milo Dor, Emil Cioran, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera, and many others, the second language became now a Western rather than an EastCentral European one. Today, one of the important cultural and political questions of East-Central Europe is whether it can overcome its cultural provincialism, whether, after its various national awakenings, it can regain in some new form the cultural and literary diversity it once possessed — a diversity of which its past literature still offers some evidence. Joining the European Union pushes these countries towards Europeanization and globalization, but achieves relatively little in reconciling them among themselves. A Typology of National Awakening What were the main cultural factors that triggered the awakening of a national consciousness? What, more specifically, was literature’s function in forming a national identity? What were the links between the emergence of national literary traditions and what we call “the institutionalization of literature”? The following typology attempts to answer these and other questions. In East-Central Europe, vernacular literature and national philology were major forces in shaping the emerging modern nations. Poets and philologists, many of whom became political leaders, forged the identity of their people by constructing both institutions and texts: MODES OF SOCIAL AND MATERIAL CONSTRUCTION 1. Founding journals and newspapers in the vernacular 2. Establishing publishing houses 3. Founding literary and cultural societies 4. Staging plays in the vernacular 5. Building National Theaters and Opera Houses 6. Establishing National Academies 7. Establishing National Libraries 8. Establishing university chairs for the vernacular language and literature 9. Including the vernacular language and literature in the school curricula MODES OF TEXTUAL CONSTRUCTION 1. Language revival 2. Translations into the vernacular 3. Writing lyric poetry in the vernacular 4. Collecting and publishing oral poetry 5. Editing and republishing older texts

John Neubauer

4 6. 7. 8. 9.

Writing new national epics Writing historical fiction Canonizing national poets Writing national literary histories.

We should keep in mind that textual construction was occasioned, and often made possible, by the new material institutions of literature and philology. While Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the first modern literary historians, had no institutional support, their East-Central European successors could write in the relative comfort of jobs at universities, libraries, or academies. Writers of national tragedies and operas were welcome in the new National Theaters and Opera Houses, and often subsidized by the Academies. The literary institutions enhanced the national character of a city, yet as cultural centers they also attracted many foreign students, artists, and intellectuals, who gave it a cosmopolitan flavor that the nationalists and populists resented (see the section on Populism in the introduction to Part I below). Building national institutions for literature, the arts, and learning was heavily dependent on the degree to which a nation had an independent constitutional tradition, whose vestiges would usually survive even after the loss of political independence. Hungary, and, to a lesser extent, the Czech lands, profited from such a tradition and were able to establish their key national cultural institutions relatively early. Poland also had a constitutional tradition, but its partitioning allowed a limited development of Polish institutions only in the Austrian-ruled Cracow. In Warsaw, which was severely restricted by the Russian occupiers, the national institutions were largely suppressed. In some countries, several cities vied for becoming the national cultural and literary center. In Hungary, an ancient rivalry existed between the twin cities of Buda and Pest, but power shifted to the latter as the University was transferred to it, and the Academy, the National Theater, the National Library, and the National Museum were all established there. The rivalry was resolved with their merger in 1872. In Estonia, the coastal port of Tallinn (now the capital) has been competing with the university town of Tartu, formerly called by its German name Dorpat (see Kirss in ECE 2: 28–39). The center of Serbian culture gradually shifted in the course of the nineteenth century from Buda and Pest to Novi Sad and from there to Belgrade. In Bulgaria, liberation shifted the power from Plovdiv to Sofia, and in Romania the early literary preeminence of Iaşi gradually weakened as Bucharest became the nation’s capital. Institutionalizing literature was a matter of national self-consciousness rather than of economics. The process unfolded relatively slowly in England and France, whereas Germany, Italy, some Scandinavian, and most East-Central European societies with problematic identities had started earlier to exploit literature and philology for national purposes. Here they played a key role in the struggle for a national language and political independence: reforming the language, writing grammars, textbooks, poems, historical novels, historical dramas, and national literary histories — all these propelled the cultural and political movements towards national self-consciousness. The renewal of a vernacular language and culture came into conflict not only with the hegemonic cultural powers of Germany, Russia, or Turkey, but also with the national aspirations of the neighbors and the minorities within. For example, the Hungarian national awakening and its state-supported projects to strengthen the Hungarian language and literature soon had to face

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both Czech efforts to get recognition within the Habsburg Empire and the national awakening of the country’s Slovak, Romanian, and Croatian minorities. Furthermore, the national renewal movements were often internally split not only between conservatives, liberals, and radicals, but also between advocates of different conceptions of the nation. This was a special problem for the Slavic people. Do all Slavs constitute one language and culture? Do the Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks have a common language and culture? Do the Serbs and the Croats? The Croats and Dalmatians? Which of the Slovak dialects should become the standard one? The leaders of the various national awakenings opted for one among many possibilities, but their choices often became vexing problems for the next generations. Building National Academies, Museums, and Libraries The Hungarian National Museum and its Hungarian National Library were founded in 1802, when Ferenc Széchenyi donated his personal library, his manuscripts, and his coin collections to the nation. The library opened on December 10, 1803. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia) was founded in 1825 upon the initiative of Ferenc’s son, István, under the name Magyar Tudós Társaság (Hungarian Society of Scholars), which first convened in 1831 in Pozsony (Bratislava). Its Division of Linguistics, the first of the six original ones, supervised the publication of the first spelling rules (A magyar helyesírás; 1831) and of a grammar (A magyar nyelv rendszere; 1832). A plan for a dictionary was presented to the Academy in 1839, but the six volumes of Gergely Czuczor’s and János Fogarasi’s A Magyar nyelv szótára (Dictionary of the Hungarian Language) were published only in 1862–74. The Academy’s language-oriented interest in literature was complemented by the literary activities of the Kisfaludy Társaság (Kisfaludy Society), founded in 1837 and named after the romantic poet Károly Kisfaludy. As time passed, the latter held on, however, to a national and folk-poetry oriented concept of literature that was hostile to Modernism. In Prague, a Königlich-böhmische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften / Kralovská česká společnost nauk (Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences) was established in 1790, and a Gesellschaft des vaterländischen Museums in Böhmen / Společnost vlastenského museum v Čechách (Society of the National Museum in Bohemia) in 1820. Both soon became purely Czech institutions. In the Austrian partition of Poland, a Cracow Learned Society was founded in 1815, which became in 1872 the Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci (Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences), a learned and cultural society for the whole country. In Zagreb, Croatia’s limited independence allowed the opening of a Hrvatska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti (Croatian Academy of Learning and Art) in 1867. A Romanian Literary Society was founded in April 1866, renamed a year later Societatea Academică Română (The Romanian Academic Society), and in 1879 Academia Română (The Romanian Academy). Elsewhere, a National Academy could be founded only once the country had achieved independence. Thus, for instance, a Bălgarskata Knižovno Družestvo (Bulgarian Learned Society) was founded in Brăila, Romania in 1869, but its building in Sofia was inaugurated only in 1893 and it achieved full national status only in 1911, when it was renamed the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

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Building National Universities East-Central Europe may have lagged behind Western Europe in establishing National Academies, but it was ahead of it in setting up university chairs for the respective vernacular languages and their literatures. As Eric Hobsbawm writes, “the progress of schools and universities measure that of nationalism, just as schools and especially universities became its most conspicuous champions” (Revolution 166). Indeed, whereas August Wilhelm Schlegel assumed the first German chair in literature (Literatur und die schönen Wissenschaften) in 1818 at the University of Bonn, and the first chair for English literature was established at the University of London only in 1829, Cracow and Prague, among the oldest universities of the Continent, were ahead: Cracow’s chair for Polish literature was established in 1782, and František Martin Pelzel (Pelcl) assumed the new Chair for the Czech language and literature at the Charles University of Prague in 1793. At the University of Pest, establishing a chair for German had to come first (András Frigyes Halitzky), but in 1791 an inter-faculty chair was founded for Hungarian, which was occupied first by the geographer András K. Vályi and then, in 1802, by Miklós Révai, the distinguished Hungarian grammarian, lexicologist, and linguist, who held it until his death in 1807. Juraj Palkovič was appointed to the first Chair for Slavic language and literature at the Lutheran lyceum of Bratislava in 1803; the Serbian gymnasium of Novi Sad (whose director later became Pavel Josef Šafárik) was opened 1810. In the Romanian principality of Moldova, Gheorghe Asachi introduced education in Romanian language at the Academia Mihăileană (Mihăileană Academy), which he opened in 1835. In other countries, foreign domination delayed the process. The study of Estonian was introduced at Tartu University only after 1874 (see ECE 2: 29); Bulgarian became a subject at the Bulgarian National University (now Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski) only in 1888, though “History and Philology” was it’s first and, for a while, only Faculty. Merely enumerating the new chairs in the vernacular would ignore the turbulent history of the universities. The venerable Charles University, for which King Charles IV issued the founding charter on July 4, 1348, became a Jesuit institution in 1622 and reverted to the state after the abolition of the Order in 1773. Non-Catholics were permitted to study there as of 1781, and German replaced Latin as the language of instruction in 1784. A century later, in 1882, the university was split into independent German and Czech universities. Tartu University was founded by King Gustav Adolf of Sweden in 1632, but in 1802 it was legally declared to be the Russian State University in Dorpat, even though its language of instruction was German. During the late-nineteenthcentury Russification, it was renamed in 1895, Imperatorskij Jur’evskij Universitet, with Russian as its official language of instruction. Tartu University became an Estonian institution only once the country became independent in 1918. The universities of Vilnius and Zagreb were founded as Jesuit institutions, in 1579 and 1669 respectively. The latter reopened in 1874 as a secular institution; the former, which was secularized in 1773, became the Imperial University of Vilnius under Russian rule in 1803, but was closed by the Russians after the 1830 Polish uprising and reopened only in 1919, as a Polish university. Warsaw University, founded 1816, was also closed down after the 1830 uprising. The “Main School” reopened with a few departments during a brief liberal intermission in Russian politics but was closed down in the aftermath of the January Uprising of 1863. By contrast, the “Polonization” of the ancient University of Cracow became possible in 1879 within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The University of Latvia was founded on September

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18, 1919 as the Latvian Superior School and renamed University of Latvia in 1923. Tirana was the last capital of the region to open a State University in 1957. The national movements received, however, some of their most important stimulation from students studying at foreign universities. The center of the Slovene national revival was, around 1800, the University of Graz; the University of St. Petersburg was the hotbed of nationalist radicals from Bulgaria and the Baltic countries; the Slovaks Juraj Palkovič, Josef Šafárik, and Jan Kollár were “awakened” at the University of Jena; important nationalist impulses came from the Romanian and Serbian students at the University of Pest and, later, of Vienna. Building National Theaters From Tallinn in the North (where the popular German playwright August von Kotzebue stimulated German theater activity) to Ljubljana, Zagreb and beyond in the South, German language theater dominated the region around 1800. Theaters in the native language had to struggle for money and audience. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, theaters in the vernacular proliferated, and new National Theaters became important conduits of the national sentiments, though they could be built and formally named so only in nations that had a degree of political independence. Warsaw’s Teatr Narodowy, which was based on a company established by king Stanisław Poniatowski as early as 1765, was chronologically the oldest in the region, though it was inaugurated in 1833, not as the National but only as the “Grand” Theater, due objections from the Russian occupiers. The Hungarian National Theater was inaugurated in 1837 and received its final title in 1841 (see Imre’s article pp. 149–53 below). The Romanian National Theater in Bucharest was completed in 1852 but was accorded the status of a national stage only in 1864, through a decree introduced by Prime Minister, historian, and writer Mihail Kogălniceanu. The Czech National Theater (Národní divádlo) opened in 1881 with Smetana’s national opera Libuše. The National Theater of Belgrade opened in 1869 with half of the company that Jovan Đorđević, founder of the Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad, brought with him. Indeed, the Novi Sad Serbian National Theater (the Srpsko narodno pozorište in the Dual Monarchy) had been founded already in 1861, and was as such the oldest, not only in Serbia but in the whole South Slav region. Tartu’s Vanemuine Theater opened in 1870 with Lydia Koidula’s Saaremaa onupoeg (The Saaremaa Cousin). Its new building, inaugurated in 1906 after fire had destroyed the old one in 1903, functioned as a national theater though it did not have that title. The building of the future Latvian National Theater in Riga was inaugurated in 1902, but until World War I it housed a Russian company. It was Ādolf Alunāns, the first Latvian professional actor, director, and playwright, who started in 1868 Riga’s first Latvian theater; it was later run by Hermann Rode-Ebeling, a German who spoke no Latvian. The Nacionālais teātris was founded in 1919; its director 1921–25 was the poet Jānis Rainis, founder of the Dailes Theater (Riga Art Theater) in 1920. The Croatian National Theater was inaugurated in 1895 in the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph. Sofia’s Nationalen Teatr started to function in 1883, but its building was inaugurated only in 1907 (its director for just one year became in 1908 the famous poet Penčo Slaveikov). Ljubljana’s theater was inaugurated in 1892 with a Slovenian drama; Slovenian and German performances were to alternate, but the Slovenians boycotted the German productions and the Austrian community was forced to build its own theater in 1913. The latter became Ljubljana’s drama theater and the former the Ljubljana

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opera. The building of the Slovak National Theater in Bratislava was inaugurated in 1886 as Königliches Freistädtisches Theater but with Ferenc Erkel’s Hungarian opera Bánk Bán; it became Slovenské Národné Divadlo in 1920, after Czechoslovakia became independent. For a number of years, however, German performances also took place in the building. The foregoing thumbnail sketch already indicates that the history of national theater buildings gives an outline of the region’s complex cultural-political history: many buildings were erected as German/Austrian, Hungarian, or Russian theaters and later converted (sometimes twice) by the emerging nation. This is true also of a great many other theaters that came to be called “national.” Thus Prague’s present Státní Opera, inaugurated in 1888 as Neues Deutsches Theater, was built for Prague’s German community, since the German troupe, which formerly used to alternate with a Czech one, had been squeezed out of the Národní divádlo. Brünn’s Stadttheater (inaugurated in 1883) became in 1918 Brno’s Národní Divadlo, which could boast the world premier of Leoš Janáček’s most important operas. Fiume’s Stadttheater (inaugurated in 1885) became Rijeka’s Hrvatsko Narodno Kazaliste. Nagyvárad’s Szigligeti Színház (inaugurated in 1900) became Oradea’s Teatrul de Stat, and Kolozsvár’s Nemzeti Színház (inaugurated in 1906) Cluj’s Teatrul Naţional after 1918. The inauguration of Temesvár’s Franz Joseph Theater in 1875 led to bitter quarrels about language; according to the compromise, performances during the winter were in German, for the rest of the season in Hungarian. As of 1898 only Hungarian performances were allowed, whereas today it functions as Timişoara’s Teatrul Naţional, with performances in Romanian. Today Timişoara also boasts, however, a Deutsches Staatstheater and a Hungarian Állami Csiki Gergely Színház, both started in their present form in 1953. Thorn’s German Stadttheater (inaugurated in 1904) became Torun’s Polish theater in 1918. Of Posen/Poznán’s two theaters, the present Teatr Wielki is used for opera and ballet, but was inaugurated in 1879 as Posen’s principal German theater, in which playing in Polish was prohibited. The present Teatr Polski, built with Polish funds, opened in 1875 to serve Polish national interests. Until the 1890s, it was the only theater in German Poland to perform in Polish. The Städtisches Theater/Teatr miejski of Lemberg (inaugurated in 1900), which performed Polish plays and Polish-Italian operas, became the theater of Polish Lwów in 1919, and Lvov’s Soviet-Ukranian opera and ballet theater in 1939; today if fulfills the same function in the L’viv of independent Ukraine. Chernowitz’s Stadttheater (inaugurated in 1905) became the Romanian Cernăuţi’s Teatrul Naţional in 1922 and the Teatr im. Olgi Kobylyanskoy of the Ukranian Chernivtsi in 1945. Such institutional transformations represent but an episode in the intricate history of ethnic theater in East-Central Europe, which has been ignored (if not suppressed) by theater historians focusing exclusively on the evolution of national traditions. To be sure, similar national interests have recently led Hungarian, German/Austrian, and Russian scholars to study the theater of their respective languages in areas that now belong to independent countries, from Estonia to Romania, Croatia, and Slovenia, but such studies seldom link the formerly dominant traditions to the now dominant national ones. The historical approach of our project attempts to move towards a more synoptic view — for instance by including the Jewish, Russian, and Lithuanian theater in Polish Wilno (see ECE 2: 25) or the German and Hungarian theaters in the Romanian Cluj. A full account would need more multilingual experts and a more radical departure from national perspectives. Several of the provincial theaters mentioned above, as well as Zagreb’s and Sofia’s National Theaters (and a host of Western European theaters) were designed and built by the famous

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Viennese architect duo of Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, in a monumental classical style that had no relation to the local national culture (see, for instance, the photos in Charles Osborne’s Opera House Album). Two forces seem to have brought this about. The first was the prestige of the “metropolitan,” i.e., hegemonic cultural model, which manifested itself not only in the plethora of monumental buildings by Fellner and Helmer, but also in theater buildings that local architects erected in the nineteenth century, such as Bucharest’s Teatrul Naţional, Belgrade’s National Theater, or Miklós Ybl’s Hungarian National Opera House, inaugurated in 1884 and modeled after the Paris opera. The second force behind the classical style of Central and Eastern Europe’s vernacular theaters was the common aspiration of all these nations to become “classic,” or, more specifically, to become the legitimate successors of the classic cultures. Whatever the original motivation, the classicist style facilitated the transfer of buildings from one nation to another (though the Romanians did have to remove some elements of the façades that allegedly expressed Hungarian nationalism). The national architectural styles that did develop after 1900 were inspired by a romantic nationalism that made inroads into East-Central Europe’s Modernism. (Re)constructing the Vernacular The idea that language defines a nation emerged around 1800 and soon became the driving force behind the language revivals that represented everywhere the first phase of the national awakening. The resultant conflicts were of three major types: (1) wrestling with a hegemonic language that had its center outside the region (German and Russian), (2) struggle against languages, for instance Hungarian and Polish, that were politically dominant in some areas where the majority of the local population spoke a different language, and (3) tensions between the various dialects of the same language. East-Central European language revivals primarily opposed German, Latin (most pervasive in Hungary), Russian (powerful in Poland and the Baltic countries), and Old Church Slavonic (among the South Slavic people; see Wilson 101–105, 386–89). In Hungary, Latin was dominant in the schools, Latin and German in government. In 1791 and 1792, the Parliament voted laws that declared Hungarian to be the official language in public offices, but the traditional multi-faceted practice proved to be resilient. Many subsequent laws intended to enforce the use of Hungarian in schools and in public offices, but even the law of 1844 could not fully succeed in establishing the universal use of Hungarian in schools. In Prague, German replaced Latin as the language of instruction at the Charles University in 1784, whereas the government decreed in 1816 that Czech was the official language in secondary education. The Polish language was treated differently in the three partitions. In the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland, Polish was strictly forbidden in schools and public offices in the latter part of the century, whereas in Austrian-governed Galicia Polish was in the 1870s permitted in the schools and at the University of Cracow. In the Baltic countries, the vernacular was suppressed by German as well as Russian authorities, though only the latter adopted explicit laws against the use of the vernacular in public. The Latvian nationalists appealed to Alexander II for help fighting the German language, but the Russian government decreed in 1885 that Russian was the official language, outlawing the use of both German and Latvian. In Lithuania, the public use of the vernacular was forbidden by the Russian authorities in 1864; books had to be smuggled into the country until 1904.

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The imposition of German in the Habsburg Empire under Joseph II had reverse effects in Slovenia, the Czech lands, Hungary, and Austro-Serbia. For instance, Austria’s attempt to replace the Cyrillic script with the Latin one (decreed in 1799 but soon rescinded) and the Austrian preferance for the vernacular at the cost of Church Slavonic (designed also to weaken ties with Russia) were bitterly fought by the Orthodox Church. As we shall see, adoption of the quotidian vernacular was also the aim of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and the other language reformers: the battle against Old Church Slavonic shows that language renewal had both internal and external opponents. For the second category, the marginalization of a local ethnic group by a “revived” major East-European language, we may cite not only Transylvania and Slovakia, but also the cultural marginalization of Greek in Plovdiv and Rumelia at the end of the nineteenth century (ECE 2: 142–44) and the depreciation of Lithuanian and Belorussian as “peasant languages” in the eighteenth. Written Lithuanian had a Baltic grammar and an all but Polish vocabulary. In the end, Simonas Daukantas and the other language reformers succeeded in “upgrading” Lithuanian by using it consistently (ECE 2: 18, 20). Finally, partisans of various dialects fought among themselves to gain a dominant position in standardizing the language. In Croatia, as we shall see, there were three contending dialects, while mountainous Albania had no less than ten different alphabets (ECE 2: 283). In Latvia, the vernacular and its literature emerged in the 1850s, once the language was standardized according to the Central Latvian dialect, mainly through the work of Krišjānis Valdemārs and Krišjānis Barons. Language reform was, curiously, often advocated and studied in another tongue. The early case of Mikalojus Daukša may serve as a paradigm: he wrote a beautiful Polish preface to his Postilla catholicka (Catholic Postilla; 1599), a collection of sermons translated into Lithuanian, in order to plead for the use of Lithuanian. Several centuries later, Atis Kronvalds, a leader of the Latvian national awakening, urged his countrymen to use their vernacular, but his most important pamphlet, the Nationale Bestrebungen (1872), was written in German and published, by necessity, in Estonia. Marko Pohlin’s Slovenian grammar was entitled Kraynska grammatika (1768), but the subtitle reveals that it was written in German: Das ist: Die crainerische Grammatik, oder Kunst die crainerische Sprach regelrichtig zu Reden, und zu Schreiben (that is, Carnolian Grammar, or the Art to Speak and Write Correctly the Carnolian Language). Pohlin presumably wrote primarily for Austrians and not for the indigenous Slovenian population. The next important Slovenian grammar in German, Grammatik der Slavischen Sprache in Krain, Kaernten, und Steyermark (Grammar of the Slavic Language in Carnolia, Carinthia, and Styria; 1808), was written by Jernej [Bartholomäus] Kopitar, a Slovenenian working in Vienna as Imperial censor (!) for Slavonic texts and, later, as Professor and Director of the Library at the University. In 1836, Kopitar published the Glagolita Clozianus (Glagolitic Glossary), a study claiming that the Slovene language was the old church language of all Slavs. Political conditions, academic opportunities, and other factors often forced the philologists of language revival to live abroad. Samuel Gottlieb [Bogumił] Linde, compiler of the first great, six-volume Polish dictionary (1807–14) studied in Leipzig and worked for a while in Vienna. The first two Bulgarian grammars, those of Neofit Rilski (1835) and Ivan Bogorov (1844), were published in Kragujevac and Bucharest respectively. Sami Frashëri, a leader of the Albanian renewal, lived mostly in Istanbul, and became known as a writer in Albanian as well as the author of a series of Turkish dictionaries. His political manifesto Shqipëria — Ç’ka genë, ç’është dhe ç’do

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të bëhetë (Albania — What Was It, What Is It and What Will Become of It; 1899) was published anonymously in Bucharest. Jan Kollár, the bitterest opponent of Ľudovít Štúr’s separation of Slovak and Czech, lived most of his life in Pest. Like Šafárik, he studied at the University of Jena (1817–19), and it was there that he became a pan-Slavist, inspired by the German youth festival in Wartburg and by a passage in Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit that recommended the collection of Slavic songs and legends in order to reconstitute the lost culture and history of the peaceful Slavs (Sämtliche 14: 279–80). Kollár discovered traces of a lost Slavic population around Jena and in much of North-East Germany. In his Slávy dcera (Slava’s Daughter), which consisted of 645 sonnets in the final edition of 1852, Slava, symbol of those erased and bewailed Slavic inhabitants of Germany, merges with the image of Mina Schmidt, daughter of a German minister near Jena, whom Kollár thought dead but rediscovered and married in 1835. She never learned Slovak or Hungarian. The most important East-Central European “ex-pat” philologist was Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, who fled to Vienna during the Serbian-Turkish war in November 1813 and remained in residence there throughout the creative period of his life. In Vienna, he found Kopitar, his great mentor, who not only stimulated him to engage in folklore collecting and linguistic studies but also publicized his work in the world, especially among German scholars and writers. Karadžić produced within a year his Pismenica serbskoga jezika (Orthography of the Serbian Language), which advocated the principle, “speak as you write; and read as it is written” (Preface to Pismenica; qtd, in Wilson 105). The Orthodox Church insisted on retaining Old Slavonic spelling, and advancement of the language reform in Miloš Obrenović’s Serbia was hampered by Karadžić’s problematic and fluctuating relation to the Serbian potentate. But his grammar (as well as his folk-poetry collections) was received warmly in Germany: Jacob Grimm himself participated in translating and editing the second version of his grammar, which appeared under the title Wuk’s Stephanowitsch kleine Serbische Grammatik (1924). Grimm thought it was a “strange misconception (Wahn)” that Serb churchmen and scholars regarded the vernacular (which they themselves used daily) as a corruption of the Cyrillic Church language fit only for herders and peasants (Wuk’s Stephanowitsch xii f). Accordingly, Grimm praised Vuk for reestablishing the prestige of the vernacular, and for advocating an orthography that was close to the spoken language (xxii). The Croats, 75% Catholic, did not have to contend with the Orthodox Church but they had to choose among the Štokavski, the Čakavski, and the Kajkavski dialects. This became a particularly vexing problem for the Illyrians, who adopted a Napoleonic designation for their Croatian national movement (1832–48) that was initially supported even by Metternich. Ljudevit Gaj, leader of the Illyrians, first chose the Kajkavski dialect but switched in 1830 to the Štokavski, which was closest to Vuk’s Serbian. Karadžić himself sympathized with the Illyrians and became signatory of the 1850 Vienna Književni dogovor (Literary Agreement) on bringing together the two languages. Hence the title of Tomo Maretić’s grammar half a century later: Grammatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika (Grammar and Stylistics of the Croatian or Serbian Literary Language; 1899). But Serbo-Croatian has come under heavy fire after Croatia’s separation from Yugoslavia in 1991 and the Croatian language is now moving away from its parental matrix. Similar problems dogged the revival of the Czech and Slovak languages. František Martin Pelzel laid the groundwork for the Czech revival with his Grundsätze der böhmischen Grammatik (Principles of the Czech Grammar; 1795), but Josef Dobrovský, the “patriarch” of Slavic

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philology, introduced later the pan-Slav view that all Slavic languages descended from a single original one. For Dobrovský, patriotic and popular Czech literature was not to be confounded with the science of linguistics. This made him unpopular with the upcoming romantic philologists, among them Josef Jakub Jungmann, who was a translator as well as a linguist: much of his life he translated foreign literature into Czech and compiled a Czech literary history (1825 and 1845), whereas his major linguistic achievement, the five-volume Slowník česko-nĕmecký (Czech-German Dictionary), appeared only in 1834–39. Dobrovský’s conception of an original single Slavic language found sympathy with Kopitar and the pan-Slavists but ran against particularistic currents in Slovakia. Anton Bernolák, a Jesuit from Bratislava, established in 1817 Slovak norms to make Slovak literature widely accessible, but his attempt was opposed by those who wanted to keep the unity with the Czech language, and by those who opposed a codification based on the dialect of Catholic Eastern Slovakia around Bratislava. Facing a choice between adopting the language of a strong Slavic neighbor or creating a standard based on a Slovak dialect, the Slovaks, unlike the Croats, opted for the latter: Ľudovít Štúr selected the Central-Slovak dialect as the standard, and he managed to reach in 1843 an agreement with the Catholic Ján Hollý, a representative of Bernolák’s view. In 1845, Štúr was permitted to start a Slovak-language journal, the Slovenskje narodňje novini (Slovak National News) and its literary supplement Orol tatránski (The Tatra Eagle). He hoped to make Slovak more palatable to the Hungarians by regarding Czech as corrupted by German, though he turned against the Hungarians after 1848 and came to believe in Russian pan-Slavism. A modified version of his codification was adopted in 1851, and in 1860 Jozef Karol Viktorin published (in Pest!) a corresponding Grammatik der slowakischen Sprache. Main opposition to Štúrist Slovak came from the Czech historian František Palacký and the two above-mentioned pan-Slavist Slovaks living abroad: Šafárik and Kollár. The former published his studies on the common Slavic traditions in Prague (hence the frequent Czech orthography of his name: Šafařík), while Kollár, a Lutheran minister of the Slovak community in Pest, published in 1836 an essay on the “reciprocity” (vzájemnost) between the Slavic languages and literatures. For Kollár, the schism was a “sin against civilization”: the Slovak language was for pigs, coachmen, and kitchen personnel. In 1846, Šafárik, Kollár, and others protested against Štúr’s “secession” by publishing the Hlasowé o potřebě jednoty spisowného jazyka pro Čechy, Morawany a Slowáky (Voices on the Need for a United Literary Language for Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks). The Slovenian language awakening, which had started in the eighteenth century with Pohlin’s grammar and other publications, led in the early nineteenth century to a “War of the Alphabets” that pitted traditionalists in matters of spelling and characters against the innovators, who wanted to simplify spelling and get away from the “Bohorič” spelling introduced by Adam Bohorič back in the sixteenth century. Kopitar, following Vuk, wanted to simplify that spelling, and Franc Metelko proposed in 1825 the “metelčica,” a “phonetically worthy but graphically bizarre concoction, which supplemented the standard Latin alphabet with new variants and Cyrillic characters” (Henry Leeming in Pynsent, Companion 547). It was forbidden in 1833. A second spelling, the “dajnčica” that Peter Dajnko developed in 1824, avoided Cyrillic characters but employed some strange graphic marks. It was used in the northeastern part of Slovenia and in about 50,000 copies of religious books before it was prohibited in 1838. With the exception of Stanko Vraz, who

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moved to Zagreb, the Slovenes were less than enthusiastic about the Croat Illyrian movement, but since they had to fend off the overbearing Austrians they started to adopt Gaj’s spelling in the mid-1840s, and accepted the “gajica” as their standard in 1848. The linguistic reforms of the region’s non-Slavic languages — the Baltic ones, Hungarian, and Romanian — ran along somewhat different lines. Hungarian and Romanian language reformers also had to battle defenders of the tradition (the Hungarian “orthologists” and the Romanians who favored the Cyrillic script), but no schisms came about. Romanian language reform was furthered by the Transylvanian School (see ECE 2: 255–56). The first edition of Samuil Micu-Klein’s and Gheorghe Şincai’s Romanian grammar, the Elementa (1780), was followed by Micu-Klein’s and Petru Maior’s Lexicon românescu-latinescu-ungurescu-nemţescu (Romanian-Latin-Hungarian-German Dictionary; 1825). Miklós Révai published his two-volume Elaboratio grammatica hungarica in 1803–1806. Last but not least, we have to consider two unique revivals, of Yiddish and Hebrew, which were intimately linked to the general trends in the region (see ECE 2: 326–28). Like the other EastCentral European linguistic and cultural reforms, the revivals of Yiddish and Hebrew responded to Enlightenment ideals, in this case specifically to the Haskala, assimilationist theories emanating from Moses Mendelssohn and his circle in Germany. Due to Haskala’s initial success, the Yiddish and Hebrew revivals emerged only towards the end of the nineteenth century, in connection with the birth and growth of Zionism, a special nationalist revival. The first Yiddish Language Conference, organized by Nathan Birnbaum, took place in 1908 in Czernowitz, “ostensibly to regularize the grammar, syntax, and orthography of the Yiddish language. But Khayim Zhitlovski, a leading ideologue of Yiddish language and culture, sought to present Yiddish as the sole language of contemporary Jewish experience” (Wolitz, ECE 2: 326). The rivalry was unique even on a purely linguistic level, for unlike Croatian and Serbian or Czech and Slovak, Hebrew and Yiddish represented two radically different languages and cultures, both of which lived embedded in other linguistic environments (Russian, Polish etc.) that had reached already more advanced stages in their own awakening. Esperanto was invented by an Ashkenazi Jew, Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof, as an attempt to overcome this Babel. Vernacular Literatures and Cultures Language reform was in East-Central Europe as much a concern of poets as of lexicographers, grammarians, and linguists. The Hungarian poet György Bessenyei championed Hungarian (rather than Latin) poetry as early as the 1770s, not for its own sake but mainly as a way to develop a rich and supple scholarly language. Living as a guardsman at the court in Vienna, Bessenyei knew German and French, envied their richness, and urged that works from these languages be translated. He also advocated the establishment of a learned society that would control language use by preparing a grammar, a dictionary, and a Hungarian theater for the cultivation of the language. The real language battle started under the leadership of Ferenc Kazinczy around 1811. Like Bessenyei, Kazinczy advocated the use of translations, but now in order to refine Hungarian literature rather than to advance learning. The Hungarian language would be best furthered by appropriating the finest works that luckier nations had produced; creating original works, however beautiful, should not be the primary aim (Levelek 3: 41). As a “neologus” seeking variety and color, Kazinczy was

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ready to adopt foreign words, expressions, and sometimes even syntax, to enrich the Hungarian language. For the “orthologists,” who clung to the heritage in order to protect the alleged unity of the language, this was language corruption (Kazinczy, “Orthologus és Neologus”; 1819). As Kazinczy wrote in his poetic epistle “Vitkovics Mihály barátomhoz” (To My Friend Mihály Vitkovics; 1811), the orthologists admire speakers whose “beautiful language is unmixed with others […] who speak as they write — in a word who came from us, grew up with us, stayed with us.” Unlike Vuk, Kazinczy did not admire those “who speak as they write,” for he wanted to elevate rather than lower everyday language. The Czech Jungmann wanted, like Kazinczy, to open a window to the world by means of translations and adaptations: he translated works by Milton, Chateaubriand, Goethe, and many other Western authors in order to refine the Czech language. He was especially eager to translate and adapt words from the Slavic languages, as a step towards reuniting them. Most of his neologisms did catch on. Although Dobrovský had established already in 1798 (in a postscript to Pelzel’s mentioned grammar) that Czech prosody was accentual (syllabotonic), Jungmann followed Palacký’s and Šafárik’s Počátkowé Českého básnjetvj, obwzlásstĕ prozodye (The Beginnings of Czech Poetry, Especially of Prosody; 1818) by claiming — surely, in part to distinguish Czech prosody from the accentual German one — that Czech prosody was quantitative. Štúr’s standard of Slovak received a literary “ratification” a year after the 1843 agreement, when Jozef Miloslav Hurban published the second volume of the almanac Nitra as the first book in Štúrist Slovak. The new language was then popularized by Janko Král and most of the Slovak poets. At the end of eighteenth century, Ienăchiţă Văcărescu and his sons Alecu and Nicolae fitted the Romanian language to the needs of lyrical poetry by writing compositions that mixed classical themes with folk rhythms and motifs; however, it was Mihai Eminescu almost a century later who turned the Romanian vernacular into a sophisticated modern poetic language, one that reflected both national experience and European modes of expression. The language reform of the Croat Illyrian movement was reconfirmed above all by Petar Preradović, who started to write poetry in German but became a leader in using the newly codified language for poetic purposes. Vuk’s reform of the Serbian language received a literary confirmation when Branko Radičević demonstrated with his Pjesme (Poems; 1847) that Karadžić’s nativist conception of language was suitable for writing non-folkloric poetry. The Slovene language was reinforced after the War of Alphabets by the poetry of France Prešeren. In Bulgaria, the long Ottoman occupation delayed the emergence of a literary culture in the vernacular. In the 1840s and 50s, the nation’s intelligentsia was mostly educated in the Russian schools and universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Odessa, although some Bulgarians attended Romanian educational institutions and Czech, French, or Austrian universities; quite a few of them studied in the Ottoman Empire (see Genčev). Many returning foreign graduates committed themselves to the modernization of the Bulgarian schools according to models they came to know abroad. The Russian trained Naiden Gerov and Botyo Petkov founded the first Bulgarian “class” schools (secondary school between elementary and high schools), in which the teaching of Bulgarian history was introduced in 1851–52 and soon became obligatory everywhere. It is worth noting that a Czech historian, Josef Jireček, became Bulgaria’s Minister of Education in 1881. He was subsequently Director of the National Library.

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In Bulgaria, too, translations made an important contribution to the development of a literary language, but the first popular translations of foreign fiction were made from already translated versions (e.g., from Defoe in French translation) rather than from the original. They readily departed from their source by changing the foreign names, the setting, and other cultural details (Aretov; Lekov, Pisatel 197–209). Most popular were Fénelon’s Telemachus, Defoe’s Robinson, Karamzin’s Bednaya Liza (Poor Liza) and Natalia (both of 1792), an adaptation of Dositej Obradović’s Dve prikazki za slavnite ženi i za Aza čelovekomrazetsa (Two Tales of Famous Women and Aza, the Misanthrope; 1853), Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, and the anonymous Istoriya na velikii Aleksandra Makedontsa (The Story of the Great Macedonian Alexander). The first important figure of original Bulgarian literature was Naiden Gerov, who wrote the first Bulgarian fictional travel story, and the first Bulgarian narrative poem, “Stoyan i Rada” (1845). The latter made pioneering use of the hitherto artistically depreciated folklore. Gerov tells a traditional story about a mother who rejects her son’s beloved, so that the lovers can only be one in death, but he legitimizes the son’s sentimental excesses in a culture that permits only timid expressions of sensuality. “Stoyan i Rada” was in this sense new. Gerov published also a good number of non-poetic texts but left many of his poems unpublished for he considered “dabbling” in poetry as unworthy of the high positions he came occupy as the Russian vice-consul in Plovdiv (1857–) and the governor of Svištov after Liberation (1879). By the end of the 1850s, Bulgarian writers started to write original lyric poetry in the vernacular. Konstantin Miladinov, for instance, used a simple language in “Želanie” (Desire) to express emotional fluctuations; he conveyed homesickness in “Taga za yug” (Grief for the South) and other moving poems; whereas he injected humor into the rather somber nationalist poetry of his age in “Gark i bălgarin” (A Greek and a Bulgarian) and “Egyptin Delia,” (Topalov 271–89). Dobri Čintulov (Topalov 292–98) published only three poems — “Stara majka se proštava sas sina si” (An Old Mother Bidding Farewell to Her Son), “Izprovodjak na ednogo bălgarina iz Odesa” (At Parting with a Bulgarian from Odessa), and “Kitka iz Balkana” (A Nosegay from the Balkan) — the rest circulated in manuscripts and was sung. The revolutionary and patriotic “Stani, stani, yunak balkanski” (Get up, Get up Balkan Hero), and “Kade si, vjarna ti ljubov narodna” (Where Are You, Faithful Love of the People) are still included in the school curricula. In Estonia, Lydia Koidula transposed German language, style, and prosody to establish poetic models for the still diffuse Estonian language. In Latvia, Juris Alunāns’s Dziesmiņas (Songs; 1856) had an important role in shaping the Latvian language. The first genuine Latvian novel, Reinis and Matīss Kaudzīte’s Mēnieku laiki (The Times of the Land Surveyors), appeared only in 1879. Cultural and Literary Societies From the end of the eighteenth century onward, both language and cultural renewal were stimulated by the formation of clubs and societies. Leaving aside the various smaller and ephemeral scientific, technological, and scholarly societies (for the Slavic ones see Kimball), we mention the Estonian Learned Society (Gelehrte Estnische Gesellschaft), founded at Tartu university in 1838 by Friedrich Robert Faehlmann and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, the “authors” of the folk epos Kalevipoeg. In the 1870s, chapters of that epic were declaimed in evening gatherings, which led to the foundation of the student society Vironia (1873–81). Kollár’s Spolok milovníkov

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reči a literatúry slovenskej (Society of the Friends of the Slovak Language and Literature; 1834) published the almanac Zora (Dawn; 1835–36, 1939, 1840); the Tatrín Society (1844–47), also Slovak but with a different agenda, was founded by Štúr, Michal Miroslav Hodža, and others. The seminal Romanian society Junimea (Youth) was founded in 1864 by the critic Titu Maiorescu and four other young writers, journalists, and politicians; this core group soon rallied distinguished representatives in literature, philosophy, history, linguistics, law, and science. The reading clubs that emerged in various parts of East-Central Europe were modeled after the French cabinets de lecture, the British Reading Rooms, and the German Lesevereine and Lesegesellschaften, but went beyond book lending by accommodating a variety of cultural activities with a national agenda (see Kimball). A reading society (čtenařský spolek) was founded in the Bohemian town of Radnice already in 1818; Kollár’s and Martin Hamuljak’s Slovak Reading Club (Slovenský čitatelský spolok; 1826) was established in Pest. Reading rooms were especially numerous and strong in Croatia. The first one in Varaždin (1837) was followed by the Karlovac čitanoica and the Illyrian Reading Room of Zagreb, both in 1838. The latter was presided over by Count Janko Drašković, a key public figure in the Illyrian movement. A Serbian reading room was established in Novi Sad in 1842. Slovenian reading rooms started in Trieste (1861), Maribor (1862), and Ljubljana (National Reading Room, 1865), and numbered seventy-seven by 1900. Bulgaria’s first čitalište, founded in 1856 in Šumen, Svištov, and Lom, were patterned after the Greek sylogoses, the Serb čitališta, and the cultural organizations of Hungarian and Polish emigrants who settled in Bulgaria after 1848–49. Forging National Canons National identity was forged by means of collected, reworked, cultivated, and canonized texts, which became founding documents and symbols of the nation. As Friedrich Schlegel envisaged, each self-respecting nation had to recuperate the myths, legends, folk songs, and founding narratives of its (presumed) pre-historic past (ECE 1: 8). Constructing a distant past involved recording an oral tradition (Karadžić and his followers), forging founding documents (Václav Hanka and others), assembling national epics from collected songs (Elias Lönnrot, Faehlmann, etc.), or writing new national epics (Arany, Buda halála; Bolintineanu, Traianida) The former three approaches were delegated to the philologists, the latter one to the poets — though it must be added, as we shall show in greater detail in the introduction to Part III below, that the philologists often surreptitiously arrogated themselves creative tasks by either reshaping what they found or just forging documents of the past. The philologists further contributed to the national program by, (1) canonizing national poets (an issue treated in the fourth volume of our History), (2) writing histories of the national literatures (see Part IV below), (3) training the future teachers and scholars of the vernacular language and literature, and (4) (re)editing older texts in the vernacular. The creative writers of East-Central Europe participated in the cultural politics of the national awakening by writing historical novels and dramas. As discussed in a section of our first volume (ECE 1: 463–511), the East-Central European historical novelists reacted to Walter Scott but developed their own themes, usually with material from their own national history. Only few of them (e.g., Henryk Sienkiewicz in Quo vadis? or Dezső Kosztolányi in Nero) chose settings outside the region. Historical dramas were far less numerous, though many national operas were based

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on events in the history of the nation. The emerging professional historians accused the writers of national histories and dramas of being subjective and cavalier with the facts, but the fiction writers, who often reached a larger public, were irritatingly popular rivals to them. In retrospect, the historians who claimed objectivity tended to be as swayed by national ideologies as the writers of historical fiction. Scholars and historians usually selected national poets from previous ages or generations. Few national poets were canonized during their lifetime. The preference of the Poles shifted only slowly from the Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski to the exiled romantic Mickiewicz — in part because the works of the latter could not be published at home. The Czechs, especially the populists, had for some time difficulty in accepting the highly individual voice of Karel Hynek Mácha. The Hungarians preferred for quite a while Mihály Vörösmarty to Sándor Petőfi. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, all peoples of East-Central Europe possessed national poet-heroes, who were chosen for their national engagement as much as for the brilliance of their writing. Next to the mentioned ones we find the Serb/Montenegrin Petar Petrović Njegoš, the Romanian Mihai Eminescu, the Bulgarian Khristo Botev, and the Slovene France Prešeren. The philologists erected national monuments for them, but some of these monuments started to corrode in the new political and aesthetic climate of the twentieth-century. Ferenc Kölcsey and István Széchenyi: What Are National Traditions? The Hungarian generation after Kazinczy went beyond his premises by reflecting on the contribution of language to national identity. Kölcsey, the author the poem “Hymnusz” (1823), which became the national anthem when Ferenc Erkel set it to music (1844), had a major role in creating a self-image for the Hungarians. Four of his other works also have exerted a decisive influence on the interpretation of Hungarian identity: “Zrínyi éneke” (Zrínyi´s Song; 1830) and “Zrínyi második éneke” (Zrínyi´s Second Song; 1838), two visionary poems that predicted the death of the nation; and two longer essays published in 1826: “Mohács,” a meditation on the disastrous battle of 1526, and “Nemzeti hagyományok” (National Traditions), a defense of folklore that constitutes Kölcsey’s most important reflection on Hungarian national identity. Kölcsey believed that culture was based on collective memory, and he assumed that the highest form of poetry was “deeply rooted in national traditions” and stood “close to the nation” (Összes művei 1: 505–506). Hence, national character emerged from early history; orality was superior to writing. Yet Kölcsey also believed that the past is rewritten by an ever-changing present, and that, accordingly, “the disappearance of tradition makes it impossible for us to develop an authentic interpretation of the characteristics of the past” (513), for “in a late phase of culture the ancient is given the features of the present age” (514). Nevertheless, the opening words of his essay describe the lives of nations in terms of human life cycles: “Nations have the same phases in their life as individuals. Their childhood is followed first by the promises of youth, and later by the strength of maturity, which, in turn, is replaced by the decline of old age” (490). How does this teleology, which gave structure to so many national histories, square with the notion of a continually rewritten history? The fundamental question for Kölcsey was whether the legacy of the early Hungarian people was sufficient for the survival of Hungarian culture. No culture could do without foreign influence,

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yet imitation indicated a weak native tradition. Kölcsey’s notion of language reform confirmed the vernacular, yet aimed at creating a standardized and “polished” idiom, purged of local dialect. “Nemzeti hagyományok” marked a shift away from the view that traditional rural culture was a barbarity that had to be forgotten for the primary task of the nation was to absorb the culture of Europe. Kölcsey believed that borrowings and translations could offer only a faint support for native poetry. A national poetry had to be inspired by simple epic and lyric folk poetry that would be intimately tied to the national tradition inherited from heroic times. Kölcsey noted with regret (as did later János Arany) that Hungarian folk poetry was not very ancient; yet, in contrast to Kazinczy, he believed that “Hungarians can achieve originality by the use of their language” (508). He regretted that Janus Pannonius “used a Roman lute when singing fine yet foreign songs” during the Renaissance, when poetry in the vernacular was on the rise (515). For Kölcsey, Hungarian literature was the legacy of Hungary’s historical memory, belief system, and way of life. This language-based conception of a nation’s imagined community was for him the most obvious manifestation of the role that texts played in shaping national identity. Kölcsey’s words encouraged artists and writers to claim that Hungary represented a unique cultural entity that emerged from a distinctive landscape. For Petőfi and others in the 1840s, the puszta became an icon of national identity, whereas the long epic poems Zalán futása (Zalán’s Flight; 1825) by Vörösmarty and Buda halála (Buda’s Death; 1863) by Arany expressed a deep sense of belonging to one’s own land and folk. Partly due to Kölcsey´s influence, some nineteenthcentury Hungarian writers came to regard literature as a means of preserving a national tradition threatened by cosmopolitanism. In “Magyar irodalom” (Hungarian Literature; 1913), and its counterpart, Az európai irodalom története (History of European Literature; 1934–35), Mihály Babits outlined in the twentieth century a different interpretation of Kölcsey’s essay: the development of a culture depends not only on its originality and unity but also on the multiplicity of the tasks it can handle in order to reach a nation’s main goal, namely dialogue with other cultures. In this reading, the preservation of one’s identity is linked to tolerance towards others, which is a precondition of culture for it allows us to look at our own community from outside. In contrast to Kölcsey, István Széchenyi wanted to imagine and create a nation, and he often entertained the idea that national characters are created by means of writing. The closing sentence of his most influential book, Hitel (Credit; 1830), became a slogan: “Many think that Hungary has been; I like to believe that she will be” (492). In Széchenyi’s view, national character “may be influenced both by the will and the climate, but is not the effect of either. Government and education are the grand and efficient causes in the formation of character both public and private” (Naplói 1: 577; April 7, 1819). A diary entry a month later reveals that Széchenyi was more skeptical about national traditions than Kölcsey: A nation emerges just as a child is born; it goes through the years of adolescence, youth, manhood, and old age and finally dies off completely. The only difference between the afterlife of a nation and a human being is that the corpse of a human being is eaten by worms and completely ceases to exist, whereas the dead body of a nation may vegetate for many more years. Whether a nation is going to be great or remain insubstantial depends as much on accident as on the education that it received in its childhood years. (Naplói 1: 629)

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Széchenyi’s view on Hungary’s national traditions oscillated. He could devastatingly remark: “We have no national habits; our existence and knowledge depend on imitation. Unlike other nations, we stick to the old and are superficial in imitating others” (Világ 72). In the same work he considered Hungary “an old fortress that needs restoration”; yet a page later he wrote: “The Hungarian is but a child. He has not achieved anything yet but the psychic and physical energy hidden in his young soul may enable him to do great things” (Világ 101–102, 103). Ultimately, Széchenyi believed that his identity was defined by language: “I have received my language from God and I will return it to Him upon my death” (Speech in the Upper House, November 30, 1835; Művei 1: 692). For Széchenyi, national character was a product of literature. In Por és sár (Dust and Mud), he wrote on June 13, 1858 that unless a nation has figures like Schiller, Alfieri, Moore, Berzsenyi, and Vörösmarty it will “sink to the level of a machine and may achieve material but no spiritual prosperity” (Hagyatéka 862–63). Széchenyi must have believed then that a Hungary that produced Berzsenyi and Vörösmarty could achieve “spiritual prosperity”; yet the pessimistic vision he expressed in the Upper House on October 2, 1844 contradicts this, perhaps only for rhetorical purposes: “It may be possible that those who will replace us will be more honest and intelligent, but I am certain that they will not be Hungarians” (Beszédei 358). Such beliefs and doubts about national traditions surfaced in all national renewals during the nineteenth century, for all calls for renewal assumed that the present was corrupt and decadent by contrast to the glorious past conjured up by literature. Modernism, to be discussed in what follows, drastically changed the parameters of this vision. II Modernism By the end of nineteenth century, East-Central Europe’s literature and philology had acquired intense national colors. But its full range of national institutions emerged only after World War I, when the Baltic countries and Czechoslovakia became independent for the first time, when Poland regained its independence, and when Croatia, the Voivodina, Transylvania, and other formerly Austro-Hungarian territories became part of greater Yugoslavia and Romania. The losers were Hungary, which also became fully independent but lost in the process much of its population, territory, and self-image, the Ukraine, which incorporated parts of Galicia, Bucovina, and the Carpatho-Ukraine but became after protracted fights part of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, and Lithuania, which gained independence but without Vilnius, which became part of Poland. The new map of the region meant for most nations, except for the latter three, a culmination of their national renewal, and an opportunity to develop additional national literary institutions: German, Russian, and Hungarian theaters and universities were converted into Czechoslovakian, Baltic, and Romanian institutions, and virtually all “foreign” publishers, journals, and literary associations were curtailed or closed down. In the new countries, but also in truncated and irredentist Hungary, most literary institutions became more intensely nationalistic by furthering, praising, and glorifying a national literary culture that allegedly rose from indigenous roots in folk art. As we shall show in the introduction to Part III, this led to the growth of populist (or “agrarian nationalist”), literary, cultural, and political movements. They were perhaps strongest in Hungary and

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Romania, the non-Slavic countries of the region that worried about losing their identity, but they were alive and kicking in Poland as well. Yet this national, now official literary culture represented only one aspect of literary life in early-twentieth-century East-Central Europe. It was countered by new aesthetic and cosmopolitan literary currents that reached the region from the West in the decades before and after 1900. Symbolism, Decadence, Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and other currents that we designate here with the generic term Modernism came from the West and sometimes from Russia, but underwent radical modifications when encountering the nationalist, populist, and often still romantic local literary traditions. Some trends, like Dada, emerged simultaneously in East-Central Europe and the West; Western Surrealism itself was replenished and reoriented later by new EastCentral European directions such as that promoted by the Czech avant-gardes and the Romanians Gherasim Luca and D[olfi] Trost. The resultant hybrid constellations became, for the better or worse, unique for the region. Modernism and the Avant-garde were already discussed by Péter Krasztev and Endre Bojtár in our first volume (ECE 1: 332–48 and 364–73 respectively), we shall therefore focus now on those important movements and institutional changes they have not covered. In so doing, we shall leave publication and censorship for the introduction to Part I below. As mentioned above, the national institutions emerged at different times for they depended on social or governmental support, which, in turn, was a function of the economic and political situation. By contrast, the modernist literary movements were primarily intra-cultural and intra-literary events that cropped up almost everywhere in a relatively short time, when waves of Western artistic innovations reached the region. They were also subject to economic and political factors but proved more flexible in coping with them. The Polish positivists of the 1870s (see the introduction to Part I), the first in the region to break with the nationalist-romantic tradition, were more concerned with economics and social justice than literature. Literary Modernism emerged in East-Central Europe later, during the decades around 1900. Moving from North to South we note the Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia) movement that Gustav Suits started in 1905, and the Latvian Jaunā Stravā (New Trend) of Jānis Rainis, Aspazija and others, which started in the early 1890s and was dismantled in 1897, when the Tsarist authorities jailed some members and forced others into exile. The Młoda Polska started in 1897 in Cracow, involving there Stanisław Wyspiański and Stanisław Przybyszewski, who returned from Germany in 1898 and assumed the editorship of the journal Życie (Life; 1897–1800). Artur Górski published 1897–1900 in this journal a series of articles entitled “Młoda Polska.” In 1880, Alexandru Macedonski began publishing in Bucharest the magazine Literatorul (The Literary Worker), which launched a generation of young writers interested in replacing the dominant classicist and romantic trends of the nineteenth century with the emerging Symbolism. The Prague group Hlas (The Voice) with its eponymous periodical (1898 and 1904) criticized the pseudo-Romantic adoration of the peasantry and the political orientation towards Tsarist Russia; the Ukranian Moloda Muza (Young Muse; 1906–) in L’viv turned from Realism to Western currents concerned with aesthetic value. The Croatian “Moderna” (and several other modernist movements) was no radical rupture with the past, “but a logical continuation, reaction, and development from the realism and naturalism of the end of the nineteenth century” that has no corresponding movement in Serbian poetry

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(Lord, “Nationalism” 278 and 285). The Albanian Bashkimi (Union) literary society was founded in 1899 by Gjergj Fishta and others. We may include here also the Vesela Bălgariya (Merry Bulgaria), a Bulgarian bohemian circle around Aleko Konstantinov, who mocked Bulgarian national characters in Bay Ganyo (1895). The radical modernist theater innovations will be discussed in the second section of Part II below. Suffice to mention here, next to Przybyszewski and Wyspiański, the playwrights and directors Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Leon Schiller, Sándor Hevesi, Geo Milev, Jaroslav Kvapil, Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich (V+W), Emil František Burian, Josef and Karel Čapek, Stjepan Miletić, Branko Gavella, Miroslav Krleža, and Camil Petrescu. Cabarets and Literary Cafés The most important new literary institutions, cabaret and literary café, were private rather than national, and nestled both at the center and the periphery of modernist culture. Of course, cafés had existed in Europe since the seventeenth century, and some of them played a historical role in the nineteenth. The Pilvax Café in Pest, for instance, was a gathering place of the young radical writers and intellectuals in 1848. The literary cafés that emerged during the decades around 1900

Figure 1. Frigyes Karinthy in a kávéház. Courtesy of the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (National Széchényi Library), Budapest, Hungary.

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fulfilled, however, different functions. They treated the literati not only to a great variety of domestic and international papers, but often also to game-, card-, and chess rooms. The literary cafés were sites for editorial gatherings, for discussions on the topics of the day, for solitary writing, for drinking, and occasionally for debauchery. As such, they often served as alternatives to domestic life, and Ferenc Molnár could hold them, tongue in cheek, responsible for the decline of family life (see his “pesti társaság”). Indeed, these spaces of homosociability lured away the husbands and fathers from the family and were only reluctantly hospitable to women. Female writers, at least in Hungary, could infiltrate the cafés only slowly, though by 1930 Budapest’s Centrál kávéház became the gathering place of the Hungarian women writers as well. Molnár accompanied his criticism with surely exaggerated praise. The availability of the latest oral and printed information, he claimed, made the literary cafés into something like the Roman agoras, sites where public opinion and judgment were instantaneously generated and disseminated (“pesti társaság”). For Kosztolányi, Budapest was “The Coffee-City” (see “kávéváros”), and everything beautiful and elevated, everything that was more than “this wretched life” would take off from its cafés (“Előkelő kávéház”). Arthur Koestler, in turn, called the cafés “Budapest’s literary ghettos” (láthatatlan 193) — perhaps also because so many of the guests were Jewish. The literary café was not only a key institution of modernist literature but also the subject of innumerable anecdotes, humorous sketches, and slightly melancholy recollections, written mostly for newspapers. More than one text speaks of the cafés’ owner and personnel, or the passing away of a head-waiter. Ernő Szép remarked in a touching farewell piece for the head-waiter at Budapest’s New York Kávéház that Gyula Reisz paid the difference between the writer’s fate and illusion, meaning that he was often willing to pay for the coffee that a destitute writer could not afford (“Egy főúr halálára”); Emil Artur Longen remembered František Patera, the legendary but blunt head-waiter of Prague’s Café Union, as a national artist of sorts who always warned him when the police looked for him (Jähn 54). František Langer lovingly evoked the many small rooms, the special atmosphere, and the odd artists and writers of Prague’s Café Union (Jähn 7–30), while Zdeněk Kratochvíl made fun of its odd owner (Jähn 170–75). The “Narkav” (Národní kavárna = National Coffee House) was where the leftist group Devětsil (see ECE 2: 178–81 and below) usually gathered in 1923–24. Café Slavia across from the National Theater was the gathering place of actors as well as writers. Each literary café had its own physical complexion, its degree of luxury or nonchalant disorder, its own clientele with a particular political orientation. The political anarchists of the Narkav were not comparable to the rather bourgeois literati of Budapest’s New York Kávéház. Yet again different was the café Pod Pikadorem (Under the Sign of the Picador) that opened on November 29, 1918, right after Poland regained its independence, or the literary café Capşa, originally associated with the symbolist poet Ion Minulescu but later the site for literary disputes between different trends and their representatives. The cabaret, which emerged in Paris in the 1880s and in Berlin with the Überbrettl in 1901, reached the Central European cities in the first decade of the new century. The first Polish cabaret, the Zielony Balonik (Green Balloon; 1905–12), was established as improvised entertainment by a close group of Cracow bohemian artists, which included the writers Tadeusz Żeleński-Boy and Adolf Nowaczyński, who usually met in the Jan Michalik café (see Fox, p. 203 below). In Warsaw, Arnold Szyfman founded the artistic and literary cabaret Momus (1908–12).

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Figure 2. The First Budapest Cabaret: The Bonnbonière.

Budapest’s first genuine cabaret, the Fővárosi Cabaret Bonnbonière, opened on March 1, 1907 with Endre Nagy as its key figure. It operated until 1910, but Nagy, the leading genius of the new genre, opened in 1908 his own Nagy Endre Kabaré. At the heart of his cabaret was the konferanszié, a kind of Master of Ceremony that commented with bitter but engaging irony on the events of the day while introducing the next number, which could be a slightly sentimental chanson, a kuplé (ironic-humorous ditty), or a short dialogue. Nagy had studied law and had worked as a journalist in Nagyvárad (Oradea), where he met Endre Ady and became one of his best, lifelong friends. Ady wrote texts for Nagy’s cabaret, as did Babits, Kosztolányi, Molnár, Szép, and many other leading writers. Nagy, a great artist of the spoken word, also wrote novels, novellas, and plays, and he published at the end of his life an autobiographical history of the cabaret (A kabaré regénye; 1935). His tradition was carried on by Tamás Emőd (also from Nagyvárad), who wrote some 300 lyrics and 80 one-act plays besides being the artistic director of several cabarets. The third important writer for the early cabaret, Andor Gábor, fled after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and survived World War II as an exile in Moscow. Czech cabaret turned from a popular entertainment into an intellectual genre after 1910, staging parodies of theater classics, political and satirical songs, and poetry recitation, involving thereby such important writers as Jaroslav Hašek and Egon Erwin Kisch, as well as actors, singers, and designers (Hučin, p. 179 below). The leading Prague cabarets included the Lucerna (The Lantern, 1910–23), the Montmartre (1911–22), and the Kabaret U kuřího oka (Cabaret at the Chicken’s Eye; 1913–15). We should not forget that the Cabaret Voltaire of Zurich launched the Dada revolution when the Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Iancu joined there Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, and other Western artists.

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The Interwar Years World War I deeply ruptured modernist art and culture. The war (see ECE 1: 177–239) fundamentally changed the art and worldview of such leading writers as Liviu Rebreanu, Jaroslav Hašek, and Pavel Hviezdoslav. The subsequent Russian revolution, the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the birth of new nations, and the redrawing of borders radically changed the institutional conditions of the region’s literary culture. The ethnic tensions and minority conditions usually got worse rather than better. After the symbolist interlude of l’art pour l’art, national and social issues moved once more into the foreground of literature, and continued to vie for public attention: the new governments appealed to nationalism and even chauvinism as a means to bring about national unity and to divert attention from the social problems that deeply divided each country internally. Major metropolitan centers now became the seat of national cultures that suppressed and in some cases ejected what remained of German culture, severely curtailed minority cultures, and harbored rising anti-Semitism. Cities that used to be sites of cultural dispersion and diversification, cosmopolitan centers and magnets for foreigner writers and intellectuals, for German and Yiddish newspapers and theatres, for various minority associations, printing presses, and publishers — these cities now entered an apparently inexorable movement towards mono-culturalism. The Writers’ Unions, one of the new literary institutions that emerged during this period, were nominally independent but vulnerable to government intervention, especially if they received state subsidy. A Society of Romanian Writers (Societatea Scriitorilor Români) was established in 1909 around Mihail Sadoveanu; a Union of Bulgarian Writers was set up in 1913; a Union of Polish Writers in 1920, under the chairmanship of Stefan Żeromski. The Estonian Writers’ Union was founded by Friedebert Tuglas in 1922. The authority of these official Unions was often challenged by rival political ones. Thus, Todor Pavlov founded a Union of Bulgarian Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers in 1932; an Estonian Union of Soviet Writers was founded in Moscow in 1943, whereas an Estonian Union of Exile Writers was established after the war in Stockholm upon the initiative of Gustav Suits. As we shall see, the official Unions came under strict state control during the communist regimes and were revamped several times. Still, in spite of the political and economic pressures (and sometimes precisely as a result of them), unexpected new transnational contact and interactions came about, even in such unexpected places as in Polish-governed Lithuania and Romanian-governed Transylvania. As we shall briefly discuss in the following sections, émigrés from Russia stimulated new departures in linguistics (the Prague Linguistic Circle) and in the theater (e.g., Russian directors and actors in the Baltic countries), whereas, facing in the other direction, many of the powerful interwar avantgarde movements in East-Central Europe adopted Russian political and artistic ideas. The East-Central European Avant-garde The Avant-garde violently challenged all social and artistic conventions, and created a variety of its own institutions: loose circles and associations, usually ephemeral journals, revolutionary theater, cabaret, and public performances, as well as new genres and styles ranging from Dada poetry, through manifestoes, to experimental amalgamations of sounds, words, and images, and revolutionary typography.

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The “historical” Avant-garde that flourished roughly from 1910 to 1930 (see Benson, Janecek, and ECE 1: 364–73) was East-Central Europe’s first genuinely international literary and artistic movement. Symbolism, Decadence, Impressionism, and the other modern Western artistic styles and trends that had reached the region earlier fomented little genuine transnational interchange. The East-Central European Avant-garde contributed to the international movement Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Fundoianu, Lajos Kassák, Karel Teige, László Moholy-Nagy and others, who were on equal footing with the French, German, and Italian avant-gardes. More importantly, the East-Central European avant-gardes interacted among themselves and reacted to each other in these years of war and chauvinism. Kassák was in touch after 1920 with virtually all major avantgarde writers and artists from East-Central Europe, reporting about their activities and publishing their articles; the Croatian Dragan Aleksić became a Dadaist in 1920–21, during his studies in Prague; and the Romanian avant-garde journals published many articles by non-Romanians. As Kassák declared in 1916 in A Tett (The Deed): the new literature “cannot serve racial or national ends” (Benson 161); soon afterwards his journal was closed down by the authorities because it published in wartime an international issue with works by such “enemy” artists as Kandinsky, Duhamel, Verhaeren, and Shaw. The Romanian avant-gardists, many of whom were Jewish, categorically rejected in the 1920s and 1930s anti-Semitism and the Romanian Iron Guard; members of the Czech Devětsil, the Polish futurists, and other avant-gardes were committed internationalists, looking both westward to Paris (or Berlin) and eastward to Moscow. Contimporanul, the most important Romanian avant-garde journal of the 1920s, followed with interest the activities of Kassák’s exiled Hungarian group around Ma (Today), maintained contacts with Western artists, and collaborated with many foreign journals, among them Stavba and Disk in Prague, and Zenit in Zagreb and Belgrade. Ljubomir Micić and his Croatian and Serbian zenitists occasionally declared themselves “anti-European” Balkanists to protest Western domination, but never in the spirit of chauvinism. Unfortunately, the shift from nationalist to leftist and communist internationalism usually led to false hopes and tragic consequences. Such a shared internationalism among the avant-gardes was remarkable since the various writers and groups had no common platform. During the interwar years, most of them tried but failed to reconcile two antithetical ideologies: a ludic and subversive ethos of individualism that belonged to the Dada heritage, and a Marxist ideology, inspired by the Bolshevik revolution and associated, for a while and not by everybody, with Constructivism. The ideological positions and aesthetic credos were usually announced in manifestoes, a typical avant-garde genre that hardly existed in the nineteenth century and died out by the time World War II broke out, with few exceptions such as Luca’s and Trost’s 1945 “Dialectique de la dialectique,” a manifesto addressed to the international Surrealist Movement. Some avant-garde texts were meant to exemplify in writing and/or in theater, cabaret, and avant-garde performances the ideologies and credos of the manifestoes. Other texts refused to exemplify anything and simply performed auditory and visual spectacles, usually to shock the philistines. The performance orientation of the literary avant-garde foregrounded poetry and theater while relatively neglecting prose fiction: apart from a handful anti-narrative fictions like Urmuz’s Pagini bizare (Weird Pages; 1908–1909) and Miloš Crnjanski’s Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (Diary of Čarnojević; 1921), which we treated earlier (ECE 1: 409–14), avant-garde narrative innovations were less frequent and radical than in other genres. Witkiewicz, for instance, was revolutionary in the theater and in aesthetics, but his most important

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novel, Pożegnanie jesieni (Autumn’s Farewell; 1926) remains traditional in its narrative mode and portrayal of people. Two East-Central European writers shaped the emergence of the Avant-garde in 1916, at the midpoint in the war: in February, Tzara co-founded the Zurich Cabaret Voltaire, thereby launching Dada; and in November, the Hungarian Kassák launched the magazine Ma after A Tett was, as we saw, closed down by the police. Tzara’s Dada magazine and Kassák’s Ma, as well as the two artist’s later career, illustrate how political engagement and desire for artistic autonomy constantly defined and redefined the Avant-garde. Tzara’s famous “Manifest Dada” from 1918 (Benson 313–17) declared: “There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away” (314–15); it closed with the ecstatic words: “Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE” (317). Kassák’s “Programm,” still in A Tett, also held that the new literature should not “swear allegiance to any one of the ‘isms,’” but glorify artistic freedom only inasmuch as it furthered (as did the detested war) the “coming of a more Human Being” (Benson 160). Tzara continued to insist that the individual’s absolute liberty had priority even if it clashed with the interests of the community. In an interview of 1927, he still viewed historical materialism as a betrayal of the permanent revolution, namely “the revolution of the spirit,” the only revolution for which he was willing to sacrifice his life. The Bolsheviks represented a “new bourgeois party,” a “bourgeoisie of the revolution” (Tzara, “Tristan Tzara parle à Integral”). Yet, after many clashes with those who rejected his individualism, he joined the French Communist Party in 1936. Kassák’s political trajectory differed, partly because he did not emigrate permanently, partly because of his inability to submit, and partly because he was oriented more towards the Germanspeaking cultures than towards the French ones. An autodidact from a lower-class family, Kassák started with publications in Nyugat and other established journals, but took much greater liberty with language than his elders. When Babits, a modernist writer with classicist leanings, chastised in Nyugat (no. 17, 1916) the authors of A Tett for their fondness for free verse, Kassák answered politely but firmly in the next issue. On February 20, 1919, during Mihály Károlyi’s democratic revolution, Kassák gave a speech on “Activism,” his new slogan; by the time “Aktivizmus” was printed in Ma on April 10, 1919, Károlyi’s revolution had already been superseded by the Hungarian Commune. Kassák favored a “dictatorial class-revolution of the proletariat” over social democracy (Benson 225). Like Tzara, he sought an art-led “permanent revolution” (219) that would recognize “no form of government” (225) but require that the proletariat undergo a “psychic rebirth” (220). In Kassák’s vision, a permanent revolution went “beyond Communism” (223). Indeed, Kassák and the Commune leader Béla Kun mutually distrusted each other, for the former was suspicious of politics and the latter of art. When Kun spoke of Ma’s “ecstatic convulsions” (Benson 230), Kassák angrily replied in his “Letter to Béla Kun in the Name of Art” (Levél Kun Bélához a művészet nevében) that Kun and his ilk were still in Russia when Kassák and his friends “were already agitating in spoken and printed words for Communism in Hungary” (230). Publishing poems by such foreign revolutionaries as the French Henri Guilbeaux, the German Ivan Goll, and the Czech Otokar Březina, Ma had demonstrated, in Kassák’s view, its revolutionary spirit (231–32). But Kassák refused to be affiliated

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with any party (231), and he told Kun that only artists were qualified to judge matters relating to their profession (233). His defiant words were rooted as much in his own hunger for power as in his avant-garde belief in creative freedom. Though the Commune banned Ma in July 1919, Kassák was imprisoned after its fall. When he managed to get to Vienna in 1920, he was joined by his collaborators Sándor Barta and his wife Erzsi Ujvári (Kassák’s sister), János Mácza, and such other distinguished Hungarian exiles as György Lukács, Béla Balázs, and László Moholy-Nagy. Ma, cut off in Viennese exile from its home audience, had to address now the Hungarian exile community on the one hand and the European avant-garde on the other (although Kassák never mastered any foreign language!). Accordingly, its first Vienna issue (May 1, 1920) carried Kassák’s bilingual Hungarian/German manifesto, “An die Künstler aller Länder!” (To the Artists of All Nations!; Benson 418–20), which reaffirmed with fiery rhetoric his vision of a “permanent revolution,” but carefully distinguished it from the communist proletarian one. Revolutionary artists had “humanity” as their motto, and refused to serve any class, even the proletariat (Benson 418). The dictatorship that Kassák sought was one of “ideas” (420). The critic Ernő Kállai and the artist Moholy-Nagy soon became representatives of Ma in Berlin. In 1921, Kassák briefly flirted with Dada by writing picture-poems in the manner of Kurt Schwitters, and by publishing in Ma texts and images by Schwitters, Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and other Dadaists. He sympathized with Dada’s radical challenge of authority and traditional artistic form, but his serious, emotion-laden rhetoric had no affinity with ludic irony and Dada’s sense for the absurd. By 1922, Kassák’s new manifesto, “Képarchitektúra” (Picture-Architecture), came to favor Constructivism (see Forgács, “Concepts”). The scientific-technological truth he found in constructivist geometric abstractions appealed to his own vision of the future. He thought that Kandinsky, Schwitters, and the other abstractionists were transforming something (e.g., emotions) into abstractions, whereas Képarchitektúra, following Constructivism, was to be a creation ex nihilo: it “does not ‘represent’ a powerful god, a fearful war or idyllic love: it is a power that demonstrates itself. Képarchitektúra does not resemble anything, tells no story, has no beginning and no end anywhere. It simply exists” (Benson 430). In the end, Kassák’s new aesthetics and his personal differences with others led to the disintegration of the Ma circle: Barta, Ujvári and others stopped publishing in the journal, and Moholy-Nagy no longer regarded himself as its Berlin representative. The early 1920s were the heydays of avant-garde manifestoes, and Dada, which arrived late in East-Central Europe, still generated a few. Among them was “Dadaizam” (Benson 348–51) by the Croatian Aleksić, published in April 1921 in Zenit, a journal that his compatriot Micić published between 1921 and 1926. Having become familiar with Dada in Prague, and having met there such local notables as Karel Teige and the actor and theater director Karel Noll, Aleksić held a conference and several dadaist séances in the city, and entered into correspondence with leading dadaists in Europe, especially Kassák, whom he visited in Vienna in 1921. Zenit published a number of Aleksić’s Dada writings, but Micić, skeptical about Dada, had already published (with Goll and Boško Tokin) his own “Manifest Zenitizma” (Benson 284–93) in the very first issue of his journal; by the summer of 1922 the break between Aleksić and Micić was complete. In June 1922, Aleksić had to publish his Dada-Tank (with contributions, among others, by Tzara, Schwitters, and Huelsenbeck) and Dada-Jazz on his own. Branko Ve Poljanski, Micić’s brother, published the anti-

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Dada review Dada-Jok about the same time (Janecek 49–50). In late fall 1922, Aleksić terminated his Dada activities and moved to Belgrade. Before this, however, Dada matinées were held in several Yugoslav cities, among them Novi Sad and Subotica, where Aleksić’s circle cooperated with Hungarian followers of Kassák to produce genuinely international programs (Janecek 53–55). Such events were exceptional in the chauvinist East-Central European atmosphere of the 1920s. By 1921, the halcyon days of Dada were over but each new East-Central European movement, like Zenitism, was forced to define itself against its iconoclastic predecessor. The increasingly leftist avant-gardes concurred that Dada had been destructive and nihilistic without offering new perspectives. Of the many new avant-garde manifestoes we single out Devětsil’s “Statement” about its founding on May 10, 1920 (Benson 240–41); Witkiewicz’s parodist “Manifest [Fest-mani]” (1921); three Polish futurist manifestoes — Aleksander Wat’s and Anatol Stern’s Gga. Pierwszy polski almanach poezji futurystycznej (Gga. First Polish Futurist Poetry Almanach; 1920), and Bruno Jasieński’s “Do narodu Polskiego: Mańifest w sprawie natyhmiastowej futuryzacji żyća” (To the Polish Nation: A Manifesto Concerning the Immediate Futurization of Life; 1921), and “Mańifest w sprawie poezji futurystycznej” (Manifesto Concerning Futurist Poetry; 1921) — and the Manifesztum (Benson 332–36) of Ödön Palasovszky and Iván Hevesy (1922). Devětsil (see also ECE 1: 364–73 and 2: 176–82) was founded by Marxist and communist poets, artists, architects, and intellectuals who believed at that time in a new proletarian art. In 1924, Jaroslav Seifert, Vítězslav Nezval, and the theorist Karel Teige launched Poetism, an unstable blend of Dada, Constructivism, and Marxism, from the Národní kavárna. It survived until 1930. A number of Polish avant-gardists, among them Jasieński, Stern, Wat, and Witold Wandurski, became communists — with tragic consequences. Jasieński came into contact with the Russian literary avant-garde while attending Polish schools in Moscow during the war. In 1919, he became a founder of the Cracow futurist club Katarynka (Barrel Organ), published futurist manifestoes, and organized scandalous poetry readings, first in Cracow and later in various Polish cities with Stern and Wat. Jasieński wanted to rid Poland of its messianic tradition and the dominance of reason. His “Immediate Futurization of Life” called upon artists to take to the streets in order to battle logic with a “deluge of wonders and surprises. Nonsense dancing along on streets” (Benson 188–89). His Manifesto on “Futurist Poetry” made clear that Polish Futurism did not want to repeat Marinetti (Benson 191). Indeed, Stern’s and Wat’s Gga manifesto echoed his anti-technological stance: “We demolish the city. All mechanisms — airplanes, streetcars, inventions, telephone. Instead — primordial means of communication” (see Janecek 111). Two years later, Jasieński admitted that mechanization doomed Futurism (Turowski in Janecek 115), and he announced the end of Polish Futurism in Tadeusz Peiper’s journal Zwrotnica (Switch). Subsequently he joined the Polish communist movement and lectured on Marxism. Police harassment and lack of success forced him to go to Paris in 1925, from where he was again deported in 1929 because of his involvement in the French Communist Party. He resettled in the Soviet Union, became a Soviet citizen, and wrote in Russian his Bal manekinów (The Mannequins’ Ball; 1931), a satirical play on capitalism. As a member of the Executive Board of the Writers’ Union he was involved in organizing the famous 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers. He was arrested, however, in 1937 and died in Siberia two years later. During those years, Stalin’s secret service systematically eliminated all Polish communists living in the Soviet Union.

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Stern, Wat, and several others fled to Soviet-occupied Lwów, when the Nazis took Warsaw in 1939. They survived — but tattered. Wat, a friend of Mayakovsky and briefly a communist though never a Party member, founded in 1929 the Miesiecznik Literacki (Literary Monthly), “the only communist magazine that had a genuinely broad range and influence in Poland” (Miłosz, Wat xviii). The government, which banned the Communist Party, closed down the journal in 1932 and briefly jailed Wat; upon release he became until 1939 the literary editor of the publisher Gebethner & Wolff. Shortly before his death in 1967, he recounted in conversations with Czesław Miłosz his arrest in Soviet Lwów and his long “Odyssey” through Russian jails to exile in Kazakhstan. My Century is a moving and shocking document of the interlacing of literary and political institutions in the twentieth century, a memoir of an avant-gardist who turned communist and got painfully disillusioned by both, of a Jewish intellectual who converted to Catholicism, and of a poet, whose true poetry was born, as Miłosz writes, “of illness and old age.” It is “a meditation on life, time and death by a man who had been through too much,” a wise meditation in which the futurist of 1919 is nevertheless constantly present (Miłosz, Wat xviii). Witkiewicz, like Jasieński, spent World War I in Russia (as a Czarist officer and then as a political commissar of his regiment), but he was among those few major East-Central European avant-gardists who did not sympathize with Communism. Like Jasieński, he died in 1939, but at his own hand, when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Like Branko Ve Poljanski’s Dada-Jok and Sándor Barta’s “Az őrültek első összejövetele a szemetesládában” (The First Gathering of the Mad in a Garbage Can” (1922), Witkacy’s “Manifest [Fest-mani]” (1921) parodies Dada and the flood of avant-garde manifestoes by setting up “hoaxing” as the highest value. In contrast to others, Witkiewicz regretted that artists wanted to abandon metaphysical aspirations (his theory of “pure form” was akin to Kandinsky’s metaphysics of abstraction), but for all his nostalgia he could ridicule what he loved. His Bezimienne dzieło (The Anonymous Work; 1921) as well as his above-mentioned novel Pożegnanie jesieni represent a dying world on the eve of a corrupt dictatorial revolution that levels all spiritual and artistic aspirations. But whereas the novel is cast in traditional form and retains a certain pathos, the play abandons psychological and narrative realism (Witkacy disliked the Stanislavski method) by engaging in a parodic and often absurd play with the romantic stereotypes and hackneyed phrases of revolutionary and nationalist hero worship — and, indeed, of art itself. After a revolution, a subsequent coup d’état, and having slit the throat of his mistress, Plasmonick, a painter, declares that now “there are only two places for metaphysical individuals: prison or the insane asylum” (151). He returns to the former, whereas his father, the famous aesthetician Blödestaug (“most idiotic eye” in German!), invites everybody “for coffee and nice fresh rolls” (152). Bezimienne dzieło, like Witkacy’s most other avant-garde plays, was neither published nor performed during his lifetime. The Hungarian theater avant-gardists were slightly more successful, though they could not realize the “great art for the masses” that Palasovszky’s and Hevesy’s “Manifesztum” demanded (Benson 332). The Zöld Szamár Színház (Green Donkey Theater), launched by Hevesy and László Mittay on March 24, 1925, performed next to works by such Western avant-gardes as Jean Cocteau, Goll, and Ernst Toller, also Hungarian productions by Sándor Bortnyik (his “Green Donkey Pantomime” gave the theater its name), Palasovszky, and others. The company survived under different names until the 1930s, in spite of censorship and police harassment. East-Central Europe’s most successful avant-garde stage, the Devětsil’s Liberated Theater

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(Osvobozené divadlo) in Prague, opened in 1926. Started by Jindřich Honzl and Jiří Frejka, it was associated from 1927 onward with the names of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich (“V+W”; see p. 181 below; also ECE 2: 180–82). By the mid-twenties, the Devětsil became — with its associated Poetism, its various ephemeral journals, and its branch in Brno — East-Central Europe’s most active avant-garde movement. As Teige proclaimed in “Poetismus” (May 1924), one of the several poetist manifestoes, Poetism wanted to abolish the gap between the arts, as well as between art and life (see also ECE 2: 177–79). Life was to be converted into “an eccentric carnival, a harlequinade of feelings and representations, a drunken filmstrip, a miracle-kaleidoscope” (Svĕt 124), whereas literature and the arts had to become “as self-evident, delightful, and accessible as sport, love, wine, and all delicacies.” Since art, gift, and play could not be entrusted to highly serious professionals (121), modern artists were to become clowns, dancers, acrobats, and tourists rather than philosophers and teachers. They had to turn to film, flying, the radio, the newest optical and acoustic inventions, sport, dance, circus and the music hall — all spaces of invention and ceaseless improvisation (124–25). Seifert’s and Nezval’s writings from the 1920s exemplify some of these avant-garde ideas in poetic practice. The poetists named Dada, Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Constructivism as their inspiration, but for all their critique of the romantic tradition they adopted a romantic desire to “poeticize” the world — and thereby liquidate art as a specific profession, as one of Teige’s titles, “Konstruktivismus a likvidace ‘uměni’” (Constructivism and the Liquidation of ‘Art’; Svět 129–43), declares. Similarly, Teige followed the romantics in seeking a unification of the arts: he favored image poems and lyrical films (128) and he claimed in a note entitled “Malířství a poesie” (Painting and Poetry; Svět 534) that a poem had to be read as modern painting and the latter as a poem. More concretely, he believed that poetry, liberated by Marinetti from the shackles of syntax, had assumed a purely optical, graphical form in Apollinaire’s ideograms. Poems, which used to be sung, were now read, and poetic expression was now defined optically and typographically rather than phonetically and onomatopoetically. In the early 1920s, such avant-garde ideas still seemed reconcilable with Teige’s somewhat naïve belief in a new proletarian art (“Nové umění proletářské”; Svět 33–63) and in the new Soviet system in general. But as ideological dogmatism and political repression intensified in the Soviet Union, and Constructivism (admired by the poetists for its reliance on science and technology) was finally banned, political differences started to divide members of the Devětsil. Nezval, like several Polish futurists, became a Party member in 1924 and remained one to the end of his life. Other members of Devětsil started to criticize propagandistic art. Teige renounced his earlier admiration of proletarian art in his 1928 “Manifest Poetismu” (Poetism Manifesto; Svět 324–25), and though he would still praise the perspectives of Marxist dialectical materialism in 1930, he now equated them with Nietzsche’s radical individualism. He now claimed, confronting Stalinism, that man truly begins where the state ends (Svět 499–500). Seifert took a position against Stalin’s increasing repression and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929. When Devětsil dissolved in 1931, Nezval, Teige, Marie Toyen, Jindřich Štýrský and others turned to Surrealism. Prague’s Surrealist Group, founded in 1934, published with André Breton and Paul Eluard the Bulletin international du surréalisme (1935). The Slovak surrealists published their own almanac,

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Áno a nie (Yes and No; 1938–). The Romanian Group of Surrealists was founded by Luca and Gellu Naum as late as 1940. After the radically experimental Romanian avant-gardists Tzara, Constantin Brâncuşi, Iancu, and Fundoianu had departed for France before or shortly after World War I, a second wave of Romanian Avant-gardism started to develop constructivist notions around 1924 (see Ion Pop). Ion Vinea envisioned an “active, integral art” in his “Manifest activist către tinerime” (Activist Manifesto for the Young; Contimporanul May 1924) and Ilarie Voronca sought a “new poetic epistemology and syntax,” predicated on the “true-synthesis-word” (“Gramatică”; Mincu 556– 58). Not all Romanian avant-gardists became communists in the 1920s and 30s. Vinea demanded in his above-mentioned manifesto to get rid of the “prostituted” art of capitalism, but intended to replace it with the “miracle of the new and self-reliant word; the strict and swift eloquent expression of Morse-code machines” (Mincu 548) — hardly a definition of proletarian art. Voronca, another leading avant-gardist, noted in “Poezie sau politică?” (Poetry or Politics?; 1934) that the suicides of Sergeĭ Esenin and Mayakovsky showed the suppression of artistic freedom in the

Figure 3. Members of the Romanian Avant-garde; the Drawings are by M. H. Maxy. From M. H. Maxy. Der integrale Künstler/Artist Integralist. Ed. Michael Ilk. Berlin: Günter Linke, 2003, p. 37.

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Soviet system. The most consistent communist, Gheorghe Dinu (who published poetry under the pseudonym Stephan Roll), attacked in “Sugestii înaintea unui proces” (Suggestions at the Threshold of a Trial; 1932) Breton, Eluard, Tzara, and Aragon, for being conservative, bourgeois, and obscure (Mincu 607, 609–10), but Saşa Pană, member of the unu circle and editor of its journal, sided in Sadismul adevărului (The Sadism of Truth; 1936) with “André Breton’s defense of Surrealism against leftist and rightist deviations” (135). East-Central Europe’s avant-gardes lost their momentum and bearing in the 1930s, suffered suppression during the war, and those of them who survived faced new difficulties during the Stalinist years, when Avant-gardism became a taboo. Nezval, Dinu, Pană, and others embraced, at least for a while, Socialist Realism and even Stalinism. Luca, Trost, and others emigrated; Teige, Seifert, Naum, Kassák, and others fell out of grace and were silenced. The great exception was perhaps the Polish Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, who assumed in the years 1946–50 the role of a buffoon with the enormously popular short pieces performed in his Teatrzyk Zielona Gęś (Green Goose Theater). The Thaw after 1953 allowed a slow but remarkable comeback of the Avant-garde. In 1956 Wat was rehabilitated while still alive, Wandurski and Jasieński only posthumously. Teige died in 1951, but the Czechoslovak reform movement leading to the Prague Spring worked towards his rehabilitation and the publication of his works in Svět. Kassák regained some recognition towards the end of his life before he died in 1967. Seifert continued to assume a leading oppositional role and received the Nobel Prize in 1984. Gellu Naum started publishing again in the 1970s, at a time when the historical avant-garde was rediscovered in Romania. Most remarkable was, perhaps, the fate of Witkacy’s work. Bezimienne dzieło was published in a collected edition of his plays in 1962 and first performed in 1967. The rediscovery of its author had a formative role in the art of Sławomir Mrożek and Tadeusz Różewicz, and the emergence of a Polish non-realist stage practice. Eugen Ionescu, Václav Havel, and the “theater of the absurd” all learned from Witkacy’s avant-garde experiments. East-Central Europe as a Russian Refuge As we have seen, Russian Futurism and Constructivism, as well Soviet Communism, were great attractions to progressive East-Central European writers, artists, and intellectuals, many of whom ended up as exiles in the Soviet Union. Much less attention has been devoted to the “counter current,” namely the flow of refugees from Russia and the other Soviet states. For many of these, East-Central Europe was just a point of transition to Western Europe or America, yet some stayed, and even those who departed left a mark on the region’s culture that neither the post-war communist regimes, nor, for different political reasons, the post-1989 governments would acknowledge. In the following sketch we focus on three phenomena: (1) The Prague Linguistic Circle, (2) Russian Writers in the independent Baltic countries, and (3) Russian artists in East-Central European, mainly Baltic, theater. The internationalism of Prague’s interwar culture is perhaps most evident in the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cercle Linguistique de Prague / Pražský lingvistický kroužek). While the surrealists were oriented towards Paris, the Circle fed on Russian sources and counted among its founding members in 1926 the Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson (earlier with the Russian

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Formalists), Nikolay Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, next to the Czechs Vilém Mathesius and Jan Mukařovský. In the first eight years, the Circle focused on the internal structure of poetic works, whereas in the second phase (1934–38) its orientation became more contextual. After the 1938 Munich treaty, Jakobson and others fled from Czechoslovakia. The Circle was disbanded after the communist takeover in 1948, though its ideas flourished elsewhere and were allowed to seep back to Prague in the 1960s. Temira Pachmuss’s 1988 survey of interwar Russian literature in the Baltic countries shows that Estonia had received the most émigré Russian writers, although Riga also had its share. Lithuania profited mostly from the influx of Russian theater people. Most of the immigrants were Russian aristocrats and officers, often with Baltic family ties or property. Many of them moved on to the West (Boris Dikoy became member of the French resistance and was shot by the Gestapo; Yuri Ivask, and Igor Chinnov became professors of Slavic literature in the USA). A handful of them moved back to the Soviet Union before the outbreak of World War II but, like Ivan Belyaev (Pachmuss 93–100), most of them disappeared in a camp, as did also those who did not depart with the German troops but remained in Soviet occupied Estonia or Latvia. Very few of them survived and managed to lead a normal life in the Soviet Baltic states after 1945. The most important and popular Russian-Estonian writer, Igor Severyanin (Pachmuss 60–85), began in the pre-revolutionary years as an “ego” and “cubo” futurist who wrote poetry to shock his audience, but he abandoned his avant-garde orientation during his Estonian emigré years. An almost nomadic mobility helped the exile Russians to develop in East-Central Europe an impressive infrastructure of literary associations, publishing, and theater (see Pachmuss 13–47). Tallinn had a Russian literary circle and Tartu’s “Tsekh poetov” (Guild of Poets) was active in 1929–31, when a talented group of Russian students attended the university. The Guild was revived in 1934–39 in Tallinn by the colorful Pavel Irtel (Freiherr von Brenndorff, a White Army officer of Hungarian descent). He was also editor and publisher of Nov’ (Virgin Soil), the most important Russian literary publication, of which eight issues appeared in Tallinn during the period 1928–35. Irtel moved to Bromberg, Poland, became a Slavic interpreter for the German army, and settled after the war in Göttingen (Pachmuss 111–24). Riga’s association of Russian poets, “Na struge slov” (In the Boat of Words), had a limited membership, but Riga featured the most important Baltic Russian newspaper, Segodna (Today; 1919–40), which published two literary supplements and was widely distributed in the Baltic states as well as in the rest of Eastern and Western Europe (Pachmuss 29, 31–33). The Russian novelist Mikhail Petrovich Artsybashev, who reached European success with his novel Sanin in 1907, emigrated to Warsaw in 1923 and published there until his death in 1927, with Dimitrii Filosofov, the violently anti-Bolshevik journal Za svobodu (For Freedom). The impact of Russian theater in East-Central Europe was more complex, because it involved not only the Baltic countries and not only refugees but also some regular exchanges and guest appearances. The Russian Nikolai Massalitinov founded in 1925 a Drama School in the Bulgarian National Theater and became there one of the most influential theater figures. Mikhail Chekhov, a leading Russian actor and director who was forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1928, became important in the 1930s in the Latvian and Lithuanian theater life. He staged in Kaunas (Lithuania’s capital then) the first Lithuanian Hamlet (1932) and Twelfth Night (1933), as well as Gogol’s The Inspector General. Lithuanian music theater greatly profited from the influx of Russian ballet

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dancers. Tallinn and Riga continued to support during the interwar period Russian language theaters that performed daily; Riga’s Theater of Russian Drama also performed in Tallinn. We should note, finally, that the theater makers of the interwar period, especially the Slavic ones, interacted among themselves. The Bulgarian National Theater, for instance, started exchanges with its counterpart in Belgrade and established cultural links with Poland in the late 1930s. The outstanding Croatian theater director, Branko Gavella, produced operas in Brno, Bratislava, and Moravska Ostrava; he lived in Prague during much of World War II. The Slovak National Theater opened in Bratislava in 1920, but lacking a native tradition it had to begin with Czech plays and operas. It was built up with the help of Czech actors and the Czech directors Janko Borodáč and Ferdinand Hoffmann until Slovak directors were able to take over in the late 1930s. Polish Interwar Literary Culture Stefan Żółkiewski argues in Kultura literacka 1918–1932 (Literary Culture 1918–1932) that the technological standards of Polish interwar literary culture approached those of a modern mass culture. Communication technology began to develop, new publishing houses emerged, broadcasting stimulated new literature, including the first radio novel (1938), and novels were adapted to films. In 1931, 7% of the adult population participated in Poland’s literary life; newspapers and journals were read by about two-and-a-half million readers. Elite literature was beyond the means of most people, but reading was encouraged through schools, libraries, workers’ reading rooms, and organized cultural activities in the provinces. The Polish state supported parish reading rooms and youth associations; the unions, particularly the Railway Trade Union, heavily promoted literature. Poland’s interwar political leaders believed that literature, especially elite literature, furthered national and social integration. Indeed, literature promoted the country’s integration and the emancipation of the disadvantaged classes, while continuing in its traditional role as the nation’s conscience. Writing had already started to become a professional matter in the nineteenth century, when landowners and bankrupt aristocrats became intellectuals working with their pen to earn a living. Most of the romantics had to work for a living in exile; Bolesław Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Stefan Żeromski and others worked as journalists, teachers, or novelists when their family estates were confiscated or went bankrupt. After 1918, writers were subsidized by means of scholarships, allowances, awards, and travel grants. The National Culture Fund, established in 1928, supported creative work and the publication of the national classics. The Union of Polish Writers managed to get the parliament to pass the copyright bill of 1926, and it obtained for its members medical insurance and pension. Still, according to a Union questionnaire from 1929, only 34% of the writers could live on writing alone; the others had to supplement their income by working in schools, at newspapers, the radio, or in the literary cabarets. Freedom of speech and press freedom were guaranteed by the Constitution, though a Censor’s Office was set up in 1923. Żeromski’s Przedwiośnie (Before the Spring), for instance, was prohibited; the communist Miesiecznik Literacki (Literary Monthly) was, as we saw, closed down, and Wat, together with his co-workers, was put in jail, though under relatively mild conditions. Informal campaigns were led against Żeromski; Tadeusz Żeleński-Boy was accused of violating religious and moral taboos, but he received Warsaw’s literary award in 1933 and was admitted into the Academy of Literature.

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During the interwar years, most Polish writers continued to function within the literary and ideological traditions, though they often questioned them or played with their conventions. They were activists in social movements, at times on the left at others in circles close to the government. Some writers turned to popular culture. Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski wrote for the cabaret, others churned out popular spy- detective-, youth- and mystery novels. Devotional, didactic, and moralizing pamphlets, as well as abridged versions of nineteenth-century classics, were published by the Church or charity organizations and sold at markets and church fairs. Catholic publishing-houses, such as the Ksiêgarnia œw. Wojciecha (St. Wojciech’s Bookshop), became modern enterprises producing monthlies with huge circulations, mainly for the peasants. A stable reading public started to emerge by the end of the interwar period, bad economic conditions notwithstanding. The new readers bought mostly the national classics of nineteenthcentury Realism; contemporary literature, which was not taught in the schools, reached the public via magazines, serialized novels in newspapers, literary cafés, clubs, poetry recitals, and theaters. Interwar Modernism was too elitist for commercialization, but popular culture did not yet threaten it because most people could not yet afford mass entertainment. The romantic tradition, with its political commitments and its belief that the written word had a spiritual mission, was still very much alive. Catastrophism, a turn from positivist optimism to a sense of impending disasters, was widely held in Polish and Lithuanian interwar culture. It was especially prominent, as we saw, in the writings of Witkiewicz, but also in Miłosz’s Żagary (Charred Wood) group in Wilno, and Krzysztof Baczyński. For the Yiddish culture in Kiev, Wilno, and Warsaw (see Wolitz in ECE 2: 182–212 and 314–32) catastrophe was indeed just around the corner. Following the Russian revolution of 1917, Kiev (then about 32% Jewish) became the center of European Yiddish writing and art. Dovid Bergelson formed here in 1918 Di Kultur-Lige (Culture League), a secular Yiddish educational and cultural institution with a publishing house that was at its inception supported by the first liberal Ukrainian government. The Bolsheviks allowed it to continue but exploited it for their own ideology. Its publishing house introduced the major Soviet Yiddish poets to the world during the NEP period of the 1920s. In Warsaw, the German writers Yankl Adler and Marek Shvarts injected Expressionism into the Yung-Yiddish movement of modernist Yiddish poetry. The Yung Vilne (Young Vilna), together with its Almanacs, became in the 1930s the last Yiddish literary movement of Ashkenaz. Most countries of the region witnessed significant new literary movements in the interwar period. Estonia’s Siuru group, which started in 1915 with a European orientation, involved August Gailit, Johannes Semper, Tuglas, Marie Under, and Henrik Visnapuu. As Artur Adson relates, the bohemian Siuru (taking its name from a magical bird in Estonian folklore) met during and immediately after World War I in Marie Under’s salon in Tallinn, and staged public readings in Tallinn’s Estonia Theater. They also frequented Tartu’s cafés. Siuru was a nomadic group with makeshift and mobile accommodations, whereas the neoclassical poets of the Arbujad (Logomancers) remained anchored in Tartu during the 1930s. Heiti Talvik, Betti Alver, Bernard Kangro, and others belonged to the first generation of intellectuals to receive their university education in independent Estonia (see Kirss, ECE 2: 34). In Bulgaria, Čavdar Mutafov led in 1926–27 the futurist literary circle Strelets (Sagittarius), whose technological orientation opposed Symbolism and aestheticism. In the Ukraine, the literary

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groups Hart (Tempering), Lanka (Link), and VAPLITE (Free Academy of Proletarian Literature) sprang up in the 1920s but dissolved when Stalin consolidated his grip on culture. In Slovakia, the most innovative movement of the late 1930s was the Lyrical Prose School of Dobroslav Chrobák, Margita Figuli, and František Švantner. In Romania, Eugen Lovinescu promoted a wide-ranging Modernism through his literary circle and magazine Sburătorul (Winged Spirit; 1919–1927), and his critical syntheses. III Re-Institutionalizing Literature under Communism After a brief transition immediately following World War II, Stalinist style Communism assumed power in all East-Central European countries, except for Yugoslavia, where Tito went his own way (see ECE 1: 107–41). All countries of the region, several of which became part of the Soviet Union, radically and rapidly revamped their literary culture and its institutions. The pattern was rather uniform: (1) older writers’ organizations, publishers, private theaters, modernist as well as right-wing movements and journals, were suppressed and disbanded; (2) new, Party-led Writers’ Unions were set up (the Bulgarian one was already established in 1945; the Czechoslovak one after the communist coup d’état, in 1949; in Romania, the minority Unions were merged into an “all-Romanian” one in 1949; in Hungary, all politically undesirable writers were expelled after 1948); (3) state publishers assumed monopoly; (4) all theaters became nationalized and put under strict ideological control; (5) the doctrine of Socialist Realism was introduced and enforced; (6) strict censorship led to the silencing, jailing, and sometimes even execution of writers; (7) information from and contact with Western writers, intellectual, and publishers were strictly controlled and surveyed; (8) Western publications, especially contemporary ones, became scarce; Soviet literature inundated the bookshops; (9) ideologically “dangerous” literature was disposed of or put under lock; (10) literary scholarship was forced to adopt Stalinist ideological perspectives; (11) the teaching of literature in high schools and universities adopted “Marxist-Leninist” principles; (12) many non-communist high-school and university teachers were dismissed, whereas new appointments were made on ideological grounds. Show trials took place in every country during the Stalinist years, and the accused included many writers. Záviš Kalandra, a Surrealist and old Communist, was tried in one of the first Czech political trials and executed in 1950; the Slovak Vladimir Clementis, who returned after the war from London, was executed in 1952. From the long list of those who were put on trial and got jailed or placed in a forced labor camp suffice to mention here the Hungarians György Faludy, and Győző Határ; the Slovaks Ladislav Novomeský, Iván Horváth, Daniel Okáli, and Ivan Stodola; the Romanian Sibiu Literary Circle and Ion Caraion (see ECE 1: 108, 149–150); the Czech Eduard Goldstücker, the Moravian poet Jan Zahradníček, editor-in-chief of the Catholic literary journal Akord, and Karel Pecka, who wrote an anti-Soviet review of a Russian film. The list could be extended, especially with the names of writers jailed after 1956 or 1968. The new policy also had some benefits: illiteracy was, for all practical purposes, eradicated; theater and publishing were freed from commercialism and provided with ample funds in order to produce low-priced books and to make theater available to a wide audience. Writers who conformed ideologically were rewarded with money, awards, and other perks.

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Yugoslavia was for a long time considered to be less brutal, but revelations about the camp on the Goli Otok island forced a revision of this view (see ECE 1: 124–32 and 541–48). The limits of the freedom under Tito’s regime became evident also when Yugoslavia’s Vice President Milovan Đilas was arrested and expelled from the Communist League in 1955. Two years later he published in the West The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. Nevertheless, Socialist Realism did not become the ideological doctrine in Yugoslavia, as our article on the Croatian Krugovi (Circles) group and its journal illustrates (pp. 84–86 below; see also ECE 2: 301–313). The Post-Stalinist Thaw After the death of Stalin on March 5 1953, and especially after Khrushchev’s February 1956 revelations about Stalin’s totalitarianism, a certain political Thaw came about in most communist countries, although with different timing and intensity. In several countries, the Writers’ Union assumed a more critical role. In Hungary, the Writers’ Union, and the Petőfi Kör (Petőfi Circle) of the Democratic Youth Association, which was founded in 1953 by reform-communist writers and intellectuals, fomented changes by gradually intensifying open public debates in the spring, summer, and early fall of 1956 on the democratization of public life and on reforms of the system from within. Indeed, critical books and plays started to reach the public. On September 17, all Stalinist members of the Executive Committee of the Writers’ Association were voted out of office; on October 23, the Irodalmi Újság (Literary News) published a letter expressing sympathy with the Polish writers. The suppression of the subsequent revolution had devastating effects on the literary institutions. The Writers’ Association and the Journalists’ Union were suspended on January 18, 1957, and the former reopened only after it was reorganized, in 1959. Many writers fled to the West; others who stayed were put in jail; some, like Gyula Illyés, just fell silent, or were silenced, for several years. The climate became less oppressive in the 1960s, but Lukács’s followers, the “Budapest School” of philosophers (Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, János Kis, and others) were prevented from teaching and publishing, and some were forced to emigrate. In Bulgaria, the 1956 plenary meeting of the Communist Party declared its intention to inaugurate a new, more liberal era, but not much happened, even though the official literary histories of the next thirty years praised the occasion as “April Breeze,” “Life-giving Breath,” and “Spring Renewal.” In Slovakia, the new literary associations turned away from ideology, but the postStalinist changes were gradual rather than dramatic. In fiction, a “Generation ‘56” appeared on the scene in the late 1950s with stories about everyday issues and individual experiences rather then epic events and heroes. The “Concretist” poets rejected history and ideology by turning to sensuality. The “Osamelí bežci” (The Lonely Runners) attacked the political conformism of postwar poets and followed the Beat generation in search for authenticity. Of course they were disbanded after 1968. In Prague, the ideologists gradually relaxed their grip in the 1960s. At the 1967 Congress of the Writers’ Union censorship and party interference came under attack. On June 27, 1968, the weekly of the Writers’ Union, the Literární Listy, published Ludvík Vaculík’s “Dva tisíce slov” (Two Thousand Words), which called for a multi-party system and was signed by prominent figures of the Czechoslovak intelligentsia. The new chairman of the Writers’ Union became

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Eduard Goldstücker, who had been jailed for years. On July 26, 1968, Pavel Kohout published an unsigned appeal in the Literární listy that urged Alexander Dubček to continue the reforms and concluded with the call “We are with you, be with us!” (“Socialismus” 1). The subsequent petition was signed by more than a million people. “Normalization” in post-1968 Czechoslovakia meant a new wave of repression under the new leader, Gustáv Husák. Vaculík, who was silenced, started to organize samizdat publications (see p. 60 below). The Charter 77 went beyond reform Communism and asked for a pluralism respectful of human rights. As an informal and open forum of divergent convictions, it became a blueprint for radically different political organizations that received support also from many Hungarians and Romanians. The old institutions started to crumble, but they collapsed only twelve years later.

Part I. Publishing and Censorship

Introduction John Neubauer (with Robert Pynsent on the Matice česká, Vilmos Voigt on the Censorship of Folk Poetry, and Marcel Cornis-Pope on Romanian Journals and Publishers)

I. National Awakenings Printers and Publishers Printing started relatively late in East-Central Europe, mostly because of its economic and technological lag and the slow growth of the reading public. Nevertheless, the region can boast a few pioneers. Jiří Melantrich of Aventinum started around 1547 the first Czech publishing house, whereas the Saxon Johannes Honterus established in 1538–39 a German press in the Transylvanian Kronstadt (Braşov), which had a decisive role in making the Lutheran Church dominant among the Saxons. Deacon Coresi, who worked in the press as of 1559, published a number of key religious texts and other translations in Romanian that helped shape a literary Romanian language. In Kolozsvár (Cluj), Gáspár Heltai started a Hungarian press in 1550, and the Dutch-trained Miklós Tótfalusy Kis set up a world-famous printing press in the last decade of the seventeenth century. The first Romanian presses, notably the one in Sebeş, were also established in those years. Efforts to develop vernacular print cultures had to contend with the use of Latin in academia, and even in politics, as well as the imposition of German, Russian, and, by the nineteenth century, Hungarian. Finally, the spread of print culture was severely hampered by moral, religious, and political censorship that operated in the region for centuries, well before it assumed its extreme political form under the Nazi and communist regimes. Nevertheless, by 1800 many vernacular texts were printed for middle- and upper class readers, and the national cultures of the following century enormously aided the spread of vernacular literacy. Progress in the technology of printing, the growth of the reading public, and the need to forge a national consciousness through print led to the emergence of many vernacular presses and publishing houses. In the nineteenth century, important independent commercial printers and publishers began working in the Czech lands and Hungary. The first modern Czech publisher, the Česká expedice of Václav Matej Kramerius in Prague, was active in the period 1790–1849, but it has been claimed that the Pospíšil print shop in Hradec Králové produced more books in Czech during the 1830s and 40s than all the Prague ones together. Later in the century, Ignác Leopold Kober and Jan Otto became the most important publishers of Czech authors and encyclopedias.

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In Hungary, the University Press of Buda rose to international eminence after it acquired a Cyrillic printing press in 1775 and received from Empress Maria Theresa the monopoly to publish textbooks. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when it became involved in publishing literature, it published works by Benedek Virág, Ferenc Verseghy, Ferenc Kazinczy, Sándor Kisfaludy and his brother Károly. It published Károly Kisfaludy’s journal Aurora, organ of the romantics, and the Academy’s Tudománytár (Treasury of Scholarship). Last but not least, the Press took in commission printing assignments from book dealers, other publishers, private persons, and various associations. We shall discuss later its activities in foreign language publication. Hungary’s first private printers and publishers were all of German origin, but these familyowned businesses rapidly assimilated to the local culture. The Landerers started their printing shops in provincial cities but moved to Pest already in 1773. From 1840 onward, in partnership with Gusztáv Heckenast (“Landerer és Heckenast”), the printing shop produced Lajos Kossuth’s famous newspaper Pesti Hirlap, and all the key publications of the March 15, 1848 revolution. Hungary’s other leading German printing and publishing firm was established as a branch of the Trattner family’s Viennese business, but became influential in Hungarian literary life when János Tamás Trattner became its director in 1813. He launched, for instance, the journal Tudományos Gyüjtemény (Scholarly Repertory; 1817–1841), which came to play a major role in the Hungarian reform period. In Transylvania, the most important pre-1848 publisher of German as well as Romanian journals was the liberal Johann Gött, an emigrant from Frankfurt to Kolozsvár and a supporter of the 1848 revolution. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of great Hungarian printing presses and publishing houses. Landerer and Heckenast was turned in 1873 into the shareholding company Franklin Társulat; the provincial printing and publishing enterprise of the brothers Leó and Samu Révai moved to Pest in 1869 and became in 1895 the shareholding company Révai Testvérek Irodalmi Intézet (Literary Institute of the Révai Brothers), which published the nineteenth-century classics, the leading encyclopedia, and much more. The Atheneum specialized in newspapers and periodicals. Remarkable was the emergence of Jewish printers and publishing houses. In Poland, Hoesick, Przeworski, Arct, and several other publishing houses were founded by Jews. Gyula Rózsavölgyi, son of a famous violinist, opened in Pest his distinguished and still functioning music publishing house in 1850; Izidor Kner started in 1882 a high-quality printing press and publishing enterprise in the provincial village of Gyoma; and József Wolfner launched in 1885 the house Singer and Wolfner, which published children’s literature and an impressive list of leading writers. Simon Tolnai started his enterprise in 1895 with the illustrated weekly Tolnai Világlapja (Tolnai’s World Paper). Tolnai, as well as the descendants of the other founders of Hungarian Jewish publishing houses, died in the Holocaust. The Csongrád-born Austro-Hungarian Geca Kon, founder of the largest and most important Serbian publishing house during the interwar period, and Pavle Bihalji, founder of the leftist Serbian publisher Nolit (=Nova Literatura) were killed already in 1941. In Vilnius, the center of Ashkenazy culture, forty-three of the sixty-one publishing houses were Jewish in 1913, publishing not only in Hebrew and Yiddish but also in Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. The most famous one, owned by the Romm family, moved in 1799 from Grodno to Vilnius and became there Russia’s foremost Hebrew publishing concern. Boris Arkadyevitsh Kletskin’s

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renowned Vilnius publishing house for Yiddish moved to Warsaw in 1925 (ECE 2: 185 f). In Kiev, Sholem Aleykhem launched in 1888 the publishing house and literary journal Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek (The Yiddish Folk Library). In Romania, Iaşi’s Tipografia Institutul Albinei (The Press of the Albina Institute), printed the magazine “Albina Românească” (The Romanian Bee; 1829–) and other works of the emerging Romanian literature. The Editura Socec, established in 1859 by Ioan V. Socec, a participant in the 1848 Walachian revolution, published already complete editions of Romanian writers. The writer Petre Ispirescu and his associates started in 1868 the Noua tipografie a laboratorilor români (The New Press of Romanian Workers), renamed in 1878 Tipografia Academiei Române (The Romanian Academy Press). For the Slavic people, the Matica foundations fomented the development of national cultures. Established by private donations, they published fiction, dictionaries, and scientific studies in the vernacular; they also furthered language reform, gave grants to students and writers, and contributed to the establishment of libraries, the erection of monuments, and the cultivation of pan-Slav connections. They all had turbulent histories but are still in operation. The oldest of them, the Matica Srpska, was founded in 1826 in Pest by Jovan Hadžić, and modeled in part after the Hungarian Academy. In addition to books, it published the journal Serbski Letopis, founded two years earlier by Georgije Magarašević, Pavel Jozef Šafárik, and Lukijan Musički in Novi Sad, where Magarašević was professor and Šafárik the director of the Serbian gymnasium (see Kimball, “Austro-Slav” 14–17). In 1838, the wealthy Serb landowner Sava Tekelija-Popović left the Matica a legacy to support Serbian students at the University of Pest. The Hungarian authorities were suspicious of the Matica and even suspended its activities in 1835–36 for alleged pan-Slavism, but they resisted Serb efforts to move it to Novi Sad. In 1863 the move was nevertheless accomplished, and the Matica, as well as its journal, is flourishing there today. The Bohemian Museum, founded in 1818, did far more for the study and propagation of Czech literature up to the 1860s than the universities or the academies for soldiers and noblemen had. Its Verhandlungen (Proceedings 1827–) first appeared irregularly, but the historian František Palacký persuaded the Museum’s governors to publish a proper journal with parallel German and Czech issues. The German monthly became a quarterly in 1830 and failed in 1831, whereas the Czech journal, a quarterly from the beginning, assumed, rather confusingly for literary historians, four different names in the course of the nineteenth century. It published belles-lettres, new and medieval, as well as essays in literary history and other disciplines. The journal originally tended to have a popular audience in mind because one of its aims was the edification of the Czech language. On that basis, Palacký conceived of a Committee for the Scholarly Cultivation of the Czech Language and Literature in 1829, which then gave rise on January 1, 1831, to a publishing house within the Museum named after the Serbian model Matice česká (The Bohemian Queen-bee). Among its early publications were Jungmann’s Slovník česko-německý (Czech-German Dictionary; 1834–39) and Hanka’s edition of Viktorin ze Všehrd’s O práviech, o súdiech i o dskách země české knihy devatery (Nine Books on the Laws, Judgments, and Public Records of the Land of Bohemia; 1499), intended as a tribute to Jungmann (1841). The edition was unfortunate on two counts: Hanka made serious mistakes in the transcription because he could not read the original accurately, and the censor had excised passages he considered politically inflammatory. The corrected edition was published in the 1860s (Tieftrunk, Dějiny 236). It is particularly ironic that this

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should have occurred to a law book since, throughout the Revival and, indeed, later, Czech literary historians paid great attention to law books. That fitted their role as composers of the cultural curriculum vitae, as demonstrators of the historical rights of the Crown Lands and, particularly after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, of the feasibility of Czech autonomy. However, the Matice česká was by no means disloyal to the Monarchy. Its first curator was the young enthusiast for all things Czech, Rudolph Prince Kinsky. Its press started with the first issue of the Museum Journal, but its second publication was Hlasy vlastenců ke dni 1. měsíce března 1832 (Countrymen’s Voices for March 1, 1832), a volume of fifteen poems by fifteen writers, including the literary historians Jungmann and Simeon Karel Macháček, in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Francis I’s accession. The fifth publication was another loyal anthology, Hlasy vlastenců při radostném vítání J.V. Ferdinanda I. a Marie Anny (Countrymen’s Voices in Joyous Welcome of Their Majesties Ferdinand I and Mary Anne; 1835). Twenty years later, while under police surveillance and suffering from diminishing subscriptions, the Matice published the best-known of its tributes, Perly české (Bohemian Pearls; 1855), in celebration of Francis Joseph I and his wife’s sojourn in Prague. This volume contains contributions by the popular song-writer and vociferous supporter of neo-Absolutism Václav Jaromír Picek, by the lawyer supporter of the forged Manuscripts, legal historian and senior civil servant Hermenegild Jireček, and by Božena Němcová, the liberal fiction writer who was quickly becoming a cult figure. Tieftrunk’s assessment of Perly české typifies a particular brand of gushing literary criticism that one would not normally associate with academic writing in the 1880s: “What a variety of pithy [sic] content, especially in the prose pieces! What polished style in all the contributions! Many an item here is still a genuine pearl, excellent reading” (Dějiny 166–67). The pun is inane. The Matice’s publications further included Palacký’s monumental history of the Czech nation, Šafárik’s Slowanské starožitnosti (1837), and Hlasowé, a joint call of several writers to preserve the unity of the Czech, Slovak, and Moravian literary languages (1846). A much weaker Matice Moravská was founded in 1836, whereas reorganization in 1852 severely curtailed the Czech one. The founding of the Matica hrvatska in 1842 as Matica Ilirska was one of the major achievements of Ljudevit Gaj’s Illyrian movement and of its publishing organ, Gaj’s Narodne Ilirske novine (Illyrian National News; 1835–). Growing Austrian distrust in the Illyrian movement led to the imperial Reskript of 1843, which forbade the use of the term but allowed the continuation of the reading room and the Matica on a limited scale. The Matica published the Dalmatian classics of Ivan Gundulić, Dimitrije Demeter’s first modern Croatian drama, Teuta (1844), and a Croatian-German-Italian dictionary. In 1847 it assumed the publication of Stanko Vraz’s journal Kolo (Round Dance; 1842–51), which had a South-Slavic and pan-Slavic orientation. Vraz, a leader in the Illyrian movement, translated into Croatian and published in Kolo works by Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Jan Kollár, and even Byron. Kolo was followed in 1851 by the literary weekly Neven (Marigold), and later by Vijenac (The Wreath), edited in the period 1874–81 by August Šenoa. With the passage of time the Matica turned academic. One of its major publication ventures became the ten-volume Hrvatske Narodne Pjesme (Croatian Folk Songs; 1896–1954), initiated by Luka Marjanović. A Dalmatian Matica functioned between 1862 and 1912. The Slovak Matica was founded in 1863 in Martin, after the Slovak Memorandum of 1861 had failed to improve the situation of the Slovaks. Engaging in shrewd diplomacy, Emperor Franz Josef contributed 1000 fl.! The Slovak Matica published its own journal, Letopis, and promoted Štúr’s

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language reform, but published relatively few literary works. The Hungarian authorities dissolved it and confiscated its assets in 1875, but it rose from its ashes after the birth of Czechoslovakia. The Slovenska matica was founded in 1864 in Ljubljana and had as many as 1200 members by 1866. The leadership was conservative (the progressive writer Fran Levstik lasted only for one year as secretary). It sponsored national histories, literary histories, histories of the arts, and ethnological research, but its Letopis published only few articles about the Slovene language and literature, and the matica itself did little for Slovene authors prior to the 1880s. Last but not least we have to mention the Polish Ossolineum in Lwów, which was established in 1817 by Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński and became a national museum of art objects, an archive of diaries and literary manuscripts, a public library, and a distinguished publishing house. It also supported scholarly research matters Polish when this was forbidden at the Polish universities of the area. However, in the mid-1840s the ossolineum also lost its publishing rights, and its director was arrested. Other Slavic publishing houses were sustained by religious societies that produced popular and cheap Bibles, Catechisms, almanacs, and other religious books in the vernacular. They included the Czech Catholic Dědistvi svatojanké (The Heritage of St. Jan Nepomuk; 1829–); Zagreb’s Hrvatsko Knježevno Društvo sv. Jeronima (St. Jerome Society; 1867–), which published the almanac Danica; the Slovak Spolok Sväteho Vojtecha (Society of St. Adalbert; 1870) in Trnava; and the Slovene Družba sv. Mohorja (Society of St. Hermagoras; 1852–), which was founded in Klagenfurt but moved to Slovenia in 1919. Many early East-Central European newspapers, literary journals, and books had to be published abroad, mostly for political reasons. A substantial number of them appeared in the metropolitan centers of the hegemonic powers, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul, perhaps as part of a deliberate policy on the part of the authorities to allow potentially dangerous publications to be prepared under close surveillance rather than in some obscure provincial corner, or, even worse, in the territory of a rival power. As Karl Dieterich noted, the first Hungarian, Serbian, and Greek newspapers, journals and books appeared in Vienna (119). It was here that Demetrije Davidović started the first important Serbian newspaper, the Srpske Novine (Serbian News; 1813–22), with contributions from the Slovenian philologist Jernej [Batholomäus] Kopitar. The newspaper reappeared in Kragujevac in 1831 as the first paper in independent Serbia. Two other Serbian papers were started in Pest in 1835 (see Lord, “Nationalism” 264). The Slovenské noviny (Slovak News; 1849–61) was published by Jonáš Záborský and others in Vienna; many other Slovak publications appeared in Pest (ECE 2: 164, 167). The Russian authorities adopted a double stance with respect to the Baltic students studying in St. Petersburg, welcoming them as part of a Russification program (publication in Latvian and Lithuanian was forbidden until 1904), but suppressing their patriotic activities. For instance, the Latvian Pēterburgas Avīzes (St. Petersburg Newspaper), started in 1862 by students associated with the New Latvia movement, was silenced in 1865. In contrast, the Russian authorities adopted a friendlier attitude towards the Serbian and Bulgarian students, for these Slavic intellectuals could be mobilized for pan-Slav goals and against the waning Ottoman power in the Balkans. Next to Vienna, Pest, and St. Petersburg, Tsarigrad/Istanbul was the fourth important “extraterritorial” publishing center. Indeed, most Bulgarian newspapers and journals of the revival period appeared here (ECE 2: 403), and Albanian national identity was created on the banks of the

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Bosporus (ECE 2: 291), though Albanian journals sprang up in the 1880s and 90s “in all the major cities of the Balkans” (p. 92 below). The Ottoman authorities were willing to tolerate “harmless” cultural and even political activities among Bulgarians and Albanians, and they actively supported exiled cultural and political leaders from Poland and Hungary. In 1839, the Porte released the Gjulhan Khatisheriff, which granted rights to life, dignity, and property for all subjects, regardless of religion and nationality. This lofty act was resisted by the local Muslim authorities, and did not improve the lot of Christian peasants, but it liberalized somewhat the cultural climate. Konstantin Georgiev Fotinov published his Lyuboslovie (The Literature Lover; 1842, 1844–46) in Smyrna, and Ivan Bogorov edited (for the first four years) the first Bulgarian biweekly newspaper, the Tsarigradski vestnik (1848–61), in Istanbul. Jani Vreto and others founded in 1879 in Istanbul a Shoqëri e të shtypuri shkronja shqip (Society for the Publication of Albanian Writing) to further the publication of Albanian books, especially textbooks, and to establish Albanian schools. When it was banned a few years later, Vreto moved the headquarters to Bucharest. The Albanian printing press he established there in 1886 published most of Naim Frashëri’s works (four in Turkish, one in Persian, two in Greek, and fifteen in Albanian). Anastas Kullurioti, another Albanian publisher, worked in Athens. Some East-Central European books and journals were published in Germany. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić’s original and translated works appeared in Halle, Leipzig, and Berlin. Leipzig was where the Hungarians Miklós Wesselényi (giving Bucharest as his spurious address), József Eötvös, István Széchenyi and others published books in the 1830s and 40s, and where Bogorov edited the three issues of his Bulgarian newspaper, the Bălgarski orel (Bulgarian Eagle; 1846). A few significant publications appeared elsewhere in Western Europe, especially after the aborted 1848 revolutions. Mickiewicz published his revolutionary and republican newspaper La Tribune des peuples (Tribune of the People; 1849) in Paris. Miklós Jósika, the Hungarian historical novelist who fled to Brussels to escape the gallows, came to direct there the central office of Polish émigrés. He published his novels in Leipzig, Braunschweig, and other German cities, in Hungarian as well as in German. In Hungary, he published under a pseudonym until 1860. Vernacular works from the Baltic countries were usually printed in Germany and smuggled in from there. As we have seen, publishing in Bulgaria was extremely limited under Ottoman rule. One of the first scholarly studies of Bulgarian literature, — written in Kharkov by the Russian scholar Ivan Sreznevski and published in Prague! — lists Buda, Bucharest, Odessa, Smyrna, Belgrade, Leipzig, Vienna, and Tsarigrad as the places where Bulgarian books were published during the period 1840–45. These were also the cities where the first popular Bulgarian translations of foreign fiction appeared. Furthermore, Georgi S. Rakovski started his revolutionary newspaper Bălgarska dnevnitsa (1857–) in Novi Sad, Stefan Verković published in 1860 in Belgrade, Khristo Botev’s short-lived journals appeared in Bucharest (1874–75), and Lyuben Karavelov edited his journals in Serbia. Indeed, it was only in 1885 that Ivan Vazov was able to launch at home Bulgaria’s first scholarly journal, Zora (Dawn). In the first half of the nineteenth century the Royal University Press of Buda was a major publishing center for virtually all countries in the region (see ECE 2: 164 and Péter Király, Typographie, esp. Köpeczi). Its authors included the Croatian Ljudevit Gaj, the Serbs Sima Sarajlija Milutinović, Lukijan Mušicki, Dositej Obradović, Sava Tekelija, and Vuk Karadžić, and the Slovaks Anton Bernolák, Jan Hollý, and Josef Miloslav Hurban. The works printed included Šafárik’s

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history of the Slavic languages and literatures (1926), Bohuslav Tablic’s almanac Zora, the first edition of Jan Kollár’s Slávy dcera (1824), his Slovak textbook reader (1825), Andrej Sládkovič‘s Marína (1846), the mentioned Serbian journal Letopis (Chronicle), Nikolai Kaidanov’s world history in Bulgarian translation (1836), Romanian translations of Fénélon and Obradović, and, last but not least, Petru Maior’s history of the Romanian beginnings in Dacia (1812). Journals Vernacular journals were central to every national awakening. Some literary journals published translations as well as original prose and poetry; others, like Pál Szemere’s Hungarian Élet és Literatúra (1826–33), printed critical and theoretical essays on literature and culture. Scholarly journals, often published by an Academy or learned society, focused on history, philosophy, the natural sciences, and other matters, but usually gave much attention also to literature and language. Such was the case with the aforementioned journal of the Bohemian Museum and the Hungarian Tudományos Gyüjtemény. The latter played a major role in the Hungarian battle over language renewal, and, after the appointment of the poet Mihály Vörösmarty as editor in 1828, in the unfolding of Hungarian Romanticism. Vörösmarty added the literary supplement Koszorú (The Wreath; 1828–) to it. In Hungary, the birthplace of vernacular journals was in provincial cities. The Magyar Museum (1788–93) and the Orpheus (1790–91) were published in Kassa (Košice); Gábor Döbrentei’s Erdélyi Múzeum (1814–18) in Kolozsvár (Cluj). József Kármán’s Uránia (1794–95) appeared in Pest and advocated making this city the center of literature, but closed down after three issues. The Tudományos Gyüjtemény was a harbinger, but Pest became the true center of journals only with Károly Kisfaludy’s Aurora (1822–37), then the Athenaeum (1837–43) of Vörösmarty, József Bajza, and Ferenc Toldy. In Romania, Bucharest and Iaşi vied from the outset for the privilege of hosting the most important Romanian journals, though some important Romanian ones were published on the other side of the Carpathians, such as Gheorghe Bariţiu’s Foé literară (Literary Paper; 1838–1865), later renamed Foae pentru minte, inimă şi literatură (Paper for the Mind, Heart, and Literature) and published in Braşov. It was in Bucharest that Ion Heliade Rădulescu launched the newspaper Curierul românesc (The Romanian Herald) in 1829, to which he added a literary supplement a year later. Mihail Kogălniceanu published Dacia literară (Literary Dacia; March-June 1840) in Iaşi, putting forth a full-fledged program for the encouragement of an original Romanian literature. A similar focus on the development of modern Romanian literature was promoted by Titu Maiorescu’s Junimea society, launched in 1863 in Iaşi, and its journal, Convorbiri literare (Literary Discussions), started in Iaşi in 1867 but moved to Bucharest in 1886. While Maiorescu was concerned primarily with aligning Romanian literature with European standards, two journals launched at the turn of the century — Sămănătorul (The Sower; 1901–10), founded in Bucharest by George Coşbuc and Alexandru Vlahuţă but edited from 1903 onward by Nicolae Iorga, and Viaţa Românească (Romanian Life; 1906–16; 1920–), which started in Iaşi but moved to Bucharest — pursued what they took to be authentic national traditions, rooted in village culture. As we saw, several early Bulgarian journals were also published in Romania. The emergence and growth of daily newspapers in the vernacular was vital for nineteenthcentury literary life. These papers propelled the national movement towards cultural and politi-

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cal independence and were often edited by literary writers. This was the case with the Latviešu Avīzes (Latvian Gazette; 1822–), the first newspaper in Latvian, and the later Latvian Dienas Lapa (Daily Leaflet), edited by Aspazija in 1893–1903 and associated with the Jaunā Stravā (New Trend) movement; Ljudevit Gaj’s Novine hrvacke, the first newspaper in Croatian; L’judovít Štúr’s Slovenskje narodňje novini (Slovak National News); Karel Havlíček’s Národní noviny (National News) and Pražské noviny (Prague News); and Heliade Rădulescu’s aforementioned Curierul românesc (1829–1848). Several of these had literary supplements: Gaj’s Danica hrvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska (Croatian, Slovene, and Dalmatian Morning Star; 1835), Štúr’s Orol tatránski (The Tatra Eagle), and Havlíček’s Česká včela (The Czech Bee). Due to chronic financial difficulties and confrontations with the censors, most of these newspapers were short lived. Štúr, who tried unsuccessfully in 1842 to publish a Czech paper in Pest, did get in 1845 permission to publish in Slovak the Slovenskje národňje novini, but this paper was banned in 1848 and replaced in 1849 by the aforementioned pro-Habsburg Slovenské noviny (The Slovak Newspaper), edited in Czech and published in Vienna. The first newspaper in the South Slav area, the Télégraphe illyrien, was edited under the Napoleonic regime (1810–13) in Laibach (Ljubljana), for a few months in 1813 by the French writer Charles Nodier. The first indigenous Slovene journal was the Krajnska čbelica (The Little Carnolian Bee; 1830–34, 1848), a literary almanac edited by Miha Castelic with frequent contributions from France Prešeren. The Slovenian journal Zvon (Bell; 1870, 1876–80) was published in Vienna by Josip Stritar and co-edited by Fran Levstik, but conservatives forced it to close down. As technology progressed, larger, commercially based newspapers in the vernacular emerged everywhere. Though they gave less attention to literature, they offered a lifeline for struggling writers, most of whom could not live on the income of their fiction and poetry. By the second half of the nineteenth century, most writers worked in some form for newspapers, and doing so they developed new genres and styles of writing that suited the dominant aesthetic trend of Realism. The most important meeting ground of journalism and fiction was the serialized novel. In Poland, for instance, Bolesław Prus and other novelists first published their realist novels in serialized form. Henryk Sienkiewicz’s “war trilogy,” Ogniem i mieczem, Potop, and Pan Wołodyjowski, serialized in the 1880s, became a Dickensian success: “Rarely has a Polish novel enjoyed, both in its own day and later, such immense success or evoked such enthusiasm from the public. Readers were so moved that they bombarded the author with letters, asking him, for instance, to spare the life of a hero who was in danger; they were happy if the hero came out alive and they prayed for the peace of soul of those who met a heroic death” (Kridl, Survey 381). Censorship The articles of Jan Čulík, Dagmar Roberts, and Kees Mercks remind us that censorship had a long history in the region. Indeed, censorship had existed throughout the ages, only its specific forms, its severity, its censoring authority, and its injunctions changed. The Catholic Church practiced internal as well as external censorship. Of the former, banishing a work by the priest Jozef Ignác Bajza is a good example (see p. 111 below). The latter, external censorship via the state, declined though never quite disappeared in the nineteenth century. Especially interesting are the cases where church and state interests clashed. Thus, for instance, Austrian imperial censorship often

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complied with the demands of Stefan Stratimirović, Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in Karlovac, because he had a strong influence on the Serbian population, though Catholic Vienna had actually little sympathy with the Serbian Orthodox Church. Stratimirović blocked the publication of several works on language and folklore. Vuk Karadžić (see p. 270ff) did find printers for his Serbian grammars and collections of Serbian folk songs, but was severely attacked by the Orthodox Church, which saw in the revision of Old Slavic spelling a step towards Catholicism. Around 1800, Austrian censorship had first and foremost political concerns, due to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, but moral censorship, especially in the theater, remained powerful. Decisions were often made on the highest level: the Emperor himself gave finally permission for Friedrich Schlegel to hold lectures on European literary history in Vienna, and Metternich granted permission, after lengthy deliberations, to stage Theodor Körner’s patriotic play Zriny (ECE 519). Since so many decisions were made at the top, the people charged with daily censorship did not have much power. Indeed, many of the early-nineteenth-century censors were themselves participants in national awakenings. In Vienna, the censor for Slavic books as of August 1810 was Kopitar, whereas the censors at the Royal University of Buda were at various times the Romanian historians and philologists Samuil Micu-Klein, Petru Maior, and Gheorghe Şincai. As the century progressed, nationalist-ethnic censorship became gradually predominant. Censorship now went beyond decisions on individual publications or performances, and included repressive measures against cultural institutions, ranging from interference and harassment all the way to closing them down. Witness the history of the Slavic Maticas, which were targeted by Hungarian as well as Austrian censorship, sometimes working in tandem, sometimes against each other. The fact that Emperor Franz Josef donated 1000 fl to the new established Slovak Matica in 1863 was surely no act of charity but a well-calculated gesture to compensate the disappointed Slovaks for his disregard of their Memorandum of 1861 and to win them for the Imperial side against the Hungarians. Because of its strong public function, theater had always been subjected to severe censorship. Political censorship of plays and performances were predominant in the nineteenth century. Polish romantic theater could not be performed in Warsaw, though some of it could be staged in the Prussian and Austrian partitions later in the century. Dobri Voinikov established in 1865 a Bulgarian theater in Brăila, Romania, but the watchful eyes of Turkish agents followed him even there. Aspazija’s first play, Atriebēja (The Avenging Woman), was written in 1887 but could not be published until 1904, and then only in St. Petersburg. During the modernist period, totalitarian regimes exercised the harshest censorship, but severely repressive measures were also taken elsewhere: during World War I, in Hungary’s Soviet Republic in 1919, and during the white terror that followed it. Political repression led to a large influx of émigrés from the Soviet Union: the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva and the linguist Roman Jakobson went to Czechoslovakia; the actor and director Mikhail Chekhov and other theater people to the Baltic countries, if only temporarily. By the mid-thirties, a new wave of theater émigrés arrived in Prague from Germany. Our articles in Part II give a few brief examples for the staging of plays underground, in ghettos, and in Hitler’s concentration camps. Censorship could not control effectively the elusive authors of oral poetry, but it exercised great power over (1) the collecting, (2) the archival preservation, and (3) the publication of folklore. On the collecting level, folklorists were often denied access to the source area or person.

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Similarly, access was often denied to the key institutional depositories of collected material, usually under state control. Those excluded this way could pursue folklore collecting as a purely private activity but they had little chance to publish the results in the native realm. A certain Apafi published in the Magyar Hirlap (Hungarian News; 1850, no. 198: 1079) an invitation to collect folk songs from the “time of the revolution” (1848–49), but he had to announce subsequently in the same paper (1850, no. 267: 1203) that the government had not approved the project, banned the collection, and confiscated the songs. He asked potential collaborators to stop collecting and corresponding with him for he would have to surrender all the material to the police. Here, the lines were clearly drawn, but in many other cases they were less clear, and the vagueness of censorial position became a factor in editorial decisions on what may be included in a collection. Finally, censorship often forbade, or at least discouraged, certain themes, topics, and genres in folklore research. In the nineteenth century, anti-clerical folklore, folklore dealing with class struggle, obscene folklore, and political jokes were largely unpublishable. Vuk Karadžić’s collection of obscene women’s songs offers a remarkable case for this. As Tomislav Longinović writes in his introduction to an English translation of these: besides his four published collections, “Vuk recorded a fifth one of women’s songs, which was preserved only in manuscript and which he never tried to publish. This fifth collection of so-called obscene (‘bezobrazne pjesme’) songs, dealt with those aspects of peasant life which would probably have shocked and alienated the exiled Serbian elite in Hungary, very much under the sway of the Serbian Orthodox church. It is likely that Vuk did not want to compromise himself by publishing this sexually explicit material, which was bound to confirm and reinforce the prejudices that his powerful enemies had already nurtured” (16). These songs, omitted also from the comprehensive twentieth-century edition of Karadžić’s works, were finally published in Crven ban. Erotske narodne pesme (Red Knight. Erotic Folk Songs; 1979). II Modernism From a regional perspective the first serious break with romantic nationalism took place in Poland, more specifically in the Warsaw Kingdom, after the aborted 1861–63 uprising. What became known as Positivism (ECE 1: 254–57), was only partly inspired by Auguste Comte’s positivist philosophy; it was rather a sober recognition that armed uprisings were senseless romantic and metaphysical undertakings. The positivists advocated, therefore, work, “organic” work at the economic and social base of Poland’s existing political and social conditions. As Aleksander Świętochowski, the leader of the positivists, wrote in his article “Wskazania polityczne” (Political Directions; 1882), the highest value of any nation lies in its contribution to universal culture rather than in political autonomy (qtd. in Kridl, Survey 354). The counterpart to the Warsaw positivists were the Cracow Stańczycy (“Stańczyks,” named after a famous sixteenth-century court jester who became a theme and symbol in Polish culture), members of a political faction that declared its ideas in the satirical pamphlet Teka Stańczyka (Stańczyk’s Portfolio), published in 1869 by the young conservative noblemen Stanisław Koźmian, Jozef Szujski, Stanisław Tarnowski, and Ludwik Wodzicki. The pamphlet ridiculed armed uprisings and declared, like the positivists, that Poland ought to concentrate on economic growth rather than on political independence. The Stańczycy blamed

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above all the Poles themselves for their misfortunes, did important work in historiography and theater, and helped Galicia achieve greater independence, though they remained loyal to the dual Monarchy in the parliament. The positivists urged their countrymen to learn from pragmatic philosophers, economists, and scientists, which stimulated the translation of works by Darwin, Taine, Smith, Spencer, and others. The publishing trade flourished so well that, according to Kridl, “never before were so many specialized and general works, both originals and translations, published” (Survey 355). Similarly, a host of new Polish periodicals started to advocate positivist principles. Adam Wiślicki launched in 1866 the Warsaw Przegląd tygodniowy (Weekly Review); Świętochowski published Prawda (Truth) and signed his editorials “Deputy of Truth”; Nowiny (The News) was edited for a while by the novelist Bolesław Prus; and the monthly Ateneum was edited by Piotr Chmielowski, the leading literary historian. The positivists rejected chauvinism, prejudices, national megalomania, Messianism, and anti-Semitism. These positivist views found their expression in the Polish novel, undoubtedly the strongest representative of Realism in the region. The novels of Orzeszkowa, Świętochowski, and, above all, Prus, belong to the best achievements of the European realist novel, and, in the case of Prus’s Lalka (ECE 1: 241–42), go beyond doctrines. The positivist writers frequently contributed to journals and newspapers, not only with serialized novels but also with new genres like Świętochowski’s “chronicles.” The Polish positivists embraced Western ideas on modernization in economics and administration, not unlike the Hungarian István Széchenyi did in the 1840s. The opening to modernist aesthetics, which followed everywhere in the region in the 1890s, was inspired above all by literary and artistic trends in France but acquired a different orientation in East-Central Europe. Artistic Modernism, like Positivism, distrusted patriotic-populist literary discourses. In Hungary, it was József Kiss who started the first liberal and urban literary journal, A Hét (The Week; 1890–1924). As he recalled ten years after its founding, he was eager to gather impressive names for the launching, but the good writers were already engaged elsewhere. Nevertheless: A Hét did have a pillar, even if his name was not yet as much of a household name as today: Zoltán Ambrus, this gentleman with an awesome sword, grandmaster of forms and timbres. Together we formed the editorial board, and we met for a midnight duel, that is to say for consultation, twicethree times a week in the Korona coffee house, which replaced then a writers’ club (Szentes 72).

The true home of A Hét became the Centrál kávéház: Strange journal! It is read in the coffee house and also written in the coffee house. Do they write it in the coffee house because it is read there? Or do they read it there because it is written there? I could never figure it out. For nearly eight years, the Centrál kávéház was the general headquarters of A Hét […] Every Friday and Saturday various corners of the coffee house were taken by suspicious-looking gentlemen who never turned up there during the week. They would sit at the same place for hours with a small glass of beer, busily writing line after line on uniformly cut pages. These were the men of A Hét. The commotion, the noise, the turbulence of discussions

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The great Hungarian modernist journal, the Nyugat (West; 1908–41), started almost two decades later, upon the initiative of Miksa Fenyő, Ignotus, and Ernő Osvát, with Endre Ady’s towering figure looming behind them (see pp. 71–79 below). Important was also Oszkár Jászi’s Huszadik század (Twentieth Century), which focused on the social sciences, politics, and social reform, though it also participated in the literary life. The so-called Sunday Club of György Lukács, which gathered through the war years, had no journal, but the publications of its members profoundly affected aesthetic thinking in Hungary. The leading Slovene literary journals fighting each other were the Ljubljanski zvon (Ljubljana Bells; 1881–), edited by Anton Aškerc 1900–1902 and then by Ivan Cankar and Oton Župančić, and Dom in svet (Home and World; 1888–1943), under Evgen Lampe’s conservative Catholic editorship (ECE 1: 336). The liberal journal of the next generation, Slovan (Slav), was edited by the novelist Fran Govekar. In Croatia, August Šenoa, of Czech descent, edited 1874–81 the aforementioned Vijenac (The Wreath), the first serious Croatian literary journal. Antun Gustav Matoš, who soaked up French Modernism while traveling in Western Europe before returning to Zagreb in 1908, had no journal of his own but became one of the towering figures for the next generation of Croatian and Serbian modernists. In Bulgaria, the voice of Modernism was Misăl (1902–07), which published Krăstyu Krăstev, Penčo Slaveikov, and others (ECE 1: 334–35). In Romania, the modernist movement started in the 1880s, when Alexandru Macedonski’s Literatorul (The Literary Worker) began to propagate symbolist ideas. Młoda Polska’s Modernism (see also ECE 1: 344 and 426–27) was stimulated by translations from and articles on Baudelaire, Verlaine, Poe, and Maeterlinck. The pioneer was Miriam (Zenon Przesmycki), who published the short-lived Warsaw journal Życie (1887) and then, also in Warsaw, the major Polish modernist journal Chimera (1901–1907); but the key figure was Stanisław Przybyszewski, who returned from Germany in 1898 and became editor first of a Cracow journal also called Życie (1897–1900), and in 1901 of Miriam’s Chimera. The Cracow journal featured, among others, the poetry of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer and the theatrical as well as artistic work of Stanisław Wyspiański. Tetmajer expressed a certain nihilistic and decadent mood, as in “Koniec wieku” (End of the Century) where the lyrical voice suggests to a silent partner four remedies to the senselessness of life, but his own negative responses to each finally forces the other to hang his head in silence (47). In contrast, Przybyszewski provocatively declared in his “Confiteor” on January 1 1899 that art was self-contained and absolute because it reflected an absolute, namely the soul. Chimera published poems by Bolesław Leśmian and Tadeusz Miciński, as well as Jan Kasprowicz’s famous hymns, written in free verse. The Czech Lumír, named after the mythic hero in Hanka’s forged manuscript and edited in 1873–77 by Svatopluk Čech (involving also Jaroslav Vrchlický and Julius Zeyer) opened early to Western currents, but Czech Modernism came to full bloom only later, with the decadent and anarchist Almanach secese (1896), edited by Stanislav Kostka Neumann, and the Nový Kult (New

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Culture; 1897–1904), edited by Neumann with Marie Majerová. Hlas (The Voice; 1898–1904), published by an eponymous association, criticized the pseudo-Romantic adoration of the peasantry and the political sympathy with Tsarist Russia. The leading modernist literary journal was the Moderní revue (Modern Review; 1894–1925), edited by Arnošt Procházka and Jiří Karásek (see pp. 63–70 below). The major modernist Czech publisher was František Borový, who printed Neumann’s avantgarde journal Červen (June; 1918–21), and works by the Čapek brothers, Vítězslav Nezval, and others. Topič also focused on modern Czech and foreign authors, Odeon (1925–1940; 1946–1949) published Czech and foreign avant-gardes, whereas Otokar Štorch-Marien’s Aventinum (1919–34 and 1945–49) published mostly nineteenth-century Czech literature. One of the largest modern Czech publishers, founded in 1898, assumed in 1910 the name of the first Czech publisher, Melantrich. In Romania, Minerva published at the turn of the century Ion Luca Caragiale, Maiorescu, and others, next to the aforementioned Tipografia Academiei Române, which already handled some of the classics. New publishers emerged here too: Editura Cartea Românească came to focus on modern literature and criticism, and Editura Cultura Naţională published in the first half of the twentieth century major modern Romanian writers. The publishing house Luceafărul (Morning Star — named after Eminescu’s poem) started in Budapest, and issued also an eponymous journal whose co-editor in 1902 became the poet Octavian Goga. Luceafărul also published his first collection, Poezii (1905). By the end of the nineteenth century, Transylvania had lost its earlier eminence in printing and publishing, but Hugo Meltzl edited in Kolozsvár the world’s first journal of comparative literature, the Acta comparationis litterarum universarum (1877–88), and Adolf Meschendörfer opened a window to the world for the Saxons with his Kronstadt literary journal Die Karpathen (The Carpathian Mountains; 1907–14). Political events and pressures often forced East-Central European modernist writers into exile. Because of the failure of the 1905 Russian revolution, the Estonian Friedebert Tuglas had to flee to Finland and Paris, whereas the Latvian Aspazija fled with her husband Jānis Rainis to Switzerland and returned only towards the end of World War I. Faik bey Konitza, though not an exile, published his revivalist French/Albanian journal Albania in Brussels (1897–1902) and London (1902–10). The Interwar Period The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the (re)birth of several nations, and the redrawing of most borders radically changed the landscape of East-Central Europe’s literary cultures as well. Unfortunately, the geopolitical changes often intensified nationalism and fuelled irredentism, whereas most of the promising new developments came to a halt through the economic crisis of the late 1920s, the rise of Hitler, and the war preparations. Nevertheless, the interwar decades produced some remarkable transnational literary achievements. Transylvania (ECE 2: 266–76), for instance, sustained literature of high quality under adverse conditions, and witnessed momentary rapprochements between its Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon cultures. The Transylvania Hungarians published the quality journals Pásztortűz (Campfire; 1921–45), Korunk (Our Age; 1926–40), and Erdélyi Helikon (1928–44), while the Erdélyi Szépmives Céh (Transylvanian

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Artist’s Guild; 1924–44. See ECE 2: 269), publisher of the Helikon, produced well-made and successful books. Gândirea (Thought; 1921–44), the major Transylvanian Romanian journal from Cluj, was founded by a group of young writers and edited by Cezar Petrescu and D. I. Cucu. It switched to a rather nationalist policy after it was relocated to Bucharest and taken over by Nichifor Crainic. Heinrich Zillich’s Klingsor (1924–38) in Hermannstadt (Sibiu) took over from Die Karpathen the task of introducing Modernism to the Saxons and pursued intensive cooperation with Pásztortűz and Erdélyi Helikon in the late twenties. The contacts came to naught when Zillich and many of his collaborators enthusiastically greeted Hitler’s Germany. The Romanian publisher Editura Fundaţiei Regale, which promoted, under various names, also literature in Romanian translation, issued in 1934 Goga’s translation of Imre Madách’s Az ember tragédiája (Tragedia omului/The Tragedy of Man). According to a report in the Erdélyi Helikon (1934: 555), Emanoil Bucuţă, Minister of Culture at the time, announced at a meeting of Hungarian writers that this publishing house planned to translate ten Hungarian novels, but the project apparently did not materialize. The often ephemeral avant-garde journals mushroomed during the interwar period. Those with a longer life included Lajos Kassák’s Ma (1916–25), published in Budapest and in Viennese exile, Ljubomir Micić’s Zenit (1921–26), published in Zagreb and Belgrade, and the Bucharest journals that marked a transition from Constructivism to Surrealism: Contimporanul (1922–32), launched by Ion Vinea and Marcel Iancu (Janco), Integral (1925–28), and Saşa Pană’s unu (One; 1928–31). Slovak Marxist writers formed the DAV circle, whose eponymous journal (intermittently 1924–37) was edited by Vlado Clementis. Tadeusz Peiper’s and Julian Przyboś’s futurist and avant-garde Zwrotnica (The Switch; 1922–37), published in Cracow, was closed down by the police in 1923 but resumed publication next year. Peiper, Przyboś, the futurists (foremost among them Bruno Jasieński), and others published here linguistic and poetic experiments that led to the development of Polish free verse, sound symbolism, and daring metaphors. The Mladé Slovensko (Young Slovakia; 1919–33) involved Emil Boleslav Lukáč and others, while Elán (1930–47), founded by Ján Smrek, became an organ of younger poets. In Poland, the short-lived expressionist journal Zdroj (Source; 1917–18) counted among its frequent contributors Przybyszewski; Zwrotnica’s great rival was Skamander, a less experimental journal that was open to artistic tendencies ranging from Expressionism to Parnassianism. The Skamandrites Antoni Słonimski and Julian Tuwim, as well as Bruno Schulz, frequently published also in Warsaw’s influential Wiadomosci Literackie (Literary News; 1924–39), founded and edited by Mieczysław Grydzewski and other assimilated Jews. The Warsaw Globus (1932–34) was edited by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Aaron Tseytlin. Yung-Yiddish (Young Yiddish; 1919), which was launched in Łódź right after the war by Yankl Adler and Marek Shvarts (see ECE 2: 206), wanted to fuse Western currents with a Judaic content. In the words of their manifesto: “In our leaning to impressionism, expressionism, and cubism, we shall combine all the perspectives with the name futurism” (Manifesto of Yung-Yiddish 2). In 1922–23, Uri Zvi Greenberg published in Warsaw the Albatros, which shocked many because it used expressionist techniques to propagate right-wing nationalist views. When the second issue of Albatros was confiscated, Greenberg fled to Berlin and published there in 1923 Albatros 3. The highpoint of Warsaw Yiddish literature became Isaac Leyb Peretz’s, Peretz Markish’s, and Israel Joshua Singer’s Khalyastre (The Gang; 1922–24), which wanted to link Yiddish litera-

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ture to the Western Avant-garde. Markish’s manifesto declared: “our measuring stick is not beauty but horror.” The almanacs of the Yung Vilne (Young Vilna) in 1934–35 and 1936 represented the last Yiddish literary voice of Ashkenaz (ECE 2: 314–32). Estonia’s most important interwar journals were Tuglas’s Looming (Creation; 1923–26), and Varamu (Storehouse), which was edited between 1937 and 1940 by Henrik Visnapuu, another poet of the Siuru group. The Latvian constructivist journal Trauksme (Alarm) involved Aleksandrs Čaks. In Bulgaria, two symbolist journals appeared in the interwar period, Dimčo Debelyanov’s Zveno (Link) and Teodor Trayanov’s Hyperion (1922–31). Čavdar Mutafov’s and Atanas Dalčev’s Strelets circle published the avant-garde journals Iztok en Strelets. In Croatia, Miroslav Krleža edited with August Cesarec the short-lived expressionist journal Plamen (Flame; 1919). Krleža renounced later his expressionist beginnings and published another journal in Belgrade, the Danas (Today; 1934–). The typically expressionist image of the flame also served as the title to Geo Milev’s Bulgarian journal Plamăk, which was banned in 1924 because of Milev’s expressionistrevolutionary poem “Septemvri” (September). Milev was arrested the following year, sentenced to a year of prison, and disappeared there. Populism or Agrarian Nationalism This may be the appropriate place for discussing the populist movements, which started in the nineteenth century but developed new forms and intensity during the interwar period. Populism, or agrarian nationalism, emerged when the revival and construction of folklore swept East-Central Europe in the nineteenth century, producing imitations of folk poetry, folk dresses, and peasant life styles (see Part III below). More importantly, glorifications of the folk led to nationalist political ideologies that idealized the countryside and the pristine origins of the national oral culture, while rejecting the cities as sites of modernization and cosmopolitanism. All nineteenth-century national literatures contained populist strains. We find them in Němcová’s stories, in the poetry of Sándor Petőfi and his followers, or in the Heimatliteratur of the German-speaking communities of the region. By the second half of the century, Populism generated a number of journals and movements. In Poland, for instance, the Warsaw weekly Głos (The Voice; 1887–) became the first social-agrarian organ of the ludowcy, the theoreticians of “peasant” politics, which proclaimed that the peasantry represented “the healthiest and most valuable” social class (Kridl, Survey 358). Poland was soon swamped by a veritable “chlopomania,” which also produced, however, such important works as Kasprowicz’s poetry and Władisław Stanisław Reymont’s Nobel-prize winning novel-cycle Chłopi (The Peasants; 1904–1909). Reymont portrayed some larger-than-life peasants (and their fight against German landowners), but also rural violence and vice. In Estonia (ECE 2: 30), Jaan Tõnisson and Villem Reiman regarded the peasant (talupoeg) as the backbone of the nation. Accordingly, it became Tõnisson’s political aim to prevent foreigners to acquire native land. Agriculture was to remain the foundation of the national economy; national culture was to be maakultuur (the culture of the land). Populist writers often held similar ideologies but clashed if their ethnic loyalties differed. Thus, for instance, the Romanian Goga and the Hungarian Dezső Szabó both abhorred Budapest as a modern, Jewish-dominated Babylon, but their national loyalties pitted them against each other. When the Hungarian Minister of Religion and Culture declared that the Hungarian state

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would recognize within its borders only the imperishable culture of the Hungarian soul, Goga sarcastically retorted on January 7, 1913: “What Hungarian culture?” The Hungarian writers were now called Meyer, Durand, and Löwy; Budapest, this “sudden” (i.e., “inorganically grown”) city, was swamped by “Americanism, cabarets, Jews, [and the] jargon of [the Jewish] Dohány utca.” In Budapest, national literature was no longer Hungarian but Jewish (ECE 2: 170). Szabó’s Az elsodort falu (The Village that Was Swept Away; 1919) painted this Jewish (and feminist) Budapest with lurid colors, but its most savage scenes depicted Romanian atrocities committed in Transylvania during World War I. Twentieth-century literary Populism had many political shades and shifting hues. Béla Bartók, who once found Budapest “absolutely hopeless,” for it attracted “a haphazardly heterogeneous, rootless group of Germans and Jews” (ECE 1: 11), soon condemned anti-Semitism and chauvinism, although he remained a populist in the sense that he attributed highest moral values to peasant culture and remained suspicious of cities to the end of his life. Slovak Populism manifested itself in the 1920s and 30s mainly in an apolitical folklore revival, which led to the emergence of a Lyrical Prose School (see pp. 190 and 311 below); but under Slovakia’s nationalist puppet government of 1939–45 Populism took a more dangerous political form. The Hungarian right-wing populists included Géza Féja, József Erdélyi, János Kodolányi, and the Transylvanian József Nyírő (see pp. 117 and 390–91 below). In contrast, some of the most important Hungarian interwar writers, among them Zsigmond Móricz (a main contributor and later editor of Nyugat; see ECE 1: 180), László Németh, and Gyula Illyés were populists of left-wing persuasion. They wrote for the populist journals Válasz (Response; 1934–38) and Kelet Népe (People of the East; 1935–43), the latter of which was edited from 1939 onward by Móricz. Válasz published Illyés’s pioneering Puszták népe (People of the Pusztas; 1934), an autobiographical-ethnological study of life in the poorest Hungarian hamlets. Illyés restarted the journal in 1945. Károly Kós, architect and leader of the “Transylvanianist” movement (ECE 2: 269–72), was another progressive populist. However, as Mihály Szegedy Maszák writes, “there are several open questions concerning the position of the [Hungarian] Populists in intellectual history” (p. 117 below). In Romania, the populist line emerged with the journal Viaţa Românească that Constantin Stere and Paul Bujor started in Iaşi in 1906, and the aforementioned Transylvanian Sămănătorul of Coşbuc and Vlahuţă (see also ECE 2: 264). Stere’s poporanism had a leftist character, whereas Sămănătorul was nationalist and conservative. Goga’s populism was continued by Aron Cotruş (ECE 2: 264–65). The great writers on peasants who went beyond Populism were Liviu Rebreanu, a supporter of Iuliu Maniu’s populist National Peasant Party and author of the rural novels Ion (1920) and Răscoala (Uprising; 1932), and Mihail Sadoveanu, who used in his fiction rural settings, local dialects, and ethnographic customs. His Baltagul (The Hatchet; 1930) turned the folk ballad Mioriţa (The Ewe Lamb) into a tragic epic of pastoral life. The most powerful and original populist thinker of the region was probably Nicolae Iorga, historian, literary scholar, journalist, and politician, who edited the Sămănătorul between 1903 and 1906 and then, until the end of his life his own Neamul românesc (The Romanian People); he also restarted the Viaţa Românească in 1920. Iorga subscribed to the myth of Dacian origins and believed that the Transylvanian peasants preserved Dacian features. His Byzance après Byzance (Byzantium after Byzantium; 1935) intended to show how the Empire lived on in Roman laws and customs, and, subsequently, in rural and peasant customs, mainly in Romania. More narrow

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and radical was Nae Ionescu’s populism: he deplored in the 1930s that rootless and cosmopolitan Bucharest had lost its contact with Eastern Orthodoxy’s folk-nourished traditions (Roza 146–48). Opposition to literary Populism and agrarian nationalism came from the modernist literary trends advocating that literature was autonomous; from futurists, constructivists, socialists, communists, and others who found misery but also vitality in urban modernity; and from believers in scientific and technological progress. As we saw, the Prague Hlasists opposed the cult of the peasantry, and the Young Estonians considered “maakultuur” narrow-minded and isolationist. In the years leading to Estonia’s independence in 1918, Tuglas, Gustav Suits, and other Europeanists sharply criticized the advocates of agrarian cultural politics. In Romania, Eugen Lovinescu and George Călinescu, among others, polemicized with Iorga’s nationalist populism. In Hungary, most contributors of Nyugat were Western-oriented, as the very title of the journal (West) indicates, but Móricz and, in some of his works, Ady revealed themselves as leftist populists. Since urbanization came relatively late in East-Central Europe, literature of the cities emerged only slowly. The early examples include Prus’s positivist Lalka (1890), Ferenc Molnár’s A Pál utcai fiúk (1907), a nostalgic portrayal of the disappearance of the last piece of urban land (the grund), and Gyula Krúdy’s equally nostalgic depiction of the decline and disappearance of Budapest’s old neighborhoods. They were followed by works that turned to broader depictions of urban life. Augusts Deglavs’ novel Rīga (1912–21) showed how this multicultural city belonged to the core of Latvian national identity, and it polemicized against its “Latvianization,” (ECE 2: 43). Angyalföld, a proletarian district of Budapest, gave the title to Lajos Kassák’s autobiographical novel, while József Méliusz’s Város a ködben (City in Mist), written in 1939–40, portrayed multiethnic Temesvár (Timişoara) in the early decades of the twentieth century. III Publications and Their Control under the Communist Regimes Modernism and the Avant-garde redefined literature and the arts but could not reform the national institutions, the universities, schools, National Academies, and National Museums. More importantly perhaps, East-Central European Modernism absorbed some populist and nationalist elements, whereas the Avant-garde, though resolutely internationalist, had only a modest success in combating nationalism. The institutional changes introduced by the communist regimes after World War II, mostly after 1948, were much more radical. Stalin’s version of Marxism-Leninism demanded that all feudal and capitalist structures be replaced by ones serving the Party, its ideology, and its politics. Only Populism in its leftist variant was reluctantly (but sometimes surprisingly) tolerated, for it exalted the poor peasantry, whom the communists saw, next to the proletariat, as pillars of the new society. Quite a few communists searching for popular support came to adopt in the 1960s and 70s some form of populist nationalism. By 1948, all East-Central European countries nationalized their literary institutions, including publishing houses, book distributors, and theaters. Schools, universities, academies, museums were restructured to serve ideological aims; teachers, publishers, curators, and many other cultural workers were dismissed if considered politically unreliable. Strict censorship was established and a network of informants was employed to control all aspects of literary life. It must be added, however, that the communist regimes introduced some culturally beneficial changes next to these

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Draconian restrictions. Great strides were made in eliminating illiteracy; books became cheap and published in large editions (though of poor quality); theaters became affordable and attracted large audiences; literature and culture were generously and steadily funded (to serve, of course, ideological ends). Bohumil Hrabal’s Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude; 1976), one of the most poignant allegories of censorship in the region, contains reflections by a man who compacts old papers and books in a solitary underground chamber. The allegory is veiled, blurred, and not always explicit, though the narrator repeatedly states that he started his job some thirty-five years ago, i.e., around 1939–40, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. This man gains all his knowledge from books he smuggles home to read while destroying the bulk: “I’m the only one on earth who knows that deep in the heart of each bale there’s a wide-open Faust or Don Carlos, that here, buried beneath a mound of blood-soaked cardboard, lies a Hyperion, there, cushioned on piles of cement bags rests a Thus Spake Zarathustra” (Solitude 6). The narrator cautiously enumerates here authorized rather than forbidden books, but, when his solitary work and reading is replaced at the end by an efficient machine and two cheerful but ignorant “Socialist Labor youngsters” (78), we know that individualism and humanism were largely at stake. At times, Hrabal’s political allegory becomes so transparent that one wonders how it could have escaped the vigilant eyes of the post-1968 Czech censors, even as an “unofficially” published book. The best friends of this “underground man” are “two former members of our Academy of Sciences who have been set to work in the sewers, so they’ve decided to write a book about them” (22). Concerning the stunning report of the two academicians about a deadly underground war between armies of rats, the narrator remarks: “And while the sewers of Prague provide the scene for a senseless war between two armies of rats, the cellars are headquarters for Prague’s fallen angels, university-educated men who have lost a battle they never fought, yet continue to work toward a clearer image of the world” (24). The communists terminated many journals once they assumed power in the late 1940s, for instance the Slovak Elán, the Hungarian Újhold (New Moon; 1946–48), which was co-edited by the poet János Pilinszky; and the Polish Kuźnica (The Forge; 1945–50), even though its editors and main contributors, Jan Kott, Adam Ważyk, Mieczsław Jastrun, and Stefan Żółkiewski, were Marxists. Many publishers were closed down, including the Romanian Cartea Românească, Cultura Naţională, and Minerva, (the latter was reestablished in 1969, the Cartea Românească in 1970, but the Cultura Naţională only in 1993). Other publishers continued in a nationalized form under a new name: the Hungarian Révai became the Szépirodalmi Kiadó, and Borový in Prague merged into the Československý spisovatel. All of the new, party-led Writers’ Unions launched official journals. In Romania the official outlet became the Flacăra (The Flame; 1948–), the successor of the Revista Literară (The Literary Review; 1947–48); Útunk (Our Road; 1946–89), edited by Gábor Gaál in Cluj, became the journal of the Hungarian writers in the Romanian Union. In Albania, the Union published the monthly Nëntori (November; 1954–91); the Slovak Union published the Slovenské smery (Slovak Directions) and the Kultúrny Život (Cultural Life; 1946–68); the Czech Union the Literární Listy. Yugoslavia, which broke with Stalin in 1948, had no official censorship and abandoned Socialist Realism as a dogma by the early 1950s, but the great publishers, Nolit and Prosveta, were restarted as nationalized companies. Nolit began in the early 1960s the important series Sazvezdja, which brought out translations of contemporary works in philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics,

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and sociology. The series Književnost i civilizacija (Literature and Civilization), edited by Jovan Hristić, published essential works of Georg Lukács, Erich Auerbach, Umberto Eco and others. Nolit also published new poets and novelists, as well as the magazine Delo, which served as the chief platform of modernists since 1950s, but its profit came mostly from publishing agricultural literature, text books, and children books. Prosveta, the biggest and most prestigious publisher of classic and contemporary authors from inland and abroad, issued the magazine Književnost (Literature) and a two-volume contemporary encyclopedia. It flourished during the postwar decades by publishing a range of literature, philosophy, and literary criticism that was unequalled in the region. Nevertheless, Yugoslavia was also highly controlled, and the absence of official censorship meant frequent arbitrary interventions rather than artistic freedom. In theater, for instance, control was in the hands of the so-called program boards, which were themselves subject to various political pressures, as the aborted performance of Robert Bolt’s State of Revolution in Ljubljana (see p. 255 below) hilariously exemplifies. The journals were vulnerable, sometimes because they represented the radical left. The dissident periodical Perspektive, which criticized the Party from a Marxist and Hegelian position for its arrogant disregard of human beings, was banned in 1964 (see p. 252 below). Literary Cultures in Exile Jerzy Giedroyć, publisher of the journal Kultura in the interwar period, founded in 1946 the exile publishing house Instytut Literacki/Institut Littéraire (see Jeleński). The Instytut moved following year from Rome to the Parisian suburb of Maison-Laffitte, and Giedroyć restarted Kultura, which soon became East-Central Europe’s most important and fiercely independent exile journal. Kultura consistently attacked political repression in Poland and scathingly criticized the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign there (even calling upon the Polish bishops to speak out against it), but it refused to become anti-Russian or to embrace capitalism. It criticized Radio Free Europe, and often disagreed with its more conservative sister paper in London, Mieczysław Grydzewski’s Wiadomości (News), which was an extension of the prewar Wiadomości Literackie. Kultura was willing to take unpopular positions, even if it meant losing subscribers. Battling against Polish nationalism, it advocated reconciliation with the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia, even at the price of surrendering Wilno, Lwów, and the surrounding territories. Kultura strongly supported Gomułka when he came to power in October 1956, but turned against him when he suppressed the following year the weekly Po Prostu (Plain Talk; 1954–), Poland’s most daring critical journal. In the 1960s and 70s, Kultura established increasingly close ties with writers back in Poland, and by the late 1970s quite a few well-known writers of Poland published under their real name what was unpublishable at home, while other writers, like the later Nobel-prize winner Wisława Szymborska, published in Kultura under a pseudonym. Kultura and the Instytut Literacki published the diaries of Witold Gombrowicz, various works by Czesław Miłosz, and texts by such outstanding Polish writers as Leszek Kołakowski, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Stanisław Vincenz, Konstanty A. Jeleński, and Kazimierz Wierzyński. From an international perspective it was perhaps even more important that Kultura published Polish translations of works by Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Simone

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Weil, Milovan Đilas, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Andrei Siniavsky, and others. Several new exile journals and publishers were launched in the 1950s and 60s by writers in exile. The Polish Kontynenty (Continents; 1959–1964), founded by Adam Czerniawski, published young poets who rebelled against the émigré traditions. The Estonian Bernard Kangro established and directed the exile publishing house Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv in Stockholm, which also published his journal Tulimuld. The Romanian poet and essayist Virgil Ierunca edited in Paris the magazines Luceafărul (1948–49), whose director was Mircea Eliade, Caiete de dor (Notebooks of Longing; 1951–57), Limite (Limits; 1969–2006), and Etos (Ethos; 1973–2006). The Lithuanian exile journal Literatūros lankai (Literary Folios; 1952–59) was published in Argentina, the Latvian Jaunā Gaita (The New Path; 1955–) in Canada, and Ceļa Zļmes (Signposts; 1957–), another Latvian publication, in London. Pavel Tigrid published in New York and then in Paris the center-right cultural, political, and literary quarterly Svědectví (Testimony; 1956–89). The reformist and socialist bimonthly Listy (Newsletter; 1970–), continued in Rome the 1968 tradition of its predecessor, the Prague Literární Listy. The Hungarian Irodalmi Újság (Literary Magazine), also a former organ of a Writers’ Union, moved to London after 1956, where it was edited by György Faludy, and in 1962 to Paris, where Tibor Méray assumed the editing. The avant-garde Magyar műhely (Hungarian Atelier) was founded in 1962 in Paris, the Mikes Kelemen Kör, founded in Amsterdam by Hungarian students in 1951, became a literary and intellectual club that fulfilled an important but tenuous role in the 1960s and 70s by bringing together Hungarians who remained home with exiles abroad. The “Sixty-Eight Publishers,” established by Josef Škvorecký and his wife in Toronto, became next to the Instytut Literacki the most successful East-Central European exile publisher. Between 1971 and 1993, it brought out more than 220 original titles on subscription. Transformation of Journals and Publishers during the Thaw Cracks and inner tensions slowly started to rend the seemingly monolithic communist systems after Stalin’s death, especially in the 1960s and 70s. The thaw took different forms in each country, but the lines dividing the permissible and the prohibited came to be somewhat blurred in all of them. The relaxation of control allowed the launching of new publishers and publications, and it also permitted existing journals and publishers to embark cautiously on a different course. The Irodalmi Újság of Budapest took such a radical turn, however, that, as we saw, it had to move into exile in 1956, just as its sister journal from Prague, the Literární Listy, after 1968. The critical Slovak journals included the reformed Kultúrny Život in Bratislava, as well as the Mladá tvorba (Young Creation; 1956), the Revue svetovej literatury (Review of World Literature), and the boldly critical Romboid (1966). Except for Romboid, all of them were closed down after the Prague Spring, and the revival of the Kultúrny Život under a new name was short lived. The impact of the 1956 and 1968 events in the other East-Central European countries was mixed. As mentioned, Po Prostu was suspended in 1957, but two other Polish literary journals that emerged in October 1956, Współczesność (Modernity) and Dialog, continued publication, breaking with Socialist Realism and publishing selected translations from Western writers. In Bulgaria,

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the arrival in 1957 of two new cultural journals, the monthly Plamak (Flame) and the weekly Narodna kultura (People’s Culture), signaled a cautious change. In Romania, the political Thaw started belatedly and came to an early end under the increasingly repressive Ceauşescu regime. Luceafărul started in 1958 as a communist magazine for young writers but came to promote by the mid-60s innovative modernist writers. Novelist and editor Ştefan Bănulescu strengthened the trend after 1968 by featuring the poets Marin Sorescu, Cezar Baltag, and Dorin Tudoran, the fiction writers Nicolae Velea, Fănuş Neagu, and Norman Manea, as well as the critics Nicolae Manolescu, Lucian Raicu, and Mircea Martin. Unfortunately, the magazine lost much of its innovative strength by the mid-1970s and adopted an officially sanctioned nationalist line. Dissident writers like Dorin Tudoran were expelled from its board. România literară started in 1968 as the publication of the Romanian Writers’ Union, but came to attract over the years unconventional writers, many of whom (e.g., Ion Caraion, Ana Blandiana, Mircea Dinescu, S. Damian, and Mircea Iorgulescu) were subsequently silenced or forced into exile. In the 1970s and 80s the magazine promoted more radical writers, debates about literature and society, experiments, and closer contacts with foreign literature. George Ivaşcu, who directed România literară between 1971 and 1988, started in 1963 Lumea (The World) as an alternative view of the international scene, but the journal became politically compliant later and closed down in 1993. The landscape of Romanian publishing underwent several significant changes from 1960 onward. ESPLA (Editura de stat pentru literatură şi artă), the publisher of literature and art in the 1950s (renamed Editura pentru literatură in 1962 and reorganized as Editura Eminescu in 1969) became the major publisher of classical and contemporary Romanian literature and criticism. The Editura pentru literatură universală, created in 1953 and renamed Editura Univers in 1969, specialized in translations from world literature, whereas the Editura Cartea Românească, reestablished in 1970 with novelist Marin Preda as its director, came to publish some of the best literature and criticism. Particularly interesting was the emergence of regional publishing houses for minority languages. Dacia, established in Cluj in 1969, specialized in Transylvanian literature in several languages; Facla, established in Timişoara in 1971, promoted the Romanian, German, Serbian, and Hungarian literature of the Banat area. Kriterion, launched in 1969 in Bucharest, became a remarkable success story under the editorship of Géza Domokos. As successor of the Hungarian section in ESPLA, Kriterion was charged with book printing in Hungarian, German, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, and Yiddish. It became especially successful with its series for young Hungarian-Transylvanian authors, its publication of Saxon-Romanian authors, and its translations of Hungarian and German literature into Romanian. Between 1969 and 1989 Kriterion printed some 3000 Hungarian and almost 1000 German titles. Hungarian literary life recovered only slowly from the failed 1956 revolution. Formal censorship was replaced after the violently repressive years, by “consultation” with György Aczél, who belonged to the Party leadership but maintained a network of contacts with writers and intellectuals. Few writers had the courage to disobey if, for instance, Aczél “advised” that in a certain literary work criticism of life in Hungary should be complemented with a recognition of achievements. The Hungarian journals had a hard time after 1956. Nagyvilág (The Wide World), which offered international literature in translation, was able to publish its second issue in 1957. Élet és

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irodalom (Life and Literature), a new weekly, was launched the same year and became gradually more critical. Kortárs (The Contemporary) became the organ of the re-organized Writers’ Association. The existing regional literary journals Tiszatáj (The Tisza Region) and Alföld (The Plainland) consolidated their status and were joined in 1958 by Jelenkor (The Present Age), published in Pécs by an eponymous publishing house. Új Irás (New Writing) was launched in Budapest in 1961. Samizdat Underground publishing or samizdat (e.g., “self-publication” in Russian) emerged in the 1960s and spread from Russia to various East-European countries. It was relatively weak in the Baltic Soviet republics (see Olesk, and Unt’s article pp. 86–89 below), though underground publishing was active in Estonia during the late 1960s and the 70s. The most powerful Estonian underground poet was Artur Alliksaar. Following the Russian samizdat approach, Johnny B. Isostamm and other Estonian authors released from prison camps, started to publish in the 1970s underground collections with titles like Marm, Vigilia, and Kamikaze. For a brief while, Estonia also had an underground theater journal, the Thespis (1972–73) Samizdat publication was strongest in Czechoslovakia and Poland. In the former, Ludvík Vaculík’s Edice Petlice (The Padlock Series) and Havel’s Edice Expedice (The Expedition Series) became the largest samizdat publishers. Samizdat publishing flourished after the emergence of the Charter 77 human rights movement in the late 1970s and the 80s, and closely cooperated by then with Czech émigré publishers in the West. In Poland, samizdat publication started in 1976 and gradually undermined the Office of Censorship. Perhaps the most important organ was NOWA, an independent publishing house with ties to the KOR (Workers’ Defense Committee) that published and distributed in Poland works rejected by government censors. One of its first publications was an anthology of Kultura. In 1977, KOR also started to publish the critical review Robotnik (The Worker). The many Polish samizdat publishers and journals included KryG, Arka, Kultura Niezależna (Independent Culture), Krytyka, and Obecność (Presence). Detailed information on these may now be found via the recently formed International Samizdat [Research] Association (ISRA), an informal network of institutions and individuals interested in samizdat (http://www.samizdatportal.org). Post-1989 Our History formally ends with the political turnaround in 1989, whose significance for censorship and publication is excellently summarized by Włodzimierz Bolecki: “1989/1990 represented several simultaneous closures, the end of several phenomena that had determined literary life up to that point: the end (1) of censorship, (2) of the underground publishing movement (1976–89), and (3) of the division between émigré and national literature (p. 135 below). Bolecki’s comments about the changes in Poland apply grosso modo to all countries in EastCentral Europe, although, as Karl Jirgens’s article shows below, censorship did not disappear overnight. The turnaround brought, for political as well as financial reasons, the death of many journals and publishers. Many other venerable ones, like the Belgrade publishers Nolit and Prosveta, declined because they were unable to adjust adequately to a capitalist cultural system. Many

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publishers and publications were taken over by their Western counterparts, with varying success. A certain degree of commercialization was in all such cases inevitable. Many new “native” ventures were born, though most of them had a short lifespan. Some new journals presented themselves as revivals; witness the Albanian Catholic Hylli i dritës (The Day-Star), edited by Gjergj Fishta in 1913–44 and revived in 1993–97, the Slovak Kultúrny život revived in the 1990s, and the Estonian Akadeemia revived in 1989–90. Blatant nationalist and political censorship is rare today, yet economic, moral, and religious censorship continues to exert considerable power in publishing and on the stage. Each short-lived political regime in contemporary East-Central Europe tries to consolidate its power by controlling culture and the media; in the less politically exposed fields, economics reigns. The communist regimes banned religion, ethnic slurs, and nationalism from folklore and its study; today the ban is lifted, but the publication possibilities are mostly restricted to anthologies and schoolbooks. Projects that do not fit these categories may remain unpublished. More serious is the legacy of Russian cultural and political oppression in the Baltic countries, which has produced reverse discrimination against the now minority Russians in these liberated independent countries. The situation of Russian literary culture in the Baltic countries is rather worse today than it was in the interwar period, though there were some promising signs under perestroika. As Irina Novikova writes in her literary history of Riga (ECE 2: 40–57), the city’s Russian-language journal Daugava (1977–), became popular in the entire pre-1989 Soviet Union. Rodnik (published in Latvian as Avots), a literary-cultural magazine with a Russian-Rigan identity launched in 1987, was closed down in 1992 under Latvia’s prevailing anti-Russian atmosphere. These two journals, which attempted to unite the cultures and democratic aspirations of both Latvians and Russians, were among the most popular cultural-literary monthlies as the USSR gradually disintegrated (ECE 2: 52). Rodnik’s editor, Andrei Levkin, now living Moscow, compared Riga in his 1986 collection Starinnaya arifmetika (Ancient Arithmetics) to a collapsed and rusted tower of Babel. One may ask whether the burgeoning telecommunication towers of globalization will adequately replace the Babel of the old East-Central European cities.

1. Publishing

The Cosmopolitanism of Moderní revue (1894–1925) Neil Stewart When in October 1894 the bank clerk Arnošt Procházka and the post office worker Jiří Karásek (see ECE 1: 353–54) began publishing the Moderní revue pro literaturu, umění a život (Modern Review for Literature, Art, and Life), several members of the literary establishment of Prague arrogantly predicted that their enterprise was bound to collapse in less than a year (Karásek, Vzpomínky 65–66). Moderní revue, however, went on to appear with almost perfect regularity on the eighth day of every month for more than three decades. Inextricably linked with the life and work of its chief editor and ideologue, it closed down only when Procházka died in 1925. His journal was a major institution of Czech Modernism, in which many young authors made their debut, topical discussions on contemporary art took place, and new standards were set in book illustration. Furthermore, Moderní revue played an important role in the internationalization of Bohemian culture at the turn of the century: Czech translations of Nietzsche, Wilde, Przybyszewski, and many others appeared here for the first time. Founders and Beginnings Procházka and Karásek met in the late 1880s as pupils of the Czech secondary school on Malá Strana, a district of Prague on the west bank of the Vltava River. Procházka, a haughty, well-read intellectual, had been brought up in German but was expelled from the German grammar school for his open espousal of the Czech national cause. He introduced his junior friend to French literature, first to Zola and Naturalism, later to Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Symbolist art (Karásek, Vzpomínky 20–22). He and Karásek began their writing careers as literary critics, each publishing reviews of contemporary Czech literature in minor magazines like Literární listy (Literary Pages), Niva (The Mead), or Vesna (Spring). Both soon gained notoriety for the harshness of their judgments. From the very beginning, their critical writings were characterized by the polemical tone later so typical of Moderní revue — a dislike of compromise and the resolute application of high artistic standards to the work under scrutiny: Czech writers no longer received credit just for writing in Czech, as had so often been the case in the course of the nineteenth century in the wake of the National Revival. According to Procházka and Karásek, art was by its very nature an international phenomenon, a noble pursuit that represented a worthy end in itself, neither to be degraded by serving any moral, social, or national goal, nor to be practiced by petty amateurs, no matter how well-meaning or patriotic they might be. Like other members of the “Generation of the Nineties,” these two young critics insisted on the autonomy of art, rejecting tendentiousness of any kind as well as naively mimetic concepts of Realism; but in their attempts at épater le bourgeois they went

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further than did F[rantišek] X[aver] Šalda, František Václav Krejčí, or Josef Svatopluk Machar. They were more radical in their emphasis on the role of the individual, more extreme in the subjectivity of their judgments, and much more ruthless in their irreverence towards the domestic literary tradition, an attitude that extended even to the illustrious figure of Jaroslav Vrchlický. In keeping with the general European trends of Dandyism and Decadence, the founders of Moderní revue seem to have regarded intellectual provocation, elitist conduct, and aristocratic self-stylization as essential to any truly “modern” comportment. The pointed eccentricities of Procházka, a “somewhat peculiar bachelor” (Udolph 108) who spent his entire life in a small flat among thousands of books and paintings, and Karásek, who never made a secret of his homosexual inclinations and added in 1901 the noble tag “ze Lvovic” to his name (claiming to be descended from the sixteenth-century astronomer and mathematician Cyprián Karásek ze Lvovic), may have added to the alienating effect the pair had even on people with similar aesthetic convictions. That neither of the two signed — or rather: was invited to sign — the famous manifesto “Česká moderna,” which was published in the journal Rozhledy (Look-out) in October 1895, may well have been due not so much to fundamental theoretical differences between them and the rest of the Nineties Generation, but rather to personal antipathy. In particular, Procházka and Šalda did not like each other, and carried on a lifelong feud. In retrospect it is all too easy to miss such mundane motives behind the grandiosely formulated public announcements. In the intellectual milieu of fin-de-siècle Prague, which many contemporaries describe as stifling and provincial, and which Karásek in his memoirs compares unfavorably to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Vienna (Vzpomínky 148–151, 166, 177), such personal squabbling and petty intrigues were apparently quite common (Zizler 40–41). There were even instances of rival literati physically scuffling in the street (Karásek, Vzpomínky 121–122, 159). Ironically, it was Šalda who unwittingly brought about the founding of Moderní revue in 1894. Using his prestige as the leading critic of the time, he put pressure on the editor of Literární listy, František Dlouhý, telling him he would no longer write for his journal if he accepted any further contributions from Karásek or Procházka. Procházka then decided to create a journal of his own, and persuaded the hesitant Karásek to join him, though Karásek declined to become a joint chief editor. The two set about finding a printer and organizing financial support. They gathered a group of seven “shareholders” around them, including the poet Antonín Sova, and Hugo Kosterka, who later became Moderní revue’s expert in Scandinavian literature and contributed a wide range of Czech translations from the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Karásek negotiated favorable conditions with a Jewish publisher, but Procházka, “a raging anti-Semite” (Karásek, Vzpomínky 68–69), was not happy with this choice and after two issues moved the publication to the Emanuel Stivín printing house. The fifty guilders that each shareholder contributed annually proved insufficient to cover all expenses, and during the early years of its existence the journal’s financial situation remained precarious, not least because the editors insisted on a costly layout with many illustrations (mostly etchings and woodcuts) modeled on the contemporary French magazines La Plume and Mercure de France. Three of the sponsors bowed out, and Procházka, whose flat served as editorial office, finally took over in 1901 as the sole owner of Moderní revue, financing its publication from his private savings and salary.

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Central Themes and Basic Features In September 1894, one month before the first issue came out, Procházka and Karásek placed a short notice in various Prague periodicals about their project and its aims: Moderní revue will not enter into unnecessary competition with the established journals, but will represent the young movement in Czech literature that has occasionally made itself heard over the last few years but as yet has never spoken out as a whole. Its program, however, will not be an exclusive one, i.e., Moderní revue will neither be expressly Symbolist, nor expressly Naturalist, nor Neo-Romantic, nor any of the existing fine-sounding labels. Rather, it will be open to anything modern. Moderní revue will translate from foreign literatures artistically highly distinguished authors as yet unknown in our country. Moderní revue will treat the questions of modern life in a thoroughly theoretical and scientific way, readily allowing space for the expression of different opinions. Apart from that, concise criticism of domestic as well as foreign books will be pursued intensively. Moderní revue appeals to the entire Czech intelligentsia (k veškeré inteligenci české) to support a journal that has but one aspiration: to be thoroughly modern and highly artistic. (Karásek, Vzpomínky 69)

The idea of making the new journal the mouthpiece of the entire Generation and uniting “the young movement in Czech literature” proved wishful thinking. Nevertheless, several traits that would characterize Moderní revue over three decades are already discernible here. Cosmopolitanism The explicit mention of foreign authors “as yet unknown in our country” is indicative of the journal’s most remarkable single feature: its utter cosmopolitanism. At a time when tensions between the Czech and the German population erupted in massive street fighting in Prague, the writers associated with Moderní revue did not join the general political propaganda but offered their readers a program designed to overcome what they saw as the main problem of Bohemian culture: its European isolation and bourgeois provincialism. In its early numbers the journal published not only in Czech, but also in French and German. Karel Hlaváček, arguably the most distinguished poet directly connected with Moderní revue, wrote in his programmatic 1897 article “Nacionalismus a internacionalismus”: National chauvinism is quite obviously the work of coolly calculating minds and, therefore, the very assumption that it might have anything to do with the psyche does not hold up, even if we were to concede the existence of separate Czech, German or French psyches. But in fact such separate souls do not exist. There is but one soul, and that cannot be divided into pens like a flock of sheep. (Moderní revue 5: 110)

Moderní revue became an important node in the network of cultural and intellectual interconnections that criss-crossed the European continent around 1900. Karásek and especially Procházka corresponded with many famous French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian artists of the time.

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Figure 4. Karel Hlaváček’s cover for Stanisław Przybyszewski’s journal Życie. Courtesy Otto M. Urban.

They were instrumental in popularizing the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch in Bohemia, and secured the co-operation of Stanisław Przybyszewski for their journal in 1895. Przybyszewski contributed several short prose works and essays, and he acted as intermediary between his friends in Prague and avant-garde circles in Scandinavia and Berlin. When he moved to Poland in 1898, Moderní revue established close ties with the modernist scene of Cracow. Hlaváček designed a cover for Życie (Life), Przybyszewski’s journal, with which Moderní revue exchanged texts (and relief plates) on a regular basis (see Figure 4). After Procházka’s death, the Polish writer justly credited him and Moderní revue with having “opened for Czech literature a big, wide window on Europe” (Karásek, Vzpomínky 153). A Modern Institution Procházka and Karásek say very little in their announcement about the original fiction and poetry that are to feature in the new journal, while stressing the role of translations, essays, and book reviews. Likewise, Moderní revue appears remarkable today not so much for the literary quality of the domestic contributions but as a platform for discussion and a medium of cultural exchange, a catalyst that boosted the metabolism of the cultural system by absorbing foreign influences and stimulating their critical digestion. Several better-known Czech writers, including the Čapek brothers, contributed to the journal at one time or another; Viktor Dyk and the internationally acclaimed Symbolist Otokar Březina did so on a regular basis. Hlaváček, an exceptionally talented poet, whose affiliation with Moderní revue was perhaps the closest, died young in 1898. Julius Zeyer, a literary authority whose co-operation Karásek had solicited, came to the editorial office unannounced with a manuscript for publication but was put off by the brusque manner of Procházka, who had mistaken him for a Jewish peddler (Karásek, Vzpomínky 104–105). The two editors were literary critics of some standing, but no first-class writers. Procházka published only one cycle of poems, Prostibolo duše (The Bordello of the Soul; 1895), which is

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considered the first work in Czech literature composed predominantly in free verse and also the first publication to have been produced and numbered in bibliophile fashion. After Prostibolo had fallen foul of the critics, its author devoted himself almost exclusively to translating, editing, and essay writing. Karásek, on the other hand, wrote several volumes of poetry, as well as stories, novels, and pieces for the stage. In his choice of subject matter he set out to break every possible taboo, including decay and death, necrophilia, and homosexual love, but his writings are at the same time fairly conventional in form, and his poetry seems to owe more to the Parnassian poetics of Vrchlický than he himself would have admitted. In any case, the historical significance of Moderní revue does not depend on such individual literary efforts. In retrospect, the journal stands out above all as a modern institution that fostered a wide range of cultural activities. Members of the circle around Procházka and Kárasek did not limit themselves to producing the monthly issue: in 1896, Stanislav Kostka Neumann edited the

Figure 5. Karel Hlaváček’s cover for Moderní revue, 1896/97. Courtesy Otto M. Urban.

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Almanach secese (Almanac of the Secession), to which most of his colleagues contributed; in the same year, Karel Kamínek and Karel Engelmüller founded the theater group “Intimní volné jeviště” (Intimate Free Stage), which regularly organized drama performances, lectures, and poetry readings. As was common practice for journals at the time (Zach 222), Moderní revue also ran its own book series, the “Knihovna Moderní revue” (Moderní Revue Library) that brought out seventy-five volumes between 1895 and 1924. These included Březina’s four pivotal poetry collections, Tajemné dálky (Secret Horizons; 1895), Svítání na západě (Dawn in the West; 1896), Větry od pólů (Winds from the Poles; 1897), and Stavitelé chrámu (Temple Builders; 1899), as well as twenty-four foreign works in Czech translations by Procházka. Many of these editions were extravagant in format, choice of paper, typography, or jacket cover, just as the journal proper attracted its readers not only by virtue of its texts but also through its sophisticated layout. Moderní revue published graphic art from all over Europe, and usually sported a host of bookplates, vignettes, and ornamental flourishes. Some issues were printed in two versions, the separate “luxury edition” on higher quality paper and with an extra pictorial supplement. The many illustrations designed by Hlaváček, who thought of himself primarily as a visual artist (see Figure 5) as well as those by Neumann, Zdenka Braunerová, František Bílek, and František Kobliha were as integral to Moderní revue’s multi-faceted aesthetic project as words (Urban 69–74). Decadence It is interesting to note that in the passage quoted above Procházka and Karásek avoided defining the aesthetics of their journal as Symbolist or Decadent, insisting instead on the label “modern.” Earlier they had decided against the titles “Dekadent” or “Dekadentní revue” as being too narrow for their purposes (Karásek, Vzpomínky 60). To this day, literary histories present Moderní revue as the mouthpiece of a distinctly Decadent trend in Czech Modernism, and there is admittedly some justification for doing so: the influence of the European fin-de-siècle is obvious in most original illustrations as well as texts (verse as well as prose, fiction as well as non-fiction). Among the foreign works chosen for translation it is precisely the Decadent canon that featured most prominently, from Baudelaire and Huysmans to Wilde and Nietzsche. Moreover, Procházka and Karásek as editors and commentators did adhere to a specific artistic doctrine, namely Decadent aestheticism and individualism. In practice they were by no means as tolerant of different programs as the above statement might indicate. Hence Moderní revue’s failure to adapt to new developments in European art once the turn of the century with its characteristic intellectual atmosphere had passed. Yet labeling Moderní revue and its authors “Decadent” can be misleading, because the specific historical and cultural situation of Bohemia around 1900 shaped a Czech literary Decadence that differs from that in Paris, London, or Berlin. While France, England, and Germany were international superpowers at the time, the Czechs saw themselves as an oppressed ethnic minority within the Habsburg Empire. The French, English, and German literary languages had an unbroken tradition going back many centuries, and Decadent authors would use these in a mannered, heavily stylized fashion, provocatively reminiscent of post-classical Latin. The literary status of Czech was not nearly as well established. The French, English, or German decadents assumed

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aristocratic poses and modeled their behavior in full defiance of the bourgeois with his positive ideals of vitality, progress, and patriotism. For their Czech contemporaries such an attitude of defiance must have seemed equivocal: there was no shortage of bourgeois in Prague, but these were mostly Jews or Germans, and opposing them almost automatically entailed a nationalist gesture that the likes of Verlaine or Wilde would have considered chauvinistic. Besides, decadent reveling in aristocratic luxuries was a notion that for most Czech intellectuals must have been even less real than for their colleagues in Paris or London. Few of them could say with Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry: “I have known everything” (Pynsent, Zeyer 169). The typical Czech decadent, a petty clerk or official, could practice aestheticism only in the evenings after the chores of the day were done (Pynsent, “Decadence” 354) and his decadent weakness was often “due not to ennui, but to hunger,” as Hlaváček put it in his ‘Vengeful Cantilena’ (Mstivá Kantilena 51). Czech Decadence as represented by Moderní revue — if we are to accept such an identification — was far from being homogeneous, much less so even than the decadent movements in Western European countries. It comprised such profoundly non-decadent elements as Hlaváček’s Sokolské sonety (Sokol Sonnets) in praise of a nationalist sports club, or the social commitment of political activists like Neumann. Karásek stresses in his memoirs that he and his friends were “not only aristocrats but also anarchists,” on good terms with the Labor Party and various underground organizations (Vzpomínky 159–60). It would be a mistake to think of the writers gathered around Moderní revue as an avant-garde group united by a single program. They were a motley crowd of Satanists, anarchists, right-wing radicals, mystifying symbolists, literary dandies, and defenders of gay rights (Pynsent, “Nation” 63). Luboš Merhaut has suggested that the aestheticism propagated by Moderní revue was above all a means to smooth over various ideological contradictions in the poetics of the journal (59), but if so, it would really have amounted to something far removed from a typically decadent l’art pour l’art. In any case, an ensemble composed of so many disparate elements could not be held together permanently, and it is not surprising that several disappointed authors broke away from Moderní revue over the years, among them Neumann, who fled in 1907 what he called “Procházka’s sorcerer’s kitchen” (Karásek, Vzpomínky 244), and later joined the Communist Party. History The history of Moderní revue may be divided into four phases: the 1890s, the first fifteen years of the twentieth century (1900–14), the war years (1914–18), and the post-war period up to the death of Procházka in 1925. The first phase was undoubtedly when the journal had its greatest domestic and international impact. Before the turn of the century, Moderní revue was the organ of radically non-conformist intellectuals whose thinking, for all the disparity of their individual convictions, had a common source in their frustration with contemporary bourgeois society and culture. The work of Hlaváček as a poet, critic, and graphic artist may be called the most distinctive influence shaping its profile during this period, although he was a contributor for only two years (1896–98) and had no part in what was arguably the most remarkable single number of Moderní revue: the June 1895 issue dedicated to Oscar Wilde on the occasion of his London trial. It contained the first text by Wilde

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ever to be published in Czech (“The Decay of Lying” translated by Hugo Kosterka as “Úpadek lhaní”), an essay in defense of homosexuality by Oskar Panizza, and a polemical article written by Karásek called “Sociální užítečnost umění” (The Social Usefulness of Art). Daringly outspoken as it is, this number of Moderní revue may well be without parallel in the European literature of its day. A few months later, Karásek’s own collection of poems Sodoma (Sodom) was confiscated by the police in the name of public morality, and the author escaped prosecution thanks only to a general amnesty proclaimed by the Emperor that year. The second phase, from 1900 to the beginning of World War I, saw the profile of Moderní revue gradually change. The spirit of subversion characteristic of the 1890s was replaced by a relatively conservative aesthetics of ornamental harmony. Neo-classicist and neo-romantic tendencies became more and more apparent as the “second wave” of Czech Decadence took over the journal, Miloš Marten established himself as its leading theorist, and Karásek’s writings became increasingly influenced by mystical Catholicism. Procházka proclaimed his new ideal of “individualism on the basis of tradition,” and he explicitly diagnosed in 1902 the decay of the Generation of the Nineties (Moderní revue 14: 161–164). Four years later, an editorial announced that Moderní revue would no longer accept contributions from little-known authors or beginners (17: 55–57). The volume and periodicity of the journal were adversely affected by World War I, and only six issues came out each year between 1914 and 1918. Its conservative turn continued, however, and became more evident when Procházka increasingly published articles on other than artistic subjects, so that during the last phase of its existence Moderní revue was as much a political as a cultural monthly magazine. True to his ideal of aristocratic individualism, the chief editor — who had criticized in 1895 the signatories of the manifesto “Česká moderna” for their herd instinct, and who had written in 1903 that “the masses do not miss art, they do not demand it, and they do not need it” (14: 214) — stubbornly refused to accept the post-war avant-garde, sharply condemned Cubism (32: 40–41), and also harbored a deep distrust of the newly established democratic state. Aesthetically, Moderní revue defended utterly anachronistic positions in the 1920s. Politically, it ended up as an organ of the extreme right, with Procházka agitating against “German werewolves” (37: 352), as well as against “internationalists, cosmopolitan humanitarians, socialist brethren, and friends of Jews” (38: 108) — a truly pathetic finale for a journal that had exercised a greater impact on Czech literature than any other periodical before or after.

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The Uncompromising Standards of Nyugat (1908–1941) József Szili Nyugat (West) appears today as the most important Hungarian by-weekly literary magazine of the twentieth century, which created lasting critical standards and kept the next generations from

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navel-gazing and national self-satisfaction. This now legendary journal of Hungarian literary culture was published between January 1, 1908 and August 1941. The subscriptions rose from an initial 800 to 4000 in the last two years of World War I, due to growing interest in the journal’s modernist, liberal, and pacifist position. When Mihály Babits, its last editor-in-chief, died, the right-wing authorities refused to permit further publication of this openly anti-fascist magazine under the co-editors Aladár Schöpflin and Gyula Illyés. To continue the program of Nyugat they launched in October 1941 the new journal Magyar Csillag (Hungarian Star), which survived until German forces came to occupy the country on March 19, 1944. Miksa Fenyő, Ignotus, and Ernő Osvát founded Nyugat in order to combat the exalted national pride in Hungary’s Eastern origins. This “oriental” ideology, with inevitable chauvinistic and imperialist overtones, originated from medieval chronicles that alleged a kinship between the Magyars and the Huns of Attila. Nineteenth-century historians discarded this assumption, but attempts to sustain or reestablish it survived as obstacles to realistic appraisals of the past. The pride that the aristocracy and the nobility took in their Eastern origin functioned as a compensation for their belated response to the challenge of modernity. They vindicated specific cultural virtues and ethnic characteristics for themselves to justify their inherited privileges. The lead article in Nyugat’s first issue, written by the editor-in-chief Ignotus, was titled “Kelet népe” (People of the East), a phrase that recalled the title of a book published in 1841 by István Széchenyi, the great political thinker who despised ethnic chauvinism and the oppression of the minorities. Ignotus concluded that the nations of Eastern Europe should preserve their uniqueness while assimilating Western thought and achievement (Nyugat, 1908/1). Though Nyugat had a Western orientation, it also published articles advocating pride in the Eastern origin of the “Magyars,” perhaps because the editors were liberally inclined to publish opposing views as well. Even the tenets of a special Hungarian species of orientalist ethnomania, called “Turanism,” appeared sporadically in Nyugat in 1912–16. “Turan” is a geographic term for the area comprised today of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, whereas the adjective “Turanic” refers to the peoples of that area and to languages that belong to the Ural-Altaic family. The Hungarian “Turanists” dreamt of a great political alliance between the Turanic countries, including even China and Japan. Nyugat’s modernists opposed “National Classicism,” an ideology in criticism and aesthetics articulated by the influential conservative critics Pál Gyulai and János Horváth at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their canon of “National Classicism” was based on the folkstyle poetry of Sándor Petőfi and János Arany, but it suppressed their anti-feudalist revolutionary tendencies. Arany denounced as “cosmopolitan” poets who did not adhere to folk forms and attitudes, yet his own poetry was saturated with intimations of world literature (Krasztev, “modernization” 333). The dogmas of “National Classicism” were based on the presumed uniqueness of “national literature.” Poetic value was negligible; the major question was whether a work was inspired by “the spirit of the nation.” If not, it would not count as “Hungarian literature.” Nyugat and its writers were confronted with the canon of “National Classicism,” which gave priority to traditional literary forms, ultra-patriotic or chauvinistic rhetoric, and unscrupulous historical voluntarism.

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The literary revolution inaugurated in the first volumes of Nyugat owed much to its editors’ aestheticism. They followed a conscious policy of eminence, adopting talent and originality as the only criteria of selection. Ernő Osvát was famous for his acute sense of poetic value, and Ignotus attacked in an early issue what he termed the “persecutor’s aesthetics,” an intolerant chauvinistic literary policy that stigmatized many things as anti-national or not Hungarian. As Ignotus wrote, “quoting” nationalists: Budapest is not Hungarian. The Hungarian spoken in Budapest is not Hungarian. Nationalizing the administration is not Hungarian. The stock exchange is not Hungarian. Socialism is not Hungarian. Internationalism is not Hungarian. Organizing the agricultural workers is not Hungarian. Mobile capital is not Hungarian. Secession and Symbolism are not Hungarian. Excluding the churches from education, and religion from the school curricula are not Hungarian. Mocking is not Hungarian. A more tolerant sexual morality is not Hungarian. Universal suffrage is not Hungarian. (Nyugat 1908/4)

The artistic character of the “Nyugat movement” was a post-symbolist and post-secessionist Modernism (Krasztev, “modernization” 342–45), which sharply differed from the traditional conception of literature privileged by the Establishment, a mere rehash of nineteenth-century folkish romanticism and unrestrained nationalism. Nyugat was a striking provocation to conservative taste and political ambition, and the reaction was elementary. Spokesmen of the Establishment, among them the quasi-liberal prime minister of long standing, István Tisza, rejected Nyugat’s poetic and the cultural innovations on political grounds, as symptoms of anti-national behavior. The emancipated urban language of its contributors was stigmatized, especially by anti-Semites, as alien to the “truly national” literary and linguistic traditions. Nyugat’s contribution to the introduction of literary Modernism in Hungary resembles the role that “little reviews,” such as the Fugitive, the Sewanee Review, the Kenyon Review or Harriet Moore’s Poetry played in the history of American Modernism. But, in contrast to the conservative, agrarian, and anti-industrial stance of these reviews, the Nyugat manifested a propensity for urbanization, democracy, anti-feudalism, anti-nationalism, and anti-clericalism. These seemed to be the necessary ingredients of progress in a semi-feudal society and state. Critics sometimes refer to a “Nyugat-legend,” a popular myth that Nyugat was the only source of fresh and progressive ideas in Hungary. Yet Nyugat started when the sociological and philosophical review that helped shape the mainstream of modern Hungarian intellectual orientation, Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century; 1900–1919), had already been in existence. Lukács, Oszkár Jászi, and its other contributors supported long-overdue reforms. They recognized that a comprehensive land reform was urgently needed in an agricultural country in which serfdom was abolished as late as 1848, and the huge landed estates of the Catholic Church and the high aristocracy, especially in Transdanubia (Western Hungary), left no room for ordinary farmers and peasants. Contributors to Huszadik Század elaborated drafts for a democratic compromise with the nationalities, another vital issue as they constituted more than fifty percent of the population. The periodical advocated general and secret voting, the eradication of illiteracy, and a radically

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new approach to the country’s social problems. Aware of the social and economic drawbacks of intensive capitalization, Jászi advocated a moderate speed in carrying out economic and cultural transformations, favoring the examples of Switzerland and Holland rather than England’s classical one: “He might have found the Swiss model all the more sympathetic because his plans for a democratic reformation of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Monarchy included the adaptation of the idea of confederation” (Veres 37). István Gál’s socio-theoretical periodical Apollo (1934–39) advocated a “Central European Humanism” by publishing studies on contacts between Hungarians and the neighboring peoples, and on the chances of international rapprochements, perhaps even a future union of East-Central Europe, in the region. Similar, though perhaps somewhat more practical or realistic aspirations were entertained in Zoltán Csuka’s literary and sociological periodical Láthatár (Horizon; 1933–44). Historical studies have distinguished four or five major periods in the aesthetic and social orientation of Nyugat. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, in an essay on Nyugat and world literature, established five periods, admitting that “the only reason for dividing the material into five units has had to do with a focus on comparison: the first volume was taken as a sample era; the pre-war period, the years from 1914 to 1919, the 1920s and the 1930s were defined by changes in editorial policy (Újraértelmezések 112). Amidst change, Nyugat held on to its original engagement. The stability of its critical stance was guaranteed by Osvát, who remained a member of the Editorial Board until his death in 1929. He dedicated himself to the discovery of new talents, and he functioned in aesthetic and poetic matters as Nyugat’s arbiter elegantiae, who made no compromises when judging submissions on their style and poetic merits. His own writing was, apart from posthumous collections of reviews, less outstanding, but it is rightly said that his chef d’œuvre was Nyugat. The tradition of l’art pour l’art was reinforced by Babits, an editor from 1919 onward, and editor-in-chief in 1939–41. His active humanism and his high aesthetic standards made Nyugat resistant to those temptations of ultra-conservatism and Populism that pushed the country into a catastrophic war and the horror of the Holocaust. Zsigmond Móricz, who joined the editorial board in December 1929, added two important elements to the editorial policy: sensitivity to social and cultural problems, and scouting for rural talents. Nyugat and World War I The unprecedented historical changes that occurred during Nyugat’s life had their inevitable impact on the periodical and its editors. Nyugat started as a liberal and democratic magazine, avoiding, where possible, the political arena. Accused of anti-national tendencies, Nyugat found itself in an uncomfortable situation at the outbreak of the war in 1914. Gradually it regained its pacifist and humanist position in 1915, and promoted resolute anti-war and anti-fascist campaigns in the post-war period, efforts that were continued by Magyar Csillag till it was banned in March 1944. The first major probe, perhaps the greatest, was World War I. In Hungary, as in practically all other European countries, the war was greeted with enthusiasm. The fate of Jean Jaurès epitomized exceptions. In Hungary, Jászi, Ady, Babits, and Dezső Szabó withstood the pressure of the national hysteria. Ady, an emblematic figure of Nyugat, remained immune to it, for he rejected

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the idea that war was a solution to political differences, though his pacifist conviction and instinctive patriotism came into conflict with each other, especially in early 1915, when the country was threatened by a Russian invasion. The anti-war poems he published in Nyugat were later included the collection A halottak élén (Leading the Dead; 1918). In the first war-year, Nyugat followed a policy of equilibrium. Pro-war writings were counterbalanced with pieces that attacked them and urged the reader to take an alternative view. The pro-war authors laid aside their earlier criticism of the dual Monarchy for they were terrified by the prospects of a defeat and they knew that Hungary alone could not resist Tsarist Russia, which had earlier suppressed three major Polish uprisings, and substantially helped Austria to defeat Hungary’s war of independence in 1849. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hungarian misgivings about the Austrian partner in the Monarchy were silenced by a fear of Russia and pan-Slavism. The outbreak of World War I surprised Nyugat so greatly that some of the contributors could not resist the chauvinistic temptation (ECE 1: 184–87). Ignotus, the editor-in-chief, anticipated already in August 1914 the territorial consequences of an eventual defeat: “It is not difficult to become a Habsburg-enthusiast if, as a Hungarian, I prefer to live in an Austria-Hungary that has restored its position as a great power, to living as the subject of a small though independent Hungary, whose border run at the cities of Szeged, Kassa, Kanizsa and Nyíregyháza” (Nyugat 1914/15). Indeed, the post-war peace treaty awarded Kassa (Košice) to the new state of Czechoslovakia, while the other three localities became border cities of the “small though independent Hungary.” In the twenty-first issue of 1914, Ignotus praised Germany for maintaining a relatively normal life, and he ironically noted that the “wicked” English achieved the same effect by fighting the war with mercenary troops (401), but immediately following this article Ady declared in “Mégsem, mégsem, mégsem” (And yet, and yet, and yet) that he could not to join the war-enthusiasts: Fölgyujtogattam minden hevülésem, S hideg szemmel is megvizsgáltam magam: Hitem, harcaim, bús kétkedéseim. Jaj, hogy nem szabad mégsem, mégsem, mégsem Beléd oldódnom, szent, gyötrött Sokaság. Nem csillapítnak könnyes vigaszaid Csillapító, nagy együtt-szenvedésben, Vérző, egyszerű meghajlásra a Sors Nem tud rábírni mégsem, mégsem, mégsem – Külön szenvedek emberként, magyarként. Százszor próbáltam elűzni sejtésem S megharagvásom sötét démonait S úszni az áradt, együttes vizeken. Jaj, hogy nem szabad mégsem, mégsem, mégsem külön utálok s külön nem enyhülök. Bár teljesednék jámbor bizakodók Golgotás hite nagy teljesedésben,

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Bár megszépülne, jobbulna a világ. Úgy fáj ez a Most s mégsem, mégsem, mégsem Szabad beállnom hívőnek hitetlen. (Nyugat 7 [1914]: 405) I ignited all my enthusiasm, and soberly examined myself, my belief, my struggles, my sad doubts. And yet, and yet, and yet, I am not allowed, alas, to dissolve in you, sacred, tormented multitude. Your tearful consolations do not melt me into a great, soothing communal suffering, And yet, and yet, and yet fate cannot force me to a bleeding, simple bending — as a human being, as a Hungarian, I suffer alone. A hundred times I tried to dispel the dark demons of my premonition and anger, and swim with the tide of swollen common waters. And yet, and yet, and yet, I am not allowed, oh, I loath and refuse to soften in solitude. May the Golgotha belief of pious, trusting persons come true in a great fulfillment, may the world become more beautiful and better. This Present pains me, and yet, and yet, and yet, as an unbeliever I am not allowed to join you, believers.

Repeated attempts were made to conscript Ady and send him to the front as a foot soldier in spite of his poor health, but he continued to publicize his anti-war emotions and tragic presentiments. By the second year of the war, Nyugat also returned to persistent presentations of pacifist ideas and demands for radical social change. In the August 16, 1915 issue Babits’s love poem, “Játszottam a kezével” (I played with Her Hand), concluded with the lines: Csak egyszer lenne még enyém s kedvemre csókkal önteném szivesen halnék azután nagyobb örömmel ontanám kis ujjáért a csobogó vért, mint száz királyért, lobogóért! (Nyugat 8 [1915]: 884) If it were once more mine and I could shower it to my pleasure with kisses, I would gladly die afterwards, for her little finger I would more willingly shed gurgling blood, than for hundred kings and banners.

Because of this poem Babits was suspended from his post as teacher in a secondary school (ECE 1: 185). Nevertheless, Nyugat published in March 1917 his powerful peace-poem “Fortissimo.” This time the whole issue was confiscated (ECE 1: 186). By 1918 the war was lost, the Habsburg king abdicated, and Hungary was declared a republic in the autumn. The government of Count Mihály Károlyi, an aristocrat with democratic and republican convictions, resigned under the pressure of the territorial claims on the country. The subsequent communist Commune was militarily defeated, and Romanian troops came to occupy Budapest in August 1919. When they departed, commandos formed by former Austro-Hungarian officers marched into the city under the leadership of admiral Miklós Horthy, who was elected

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regent of Hungary in March, 1920. The “Trianon” peace treaty cost Hungary two third of her land and ten and half million of her eighteen million population. More than seven million Hungarianspeaking people became Austrian, Czechoslovak, Romanian and Yugoslavian subjects. Horthy’s policy was based on conservative semi-feudal traditions, anti-socialist and anti-communist campaigns, demands to revise the peace treaty, and on the rejection of democratic and social reforms. At the beginning of Horthy’s rule eminent men of letters, among them Babits and Móricz, were exposed to political persecution and police measures. Practically all major figures of the Avant-garde fled to Austria and gathered initially around Lajos Kassák and his periodical Ma (see pp. 26–27 above). Nyugat was suspended for four months in 1919 but resumed publication in November, after the defeat of the Commune, with Babits’s searching self-examination entitled “Magyar költők kilencszáztizenkilencben” (Hungarian Poets in 1919). He contested the right of the Kisfaludy and Petőfi Societies to review the “behavior” of its members during the Commune: the writer’s freedom is the only possibility to progress towards the Better without a revolution, for the inherited convictions and superstitions of the majority are almost always a hindrance on the way towards the Better. When writers are not guaranteed freedom, the Better can not even be launched as a winning idea. The writers at least must feel that way lest they appear completely useless in the world or produce idle leisure reading… The right to contradict: true writers insist on this instinctively as prophets of past ages did. Did I dare rattle a golden calf idolized by your majority? But did not whole nations idolize false gods? If no prophets existed to speak up against the gods of the majority we would never attain true religion. The poet’s call is to struggle with the gods, and sacrilege is often his duty. (Nyugat 12 [1919] no. 14–15)

The new regime was greatly distrustful of Babits, but he was allowed to continue as editor of Nyugat, and the periodical managed to maintain the highest aesthetic standard then possible. It continued to resist right-wing political and literary trends. Nyugat and World Literature Nyugat has been criticized for its reluctance to support radical experimental writing. Yet the Nyugat circle of writers was keen to comprehend, reinterpret, and refashion poetical traditions. For them, the relationship to cultural tradition involved a discriminating approach, careful selection, rediscovery of past values, and elimination of waste. They expressed their opposition to literary conservatism in actual literary works rather than in manifestoes, programs, and declarations. Talented authors actually rallied around the periodical, so that practically all renowned modernists published in Nyugat at some stage of their career. The avant-garde periodicals of Lajos Kassák, Tett and Ma were more consistently radical, but Nyugat readily published important works by Kassák and his associates. As Lóránt Czigány put it in his Oxford History of Hungarian Literature: “Artistically demanding editorial policy naturally led to a position of authority in shaping literary taste, and within a short span of time Nyugat achieved a unique position in literary life; no selfrespecting author regarded himself as established until he had appeared in Nyugat, although Nyugat had at least as many enemies in the literary and political world as it had supporters” (288).

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In retrospect, the radicalism of Nyugat appears as a moderate variant of Modernism, comparable perhaps to the paths taken by Rilke, Yeats, or T. S. Eliot. György Rába relates Hungarian literary Modernism, often called Symbolism, to Belgian Symbolism as exemplified by Verhaeren, for it was symbolist with a realist perception of the world and a humanist interest in social problems. Hungarian Symbolism poeticized anti-capitalist gestures and a belief in social progress, occasionally with lasting poetic results. In Rába’s interpretation, the Hungarian reception of Symbolism incorporated Decadence as well (36). Some Hungarian literary historians now locate the rise of Hungarian Modernism around 1900, and they distinguish early, classical, post-classical, and post-modern phases in it. Attempts have been made to correlate Pound’s poetics with that of his Hungarian contemporary, Lőrinc Szabó, although Pound was hardly known in Hungary during the 1930s and 40s. József Reményi, a Cleveland correspondent of Nyugat, mentioned him incidentally in reviews (Nyugat 1922/17–18 and Nyugat 1937/1), as did László Cs. Szabó, in a review of a volume of translations by Géza Képes that included “The Goodly Frere,” for decades the only Pound poem translated into Hungarian (Nyugat 1937/12). Antal Szerb, the outstanding literary historian of the Nyugat-circle, wrote Pound and Eliot off in a strange way: “I do not understand a couple of Anglo-American poets, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but I have the feeling that it is not worth understanding them; they are, anyway, already aged men, no heralds of a new faith” (Nyugat 1938/10: 280). Evaluations of Nyugat’s relation to “world literature” depend on the critic’s conception of the canon of world literature. In a talk at the seventieth anniversary of Nyugat, George F. Cushing, a British scholar with an excellent first hand acquaintance of Hungarian literature, pointed out that the title Nyugat was misleading because the periodical cared only about Hungarian literature (199). In its first decade, Nyugat domesticated the style of Budapest, the new metropolis, its nontraditional language, its phraseology and way of thinking (Cushing 197). The journal’s merit was the creation of modern Hungarian literature and a usable past for it. The journal won an exceptional place in the history of Hungarian literature because it did not represent any definite political trend and its main goals were artistic ones. In Ignotus’s apt phrase, “Art has a single rule: make whatever you want if you are able to make it”. Cushing adds that in this regard Nyugat resembled British periodicals more than any other Hungarian magazine. The editors succeeded in recruiting the best of the young talents for they knew how to respect them as individuals. In this sense Nyugat was neither a movement nor an organized group. Experimentation enjoyed complete freedom though with some bias towards moderation. From the 1930s on, a new traditionalism, a neo-classical trend was cultivated, first and foremost by Babits, and a return to social documentation was advocated by Móricz (Cushing 195–96). In the early Nyugat volumes literary interest was focused on French and German achievements. The perception of English literature varied: the journal published translations of nineteenth-century poems, and Oscar Wilde was in vogue. In the 1930s, reliable introductions to John Galsworthy, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce appeared. A British critic, Vernon Duckworth Barker, contributed articles on contemporary English literature, including D. H. Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, and Harold Monro. Cushing notes that Nyugat had published ninety-nine English writers in total, only few of whom are now forgotten, but interest in the literatures of Hungary’s neighboring countries was meager: two short stories were translated from Czech and one single poem from Polish. Japanese and Scandinavian literature received much more attention (Cushing 199).

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Mihály Szegedy-Maszák contrasted the cult of Oscar Wilde with the lack of serious responses to Henry James (Újraértelmezések 113). Here we may mention, as a matter of curiosity, Babits’s report on a peculiar encounter he had with James’ art of narration. He read about a short-story type in a James memorial issue of an American magazine, became interested in it, and wrote himself a story in that form, though he had not yet read anything by James. The lesson lay in the paradox of the imitation’s latent originality: “My readers will not recognize which of my short stories I think of, since this one does not resemble any of James’s stories. It imitates a non-existent original” (Nyugat 1938/6). As Szegedy-Maszák points out, critics writing in Nyugat failed to identify the main currents of contemporary American literature, and Babits, despite his wide readings in world literature, reduced the status of American literature to a mere subsection of the European one. The first volumes of Nyugat filled gaps and met long felt needs. In the first two years of World War I a German orientation prevailed and a number of anti-French writings were published, but a Francophile bias informed articles by Ady, Dezső Szabó, and by the musicologist Antal Molnár. During the interwar years, the editors were especially keen on keeping abreast of new developments in French culture and literature. Issues in world literature, the place of Hungarian literature in it, and the problems of poetic translations were also discussed regularly. Contacts with the neighboring countries were not completely neglected. In 1913, Nyugat printed a study by Emil Isac on the “new Romanians” (issue 12) and one by Konstantin Pável on influences on Romanian literature (issue 22). During the interwar period, Nyugat published works by Freud, Bergson, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, H. G. Wells, André Gide, and Maxim Gorky, but information on new trends and works in English and American literatures was, as a rule, outdated and superficial. Béla Hamvas’s essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses (1930), and on Finnegans Wake (1931) were exceptions, as was Gábor Halász’s study of contemporary English poetry (Nyugat 1939/1–2) with relevant observations on T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and the newly discovered Gerald Manley Hopkins (Szegedy-Maszák, Újraértelmezések 132–33). At the seventieth anniversary of Nyugat’s launching, its contacts with Czech, Slovak, and South Slav literatures were also reexamined. Karol Tomiš, a comparatist in Bratislava, recalled that the poet Vladimir Roy published an essay on Ady in Prúdy as early as 1910, and he also translated poems of his. But in a letter of March 1931 to Emil Boleslav Lukáč, a fellow Slovak poet, Roy claimed that the pessimism of his generation was a response to Slovak culture and not to Ady. Tomiš also cited Štefan Krčméry words on Ady, Kosztolányi, Babits, and Margit Kaffka. Since teaching was bilingual before 1918 in the Hungarian school that Krčméry attended, he started to write poems both in Hungarian and in Slovak. When he recited one of his Hungarian poems in the literary society of his school, his fellow students remarked that they were written in Ady’s style. Since Krčméry had not heard of Ady, he bought a volume of his poetry. Years later he wrote essays on him, and he published in 1916 his translations of Ady poems in the journal Živena (Tomiš 224–27). Krčméry also published an Anthologia Slovák költőkből (1925), an anthology of Slovak poetry in Hungarian, which Aladár Komlós reviewed in Nyugat, taking the opportunity to criticize Hungarian attitudes towards the neighboring countries:

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While in Hungary there are indignant protests against any rapprochement with the victorious nations [of the Great War], a large part of the Hungarians living in the neighboring succession states is well aware that changing hostile attitudes is an ethical duty and of political interest on both sides. Even the “official” poet, so to speak, of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia calls Slovak boys and Hungarian girls to a “siblings’ war.” But we are still waiting for the rapprochement. (Nyugat 1926/2)

Komlós refers here to László Mécs’s poem “Hajnali harangszó” (Morning Bell; 1923), but curiously distorts it, for the bells of Mécs’s poem were meant to call the siblings to a “testvér-tánc,” a “sibling dance” rather than a war. Komlós praised Krčméry as a leading Slovak writer, and he thought that his earlier translations of Ady poems testified to “his noble humanism.” He valued the broad history of Slovak literature in Krčméry’s introduction, which led from 1560 via the Slovak national revival and populist literature of the 1840s down to such Slovak classics as Sládkovič, Hurban-Vajanský, and Hviezdoslav. Though Komlós considered Krčméry’s Hungarian generally inadequate for the task, he found music and warmth in the translation of a stanza from Sládkovič’s Marina. The anthology was for Komlós a uniquely beautiful gesture in cultural politics, “one of the most serious Slovak testimonies for a politics of understanding. Does Krčméry not speak perfect Hungarian? The Hungarian writers who should have carried out his job, have the least right to complain about this.” Rapprochement was not an easy path for nations that had been bitter foes in World War I and whose differences deepened with the Trianon peace treaty. In the 1930s and 40s, the editors of Nyugat arranged literary conferences in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia to further mutual understanding and cooperation, which contrasted with the political plans of the Hungarian governments then. Opposing their revisionist and pro-Nazi propaganda, Nyugat’s editors and writers convened peace conferences and sought encounters with the great Western humanist writers. “Europe” became the symbol of a new humanism that had to confront totalitarianism. In 1932, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nyugat’s foundation coincided with the tenth congress of the PEN Club in Budapest, and the journal printed on this occasion a special issue (1932/9–10) with translated texts by some of the most prominent European writers. Babits’s editorial for the issue, titled “The Nyugat and the West,” talked mostly about Hungary’s relation to Western culture, and the spiritual ties that linked the journal to a European spiritual community even when hatred cut the continent into bloody warring factions. The content of the issue went beyond the usual East-West dichotomy by printing also texts of such eminent East-Central European writers as Sholem Asch, Karel Čapek, František Langer, Johannes Semper, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Victor Eftimiu, and Jovan Dučić.

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A Contest within Romanian Modernism: Sburătorul vs. Gândirea Marcel Cornis-Pope The significant changes brought about by the end of World War I in Romania, from its increase in territory and population to modernizing reforms in all areas, created conditions for the emergence of a Romanian Modernism. It was promoted primarily by the critic and novelist Eugen Lovinescu through his influential magazine and reading circle, Sburătorul (Winged Spirit/Incubus; 1919–27). From its first issue on April 19, 1919, the magazine and its literary meetings, which featured literary readings, brought together the most important figures of the modern movement. Sburătorul promoted itself as a magazine without a rigid program. As Lovinescu stated: “Its program will emerge from the talent of those who publish in it” (qtd. in Micu 199). Most young writers felt attracted to the magazine and its circle because of its supportive atmosphere, which combined opportunities for literary discussion with publication. Novelist Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu stated the significance of her affiliation with this circle in paradoxical terms: “Those who do not know the taste of isolation cannot appreciate the value of this ambiance” (qtd. in Zaciu et al. 591). Clearly, Sburătorul offered her and other writers of her generation companionship and group solidarity without the imposition of a rigid program or school ideology. While encouraging the new literature, the magazine avoided avant-garde self-promotion and exclusivist formulas. As Lovinescu wrote in the October 11, 1919 issue, “Every formula is limited by definition. It focuses only on one aspect or detail and exaggerates them. Art does not originate either from the peasant’s boot or from the aesthete’s neurosis. Art is more capacious and multiform” (qtd. in Micu 200). Lovinescu, who edited the magazine in 1919–22 and 1926–27, presided over the literary circle attached to it until the end of his life. He advocated the systematic adaptation of Western models in order to fill the lingering gaps in Romanian culture and help realign it with contemporary standards. According to his philosophy, developed in his imposing critical syntheses, Istoria civilizaţiei române moderne (History of Modern Romanian Civilization; 1924–25) and Istoria literaturii române contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature; 1926–29), each cultural period had a common spirit that included the totality of material and moral conditions determining the life of a people. All cultures obey a law of “synchronism,” harmonizing through imitation their sociocultural conditions with those prevailing in the most advanced European civilizations. The same law applies also in the domain of literary and aesthetic values. Hence Lovinescu encouraged the synchronization of Romanian literary culture with the urban-liberal cultures of the West. This indispensable synchronization did not jeopardize, according to him, a culture’s specificity. As the opening epigraph of Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky to Istoria literaturii române contemporane says: “if a people possess inner powers, it does not have to be concerned about its national originality: this originality will manifest itself spontaneously, like nature.” As for the process of synchronization, not much of it was spontaneous. Lovinescu actually provided specific developmental guidelines for both prose and poetry, aligned to Western canons of Modernism but capacious enough to welcome both Liviu Rebreanu’s realistic prose and Ion Barbu’s modernist-hermetic poetry. Through theoretical and critical interventions, mentorship of emerging writers, and patronage of the literary magazine and its reading circle, Lovinescu defined

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and refined the literature of the interwar period. He opposed sentimental lyricism, romanticized rural fiction, and the collapsing of aesthetic and socio-political (nationalist) values, encouraging instead efforts of “exploration and innovation” in literature. In fiction, he advocated a distinct “mixture of [analytic] lucidity and fever,” an emphasis on “the poetry of the urban environment,” and a psychological “deepening of the object” (Istoria literaturii 4: 282). The chapter on “The Fiction of Psychological Analysis” in Lovinescu’s later one-volume synthesis, Istoria literaturii române contemporane, 1900–1937 (1937), praised both the “analysts of consciousness” and “those who, without precise analyses, probe the unconscious or achieve through accumulation of detail and suggestion states of obsessive, morbid, or not analyzable consciousness” (54). At the same time, Lovinescu was careful to define the boundaries of Romanian interwar Modernism by distinguishing it both from turn-of-the-century Symbolism and the “extremist trends” of the Avant-garde (Istoria literaturii 3: 267). Interwar Modernism was located for him between the earlier attempt to modernize Romanian poetry by adopting French symbolist models, and the more extravagant experimental trends that broke entirely with Romanian traditions. Lovinescu was clearly most comfortable with a middle road: while emphasizing the need for foreign models, he did not overlook the importance of a national spirit in literature. Lovinescu’s own series of five psychological novels, from Bizu (1932) to Accord final (Final Chord; 1938-39), recalled themes of nineteenth century fiction but broke with the formal conventions by intermixing confession, psychological analysis, and discussion, as well as by pursuing “authenticity” of feeling rather than narrative verisimilitude (see also ECE 1: 448-49). Lovinescu’s theoretical aspirations for the novel were carried out more persuasively by Camil Petrescu, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Anton Holban, who was Lovinescu’s nephew, Gib I. Mihăescu, Ury Benador, Marcel Blecher, and others. Several of these novelists contributed briefly or longer to Sburătorul, and some of them even served as its editors. Lovinescu used Sburătorul and its literary circle (which he hosted every afternoon in his own house) also to hone his own version of modern critical impressionism. By turning revision into one of his chief methodological instruments, Lovinescu gave his critical impressionism a systematic, theoretical emphasis, anticipating thereby reader-oriented and deconstructionist criticism. Lovinescu’s readings were deliberately “contemporary” and revisionist because they responded to a constant “mutation of aesthetic values,” informed by changing canons of taste and value (see Cornis-Pope 36–37, 81). The dynamic of literature itself was redefined through this concept of revision/transformation. Lovinescu posited a complex relationship between aesthetic variation and the socio-psychological particularities of individuals and cultural groups. As he wrote in Istoria literaturii: “The aesthetic is not […] a universal notion, generally applicable, but the expression of a variable, individual desire” (5: 8). Earlier, in the first volume of this massive synthesis, he explained: “Being constituted of relative values, of values that can never be taken as absolute, a people’s literature must be studied in its evolution and not in the fixity of a Platonic ideal; there is no science of literature; there is only history of literature studied in relation […] to a historical moment and to the congruence of subjective factors that determine its style” (1: 7). The theory of synchronization with Western cultural and literary canons that Lovinescu’s magazine and writings promoted, captured the polemic imagination of the Romanian Avantgardes. They found Lovinescu’s concept of Modernism, with its emphasis on creative imitation as a means of subverting the slow “natural” evolution of Romanian literary culture, too mild, and

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they opposed to it a more aggressive concept of experimental disruption, as exemplified by the work of Tristan Tzara and Urmuz. Lovinescu himself accepted as inevitable the Avant-garde’s excesses. Such “extremism,” as he called it, was a byproduct of synchronization: “the small trends with unstable tendencies” represented “the shock wave of Parisian avant-garde literature” (Istoria civilizaţiei 1: 438–39). Another important outlet for defining and reconceptualizing interwar Romanian literature was Gândirea (Thought; 1921–44), co-founded by Cezar Petrescu, Gib I. Mihăescu, and Adrian Maniu in Cluj, Transylvania’s cultural center in the interwar years, where the Hungarian journals Korunk and Erdélyi Helikon were also published. The Erdélyi Helikon published translations of Romanian folk ballads and of a large number of Romanian poets, whereas Gândirea contributed to a multicultural idea of modernity by publishing in its first two years translations from Ady, Babits, and others. Blaga also contributed to this magazine, redefining Romanian literature in relation to the great Dionysian, Neo-Platonic, Romantic, and Expressionist traditions of Europe. However, after its transplantation to Bucharest in 1922, and especially after 1926, when Nichifor Crainic became sole director-editor, Gândirea adopted a mystical-nationalist program, opposing the cosmopolitan, pro-Western tendencies of Modernism promoted by Sburătorul. Crainic rejected “westernization” in favor of an “autochthonism” and rural culture that replaced history with myth, folklore, ethnicity, and religion. As he argued in “Parsifal,” “culture stands in a deep, almost mystical relationship with the space within which and through which it wants to realize itself” (182). Once it has reached its full potential, culture freezes and dies. To escape stagnation and death, culture needs to recreate itself continually in the spirit of its own traditions, refusing “Europeanism,” “Occidentalism,” and “urbanism,” and valorizing instead rural traditionalism, the richness of the native language and mythology, and the “folkloric idea.” In Ortodoxie şi etnocraţie (Orthodoxy and Ethnocracy; 1938) and in his various Gândirea articles, Crainic promoted an ethnocentric and religious model of culture, based on native spiritual energies rather than on imitation of foreign models as proposed by Lovinescu. Bucharest, he argued, can become the center of a Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) revival against the Western post-Renaissance centers that had lost their religious dedication, except for Rome, whose Catholic-fascist spirit under Mussolini he praised. Crainic’s ideological writings promoted ethnocentric and, at least implicitly, xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes. Crainic’s was careful to dissociate his Dionysian version of traditionalism from the conventional traditionalism of turn-of-the-century culture. Still, his own poetry often illustrated traditionalism to a fault, cultivating rustic and patriarchal themes with mostly conventional formal means; at other times, however, his poems used the techniques and imagery of carols and charms more imaginatively, creating a tension between the archaic material and its contemporary use. The magazine itself was divided between a dogmatic theoretical approach and a more tolerant position towards the literary texts it published. No doubt, Gândirea published much second-rate literature that trivialized religious iconography with its inflation of angels and miraculous interventions. However, the journal attracted also writers who took a more creative approach, not only in thematics, but also in matters of poetics and literary ideology, mixing Modernism with traditionalism. Radu Gyr started writing under the influence of Symbolism and the early work of Fundoianu. Like Fundoianu and Ion Pillat, he “nativized” Symbolism and the Avant-garde, to use George Călinescu’s phrase (Istoria literaturii 773). Gyr’s later poetry continued to mix folk motifs with nationalist themes and some avant-garde or expressionist procedures; there are also echoes in his

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poetry of the dubious “Roman school” that was propagated in Mussolini’s Italy. Paul Sterian approached religious themes with avant-garde techniques, but the latter sometimes ended by parodying the iconological vocabulary promoted by Gândirea, mixing dark Expressionism with playful or morbid eroticism, and mystical pathos with sarcasm. The fiction of Cezar Petrescu, the first editor of Gândirea, also illustrates both Modernism and tradition and their revision. By contrast to the psychological-experimental novelists that Lovinescu promoted (Camil Petrescu, Bengescu, Holban, and Mihăescu), who had their roots in Dostoevsky, Proust, and Gide, Cezar Petrescu’s urban chronicles drew on the older and less experimental tradition of Balzac, Zola, and Tolstoy, as well as on a native tradition of nineteenth-century social narrative. The psychological-experimental direction focused on individual destinies and transformations, the sociological direction on shifting social environments; for the former, fiction was a mode of analytic inquiry; for Petrescu, it remained to some extent a species of “history” and “storytelling” (Munteanu 188–89). Still, Cezar Petrescu also modernized novelistic techniques by resorting to simultaneous presentation, cinematic splicing, and blending of document, essay and fiction, especially in his urban novels, Întunecare (Gathering Clouds; 1927), Calea Victoriei (Victory Avenue; 1930), and Carlton (1944). In this way, Cezar Petrescu’s work seems to fall between the more experimental direction of Sburătorul and Gândirea’s regressive version of Modernism (or modern traditionalism). The most important writer associated initially with Gândirea, Lucian Blaga, was equally divided in his allegiances to Modernism and traditionalism. In his multi-volume history of Romanian literature, Lovinescu included Blaga among the “modernists”; in his compressed 1937 single volume history, he redefined him as a “traditionalist,” though he was aware that the poet used the national imagery mostly decoratively. Blaga was a true originator, the first important Romanian poet (after Eminescu) who effectively synchronized Romanian poetry with modern European art forms. However, in adapting Expressionism (with which he became acquainted during his studies in Vienna) to Romanian poetry, Blaga reappraised the models and forced them to serve the needs of Transylvanian (Romanian) culture. His first collection, Poemele luminii (Poems of Light; 1919) violated poetic conventions, combining free prosodic forms with poetic visionarism, Dionysian vitalism, and “archaic” Transylvanian landscapes. Beginning with Lauda somnului (In Praise of Sleep; 1929), Blaga pursued a personal synthesis between the rational heritage of the West and the untapped magico-mythic potential of the East, in a style that was itself more structured and “neoclassical,” closer to Goethe (whom he translated) than to Rilke. Blaga’s “mythic spiritualism” took a conservative turn in later poems, but it still managed to transcend the orthodox ethnocentric line promoted by Crainic’s Gândirea. Blaga liked to associate his later poems with the “heretic spontaneity” of the popular genius,” but one can say that his entire work attempted a synthesis of Modernism and traditionalism, foreign-inspired innovation and the durability of native structures. He inculcated that balanced spirit in his students and followers, who adopted his hybrid geocultural and typological model of poetry (at the crossroads of East and West, Classicism and Modernism) but at the same time pitted a liberal and cosmopolitan stance against Blaga’s more conservative one. Gib I. Mihăilescu, Mateiu I. Caragiale, Dan Botta, Ion Vinea, Ion Minulescu, Emil Isac and others who published in Gândirea illustrated broader aesthetic and cultural positions, some associated with Modernism and avant-garde experimentalism. Paradoxically, the best literary

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products published in Sburătorul and Gândirea were not as different as the journals’ theoretical and ideological positions suggested. Major writers associated with a tempered version of Modernism, and occasionally with a more experimental approach, published in both. The opposition between Sburătorul and Gândirea and their respective leaders became more important in the 1940s and during the communist rule, as the polarization of the country on the right or left foregrounded more clearly the ideological conflict between the cosmopolitan-liberal tendencies of Sburătorul and the nationalist-rural-xenophobic tendencies of Gândirea. Paradoxically, a version of this battle was recreated during Ceauşescu’s nationalist Communism, when the xenophobic-traditionalist-nativist position promoted by Gândirea and echoed by writers faithful to the regime was countered with the liberal-cosmopolitan-revisionist position inherited from Lovinescu’s Sburătorul. Lovinescu became a model of cultural resistance for a generation of critics and literary historians who, coming of age in the 1960s, opposed dogmatic positions on the left and right while also seeking to reconnect Romanian culture to the West. Critics like Nicolae Manolescu, Ion Negoiţescu, Matei Călinescu, Lucian Raicu, to name just a few, followed the example of Lovinescu’s modernist criticism in two different ways. By emphasizing aesthetics as an alternative mode of cultural construction, their work performed, at least implicitly, the function of a cultural critique. This role was most relevant in the repressive ideological context of Ceauşescu’s regime, when literature had to assume the traditional functions of social criticism, challenging official dogmas, and sounding the voices of discontent. Furthermore, by emphasizing the liberating, recreative role of critical subjectivity (aesthetic impressionism), the post-Lovinescu criticism was able to slyly deconstruct official ideology, creating breaches within it for alternative literary discourses. In both cases, criticism became a form of oppositional discourse, much like Lovinescu’s disciples in the “Sibiu Circle” intended it in the early 1940s (ECE 1: 41, 149–50). The post-Lovinescu generations of critics built on their predecessor’s example, dissociating his emphasis on aesthetic autonomy from socially-blind “aestheticism” and turning his revisionist criticism into a political instrument for probing the ideological underpinnings of culture (see Cornis-Pope 83–84).

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The Krugovi: A Croatian Opening (1952–58) Tomislav Brlek Krugovaši is a name commonly applied to a group of Croatian writers associated with the literary monthly magazine Krugovi (i.e., circles or cycles), published in Zagreb between 1952 and 1958 (see also ECE 2: 301–14). The seminal influence of the magazine was twofold: (1) it had an immense immediate impact on the literary scene by breaking with the previously dominant ideological molds of fascist nationalism (1941–45) and Bolshevik artistic orthodoxy (1945–51); and, (2) it introduced a number of writers, notably Slobodan Novak, Ivan Slamnig, and Antun Šoljan, who would lead Croatian literature in the next decades.

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In the wake of the rift with the USSR in 1948, the distinguished and politically influential writers Petar Šegedin and Miroslav Krleža argued (in 1949 and 1952 respectively) for a rejection of Soviet Socialist Realism and the adoption of complete creative autonomy. Accordingly, the opening essay in the first issue of Krugovi called for open-mindedness and tolerance in aesthetic and ideological matters and heralded, with the typical self-assurance of an informal manifesto, a new period in Croatian literature. The magazine, like the authors it came to represent metonymically even long after it had ceased publication, staked its claim to a middle-ground between accessible popular culture (whether dictated by a political agenda or the imperatives of mass consumption) and the hermetic cul-de-sac of avant-garde experiments and arcane philosophical learning. It favored individual expressions of creative sensibility at the interface of local patrimony and contemporary international movements, and it opposed social commissioning of one-size-fitsall texts in the name of “millions of readers.” This in-between position, bereft of any poetic or ideological stance, reflected the actual social and cultural predicament that would come to be identified as the epistemological framework informing the literary production of the Krugovaši: fundamental uprootedness, acute sense of loss of a (real or symbolic) homeland or any given fixed center, and a complementary disillusioned endeavor to create an imagined community based on elective affinities and responsiveness to the marginalized and the outcast. The Krugovaši blamed this on the absence of literary standards, which, in turn, was ascribed to the numerous ruptures in the native tradition, as well as to the socio-economically and ideologically enforced isolation from the matrices of modern European and world literatures. Attempting to overcome the isolation, the magazine published translations of essays by the likes of László Moholy-Nagy, Gertrude Stein, and Virgina Woolf; selections of Polish, Spanish, Czech, Mexican, Scandinavian or black French poetry; and overviews of the current literary production abroad. It briefly but informatively discussed many modernist Western authors, as well as Pasternak, Yesenin, and Ady. Translations usually followed later. Reclaiming the native tradition and reconnecting ties severed by ideological decrees, they focused especially on the Croatian high modernist poets A[ntun] B[ranko] Šimić and Tin Ujević, and the Croatian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who were, their eyes, beset by similar difficulties and could therefore be profitably studied. Professional standards were invoked in both creative and critical activity, requiring disciplined analysis rather than impressionistic outpouring. The theoretical assumptions underpinning these assessments of and demands on literature and criticism eclectically conflated Sartrean notions of the subject with Crocean intuitionism with respect to the creative act, and, above all, with the critical and poetic practice of T. S. Eliot, particularly his notion that an interplay of tradition and individual talent shaped and reshaped the dynamics of literary culture. The quality of a literary text was defined and evaluated from a functional point of view, in terms of composition, structure, and the use it made of narrative techniques, motifs, meters, imagery, rhyme, and other devices in order to purify and enrich the language of the community. The Krugovaši emphatically insisted that semantic relations were established only by the form of the text and could not be ascertained from external evidence; in the act of reading the mode of referring to a given context took ontological priority over the context itself. The Krugovaši paid particular attention to language, for they considered it literature’s sole material and its bloodline to other spheres of human activity. They encouraged the introduction of colloquial expressions and speech rhythms into literature, and the deliberate use of pastiche, liter-

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ary quotations, and allusions, jargon, hackneyed phrases, and ready-made slogans; they rejected the bogus lexical, ideological, and emotional neutrality of a zero-degree style and the in-jokes of what they considered the obscurantist histrionics of dada. These ideas had their strongest impact in poetry. The Krugovaši sought introspection and free verse, revived older forms and meters, engaged in unexpected rhythmical turns, idiosyncratic typographic organization, unusual imagery, and a tone of individual anguish that ranged from striking a ludic pose to existentialist ennui. They disdained declamatory metrics, mechanical rhythms, conventional verse forms, clichéd rhyming and the hyperbolic heroics that were so characteristic of the populist poetry of Socialist Realism. In prose, they severely reduced or dispensed with plot; they foregrounded static descriptions of psychological states and circumlocutory impressions; they replaced the epic sweep of the omniscient narrator with interior monologue or shifting points of view; their frequently employed devices were repetition, black humor, irony, allegory, and allusion. Their typical protagonists were out-of-place, disenchanted, and contemplative intellectuals, at a loss in the brave new world of collective promises and commissions; they were accompanied by a motley crew of freaks and outsiders in grotesque and futile acts of rebellion against an imposed normality. Their narratives often lacked temporal and causal continuity, being but random collections of heterogeneous fragments of private experiences provisionally shored against the epistemological ruins by an ironic narrative voice, often discordant and divided against itself, looking awry at its situation of perpetual cognitive impasse in meandering meditative and often sarcastic digressions, resolved in a bitter and anxious conclusion — if there was one.

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Underground Publishing in Estonia under Soviet Censorship Kersti Unt Political and military resistance to the postwar Soviet occupation of Estonia was limited to guerilla activities in South Estonia, hoisting the Estonian flag, writing petitions against the occupying power, and other daring actions by schoolchildren, which became something like a tradition (see Niitsoo). Stalinist forces repressed Estonia fiercely and devastatingly, with mass deportations to Siberia. The powerful literary awakening during the first part of the century, leading to the forming of a national tradition in the interwar decades, came to a halt, and its manifestations were eliminated from the country’s institutional literary life. Recognized authors like Marie Under, Kalju Lepik, Bernard Kangro, Karl Ristikivi, and Gustav Suits fled and settled after the war in various Western countries, first and foremost in Canada, the US, and Sweden. These exiled authors were practically cut off from literary life at home during the late forties and the fifties. The imported and crudely imposed ideology severely suppressed those who had stayed. The leading authors of the 1930s underwent strict screening and ideological control. Some were deported to Siberian prison camps; Heiti Talvik, an outstanding Estonian poet, actually died in one

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of them. A number of authors were not allowed to publish during the first decade of the Soviet occupation, or were severely taken to task for what they had formerly written, at a Congress of the newly formed Writers’ Union of Soviet Estonia. Estonian literature written between 1945 and 1989 consisted of works published (1) legally in the country, (2) abroad by exiled authors, and (3) through alternative channels (see Olesk). The latter, underground publishing, was far less powerful in Estonia than the Russian samizdat, though the oppression that generated it was even more overwhelming. This had to do, in part, with divisions in the opposition. Next to unequivocally oppositional authors there were others in the middle spectrum of politics who cooperated sometimes with the authorities and frequently changed their views. Where the underground began was not always easy to determine. A text could, for instance, exist as an underground writing for a while and then become, under changed conditions, a legally published text. A number of underground texts were legally published during glasnost and later. Some authors who published underground also published legally during the 1970s, but they had to fight the restrictions and their most daring pieces remained unpublished. Works published abroad remained unavailable to readers at home. Underground publishing was most active in the late 1960s and the 70s. When the Thaw arrived, hope replaced the despair of the late 1940s and early 1950s. After nearly fifteen years of staring at the “iron curtain,” a tenuous and sporadic contact with Western thinking and writing was renewed. Friedebert Tuglas, Betti Alver, Kersti Merilaas, August Sang, and other prewar authors were step by step rehabilitated, though official acceptance differed from case to case. Uku Masing, a poet, theologian, anthropologist, and folklorist of world renown, actually remained a quasi-underground figure for the rest of his life, though he acquired among the young people of the 1960s and 70s an enormous following as a leading philosopher and even ideologist. The end of the 1950s saw a revival of poetry. Ain Kaalep, Jaan Kross, Ellen Niit, and others who were born and who grew up during the prewar decades, started to distance themselves more boldly from the strictly ideological approach of postwar poetry. They concentrated on new verse forms, especially free verse, and, later, associative poetry. Bolder attempts at using forbidden literary themes or forms were punished, if not by the Soviet organs then most certainly by the press. In the 1960s, which was a decade of poetry, new and even more daring poets emerged, among them Jaan Kaplinski and Paul-Erik Rummo. This so-called cassette generation, whose works were often published in cassettes of two or three authors, used bold rhythm and rhyme combinations to accompany an audacious content. Tricking the censor by using Aesopian language and writing between the lines became more and more popular. Artur Alliksaar, who used rich imagery and sound associations, became a powerful figure on the Estonian poetry scene and deeply affected the upcoming generations. He published his first small collection of verse in 1968 and remained an underground figure that spread his poetry in manuscript form. The public received warmly the works of the cassette generation, and lines like the following ones from Kaplinski’s “Tolmust ja värvidest” (From Dust and Color), awakened a dormant national feeling in many readers: SAID VERCINGETORIX: Caesar, you can take the land where we are living, but the land where we died you never can take (10)

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This new poetry and literature emerged between the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and that of the Prague Spring in 1968, both of which were followed by the Estonians with keen sympathy for the suppressed. The younger Estonians became partly or totally introverted: they rejected the social climate (and sometimes even themselves), perhaps because the events wiped out all hope of even partial freedom in the Baltic region (see Olesk & Unt). Having started their writing under the guidance of official literary organizations, the youngest poets soon became disappointed in the subtler and masked forms of censorship. Following the Russian samizdat tradition that authors just released from prison camps had introduced, writers like Johnny B. Isotamm started to publish in underground collections. Numerous such collections (e.g., Marm, Vigilia, Kamikaze; some of the roughly 15 titles had several issues) appeared in the 1970s, with works by authors of widely different literary ability and maturity. The underground publications generated their own reading public, including a range of future poets who helped spread the publications and find new authors, but actually never published in the underground collections themselves. The publications were mostly illustrated by young artists who sought, like the poets, new forms and free ways of expression. At the end of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the underground publications contained mostly poetry. Its authors may be divided into three main ideological groups. The poets of the first group idealized the ancient Finno-Ugric world and focused on the dark side of Western culture. Inclined to idealize rural life, they often associated with those legal and underground poets and intellectuals who moved to the countryside, partly with the environmental protection movement. The poets in the second group adopted, like certain musicians and other artists, beat and hippie ideologies, which they also expressed in their clothing, social and sexual behavior, and their attitude towards marriage, family, and the state. These attitudes had their analogues in Western Europe and America and, of course, in the most important Russian cities. Poets in the third group found the current state of affairs totally absurd, and they expressed this view in poetry as well as in other ways (see Olesk & Unt). During the 1970s, prose started to dominate the legal publications. The first wave of underground publishing ended in 1973 and was followed by a pause of almost three years. The new type of underground publishing that emerged at the end of 1977 was far more heterogeneous than the first one. The essay became now the most popular form of prose writing. The themes varied, but, notably, some essays attempted to acknowledge the period, reflecting the general laxity and passivity peculiar to the stagnation of the whole Soviet Union. Gone was the idealistic drive of the first period. The publications, no longer illustrated, became simpler but were often supplied with pretentious manifestoes. The new publishing wave reached its peak in 1978, when Ants Juske and Linnar Priimägi attempted to analyze the shifts of the 1970s in the essay “Tartu sügis” (Autumn in Tartu). At the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, the underground tradition became gradually more political. With glasnost and the subsequent regaining of independence, Estonia lifted the restrictions on publishing and the underground publication tradition died out. Looking back, one notes that the underground publications were an outlet for poets whose official recognition partly diminished in the glasnost period and independence. Kalle Eller, Juhan Tomingas, and some other poets of the generation are now all but forgotten because they published only in literary magazines. Others are considered by the younger critics old fashioned or sometimes even incomprehensible. From a later vantage point, they seem to have been swallowed up by

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the gulf between Modernism and Postmodernism. The mythical aura of the Estonian underground tradition tends to tarnish with time and slowly disappear from memory, for it has left but few followers and published traces. But alternative publishing was broader than the rather narrow aesthetic tastes of usually very young authors. It opposed not only state suppression and censorship but also Puritanism and rigidly restrictive social habits.

* * *

Slovak Journals between Languages and against Censorship Dagmar Roberts Juraj Palkovič, who was appointed professor of the Czechoslovak language and literature at the Lutheran gymnasium of Pozsony in 1803, edited between 1812 and 1818 the Týdenník aneb císařsko-královské noviny (Weekly, Or Imperial-Royal Newspaper), which published topical news, information on science, economy, geography, inventions, and pedagogical reflections, as well as a list of new books. Palkovič published later the magazine Tatranka (1832, 1841–47), which served as a venue for promising Slovak writers, whereas Karol Kuzmány’s Hronka (1836–38) stimulated the move away from Classicism. The Spolok milovníkov slovenskej literatúry (Association of Lovers of Slovak Literature), founded by Jan Kollár and others in Pest in 1834, published the almanac Zora (1835–36, 1839–40). Tatranka, Hronka, and Zora, along with the student periodicals Plody (The Fruits; 1836) and Jitřenka (1840), all furthered Slovak Romanticism, of which Plody is now considered to be a milestone. The movement towards national emancipation led, after a long struggle, to the founding of a Slovak newspaper, when Ľudovít Štúr finally received permission in 1845 to publish in Bratislava the Slovenskje národňje novini (The Slovak National Newspaper), together with its literary supplement, the Orol tatránski (The Tatran Eagle). Unfortunately, the newspaper was banned in 1848 and replaced next year by the pro-Habsburg Slovenské noviny (The Slovak Newspaper), edited in Vienna by Daniel Lichard, Jonáš Záborský, and Andrej Radlinský. It was published until 1850 in the “corrected Slovak language,” a modified version of Štúr’s codification, and afterwards in Czech on Kollár’s recommendation. The first book published in Štúrist Slovak was Jozef Miloslav Hurban’s second volume of the literary almanac Nitra (1844), but Hurban reverted to Czech in the 1876 and 1877 volumes because he was disappointed by the Slovak political impass and hoped to overcome it through closer cooperation with the Czechs. Habsburg, rather then Hungarian, repression became the major obstacle to publication in the years after the 1848 revolution. Cyrill a Method (Cyril and Methodius), a magazine started by Ján Palárik in 1849, ran into repeated censorial interventions and suspension of publication, until finally, in 1851, publication was terminated and Palárik imprisoned. To make things worse, a new empire-wide law of 1852 required that both editor and publisher reside in the periodical’s place

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of publication and submit a high fee for the privilege of publishing. Hurban, the editor of Nitra, had started in 1846 the oldest Slovak literary magazine, the Slovenské pohľadi na vedi, umeňja a literatúru (Slovak Views On Science, Arts, and Literature), but had to stop with the magazine after the second volume (1851–52) because as a poor minister from a small village he was unable to meet the requirement. In the end, it was Hurban’s son, Svetozár Hurban-Vajanský, who assumed the editorship of the magazine, but only in 1881. Jozef Škultéty was mainly responsible for the publication from 1890 to 1916, when Hurban-Vajanský’s death intervened. Regular publication resumed only in 1922, but since then, the Slovenské pohľadi has enjoyed uninterrupted publication. A relaxation of Habsburg absolutism at the end of the 1850s allowed Ján Francisci to start publishing in 1861 the Pešťbudínske vedomosti (Pest-Buda News), subtitled Noviny pre politiku a literatúru (A Newspaper for Politics and Literature), which continued the tradition of Štúr’s Slovenskje národňje novini and pursued the political agenda of the Slovak Memorandum of 1861 (see ECE 1: 246 and 257). Its literary section was rather meager, for it focused mostly on local writing, deliberately avoided translations, and marginalized literary criticism. Jozef Karol Viktorin’s almanacs Concordia (1858) and Lipa (Lime Tree; 1860, 1862, 1864), as well as his magazine Sokol (Falcon), edited in 1860–61 by Pavel Dobšinský, were more important for the younger Slovak writers. By the 1870s, Turčiansky Svätý Martin became the center of Slovak culture. Ján Kalinčiak and Andrej Trúchly-Sytniansky published here Orol (Eagle; 1870–) and its literary supplement Slovesnost (Literature; 1873–), and this was also where the Slovenské pohľady, and the Národnie noviny (The National Newspaper; 1870–1948) were published. The conservative Národnie noviny was a newspaper of the Slovak National Party but gave much attention to literature since most of its editors were writers. It furthered the rise of Slovak Realism in the 1870s, and played an important ideological role between 1878 and 1916 under the editorship of Svetozár Hurban-Vajanský. His imprisonment for writing nationalist articles in 1893, as well as in 1900–1901 and 1903–1904 turned him into a martyr for the Slovak cause and furnished him with material for three books. Becoming the editor of Národnie noviny was a sure method of landing in prison: it happened also to Hurban-Vajanský’s collaborator and successor, Jozef Škultéty. Hlas (The Voice; 1898–1904) opposed the conservative center at Martin, and switched from a traditional pro-Russian orientation to a closer collaboration with the Czechs, supporting Masaryk and advocating a more pragmatic economic-political program for Slovakia. Its political line was continued by Prúdy (The Streams; 1909–14). The young Slovak symbolists and decadent writers found their publishing venue in Slovenský obzor (Slovak Horizon; 1907–14). The religious magazines were split along confessional line. The Catholic group, led by František Richard Osvald, wanted to counterbalance the cultural hegemony of the Protestants with the newspaper Literárne listy (The Literary Letters; 1891–98) and the almanac Tovaryštvo (The Guild; 1893, 1895, 1900). The first Slovak women’s periodical, the Dennica (The Morning Star), began publication in 1898. The women’s association Živena in Martin, established already in 1869, occasionally issued an almanac and started in 1910 its eponymous magazine under the editorship of Elena Maróthy-Šoltésová. The other leading female author, Terézia Vansová, edited Dennica, and, later, the women’s periodical Slovenská Žena (Slovak Woman; 1920–23). The founding of the Czechoslovak Republic opened new publishing opportunities for Slovak writers. The most important periodicals of the 1920s were the revived Slovenské pohľady, along

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with Vatra (Bonfire; 1919–25), Mladé Slovensko (Young Slovakia), Svojeť (Our Own; 1922–) and DAV (an acronym of the editors Daňo Okáli, Andrej Sirácky, and Vlado Clementis). Whereas Slovenské pohľady was traditional, the others attracted mostly emerging writers and offered space for avant-garde experiments. Svojeť, edited by Gejza Vámoš and Jarko Elen in Prague, was the first Slovak Expressionist literary magazine. The Marxist DAV was published (with breaks) from 1924 to 1937 in Prague and Bratislava. Vatra was a conservative magazine for Catholic students. The most important literary magazines of the interwar period were Elán (1930–47), Slovenské smery umelecké a kritické (Slovak Directions in the Arts and Criticism; 1933–38), LUK (1930–32), and Tvorba (Creation; 1940–44). LUK was a periodical of the younger generation, and Slovenské smery the official literary magazine of the Association of Slovak Writers. Elán and Tvorba were stamped by the personalities of their first editors, Ján Smrek and Emil Boleslav Lukáč respectively. Elán played a significant role in the late 1930s and during World War II; Tvorba, politically less outspoken, represented spiritual resistance during World War II and was revived in the 1990s as a magazine of the Slovak Lutherans. Several periodicals, among them Prameň, Kultúra, and Verbum were associated with the rise of the poetic Catholic Modern School between 1935 and 1945. The Surrealists, another strong avant-garde movement during this period, published between 1938 and 1945 the almanacs Áno a nie (Yes and No; 1938), Vo dne a v noci (Day and Night), Sen a skutočnost (Dream and Reality), and Pozdrav (A Greeting). Áno a nie asserted that its authors and contributors said “no” to fascism and conservative tendencies in the arts but “yes” to the idea of progress. It featured surrealist poetry, visual images, as well as articles on literary history, philosophy, and aesthetics, mostly influenced by Structuralism. The Association for Scientific Synthesis (Spolok pre vedeckú syntézu), founded in 1937 in Bratislava, published its proclamation here. Kultúrny Život (Cultural Life; 1946–68) was an indicator of the changes in the Slovak political-cultural climate after 1945. It spread the official ideology in the 1950s but became a major conduit for discussion on reform the next decade. It was closed down after August 1968, shortly revived under the name Literárny Život (Literary Life) in 1969, and restarted, with numerous breaks, in the 1990s. Mladá tvorba (Young Creation; 1956–70) helped launch the young writers of the “Generation 56,” the “Concretists,” the “Lonely Runners,” and others. It emerged during the Thaw as a journal of literary criticism but was closed down after the Prague Spring. In 1972, the weekly Nové slovo started a literary section to attract authors that were not involved in the politics of the 1960s. It offered them the possibility to publish their first book — after proper ideological and aesthetic schooling. It became the prime publication organ of the emerging writers of the late 1970s and early 80s. Romboid (1966–), one of the most independent Slovak/Czechoslovak literary journals in the 1970s and 80s, was co-edited by Pavel Vilikovský. Like Romboid, the Revue svetovej literatúry (Revue of World Literatures; 1965–) promoted foreign literatures and recent trends in literary criticism. The Literárny týždenník (Literary Weekly; 1988–), a perestroika periodical, played an important role in the process of democratization but shifted towards nationalism in the early 1990s. Jana Juráňová and Jana Cviková founded in 1995 the feminist magazine Aspekt. In 1996 two news publications were launched: RAK (=Revue aktuálnej kultúry), which focuses on contemporary literature and criticism, and follows no political line, and Literika, published by the National Literary Center.

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The National Role of the Albanian Literary Journals Robert Elsie Journalism played a key role in stimulating the Albanian national awakening, not only with information and ideas, but also with works of creative literature written in Albanian. In the 1880s and 90s, Albanian-language periodicals sprang up in all the major cities of the Balkans, including Constantinople, Bucharest, Sofia, Thessalonika and Athens, carrying the ideals of the nationalist movement to the remotest corners of Albanian-speaking territories. Most of these periodicals were short-lived newspapers that devoted a modest section of their issues to creative writing in Albanian. The most influential of all Albanian writers and publishers at the turn of the century was most certainly Faik bey Konitza. At the age of twenty-two, in 1897, Konitza founded in Brussels the Albanian/French periodical Albania, which soon became the most important organ of the Albanian press at the turn of the century. He moved to London in 1902 and continued to publish the journal there until 1910. It was also in London that he made friends with the French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who stayed with him in 1903 and 1904. Albania not only helped make Albanian culture and the Albanian cause known in Europe, it also set the pace for literary prose in Tosk dialect. It is widely considered to be the most significant Albanian periodical to have existed up to World War II. Writers like Thimi Mitko, Kostandin Kristoforidhi, Andon Zako Çajupi, and Gjergj Fishta first became known to a broader public through the pages of Albania, which Konitza published faithfully over a twelve year period. The periodical contained articles and information on a wide range of topics: history, language, literature, folklore, archaeology, politics, economics, religion, and art. As such, it constituted a mini-encyclopedia of Albanian culture of the period. Other outstanding literary journals of the period were supported by the Catholic Church in Shkodra. In 1913, Father Gjergj Fishta founded and edited the Franciscan monthly Hylli i dritës (The Day-Star), which was devoted to literature, politics, folklore, and history. With the exception of the turbulent years of World War I and its aftermath (1915–20), and the early years of the dictatorship of Ahmet Zogu (1925–29), this influential journal of high literary standing was published regularly until July 1944 and became as instrumental for the development of northern Albanian Geg culture as Faik bey Konitza’s Albania had been for the Tosk culture of the south. Also of literary and cultural interest was Zâni i Shna Ndout (The Voice of St Anthony; 1913–44). Like the Franciscans, the Jesuits also produced periodicals of note, including Elçija i zemers t’Jezu Krisctit (The Messenger of the Sacred Heart; 1891–1944), known from 1914 on as Lajmtari i zemers t’Jezu Krishtit, a magazine of religious culture, Përparimi (Progress; 1914–16), a shortlived historical and scholarly journal, and Leka (1929–1944), a monthly cultural review. For the majority Muslim community in Albania, there was the monthly Zâni i naltë (The Sublime Voice), published in Tirana from October 1923 to 1938, and Kultura islame (Islamic Culture) published from 1939 to 1945, which kept their readers abreast of the past and present of Islamic culture in Albania and the Middle East. Essential to the strengthening of written culture in the mid-thirties were three periodicals in particular. The illustrated monthly Minerva, which called itself the “great literary magazine of

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modern life,” was a liberal journal published in Tirana from 1932 to 1936. From 1934 to 1936 many leading journalists also published in the Tirana cultural weekly Illyria. Migjeni, for instance, published there his first prose and poetry. Përpjekja shqiptare (The Albanian Endeavor), published from 1936 to 1939 by Branko Merxhani and administered for a time by Petro Marko, also reflected the qualitative advancement of Albanian literature. Ephemeral though not insignificant for the diffusion of the new progressive ideas of the left were ABC, a fortnightly magazine published in Tirana by Petro Marko in March 1936, soon thereafter shut down by the Zogist authorities, and Bota e re (New World) of Korça, the fortnightly organ of the Korça communist organization, published from April 1936 to February 1937. The major literary periodical of the war years was the monthly Shkëndija (The Spark; 1940– 43), founded and run by Albanian Minister of Education, Ernest Koliqi. Even in 1944, several short-lived but serious literary periodicals managed to appear amidst the chaos of the civil war: the monthly Fryma (The Spirit), established in January 1944 by Myzafer Pipa; the fortnightly Revista letrare (The Literary Review), founded in February 1944 by Mitrush Kuteli, Vedat Kokona, Nexhat Hakiu, and Sterjo Spasse; and the monthly Kritika (Criticism), founded in March 1944 by Arshi Pipa. The communist takeover of Albania in November 1944 put a sudden end to literary journals and publishing, and soon turned into an apocalypse for publishers and writers. Most men of letters were executed or died in prison. The Stalinist regime set up and run by Enver Hoxha transformed Albania into a cultural wasteland for at least a decade. Only in the mid-fifties was a modicum of literary culture visible again. From 1954 to the end of the dictatorship, the Albanian Union of Writers and Artists issued a monthly periodical entitled Nëntori (November), which served as a tribune for all official literary activity in the country. In 1961 it also began publishing the weekly literary newspaper Drita (The Light), which is still being printed in Tirana on a fortnightly basis. In order to help contemporary Albanian literature out of its depressing isolation, the Union of Writers also published from 1978 to 1990 a French-language quarterly entitled Les lettres albanaises (Albanian Literature). The fifty issues published in that twelve year period reflected, of course, the official taste in literature, but did provide the outside world at least with a glimpse of the curious cosmos of Albanian literature under communist dictatorship. In Kosova, the founding of the literary periodical Jeta e re (New Life) in 1949 by the poet Esad Mekuli gave voice to the young generation of Albanian writers there and served as an initial forum for literary publications. The Writers’ Union of Kosova also issued a weekly literary newspaper entitled Fjala (The Word), Prishtina’s much more liberal and open pendant to Tirana’s bland Drita. There was hope for a renascence of literary journals after the fall of Communism in Albania and Kosova, but in fact little progress has been made. The Albanian-speaking world is simply too impoverished and chaotic to devote much of its energy to such periodicals. Nonetheless, a few have arisen recently and are carrying the torch, so to speak. In 1993, the Catholic community revived Fishta’s aforementioned Hylli i dritës (The Day-Star), but managed to publish only fifteen issues until it fell silent in 1997. The new, retrospective Hylli i dritës concentrated on publishing excerpts from texts by formerly forbidden authors. A much more contemporary and intellectual approach has been taken by Tirana’s dissident publisher Fatos Lubonja in Përpjekja (Endeavor; 1994–). He courageously attacked many “sacred cows” of Albanian culture, and was accordingly

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soon decried by the new establishment as a traitor. In 1997, Lubonja also printed one issue of a journal in English entitled Përpjekja / Endeavor, Writing from Albania’s Critical Quarterly. In October 1996, the Velija Cultural Foundation of Tirana began publishing a thought-provoking literary and cultural quarterly entitled Mehr Licht (More Light). Its director, the talented prose writer Mira Meksi, has made much high-quality contemporary Albanian writing available, but she has concentrated even more — and perhaps rightly so — on contemporary literature from abroad. Mehr Licht can now be considered as the main forum of international literary exchange in Tirana. Perhaps the broadest and most interesting literary periodical to have appeared in the 1990s was MM, revistë mikste teorike dhe letrare (MM, Mixed Theoretical and Literary Review), published in Kosova by a team of leading writers and intellectuals. Among other periodicals to have provoked and modernized Albanian thinking and literary culture are the respected journal Përpjekja (The Endeavor) published in Tirana by Fatos Lubonja, the now defunct literary review Aleph of Tirana, the poetry periodical Poeteka published in Tirana by Arian Leka, and a literary review issued in Bucharest entitled Haemus, revistë evropiane dygjuhëshe kulture dhe traditash (Haemus, Bilingual European Review of Culture and Tradition; 1998–) by the prose writer Ardian-Christian Kyçyku. Literary discourse is now increasingly moving into internet forums.

2. Censorship

The Laws and Practices of Censorship in Bohemia Jan Čulík Under Empress Maria Theresa, the Austrian state took the censorship of books into its own hands. State Censorship Commissions were set up in all the lands of the Austrian Empire, but these were gradually taken over by supporters of Enlightenment ideas. Under Joseph II, the censorship commission began to ban all publications dealing with unsubstantiated miracles; Protestant literature was no longer banned; criticism of rulers and power holders was allowed as long as it was factual. Literature based on superstition, and publications irreverent towards religion and state without factual basis were prohibited, as were unreliable publications by charlatans and quacks. During Joseph II’s rule, the number of new works written and published in Bohemia increased considerably, and this encouraged some authors to start writing in the Czech language. The liberal reforms of Joseph II served as a catalyst in the nineteenth-century Czech National Revival. More books were published in Bohemia during the ten years of Joseph II than during the previous eighty. Some of the liberal reforms instituted by Joseph II were abolished after his death in 1790, but Czech periodicals perpetuated the spirit of Josephinian liberalism well into the 1820s, in spite of the accession of Emperor Francis I, who turned Austria into a reactionary, absolutist police state. His new law on censorship (1795) curtailed many of the liberal practices under Joseph II. From 1798 on, literary periodicals and leaflets were no longer allowed to be displayed on premises accessible to the public. Many libraries and reading rooms that had opened in previous years had to close down. In 1801, more than 2000 formerly free titles were banned. In 1810, the power of the censor was made all but absolute. “Censorship is worse than a lottery,” sighed the Czech poet František Ladislav Čelakovský, whose first poems were prohibited by the censor (Menčík 135). When, in 1822, Čelakovský submitted the manuscript of his three-volume collection of folk songs, Slovanské národní písně (Slavonic National Folk Songs), the censor wanted to suppress the adjective “Slavonic” from the title. From 1834 onward, Čelakovský edited the Prague newspaper Pražské noviny (Prague News), but when the paper criticized the Tsar’s refusal to listen to the demands of Polish petitioners in November 1835, he was sacked both from the newspaper and from his university post and lived in destitution for seven years. Pavel Josef Šafárik criticized “futile conflicts, and the censors, native Czechs, who were the greatest obstacle to the development of literature” (Jakubec, Dějiny 306); Josef Jungmann’s literary textbook, Slovesnost (Literature; 1820), was truncated by the censors. Several of Jan Kollár’s love sonnets with a nationalist subtext were suppressed; his collection Slávy dcera (Slava’s Daughter; 1824) had to be published in Buda, and nobody dared review it in Bohemia at the time. The Austrian authorities were particularly afraid of the neo-Catholic, reformist views of Bernard Bolzano, who had a major influence in Prague among university students, many of whom later became important figures in the Czech National Revival. Bolzano became professor of theology

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at Prague University in 1805 and also taught later mathematics and philosophy until was sacked from his post and exiled to the countryside in 1819. In spite of the repression, Czech cultural and literary activities began to acquire a political dimension in the years leading up to the 1848 revolution, especially through the work of Karel Havlíček, the first great modern Czech journalist (see also ECE 1: 271 ff). Havlíček became the editor of the Prague government paper Pražské noviny (Prague News) in 1846, and, after the abolishing of censorship in the spring of 1848, he founded his own opposition newspaper, Národní noviny (National News). Havlíček explained and defended in this excellent publication the basic principles of liberal democratic politics until the journal was closed down by the Austrian government on January 19, 1850. Havlíček then moved to Kutná Hora and published, from May 8, 1850 until August 14, 1851, Slovan (The Slav), a political newspaper that came out twice a week. The Austrian government put Havlíček on trial in April 1849 and in November 1851, accusing him of seditious writing, but Havlíček defended himself brilliantly and the jury unanimously declared him not guilty on both occasions. Havlíček was then deported in December 1851 without trial to the South-Tyrolean town of Brixen. He was allowed to return in 1855, but by that time his wife was dead, most of his Prague friends were afraid to meet him, and he had contracted tuberculosis. In his Brixen exile, Havlíček wrote three long satirical poems against (Russian as well as Austrian) absolutism, which were circulated in manuscript form until they could finally be published in the 1870s: Král Lávra (King Lávra; 1870), Tyrolské elegie (Tyrolean Elegies; 1870) and Křest svatého Vladimíra (The Baptism of St. Vladimir), published in 1876 anonymously. The temporary abolishing of censorship during the revolution of 1848–49 allowed the sudden emergence of more than thirty Czech newspapers. Two distinct political groups emerged: the middle-of-the-road liberal democrats and the left-wing radicals. Leaders of the second group, Prokop Chocholoušek, Karel Sabina, and Josef Václav Frič, were interned, imprisoned, and exiled during the period 1850–60 of renewed absolutism. Josef Kajetán Tyl, an older figure of the pre-1848 Czech National Revival, was also silenced by the Austrian authorities after 1848. This journalist and playwright attempted to increase the political awareness of the Czech people by writing and staging accessible, entertaining plays with implicit political messages. After 1848, his politically colored historical dramas were prohibited, Tyl was placed under police surveillance, lost his job as repertory adviser to the Prague Estate Theater (the government stopped subsidizing the production of Czech plays), and he was denied a license to run a traveling theater. He attempted to run it with somebody else’s license, and died in extreme poverty. The December 1867 constitution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy guaranteed basic civic rights to its citizens, and within the limits of an unequal electoral law the Czechs could enjoy fundamental democratic freedoms between 1867 and 1914. The Austrian absolutist press law of May 1852 was replaced already in December 1862 by a more liberal one, and modified further in 1868 and 1894, until it was actually taken over by the democratic Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 and further modified in 1934 and 1935. The 1867 constitution declared censorship to be the responsibility of the provincial governors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Articles were often confiscated, the publication of newspapers temporarily suspended, and journalists were imprisoned, mostly for short periods of time, for “subversion” and offences against the public order. The Czech writer and journalist Jakub

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Arbes listed in Pláč koruny české (The Tears of the Czech Crown; 1894) more than a thousand acts of petty political persecution perpetrated by the Austrian government against Czechs during 1868–73, five-years of intense Czech demands for autonomy within Austria. Though the Austrian authorities tried to minimize nationalist friction in the Empire by suppressing critical voices, the press law of 1862 was relatively liberal, allowing anyone to edit and publish books and periodicals in line with current business legislation, though the premises where books and newspapers were sold had to be registered with the police (see pp. 89–90 above). The Monarchy reverted to strict absolutist rule and harsh censorship during World War I. The state authorities assumed an openly hostile attitude towards the Czech population and regarded it, rightly, as disloyal. The parliament was closed down, democratic rights were curtailed, and the influence of the top military commanders on state policy increased. Czech politicians were silenced and so only Czech writers and artists could speak to the nation. The daily newspapers were heavily censored, but between the lines the journalists countered the official Austrian military propaganda. The Constitution of the independent and democratic Czechoslovak Republic from 1920 stated expressly: “the freedom of the press as well as the right to peaceful assembly is guaranteed. This is why it is in principle inadmissible to subject the press to preliminary censorship” (article 113); “the privacy of correspondence is guaranteed” (article 116). With the emergence of political extremism in the early 1920s (the Finance Minister, Alois Rašín, was murdered in January 1923; a doctrinaire Czechoslovak Communist Party was founded in 1921), Czechoslovakia promulgated in 1923 a “Law for the Protection of the Republic,” which made, among others, the following punishable: acts of subversion directed against the constitutional and republican system of Czechoslovakia; law and order offences; the dissemination of unfounded, alarmist news; and verbal and physical assaults directed against holders of some constitutional posts, including that of the President. Article 26 allowed the authorities to remove from public places “anti-state monuments, inscriptions, and other objects,” which included monuments to members of the dynasties that ruled Austria-Hungary and Germany when World War I broke out. Until recently, visitors to Prague can still see on the Smetana Embankment in the Old Town the pedestal of a neo-gothic monument to Austrian Emperor Francis I without the statue itself. According to the new law, daily newspapers could be suspended for a maximum of one month, other periodicals up to six months. Left-wing newspapers bore the brunt of this censorship, especially the communist daily Rude Pravo (Red Rights) which often appeared with blank spaces. In 1925, Jaroslav Seifert’s left wing volume of poetry Město v slzách (A City in Tears) was confiscated; in 1932, Baudelaire’s collection Les Fleurs du Mal was suppressed; similar was the fate of works by the controversial Catholic priest Jakub Deml, Šlépěje (Footprints; 1930) and Zapomenuté světlo (Forgotten Light; 1934). However, the Czech translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the third foreign translation of it, was published without problems in 1930. Two days after the occupation of the Czech Lands by Nazi Germany on March 15, 1939, the Press Department of the Government Office established a new Central Press Service, which had employees in the editorial offices of individual newspapers and gave special instructions to the editors-in-chief. The Nazis used the newspapers and periodicals for their propaganda purposes. Many books were banned and confiscated. Initially, the banned titles included all books about the Czech democratic presidents Beneš and Masaryk, Marxist works, anti-German works, and some

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publications about Hitler. When World War II broke out, wholesale prohibition was imposed by internal Nazi decrees not only on Soviet literature, but also on French, British and eventually also on American literature. After May 1945, technically no censorship existed in Czechoslovakia, but conflicts soon emerged between the political parties. In November of that year, the communist Minister of Information, Václav Kopecký, accused the People’s Party of publishing newspapers that print “fascist and reactionary material,” and he temporarily banned some of them. The fear that the Minister of Information would arbitrarily prosecute or prohibit the publication of non-communist newspapers whenever they criticized the Czechoslovak government or its Allies, led to a petition to institute an official censorship with clearly defined rules. But the communists assumed power in February 1948, before such a censorship could be instituted. Between 1948 and 1953, the Communist Party exercised its monopoly over propaganda and information via a Party Censorship Office; the censorship was afterwards run jointly by the Party and the government. In general terms, the agenda for the media was established by the Cultural Council, a department of the Communist Party. The daily inspection and governance of the media was carried out by the Culture and Propaganda Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and by similar Party Committees in the regions and districts. The Communist Party controlled also the non-communist periodicals, most of which were actually closed down after 1948. All public libraries were cleansed of “Trotskyite and anti-Soviet literature, right-wing social democratic literature and works by T. G. Masaryk and Eduard Beneš” (List of Banned Titles No 2, issued in April 1953 by the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party; see Kaplan & Tomášek 15). One copy of each banned work was saved, all the other copies were pulped; it is estimated that 27,5 million books were destroyed in Czechoslovakia during this period (Kratochvíl, Žaluji 265). On April 22, 1953, the Czechoslovak government secretly created the Office for Supervising the Press — a preliminary censorship office that was accountable to the Interior Ministry and cooperated closely with the Czechoslovak Secret Police. Only those materials could be printed or otherwise disseminated that had been given a permit number by the censorship office. Publication of materials without a censorship number was a criminal offence. Private mail, especially letters going abroad, was regularly checked by the censors. In order to limit international mail, all letters abroad were required after February 1950 to have a return address, and senders had to reconfirm their identity with a personal document when handing in the mail personally at the post office. In cooperation with its East-European allies, the regime quickly built a dense network of devices that jammed, until late 1988, Radio Free Europe broadcasts in Czech and Slovak. In the late 1950s, the communist authorities started to relax gradually their ideological rigidity. The liberalization first affected Czech theaters. Pavel Kohout’s Taková láska (Such Love; 1957) and Milan Kundera’s Majitelé klíčů (The Owners of the Keys; 1962) reintroduced authentic and complicated characters. Lyrical and satirical plays by Josef Topol and František Hrubín reappeared, and small, highly popular fringe theaters, such as Jiří Suchý’s and Jiří Šlitr’s Semafor Theater, acquired an important role by combining topical comedy shows with popular music. Václav Havel’s absurd plays, which satirized bureaucratic communist rule, were staged at the Theater on the Balustrade in Prague as of 1963.

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In 1966, the Czechoslovak government issued a press law that, for the first time in communist Czechoslovakia, legalized censorship and attempted to define its prerogatives. The Central Office for Supervising the Press was renamed Central Publication Office, and made into a civil institution that was controlled by a government minister rather than the Party and the Secret Police. The censorship had the right to prohibit the publication of state secrets, but publishers could negotiate about materials dealing with matters of public interest. In December 1967, the Central Committee of the Communist Party decreed that editors-in-chief had to decide whether or not to obey the instructions of the censors with regard to controversial materials. At the beginning of the Prague Spring, in March 1968, the head of the censorship office provided advance information about the new Communist Party Action Program. The text, published on April 10, stated: “The working people, who are no longer being dictated to by a class of exploiters cannot be arbitrarily told from above what information should or should not be available to them. Scholarly journals and scholarly debates must not be subject to preliminary censorship. The arts must not be subjects of censorship” (Tomášek, Pozor 151–52). In the 1960s, Czechoslovakia experienced an unprecedented period of cultural and political renaissance, which produced major literary and artistic works. During this period, the Czechs and Slovaks used the arts as instruments to gain freedom, without abusing them as mere political tools. The drive for freedom culminated in the annus mirabilis, the Prague Spring of 1968, during which a total freedom of expression existed for several months, starting in March 1968, before the official termination of censorship. Alexander Dubček’s new Czechoslovak Communist Party abolished the Central Publication Office on June 13, 1968. Law 84/1968, dated June 26, confirmed this in Article 17: “Censorship is inadmissible. Censorship is defined as action by the state authorities against the freedom of speech and pictures and against their dissemination by the mass media.” The 1968 Prague Spring became an illustrious chapter in Czechoslovakia’s media history. Human rights abuses in the Stalinist 1950s were then openly discussed, and debates about the future political and economic direction of Czechoslovakia got under way. The Czech National Assembly annulled the abolition of censorship shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 by the Soviet-led armies of the Warsaw Pact countries. Preliminary censorship was replaced by the “self-censorship” of editors, journalists, and other writers. This inaugurated a period of “normalization,” a stagnant and oppressive neo-Stalinist era, which lasted roughly unchanged until November 1989. Since the authorities understood that Czechoslovakia’s “spring” in the 1960s was brought about largely by the Czech and Slovak intelligentsia, they sought to destroy its public function. Although Stalinist Communism had been utterly discredited in the 1960s, those who wished to make a career were required to support its precepts from 1970 onward. All citizens, journalists in particular, were expected to embrace enthusiastically the official neo-Stalinist ideology. It was particularly dangerous that the authorities no longer defined what was politically unpublishable. Citizens were supposed to know what was expected of them, and it became subversive just to ask whether something was permissible. The threat of punishment, which included the closing down of a periodical for up to three months, and the sacking of reformist journalists effectively prevented the publishing of controversial or prohibited materials. In 1972, all public libraries were purged once more of materials “critical of Marxism-Leninism, the policy of the Socialist States, and the Marxist-Leninist Parties”; further items to be

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removed comprised “revisionist and right-wing opportunist literature, works praising the capitalist order, the pre-war Czechoslovak Republic, works by T. G. Masaryk, Eduard Beneš, and other bourgeois politicians, all works (regardless of their content) by authors who have emigrated from Czechoslovakia or aligned themselves with the right-wing forces in 1968, as well as unproblematic works with a problematic preface or epilogue” (Czech Education Ministry, internal document dated June 15, 1972; qtd. in Tomášek, Pozor 154–55). Lists published by the Central State Library of the Republic served to inspect the libraries. Gustáv Husák’s neo-Stalinist regime managed to suppress meaningful official discourses almost totally until the end of the 1980s. The sustained onslaught of propaganda isolated the independent thinkers, the intellectual elite, and the artists from society at large. In 1972, the government set up a new Union of Czech Writers with pro-Soviet collaborators headed by Jan Kozák. The earlier, reformist Union of Czech Writers was thereby outlawed; about 400 Czech writers, most of whom had actively participated in the Prague Spring, were no longer allowed to publish, and were submitted to police surveillance and harassment. As in the case of Jiří Gruša’s Dotazník (A Questionnaire; 1978), some authors were arbitrarily imprisoned for merely writing a literary work. Others, like Vaculík, were frequently harassed by the police at interrogations and by means of house searches, but escaped imprisonment. Václav Havel and several of his colleagues were given long prison terms in 1979 for collecting and publishing information about police harassment. Between 1969 and 1972, the banned writers of Czechoslovakia gradually created a samizdat literary culture; it evolved from informal gatherings at which writers read from their works to their colleagues. Several relatively well-established samizdat editions emerged, among them the Edice Petlice (The Padlock Series), run by Ludvík Vaculík, and the Edice Expedice (The Expedition Series) edited by Václav Havel. In this pre-computer age, the banned titles were copied on the typewriter, using flimsies and carbon paper, usually producing about 10 copies at a time. The impact of samizdat was so small that immediately after 1989 most people did not even know who Václav Havel was. Still, samizdat publishing flourished after the emergence of the Charter 77 human rights movement in the late 1970s and the 80s, and it started to cooperate closely with several Czech émigré publishers who operated in the West from the early 1970s onward. The bestknown of these was the “Sixty-Eight Publishers” that Josef Škvorecký and his wife established in Toronto. Soon after the fall of Communism, the Czechoslovak Parliament abolished the Press Law 127/1968 on censorship, and updated the Press Law of 1966 by removing its Marxist and communist terminology. Law 86/1990 fully restored Article 17 of the 1968 Law that forbade censorship. The Czech Republic has enjoyed press freedom since 1990, but most journalists fail to use it effectively. Conformism survives as a difficult legacy of several decades of totalitarian censorship.

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Censorship: A Case Study of Bohumil Hrabal’s Jarmilka Kees Mercks

General Considerations Censorship, a curious phenomenon, exists in both communist and capitalist countries as well as in virtually all other political systems of the past and present, though in each system with different political, moral, and psychological effects. Searching for the term “censorship” in legal texts one might conclude, however, that this phenomenon has never existed at all. Scarcely any references can be found in legal codes or dictionaries; at best (or worst) one finds references to exceptional situations, such as a war or other catastrophes. Generally speaking, there are no laws that would define what censorship is supposed to be, let alone how it functions. Nevertheless, people in both communist and capitalist countries are aware of its existence and effects. Censorship has generally two aims: to protect the representatives of the state government or, more generally, to protect society from values that are subversive to state ideology. In the first case, the top of the political or dynastic hierarchy is to be protected against subversive and defamatory utterances; in the second case, censorship intends to protect a considerably larger group of people against not only hostile political values, but also “immoral” values, such as vulgarity and obscenity. State ideology and the moral integrity of the people must be safeguarded. In dictatorial states one is not allowed to defame the political leadership or to undermine basic ideological concepts by means of provocative political ideas, by ridiculing such ponderous values as Socialism, Party, working class, labor, truth, the people; or by invoking irreverently the names of Marx, Lenin, Engels and other beatified socialist heroes, including the political leaders. In capitalist states, one is discouraged from defaming the head of State, President, or Royal Family. In relatively permissive societies such cases seldom occur, but in former days one could neither call Nixon a “Murderer” nor make a fool of politicians, as was done in the satirical political television program Spitting Images; the effect of the latter, was still far less dramatic than in communist societies. The second domain of censorship, which deals with moral standards and various forms of sexual libertinism, was stricter in communist countries than in politically pluralistic systems. This is all the more surprising since one of the socialist ideals was to replace the bourgeois relic of legal marriage with free relations and companionships based on love and solidarity. Instead, rigid prudishness and narrow-mindedness predominated in communist countries. State ideologists wanted to establish “clean” values for the new political system and thus, for many people, it was an indirect political protest to defy these rules. This regressive attitude supported a definite conservatism, which the state itself reinforced by discouraging free, romantic companionships. Sexual otherness, for instance homosexuality, was disapproved by the state as well as by “ordinary people.” The same goes for the use of vulgarity: although the working class was allowed to speak in a robust manner, obvious vulgarisms were to be avoided, and those who did not wish to be identified with the proletariat rarely deviated from the standards of written language. A rather strong

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conservatism prevented potentially subversive large-scale experiments with norms. Obscenities were completely banned, and the range of forbidden expressions was considerably greater than in capitalist countries. Hence communist cultures developed a set of ideological and stylistic restraints, which changed as the political ideology changed from the rigid fifties, through the political Thaw of the sixties, to the severity of the seventies and eighties, and the restored liberties after the fall of Communism. Parallel to these restraints, a system of sanctions was developed in keeping with the political atmosphere of the time: it ranged from imprisonment to “a cup of coffee with my interrogator,” as Ludvík Vaculík ironically called it, an expression he used as the English title for his collection (1975). After installing in 1948 a communist regime that tolerated only the official Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Czechoslovak government imposed censorship in order to protect the political top from ideological interferences that could threaten its still fragile and unstable political position and its striving to rebuild the infrastructure of the country through a series of radical political, social, economic, and cultural reforms. Several years passed, however, before the first office of censorship, the HSTD (Chief Administration for Control of Printing), was established. The 1953 decision of the Communist Party to create this instrument (taken when the political show-trials were held) was kept secret, and the HSTD became part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In previous years censorship had apparently been in the hands of the Party itself, which had for this purpose a special “committee of readers” (lektorská rada) that ruled over the entire Czechoslovak publishing business and decided what could, and, more importantly, what could not be published. Even during the period between the end of World War II and the establishment of the communist system, certain institutions denied public access to extreme right-wing publications produced before and during the German occupation. This task, initially given to the Syndicate of Czech Writers, was soon taken over by the Ministry of Education and Information and carried out by its communist representatives Zdenĕk Nejedlý and Václav Kopecký, though the leftist governments under President Eduard Beneš were, like the Syndicate, still politically pluralistic institutions. Of course, no leftist books were banned during this period. From an institutional point of view, the changes after February 1948 were actually less drastic than one would expect. The main difference was that the Communist Party now became the leading party and assumed therefore full responsibility for the censorship carried out by the HSTD, a department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. For writers, the situation did, of course, change dramatically. Censorship had already started before February 1948, but after the February coup it rapidly intensified. Jiří Weil’s novel Život s hvězdou (Life with a Star) could still be published in 1949, even though the author was a communist renegade and a Jew, neither of which were conducive to publication in the shiny new era of early Communism. Weil received permission to publish this novel perhaps because of his treatment of the war, and his positive portrayal of Materna, a member of the communist resistance who had to persuade the extremely weak and inactive Jewish protagonist Roubíček to join the resistance against the German occupier. But Roubíček’s decision at the end of the novel is not that clear. Moreover, his extreme incapacity to cope with the German occupation and the deportation of Jews is much more interesting than his rather awkward meetings with Materna. His indolent attitude did not fit the scheme of Socialist

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Realism. When Ždanov’s rules of Socialist Realism became fully implemented in the ČSSR, Weil was not allowed to publish thoughout the repressive fifties. Josef Škvorecký’s novel Zbabĕlci (The Cowards) was already finished but could not be published in 1949 for political reasons. The novel depicts the last week of World War II in an average village and offers a satirical image not only of the Germans but also of the Russian liberator and, even worse, of a fainthearted Czech population that tries to make the best of the War, twisting one way and the other. In 1949, before the great political trials, the writer Karel Pecka was sentenced to eleven years imprisonment because of his involvement with an illegal cultural journal. The Syndicate of Czech Writers, founded before the war to protect the interests of writers and their freedom of expression, was suspended and replaced in March 1949 by the (communist) Union of Czechoslovak Writers, from which ideologically deviant authors were purged. Writers were further intimidated by aggressive, idiosyncratic pro-communist publications, such as Ladislav Štoll’s 30 let bojů za socialistickou poesii (Thirty Years of Struggle for Socialist Poetry), in which the author declared Stanislav Kostka Neumann and Jiří Wolker as chief founders of prewar communist poetry, and Julius Fučík as the unsurpassed and inspiring prewar communist critic. He sharply criticized the excellent communist poets Josef Hora, Jaroslav Seifert, and František Halas for disagreeing with the Party’s approval of the prewar Stalinist trials. Štoll’s criticism was, of course, ideologically and not esthetically inspired. He attained a high position in the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the worst years of the fifties and became the dreaded director of the Institute for Czech Literature during the sixties. Mojmír Grygar, a representative of the young academic generation that actively cooperated in founding the new communist culture, violently attacked in 1951 Karel Teige, the theoretician of prewar Poetism and Surrealism. The vehement allegation of Trotskyism could have meant long imprisonment or even a death sentence for Teige, but just before this attack Teige died from natural causes. Grygar continued his career as co-founder of the Julius Fučík myth by writing idyllic biographical sketches about this “Great Communist Hero” and glorifying the author for his world-famous notes, Reportáž, psaná na oprátce (Report from the Gallows), smuggled from prison during the war. Later, these texts turned out to be highly “manipulated” by the editors to favor the communist resistance. Concerning the Teige-affair, Grygar asserted some fifty years later at a literary congress in Prague that the political invectives of his article had been added by the Editorial Board. Konstantin Biebl, a fragile and sensitive leftist poet from prewar Poetism and Surrealism and a one-time close friend of Wolker, committed suicide in 1951, undoubtedly under the pressure of politics. Jan Zahradníček, an outstanding Catholic poet and explicit opponent of the communist regime, was arrested the same year because of his alleged ties with the Vatican. A year later he was sentenced to thirteen-years of prison, a sentence that was later reduced to “only” nine years. Exhausted and embittered, he died soon after his release from prison in 1960. These few striking examples from the early fifties could easily be augmented by numerous other cases. They precede the great political trials of 1951–53 against Slánský and others; in turn, they were preceded by the 1949 political trial in which Milada Horáková sentenced to death. The regime was highly suspicious of the right wing, which ranged from war collaborators to conservatives and Catholics, as well as of the left, which extended from Social Democrats to communist renegades and deviant factions. It is unclear to what extent the HSTD directly controlled

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the whole ideological field. It was probably only one instrument of the Party’s ideological department, which was responsible for poisoning all of society, from the highest governmental level to the lowest one, affecting all state organizations, including the state enterprises, the courts, the police, the army, the churches, welfare, education, science, the arts, the press, the media, and sports. Ideological directives existed, but they seemed less threatening than the omnipresent and omni-active political practice of the totalitarian state. Intimidation consisted mainly of secret and oral warnings that spread from one official body to another and from one person to the next. All party and state functionaries were beset by doubts and were afraid of their neighbors, their superiors, and their subordinates. The political terror forced many writers to leave the country, but the iron curtain soon came down and closed the borders hermetically for a couple of years. Many of those that stayed behind were sentenced or expelled from the Party and/or the Writers’ Union, and lost their jobs. Those that had been expelled from the Writers’ Union could often not publish, so that their manuscripts accumulated in their drawers. Other writers chose silence as a form of extreme self-censorship, a decision that was sometimes accompanied by a writer’s block. Jaroslav Seifert (Nobel Prize 1984) bravely criticized the Writers’ Union in 1956; Vladimír Holan could not publish his hermetic poetry until the political Thaw in the sixties, though he had enthusiastically welcomed the Red Army when it liberated Czechoslovakia. The well-known poet and collage artist Jiří Kolář spent nine months in prison due to a “minor” conflict with the authorities (1952). After his release, he devoted several years to children’s literature, an innocent genre, like translating, that was a desirable sideline for writers with political problems. One could assume that the HSTD was behind the court sentences, but in the case of published texts it remained unclear whether a writer was forced to rewrite his text (or a portion of it). The 1950s ended with a great scandal around the release of Škvorecký’s The Cowards in 1959: the book had to be withdrawn from the market and the entire editorial board of the publishing house was suspended. Its publication in 1963–64 indicated that de-Stalinization finally got on the way, ten years after Stalin’s death. Two other famous writers managed to have their literary work staged or published at this time: Václav Havel’s play Zahradní slavnost (The Garden Party) ridiculed the communist system, hollow speech, dialectical thinking, and ambitious behavior. The play’s enormous success illustrated the deep relief people experienced after the fifties. The other author was Bohumil Hrabal, who could finally publish his Perlička na dnĕ (Little Pearl at the Bottom), a collection of stories written during the fifties. Censors might have had problems with the political and ideological allusions in Škvorecký’s and Havel’s works, but Hrabal’s case was quite different. The Jarmilka Case Hrabal had strongly sympathized with the Surrealism of Skupina 42 (Group 42), which did not conform to Socialist Realism. He took a job as a laborer at the Poldi steel plant in Kladno, where he could observe the unembellished life of a socialist worker and was amazed by the extremes of the work conditions, the gigantic melting process of the blast-furnaces, and the creation and reshaping of materials and products. He did this hard labor from 1949 onward, until he had a

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serious accident in 1952 and had to stop. After a long period of recovery, he found another kind of “proletarian” work, compressing old paper into bales in a cellar of Prague’s Spálená Street (1954–59), an experience that later yielded his aforementioned novella Too Loud a Solitude. Once again, he was astonished by the seemingly alchemical process of changing one object into another, turning something into an artifact. The censors probably welcomed Hrabal’s transformation from a well-dressed salesman of fancy goods into an exemplary proletarian in blue overalls at a steel plant and, later, a worker in a cellar. What bothered them was presumably Hrabal’s unusual literary style, what he called “total realism” though it had nothing in common with Socialist Realism or even with traditional Realism. Thanks to the publication of Hrabal’s collected works (Sebrané spisy) by the small publishing house of Pražská imaginace in the 1990s, it is possible to compare the texts published in the sixties with the texts that remained in his drawer, published for the first time by Pražská imaginace. This enables us not only to look over the censor’s shoulder and observe the result of his interference, but also to observe a certain discontinuity in Hrabal’s stylistic development. Which changes were made or suggested by the HSTD, which by subordinate boards, and which by Hrabal himself as a political or artistic self-censorship remains difficult to say. Hrabal’s late debut, Perlička na dnĕ (Little Pearl on the Bottom), is an apolitical collection of stories with interesting compositions and an often expressive style. The provocative vulgarities are, from today’s perspective, fairly mild but may have been then the maximum tolerated. There are no alternative versions to these stories; some of them appeared later in several collections without major changes. It seems more fruitful to compare two versions of a text from the fifties: the “adapted” version published in one of Hrabal’s collections and the one published for the first time in the collected works. “Jarmilka” is just such a story. We have at our disposal “Jarmilka: a Document,” written in 1952 but published for the first time in volume three of the Sebrané spisy (1992); “Jarmilka” from the collection Pábitelé (Bletherers; 1964); and a version with the title “Majitelka hutí” (The Woman Owner of the Blast Furnaces), which is almost identical with the 1952 text. The latter was supposed to have been published in a 1969–70 collection called Poupata (Buds), but the font for this volume was destroyed in 1969, after the suppression of the Prague Spring. Poupata was finally published in 1992 as a publication separate from the Sebrané spisy. We have then three variants of the story: Version I (Jarmilka. A Document) of 1952, II (“Jarmilka,” 1964), and III (the Poupata version “Majitelka hutí” of 1969/92). Versions I and II differ considerably from each other, whereas I and III are fairly similar. To make things more complicated, Hrabal reused the ending of Version I as the ending of “Krásná Poldi” (Lovely Poldi; 1965), which is also based on Hrabal’s experiences at the notorious Poldi steel plant. One of the most conspicuous features of these different versions is the layout of the text. The previously unpublished Versions I and III are presented in the style we know from Hrabal’s later work, especially from the seventies and eighties. The main feature of that layout is the minimal use of paragraphs. There are long blocks of text, in which the flow of discourse can easily move, unencumbered by demarcation lines or blank spaces between the lines. Another peculiarity of these texts is the frequent use of three dots to replace a period, apparently meant to further the flux of words and to embed the stream of utterances in a stream of consciousness. Both features may seem to be mere typographical matters, but are of great importance for a narration that is analogous to Hrabal’s state of mind, aroused by his semi-ritual way of typewriting, sitting in the sun on a little

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slanted roof, as we know from several descriptions in his work. Nearly all the texts published in the sixties present us with a different layout: a neat, standard text, with paragraphs and colons in their “proper” places. Only the novella “Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročile” (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age; 1964) has a similar layout. This text was written as one long sentence, following the typographical rules of a single sentence, so that the editor could not object. Whether the traditional layout was adopted under the pressure of a censor, or was simply due to a then customary editorial intervention is unclear. As Karel Dostál, an editor of the Sebrané spisy, writes: “Unfortunately, one cannot fully assess where and to what extent we are dealing with corrections made by the author, and where it is actually the capriciousness of an editor or proofreader (to say nothing of interference by the censor)” (Sebrané spisy 2: 231). Even more interesting are certain lexical differences in phrasing between the “unpublished” original texts, Jarmilka I/III, and the published Version II. One may assume that the text of Version I was deemed unsuitable for publication because of its profanities and political jokes, and served only as a base for its adapted versions. This basic text is, indeed, teeming with profanities, such as derivations from the verbs chcát (to piss), srát (to shit), and prcnout (to screw), and the nouns prdel (arse), hovno (shit), and kurva (whore). Those words fit well the expressive language used by the first-person narrator and several sub-narrators. Only rarely are there provocative political jokes or allusions. For instance, the first-person narrator mentions that Stalin’s slogan, “a laborer is someone who is not afraid of troubles,” perfectly applies to Jarmilka. The remark is hardly provocative, at best highly ironic: Jarmilka is troubled by her pregnancy, as she has been abandoned by her lover and is working in the steel plant under arduous conditions. She has very few promising perspectives in her work and private life. Stalin had obviously referred to different sort of troubles. Moreover, the slogan is hanging under his enormous moustache (pod vousisky), which makes for a comical effect. The joke is mild, not more than a gentle badinage, though it appears in a rough, sometimes even vulgar context, which was, apparently, bad enough for a banning. More provocative was Jarmilka’s complaint that she could make no down-to-earth use of any of the communist slogans about future happiness blaring from the plant’s loudspeakers. We come upon a stronger political allusion, when the narrator’s colleague at the steel plant remarks that one of the female prisoners in the neighboring penal colony was the secretary of the Social-Democratic Party, for this hints at the political persecution of the social-democrats by the communists in the early fifties. Hrabal does not let him overdramatize this: the colleague briefly mentions it in an everyday conversation about domestic politics, amidst such names as Slánský (First Secretary of the Communist Party, soon to be tried and executed), Gottwald (Czechoslovakia’s first communist President, responsible for Slánský’s execution), and Zápotocký (Gottwald’s successor, who was in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen). He also mentions the important Soviet politicians Bucharin, Zinovjev, and Radek, all of whom became prewar victims of Stalin (Sebrané spisy 3: 98–99). One political joke that could be categorized as “vulgar” comes from the mouth of a blastfurnace laborer: A comrade walks in and remarks that the Soviet laborers are better off than their Czech counterparts, for the Czech usually drink beer during their work near the fire, but the Russians only saltwater. This provokes one of the other workers to stand up and say: “I’d like to suggest a methodological improvement: since we’re so bloody hot, why don’t we just piss directly into each other’s mouths?” And everyone, even the comrade, bursts out laughing, though the

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remark ridicules and vulgarizes the Soviet system as well as its adopted Czech version. The joke is followed by another one on “Soviet improvements”: it seems that Soviet cows are usually given worse feed than their Czech counterparts. By way of compensation, the Soviet farmer gives a massage to the udders of his cow after a nice walk in the open air. To which one of the listeners responds: “Fantastic! I’ll try it on my wife this very night” (Sebrané spisy 3: 94–95). Such political jokes and allusions in Jarmilka I and III, are completely absent in Jarmilka II. On the lexical and stylistic level, a more accurate comparison of the first two pages of Jarmilka I/III and II (Sebrané spisy 3: 88–89) yields more astonishing examples of textual interference, in particular bowdlerization: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

až pokvetou hovna (literally: when shit-flowers [bloom]; meaning, in a very uncertain future): tamed in II to lejna (cow pats) v prdeli šípy (lit.: arrows in your arse): changed to v zadku (bottom) in II the motif string “drinking…water-bottle”, leading to “her pissing” was eliminated in II posrat se do vejšky (lit.: to shit up in the air, i.e., to do something impossible): changed in II to dát si nohu za krk (to place your leg around your neck); strčte si ho do prdele (lit.: shove him up your arse): changed to strčte ho … víte kam (put him … you know where) in II a když mu dobrák ženská podrží, tak se pak na ni vyserete (lit.: and when the good woman gives in to you, then you start to shit on her [i.e., abandon her]): replaced in III by nakopete (you kick her away), and in II by pohovoří — jí udeláte vostudu (when a woman talks to you, you disgrace her) že se zkurvím s ženatejma chlapama (lit.: I screw around with married guys): slightly modified in III and replaced by lezu za (I go after) in II chlapi jí sahají na život (lit.: the guys feel her pregnant belly) replaced in II by hladí ji po ramenou (caressed her shoulders) posranej (lit.: shit) became podĕlanej (messed) in II

Even this brief lexical analysis indicates that Versions I and III are much more vulgar than the systematically cleansed one of II. The effect of the profanities is dramatic: Jarmilka, a fine woman-laborer in the steel plant speaking in robust, male language, though unfortunately pregnant, is converted into a sort of supermarket cashier! Re-reading Version II, we realize that she became a quite un-Hrabalian character, a pale shadow of the lively figure she is in Versions I and III. Apart from purging her vulgarities, the edition changed the layout, and made a few small additions as well as synonymic replacements. Another interference in the text supports the conclusion that Jarmilka became a more civilized character than originally intended. Here we must take into account the different endings. The ending of Version I that Hrabal transferred to “Lovely Poldi,” published in the sixties, focuses on a rather unconnected observation about changing perspectives during the daily bus rides between Prague and Kladno, which may not belong to Jarmilka’s story at all. Sebrané spisy uses a special text separator “ — ” to indicate its uncertain status (3: 122). In Version II those “changing perspectives” are replaced by a sentimental, almost tearful ending, written in a standardized style that was, perhaps, not formulated by Hrabal himself, but

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imposed by the member of the editorial board that had already corrupted the text lexically. In the ending of Version II the narrator and his colleague fulfill their promise to look Jarmilka up once the baby is born. Jarmilka, the abandoned unwed mother, is first apathetic and doesn’t react to their social visit — which would suit melodramatic trivial literature or the didactic character of socialist literature, both of which would blame the unfaithful father for the lethargy of the mother. But since a work of Socialist Realism is not supposed to end negatively, the last sentence is optimistic: at the very last moment, Jarmilka shows a sign of life by sending her regards to the “guys at the steel plant.” Quite unlike Hrabal! The ending of Version III differs from both I and II: Jarmilka is leaving the steel plant with a heavy heart to go on a maternity leave. She is uncertain about her future because she is a betrayed, unwed mother, and she will soon be deprived of her social contacts at work, including her cordial relationship with the narrator. The narrator shares her deep sorrow, for he will miss this fine, energetic girl. This ending, which plunges the reader into a thematic and semantic vacuum, is more “existential” than the didactically explicit and socially sentimental ending of Version II. On the thematic level, the stories differ remarkably in Versions I/III and II. Version II omits, as mentioned, many of the political anecdotes and allusions, but contains a great number of secondary narrations that show the extreme brutality of the Germans during World War II, a welcome theme under the communist regime. Quite a few of these anecdotes we also find in I/III, but mixed with similar anecdotes about other enemies, which neutralizes the political bias of Version II. Another conspicuous difference between Versions I/III and II is the name of the narrator’s colleague. The German name of the “unpolished” Versions I/III, Hannes Reegen (the name of a real person), is replaced in the politically correct Version II by the fictitious Czech name Vašek Průcha (Reegen/Průcha is the main secondary narrator of the brutal World War II anecdotes). Short of a complete survey of the thematic differences between I/III and II we characterize the three versions as to length and ending: Version I (1952): 37 pages (+ “perspectives” ending); Version II (1964): 26 pages (+ “tearful” ending); Version III (1969): 33 pages (- I/II ending: “existentialist” version).

The stylistic, compositional, and thematic deviations of Version II, as well as its neat, traditional layout, pose the question to what extent all other Hrabal texts published in the sixties were expurgated and streamlined in similar ways by editors. In the absence of alternative texts at our disposal the question cannot be answered; Sebrané spisy makes at least an attempt to unify their layout. Prague Spring and its Aftermath Censorship disappeared for three months during the Prague Spring. The HSTD had been replaced a year earlier already by the civil institute ÚPS (Central Publication Management). Though the policy of this office followed the changing political climate, a book like Pecka’s Veliký slunovrat (The Great Solstice), which related his experiences in the Jáchymov uranium mines and other hard labor camps, could still not be published before 1968. Jan Beneš, the last author sentenced prior

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to the Prague Spring, was pardoned in 1968 and immigrated to the US in 1969 in order to avoid being jailed again. Soon after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 censorship became once more stricter. The new institute that assumed the tasks of ÚPS, ÚTI (Bureau for Press and Information), was placed again under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Due to the federalization of the ČSSR, the Ministry changed its name to “tutti-frutti”: ČÚTI (Czech), SÚTI (Slovak) and FÚTI (Federal Bureau). A long state terror ensued, prompting some writers to emigrate and others to choose “internal” emigration as an expression of disagreement with the official policy. The few writers who were admitted to the purged Writer’s Union could publish their books without major problems. Ludvík Vaculík organized the first underground press, Edice Petlice (Padlock Series), whose list contained the name of Hrabal and others, along with several new manuscript titles that were soon smuggled out of the country to be published and translated abroad. In the early seventies, the dissident movement of the ČSSR gathered strength and sought an alliance with the civil as well as human rights movements. Václav Havel became the preeminent dissident. Vaculík, formerly the conscience of and spokesman for the “better” part of the nation, got embroiled in a bitter quarrel with Havel and others, and became increasingly marginalized in the dissident world. Out of this new orientation of the Czech underground grew Havel’s Charta 77, which received global attention. Nothing was heard about Hrabal in these turbulent years, only his name appeared on Vaculík’s list of underground literature. By the end of the sixties, Hrabal became a famous and honored writer: his works were made into films and stage plays, and he played the role of the Eminent Writer in his favorite Prague pub, The Golden Tiger, which became an almost mythical place, a Pub of Pubs. Hrabal had his own Stammtisch in this pub, and many friends dropped by to have a chat with him over a pint of beer. Hrabal allegedly drew inspiration from the stories he heard, but he refused to discuss current political matters there, because he knew that the place was also frequented by agents of the Secret Police, or rather by “friends” who had been compelled by the secret service to collect information about him, his companions, and his visitors. A very confused and awkward atmosphere developed gradually, for everyone suspected everyone else. From the point of view of censorship, the situation was quite clear in the early seventies. Those who were excluded from the purged Union of Writers could not publish at all through normal channels. This decimated Union was, however, eager to win over members of the famous older generation that had categorically refused to cooperate with the authorities. Most such attempts failed, though they succeeded with the poet Miroslav Holub and the prose writers Ladislav Fuks and Jiří Šotola. Soon, in 1973, political pressure was also exerted on Hrabal to join the “official literature” and its organizations. Hrabal was at that time in bad shape both physically and mentally: he suffered from his gallbladder and though he underwent successful surgery he lived in great fear of death. Hrabal caved in under the pressure to sign a statement of support for the regime, mainly because he wanted to be published in his own country and keep in contact with his Czech readers. Milan Kundera immigrated in 1975 to France because he found it intolerable that he could only publish at the price of prostrating himself before the authorities. Hrabal’s “declaration” appeared the same year in the communist journal Tvorba within an interview with the editor. The answers seem at first glance to be authentic: they show Hrabal’s typical colloquial style, though

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here and there certain strange political phrases deviate from his usual way of expressing himself. The following sentence is a case in point: “I am not a political person, it takes me some time to understand everything, but one thing I did understand very well: the XIVth Congress of the KSČ appealed to all writers in this country to enrich the life of the people.” And a few sentences earlier: “as a Czech writer I feel connected to the Czech people, with its Socialistic present and future” (Sebrané spisy 15: 365; italics KM). Naturally, these sentences were inserted by the editor, though Hrabal, in contrast to Grygar, never denounced this kind of censorial meddling. This interview allowed Hrabal to publish officially but raised a storm of protest among young dissident writers and students. They were so furious that they began burning his books in public — an act that was meant to hurt Hrabal especially, for he had repeatedly protested in his literary works against such anti-cultural barbarisms as the destruction of books. The young dissident singer Karel Kryl, who immigrated to Germany soon after the 1968 invasion, reacted violently: “Personally I regard Hrabal’s behavior as a moral mess. […] As long as Vaculík is not allowed [to publish] Hrabal is a whore” (Sebrané spisy 15: 369; italics KM). Fortunately, most of the dissident writers were more restrained and called him only “politically naïve,” while condemning the blind fury that some youngsters poured on him. Charta 77 followed a few years later and released a new avalanche of protest against the authorities. The overall political situation rapidly deteriorated, and the gap between the “official” and “dissident” cultures widened. Censorship became a form of officially sanctioned criminality: agents of the Secret Police began intimidating dissidents by accosting them on the street, or kidnapping them, driving them out of town, beating them up, and then releasing the devastated and disoriented victims in the middle of nowhere. In order to avoid international protests, they targeted not the leading dissidents but victims that were less known abroad. The leaders were dealt with in the Prague Court. Meanwhile, Hrabal’s literary work started rolling from the state printing presses. His cooperative attitude did, indeed, turn out to be naïve: his work was published, but censored, and to such a degree that it changed the literary quality of his texts. Comparisons of the new texts to the originals, published by Jan Lopatka (“problémy textologické”) in the underground press, and by Mojmír Grygar (“Hrabal”), Helena Kosková (“Hrabalovo dilema”), and Susanne Roth (Einsamkeit 102–124) abroad, showed how remarkably different Hrabal’s officially published texts were from his underground editions. All critics concluded that these changes served no artistic purpose. Hrabal himself always denied that the censors meddled with his texts, asserting that the existence of multiple versions of a text was part of his basic poetics: it belonged to his (mythical, uncontrolled, and thus chaotic) manner of writing, and to his collage-like method of producing new texts with scissors and glue. When the communist regime fell in November 1989, Hrabal was filled with remorse that he lacked the courage to oppose the authorities. As he wrote in the story “Listopadový uragán” (November Hurricane), this shame was nearly existential. He blamed himself, and tried to overcome his feelings of guilt by sponsoring student committees with a grocery bag full of “green banknotes.”

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To Summarize 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

State censorship had already begun before February 1948 but reached its vast and devastating dimensions only after 1948, during the communist era. Institutional censorship was only one part of the ideological suppression; much of it was carried out directly by the Party, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Secret Police, and the Courts. The latter focused on the authors rather than on their texts, and their treatment of persons was, of course, much more dramatic than textual interventions. The changes in texts involved mostly political statements and vulgar expressions. They were sometimes so minuscule that one wonders why the censor bothered at all. However, the minuter the censorial changes were the more severe their pressure on society, and the greater the general fear of transgressing unwritten rules. It is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to separate state or editorial censorship from the author’s self-censorship, since neither agency owned up to its role. The existence of fundamentally different versions of “Jarmilka” prompts the hypothesis that Hrabal’s other texts from the sixties may also have had earlier versions, containing stylistic and layout characteristics similar to those used in texts from the fifties, or to those written after 1968. Hrabal’s compromise with the authorities in 1975 may be understandable but cannot be justified. However, he was the first to blame himself for this faux pas.

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Religious and Political Censorship in Slovakia Dagmar Roberts Emperor Joseph II abolished the Jesuit order in 1773 and limited church censorship in the decree of July 11, 1781, but the position of the Catholic Church remained strong in Hungary. Slovak authors around 1800 were Catholic priests who often had to submit to church regulations. When Jozef Ignác Bajza’s satirical “Rozličné verše” (Various Verses; written in 1782) were banned, he included slightly modified versions of them in the second volume of his René mláďenca príhodi a skúsenosťi (Adventures and Experiences of Young René), which was then also banned in 1785 by the church censors because it attacked, along with the backwardness and cruelty of the nobility, religious denominations, monks, and censorship in Hungary. Printing of the volume was interrupted; the printed copies, except for two surviving ones, were destroyed. Another Catholic priest of this generation, Juraj Fándly, focused in Dúverná zmlúva mezi mňíchom a diáblom (Confidential Treaty between a Monk and a Devil; 1789) on the reforms of Joseph II. He also criticized the mendicant orders and the wealth of the Church for diverting attention from religion’s primary mission. The work led to a polemic and was finally banned; only

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two of the four volumes were printed. Fándly’s work was considered even more dangerous after the death of Joseph II: he was imprisoned for two weeks in a monastery and further discussions of his books were forbidden. Ironically, Fándly was denounced by Bajza, who hoped to improve thereby his tarnished reputation with the church. Bajza also published pamphlets against Anton Bernolák’s codification of the Slovak language (which Fándly supported), whereas Bernolák criticized Bajza’s use of syllabic and quantitative verse in poetry. The more liberal censorship law of 1810 did not change the situation radically. Whether a book could be published depended largely on arbitrary rules and the censor’s subjective disposition. Political newspapers were censored at that time by Presidiums at the Regional Administrative Offices of the Imperial Administration, while historical, sociological, and other scholarly publications were censored in Vienna. There were five censorial categories: Imprimatur, Imprimatur omissis deletis (some parts had to be omitted), Imprimatur correctis corrigendis (some parts were “corrected” by a censor), Non admittitur (Refused) and Typum non metetur (indecent). The censors regulated the distribution and sale of foreign press and publications; they also censored scientific and technical writing. In 1824, the censors forbade Bohuslav Tablic to publish the first Slovak scholarly book, the proceedings of Učená společnost bánského okolí (The Educated Society of the Mining Region), founded in 1810. If Catholic censorship was to protect the faithful from disbelievers, state censorship in nineteenth-century Austria mainly concerned itself with national movements. Thus poems by Johana Lehotská, the first Slovak woman writer, and others had to be dropped from Jozef Miloslav Hurban’s almanac Nitra because they referred to a Slovak rather than Hungarian nation and motherland. The law on censorship was replaced in 1848 by a “press law,” but not much changed. Even the Slovenské noviny (The Slovak Newspaper), a pro-governmental periodical for Slovaks founded in Vienna in 1849, had to be careful. Jonáš Záborský quit the editorial board in 1853 when the censors accused him of criticizing the government. We saw (p. 90 above) that Palárik, HurbanVajanský, Škultéty and other editors of Slovak publications were frequently jailed. After 1870, Slovak nationalist discourse adopted double entendres, compromises, and provocations. In Turčiansky Svätý Martin, the center of the national movement then, the first major cultural facility was named in 1889 simply “The House,” for the adjective “National” was prohibited. Marína Oľga Horváthová, one of the female pioneers of Slovak theater, had to drop the adjective “Slovak” from the title of her play Sirota (An Orphan; 1892). The Austro-Hungarian authorities often expelled students from secondary schools and universities for reading Slovak books. Not even Tolstoyan Pacifism could be tolerated. Albert Škarvan was imprisoned and lost his medical degree when he refused to do military service, and his account of the case, Zápisky vojenského lekára (Memoirs of an Army Doctor), could not be published in the Monarchy. A Russian version appeared in England (1898), but the Slovak one of 1904 had to be published in the USA. When Škultéty wanted to cut Škarvan’s Slovak translation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Škarvan refused and gave the unabridged text to the Žilina publisher Dušan Makovický, another follower of Tolstoy. During World War I, Timrava ran against the censorship with her Hrdinovia (Heroes); Janko Jesenský, who refused to sign the loyalty statement, was imprisoned and later sent to the Eastern front. Twentieth-century censorship functioned via various legal regulations and press laws. The communist press was repressed both during the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–39) and under the pro-Nazi Slovak Republic (1939–45). Censorship silenced many writers, and was most severe

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in the theater (see ECE 1: 149). Within the relatively small community of Slovak authors friendly “hints” or help from friends in the opposite camp were customary, relatively peaceful adaptations to a new regime. The Surrealists, for instance, “Slovacized” themselves by replacing the “sur” in their name with “nad.” Radical opponents were, however, punished, and severe measures were taken against authors who did not venerate the national idols. When the communist-suspect Ján Poničan protested in Divný Janko (Strange Johnny; 1941) against the official exaltation of the romantic poet Janko Kráľ, he was briefly imprisoned and the poem was banned. Immediately after the communist coup in 1948, writers were subjected to ideological reschooling in Dobříš, and Budmerice. Next to directives from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, authors had to listen to critical and instructional voices of factory workers from below. New works were discussed in the Club of Workers and Writers. Most writers seemed to agree initially with the new historical role of literature in Communism, many of them were reassessed or rewrote their previous works. The dissidents emigrated, practiced voluntary auto-censorship in the early 1950s (see Petrík “Autocenzúra”), or remained silent. When Ladislav Novomeský, Daniel Okáli, Theo Florin, Ivan Stodola, and others were brought to court and imprisoned in 1951–52 as “bourgeois nationalists,” and Vladimir Clementis was executed in 1952, fear took over. When Dominik Tatarka’s Farská republika (The Parish Republic; 1948) about the pro-Nazi Slovak Republic was condemned by critics as well as and worker-readers for the protagonist’s extra-marital affair, Tatarka revised the most “spicy” sections, explaining that his hero was raised in the old society. When František Hečko’s Červené víno (Red Wine; 1948), started during the war, was criticized for the way he represented religious, erotic, and class issues, Hečko partially revised the text and exercised self-criticism by admitting that he had very good and relevant material but was unable to resolve the class problems in an ideologically proper manner (see Petrík, “Autocenzúra” 227). Hečko then “bettered” himself with the schematic novel Drevená dedina (Wooden Village; 1951). When Vladimír Mináč was criticized for his novel on the 1944 Slovak uprising, Smrť chodí po horách (Death Walks in the Mountains), he admitted its limited “historical vision” and aligned himself politically with the three-volume Generácia (Generation; 1958–61). Margita Figuli turned the protagonist of her Zuzana (1938) into a revolutionary a year later, and she eliminated numerous biblical passages from Tri gaštanové kone (Three Chestnut Horses; 1940) and Babylon (1946). The auto-censored version of Three Chestnut Horses was republished a dozen times, but the 1940 original could only by reestablished in 1996. Writers who left in 1945 and 1948, supporters of the pro-Nazi Slovak Republic, liberal democrats, and “bourgeois nationalists” could not be published in the 1950s. The period has been studied by the contributors to Štefan Drug’s volume. After 1956, Slovak writers, unlike others, were first seeking merely to improve the doctrine of Socialist Realism. But in the 1960s, the democrats Ján Smrek and Valentín Beniak, the religious poet Emil Boleslav Lukáč (a member of the Tiso parliament), and such earlier supporters of the pro-Nazi Republic as Milo Urban and Tido Jozef Gašpar were rehabilitated and allowed to publish. But those who fled after the failed Prague Spring — Ladislav Mňačko, Jaroslava Blažková, Rudolf Skukálek, and others — became taboo in 1969–70. In 1971, thirty-seven writers, among them of Tatarka, Peter Karvaš, Milan Hamada, and Ladislav Ťažký, were excluded from the Writers’ Union; about forty publications, among them school textbooks on literature, were removed from libraries and bookshops, some to collections labeled “P” (prohibited) that were accessible

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only with special permission. Some authors “modified” their texts to become publishable. This was the case with Dušan Mitana’s Koniec hry (End of the Game; 1984) and Rudolf Sloboda’s Rozum (Reason; 1982), both widely discussed. As mentioned in the article on Slovak journals, the important periodicals of the 1960s were closed down. Many authors were again silenced, some until about 1975, others until perestroika in the later 1980s. A dictionary of Slovak writers, prepared by the Institute of Slovak Literature, was withdrawn in 1981 because it included some exiled and banned writers. In spite of the repression, samizdat publications with “unofficial” authors like Tatarka, Pavel Hrúz, Hana Ponická, Milan Šimečka, and Oleg Pastier slowly emerged. Some older manuscripts were published belatedly in the late 1980s, just as it happened after 1956. Martin Bútora made his debut with the prose volume Ľahkým perom (With an Easy Pen) in 1987; Pavel Vilikovský, who was silent since the late 1960s, resumed publication in 1983 and brought out three novels in 1989, including Večne je zelený (Forever is Green). Hrúz, Ivan Kadlečík, and others became “legal” authors again during perestroika.

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The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary: 1945–49 Mihály Szegedy-Maszák The origins of the literature of the Hungarian bourgeoisie can be traced back to the late-eighteenth-century Freemasons, who tried to liberate themselves from the constraints of feudalism. Their initiative was continued by intellectuals of humble origin who could profit from the social mobility of the age of reforms that culminated in the 1848 revolution. Although the rise of bourgeois culture suffered setbacks in 1849 and at the end of World War I, such temporary declines were far less serious than the damage caused by the German occupation of 1944. At the end of that year, the chances of continuity appeared so slim that it was an open question whether recovery was possible. Hungary suffered serious military, material, civilian, and intellectual losses in World War II. Some 800–900 000 people were killed in the war and 40% of the national wealth of 1938 was destroyed. About 450 000 Jews perished in the holocaust. Political and social changes were inseparable from a large-scale migration that affected approximately 450–550 000 people. 60–80 000 ethnic Hungarians fled to Hungary from the neighboring countries, 170–180 000 ethnic Germans were forced to leave. As a result of a Czechoslovak-Hungarian exchange scheme, 90 000 ethnic Hungarians left Czechoslovakia for Hungary and 60 000 Slovaks left Hungary to settle in Slovakia. Of a population of 9 200 000 in 1949, 376 173 were born outside Hungary. Economic factors made it very difficult for the country to recover after the end of the war. In 1938, the per capita national income amounted to 120 US dollars, which was 60 per cent of the European average. World War II and its consequences led to a rapid decline, and the 1938 level was not reached until 1950.

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In short, this period was marked by an increasingly backward economy and serious intellectual losses. The poets Miklós Radnóti and György Sárközi, the short-story writers Károly Pap and Andor Endre Gelléri, the essayists Antal Szerb and Gábor Halász died in forced labor camps. Several eminent writers, among them the philosophers Tibor Joó and József Révay, and the shortstory writer and critic István Örley, were killed by the communists in 1945. Continuity was broken also by the arrival of a group of communists from Moscow. The film critic and writer Béla Balázs, the philosopher György Lukács, the journalist Andor Gábor, and the critic József Révai belonged to a generation active since the early twentieth century. Like the somewhat younger novelists Béla Illés and Sándor Gergely, they had lived in the Soviet Union before and during the war. Largely ignorant of the conditions in Hungary, they made an immediate attempt to force the Soviet system on the country. What the American historian John Lukacs wrote about his namesake, recalling their meeting shortly after the philosopher’s return to Budapest, may give some idea of the distance between a communist leader who had spent long years in Moscow and the experience of someone who survived the Holocaust and the siege of Budapest: His conversation, or what I remember of it, consisted mostly of tired Kaffeehaus witticisms with which he tried not only to lighten the customary Marxist platitudes but also to cover up the condition that he knew remarkably […] little of what Hungary had lived through and what Hungarians were thinking. (Lukacs 97–98)

In spite of the lack of material resources and the presence of the Soviet troops, the Muscovite communists met with considerable resistance. The surviving representatives of the interwar literature tried to restore the continuity broken by the German occupation starting on March 19, 1944. In April 1945, the journal Magyarok was started with the idea of preserving the tradition of Nyugat (see pp. 71–79 above). Válasz, the periodical of the Populists, appeared the next autumn. Lajos Kassák also made an attempt to continue the activities of the literary and artistic avant-garde by publishing Kortárs (1947–48). In 1946, the members of the younger generation, the poets Sándor Weöres, János Pilinszky, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, and others decided to start another monthly. By adopting the title of a collection of poems by Radnóti, published in 1935, Újhold (New Moon) openly referred to the tragic experience of the holocaust. The same year saw the publication of Radnóti’s posthumous volume, containing the poems composed in a forced labor camp that are justly regarded as this poet’s most significant contribution to Hungarian literature, texts that have an additional documentary value by representing the unexpected legacy from the dead (see Szegedy-Maszák, “Radnóti”). This posthumous publication served as a starting-point for Pilinszky, the most important Hungarian poet to emerge in the years following the end of World War II. Trapéz és korlát (Trapeze and Parallel Bars; 1946) represented a new start: identifying himself with the fate of the holocaust victims, the young Catholic poet focused on a cosmic homelessness and created a language of great complexity in short and cryptic pieces. His influence was felt even in the work of Weöres, an outstanding poet of the previous generation, who published in A fogak tornáca (The Colonnade of Teeth; 1947) a series of one-line poems. The movement represented by Pilinszky and others, sometimes characterized as a form of Central-European Catastrophism, was at odds with the propaganda literature written according to the dictates of the Muscovite communists, whose first product was an anthology entitled Májusi

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kórus, 1945. Harcos versek gyüjteménye (May Choir, 1945. A Collection of Fighting Poems). It contained poems by Tibor Méray, known in the West as the co-author of a book on the 1956 revolution. For Lukács and Révai, the chief architects of the culture controlled by the Hungarian Communist Party, the immediate purpose was to lay down the political grounds of the ideology of what Mátyás Rákosi was to call “salami tactics.” The first step towards this goal was made by Révai, who proposed a popular front in Marxizmus és népiesség (Marxism and Populism), a book originally published in Moscow in 1943. There are two radically different interpretations of the years 1945–49. Some argue that after the war Hungary had a better chance for democracy than previously, and the high hopes were lost only because of the communist takeover. Others believe that the fate of the country was sealed already in 1945. It is difficult not to find the topic depressing and controversial. Some of the documents are still not accessible and may be lost. Popular beliefs notwithstanding, the post-war years cannot be called a closed chapter, yet surprisingly little has been written on them since 1989. There are some survivors with painful memories and interpreters may upset personal feelings. The plan to take full control over literature was made by a group of communists in Moscow, before the Soviet troops reached the Hungarian territory. In 1945, Révai and Lukács were given roles that suited them well. Révai’s task was to take measures against “the enemies of the people,” while Lukács was expected to provide a theoretical framework for the campaign against bourgeois culture. One of the lessons the Hungarian communists had learned after the failure of the 1919 Commune was that the one-party system could not be introduced without the support of some spokesmen of the rural population. In the 1930s, Révai worked out an ideology of popular front and, after returning to Hungary, his chief objective became to strike a deal with some members of the bourgeoisie and some writers who claimed to have represented the interests of the peasantry in the interwar period. There were underground communists in both groups who were eager to help him. The others had to make a quick decision. Since we are talking about a period that calls for a drastic reinterpretation, it is not easy to make generalizations. In 1945, the new political leaders of Hungary, the members of the coalition government that included communists, declared that no one was immune to accountability for personal conduct. According to independent Western estimates, over 250 000 persons were deported to forced labor camps in the Soviet Union after the end of the war, and there were almost 40 000 political prosecutions between January 1945 and March 1948, which resulted in over 20 000 people being sentenced (Hoensch 161, 178). Hungarian intellectual life was badly manipulated from the very beginning, so that the chances for the development of a democratic system were very slim. Some urban intellectuals were tolerated, though their totalitarian or opportunistic inclinations were apparent already in the 1930s, and some Populists were accepted as representing a “progressive,” democratic movement, while the questionable elements in their ideology were ignored. Révai decided to have the poet and prose writer Gyula Illyés as an ally. In March 1945, he compared Illyés to such progressive figures in history as Ferenc Rákóczi II, Lajos Kossuth, and Sándor Petőfi. Illyés responded by arguing at a meeting of the National Peasant Party that “the communists have gone much further in guaranteeing freedom for writers than we expected. We have to appreciate this” (Standeisky 29). It is far from easy to evaluate the role Illyés played during this period. He is still respected by many Hungarians, yet his artistic and political reputation has undeniably declined since the 1980s. Older people maintain that he saved some intellectuals,

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in a literal or metaphorical sense, while the younger generation blames him for never opposing the political establishment. It is certainly true that he was awarded the Kossuth prize in 1948 and 1953, and never stopped publishing in the early 1950s, when almost all Hungarian writers of distinction lived in internal exile. It cannot be forgotten, however, that as a shrewd tactician he often outwitted the authorities and he composed in 1950 “Egy mondat a zsarnokságról” (A Sentence on Tyranny), a poem that later became associated with the 1956 revolution. In more general terms, there are several open questions concerning the position of the Populists in intellectual history. The only book available on the subject was written in the West. While it is reliable in most respects, it fails to address the question of anti-Semitism, as the following questionable statement indicates: “As for the Jewish question and the interpretation of anti-Semitism, the Populist writers were balanced, good-natured, and humane; they condemned the discriminative measures, the persecution and extermination of Jews, and they regarded anti-Semitism as useless and detrimental” (Borbándi 390). At present, the only hypothesis I can formulate is that the leaders of the Hungarian communists sometimes tolerated writers who compromised themselves in the 1930s or during World War II. My example would be József Erdélyi, whose volume of poetry Ibolyalevél (Violet Leaf; 1922) may be regarded as representing a paradigm shift in Hungarian literature by heralding the Populist movement that was to play a decisive role in the political, social, and intellectual life of the interwar decades. Erdélyi was an unquestionably talented poet of half-Romanian origin, whose ideology was strikingly similar to that of Octavian Goga and Lucian Blaga, or the young E.-M. Cioran and Mircea Eliade. For an understanding of the anti-Semitic elements in the ideology of the Hungarian Populists, we need to refer to an incident in the nineteenth century. On May 23, 1882, an anti-Semitic member of the Hungarian parliament reported that a peasant girl from Tisza-Eszlár, a village in Eastern Hungary, disappeared just a week before the Jewish Passover (Istóczy 118–25). A ritual-murder allegation was made, and another member of the Lower House, Győző Istóczy, who modeled his activities on those of Wilhelm Marr, made a speech in the Hungarian parliament on June 25, 1878, with the title “Jews, the Iron Ring Around Our Necks” (Levy 100–103), showing a portrait of the alleged victim at an international anti-Semitic congress held in Dresden. The case resulted in a trial and the fifteen defendants were acquitted. The defense was represented by Károly Eötvös, a Liberal member of the parliament who was also well-known as a writer. His three-volume account, A nagy per, mely ezer éve folyik s még sincs vége (The Great Trial that Has Been Going on for a Thousand Years; 1904), was widely considered a document about the triumph of Liberalism over superstition at the time. Erdélyi composed a poem Solymosi Eszter vére (Eszter Solymosi’s Blood; 1937), suggesting that the verdict had to be reversed because the girl had indeed been a victim of ritual murder. In post-war Hungary, Erdélyi spent close to three years in prison, but he was allowed to make a new start as a poet with his collection Visszatérés (A Return; 1954), which contains poems written between 1945 and 1954. My intention is not to find fault with Erdélyi, or such other Populists as István Sinka, Péter Veres, or János Kodolányi, who expressed similar anti-Semitic views, but to suggest that such prominent communists as Lukács or Révai were responsible not only for severe limitations on personal liberty after 1945 but also for the survival of anti-Semitism.

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Instead of passing a moral judgment on some Populists, we should admit that in their works anti-Semitism was not only closely tied but even subordinated to anti-capitalism. The assessment of historians differs on the role played by the industrial magnates who were largely responsible for the economic growth of Hungary around 1900. As in some other cases, the truth may be rather complex. On the one hand, Manfred Weiss, the owner of the factories of Csepel, made a very important contribution to the rise of Budapest; on the other hand, his success was partly due to his significant involvement in the war industry in the years 1914–18. Some Populist writers were uneducated and their anti-Semitism was largely emotional, but several Hungarian communist leaders who had important functions in the years following 1945 came from families closely associated with capitalism. Because of their social background, they felt vulnerable to the criticism leveled at the capitalist exploitation of workers and agricultural laborers, and tolerated the anti-Semitism of some Populists. They may have been taken by surprise when the most sophisticated analysis of anti-Semitic feelings came from István Bibó, a political scientist associated with the Populists. His long essay “Zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után” (The Jewish Question in Hungary After 1944) was published in the Populist journal Válasz, in October and November 1948, shortly before he was silenced by the communists. It is almost certain that the Populists were favored by the Hungarian Communist Party for political reasons. The first issue of Újhold came out in July 1946. Shortly afterwards, the communist monthly Forum appeared, edited by Lukács, György Vértes, and two intellectuals who were called fellow travelers by some historians. The term is somewhat misleading, since both had joined the communists in the 1930s and were given the task of undermining other political parties. The folklorist Gyula Ortutay was officially a member of the Smallholders’ Party, while the prose writer József Darvas belonged to the National Peasant Party. The first issue of Forum contained an article by Lukács attacking Újhold. A few months later, Válasz appeared, almost simultaneously with an essay by Lukács in Forum that praised the Populists’ journal edited by Illyés. The discrimination was obvious. In his opening statement Illyés claimed that in politics the working-class, whereas in literature the peasantry was destined to lead. Lukács tacitly accepted this division of labor. Of course, there is every reason to believe that the philosopher regarded the pact with some Populists as temporary. After twenty-five years abroad, Lukács badly needed followers. Among his first disciples were the philosopher József Szigeti and the literary critic István Király. Szigeti’s article in the October issue of Forum, “Magyar líra 1947-ben” (Hungarian Lyric Poetry in 1947), attacked the bourgeois decadence and irrationalism of Weöres’s poetry, and Újhold was banned subsequently. Király was rumored to have been affected by right-wing ideas, so his sudden conversion to Marxism may have been influenced by a desire to make people forget his earlier activity. In October 1946, he published a long article on László Németh, in which he downgraded this author’s essays and insisted on the significance of his narrative fiction (István Király 339–52). Király’s article signaled the communist intention to put political pressure on the representatives of what they viewed as the most important intellectual movement of the interwar years. It was known that Németh subscribed to a strong anti-communist ideology. Before the war, he published a lucid analysis of Stalinism and insisted that Hungary was part of the Western world. At the same time, he had one important advantage over the urban intellectuals: he paid serious attention to the other nations of Central Europe. Although what he called “the revolution of quality” was

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conceptually unclear, it implied a rejection not only of Western capitalism but also of Eastern Bolshevism. By defending Németh, Király set himself the task of manipulating him. Although during this period Németh refused to make concessions and his novel Iszony (Revulsion; 1947) is free of any communist influence, other Populists proved to be less independent. They paid a heavy price for their survival for they became compromised in the eyes of later generations. We must add that social democrats and bourgeois radicals expressed discontent with the compromise between the communist leaders and the Populists. Moreover, by 1947 even some communists thought it was time to end the alliance with the spokesmen of the rural population. On February 16, Géza Losonczy — who after the 1956 events was executed with Imre Nagy — condemned the pessimism of Illyés in an article published in the daily of the Communist Party, and in June, László (B.) Nagy — a young communist who committed suicide in 1973 — harshly criticized the Populists and attacked Bibó as the architect of their reactionary ideology (Nagy 446–70). By this time the goals of the campaign against bourgeois values were largely accomplished. After a considerable number of articles and books against contemporary writers associated with these values, the past had to be rewritten, a new canon had to be established and institutionalized. During their years in Moscow, Lukács and Révai interpreted works on the basis of a dichotomy: progressive traditions were opposed to reactionary trends. Sándor Petőfi and Endre Ady were regarded as representing the main stream of Hungarian literature. After 1945, the name of Attila József was added, mainly because of an initiative taken by Márton Horváth. A drastic selection was made from the texts of these three poets, with official interpretations attached to them. Later the most trustworthy literary historians were commissioned to write books on the three poets. The task of Pál Kardos (Pándi) was to develop Marxist interpretations of the poetry of Petőfi to replace János Horváth’s highly influential book (1922). Horváth would be soon forced to give up his position at the university, together with other bourgeois scholars. István Király, the son of a Presbyterian priest, was asked to find an explanation for Ady’s attachment to Socialism and Calvinism, and Miklós Szabolcsi, a well-educated critic with a special interest in twentieth-century French literature, was destined to discuss the poetry of Attila József, which had obvious links with the international and Hungarian Avant-garde. The consequences of this canon formation were far-reaching and often damaging. In a February 1998 colloquium on Ady, most of the papers dealt with the decline of the poet’s reputation, and in April of the same year, at a 1998 conference celebrating the 175th anniversary of Petőfi’s birth, several participants spoke of a general lack of interest in the works of this author. As for József, documents concerning his conflict with the communists have been published in recent years, and the interpretation of his works had changed radically. Some poems by Petőfi, Ady, and even József, seem unreadable today. Teachers do not know how to handle them, and they are usually avoided by writers of dissertations. By contrast, the young critics of the 1990s are avid readers of works by the authors who were dismissed by the Marxists in the late 1940s. A collection of essays, mainly by scholars in their twenties, appeared in 1998, testifying to the high reputation of Dezső Kosztolányi today. In the years following 1945, this middle-class writer was the main target of the communists. In March 1947, Árpád Szabó — later a professor of classical philology and a prominent member of the Presbyterian Church — published an essay that condemned Kosztolányi as a fascist: “I belong to that part of the Hungarian intelligentsia,” he wrote, “which needs Kosztolányi to be aware of what we wish

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to eliminate for the sake of our future” (220). The essay appeared in Valóság, a monthly edited by Sándor Lukácsy, who later was at least partly responsible for the abolition of the Eötvös College, the equivalent of the École Normale Supérieure founded in 1895, and for putting together a long list of books that the communists wished to destroy (Lukácsy 10–18). Szabó’s article was part of a large-scale campaign led by Lukács and Révai with the purpose of restructuring the canon of Hungarian literature. Lukács consistently condemned certain representatives of the bourgeois tradition and expected his disciples to support him. In 1957, when he feared a revival of the legacy that was virtually eliminated in the late 1940s, he urged a former student of his to repeat the attack on Kosztolányi. The main thesis of Az erkölcsi normák felbomlása (The Disintegration of Ethical Norms) by Ágnes Heller — currently professor at the New School for Social Research and a member of the Hungarian Academy — was but a variation on Szabó’s line of argument ten years earlier. Both works are indebted to the articles Lukács published between 1939 and 1941 in Új Hang (New Voice), the organ of the Hungarian communists living in Moscow. In 1945, these pieces appeared in Budapest with a twenty-page preface, written in March in Moscow, with the aim of heralding a new era marked by “the annihilation of the relics of feudalism, the creation of a Hungarian democracy, and the defense of the independence of the Hungarian people” (felelőssége 4). Since Lukács was convinced that greatness in literature could be achieved only by serving social progress, writers who did not seem to have an unqualified belief in progress were dismissed as second-rate. Kassák, a free-verse writer and constructivist painter who refused to subordinate his creative activity to the principles laid down by the Communist Party in 1919, was rejected for “having obscured the real interests of the workers,” and Kosztolányi was called “a conscious and malicious reactionary” (felelőssége 11). On May 20–21, 1945, the Hungarian Communist Party held a conference with long and passionate debates over the tactics to be followed. On May 31, Márton Horváth, the editor of the communist daily Szabad Nép (Free People), launched a campaign against bourgeois culture by summarizing the conference conclusions under the title “Babits’s Death Mask.” His main target was Sándor Márai, widely regarded as the most distinguished representative of the bourgeois-liberal tradition of Babits and Kosztolányi. One of the most important books published in Hungary in 1945 was the diary Márai kept during the German occupation. Lukács characterized it as reactionary in a lecture he gave in December 1945 under the long-winded title “The Hungarian Middle Class is so Rotten that It Still Does not Want and Has no Courage to Face Reality.” Márai wrote in 1943 about those who believed in a German victory (Márai, Napló 1943–1944 149). After March 19, 1944, he lived in internal exile, and when the persecution of the Jews started he identified himself with the victims: “I cannot expect anyone to forgive me that I was alive, writing novels while (s)he was in a labor camp” (1943–1944 231). To my knowledge no one formulated a conclusion comparable to the following: “Although we all suffered much, we are all guilty” (1943–1944 462). Lukács wrote his unfavorable interpretation from the perspective of “pártköltészet,” a term denoting a strong political commitment defined in the following manner: “to give a wide, profound, and all-embracing picture of the development of social life. To fight for the progress of mankind, for a higher development by revealing the direction of such a progress, the driving forces behind it, and the interior and exterior powers that try to block it. The true and faithful

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reflection of social life is the main instrument that can be used to exert an influence on the people” (Irodalom 119). Since Márai was the most important writer forced into exile by the communists, his case might help us understand their cultural policy. Born in Kassa (Košice) in 1900, he came from the Saxon bourgeoisie of what was Upper Hungary until 1920. His original name was Grosschmid, but he adopted the name of one of his Hungarian ancestors at the very beginning of his career. His first book, a collection of verse, was published in 1918. Although he was a non-communist, he left Hungary after the fall of the first Hungarian Commune of 1919 because he disapproved of the right-wing regime. In the Weimar Republic, he became a respected journalist and published fiction, drama, and essays in German. In 1923, he married the daughter of a Jewish merchant. Having spent the years 1923–28 in Paris, where he was associated with the movements of the international Avant-garde, he returned to Hungary. The reason behind this move was quite simple: he loved the Hungarian language and wished to continue the tradition of Kosztolányi and Gyula Krúdy. Istenek nyomában: Egy utazás regénye (In Search of Gods: Novel of a Journey; 1927), written at the end of the author’s first exile, offered a shrewd analysis of the ethnic and religious conflicts in the Near East. As a journalist he wrote a series of articles attacking Hitler from 1933 onward. His two-volume autobiography, Egy polgár vallomásai (Confessions of a Citoyen; 1934–35) was received by many as an imaginative characterization of the life style of the Hungarian liberal bourgeoisie. By the end of the 1930s, he developed a high reputation as novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, and poet. Because of his violent opposition to the Nazis he had to seek refuge in a village north of Budapest after March 19, 1944, and could not return to the capital city until the Soviet occupation. Lukács described Márai in the above-mentioned lecture as a representative of “vulgar bourgeois individualism” (Irodalom 126), the opposite of a progressive writer who “never ceases to sing about the great national, humanistic mission of the party that plays a role in world history” (128). As for world history, Lukács saw it dominated by such great individuals as Cromwell, Marat, Lenin, and Stalin, “who could unite their individual strength with the task given them by the party in a higher synthesis that is new, exemplary, and endowed with classical value” (127). In April 1947, the text of this long lecture was placed in the larger context of the book called Irodalom és demokrácia (Literature and Democracy). To promote Realism, the author asked for the introduction of tighter controls and outlined a program with the aim of “destroying the reactionary thought of imperialism” (7). Lukács specified the cultural features that needed to be combated as “aristocratism, the rejection of equality, the contempt for the masses, the underestimation of economic, political, and social causes, the cult of irrationalism and myth, an emphasis on the vanity of life, a distance from life, and a focus on the psyche” (10). Assuming that after the 1848 revolutions the bourgeoisie ceased to be a progressive force in European history, Lukács argued that twentieth-century bourgeois writers would produce either so-called pure literature, dominated by the cult of the ivory tower, or works of kitsch. He detected both weaknesses in Márai’s works. According to the deal struck with the Populists, great art was defined as inspired by peasant or working-class culture. Márai had no place in the literature of post-war Hungary. In May 1947, the younger communists started new journals. Emberség (Humanity) was edited by Imre Keszi, Tamás Aczél, and Tibor Méray; Géza Losonczy was one of the two editors of Tovább (Further). Supported by the daily Szabad Nép and the periodical Forum, they urged writers

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to follow the instructions of Ždanov and the example of Fadeev, the main representative of Soviet Socialist Realism. Márai’s comment on Tovább (published only in 1993) was that it represented “a perfect copy of the Fascist Egyedül vagyunk (We Are Alone) in typography, setting, spirit, and tone,” and he characterized the anti-Semitic articles that appeared in it as follows: “The photographs of Jewish bankers appear with a text entitled ‘We Have Worked for Such People.’ This is what the Fascist newspaper did three years ago. The only difference is that in the past the attacks on Jewish capitalists were made by blackmailing Christian journalists, whereas now the authors of similar articles are blackmailing Jewish journalists” (kimaradt 1947 209–10). In the September-October issue of Emberség, Keszi asked for “the art of the rising workers” and condemned “the trends serving the taste of the old ruling classes.” By that time Rákosi, who wanted to be called “the Wise Leader of the Hungarian Nation,” could boast that he had “sliced off like salami” most of the parties and factions other than his own. After the expulsion from the Smallholders’ Party of those who spoke about communist malpractices, the revelation of an alleged “counter-revolutionary conspiracy” led to the arrest and deportation of Béla Kovács, Secretary of the Smallholders’ Party, by the Soviet military police. A long stream of refugees started. After Ferenc Nagy, the Smallholder Prime Minister, the Roman Catholic priest and president of Parliament Béla Varga, and Imre Kovács, one of the leaders of the National Peasant Party had left, the liquidation of Social Democrats followed. In October 1947, Kortárs (The Contemporary) was started. Edited by Kassák, it was a last attempt to preserve the tradition of the socialist Avantgarde. On December 16, Géza Losonczy dismissed Kassák’s movement as representing “anti-Realism,” and the contributors of his periodical as the most consistent enemies of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. At the same time, the first issue of Csillag (Star) appeared. Until 1956 this monthly would define the ideological principles of Hungarian culture. One of the functions of Csillag was to strengthen the links with Soviet culture. In this respect the activity of Béla Illés, Major in the Soviet Army and editor of the Red Army’s Hungarian journal Új Szó, is relevant. In 1947, he published a story A Guszev-ügy (The Gusev Affair) with the purpose of setting the tone for the centenary of the 1848 revolution. To play down the Russian invasion that stopped the Hungarian uprising, Illés decided to advertise the merits of a previously unknown lieutenant. Gusev was said to have revolted against the Tsar in support of the Hungarian revolution. A street in the center of Pest was named after him, and an abridged version of the story was included in the textbooks published for primary schools. In recent years the street reverted to its original name since Gusev proved to have been invented by Illés, an author entirely forgotten today. In communist historiography, 1948 was called the “year of the turning-point,” which transformed the country into a people’s democracy. On February 12, the Politburo of the Communist Party decided to establish ideological unity. In his speech titled “Literary Balance of the Hungarian Democracy,” published in the March issue of Csillag, Márton Horváth condemned writers as different as Kassák and Márai, Németh and Weöres, and he associated even Illyés with “antidemocratic” forces. On March 7, the editorial of Szabad Nép was written by Rákosi himself. He called for an improvement of the theoretical activity of the Communist Party. A Committee of Cultural Policy was set up with the aim of defining the norms that artists and writers should follow. All cultural institutions were to be subordinated to the Committee of four that included Horváth as its leader. Otto Klemperer, the artistic director of the Budapest Opera, was sacked on the grounds

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that he was an American citizen of German birth and conducted works by Wagner. Painters were commissioned to work on a project called “The Portrait Gallery of the Heroes of Labor.” The first draft of the declaration of the Hungarian Workers’ Party was published in the Szabad Nép on May 9. At the first Congress of the “new” party, held in June, Lukács spoke about the liberation of creative activity from the pressures of Capitalism, the end of reification and alienation, the triumph of Realism, and the supreme value of the Soviet experience. What followed was the darkest period in the history of Hungarian culture, dominated by an extreme form of censorship. After the Hungarian Communist Party merged with the Social Democratic Party, several books were banned. One of these was the fifth volume of Márai’s “roman-fleuve,” A Garrenek műve (The Work of the Garrens), containing a visionary presentation of a “Leader” addressing a public demonstration and the narrative of a meeting of the autobiographical hero Péter Garren with the famous writer Berten, who had been placed under house-arrest. Although these parts were based on Márai’s article about Hitler’s 1933 speech in the Berlin Sport Palace and on his interview with Gerhart Hauptmann, retrospectively one may assume that the communist authorities saw a general criticism of totalitarian systems in the book. The scene in which the “Leader” succeeds in manipulating his audience is concerned with fanatics who lose their personalities and are controlled by the “center,” a small group that has power and is alienated from the community. The general import of the meeting of the two writers, the young Péter Garren and the old Berten is no less obvious. Berten’s hypothesis is that only communities with discontinuous memory can be manipulated from above. In other words, despotism is made possible by the destruction of historical consciousness, the distortion of collective memory. Other works by Hungarian writers had a similar fate in 1948. A volume of poetry entitled Álom (Dream) by the Transylvanian-born Zoltán Jékely, was printed but not published. After 1949, many writers, including the Avant-garde Kassák, the Roman Catholic Pilinszky, and the Populist Németh, were forced into silence. In 1948, the Geistesgeschichte philosopher Lajos Prohászka was expelled from the university, and during the next two years a great many scholars lost their positions at the universities or at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. To my knowledge Márai’s diary and his memoirs Föld, föld! (1972) represent the only account of the years 1945–48 that can claim credibility. Ironically, his diary was not made accessible in its entirety until the 1990s. István Csicsery-Rónay, a Smallholder, made a drastic selection of the material when publishing in 1968 the diary covering the years 1945–57 in Washington. As he told me some years ago, he refused to include those passages in which Márai called the Populist writer Gyula Illyés an opportunist. Other parts were excluded because of Márai’s strong opinions on sensitive issues, for which the following entry from 1946 is an example: “The problem with the Jews is not that they failed to learn anything from suffering and misery. Who would be different from them in this respect? The problem is that they have learned to continue fascism in their own style” (kimaradt 1945–1946 131–32). It is not easy to generalize about the reasons why so many writers renounced their past in the years following the end of World War II. Except for Márai, no one is known to have expressed strong reservations about the behavior of the Soviet soldiers, and no other writer questioned the legality of the expulsion of ethnic Germans. By 1948, Márai became increasingly isolated for two reasons: he was unwilling to paint reality in black and white and refused to accept any political function. He asked to distinguish between Germans who supported and those who opposed Nazi

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Germany. “It is hard to win and hard to be defeated. It is hard to be Russian and to be human” he wrote in the summer of 1945 (1945–1957 15). Later he commented on the Soviet soldiers he met: “Their aim was to give up their personality […]. I as a Western man cannot accept this argument. Giving up my personality — this crazy ideal — would mean giving up my attachment to life” (Föld 78). In a period when many of his colleagues changed their views under political pressure, Márai was consistent: throughout his life he approved of Socialism but he never renounced his individual freedom. “My experience is that writers lose as much of their artistic and moral integrity as they gain in political significance,” he remarked in 1945 (1945–1957 17); and two years later he expressed his disgust at the manipulations and corruption he witnessed: “Elections. […] It is not a good solution to keep silence in the midst of idle talk. Not to respond from the inside, not to listen — that is the real task” (kimaradt 1947 152). He regarded radical land reform as “the greatest event in the life of the Hungarian people” (1945–1957 46) and held the whole nation responsible for the massacre of Jews but described the Soviet soldiers’ idea of the bourgeois as ridiculous and felt contempt for those who enjoyed executions. As for the communists, he made clear: “It is not enough to like what they like; they expect you to hate what they hate. There we drift apart” (1945–1957 57). In the summer of 1947, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet visited Budapest. Aragon attacked in his public lecture those who lived in an ivory tower and called Paul Valéry a Nazi sympathizer and admirer of Pétain and Salazar. Márai wrote about Aragon’s visit with contempt. For him, continuity was unbroken between the German and Soviet occupations. He refused to distinguish between class hatred and racism. No one had the inclination or courage to share this view. The first sign of Márai’s alienation from a country living in fear was that on the day celebrating Hungarian books, in the summer of 1946, Ferenc Nagy, the Smallholder Prime Minister avoided him. “I cannot side with the left,” Márai confessed one year later, “because it would be moral suicide to leave my class. I can criticize it from the inside, but I do not wish to be treacherous. Nor can I make a single step towards the right, because I am unwilling to support the fascism that may be hiding behind honest right-wing people” (kimaradt 1947 147). Although feudalism had been abolished in Hungary in 1848, Communism aborted the rise of bourgeois culture. This was the conclusion Márai reached in 1948, shortly before he left his country: “In Hungary two social types could play a full-scale role: the aristocrat and the peasant. The class that stood between them had to step down before it could fulfill its function in history” (1945–1947 64). One of the clichés of Marxist historiography is that Hungary never had a bourgeoisie. One of the worst consequences of the impact of the works of Lukács and Révai was the transformation of Hungary into a country with a history of backwardness. In 1948, Márai was forced to emigrate. A sense of foreboding haunted him, and his predictions proved to be correct: the persecution of kulaks, the nationalization of the Hungarian industry, banking system, and education were followed by the trials of Cardinal Mindszenty and the communist Rajk in 1949, and by the large-scale deportations of “class-aliens.” Lukács himself came under criticism. On April 29, 1949, Rákosi received a long essay from László Rudas, an arch-enemy of the philosopher, which attacked Lukács for viewing Hitler as a tragic figure in history. Although the essay was not printed without significant changes in Társadalmi Szemle, the theoretical journal of the Hungarian

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Workers’s Party, others joined in the debate. On December 25, Szabad Nép published an article by Horváth that blamed Lukács for downgrading Socialist Realism to “an obscure generalization that can be approached with the help of abstractions rather than with that of the living reality of Soviet literature” (János Molnár et al 174). The philosopher had to exercise self-criticism. Ironically, the main target of his opponents was Irodalom és demokrácia, the book which was largely responsible for the fall of bourgeois literature. By this time most of those Lukács attacked between 1945 and 1948 were involved in writing fairy-tales for children or translating from Russian. The only major exception was Márai, who had to face poverty in exile. The rest of his life proved how difficult it was for him to leave his country and can be interpreted as a sad epilogue to the history of bourgeois literature in post-war Hungary. For forty years he continued to write and publish in Hungarian, but his works were inaccessible in his native country. The reason for this was quite obvious: those historians and critics who identified Hungarian culture with the traditions of the gentry could not find a place for a writer whose works contradicted their ideological assumptions. “Darkness surrounds me and I can see only one goal: I have to write in Hungarian as long as I can. This is the only task that is still meaningful. I have signed a contract with this language; this is the destiny I can never forget” (kimaradt 1947 107). These words were written in 1947, at a time when many Hungarian writers denied their attachment to the bourgeoisie. Márai had expressed many reservations about his class throughout his career, but remained committed to its values to the very end. One of the reasons for his decision to commit suicide in San Diego (California) on February 21, 1989, was that he saw no chances for the recovery of bourgeois literature in Hungary. After forty years of Communism those chances still remain very much in doubt.

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Strategies against Censorship in Soviet Lithuania: 1944–90 Violeta Kelertas

Historical Background Tsarist censorship in the territory of Lithuania, or the so-called Western Provinces, took the most extreme form after the failed 1863 uprising, when a weakening Russia tried to suppress the awakening Lithuanian consciousness with a Prohibition on Books (1864–1904). Lithuanians defied the Russian attempt to impose the Cyrillic alphabet on writing in Lithuanian by smuggling over the border Lithuanian books in the Latin alphabet, printed and published across the Nemunas River in East Prussia. Censorship was also a fact of life during the authoritarian Smetona regime after the 1926 coup d’état, when all printed matter had to be approved by a censorship committee. This lasted until President Antanas Smetona abdicated in 1940 just before the advancing Soviet army.

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After the chaos of the war years, consisting of occupation by the Soviets from 1940 until June 1941, followed by a Nazi occupation that was terminated by the Soviets in 1944, it took the Communist Party some time to establish control of all cultural life. Still, by 1945–46 the publication of books and journals had become a state monopoly, and a Writers’ Union was instituted to manipulate, reward, or withdraw favor. The state-controlled venues to publication doled out not only honorariums to authors, but also such banal necessities as paper and registered typewriters. There were several levels to the bureaucratic apparatus of censorship. The lowest rung was the Writers’ Union, headed by four to six Party members. It oversaw internal matters but was responsible to city and county-level committees that constantly examined its work and often signed off its decisions. The Department of Agitation and Propaganda, as well as the Secretary for Ideology, were the next level; above them was the Lithuanian Central Committee of the Communist Party or the de facto government, itself supervised by and receiving instructions from Moscow. A book went through several stages of editing and possible revision, giving the Party ample opportunity to exert its power. There was an Editorial Committee, the formal plan of the publishing house, the Publications Committee, the Lithuanian Communist Party’s Central Committee for Publications, the USSR Committee for Publications, all subordinated to the Central Committee of the Soviet Socialist Communist Party. Even finished proofs had to be approved by the Glavlit, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic’s official organ for protecting state secrets. Without its stamp of permission no printer could begin printing. In practice, however, an author first met with an editor from the State Publishing House who already at this early juncture in the publication process examined the manuscript for problems and enforced censorship rules, which shifted and were not generally known. Authors could fight back and argue for the general conception of their work, or defend the text word for word, line by line. But the editors of the Publishing House had virtual control of the product. They could send the author and his manuscript away, or require extensive, politically motivated revisions that could prove artistically deadly. The most pedantic editors acquired a reputation among the writers for being fastidious Party line conformists; they aroused disgust and were hated as serving the enemy. The “invisible” institutionalized Glavlit censor was always referred to in the singular, but since everything printed (even posters, theater and concert programs, pamphlets, and bulletins) had to pass this so-called “censor” it was clear that in reality a whole office of censors practiced the trade behind closed doors. Glavlit’s structure and methodology were directly taken over from the Soviet Union and put into practice shortly after the end of the war. For an author, the main difficulty was to surmount the conditions set by the Communist Party with respect to the correct ideological orientation of the work and the glorification of the government. If a work did not obey adequately these prime demands, it could not be included in the publishing house plan, and if it was not in the yearly plan, printed as a separate booklet by each publishing house, the work could not appear. The requirements of Glavlit were relaxed only when glasnost took hold of the Soviet Union; a gradual weakening of the system finally led to Glavlit’s quiet disappearance after 1989. For writers of fiction there was one other trial by fire. Novels especially were published in a serial trial, run in the official journal Pergalė (Victory) to see how readers and critics would react to them. If the work passed this stage successfully, it would be published as a book. If not, as it happened, for instance, to the Lithuanian writer Icchokas Meras in 1971, the author’s career could

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be cut short. Meras’s allegorical novel Striptizas, arba Paryžius-Roma-Paryžius (Striptease, or Paris-Rome-Paris) ran afoul after journal publication in Vilnius, and was printed in book form first by the Lithuanian exile press in the United States in 1976, after the author had immigrated to Israel. Self-censorship Though journalists, historians, and other authors had their own problems and crises of conscience, writers of literature had some additional difficulties in passing the hurdles of censorship. First of all, there were at least two layers of self-censorship: unconscious (or semi-conscious, as the case may be) and deliberate. By unconscious I mean that isolated people were increasingly exposed to collective deviations from norms obtaining in the free world. The educational system and the limited discourses circulating in a communist society played their part in distorting the basic knowledge that people behind the Iron Curtain had of the larger world, and shaped their consciousness more than they themselves realized or were willing to admit. Fifty years of “building the new Soviet man” and limiting his reading had a rather severe effect. At the best of times, translations from the major languages were limited to known communist authors or sympathizers. One year Heinrich Böll could be in, the next, after he had made an anti-Soviet declaration, his books would be removed even from factory libraries. Intellectuals sought exposure to Western publications by learning Polish for the sole purpose of having access to them, but the rise of Solidarnośc closed the literary border between Lithuania and Poland and removed vital Polish translations from the shelves and people’s minds after 1980. When the Polish access to the West closed, another one opened. As of 1967, émigré groups began visiting Lithuania and smuggling significant quantities of exilic books and journals to the home country. Individual tourists also contributed. Tomas Venclova and a few other vocal dissidents were forced to emigrate in the late 1970s, but their Western works and interviews rapidly reached the homeland. Vilnius publishing houses, unlike those in Tallinn and Riga, had quite a few shelves of hand-picked books by émigré writers, with lengthy introductions by politically reliable local critics that were meant to inculcate the readers with “correct” interpretations, but these could be ignored or, as was even more common, read against the grain. In any case, many exiled authors, critics, and, especially, poets were familiar to readers in Lithuania and they were sometimes revered strictly for their anti-communist poetry, regardless of its artistic merit. Quasi-conscious self-censorship refers to an author’s instinctive sense before and during the act of writing to avoid certain topics or styles of writing because they would not pass censorship. Writing according to one’s own taste could cause problems in daily life (which was difficult enough) even after Stalin’s death in 1953. The Writers’ Union was an indirect instrument of control because it distributed such perks as housing, cars, and vacations among its members. Why so few talented Lithuanian writers opted for overt opposition to the government or became dissidents has been a soul-searching question since Sąjūdis (the Reform Movement) and independence. The answer usually has been that Lithuanian writers “wanted to be published.” But did they perhaps just want decent housing for their families? The drawers of writers that accommodated themselves in order to publish turned out to be empty when freedom came: writing for the drawer, a practice

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in Russia and some East-Central European countries, was less wide-spread in Lithuania because self-censorship was internalized and functioned rather well. Still, writers were regularly turned away from Vaga, the state publishing house for literature, thus obviating an encounter with the editors who were the stand-ins for the real censor and acted as the first line of control. Deliberate self-censorship means to construct a text so that it will pass scrutiny without difficulty. For example, since overzealous local censors did not allow capitalizing “God” in Lithuania (most likely because religion’s special power here, in contrast to neighboring Latvia, where no such rule existed), poets sometimes put “God” in initial position in a sentence or line of poetry, so that it would be automatically capitalized. A particularly vivid illustration of censoring oneself is a single known copy of a book of poetry by the prominent poet Sigitas Geda. His Mamutų tėvynė (Homeland of the Mamoths; 1985) was presented to me by the poet himself in 1987. Geda inscribed the book and made certain changes by hand in my presence. Upon examination it turned out that the 13 changes all had to do with religious imagery (e.g., “God” or “Lord” was superimposed on “wind” or “earth” or “no one”; “angel” on “boy” or “plant”): Geda wanted to use the name or attributes of God, but had to be satisfied with substituting for them “wind,” etc. This gives us a glimpse of a phenomenon that is, admittedly, difficult to study and grasp. How to get inside an author’s mind? How to measure his courage or lack thereof? One thing is certain: writers had to plan and study the extent to which they could play games with the censor and win, and decide how much of their artistic and personal vision they had to surrender already prior to presenting their manuscript to the editor. The Period from 1946 to 1966 In this the gloomiest period for writers and literature, everyone had to adhere to the primitive restrictions of glorifying the Soviet Union, the “brotherhood of nations,” the working man, and the ascent toward Communism. Until the Thaw, signaled by Khrushchev’s personal permission to publish Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the journal Novy Mir (1963), Lithuanian literature had no room to maneuver. The policy on Socialist Realism prescribed for ideologically loyal artists and writers how to produce works of the required kind, but the formula invited stereotyping into good and evil characters and was banal to an unbearable degree. Many of these works were written by Party hacks, in one well known case even by the KGB official Aleksandras Gudaitis-Guzevičius. These works were praised, for literature was regarded as a propaganda tool to inoculate the masses and appropriate texts helped achieve this goal. Writers who had not had socialist leanings before the takeover were, at least until Stalin’s death, urged to conform, harassed, threatened, and bullied in public. Some stopped writing altogether, but were still harangued for their silence; others died young of drink or stress, committed suicide, or died under mysterious circumstances. Some reluctantly yielded, but their best work stems either from the pre-war period (Vincas Mykolaitis-Putīnas) or from an abrupt about-face after the Thaw (Vytautas Bložė)

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The Period 1963 to 1970 The relatively late Thaw in Lithuania resulted in two key concepts that were meaningful in their cultural context but repeated so often that they became empty albeit influential clichés: “the rebirth of man” and “an advanced confidence in the reader” (in other words, trust that the reader would understand the subtext). The latter instituted an almost secret complicity or compact between author and reader, leaving the censor no role in meaning construction. The first attempts at liberalizing the allowed limits ever so little came relatively early for this periphery of the Russian Empire. Eduardas Mieželaitis’s Whitmanesque long poem Žmogus (Man) won the Lenin State Prize in 1963, gained all-Union attention, and was translated into Russian and other languages. The fine arts actually serve as a better illustration for the slight relaxation of censorship and the novel emphasis on man as an individual then. Stasys Krasauskas’s zincography, the cycle “Moters gimimas” (The Birth of Woman), became popular because it portrayed the human body as graceful and suggestively erotic. In Krasauskas’s other cycle, “Amžinai gyvi” (Eternally Alive), the space of the paper is cut in two: naked members of a living family, usually women and children, are above ground, whereas naked but helmeted dead soldiers underground are portrayed whole as if living. The suggestion that soldiers are human beings first and fighters only in a secondary sense is indicated by portraying the soldiers without uniforms (so loved by the Russians) and emphasizing their solidarity with their families above. The helmets, signs of military regimentation, actually seem superfluous and may well have been imposed by those in power. Such a humanistic emphasis on family relationships would have been unthinkable during Stalin’s reign.

Figure 6. Stasys Krasauskas, Moters gimimas (The Birth of Woman). Courtesy Violeta Kelertas.

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Reflecting a similar “return of the human being” in prose fiction, a discussion was initiated in the literary journals of 1963 about the viability of the interior monologue as a “Socialist Realist mode of writing.” At first this was negated. The publication of a round table discussion in the weekly journal Literatūra ir menas (Literature and Art) suggested that the powers that be were displeased. However, if enough literary critics dared defend a certain position, those in charge (usually the Minister of Culture) pretended to yield to their wisdom, for otherwise open discussion could not take place at all. Thus three novels representing what came to be known (somewhat incorrectly) as the Lithuanian school of stream-of-consciousness were published in 1966: Jonas Mikelinskas’s O laikrodis eina (But the Clock Keeps Ticking); Mykolas Sluckis’s Adomo obuolys (Adam’s Apple); and Alfonsas Bieliauskas’s Kauno romanas (The Novel of Kaunas). The translation of some of these seminal texts into Russian influenced later Soviet writers like Yuri Trifonov. The periphery thus had more freedom than the center: what was allowed in Vilnius was not automatically or initially permitted in Moscow. Adomo obuolys, though the weakest of the three, summarizes well the new cultural situation through the narrator’s refrain, addressed to his young daughter: “Giedrė, your father will be a man” (meaning that he will not yield to temptations in his career path). Delving into the subconscious in Soviet Lithuania was not only politically dangerous but raised artistic problems as well, for the psychology of the characters could not be adequately expressed. In Adomo obuolys the protagonists’ deepest motivations had to be left undefined, whereas in Kauno romanas the content and the means of expression were primitive. These were not world-class writers yet: restrictions of all kinds became their second skin. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were unknown to them even in the 1960s. They were creating a tradition in the Soviet bloc that was, like many other things there, a deformed rather than an adapted one. They rarely experimented with language and images, these basic ingredients of a genuine streamof-consciousness technique. Though the political atmosphere became more relaxed, there were still taboo topics and forms. Socialist Realism attempted to limit itself to realistic; i.e., essentially anti-modernist forms. Serious and subtle intellectual writing addressed to an elite only was unimaginable and would have been considered pretentious. Labeling Modernism as “mannerism” and frowning upon experimental writing delayed the arrival of Modernism, not to mention Postmodernism. The latter had to wait until the 1990s, when it was taken up with much enthusiasm and, at least at first, with little understanding of what it involved or what the rationale behind it was. The Period from 1970 to 1990 In Lithuania, the rather short Thaw was brought to a premature and sudden halt by the self-immolation of the student Romas Kalanta in Kaunas, and the demonstrations that followed his funeral, protesting that its time and location had been kept secret (some 400 people were arrested). What came to be known euphemistically as “the Kaunas events” resulted in a new microscopic scrutiny of literary and artistic values. Melancholy, sadness, yearning, pessimism, depression, suicide were cause for alarm in the eyes of the establishment. In 1970, Juozas Aputis published a collection of short stories, Horizonte bėga šernai (Wild Boars Run on the Horizon), which depicted nostalgia for the disappearing agricultural way of life, the destructive move away from single family farms

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into villages, “the dehumanization of man” (a term first used by the émigré critic Ilona GražytėMaziliauskienė), and the pervasive lack of values resulting from collectivization and Sovietization. Consequently, Aputis was forbidden to publish until 1978. Even the lack of bright colors in painting was now seen as opposition, because such pictures lacked optimism and did not portray the building of Socialism. Portraits of people at work, of those actually building Socialism, were preferred. The prescriptive literary criticism of the time asked for “novels of production.” That people working did not make for terribly exciting reading was immaterial. The guerrilla fighters of the resistance had to be called “bandits,” the deported farmers “kulaks.” Literally hundreds of wellknown euphemisms (and misnomers) flourished on the lexical as well as on the syntactic level. The first years of independence, the 1990s, revealed how well the propaganda machine had worked, how during fifty years of occupation several generations had grown up knowing only one register of language and speak only in this one. Happy endings in films and literature were the norm. Contrary to the American convention of a cowboy riding into the sunset, approved Soviet characters walked into the rising sun, which silently demonstrated the eastern orientation of Russian culture and was intended to represent an optimistic, rising economic curve in Soviet daily life. Though literary critics and scholars, both in the homeland and in emigration, complained that the rules of Socialist Realism were imposed with increased rigidity, every year through the 1970s and 80s actually produced at least one daring, controversial, and widely read book of prose fiction. This “book of the year” garnered critical attention, and encouraged a growing number of interesting and creative authors. Poetry, more difficult to decipher by the popular reader, was even freer in its own convoluted way. How could these deviations come about? Simply put, writers became increasingly more adept at manipulating and evading the censorship with what has come to be known as “Aesopian language.” Yet this catch-all term covered a multiplicity of strategies, some of which can be analyzed and named. The times were changing and the censors seemed to get blinder. Some have interpreted this as a diversionary tactic pursued by the Party to let some steam escape, so that the people’s pot of discontent would not boil over. Be that as it may, the result was better literature, literature, however, that demanded more work on the part of the reader to decipher all the encoded meanings and implications. To adopt Stanley Fish’s concept, Aesopian languages worked by including authors and readers in the same “interpretive community,” while excluding the censors more and more. Gradually, Socialist Realism became defined from bottom up instead of being imposed from top down, defined by what was written by writers and survived the publication process. Obviously, it differed substantially from the theory as originally prescribed in Russia in the early 1930s. Aesopian language used such a variety of methods and depended on such shifting contexts that one cannot enumerate all modes of it. We shall, therefore, only attempt a definition and discuss a few prominent methods, mostly from prose fiction.

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Literary Resistance: Some Methods for Evading Taboos 1) Historical Displacement This involves the transposition of the present to a safely distant historical moment that readers can decode as a commentary about the present because of its similarity to Soviet conditions. In 1972, Vytautas Martinkus described in Akmenys (Rocks) the cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazis, for example Joseph Mengele’s experiments on humans. But this modernist novel can also be interpreted as hinting at the horrors of Soviet-instituted psychiatric hospitals for dissidents. Similarly, in 1975 Romualdas Granauskas focused in “Jauçio aukojimas” (The Sacrifice of the Bull) on the brutal battles that the Teutonic Knights led against the pagans in order to impose Christianity. The decoy tactic exploited here, one dear to the anti-religious communists, was to show that the Christians were cruel and inhumane when instituting a new belief system. This spoke eloquently also of the Soviet methods to solidify their power between 1944 and 1953. 2) Gaps and Elisions These are deliberate omissions due to the political sensitivity of the subject, which are to be filled in by readers who share the author’s code and political views. In Aputis’s “Horizonte bėga šernai,” a wife pokes out without much provocation her husband’s eye with a broomstick, but realizes then that her husband’s drunken habits are not to blame for her brutal action. It is clear from the text that she is casting a wider social critique, that it is she herself who does not care about the fields (because they belong to the collective farm), or even about her children. She wonders what kept her own mother going in such moments of desperation, but, unable to give an answer, she leaves the question in suspension. Readers sharing the author’s values would fill this gap, thinking of family or religious values, which could not be directly mentioned. 3) Magic Realism It has recently been claimed that Magic Realism is a feature of postcolonial writing that includes the colonial period as well. As Stephen Slemon puts it, Magic Realism “carries a residuum of resistance toward the imperial center and to its totalizing systems of generic classification” and can, therefore, “signify resistance to monumental theories of literary practice” (408). Resistance occurs, especially, when the writing appears under a totalitarian system still in control. In Lithuanian literature of the earlier Soviet period, Magic Realism appeared most often under the guise of folklore and was made to serve a didactic purpose. In Aputis’s “Skraidančios obelys” (The Flying Apple Trees; 1970) a farm worker is moved to a centralized village and he illegally sells an excessive number of blooming apple trees to the state from the orchard surrounding his family home. Once the committee leaves his cabin with the sales document, Milašius imagines that his trees with all their blossoms and the trees of his neighbors who have also inflated their property, fly above his head, covering the former orchards like snow (just as the wholesale corruption covers the land). Earlier, when he was still contemplating the

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morality of the deal, he saw his mother flying about the barn, shaking her finger at him in evident disapproval of the “new” ways, but he paid no heed and salvaged his conscience and that of the committee members by offering them alcoholic beverages to seal the arrangement. Rimantas Šavelis’s “Po rudenio lietum” (In the Autumn Rain), published in 1980, is a love story between two young horses from different parts of the world: a beautiful mare from some unidentified sunny clime with sweet grass, and a pony from a land of rain and suffering (Lietuva, the Lithuanian word for the country, is often associated with the word for rain). He gallops with her to her land, but after a romantic night of love he leaves her to return to his miserable country, because, as he says, “my fields are there.” The story focuses on the sensitive question of whether to remain behind or immigrate to a more attractive country by transposing the dilemma to the world of horses. 4) Reduction from a Macro- to a Microstructure and Vice-Versa This form of displacement conceals the real subject of the narrative. By making the family, for instance, a stand-in for Lithuania or Russia, the author safely avoids discussing features or actions of the macro group, thus hiding the target of his allusions. In Saulius Šaltenis’s “Amžinai žaliuojantis klevas” (The Ever-Green Maple; 1983), a battle between neighbors, the Tenant and the Owner, blurs the lines of their roles, as the Tenant (symbolizing the Russian who has moved in) takes over more and more of the Owner’s property (symbolizing Lithuania), including his wife and his outhouse, and eventually poisons the Owner’s maple tree, what is most dear to the latter. In Ramūnas Klimas’s “Ką aš galvojau važiuodamas autobusu pas buvusi suolo draugå” (What I Thought about on the Bus Ride to See my Former Classmate; 1981), a soccer match between the teams of two towns, one much bigger than the other, provides an opportunity to discuss whether one should be “a pigeon on the grass” (a conformist), or grab “the flower of fiery matter,” by taking risks, becoming a dissident or a guerrilla. Indeed, basketball games between Lithuania and Russia often ended in a scuffle, for the teams were perceived as representatives of their nations. 5) Postmodern Relativism? Questioning the Grand Narratives Hallowed official stories and communist myths could be questioned or even disbelieved, sometimes by juxtaposing a Soviet and a Lithuanian truth. Klimas’s “Gintė ir jos žmogus” (Gintė and Her Man; 1981) presents in the text at least five versions of the events, allowing readers to pick their own version. The versions presented range from a happy ending, one preferred by the Writers’ Union and the censor, to total disbelief in the Party’s version, even cracking jokes about it and making fun of anyone naive enough to believe in official propaganda about camouflaged recent history dealing with the post-occupation guerrilla war.

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134 6) Presentation of Facts by an Unreliable Narrator

The narrator or speaker in a dialogue is quite often tired, half-asleep, or drunk. Or the perspective of a child is used, which supposedly cannot be trusted with accuracy. Such narrators exempt the author from blame should censorship accuse the writer, for he could always claim that matters appeared that way to a narrator who was less than competent due to his/her age or state of mind. In Ona (1981), Ema Mikulėnaitė successfully used the perspective of a young girl to describe in her own words her whole life, including various details that had to do with her maturation. The author could represent this way, perhaps for the first time in Lithuanian literature, the brutalities of guerrilla war. Mikulėnaitė was “punished” for her courage with a shoddy cover and a tiny format to minimize attention to her book, which was not republished until liberation. 7) Subtexts and Intertexts. Subtexts are difficult to identify since usually they do not appear explicitly. They are effective only if readers can recognize them and if their point of view and frame of reference nearly coincide with that of the author. Subtexts require considerable subtlety from the reader to infer, grasp, and decode. Such Aesopian language and reading between the lines became a habit and some writers in the former Soviet bloc now say that they cannot and do not want to shake it, because they have become for them a way of speaking and writing. Only the younger generation of writers abandons these devices. Intertexts are a bit easier to identify because readers of a certain age, class, and educational background will more likely share a cultural frame of reference. Lithuanian intertexual allusions were usually tinged with political meanings. Our attempt to categorize some favorite methods of camouflaging political meaning is pioneering. Very little work has been done along these lines, and the few existing studies limit themselves either to published documents lacking commentary or to surprising autobiographical statements by authors who had generally conformed, who had lived well under the Soviet regime and were adulated by the Party, but now claim that their works were the most severely censored ones. Writers who suffered the severest control and paid for their resistance in various ways are strangely quiet, perhaps because their work speaks for them. A new generation interested in the immediate past is needed to unravel the complexities of all the twists in the real or imagined political plots. Frederic Jameson has pertinently remarked in his article “Third-World Literature” that Third- (in this case Second-) world literature always has national allegory at its heart. If allegory is continuous throughout a text and allegorical tendencies include the kind of strategic maneuvers we have discussed here, his statement rings true for Lithuania under Soviet occupation.

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Getting around Polish Censorship: 1968–89 Włodzimierz Bolecki For the majority of the East-Central European countries, the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 90s constituted a turning point that entailed one common fact of utmost importance: the lifting of censorship. In Poland, this meant in effect the end of a literature that was controlled by a state that emerged under Soviet Occupation in 1939 in Lwów (L’viv) and Wilno (Vilnius/Vilna) and in 1944 in Lublin. It lasted for almost half a century under the name literature of the Polish People’s Republic (Polish official publications under the German occupation were of no significance). We are not concerned here with specific works published in the communist state, though there were among them, of course, brilliant works, even literary masterpieces. Rather, the issue at hand is the institutional framework into which literary life was pressed and within which it was carried out, from publishing houses, through literary journals, to the teaching of literature in schools and at universities. The literature of this People’s Republic signifies in this sense not individual texts but rather the system of their circulation, controlled by the Communist Party. In Poland, the most visible element of that system was the Office of Censorship; the beginning of its end was the emergence of an independent publishing movement in 1976. This movement and network (whatever its aspirations and achievements) was an internal matter of the indigenous intelligentsia, but it was also the beginning of — and a powerful factor in — ousting censorship. The formal and legal fact of lifting censorship in 1990 ended this process, and ended, undoubtedly, more than just the literature of the 1980s. It gave both writers and readers the feeling they are participating in the finale of a circulation game in which everyone had been inveigled, starting with writers who programmatically fought with the censor (e.g., Stanisław Barańczak and other poets of the so-called New Wave) to writers such as Miron Białoszewski, to whom censorship was apparently of no concern. This feeling of an end appeared, however, not as decadence or as a fin-de-siècle, as it did a hundred years ago, but rather as the fortunate slamming of a door, a break with fifty-years of political constraint and imprisonment of public life, culture, and social news. It represented several simultaneous closures, the end of several different phenomena that had determined literary life up to that point: the end 1) of censorship, 2) of the underground publishing movement, and 3) of the division between émigré and national literature. Before 1976, publications not controlled by censorship were printed exclusively outside Poland, mostly in Paris and London, where, the Polish émigré population had been most numerous since the nineteenth century. In Poland, all books and magazines printed by the émigré press were strictly forbidden. They could not be brought or sent into the country, nor received by mail. The infringement of this prohibition was punished by prison sentences, or, in the most extreme cases, with the rejection of passport applications. Having copies of émigré literature in home libraries was punished by confiscation, fines, and sometimes by a trial. The most severe reprisals were directed against those writers who, while living in Poland, dared publish their works at émigré publishing houses. Before the mid-1970s, their numbers were small, because for writers living in Poland, every publication in émigré circles resulted in a ban of their publications at home. Some

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writers who printed their books abroad, among them Witold Wirpsza and Włodzimierz Odojewski, decided to leave Poland. When the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) was born, writers dissatisfied with the ever stricter censorship founded the independent literary magazine Zapis (The Record), which originally planned to publish only works that were prevented from official publication by the censorship office. But this exercise in freedom proved to be contagious, and the magazine soon began to publish commissioned works. Censorship is an external limitation on a writer. However, in a system that controlled everything, writers who wished to “smuggle” some prohibited thoughts and information into their works imposed some limitations upon themselves. By eliminating subjects and statements that might be deleted by the censors, writers assumed some of the control that state-offices would exercise. Such forms of internal censorship, which were much more dangerous than the external ones, became superfluous with the birth of the independent magazines. Writers did not have to present their work to a censor anymore. The new publication opportunity lifted the psychological barrier that had earlier restricted intellectual life in Poland. Two novels by Tadeusz Konwicki provide an excellent example for this change. The first one, Kompleks polski (The Polish Complex; 1977), Konwicki wrote for a state-owned publishing house. The censorship office stopped the publication, and Konwicki had to publish it in an independent literary magazine. His following novel, Mała apokalipsa (A Little Apocalypse; 1979), was expressly written for an independent publisher. In the history of Polish literature, 1968 is not just a political date but also a literary one, for that year a new generation, still called the “68 generation,” started to publish. These were writers who emerged from the student strikes. In their first books, they rebelled against the writing methods of the day and ridiculed the language of communist propaganda. The censors did not tolerate them for very long, yet these young writers defied censorship. They began to publish volumes of poems, fiction, and essays in the form of multiple-copy typescripts, a publication the Russians called samizdat. Typing was soon superseded by printing. At the outset, the printing machines were very primitive, and the quality of the print very bad. In 1981, the “Solidarity” organization received modern printing equipment from Western trade unions, which made it possible to print books of better legibility. During the Martial Law (1981–), much of this equipment was confiscated and destroyed by the police. But the machines that were hidden worked for all these years and are still in operation. The largest independent publishing house, NOWA, was founded in 1977 and had published by 1981 its hundredth book. Between its beginning in 1976 and the birth of “Solidarity” (1980), the independent publishing movement had brought forth several hundred titles. This number may not seem great, but it should be remembered that these books were printed in the underground and the printers were in constant danger of being arrested. Moreover, no modern equipment was available before 1981. The publications were sold in two interesting ways. Sometimes, agents of the publishing firm brought the books directly to the buyer, often students and writers. The other method was distribution through shops in private apartments, whose addresses were known in opposition circles. The shops needed to be mobile and were often open during large social or public meetings. The danger of police intervention was omnipresent. In 1981, all these forms of book peddling linked up with the “Solidarity” network. At that point, illegal practice became legal for the first time. For the first

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time too, the official press admitted the existence of the “secondary circulation” of uncensored publications. During the Martial Law, this circulation became illegal again, and many independent publishers and printers were arrested. One could be punished by arrest or fine for owning an independent publication, or even for carrying a single leaflet. In looking for independent publications, the police stopped people and even searched them on the street at random. A few weeks after the declaration of the Martial Law, the independent publishing movement was reborn. In the early spring of 1982, the first underground literary periodical, Wezwanie (The Summons), appeared in Warsaw. Soon afterwards, other magazines appeared: Arka (The Ark), Kultura Niezależna (Independent Culture), and many others. Within a few months, the underground publishing movement gained popular support. New publishing houses were founded, weekly papers were printed, as well as monthlies, literary and political magazines, essays, poems, novels, plays, and even photograph albums — all this despite constant police investigations, searches, and arrests of printers and publishers. The independent publishing movement was reborn under the conditions of Martial Law only because it was part of a broad social movement, and received practical support from the majority of the Polish people. In the first period of Martial Law, when the trade union movement was in a state of utter confusion, the independent publishing movement was the most visible manifestation of the existence of “Solidarity.” A few details concerning the period are relevant here: in the years 1982–86, during the period of the strictest Martial Law regulations, at least 2500 titles of magazines and books were issued in Poland. Books and magazines were most often printed in issues of two- to three-thousand copies. Very few had a larger circulation. It is difficult to assess the exact number of copies issued at that time by the Polish independent publishing houses, but it reached certainly more than half a million. All this was produced within just five years. So much for figures. Let us focus now on the types of publications, names, and titles, because these invariably say more about the character of the publishing movement than statistics. From the beginning of their existence, the independent publishing houses have issued all types of works: literary, scientific, and political books, as well as video- and tape-recorder cassettes. Some of them do not include any political contents and could just as well have been published by the regular publishing houses. They could have, but were not. Why? For many years, the censorship office forbade not only the publication of specific works but also of works written by specific authors. For example, works by Miłosz and Gombrowicz were not issued because their authors had emigrated. The poems of Mandelshtam were not printed because he was forbidden in the Soviet Union. Works of Kundera were not reprinted because such was the wish of the Czechoslovak authorities. Works by those Polish writers who belonged to the opposition were not published either. Apart from political reasons, there were also organizational ones: state publishers, as the Polish economy in general, became less and less efficient, and in the end writers or translators had to wait several years before their books were published. The independent publishers acted quickly. Although authors were offered books of worse quality, smaller number of copies, and lower fees, the results came quickly: books were published within several months. Moreover, writers no longer had to conduct often humiliating conversations with officials that tended to lead in the end to a surrender to the censor’s demand for “improvements.”

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Finally, we must ask the question, what literary culture owes to the independent publishers. First of all, writers could publish works not accepted by the censors in the state publishing houses. Secondly, independent publishers acquainted readers with émigré literature. Thirdly, the independent houses published scholarly books and many historical and sociological ones (e.g., books by Max Weber, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Davies) that became important in Polish intellectual life for they dealt with problems that were taboos. Fourthly, the independent houses published many translations, among them translations from Russian, Czech, and Hungarian, which considerably increased awareness about the history and society of these countries. To conclude, the independent publishing movement fulfilled the role of a great university. Due to this movement, readers could get acquainted with issues that until then had been passed over in silence or distorted in books printed by the state publishers. In Poland and the other countries of the Soviet block, this movement changed the readers’ knowledge about the world. Owing to independent publications, the nations of Central and Eastern Europe had, for the first time, an opportunity to learn about their true past and present condition. The period was marked by the formation of independent magazines, whose editors represented various nations. Former hostilities, enflamed and excited in previous years by the governments of these countries, were now subsiding, to make way for an understanding of the diverse historical identities of individual nations. The independent publishing movement was not unique to Poland, for it had counterparts in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. Trans. Diana Kuprel

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Censorship after Independence: the Case of Aleksander Pelēcis Karl E. Jirgens Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty in August 1939, according to which neither country would interfere if the other chose to invade its neighbors. As a result, Soviet tanks invaded Latvia on June 17, 1940, in spite of the Latvian-Soviet Peace Treaty of August 11, 1920. On June 20, the occupying Soviet forces formed a pro-Soviet government, ironically called the “Latvian People’s Government,” which tried to legitimize the annexation of Latvia to the USSR. On July 14–15, 1940, the Soviet-sponsored one-party parliamentary elections brought to power the Soviet-controlled “Latvian Workers’ Bloc,” and the new puppet government proclaimed a close alliance with the USSR. A process of “un-naming” the Latvian socio-cultural heritage ensued within a systematic annihilation of the Latvian people, the Latvian culture, and Latvian worldview. In Latvia’s “Year of Horror” (1941), mass murders, mass deportations, and other atrocities took place.

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The violent suppression continued after World War II, when another one-party election brought another Soviet-backed puppet government to power. Agreements made at the Potsdam, Teheran, and Yalta Conferences were flouted. During the second half of the twentieth century, half of Latvia’s population was either evacuated and deported, or killed. Hundreds of thousands of Latvians were murdered, imprisoned, or shipped to slow death in the Siberian Gulag archipelago. Only half of the two million Latvian people survived. In the meantime, against the stipulations of the Hague convention, the nation was Russified through the “importation” of a Russian population that brought the total back to two million. Under the Soviet rule, Latvians were granted few opportunities to manifest their cultural views, and they were forced to surrender their identity. The Latvian language was attacked from a variety of fronts, including education and publishing. For example, students could attend either Russian- or Latvian-language schools during the Soviet occupation, but only those who attended the Russian ones could continue with a post-secondary education. In publishing, texts that overtly identified a Latvian socio-political or cultural position were often either openly censored or surreptitiously suppressed. In essence, all of Latvian culture was censored. The “betterment of the state,” introduced by the Soviet authorities, was a euphemism for mass deportations and killing, just as the more recent term, “ethnic cleansing.” The Soviet-endorsed Socialist Realism was almost universally rejected by authors who opposed the Russian occupation. In some cases, resistance to cultural and political oppression took the form of irony, the mode that Bakhtin has called “carnivalesque.” As a result, an underground culture began to develop, just as in the other occupied East-Central European nations. For the mind-set of this culture, writing and, more importantly, reading, was an act of resistance, even defiance. As Andrejs Plakāns writes in “The Tribulations of Independence: Latvia 1991–1993,” the situation changed in the 1990s, but the decimated and Russified Latvians found their sense of language and self diluted by an infusion of non-indigenous culture. The colonization of the Latvian mind left deeply engrained habits behind, even after the country regained its political independence. Censorship paradoxically continued even after independence, sometimes practiced by Latvians against themselves. More than a dozen years after regaining independence, Latvian artists and writers return only slowly from psychic exile, even though, as Andrejs Peniķis notes, writers have been the spearhead in the Latvian movement for independence (268–69). As a result of the Soviet rule, Latvian identity weakened from relative sovereignty to dependence upon an oppressive Other. Oppression contributed to the emergence of an evasive and allegorical literary style that could by-pass Soviet censors, for they considered texts with narrative disjunctions, polysemic signification, and dialogical structure too obscure to threaten the status quo. Censorship had thus been instrumental in bringing about an expression with certain post-modern features. Michael Holquist suggests that censorship is a dynamic and multi-directional relationship between censor and censored. Though the dominant power attempts to establish discursive hegemony, it is locked into a negotiation with those it suppresses (17). The censor’s attempts to inflict a hegemonic world-view draws various reactions from the censored with unpredictable side effects. Modris Eksteins suggests in Rites of Spring and Walking since Daybreak that a fragmented consciousness caught on the ideological battleground between colonizer and colonized is definably postmodern for being dialogical, historical, and fictional. He further identifies an emergent

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borderland syndrome in the Baltic region, characterized by unstable frontiers, blurred definitions of identity and place, and a fragmented, post-traumatic psyche. These resulted from a ceaseless slaughter that began in the thirteenth century and culminated with the traumas and destructions of the two world wars. In Latvia, one side effect of extensive censorship was that writers started to explore ideological “loopholes” and write a veiled form of literature to elude the censor. They chose complex literary forms and ironic modes that were shared by the insiders but excluded, or “counter-censored,” the hegemonic Soviets. Other East-Central European writers, particularly in the Baltic nations, used similar tactics. In ‘Come into My Time’: Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970–90, Violeta Kelertas identifies a similar response to censorship in Lithuania following World War II. Wishing to communicate information that could be perceived as subversive, Lithuanian writers adopted allegories, magic realism, complex sub-texts, and irony: “By writing in this modern fashion, writers hoped to evade the censor, who was notoriously obtuse and was not up to deciphering the meanings of strange, convoluted texts whose point usually required that the reader work to see it” (7; see also her article pp. 125–34 above). The following discussion of Aleksandrs Pelēcis’s writings will illustrate these remarks. Pelēcis, whose last writings appeared just prior to and immediately following the Latvian declaration of independence in 1990, depicts a darkly ironic “carnival” of death, related to a violent but understated clash between Latvian and Soviet worldviews. In particular, his Sibirijas Grāmata (The Siberia Book; 1993) is emblematic of Latvia’s struggle against overwhelming cultural, political, and military oppression. Pelēcis’s autobiographical writing also features some sophisticated postmodern structural innovations in contemporary Latvian writing: reflexive imagery, shifting perspectives, spatio-temporal leaps, polyglossic linguistic innovations, and dead-pan irony. Pelēcis, a noted poet and author already prior to his long imprisonment in Siberia, wrote several poems in 1946 that questioned Latvia’s Soviet regime. He was promptly arrested, tried, and sent to Siberia. He was released from detention twenty-three years later, in 1969, but this did not end his persecution, nor did it guarantee him free expression. Like Solzhenitsyn, who dedicated his Gulag Archipelago to all those who did not live to tell it, Pelēcis became concerned with the psychological burden of setting down a record as a duty to those who died. Pelēcis reminds the reader of the need to recall the massacre under Stalin so that it may never happen again. He estimates the number of dead in the Gulag camps of Kolima, Vorkuta, Taiseta, Inta, Komsomolska and elsewhere to have been around 10 million. There are two versions of Pelēcis’s book. The first, substantially censored version was published in Latvia by the publisher Avots as Ar Melno Vēju (With the Black Wind) in 1991, a full year after Latvia became independent. The second, uncensored version, that was published in the United States under the title Sibirijas Grāmata (Siberia Book) by the Latvian Press Group in 1993 won the General Gopera Foundation Literary Prize in 1994, shortly before the writer’s death in October 1995. Pelēcis directly links writing to the experience of oppression: Food, is offered at less than subsistence levels, eventually all will die from malnutrition, unless they learn to adapt quickly. Gruel the daily food. “Sundays,” I ask, “what happens on Sundays? Do we have a day of rest?” The guard laughs, “Of course, on Sundays the task is much lighter, no logs to carry then.” I endure until the end of the week, when I learn the task is now to bury bodies.

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Three stiffs to a grave, “to save time” in digging and wood in the making of markers, they say. The earth is rock hard, the shovel ineffectual. The guard is heavy and armed with a sub-machine gun and metal fillings on his teeth. He laughingly gives me what they call a “pencil,” a rod of steel with sharpened point for hacking the permafrost. This work turns out to be harder and more melancholy than the daily routine; by Sunday noon we look forward to hauling timbers. (Sibirijas Grāmata 71–72)

The “pencil” functions here as a double-signifier, symbolizing imprisonment and expression, destruction and creation, censorship and freedom, as well as a clash between Soviet and Latvian worldviews. Pelēcis defied censorship in Siberia and continued to write by trading with local black-market dealers some of his rations for the stub of a pencil and a Portland cement bag made of layers of paper. The multi-layered bag served well, but the pencil needed constant sharpening, and each sharpening required payment with rations. Eventually, when the pencil was used up, Pelēcis recorded his writing in the Siberian permafrost using only his finger. The image of a broken kaleidoscope may refer to such disruptions of language: If you look through a kaleidoscope, you can see wonderful abstract scenery. Like a geometrical Martian illustration. But if you break the kaleidoscope, the symmetry collapses. Instead, the soul is pricked by multi-colored shards of glass. (69)

Pelēcis’s book can be understood as a deconstruction of both the social order and the formal conventions of literature, including the unities of time, place, action, narrative viewpoint, and even conceptual flow. His text is associative rather than linear, absurd rather than rational, disjunctive rather than unified, dialogical rather than monological. It offers contradictory perspectives on the Gulag, juxtaposing, for example, the steadfast admiration of Russian prisoners for Stalin and the Soviet government with the hostility that prisoners from other ethnic groups feel against them. Pelēcis’s disjunctive narrative conveys a sensory breakdown that seems to suspend time and space, as in a remembered experience in the icy North where time seemed frozen. His multi-perspectival representation deviates from the monologic Party line. Pelēcis’s historical account assumes an anti-authoritarian and anti-authoritative stance that remains subjective. In his self-reflecting rendition, personal history becomes as important as the history itself. Pelēcis’s writing represents the author’s traumatized recollections that transcend forensic truths and enter into a mythic mode. Pelēcis explains in his foreword to the US edition that the Latvian editors censored and watered down the text until it was almost unrecognizable, which is curious, considering that Latvia was on the brink of independence when he began writing the book and had actually achieved freedom by the time the book went to press. The editors apparently feared reprisals from the Soviet authorities, which still held most power positions in Latvia following the declaration of independence. Some of the many passages omitted in Ar Melno Vēju describe the prison-guards’ complete lack of emotion in carrying out tortures and executions. As Nietzsche and, after him, Foucault have suggested, moral codes of behavior are imposed on individuals through intimidation and violence — two forms of oppression practiced by the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, many Latvians continued to practice self-censorship, for they were unable to confront the

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painful truth that they had submitted to oppression in order to stay alive. Such self-perpetuating self-censorship indicates the degree to which indoctrinated subjects become effects of censoring power structures. In Pelēcis’ case, however, truncating his work attracted attention to his writing. Pelecis’s experiences are akin to those found in the Lithuanian Balys Sruoga’s Dievų Miškas (Forest of the Gods; 1957), in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and Agate Nesaule’s A Woman in Amber (1995). Latvian experiences in Siberia have meanwhile also been recorded by Aina Bērziņa in Nekas Nav Aizmirsts (Nothing Is Forgotten; 1995), Ojara Mednis in Trīs Burtnīcam (For Three Journals; 1992), and Melanija Vanaga in Dveselu Pulcēšana: Veļupes Krastā (A Gathering of Souls: At the Shore of the River of Spirits; 1999).

Part II. Theater as a Literary Institution Editor Dragan Klaić

General Introduction Dragan Klaić Historical and theoretical discourses of theater tend to focus on dramatic theater, associating it thus closely with literature and literary production. In modern European theater history, dramatic theater represents only one dimension, which has not always been dominant and most popular yet often most appreciated and most studied. It hardly could be otherwise because theater productions leave few traces behind. From the performance of a play often only the text is preserved and studied. Theater history, initiated by Max Herrmann as an autonomous academic discipline when he founded the Theater Institute at the University of Berlin in 1922, gradually emancipated the study of the theater from philology and dramatic theory, and led to systematic examinations of the stage elements, as well as of the political, cultural, and economic context of the stage as a medium, institution, and system. This revealed that the theater is a complex institution involving meaning creation on stage, audience reaction, and “backstage factors.” Meaning on stage emerges from the use of such overlapping semiotic fields as text, music, movement, gesture, lighting, costumes, scenery, and make up. The reception of the performance is affected by the composition and behavioral conventions of the audience; and the “backstage” includes the architecture of the venue, technological and economic foundations, professional training and recruitment, institutional hierarchy and specialization of labor, external supervision by the authorities, mobility of the artists and their work, and many other factors. Multifaceted research approaches revealed theater as a form of highly symbolic public representation of cultural and political values, ideas, and aspirations. The social role of the theater tends to be ambivalent since it serves as an instrument of elucidation and indoctrination, critique, and dissent, but also as an effective means to appease its audience. Traditional theater history has been predominantly articulated in terms of national histories and cultural narratives, but it has been gradually recognized that theater is an intercultural field of constant borrowings and transmutations of textual, cultural, technical, and organizational elements, originating from various cultural realms. This dynamics goes beyond the formation of the nineteenth-century repertory canon, which accommodated some international classics and popular contemporary melodramas, operettas, and comedies, or, later, the adaptation of Stanislavsky’s “System” in virtually all European schools of acting. Differences in the organization of the companies and their daily work (rehearsals, performances, tours, advertising tactics, fund raising) notwithstanding, theater across nineteenth-century Europe showed a high degree of standardization, mostly due to the practice of intercultural communication and intensive translation activity. A fairly coherent corpus of plays

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appeared in the European repertory, in translation from the original, sometimes in a major language (usually German), and often in adaptations. In the continental capitals, especially Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, theater life provided some highly professional standards that were replicated elsewhere. Viennese workshops delivered standard stage sets to venues across the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; architectural and technological solutions were quickly imitated elsewhere. The increased mobility of nineteenth-century European society benefited the theater as well. The growing number of tours, leading beyond the immediate surroundings of a theater company’s residential venue, spread aesthetic influences and shaped audience expectations. Companies traveled, sometimes considerably far, and so did prominent actors, directors, and writers. Actors sometimes appeared as solo guests in their own language, alongside the domestic colleagues who kept playing in their own language. The careers of directors like Adam Mandrović and Branko Gavella show considerable regional mobility. The present history of literary cultures in East-Central Europe approaches theater primarily as a literary institution, as it relates to literature, literary production, and literary criticism and theory, as well as to the various institutional and organizational endeavors generated within the field of literature. But the articles in this section look beyond dramatic theater and cover various forms of music theater, as well as such genres as cabaret that have traditionally been seen as a lower art form if judged by literary qualities and criteria. The essays of the Polish contributors, for instance, show that avant-garde experiments used various stage forms as their vehicle, including cabaret. The ordering logic of following theater’s development primarily through the prism of national theater histories might find its justification here in so far as the stage has been serving as a platform for the affirmation of national identity, national language, and national literature, as Zoltán Imre’s essay on the complicated history of building the Hungarian National Theatre demonstrates. The stage used to be perceived as a key public institution of the nation, capable of articulating with symbolic presentations the essence of a nation’s “mission,” recalling its past glory, and investing it with no less a glorious future. Of course, these heavily ideological tasks could be implemented only with a great deal of willingness to compromise, which means that theater needed to develop its entertainment function in order to build its audience and to feed it simultaneously with an emancipatory message. Moreover, everyday communication among the inhabitants was bilingual or multilingual in many cities of the region, and theaters had, therefore, to face competitors performing in the same location in other, often culturally hegemonic languages. This was the case with Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Timişoara, or Poznań at various moments of the last centuries and in some regional cities even today. Linguistic differentiation did not mean totally different repertories, neither in dominant genres nor in particular titles; they encompassed similarities in the exercise of the métier and the visual image of the stage. In some instances, necessity even demanded that two companies playing in two different languages share the same venue. In practice, the nineteenth-century theater life of Prague or Budapest, or even of some smaller towns, was multicultural and inevitably intercultural, despite the intensive appropriation of the stage for the national cause. We have divided the region’s theater history since 1800 into three historic phases: 1) national awakening and Realism, when the playwright took the central role; 2) Modernism and the emergence of dominant theater directors; and 3) theater after World War II, when strong ideological requirements and repressive mechanisms were compensated to some degree by strong government

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funding of culture, especially theater. In all three sections, longer overview articles alternate with shorter texts on some important aspects and developments, and a few profiles of prominent artists. We aimed at highlighting emblematic moments and dynamics rather than providing comprehensive coverage. The similarities and common points of the supposedly national theater histories become visible in the overall structure, which foregrounds some common parameters of theater’s development in East-Central Europe, as well as its often delayed parallels with developments in Western Europe.

Figure 7. The Hungarian National Theater (A Nemzeti Színház). Franz Sandmann’s colored lithography, based on a drawing of Rudolf Alt. 1845. Courtesy of the Országos Színháztörténeti Múzeum és Intézet (State Museum and Institute for Theater History), Budapest, Hungary.

1. Professionalization and Institutionalization in the Service of a National Awakening

Introduction Dragan Klaić While in some Western European countries rich theater life was divorced from contemporary literature throughout much of the nineteenth century, in East-Central Europe it appeared during that period in its professionalized and institutionalized form, thanks to literature and theater’s mission to serve the dissemination of literature. In the long period between Sheridan and G. B. Shaw, for instance, established English writers did not write for theater, and its prosperity was due to hack authors, capable of delivering huge quantities of melodrama and various comic plays to feed the growing audience demand and sustain the stage as a commercial enterprise. In East-Central Europe, meanwhile, theater emerged as an interface between authors engaged in the cause of national emancipation and a growing audience. The professional companies that emerged in East-Central Europe from student and amateur groups faced the multiple task of securing performance venues, building a repertory and an audience, developing professional skills, combating censorship and various prejudices and traditional suspicions associated with the performance and the performers. Literary figures stood at the cradle of theater as a national ideological project, formulated its goals in affirmation of the culture’s national identity, national language, and national literature. The authors provided the connection between romantic interpretations of the nation’s past and projections of its future as a community, ultimately reaching its utmost promise in the creation of an independent national state. Writers formulated the cultural and political mission, the theoretical framework of dominant genres, the basic repertory material, and often even assumed the roles of manager, director, agitator, fundraiser, supervisor, and critic. The less politically powerful the nation was, the higher the expectations were for the theater. In tripartite Poland or in tiny Slovenia, theater acquired not just cultural but also essential political functions. If public performance in the native language could not emerge before the beginning of the twentieth century for Lithuanians, clandestine performances offered a solution. Historic delays in nation formation and the articulation of its cultural program were overcome with accelerated development, as in the case of the Estonians. In order to build up an audience, the stage language relied on the vernacular and cast aside abstract projections of an ideal national language by the philological founding fathers. The enormous body of European romantic and late-romantic dramatic literature provided ample models for the creation of a national dramatic repertory. Roughly speaking, the past was thematized in various approximations to the tragic genre; contemporary life, whether urban or rural, was left to various comic genres. Tragic coloring of the national past was supposed to inspire and encourage and thus serve a moral and educative purpose. The comic genres aimed at civilizing, emancipating, and consolidating the community, as

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well as to reward virtue over vice chastised. Foreign authors provided welcome models and their works were integrated in the repertory through translations, sometimes from second-hand sources (e.g., Shakespeare via German). Translations often turned into far-reaching adaptations that would stress the local circumstances and thus imply an intricate intercultural transaction and domestication, for instance of Molière’s characters. Despite all of its intellectual and literary ambitions, theater could not survive without melodrama, whose stereotypical features (albeit in a mesmerizing diversity of packaging) eased the cultural adaptation and absorption and were essential for ensuring the emotional allegiance of a large audience. Foreign cultural influences, especially in music and songs, colored the comic genres and matched the borrowings from the national folklore. Even in its nascent phase, theater was supposed to serve many interests and specific agendas, to satisfy the desires and expectation of various social groups, literary factions, and political orientations. Inevitably, it became a contested terrain, a turbulent zone where the contradictions and divergences of an evolving nation were mirrored in a temperamental way. The other complicating variable was censorship, imposed practically everywhere in a systematic fashion but with various degrees of severity and with often unpredictable shifts and turns. Beyond these political complications theater had to face the economic vulnerability of show business. The limited size and modest spending power of the potential audiences yielded an income that could not sustain the theater companies. Contributions from wealthy patrons and various institutional charity drives were needed to provide the bare minimum. The notion of a theater company, its status, impact, and prestige were inextricably tied to the notion of a venue. In most places where theater activity started in the nineteenth century, venues did not exist or were controlled by competing companies performing in another language. The sharing of a venue from one evening to another was an arrangement dictated by necessity, but the ambition to build theater buildings as physical embodiments of a national mission became a pressing and often long lasting project, as the Hungarian case demonstrates. The recruitment of the first generations of professional actors is another fascinating topic. Ever since the early sixteenth-century professionalization of theater in Western Europe, amateurs have kept supplying new professional practitioners. One learned the tricks of the trade from parents, peers, and older colleagues, thus creating theater dynasties. In nineteenth-century East-Central Europe, the situation was not much different; the first theater schools were established at the end of the century at the earliest. Yet another option was available as the Bulgarian case amply shows: to send talented young people abroad for some systematic schooling. This way, and also through touring foreign companies, professional acting standards were constantly upgraded. Nevertheless, playwrights regularly had to function as coaches, supervisors of diction, and disseminators of proper stage manners. Professional theater companies appeared as private enterprises, initiated by committees that included representatives from the literary, intellectual, and economic elites, and licensed by the authorities but mostly without some steady government subsidy. Since theater tends to be a costly undertaking, appeals to the patriotic as well as to the mere theater-loving sentiments of the public were constant features of the precarious nineteenth-century theater economy. The growth of urban population enlarged the audience base but sometimes brought increasing competition from dissident and alternative traveling groups. The development of the press was an important collateral to the maturing of the stage. Papers provided not only a critical platform but also a publicity medium and a channel for popularizing theater as a key institution of any self-respecting nation.

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Building a(s) Theater: the Pesti Magyar Színház in 1837 Zoltán Imre Debates on the Pesti Magyar Színház (Hungarian Theater of Pest), its opening night’s performance, and its reception reveal how important it was to build a theater to bolster a Hungarian national identity, culture, and state within an Austrian imperial context during the first half of the nineteenth century. Theater as a Multifunctional Institution Eric J. Hobsbawn argues that the formation of national states in nineteenth-century Europe was connected, in practice, to a historically accepted and/or territorially independent country, administrative institutions, aggressive political practice, a deep rooted cultural elite, national literature, and administrative language (Nations 50–53). People without an independent country and without administrative institutions were to legitimize themselves through cultural practices and institutions. Though part of the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Hungary could keep its quasi-independence through its own administrative institutions that were subordinated to the Emperor (and his representatives), just as foreign affairs, defense, and the treasury were. This institutional system and political relation was not changed until the war of independence in 1848/49 (Bertényi and Gyapai 305–307 and 323–47). By the second decade of the century, the “neologist” movement of prominent writers recognized the importance of Hungarian as a national language and strove to modernize it so that it can properly express contemporary ideas on everyday life. National literature, relying on the national language, was the main provider of texts about a mythical national past and a desired future. Since Latin was the main language in the administration, German in business, and French in the salons of the aristocracy, the renewal of Hungarian represented also a passive resistance against the Austrian political oppression and the foreign cultural influences. Next to the development of language and literature, the national survival also demanded a transformation of cultural and civil institutions into symbolic means. Institutions such as the Academy of Sciences (1825), the National Museum and Library (1808), and a bridge across the Danube (1842–48) had obvious practical and modernizing functions, but they were seen also as monuments expressing the power and the values of the nation by means of their size, design, ornaments, and location. These newly established institutions in Pest-Buda became sites of cultural performances expressing the nation’s longing for independence. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Pest-Buda enjoyed a growing economic significance and was transformed into an administrative center of the Austrian government. By 1835, Pest-Buda’s population was about sixty-seven thousand, out of which only a fifth were Hungarians (Viszota 64–68); the rest were Germans and Slavs of various background. Though Hungarians already recognized Pest-Buda as their capital, its officially legitimated culture and widely-spoken language remained German. There were various German newspapers, and in 1812 a new Pesti

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Német Színház (German Theater of Pest) opened with three-thousand-five-hundred seats (sic!); another one had been in operation in Buda since 1789. In this constellation a Hungarian theater could not function as a business venture because the potential audience was limited. Since its inception, the project of a Hungarian theater had been dependent for its legitimacy and financial security on politics, especially national politics; it was obviously utilized for political purposes. Although political oppression and censorship prevented the full articulation of all political implications in the debates, they were expressed symbolically both in literature and on the stage, and even through the very name of the new theater: Pesti Magyar Színház (Hungarian Theater of Pest). The theater was not utilized only for (disguised or open) political purposes, but was launched also as a cultural institution. Since the renewal of Hungarian was considered crucial for everyday life and national survival, theater was employed to create, spread, and maintain the public use of the national language through playing translated, adapted, and original Hungarian dramas, and to establish eventually a national repertoire. One of its main functions was to develop a national tragedy for articulating a glorious Hungarian past and to project it in service of a desired Hungarian independence and dominance over the country’s Serbian, Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and other smaller ethnic minorities. The political and cultural functions of theater were obviously connected to moral and social ones. For the contemporaries, the purpose of the theater was to establish and represent the features of the “good” Hungarian citizen, and to train the audience for the roles it was to play in a reformed and modernized capitalist society, while maintaining its national character and identity. Theater was to present also the appropriate costumes, habits, and behavior of the day, and to propagate the actual political and social views through contemporary Hungarian and foreign dramas (Kerényi, Magyar színház 259–263 and “Nemzeti Színház” 40). Theater was, therefore, transformed into a multi-functional national institution and was understood by the contemporaries as a site of meaning production. Anxieties about Building a Theater According to Peggy Phelan, architecture plays a significant role in the strategy to outlast the body’s decomposition by placing the terror of temporality within a solid monument, for instance a building (“Dead”). In addition to its political, cultural, social, and moral functions, the theater is supposed to have, therefore, implicit ontological functions in facing death. In this sense, the theater building itself can be seen as a solid monument for the past and the present; and as a site where, remembering the past, “the survivors [can] create identity for themselves” (Reinhart Koselleck in Assmann, Gedächtnis 63). Furthermore, the stone of a theater building can express a nation’s identity and the personalities of its founding fathers, transforming them thus into an enduring physical and visible manifestation. The absolutist European rulers of the Enlightenment revitalized the notion of the theater as public monument, because regularized city spaces were presumed to be correlatives of an orderly society, carrying cultural and political implications for expressing, publicizing, and visualizing the founding ruler’s fame and power (Carlson, Places 72–75). This revitalization

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reached Pest-Buda around 1800, when Viceroy Joseph, the highest public dignitary and representative of the Emperor in Hungary, established the Királyi Szépítő Bizottság (Royal Improvement Committee), which built the German Theater of Pest (1808–12) and renewed the city center. Hungarians had recognized the cultural and political possibilities of theater since the 1790s. In 1830, the Assembly laid down the basic principles of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and declared its intention to establish a national theater for the promotion of the Hungarian language. In 1831, Pest County formed a Committee for Promoting Hungarian and asked a leading reformer, Count István Széchenyi, to submit a detailed plan for a permanent theater. As he stated in his Magyar játékszínrül (On the Hungarian Playhouse; 1832), the theater should be a national institution run by a corporation, supported by the Assembly, and located in the city center by the Danube. Its building should follow a Parisian model. The leaders of Pest County were not entirely satisfied with Széchenyi’s plan because they wanted to keep control of the theater. They started, therefore, in August 1835 the construction of a temporary building. Széchenyi, who had not given up his plan for a permanent theater supported by the Assembly, received from the Viceroy in October as a gift the area proposed in his book, while the city of Pest announced a third plan with a third location. Upon instructions from the Viceroy, the city abandoned its plan, and, in February 1836, Pest County also postponed its construction for four weeks, in order to allow the Assembly to authorize a permanent theater for the nation. This, however, was refused by the Upper House. Thus, in March 1836, Pest County could continue its construction. After that decision, the county’s project received nation-wide moral and, later, financial support, especially after the Emperor dissolved the Assembly and imprisoned the leaders of the reformist opposition (Szekér 23–37; Vörösmarty, Lapok 363–371; Vörösmarty, Drámák 537; and Bertényi and Gyapai 343–47). Realizing a national theater with the Pesti Magyar Színház between 1790 and 1837 involved a struggle for power among Hungarians, a symbolic resistance against the Monarchy and its Hungarian representatives, and also moral prejudices against the theater as an institution. In the end, the Theater Committee of Pest County built the venue, supported it, and controlled it. The theater foregrounded the landed gentry (középnemesség) that rose to power in Pest and other counties, and utilized the theater and its program to propagate civil reforms and liberal national political views. A theater was suitable for these reforms and views because it was designed to see and to be seen at the same time. It was the only medium with the capacity to regroup on and off-stage the various strata of society — members of the various classes in terms of occupation, wealth, and social status — and to display them so that they could be seen and recognized together as a nation. For Mihály Vörösmarty, the spectators of the opening night were transformed into a real community, representing a virtual one, a nation: The audience “was immersed in its clear patriotic feeling […] and its silence contained amazement, deep emotions, and the dignity of a self-respecting nation” (Lapok 66). The theater suggested the united body of the desired nation but it also manifested and made visible the social and political divisions. In this respect, the theater was a site for social, political, and moral control, based on the process of inclusion and exclusion.

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Performing Theater — The Opening Night Peggy Phelan observes that architecture is implicitly linked to “theater, to the art of disguise. Theater itself is the space in which death is made to play, to be a play” (“Dead” 75). In addition to its political, cultural, social, moral functions, the construction of a theater is supposed to have an implicit ontological function, to face not only death but also life. This is what happened on the stage of the Pesti Magyar Színház. The opening performance played with death and made it part of the play. It was an evening of celebration, including Hungarian dances, music, songs, and a melodrama, Belizár (Belisarius; 1828), written in German by Eduard von Schenk and translated into Hungarian by János Kiss. Even contemporary critics noted the lack of Hungarian drama. The Prologue of the festive evening was a poetic fantasy, Árpád ébredése (Árpád’s Awakening), an allegory involving Árpád, the Conqueror, mythic leader, territorial founder of an independent Hungarian Kingdom, and the founder of the first Hungarian dynasty. This founding figure — one of Hobsbawn’s and Assmann’s criteria for national legitimization — was awakened by a Ghost on stage to open the theater, so that his theatrical awakening could also be interpreted as an awakening of the nation by means of theater. Mihály Vörösmarty, the author of the Prologue, had previously written a Hungarian national epos, Zalán futása (Zalán’s Flight; 1825), which told the story of how Árpád defeated the Bulgarian Prince Zalán and regained thereby Attila’s territory, what was considered as historical Hungary. The Prologue thus made reference to the famous Hungarian mythological past, and legitimized symbolically national purposes and claims: the Hungarians had a right to an independent national state in the Carpathian basin, for it was assumed by Árpád as a legacy from Attila. Árpád’s historical figure was thus related to the great Hun Kingdom and was to conjure up the images of a mythological past and to serve as the source for a desired Hungarian hegemony. The performance of the Prologue was used to legitimize the theater as an institution for spreading language, moral values, social customs, and liberal civil reforms. This was evident in a scene in which the allegorical figure of the Actress, symbolizing a theater profession that is often implicitly linked to prostitution, was defended from various ghosts by the national hero Árpád. Moreover, the ideas of the liberal reform politics were symbolically expressed on stage by various characters — the Old Man, Young Man, Father, his Son, Women — suggesting that the construction of the theater was the result of national cooperation. Using a mythical past to legitimize the present can be reassuring, but, as Assmann argues, it can also draw attention to the problems of the present (Gedächtnis 79). The present is, then, not only reassured but “becomes relative in relation to a greater, more beautiful past” (79). In the Prologue, the Poet tells Árpád what had happened to the Hungarians since his death. The difference between the heroic past and the present could relativize the present and serve as a plea to change it. This project was carried out on March 15, 1848, when the Hungarian revolution broke out in Pest. Its celebration in the evening performance of József Katona’s national drama, Bánk bán, showed how important theater had become socially, culturally, and politically. The Pesti Magyar Színház was renamed by the assembly as National Theater in 1840, but the cultural, political, and financial control over it has been debated ever since. The control over the existing theater (company) was connected to the proposed permanent building, which was not built until 2002. The first temporary building was demolished in 1913, the second one in 1965.

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The company then stayed in its third temporary building until the opening of the new building on March 15, 2002, on the Danube shore, south of the present city center. Though the company of the National Theater has worked since 1837 in Budapest, and four other National Theaters exist in Győr, Miskolc, Pécs, and Szeged, the notion of a permanent building has been the most significant (virtual) theater project in Hungary, around which (real and virtual) cultural, political, moral, and social performances took place. Even after the end of the communist system in 1989, when theater in Hungary became a marginal commodity in the capitalist cultural and entertainment industry, this virtual theater project continued to draw people, parties, and institutions as performers into a debate or a demonstration. The architectural concept of the National Theater’s new building, its construction process and budget, artistic leadership, ensemble, salaries, repertory, and finally the use of Imre Madách’s Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man; 1861) at the opening in 2002 — all these became subjects of passionate public controversies.

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Slovenia: from Jesuit Performance to Opera Lado Kralj Slovenian theater began in 1657 with performances in Slovenian by students of the Jesuit school. Subsequent performances were sporadic: in 1721 there were passion plays in Slovenian, in 1789 performances stimulated by the French Revolution, and in 1848 performances that responded to the March Revolution in Vienna. Continuous and professional theater activity began only in 1867, with the establishment of the Dramatic Society in Ljubljana. The performances were given in the Stanovsko gledališče (Theater of the Guilds) that the German population was already using for its own theater events. The Theater of the Guilds burned down in 1887 and was replaced by the Deželno gledališče (Provincial Theater), erected in 1892. This building was used for Slovenian as well as German performances, but since the German theater company was increasingly more eager to have a place of its own, a Kaiser Franz Joseph Jubiläums Theater was built for the German artists in 1911. After the breakdown of the Monarchy, in the autumn of 1918, the Provincial Theater staged for several months Slovenian dramas as well as opera performances; the Slovenian drama ensemble moved to the Jubiläums Theater when it was confiscated by the new State of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians. The opera ensemble stayed in the Provincial Theater. The Slovenian National Theater still consists of the same two houses, one producing dramas and the other operas.

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Czech Theater: A Paradoxical Prop of the National Revival Ondřej Hučín The early activists of the Czech national movement in the 1770s were aware of the educational and linguistic potentials and the social appeal of the theater. The Enlightenment did not generate a tradition of urban theater in the Czech language, so that the pioneers of Czech theater had to adopt the operational and artistic model that German and Austrian theaters had developed. They introduced in this adopted model the Czech language and furthered a national identity based on a presumed old glory. Out of consideration for the lower and middle class urban public attending Czech-language performances, theater people were unable to join the revivalists who codified a literary language and a “higher” culture. Instead, they opted for a broadly acceptable conversational Czech, working with appropriate popular themes, legends, histories, contemporary social questions, and comic stories that were easily accessible to their public. A conflict between ideal expectations and practical possibilities became typical of the national revival in theater. The idea of a Czech national theater was first formulated in 1793 under the influence of Friedrich Schiller’s writings (Šedivý 25–41; Černý, “Idea” 22). From the very start of the National Revival, theater people have shown a steady interest in historical drama as an expression of national identity. A number of texts, of which few survive, laid the basis for one of the most typical dramatic genres of Czech nineteenth-century theater, dramas of a marked national orientation, derived from well-known domestic quasi-histories. The repertoire of Czech urban theater was, however, wider: it developed from the Enlightenment didactic theater and comedy of manners (Gottlieb Stephanie the Younger, Paul Weidmann, Johann Jakob Engel), translations of Molière, Lessing, Schiller, and Shakespeare, and trivial romantic folk comedies, chivalrous plays, Italian buffo, and Viennese Singspiels (Černý, Dějiny 171). Shared Venues Czech professional theater began in 1785, in the Gräflich Nostitzsches Nationaltheater (Count Nostitz National Theater), which was called from 1798 onward Ständisches Theater or Stavovské divadlo (Theater of the Estates). The main tenants until 1920 were German drama and opera companies. An independent Czech company, the Vlastenské divadlo (Patriotic Theater), was founded in 1786 but operated in steadily deteriorating working and political conditions and finally merged in 1805 with the Theater of the Estates, where Czech-language productions had virtually disappeared in the previous years. From 1812 onward, Czech-language performances were offered again in the Theater of the Estates under the leadership of the dramatist Jan Nepomuk Štěpánek. From 1824 onward, the performances took place regularly on Sunday and holiday afternoons. Repertoire and production style were determined by the popular taste of the Czech public, as well as by the unfavorable political situation after the Napoleonic wars. The measured and mild public taste favored plays by August Kotzebue, as well as fairy-tale plays (Adolf Bäuerle, Ferdinand Raimund) and chivalrous-robber plays (Heinrich Cuno) from Vienna. The popular native au-

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thors, Jan Nepomuk Štěpánek and Václav Kliment Klicpera, wrote historical and adventure plays but also contributed to the creation of an original Czech-language contemporary drama repertoire with Štěpánek’s Čech a Němec (Czech and German; 1816) and Pivovár v Sojkově (The Brewery in Sojkov; 1825) and Klicpera’s Divotvorný klobouk (The Magical Hat) and Veselohra na mostě (The Comedy on the Bridge), both written in 1828. Klicpera’s sophisticated comic plots provided the Czech core repertoire. Štěpánek’s opera repertoire relied on the German company and produced mainly foreign works (Weber, Mozart, and Rossini). Endowing a folk theme with a lyrical mood, the composer František Škroup attempted an original Czech-language opera with Dráteník (The Tinker; 1826), which was repeatedly revived later. With Oldřich a Božena (Oldřich and Božena; 1828), based on a popular Czech tale, Škroup attempted also a higher genre but he stumbled on the quantitative verse that Josef Jungmann and others championed and the performance failed. During the National Revival of the 1820s, attempts were made to create a “higher” and independent Czech-language culture that would surpass the German one. A number of literary mystifications and forgeries were launched to raise the prestige of Czech culture. Václav Hanka’s forged texts functioned as thematic sources for Czech drama and theater throughout the century (see pp. 277–78 and 366–67 below). Jungmann wanted to set normative standards for literature and theater in Slovesnost (Literature; 1820). He adopted from German classical theories a strict hierarchy of genres (tragedy/drama/comedy/farce), determined what their appropriate linguistic resources were, and demarcated them thematically (Jungmann, Slovesnost 131–148; Macura, Znamení 193–197). But the dramatists and theater practitioners were not eager to respond to his challenge to create a Czech tragedy. Only František Turinský’s Angelina (1821), and Klicpera’s Soběslav, selský kníže (Soběslav, Peasant Prince; 1826) are worth mentioning. Newly published translations of poetic dramas by Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare were neglected as well. Josef Kajetán Tyl and His Opponents Meanwhile, the early professional Czech-language productions in Brno, the extensive activities of amateur theater groups elsewhere, and the strolling folk puppet theater followed the concepts of the Prague stage, its themes and genres. Only two Prague amateur companies attempted a more challenging repertoire: the Teisingerovo divadlo (Teisinger Theater, 1821–1824) and the České divadlo v Kajetánském domě na Malé Straně (Czech Theater at the Kajetán House in Malá Strana, 1834–1837), usually referred to as the Kajetánské divadlo. Under the leadership of Josef Kajetán Tyl, a publicist and versatile theater man, Karel Hynek Mácha, Karel Sabina, Jan Kaška, and other Czech writers and actors tried with partial success to establish an independent Czech stage in the Kajetán Theater, with a predominantly domestic repertoire consisting mainly of Klicpera, together with Štěpánek, Kotzebue, and Ernst Raupach. Tyl’s work in the 1830s and 40s had a decisive influence on Czech theater. After his early days as an actor and critic, Tyl concentrated on dramaturgy, directing, and writing, the latter primarily for the theater. He formulated a concept of a “national theater” that derived from the National Revival movement but appealed also to the mentality and taste of a broad and socially disparate general public. Tyl’s dramatic work absorbed influences from Romanticism, didactic

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trends, and realist procedures, encapsulating thus the whole spectrum of theater genres of his age. He wrote locally-based farces, dramatized tall stories, and contemporary plays known as “picture of life.” He also wrote the Czech historical dramas Jan Hus (Jan Hus) and Kutnohorští havíři aneb Krvavý soud (The Kutná Hora Miners; or The Bloody Court), both in 1848, and he even wrote a poetic drama, Čestmír (1835), though this stood outside his main interest. Tyl tried to focus on political and ethical themes from current issues and national history to catch typical features of the contemporary Czech city and village. At the same time he wanted to contribute to national education by creating characters and situations that, however idyllic, would serve as examples for the conduct of the spectators. The dramatic fragments that Tyl’s opponent, the poet Karel Hynek Mácha, wrote between 1831 and 1834 sharply deviate from this concept: Bratrovrah aneb Václav a Boleslav (Fratricide, or Václav and Boleslav) and Bratři (Brothers) are a case apart in the Czech drama of the National Revival for their extreme introspection. Tyl also shaped the Czech theater as a dramaturg and director. In the Kajetán Theater, and in the years 1846–51 as leader of the Czech-language company in the Theater of the Estates, he devoted hitherto unknown attention to the preparation of productions, stressing teamwork, knowledge of the text, and quality of speech. During the revolutionary year 1848, Tyl also helped formulating ideas about an independent Czech National Theater. During the 1830s and 40s the number of translations considerably increased. Shakespeare and Schiller were newly translated, followed by August Wilhelm Iffland, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, and, occasionally even some Slav writers like Aleksander Fredro, Pushkin, and Gogol. In the 1840s, an anti-Tyl opposition gradually emerged that wanted to unburden the Czech theater of its national didactic role and open it up to West-European trends. When Tyl was forced to leave Prague in 1851 for political reasons, greater opportunities opened for this program, whose chief proponents were the actor, dramatist, and translator Josef Jiří Kolár and the critic and dramatist Ferdinand Břetislav Mikovec. The stylistic inertia of the Czech company in the Theater of the Estates limited the reformist drive, and so did the conservative public and the strict censorship imposed in 1850. The new dramaturgical concept required a broad knowledge of world drama and a careful selection of demanding texts. It promoted above all Romantic tragedy, with irreconcilable conflicts in an inconsistent hero, and the conversational comedy, with intricate twists and sparkling dialogues (Klosová 11–12). Mikovec, and especially Kolár’s Žižkova smrt (Žižka’s Death; 1850), and Don César a spanilá Magelóna (Don Caesar and Charming Magelona; 1852), aimed at reconceptualizing the drama of Czech historical plays, respecting the traditional Czech motif of personal sacrifice for the good of the nation. Major input into the dramaturgy came from a wide range of translations that provided the Czech theater with a basic international repertoire. Translations of Schiller, Goethe, Molière, Hugo, Scribe, Fredro, even the complete works of Shakespeare were published in Czech between 1854 and 1872. There were also dramatizations of prose by Hugo, Balzac, and Sand. The accent in acting was on the internally complex individuality of the main hero and its passionate expression. According to Kolár, acting should be based on self-knowledge and on the subjective interpretation of a role (“Slovo o deklamaci” 17–18). Kolár’s theory and practice represented the first systematic departure from the normative principles of dramatic texts.

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Consolidation and Diversification Efforts to complete the building of the National Theater in Prague led in 1862 to the opening of the Prozatímní divadlo (Provisional Theater), which later became the back part of the National Theater building. The completion of the National Theater in 1881, and its reopening in 1883 after a fire, became a main theme of Czech politics (Černý, “Idea” 20; Kvaček). Romanticism in the Czech theater was moving towards its final phase, in which initial provocation and exaltation were replaced by a more rational analysis, a cultivated and flowery form, lyricism and political pragmatism. Czech drama continued to be dominated by bourgeois comedies and poetic historical plays that retained features of an earlier Romanticism. Josef Václav Frič’s Ivan Mazepa (1865) displays pathos, Emanuel Bozděch’s Baron Goertz (1868) is full of irony; inspiration from Shakespeare and classical drama is evident in Vítězslav Hálek’s Sergius Catilina (1863) and Jaroslav Vrchlický’s trilogy Hippodamie (1890 and 1891); late Romantic theatricality is evident in Václav Vlček’s plays and in Bohumil Adámek’s Salomena (1883). Historical themes often concealed topical political issues. Amusing pictures of bourgeois life by František Věnceslav Jeřábek, František Ferdinand Šamberk, and Josef Štolba signaled the approach of realist drama. Emanuel Bozděch wrote successful conversational comedies, such as the Světa pán v županu (A Man of the World in Dressing Gown; 1876). Lyrical comedies were the domain of Jaroslav Vrchlický, author of Noc na Karlštejně (A Night at Karlštejn; 1884). The classics, above all Shakespeare, enjoyed continued interest, but contemporary foreign authors like Franz Grillparzer, Juliusz Słowacki, Gogol, Ostrovsky, and Ibsen were also played. Vrchlický’s translations of Corneille, Goethe, Hugo, Calderón, and others made exceptional contributions to Czech theater. Plays by Kolár, Klicpera, and Tyl became a stable part of the repertoire. The theory and practice of acting, as incorporated in the writings of Jan Neruda and Josef Durdík’s Kallilogie čili o výslovnosti (Kallilogy, or On Pronunciation; 1873), focused on natural behavior and the intellectual content of declamation, but in the 1880s the National Theater’s prevailing style was still melodic and ornamental declamation. Czech national opera emerged at the end of Romanticism, with the compositions of Bedřich Smetana, who was the conductor of the Provisional Theater between 1866 and 1874. Like Tyl, Smetana turned to legendary, historical, and contemporary bourgeois and country themes. Other composers used similar themes; sometimes they were inspired by Shakespeare and Schiller. The Provisional Theater and the National Theater performed operas by the Czech composers Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Zdeněk Fibich, and Karel Bendl, the Slavic composers Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and Stanisław Moniuszko, and a broad range of Western European composers, including Meyerbeer, Rossini, Verdi, Gounod, and Mozart. During the second half of the century, new professional stages gradually established themselves in Prague, and permanent Czech theaters opened in Pilsen (1865) and Brno (1884) to compete with the older German theaters there. The development of theater life brought about a differentiation in the repertoire and in acting styles. Next to the Prague National Theater, the only other outstanding theater company was Pavel Švanda’s Semčice in Prague and Brno, which relied on realist and naturalist dramaturgy. The popular outdoor arenas — managed by the Provisional Theater as well as by such private groups as the Aréna na hradbách (Arena on the Ramparts; 1869–75) and the Nové české divadlo (New Czech Theater; 1876–85) — offered pure entertain-

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ment and developed distinctive acting styles based on improvisation and topical commentary. The expansion of the popular Czech šantány (cafés chantants) in the 1880s and 90s represented the same trend, as were the cabarets, which combined musical numbers with original, comic, sentimental, and socially critical sketches. Variety and travelogues, often derived from Jules Verne’s adventure stories, achieved considerable popularity in the arenas. These new or revived theatrical genres gradually undermined the central position that the traditional repertoire of the urban theaters held in the Czech lands.

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Slovakia: Theater Starts as an Amateur Endeavor Dagmar Roberts From 1830, when Gašpar Fejérpataky-Belopotocký had founded in Liptovský Mikuláš the first regular, amateur theater company, until 1920, Slovak theater operated on an amateur basis. The professional theaters of Bratislava/Pozsony and Košice/Kassa performed in German and Hungarian. The first performance of Fejérpataky-Belopotocký’s group was Ján Chalupka’s comedy in Czech, Kocourkovo aneb Jen abychom v hanbĕ nezůstali (Kocourkovo, or If We Could but Stop Living in Shame). Chalupka, the most prolific playwright of the period, also wrote comedies and farces in Czech and Hungarian, such as Všecko naopak (All Upside Down; 1832), Třinácta hodina (The Thirteenth Hour; 1835–37), and A vén szerelmes (The Old Lover; 1835), which received a prize from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Another amateur group, with the ambitious name of The Slovak National Theater of Nitra, performed in Sobotište in 1841–42, engaging several well-known writers of the time as actors, among them Andrej Sládkovič, Janko Francisci, Samuel Štúr, and Ján Kalinčiak. The pioneer Slovak actress Anička Jurkovičová was also a member of the group. Until the 1860s, new plays and theoretical or critical reflection on drama were rare. One exception was Mikuláš Dohnány’s 1845 lecture Slovo o dramate slovenskom (A Word on Slovak Drama; 1861), which reflected the expectations of students who were amateur actors in Levoča that in a new era of playwriting drama would be modeled on folk-tales. Jan Palárik, a playwright, wrote several essays on drama, including Dôležitosť dramatickej národnej literatúry (The Importance of National Drama Literature; 1860), which defined drama as the supreme literary genre for its ability to influence society with representations of real people, not biblical stories or Christian ethics. The few original dramatic works of the romantic period include Janko Matúška’s Siroty (Orphans; 1846) and Mikuláš Dohnány’s Podmanínovci (The Podmaníns; 1848). Other amateur theater groups were established in Liptovský Mikuláš (1861) and Turčiansky Sv. Martin (1872). In 1889, a playhouse was built in Turčiansky Sv. Martin and simply called “The House,” since the adjective “National” was banned by the Hungarian authorities. The first play staged there, Marína Oľga Horváthová’s Slovenská sirota (Slovak Orphan), was performed under

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the title Sirota in order to avoid charges of nationalism. In the 1890s, new groups were established in Liptovský Mikuláš, Tisová, Dolný Kubín, and Skalica. The most popular genres of the period were allegorical drama, sentimental plays or farces, and stylized folklore plays. The now forgotten Ferko Urbánek wrote thirty-nine very popular plays in all three genres. Jozef Hollý wrote village comedies such as Kubo (1904) and Geľo Sebechlebský (1912), but also the tragedy Černová (1909), which he published under a pseudonym because it was based on a true incident: during the consecration of a church in the village of Černová in 1907 the Austro-Hungarian military shot Slovak peasants because they were suspected of holding a nationalist demonstration. The incident led to numerous protests both within and outside Slovakia. Realist drama emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century: Jozef Gregor Tajovský’s Ženský zákon (Female Law; 1900), Statky-zmätky (Estates-Confusions; 1909), and Hriech (Sin; 1911) are still stalwarts of the classical repertoire in Slovak theaters. Tajovský used naturalist elements in Medzník (Boundary), originally published under the title Tma (Darkness; 1912), and he showed his knowledge of Ibsen and Tolstoy in Nový život (New Life; 1901).

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Polish Drama Sustains Spiritual Unity in a Divided Country Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Polish drama continued with the Enlightenment genres and experimented with pre-Romantic ones. Due to Poland’s partitioning between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, comedies referring to specific political events, so common in the Enlightenment period, were prohibited and replaced by vaudevilles and comic opera; the latter became a popular form of entertainment with increasingly local motifs. Historical and folkloristic motifs were used with greater frequency. Following the trend in other countries, sentimental comedy also appeared on the Polish stage, mostly as translations and adaptations from other languages, but some young authors fell under their influence and attempted their own works. Notable examples are Juliusz Słowacki’s Maria Stuart (1830), Józef Korzeniowski’s Mnich (The Monk; 1824) and Dymitr i Maria (Dymitr and Maria; 1828), and Tymon Zaborowski’s Bohdan Chmielnicki (1823–24). Elements of these literary conventions and genres are recognizable in parts 2 and 4 of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve; 1820–23), considered to be at the origin of Polish Romantic drama. Their originality lies in overcoming the clichés with powerful lyrical monologues and creating an organic unity between the real and the metaphysical world. Mickiewicz gives credibility to this unity by utilizing folk beliefs, and juxtaposing a Belarusian ritual commemorating the dead with the Christian All Souls’ Day. Part 2 focuses mainly on the ritual itself, evoking the spirits of the dead who admit their sins and warn the living, whereas Part 4 contains a compelling story of a young man driven to madness and destruction because his beloved marries a wealthier man. The unfinished Part 1 was supposed to present the love story itself.

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Drama of Defeat and Survival The failure of the 1830 November uprising shaped Polish Romantic drama both ideologically and historically. A number of plays were intended for reading rather than acting, and were only much later actually performed and contributing to the development of Polish theater art. The three most representative examples of this genre are Part 3 of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve (1832), Słowacki’s Kordian (1833), and Zygmunt Krasiński’s Nie-boska komedia (The Undivine Comedy; 1835). Written and published in exile (Dresden, Geneva, and Paris, respectively), beyond the reach of censorship, they all present young heroes entangled in romantic conflicts of loneliness and alienation, conditioned by history and metaphysics. Each work offers a different interpretation of the national issues, each has a loose and open composition that allows for adaptations and modifications. Because of the complicated turns and twists of Polish history, they have remained relevant for many generations and have been reread and reinterpreted in multiple ways, especially in times of oppression. Forefathers’ Eve, Part 3, undoubtedly the most influential Polish dramatic work, has played a significant political role and inspired numerous Polish artists and writers. Several of its characters are authentic historical figures under their own or slightly altered names. The work can be read on various levels: as a testimony of crimes committed by the Russian occupying power against the Polish people, as a universal story of opposition against tyranny, and as a metaphysical struggle between the forces of good and evil. Next to realistic figures and scenes, the play also contains supernatural ones. The messianic message, so prevalent in Mickiewicz’s later poetry and thought, is clearly expressed in one of the most powerful scenes, “Widzenie księdza Piotra” (Father Peter’s Vision), which is based on prophetic and apocalyptic texts from the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Słowacki wrote a number of dramas in the years 1834–45. Influenced by and alluding to Calderón and Shakespeare, he created the historical tragedies Mazepa (1839) and Samuel Zborowski (1845); the political plays Horsztyński (1835) and Złota czaszka (The Golden Skull; 1842); and chronicles based on myths and legends, such as Balladyna (1839) and Lilla Weneda (1839). Some of these were published during his lifetime, others posthumously; a number of his unfinished pieces were adapted and tested on the stage only in the twentieth century. Krasiński’s Nie-boska komedia contains a powerful vision of future social turmoil against the background of the poet’s personal drama as a defender of religion and past glory. His other major achievement is Irydion (1836), a drama of revenge that presents an apotheosis of the Christian ideas on the ruins of fallen Rome. The dramatic works of the fourth “Romantic bard,” Cyprian Kamil Norwid, include Wanda (1852), Krakus (1851), Kleopatra i Cezar (1872–79), and Pierścień wielkiej damy (The Ring of the Grand Lady; 1872). Norwid deals with important contemporary moral, philosophical, artistic, and social problems, sometimes polemicizing with Mickiewicz or Krasiński. Addressing a select few, he is more difficult and esoteric than his contemporaries. Most of these works by writers in exile could not be performed at home, only some of them were staged in Wielkopolska (Posnania or Greater Poland) and Galicia during the second part of the nineteenth century. They reached the theatrical centers of Warsaw and the Russian partition in general only in the twentieth century.

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Comedy, Historical Plays and Stage Journalism The major achievements in comedy were Aleksander Fredro’s Mąż i żona (Husband and Wife; 1822), Śluby panieńskie (Maiden Vows; 1832), Pan Jowialski (Mr. Jowialski; 1832), Zemsta (Vengeance; 1833), and Dożywocie (Annuity; 1834–35). He introduced local color and Polish motifs into stereotypical traditional plots and presented the vices and eccentricities of the Polish gentry with good-humored irony; he preferred country life to urban customs, whose pettiness, snobbery, and hypocrisy he ridiculed. These comedies offered virtuoso roles for actors and lively entertainment for the public and quickly conquered the Polish stage. But Fredro was severely criticized by his Romantic contemporaries, and Seweryn Goszczyński accused him of indifference to the national cause in Nowa epoka poezji polskiej (The New Era of Polish Poetry). As a result, Fredro retreated from theater and literary life. He resumed writing comedies a couple decades later, but Dwie blizny (Two Scars), Pan Benet (Mr. Benet), Wielki człowiek do małych interesów (A Big Man for Little Business), and his other late plays were published and staged only after his death. After 1848, comedies of manners, as well as nostalgic and melancholy treatments of a distant, and usually idealized, historical past, were staged. The only work of this type that has acquired a permanent place in the Polish repertoire is Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Straszny dwór (The Haunted Manor), based on a libretto by Jan Chęciński (first night in 1865). To a large extent, drama played a journalistic function during the Positivist period and was influenced by the French pièce à thèse as well as by Polish realistic comedies. In the best works of this period, Aleksander Świętochowski’s Niewinni (The Innocent) from 1875 and Piękna (A Beauty) from 1878, the philosophic content weighs down the dramatic construction. The comedies

Figure 8. Stanisław Wyspiański, Self-portrait (1902). Courtesy of the Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (National Museum in Warsaw), Warsaw, Poland.

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from that period were more successful. Józef Bliziński with Pan Damazy (Master Damazy; 1877) or Michał Bałucki with Grube ryby (Big Shots; 1881), Dom otwarty (Open House; 1883), and Ciężkie czasy (Hard Times; 1889), presented lively satirical scenes from the life of the middle class and survived the test of time. Actors could meaningfully participate at that time in choosing the repertoire, especially the lighter one, for instance for outdoor stages, popular in the summer. Wincenty Rapacki and a number of other playwrights were also actors and directors. Warsaw and Cracow were the two major nineteenth-century centers of Polish theatrical activity. Warsaw stages, hindered by Russian censorship, could not choose their repertoire freely but boasted excellent actors who showed their skills mainly in French plays by Dumas, Sardou, Augier, and others. Cracow, under Austrian rule, had a more ambitious repertoire and could function more successfully, thanks to the more liberal political and artistic climate. With the arrival in 1893 of Tadeusz Pawlikowski, theater in Cracow opened to new trends from Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia. Pawlikowski was the first Polish stage director of European renown who appreciated both foreign Impressionism and Naturalism and new Polish trends; he was also the first Polish translator of Gordon Craig’s works. During the Young Poland period he introduced major Romantic poets to the Cracow stage and facilitated the debut of numerous playwrights who became well known later, including Lucjan Rydel, Tadeusz Miciński, Jan August Kisielewski, Stanisław Przybyszewski, and Jan Kasprowicz. Especially successful was Pawlikowski’s cooperation with Stanisław Wyspiański, an artist and a poet with a unique sense for the theater (see Figure 8). Wyspiański experimented with the Polish language, revolutionized theatrical expression, combined folkloric forms with modern artistic means of expression, used numerous symbols, and was a master in creating compelling atmosphere. He turned to antiquity, Polish history, and contemporary events; combining music and pantomime with verbal dramatic expression, he created, around 1900, plays that had a lasting impact on the Polish stage.

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Lithuania: School, Court, and Clandestine Performances Audronė Girdzijauskaitė On the territory of today’s Lithuania ancient theatrical elements are discernible in folk customs, entertainment, and folklore, as well as in pre-Christian cult ceremonies and Lithuanian mythology, in customs and ceremonies of marriage and funeral. Traditions of the Twelfth Night, Shrovetide, and Midsummer have survived to this very day, though transformed and mixed with Christianity. In 1592, at the Vilnius palace of the Lithuanian Duke and Polish king Sigismundus Vasa, Italian actors performed pastorals with commedia del’arte types. Around 1616, English companies performed plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Thomas Heywood. King Ladislas IV Vasa hosted between 1632 and 1678 in Vilnius a commedia dell’arte troupe with the prominent Flaminio Scala, as well as a professional Italian opera company. The theater of the Lower Castle functioned

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in the years 1635–48, and its orchestra included local musicians. Opera in Lithuania dates from 1636 when Il Ratto di Helena, an Italian dramma per musica by Marco Scacchi, was presented. The Jesuits settled in Lithuania in the sixteenth century and introduced school performances at the Vilnius College and Academy, which functioned for about two centuries. Closely related to Baroque school drama in France, Germany, and Austria, it derived from the Middle Ages and Renaissance stage traditions. Alongside theatrical processions and public disputes, special original plays were performed as early as 1570. The most notable theorist of school theater was Matthias Casimirus Sarbievius, professor at the Vilnius academy, poet, and philosopher, whose best known work is De perfecta poesi (1626). In the eighteenth century, theaters of Lithuanian noblemen performed French classical drama and Italian musical theater. Best known were companies playing at the estates belonging to the Radvila, Oginsky, and Tyzenhaus families. Future city actors were educated at drama and music schools sponsored by these noblemen. Beginning with 1785, a Town Theater (Miesto teatras) in Vilnius played in Polish, and after 1863 in Russian. The repertory included plays by Beaumarchais, Molière, Schiller, Shakespeare, later by Grillparzer, Scribe, Musset, Hugo, as well as operas by Mozart, Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, Flotow, Auber, and Rossini. Romanticism stimulated some works on Lithuanian themes, such as Antoni Edward Odyniec’s dramatic poem Barbara Radziwiłłówna (1858). After 1864, when the public use of both written and oral Lithuanian was prohibited by the Russian authorities, the nation was confronted with the perils of a spiritual vacuum. The future of Lithuanian theater and its relationship with the audience were as uncertain as the prospects of a national literature. Clandestine book distributors smuggled Lithuanian press and books into the country from abroad, gaining substantial support from the clandestine movement of amateur acting known as Lithuanian Evenings or barn theater, a part of the National Revival. The first public performance of Keturakis’s Amerika pirtyje (America in the Bath), organized by Lithuanian intellectuals at the seaside resort of Palanga in 1899, made history as the first legal theatrical event in Lithuania. In 1904, when the press ban was lifted, amateur and semi-professional theater started to function legally within Lithuanian cultural associations in different towns of the country, but also in Russia, Prussia, and the USA.

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Politics and Artistic Autonomy in the Estonian Theater Jaak Rähesoo Two conditions have basically determined the development of Estonian culture from its beginnings in the nineteenth century onward. One is political: since their subjugation by Teutonic crusaders in the thirteenth century, the Estonians have lived under various and often very oppressive foreign rules, except for the periods of independence, 1918–40 and after 1991. Consequently, cultural

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chronology largely copies political chronology: in most arts the years 1905 (the first Russian revolution), 1918, 1940, 1953 (Stalin’s death), and 1991 are important watersheds. The other condition has been that practically the whole course of Estonian culture has run during the latest and most accelerated phase of modernity, whose beginning is usually placed around 1870 — which actually coincides with the peak of the Estonian national awakening. The rapidity of that global change made it possible for Estonia to turn in the short span of fifty years (1870–1920) from a mass of backward peasantry into a modern nation. It was a spectacular transformation: the last peasant uprisings and religious disturbances of the 1850s still had an almost medieval character, while the national awakening of the 1860s was quite different in its consciously planned aims and tactics. The speed at which the nations of the Eastern Baltic arrived at an advanced stage of modernity was exceptional. The Estonians share it with their closest neighbors, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and the Finns. Nowhere else in Europe have people rushed directly from folklore to modernity; the only bridges between these distant worlds were a Bible translation and a handful of purely practical or edifying tracts. Even the Balkan nations, which had lived for centuries under Ottoman rule, had some previous “high culture.” This special relationship to modernity also means special ties to Modernism, which has generally emphasized the autonomous, immanent, non-political forces in the development of the arts. The two conditions oppose one another. A Crash Course The youthfulness of a culture is a source of ambivalence. One can take pride in the rapidity and thoroughness of change, but one can also feel uneasy in the company of older nations. The dominant rhetoric of Estonian culture has always been to catch up with more developed peoples. In practice it meant a “crash course” in recent European cultural periods and movements. But the terms used to describe the process are somewhat arbitrary or need at least significant qualifications. They apply primarily to literature, as literature was initially the most important art. Hence it is customary to speak of the first half of the nineteenth century as an Age of Enlightenment, although Estonian Enlightenment was mostly concerned with pretty elementary popular education. The period from 1850–80, the peak of the national awakening, is described in literary terms as “National Romanticism.” Poetry, the leading genre of the time, was, indeed, consciously nationalistic, but it was not aware of its Romanticism. Realism, the leading trend at the end of the century, was the first Estonian literary movement to be conscious of itself as such. But this Realism was typologically more akin to the Realism of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol than to its contemporary European masters. It was only with the Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia) movement of 1905 that Estonian literature (and the other arts) largely caught up with contemporary European trends, rushing headlong from peasant cottages into the refined world of still-fashionable Symbolism. The generation of 1905 was certainly aware that it was living at a time of profound social, ideological, and artistic upheavals. In the European context these upheavals were seen as either progress and promise, or as crisis and threat. Like most of the oppressed peoples of the crumbling empires of East-Central Europe, the Estonians chose to greet social changes with hope. The members of the Young Estonia group enthusiastically embraced artistic and intellectual novelties, often with open contempt for Baltic German conservatism and provinciality. That their artistic

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preferences adhered to Symbolism, a movement already on the way out, mattered less. More important, they accepted the idea that their own tastes, whatever these might be, were soon to be replaced by still newer trends. This typically Modernist attitude forcefully entered the young Estonian culture. All these developments would have been impossible if the recently emancipated Estonian peasants and urban working classes had not taken avidly to the forms of European “high culture” that were hurriedly introduced by the tiny group of nationalist-minded intellectuals. The most conspicuous example is probably the theater. Like all peoples, the Estonians had their games and rituals centered on seasonal turning-points and important family events. But theater as an art form was introduced by the conquering Germans, and its function was limited to the Baltic German urban milieu, outside the sphere of native folklorist culture. Although there are hints that the crusaders had used already in the thirteenth century some forms of spectacles in their propaganda, there is no evidence that the rich European tradition of medieval religious theater ever took stronger roots in the newly-conquered Baltic lands. There were scattered instances of Latin school drama in the larger towns during the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, during a flowering of European drama, the Baltic lands saw only a few itinerant troupes from Germany, and some shows put up by local amateurs. It was entirely by chance that the young and highly energetic German dramatist August von Kotzebue came to Tallinn (Reval in German) in 1783 and stimulated theater life so successfully there that in 1809 a professional German theater was founded. But both its repertoire and its actors came predominantly from Germany; local Baltic Germans remained relatively passive consumers, and their tastes were generally provincial and conservative. The historic service of Baltic German theater was to give an impetus and an initial model to native Estonian and Latvian theater. Estonian theater was born in 1870 with the production of Saaremaa onupoeg (A Cousin from Saaremaa), a one-act comedy by the ardently patriotic poetess Lydia Koidula, whom many regard as the symbolic figure of national awakening. It had initially a much simpler taste than even the Baltic German theater, and took its format mostly from folk comedy, as in Juhan Kunder’s Kroonu onu (The Soldier-Uncle), and various sorts of romantic Singspiel, as in August Kitzberg’s Rätsep Õhk (Tailor Õhk), although both genres usually transmitted hidden social and political attitudes. This novel art form was popularly accepted at an amazing speed. By the 1880s, more than a hundred towns and villages already had more or less regular theater performances. These amateur circles were primarily vehicles of social and cultural interaction in the rapidly changing Estonian society, but they also manifested a newly-born enthusiasm for spectacles. By 1906, the leading amateur societies, the Vanemuine in the university town of Tartu and the Estonia in Tallinn, became professional enough to start paying actors for their work — which increased the demand for artistic training. In 1911, the Endla of Pärnu joined the rank of professional troupes.

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Theater Speaks Many Languages in Romania Marian Popescu The first theater performance in Romanian was a school event prepared by the students from Blaj in Transylvania in 1754. The first known original play in the Romanian language is Occisio Gregorii in Moldavia… (The Assassination of Grigore Voda in Moldavia…, 1778–79), but Romanian translations of Metastasio, Molière, and Voltaire appeared around 1740 already. A theater with performances in German opened in Sibiu (Transylvania) in 1788. Gheorghe Asachi organized a theater performance in Romanian in Iaşi (Moldavia) in 1816, with an adaptation from the French Jean Pierre Claris de Florian, based on a pastoral play by the Swiss Salomon Gessner. The first theater in Bucharest was opened in the Cişmeaua Roşie (The Red Pump) square, where Prince Caragea’s daughter, Ralu, organized a theater season in 1817, only few months after the terrible plague killed over 100,000 people. Thanks to the efforts of Ion Heliade Rădulescu and others, a theater school (The Philarmonic Society) opened in Bucharest in January 1834, and the first exams were presented to the public in August of that year. An opera house opened in 1833 in Bucharest under the name of Philarmonica, and one in 1836 in Iaşi, called the Philarmonic-Dramatic Conservatory. Tours of German, French, and Italian companies in Transylvania, Banat, Moldavia, and Muntenia, mostly with operettas and vaudevilles, contributed to the development of a theater life. Challenged by these foreign companies, the Romanian intelligentsia began to involve itself in theater by presenting plays, in original and in translations, in order to consolidate the status of the Romanian language and the prestige of local authors. By mid-century, in both Iaşi and Bucharest, National Theaters began to operate thanks to the engagement of numerous writers, political figures, and theater people. Censorship was very severe, especially during the frequent wars. Theaters were under the supervision of the Domestic Affairs Department and subject to penalties when disturbing the public order. The initial repertoires of Romanian theaters were dominated by plays translated from French, German, and Italian. Shakespeare was a reference point as of mid-nineteenth century, with translations done mainly via German. Other popular authors were Molière, Voltaire, Byron, Metastasio, and Alfieri. Romanian language on stage went hand in hand with popular French and Italian opera. On the whole, theater in the Romanian provinces fulfilled an educational mission and spread European cultural trends. The repertory was broad since most productions had a very short run. Romanian plays, which were originally less numerous than translations, took the lead at the turn of the century from the popular German, English, and, subsequently, Italian, Scandinavian, Russian, and Greek plays. The bourgeois audience favored for a long time French vaudevilles and farces, as well as Italian and German opera. Interest in drama, Romanian and French, came later. The best-known Romanian nineteenth-century author was Ion Luca Caragiale, undoubtedly still the emblematic figure of Romanian theater. His comic plays, O noapte furtunoasă (A Stormy Night; 1879), O scrisoare pierdută (A Lost Letter; 1880), and D’ale carnavalului (Farces from the Carnival; 1885), are essential for the understanding of Romanian life then, just as Chekhov’s plays are for pre-revolutionary Russia. The new theatrical language, the use of farce structures, characters derived from bourgeois society, all point to the later absurd world of playwright Eugene Ionescu

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(Eugène Ionesco). Among the most successful playwrights and plays of the period before Caragiale were Costache Caragiale, Vasile Alecsandri with Iaşii în carnaval (Carnival in Iaşi; 1845) and Chiriţa în Iaşi (Chiriţa in Iaşi; 1850), Matei Millo with Baba Hîrca (1851), and B. P. Hasdeu with Răzvan şi Vidra (Razvan and Vidra; 1875). Echoes of European Romanticism were amplified by the revolutionary events of 1821 and especially the Revolution of 1848. The unification of Muntenia and Moldova (1859) ushered in a period when theater activities in public places were regulated. After the War of Independence (1877) and the freedom gained from the Ottoman Empire, conditions were ripe for putting the National Theater in Bucharest on more professional footing, and for engaging there the best actors and directors of the country. After 1859, and especially 1877, when the foundations of modern Romania were laid, theater played an important part in shaping the country’s modern culture. Iaşi’s modern edifice of the National Theater (Teatrul Naţional) was inaugurated in 1896 (its director in the years 1910–1919 was the writer Mihail Sadoveanu). Writers appreciated theater, theater critics appeared, the dramatic repertoire was growing, and officials saw theater as a venue to stimulate the national consciousness and the national culture. The first Theater Rule (1852) and the first Theater Law (1877) stipulated the conditions of public performances, the obligation of actors to follow the text, and the relationships between the theater entrepreneurs and authorities. Efforts to open and consolidate theaters for the benefit of the Romanian public ran parallel with the activity of companies performing in Hungarian and German in Transylvania, which belonged until 1918 to the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarcy.The most important nineteenth-century German and Hungarian theaters of Transylvania functioned in Cluj/ Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, Sibiu/Nagyszeben/Hermannstadt, Braşov/Brassó/Kronstadt, Timişoara/ Temesvár, Arad, Oradea/Nagyvárad, and Târgu-Mureş/Marosvásárhely (see pp. 7–9 above and ECE 2: 245–82). Theater in the Yiddish language started in Iaşi (Moldavia) in 1876 and has led, almost without interruption, to the Jewish State Theater of Bucharest today.

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From the Čitališta to the National Theater in Bulgaria Joanna Spassova-Dikova The beginnings of the Bulgarian theater were tied to the national struggle against the Ottoman rule during the second half of the nineteenth century. Theater was an important instrument in achieving political and cultural freedom, strengthening national identity, and helping Bulgarian society to take decisive steps towards its long-delayed emancipation and modernization. The need for public representation to natives and foreigners, the desire to show oneself to the world, partially explains why theater in Bulgaria has been popular and garnered wide social support from the beginning. The first national manifestations pertained to the čitališta. These civic institutions, special public reading rooms, were the cradles of theater. Founded in the second half of the nineteenth

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century all over the country as amateur cultural and educational organizations, the čitališta offered the Bulgarians under Ottoman rule an opportunity to develop national, cultural, and revolutionary activities, often in a conspiratorial form. They included meetings, lectures, concerts, performances, literary and dance evenings, as well as arts and crafts circles. Some of these events were legal patriotic propaganda that slipped the attention of the authorities. Theater, as developed in the schools and the čitališta, was a festive ceremony, sometimes related to church liturgy, marked by a combination of institutional, educational, and revolutionary functions. Since the theater had to propagate particular social and political ideas and to fulfill strictly defined didactic, educational, and reform tasks, it had a highly institutionalized and normative structure. The typical building of the čitališta, set up by the municipality with contributions from the citizens, had a library, a reading room, rehearsal rooms, and bigger assembly rooms with a stage. Following some school performances in 1840s, the first theatrical performances were given in 1856 in the čitalištas of the towns of Lom and Šumen. The čitališta tradition still functions in Bulgaria today. The first original dialogues from mid-nineteenth century could be considered as attempts to create a national drama. They were followed by translations and adaptations of European plays, and then by original pieces written by Bulgarian authors. The repertoire consisted of historical plays, melodramas, and comedies. Plays by Molière, Lessing, Hugo, Voltaire, and Schiller were most frequently performed. Quite popular was the melodrama Mnogostradalna Genoveva (Suffering Genoveva), perhaps an adaptation of Ludwig Tieck’s epic closet drama Leben und Tod der Heiligen Genoveva (The Life and Death of Saint Genevieve; 1799), while the most often played comedy was Mihal-Mishkoed (Mihal the Mouse Eater), probably a variant of a then popular Greek piece. Velisarii, perhaps an adaptation of an Austrian source, was one of the favourite historical plays. These plays were staged many times, almost everywhere in the country, and received with great enthusiasm, often with naive public reactions such as shouting and commenting in a loud voice, taking the actors for the played characters, and even trying to expel the villain from the stage. Theodosi Ikonomov wrote the first original Bulgarian comedy, Lovčanskiit vladika ili Belja na lovčanskiit sačatchia (The Bishop of Loveč, or the Troubles of the Loveč Watchmaker; 1857). The early years of Bulgarian theater were connected with the names of Sava Dobroplodni, Krastjo Pishurka, Dobri Voinikov, and Vassil Drumev — all of them teachers educated abroad. They translated foreign plays, wrote original pieces, and prepared performances with their pupils or amateurs. Very important was the emigrant theater that Voinikov organized in Brăila, Romania (1865–66), for revolutionary plays, forbidden in Bulgaria by the Turkish powers, could be performed here. The Turkish authorities usually sent their agents to the performances to observe what was shown. The spectacle finished, not infrequently, with revolutionary songs and patriotic outcries. Theater was an occasion for nationalist public manifestations. After the national liberation in 1878, Bulgarian theater remained for a while amateur as to its dramaturgy, the status of the theatrical formations, the actors, and the financing. In the 1880s, further translations of foreign plays were made, and the romantic melodramas of Hugo, Dumas, and Scribe enjoyed great successes. The original Bulgarian dramas of this period focused on the struggle for national liberation with much patriotic enthusiasm, but they usually were quite naive and had mediocre artistic qualities. After 1879, theater in the liberated parts of Bulgaria had to form a new stage culture in the Bulgarian language. The printers from Plovdiv, who were among

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the early theater amateurs, founded several theater associations, and their initiatives led in 1881 to a resolution by the Board of the Ministry of the National Education (literally called Ministry of the National Enlightenment) to allocate money for the foundation of a permanent theater company. The first performance of the new Bulgarian National Theater Troupe took place on June 11, 1883, in the only theater building in Bulgaria at that time, the “Luxembourg” theater in Plovdiv, which had an elliptic shape with about 300 seats on the ground floor and gallery, and nineteen boxes. All actors were amateurs. The repertoire consisted of Bulgarian national-historical plays, comedies, and melodramas, most of them translated from Russian and French. When Eastern Rumelia and the Bulgarian Principality were united in 1885, the work of the company was interrupted because of a rivalry between Plovdiv (center of Eastern Rumelia) and Sofia (center of the Bulgarian Principality). Although most of its initiators moved in 1887 to the new capital, Sofia, amateurs formed a semi-professional company in Plovdiv, some of whom became the pioneers of Bulgarian professional theater. When the company made in 1888 a very successful tour to Sofia, the Plovdiv Municipality gave financial support to it. A new wooden theater, called Osnova (Base), was built the same year. In 1892, the company was renamed Capital Bulgarian Drama Troupe Salza i Smjah (Tear and Laughter), and for twelve years it worked mainly in the newly built theater auditorium of the artistic society Slavjanska besseda in Sofia. Further professionalization was marked by improving the repertoire and the acting style, and by the appearance of semi-professional theater critics who discussed issues having to do with the social functions of theater, the repertoire, the aesthetics of reception, conceptions of theatrical rules, and the specific roles of the actors. The critics, mostly public and political figures, writers, and publishers, usually wrote reviews and articles for periodicals. Bulgarian dramas were devoted during the 1890s to the historical themes of the previous Bulgarian kingdoms, the Renaissance, the national heroes, and their patriotism. The national struggle in Macedonia was an additional thematic focus. The contemporary plays, influenced by foreign models, dealt with everyday life, politics, and social problems in villages and towns. They were written and staged by the Salza i Smjah troupe. The main authors were Ivan Vazov, Anton Strašimirov, and Petko Todorov. In 1895, the Ministry of National Education awarded four grants for studying theater in St. Petersburg, in Moscow (two), and in Vienna. Others went the same year to Paris, Milan, Zagreb, Berlin, and elsewhere at their own expense. The first truly professional Bulgarian actors were the scholarship students and other enthusiasts who came back in 1898–99 and were appointed to the theater after a competition. By the end of the century, the Salsa i Smjah troupe was predominantly professional, with mostly actors trained abroad. The first Bulgarian theater directors, who were also organizers and actors, were amateurs. They usually gave short practical instructions during rehearsals and showed to the non-professional actors how to play. In 1899, the Theater Committee appointed (with the approval of the Ministry) the Croatian director Adam Mandrović to professionalize theater directing. He had a great impact within just one year: the repertoire, the rehearsals, the acting, the ensemble playing, and the general rhythm of the performance all improved. Mandrović managed to moderate the quibbles among the actors and made them concentrate on artistic issues. Subsequently several other foreign directors followed for a season or two, but the prevailing practice became to let leading actors direct the rehearsals. At the center of Bulgarian theater around 1900 were a few, already professional star actors. The theatrical models and ideas were imported from abroad and applied by way of compensatory gestures.

2. Modernism: The Director Rules

Introduction Dragan Klaić At the turn of the century, Modernism starts making some inroads into East-Central European theater, driven by energies radiating from Vienna, Munich, Berlin, and, increasingly, Paris. The new aesthetics rejects illusionist and realist concepts of staging and foregrounds aesthetic tasks where previously national and ideological priorities dominated. The emerging profession of theater director challenges the authority of the literary figures that instigated and led national theater companies as prominent institutions of the national revival. This new profession acquires its autonomy and specificity only gradually: authors as well as actors turn to directing, and some directors, who are neither actors nor authors, run their companies with aesthetic vision and authority. The inspiring models of the Duke of Meiningen, André Antoine, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Gordon Craig find an echo in East-Central Europe. This section starts with a portrait of the Croat writer Stjepan Miletić and ends with a profile of the Croat theater director Branko Gavella. They mark the transition occurring in a few generations, and enframe the modernist epoch and the rapid transformation of the stage it induced. In fact, the teenager Gavella saw the productions of the Croat National Theater in Zagreb under Miletić’s leadership. Both were well-educated, cosmopolitan, reflective, and enterprising theater professionals. Miletić came at the end of a period when literary figures dominated the theater, and his modernizing influence prepared the stage for Gavella and the directors of his generation. Gavella started as a theater critic before becoming a full-time theater director of drama and opera. Against the uncompromising figure of Miletić, Gavella was a survivor, a mobile practitioner who knew how to recognize artistic opportunities but also to find jobs under difficult circumstances. His mobility was often due to duress and his desire to avoid personal dangers resulting from political pressure and war. When his career seemed to come to an end, he was able to restart it by accommodating himself successfully with the new Communist authorities. In this last period of his life (1945–58) he became the towering figure of the Croat and Yugoslav stage, a mentor, teacher, and source of inspiration. The stage of the first four decades in the twentieth century is marked by directorial visions and by the strong personal imprints left by Gavella’s generation and those a bit older or younger: Sándor Hevesi, Geo Milev, Jaroslav Kvapil, Emil František Burian, Leon Schiller and others. They strove to develop a personalized stylistic niche within the conceptual frame of Modernism. They found stronger allies among the modernist stage designers than among the actors, who often stubbornly clung to the realistic and naturalistic acting conventions. The classics offered a solid ground for experimentation. To create a domestic modernist repertory was another matter, a frustrating endeavor practically everywhere, except perhaps in Poland, where the successes of Stanisław Wyspiański and Stanisław Przybyszewski encouraged other authors. And yet, even in

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Poland, Stanisław I. Witkiewicz, a major creative figure, was ignored if not despised as a playwright in his lifetime. His dramatic failure contrasts with the domestic and international success of Karel Čapek, but the Czech author was less radical and actually preferred to twist and turn the established dramatic genres rather than to break with them altogether. Similarly, the international successes of Ferenc Molnár came from his loyalty to the established comedy canons and not from some experimental zest. The shortage of native plays was compensated for by works of the French and Belgian Symbolists and the German Expressionists, as well as the early works of O’Neill and Pirandello. After the October Revolution many Russian émigré theater directors, designers, voice coaches, and ballet masters added an intercultural quality to the theater life of the region. They brought high standards from the Moscow and St. Petersburg theaters, popularized Stanislavsky’s “System” and the discipline of classical Russian ballet, while some of them carried on the precious flame of the Russian avant-garde that the Communist extinguished in Russia by the mid 1920s. What Pitoëff, Komissarzhevski, and Mikhail Chekhov (after some years in the Baltic) achieved in the West, their peers delivered in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia: meticulous text interpretation, careful coaching of the actors in the role, a sophisticated mis-en-scène stylistically harmonized with the visual elements of the stage, and a delicate deviation from the illusionist norm. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Baltic states interwar theater was often still bilingual. Opera, based on a traditional canon and repertory, underwent a modernist revision, and cabaret exploded in several big cities of the region as a sophisticated intellectual medium and a popular entertainment for the masses. Magazines served for the dissemination of modernist manifestoes and polemics. The articles in this section signal, however, that the modernist inroads would never be self-evident, and that realist and naturalist elements frequently slipped back, solidly supported by the actors and the audiences, often by the playwrights as well. Miroslav Krleža’s theater reputation grew when he recanted his expressionist dramaturgical mode and adopted a psychological realism in Vučjak (1923) and in his Glembay trilogy (1928–31). He was fortunate to have Gavella follow him on this journey. In the years preceding World War II, the mainstream stages and workers’ theaters, set up by professionals for the working class, offered a platform to mobilize and assume an anti-Nazi stance. To little avail. Nazi occupation brought to an end the Yiddish theater, especially strong in Poland but also important in Romania, and launched everywhere a systematic purge of Jews from the theaters, both as professionals and as audience. Where theater was permitted at all, the repertory was subjected to Gestapo or domestic censorship; a thin line had to be trodden between collaboration and spiritual resistance, at least until 1944, when the approaching front and the catastrophic shortage of all supplies brought theater life to a halt. Against the harsh impositions of the Nazis and their allies, Poles braved stage performances in illegality, Czechs in prisons and concentration camps (children’s opera Brandibar in Therezin!) and Yugoslavs in the Tito’s partisan army. Some theater people were lucky to emigrate before the war, others followed an émigré trajectory after they were liberated from camps and prisons in 1945. Theater infrastructure was seriously damaged all over the region, especially during the last phase of the war. Once the Communist authorities took over and a Soviet ideological course governed the entire cultural life, Modernism in theater and drama became a short-lived episode, never totally eradicated from cultural memory but seriously undermined and marginalized in the new artistic production and the official critical discourse.

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The European Horizons of Stjepan Miletić Nikola Batušić Unjustly slandered and heaped with unfounded accusations, embittered but ultimately satisfied, Stjepan Miletić left in 1898 the manager’s box of the Zagreb theater forever, convinced that “the strongest man stands alone” (Miletić, glumište vii). Miletić was not only a theater person of great creative capacities and indestructible energy, he also made, in less than twenty years, invaluable contributions to Croatian culture as a dramatist, critic, poet, travel writer, essayist, memoir writer, translator, and librettist. His early critical pieces on theater exhibit erudition, irony, and polemic lucidity, and he would formulate here already the famous thought that can be considered as his motto for the theater: Our theater ought to be the hearth of the whole Croatian art, the home of opera, operetta, and drama. Such being the circumstances with the other nations, there should be no reason for them to obstruct progress. The real reason for the slow progress lies elsewhere; it lies in the way the theater is managed. The most profitable way of theater management is absolutism, the monarchy with only one man at the head, a man who possesses literary education and is well acquainted with finances, a man who lives for theater, a man for whom theater is his whole world, a man who is possibly an artist himself, a man who has studied the stage to the last detail, a man who has a great soul and a great mind. Such a man can evoke passion in the hearts of actors for their profession; and only when this happens will theater flourish again — for flourish it must. (Iz raznih novina 4)

As manager of the Zagreb Theater (1894–98), the only professional Croatian theater then, Miletić consistently realized ideas of his youth. Managing the repertoire and the organization, he succeeded in raising the Croatian national theater high above its earlier mediocrity, and he steadied its artistic progress. His dedication imposed criteria that have since then become unquestioned yardsticks for the development not only of the Zagreb stage but also of the other national stages. His devotion to all aspects of theatrical art, his enormous knowledge and energy, opened at the end of the nineteenth century the possibility that Croatian theater may rise to European attainments. Until then, this was only wishful thinking or a frivolous delusion. As is often the case, Miletić was alone in conceiving and carrying to completion his visions. This is why he could, dared, and — I would add — had to dedicate his book of memoirs, Hrvatsko glumište (Croatian Theater; 1904), to Doctor Stockmann, the hero of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, who held after the collapse of his ideals that loneliness was the only effective weapon in fighting against social hypocrisy. Miletić entered Croatian modern theater loudly, determinedly, and without compromise. He was born exactly thirty years after his great idol, Dimitrije Demeter, the first dramatist of the new national literature, had written in 1838 the historical introduction to book 1 of his Dramatička pokušenja (Dramatic Attempts), and during the summer when August Šenoa became “the artistic manager” and one of the most important reformers of the Zagreb theater after the unsuccessful première of his comedy Ljubica. This is how — by coincidence — two Croatian theatrical giants of the nineteenth century stood guard, so to speak, at Miletić’s cradle.

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Accepting and respecting their legacy, he headed toward new horizons. The third, modernist, member of Croatia’s nineteenth-century theatrical triad after Demeter and Šenoa, Miletić was remarkable for his individuality, and a standard for Europeanizing Croatian theatrical culture. Demeter thought that Vienna’s Burgtheater was the only possible point of orientation; Šenoa protested against the importation of what he considered an unfruitful German tradition and turned to a Slavic and Romance repertoire. Although both Demeter and Šenoa were playwrights, managers, and theater critics, they came into conflict with theatrical practice and could never realize their concepts and high ideals. The reason for this lies probably in their attitudes, which, compared to the European theatrical standards, were narrow. Demeter got acquainted with the theaters in Graz, Vienna, and Padua while he was a student of medicine. He devoted himself to the theater at the moment when he had no significant connections with Central European theater. Šenoa, on the other hand, experienced the real theater only while he was a student in Prague. In the early sixties, as a theater critic of Pozor (Zagreb’s oppositional daily paper), he had only remote memories of the Prague divádlo and even fainter ones of the Burgtheater. Demeter was a doctor by profession and Šenoa a lawyer. They had both entered the theater as well-educated men, replacing their primary vocation with the pen and a permanent seat in the auditorium or in the management of the theater. But they did not exhibit in their youth such passion for theater as Stjepan Miletić, who gradually moved towards the stage. From his early reviews to the deep analyses of the role of theater in the national culture, he was the only one among the three to realize that the Croatian theater ought to broaden its horizons beyond Vienna and Prague. In the romantic period of the national revival, hopes of national and theatric autonomy could be realized only through institutions, and it was only logical for Demeter to turn toward Vienna and the Burgtheater. Though the German political, cultural, and, therefore, theatrical pressure hindered the progress of Croatian theater in statu nascendi, Demeter saw no other model. Šenoa’s loud protests in the mid-sixties against trivial German and Austrian dramatic literature were clearly inspired by the Pan-Slavism of the 1848 Congress in Prague, and his suggestion to shift the repertoire to Slavic and Romanic literatures represented a radical innovation. But this later theater manager did not go much further in the daily practice of theater life than the nearest Austrian example. Miletić definitely knew, even before he was offered the manager’s position, that theatrical events of importance were taking place not only in Prague and Vienna but also on many German, Italian, and Parisian stages. He would not deny the importance of Vienna’s theater milieu — after all, he had watched the famous Dingelstedt productions of Shakespeare’s history plays as a student, and he wrote his dissertation there on a topic that was both philosophical and theatrological. Inspired probably by the English playwright, he conceived his own dramatic cycle about Croatian kings, strongly imbued with a Shakespearean intertext. He would not underestimate theatrical life in Prague either. On the contrary, in 1890 he stayed there for a few months and became well acquainted with the Národní divádlo (National Theater). But already at that time he sensed that Modernism in theater demanded broader horizons. “The Meininger Company” was already performing across Europe in Miletić’s youth, and the new theater aesthetics of George II and his director Ludwig Chronegk had changed the theater scene from Paris to Moscow. The young amateur Konstantin Alekseiev, later known as Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, would retrospectively describe this “Meiningenian shock” with great power. The years of Miletić’s early theatrical life were strongly inspired also by the musical as well as cultural phenomenon of Richard Wagner. The

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first complete performance of Wagner’s tetralogy took place in 1876 in Bayreuth, where Miletić would later go on pilgrimage devoutly and loyally. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the musical and theatrical world was permanently divided between fervent followers and bitter enemies of the German composer. Miletić was, of course, among his devotees, and his later repertoire clearly reflects this. Once Miletić realized that there could be no modern theater without an educated director that replaced the earlier lead actor in the development of the production, Miletić took the risky decision of “qualifying” himself for the director position, but not before he had seen various production techniques on the spot. His European theatrical itinerary was not an aimless wandering but a consciously composed picture of the greatest European theaters from Budapest and Prague to Munich, Paris, and the nord-Italian cities (colored by the example of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister), which explains many of the historical reforms he carried out later as a manager. A great number of them were conceived in Paris. Miletić was well acquainted with the style of acting and directing in André Antoine’s Théâtre libre, he read Adolf Appia’s studies on music and production, but, knowing that the Zagreb theater had to overcome its provincial and neglected state, he turned to the fortress of traditionalism, the Comédie française, and obtained the staging books of Molière’s comedies, which would later make the Zagreb performances of his plays more faithful to classicist stage poetics. He deliberately followed a pedagogical intention, since, together with the transplantation of refined Meiningenian Realism, this was the only way for Miletić to create a starting point for a second Croatian theatrical Modernism. It would be initiated in 1909 by his student, the actor and director Ivo Raić, upon return from the Prague and German stages. During the four years that Miletić was theater manager, several important events happened in the theater world, near and far from Zagreb. In London, George Bernard Shaw acquired a strong following; in Munich, Karl Lautenschläger introduced the revolving stage; in Paris, Jarry’s King Ubu had its première in 1896; in Vienna, Gustav Mahler took the lead of the Vienna opera the same year; and in Moscow, the later famous theater of Stanislavsky and Vladimir NemirovichDanchenko (MHAT) opened in 1898. Miletić witnessed during his lifetime the beginnings of Max Reinhardt and Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, the famous Gordon Craig’s production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in Florence with Eleonora Duse playing Rebecca West, and the opening of Strindberg’s Intima Taetern in Stockholm. Miletić refined his early idea about theatrical absolutism during his European travels and experiences. Following the example of Heinrich Laube and Franz Ferdinand Dingelstedt, he demanded for himself unconditional aesthetic and organizational powers, which influenced his wellconceived and in all segments evenly balanced eclectic repertoire. Thus he shaped the essential structural form of the Croatian theater following the best-known European models and leaving to his successors an invaluable legacy. Miletić’s broad horizons enabled him to foresee almost everything that could be presupposed in the development of a national theatrical culture — something that until then nobody had achieved. In his theatrical writings (memoirs, travel records, polemic reviews, and theatrical feuilletons) one can discern today an ideal picture of a nationally and territorially complete Croatian theater of the present as well as the distant future. For many of his contemporaries this was a utopia. In Miletić’s character we recognize the self-consciousness of a young intellectual, emerging at the moment of early Croatian Literary Modernism and nourished by a wide, heterogeneous, and

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multinational European cultural territory. He was determined and bold even in his early youth, holding incorruptible political views. Although this was not easy in the Croatian political situation of his time, Miletić, a declared admirer of Edmond Rostand’s work to the very end of his short life, could always point, with Cyrano, to the “untouched whiteness of his knightly plume.”

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Reform within: the Thália Társaság 1904–1908 Zoltán Imre Stratos E. Constantinidis claims that “the logocentric systems of Western play production operate under two dominant spatial metaphors: the metaphor of the production line and the metaphor of the market ellipse” (7). Under the latter, Constantinidis writes, the theatrical system of a country is organized around a center and “the companies on the outer rings generally repeat (rehash) the shows and the production structure of the companies in the center,” while any theater company that “operates under the metaphor of the production line adopts a structured, hierarchical order of production which proceeds from playtext to performance-texts” (7). Both metaphors have their limitations, yet we can use them in analyzing the Hungarian theater structure (institutions, repertoire, and working methods) around 1900 and the function of the Thália Társaság (Thália Association) between 1904 and 1908. By 1900, Budapest became a theatrical center with several venues and permanent companies, each with a well-defined and clearly recognized program, as well as acting and staging methods geared at a specific public, as in any other late nineteenth-century European theatrical capital (Carlson, “Audiences” 88). The National Theater presented classical and, by then, canonical contemporary (Hungarian and foreign) plays in the late Meiningen-style, based on stock-type characters, with codified features from costume to gestures and vocal delivery. The Népszínház (Popular Theater; 1875–1965) played vaudevilles, the Nemzeti Operaház (National Opera House; 1884- ) operas and ballets, the Vígszínház (Comedy Theater; 1896- ) French comedies and farces, and the Magyar Színház (Hungarian Theater; 1897- ) Austrian, English, and Hungarian operettas. Various cabarets, music halls, and orfeums offered light entertainment. For these companies the production line originated with the playwright; the theatrical process was governed by his will as embodied in the dramatic text, adapted, however, to the company’s overall performing style. In the hierarchy prevailing on stage, the opulence and purity of the actor’s delivery had precedence, while the visual, proximal, gestural, and other elements were codified illustrations. Paradoxically, this approach to theater was considered by the early-twentieth-century Hungarian theater critics as literary, since they dealt first and foremost with the play. Only then, if at all, did they take into consideration its performance (i.e., the actors’ work), reflecting on how they adopted and fulfilled the possibilities offered by the text (Ambrus 213–19).

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In the provinces nearly every administratively important town had a theater with its own company that generally adopted the repertoire, the working methods, and the conditions of the capital, incorporating touring stars from Budapest in its own productions. The theatrical infrastructure was by 1900 fairly well developed: newspapers and magazines employed theater critics; various drama schools produced generations of actors and actresses, following the strategies and methods accepted in established theaters. The Thália Társaság that László Bánóczy, Marcell Benedek, György Lukács, and Sándor Hevesi initiated in 1904, entered this institutional system and practice with two interrelated aims: to renew the Hungarian dramatic canon, “occasionally performing such old and new plays which cannot be found in the repertoires of theaters of the capital, but which possess great artistic or cultural values and interests”; and to renew by the Society’s own efforts and resources the acting and directing approach in the staging of these plays, “in which professional actors, or actors under contract, cannot take part” (Gábor 64). The Thália Társaság, like André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris, Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne in Berlin, and other European independent theaters, presented plays by modern naturalist, symbolist, and secessionist authors. Members of the Society or their friends translated Hauptmann, Ibsen, Strindberg, Wedekind, Schnitzler, and others, simultaneously propagating new Hungarian stage plays. The contemporaries recognized the mise-en-scène and the acting as modern. About the production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the well-known and respected critic Ignotus wrote that “it was played with intimacy, and simplicity, not with separate characters, but with characters drawn together as an orchestra, which, if good, merges into one musical instrument. The characters were played not so that the actors were visibly aware of being watched, but as if the audience watched them through a peephole” (289). The mise-en-scène was shaped into an organic whole by the overall concept of the director, Sándor Hevesi, who published various articles on theater and drama, and was then invited as a director’s assistant to the National Theater before joining Thália’s company. Actually, he was the only one among Thália’s artistic leaders who had some working experience in the theater. Based on his visits to European theaters, he varied his mise-en-scène for each play but kept his interpretation subservient to the authority of the dramatic text. The company consisted of amateurs and young professional actors and actresses, educated in Thália’s school and trained by the director during a relatively long rehearsal period (often more then two months). Their work was constantly threatened by a lack of appropriate venues and financial backing. The great achievement of the Thália Társaság was to adapt to the Hungarian stage the canon of modern Western-European drama and theater, its acting and its staging methods. Yet, the dramatic text, usually published before the première, paradoxically remained the main focus in the mise-en-scène (de Marinis 38–73). Hence contemporary critics like Ignotus, Hevesi, and even later critics could all agree that the Thália failed to produce “a representative Hungarian playwright who could have represented its direction and achievement” (Katona and Dénes, Thália 149). This reveals Thália’s literature-dominated context: performance was subordinated to the pre-existent text, director to the playwright, and actor to the character. The notion and scope of the reforms, however significant, were situated within that traditional structure that Constantinidis describes as a hierarchical order that proceeds from playtext to performance-texts, without questioning, in fact strengthening, the supremacy of the written text, the hierarchy of the stage, and the relevance of the entire structure. Thália’s achievements were continuously incorporated into the

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institutionalized theaters of the day through the employment of its actors and directors, through the adoption of plays presented by the Thália, and by accepting some of its working methods in the rehearsal process. By the time Thália actually ended its activity in 1908, it accomplished a limited reform of the official Hungarian theater system within the existing logocentric structure that remained unperturbed until the 1930s. In some respects it survives even today.

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Modernist Inroads into Czech Theater Ondřej Hučín In the last decades of the nineteenth century only Prague’s Svanda ensemble and the National Theater were able to carry out a systematic program of Realism and Naturalism. There were no creative forces to set up an independent experimental stage. The National Theater assembled the best actors and playwrights; the main advocates of the new style in direction were the artistic director František Adolf Šubert, the dramaturg Ladislav Stroupežnický, and the director Josef Šmaha. Stroupežnický’s Naši furianti (Our Proud Peasants; 1887), Gabriela Preissová’s Její pastorkyňa (Her Stepdaughter; 1890), Alois and Vilém Mrštík’s Maryša (1894), and other plays show that Czech realist drama was primarily concerned with the rough, firmly structured village community and its social-pathological problems. Some of these plays are still part of the Czech canon. The most frequently played foreign realists were Ibsen, Gogol, and Ostrovsky. Realism and salon Romanticism had a marked influence on Czech theater up to the 1920s, especially in acting style and dramaturgy. The first writers to stage symbolist features started to rally around the manifesto Česká moderna (Czech Modernism) and the journal the Moderní revue (Modern Review) in the mid–1890s. The Moderní revue spawned the independent studio theater Intimní volné jeviště (Intimate Free Stage, 1896–99), which organized evenings of Czech poetry and produced plays by Strindberg, Przybyszewski, and the Czech authors Viktor Dyk and Jiří Karásek. Further experimentation took place around 1900 in the Kruh českých spisovatelů (Circle of Czech Writers) and occasional cycles of contemporary drama were offered in Švandovo divadlo (Švanda’s Theater, 1881-; after 1908 the Intimate Theater in Smíchov) and in the Uránie theater (1902-). The program included Schnitzler, Maeterlinck, Chekhov, and Max Halbe; as well as Czech plays by Jaroslav Kvapil, Jaroslav Hilbert, Viktor Dyk and others. Lyrické divadlo (Lyric Theater, 1911-) and Divadlo Umění (Art Theater, 1912–14) experimented later with symbolist production styles. The poet, dramatist and director Jaroslav Kvapil developed from 1900 his own variant of Modernism on the stage of the National Theater. His program combined elements of Realism, Secession, Symbolism, and Impressionism. His stage design emphasized suggestion and indication, using light and sound for an atmospheric stylization and relying above all on an acting style that was psychological and analytical. He could work with a mature acting company headed by

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Eduard Vojan, and Hana Kvapilová. Considering the artistic and social standing of the National Theater, Kvapil’s repertoire was very wide: next to world classics, especially Shakespeare and Ibsen, it included Czech realist and romantic dramas by Alois Jirásek (Jan Žižka, 1903) and Jaroslav Vrchlický (Hippodamie, 1911), works by the symbolists (Maeterlinck, Claudel, Dyk), and impressionist plays like Jiří Mahen’s Janošík (1910) and Fráňa Šrámek’s Léto (Summer; 1915). Outside the National Theater Kvapil explored “fringe” genres, popular theater, and cabaret. After 1910, Czech cabaret abruptly developed from a popular entertainment into an intellectual genre, staging parodies of theater classics, political and satirical songs, and poetry recitation, involving important writers, actors, singers, and designers in a collaborative process. The leading Prague cabarets were Lucerna (The Lantern, 1910–23), Montmartre (1911–22), Kabaret u kuřího oka (Cabaret at the Chicken’s Eye, 1913–15) and Rokoko (1915–23). Performers included Karel Hašler, Jaroslav Hašek, Emil Artur Longen, Egon Erwin Kisch, Vlasta Burian, Ferenc Futurista, and the group Červená sedma (Seven of Hearts, 1910–22) with Jiří Červený, Míla Beránek, Eduard Bass and others. At the beginning of the 1920s, the cabarets either closed or became small drama stages. Original cabaretiers established themselves on these stages, some even had their own theater; they included Emil Artur Longen, an actor and author of social satirical plays, the comedians Ferenc Futurista and, especially, Vlasta Burian, who achieved exceptional popularity as an actor with broad improvisational ability. Shortly prior to World War I, a Czech theatrical Expressionism began to take shape around the journal Scéna (The Stage), which produced emotionally charged performances with synthesized expressive elements of movement, light, sound, in an exact rhythmic production. The dramatic text, conceived as a beginning, was “translated” into complex stage language (Hilar 99–112). In 1913, the stage designer Vlastislav Hofman was the first to formulate in the Czech theater the idea of a scenography, changeable in action, time, and space (Hofman 4–9). Expressionism made its most striking appearance on the Czech stage in the productions of Karel Hugo Hilar, first in the Městské divadlo na Královských Vinohradech (The Municipal Theater of Royal Vinohrady in Prague; 1911–20) and, after the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, in the Prague National Theater (1921–35). Hilar’s most valuable productions were 1) grotesques, such as Carl Sternheim’s Snob (1935) and Jan Bartoš’s Krkavci (Ravens; 1920); 2) mass productions and social visions, such as Zygmunt Krasiński’s The Undivine Comedy (1918), Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1921), and Josef and Karel Čapek’s Ze života hmyzu (The Insect Play; 1922); and 3) intimate analyses of individual psychology by Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, and others. The Prague National Theater also staged plays by Pirandello and O’Neill, dramatizations of Dostoyevski’s novels, and, at the end of the 1930s, Karel Čapek’s anti-war plays Bílá nemoc (The White Plague; 1937) and Matka (The Mother; 1938). Czechoslovakia’s newly won independence in 1918 had a profound effect on the theater. New permanent regional companies were set up in České Budějovice and Ostrava in 1919, and in Olomouc in 1920. In Bratislava, the Slovak National Theater was established, mainly by Czech professionals, also in 1920. Together with the older stages, these companies opened themselves to a modern repertoire and new styles, primarily Expressionism. The long-time symbiosis of Czech and German theater continued in the Czechoslovak Republic, although German companies struggled with serious financial problems due to severe cuts in state support. In Czech lands there were almost thirty German theaters, even in small towns. The large German stages in Prague, the Neues

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Deutsches Theater (The New German Theater; 1887-) and the Deutsches Landestheater (The German Provincial Theater; formerly The Theater of the Estates, confiscated by the Czechs in 1920) hosted since the 1890s Otto Brahm, Max Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, and other German modernists directors. The composer and conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky, head of the German opera in Prague (1911–27), and the dramaturg and director Hans Demetz made important contributions to theater in the Czech lands. Both advocated modernist concepts of staging and an expressionist repertoire that included Arnold Schönberg and Franz Schreker in opera, Walter Hasenclever, Georg Kaiser, Franz Werfel, and Bertolt Brecht in drama. After Hitler’s rise to power, political emigrants from Germany enriched Czechoslovakia’s theatrical life. The emigré cabaret Die Pfeffermühle (The Pepper Mill) visited Prague, and several emigré theater companies were founded, including Studio 1934, inspired by E. F. Burian’s voiceband, the Freie deutsche Spielgemeinschaft (The Free German Theater Company), and the Dynamisches Ballett (The Dynamic Ballet). Paradoxically, Czech theatrical Expressionism had little impact on expressionist drama. Even such impassioned poetic or historical plays as F. X. Šalda’s Zástupové (Throngs; 1921) and Stanislav Lom’s Svatý Václav (St. Wenceslaus; 1929) failed to achieve permanent recognition. The mainstream repertory companies prefer even today the realist plays of the 1920s that manifested strong social engagement, irony, and lyricism: Šalda’s Dítě (The Child; 1923), František Langer’s Periferie (1925), and Edmond Konrád’s Komedie v kostce (Comedy in a Nutshell; 1926). The philosophical discourses on modern existential dilemmas in the plays of Karel Čapek and those written with his brother Josef are unique in Czech drama (see Veronika Ambrus’s article on the Čapeks below: pp. 183–89). No other Czech dramatist succeeded in creating such original, comprehensive, and lively parables of contemporary society. In the Čapeks’ plays the philosophy of the “little-big” human being, typical for Czech culture, found its exact, both comic and serious, expression. A modest human being (for instance the Tramp in The Insect Play) stands amidst the world’s complex machinery and seeks to make sense of it, or is forced by conscience or circumstances, to decide whether to create a new and better world, whether to accept the secret prescription for immortality (The Macropoulos Affair), or whether to give the sick Dictator a rare medicine against a fatal illness (The White Plague). The dramaturgy and the staging of Czech opera also underwent striking changes. Partly responsible for this, both in Prague and Brno, were the directors Ferdinand Pujman and Ota Zítek, and the conductors Otakar Ostrčil and František Neumann, who attempted to synthesize composed music with movement based on stage work. Leoš Janáček is to be credited with the greatest dramaturgical achievement in Czech opera. In Jenůfa (based on Gabriella Preissová’s mentioned Její pastorkyňa), Věc Makropulos (The Makropoulos Affair; 1926), and Z mrtvého domu (From the House of the Dead; 1930) he closely linked Expressionism and themes drawn from realist and contemporary drama and prose. Works by Bohuslav Martinů, Emil František Burian, and Pavel Haas and other Czech modernists were produced, primarily in Prague and Brno, together with works by Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel, Karol Szymanowski, and Alban Berg. The Czech puppet theater, which traditionally imitated the dramatic theater and drew largely from fairy-tale literature, sought to find in the 1920s and 30s its own independent expression. The Pilsen puppet theater of Josef Skupa aroused greatest interest with the puppets Spejbl (1919–) and Hurvínek (1926–), two modern theatrical types influenced by expressionist caricature and the cabaret.

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Spejbl, the petty bourgeois and slightly silly father, and the rascal son Hurvínek achieved enormous and lasting popularity through the universality of their types and their characteristic jargon. The avant-garde tendencies in the Czech theater of the early 1920s reflected foreign developments, especially events in France and the Soviet Union. Original work, for example Vítězslav Nezval’s Depeše na kolečkách (Telegram on Wheels; 1922), followed the staging of ideas that Karl Teige launched in 1922 with Czech Poetism. Starting 1923, Jiří Frejka directed a group of students from the Prague conservatory and developed with them a playful constructivist style of production (e.g., a remaking of Molière’s George Dandin in 1925), inspired by the principles of the commedia dell’arte. After 1926, their work became associated with the Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated Theater), the theater section of the avant-garde group Devětsil. Frejka was joined there by director Jindřich Honzl, who leaned towards contemporary modernist and avant-garde experiments, as well as productions in the spirit of Czech Poetism (Honzl 108–116; Mukařovský, “Jevištní” 70–73). They staged, for example, Guillaume Apollinaire’s Prsy Tiréziovy (Les Mamelles de Tiresias; 1926) and Vladislav Vančura’s Učitel a žák (The Teacher and the Pupil; 1927). From 1927 onward, this theater was linked with the names of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, otherwise known as V+W. They created an independent authorial and acting partnership, linking their intellectual clowning to the tradition of cabaret, silent film, and commedia dell’arte. They produced only their own plays, or original adaptations in which they stylized themselves as “naive” comics who are involved willy-nilly, but substantially, in historical affairs. The plays of V+W, such as Gorila ex machina čili Leon Clifton…(Gorilla ex machina or Leon Clifton…; 1928), Don Juan & Comp. (1931) and Caesar (1932), often drew their themes from the canon of world literature or history, freely transforming them in a parodic and satirical spirit. The central scenes of these plays were improvised appearances known as předscény (forestages), in which V+W departed from the action and their role, embarking on satirical dialogues, usually on social or political topics. Another permanent part of these performances was created from jazz songs, with texts by V+W and music by Jaroslav Ježek. The dramatic work of V+W, developed from parody-style revues — for instance the Vest Pocket Revue (1927) and Fata Morgana (1929) — and pseudo-romantic stories, for example Golem (1931), turned into politically and socially critical theater, but deviating from documentary style by exaggeration, metaphor, and, above all, humor. In the 1930s, the Nazis became the most frequent target of their political satire, but the authorities closed down the Liberated Theater in November 1938 and the duo emigrated to the USA. After leaving the Liberated Theater in 1927, Jiří Frejka further developed his concept of a playful synthetic theater (Frejka, Člověk 90–95) in the theater groups Dada (1927–29) and Moderní studio (1929). From 1930 to 1945, he worked in the Prague National Theater, where he gradually connected his creative origins with a psychological and realist style he named “hyperbolic realism” (Frejka, O divadlo 19). Next to contemporary dramas by Georges Neveux, Jean Cocteau, and Vladislav Vančura, he staged classical plays by linking general themes with topical events. Frejka’s concept of theater was supported by the allusions and dynamic stage design of František Tröster. Jindřich Honzl, who was from 1929 to 1931 in Brno, and subsequently in Pilsen as well as in the Prague National Theater, sought a similar composite expression in big theaters. In the 1930s, he worked primarily in the Liberated Theater and staged also surrealist theater, otherwise relatively rare in the Czech lands. In 1934 and 1935 he staged, for example, Vítězslav Nezval’s

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Strach (Fear) and Věštírna delfská (The Delphic Oracle), and in 1938 Bohuslav Martinů’s opera Julietta. The composer and director Emil František Burian was most effective in developing a program of poetic, synthetic, and yet politically engaged theater. In 1933, he founded the Theater D 34 — D meaning divádlo (theater), as well as dějiny (history), dnešek (today), dělník (worker) and duch (spirit), whereas 34 referred to the year, and was raised year by year. The theater functioned until 1941, and again in the period 1945–60. Burian turned away from traditional causal dramaturgy and composed productions by expressive means from a variety of materials (acting, sound, light projections, properties etc.), using association and contrast in strict temporal and spatial order (Burian, “Dynamické” 40–46; “Syntetické” 151–53). He experimented with individual elements and developed a method of rhythmically and melodically stylized declamation known as the “voiceband”; he established with the designer Miroslav Kouřil a complicated projection, lighting, and sound system known as the “theatergraph”; and he linked the lyrical power of suggestion with the direct social criticism of Sachlichkeit (sobriety), which went beyond words and involved a broad range of means to create a synthetic theater. Burian’s productions thematized protests against social and political oppression (under Capitalism, Nazism, but also Stalinism), the life of young people, and existential anxiety. His very subjective and original productions often preferred non-theatrical texts (Srba 7–34). Dramatizing prose and poetry was essential for Burian’s repertoire, which included reworkings of Jaroslav Hašek’s Dobrý voják Švejk (The Good Soldier Švejk; 1935), a montage of folk poetry entitled Vojna (War; 1935), and K. H. Mácha’s Máj (May; 1935 and 1936), as well as Goethe’s Werther, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1937) and poems by François Villon (1938). Burian also adapted well-known plays by Beaumarchais and Wedekind, as well as Václav Kliment Klicpera’s Každý něco pro vlast (Everybody Something for His Fatherland). Theater D became not only a new original stage but also an active cultural center that published its own journal and organized exhibitions of contemporary art, concerts, festivals, and educational programs. The Czech avant-garde on the political left included strong amateur theater groups, in which workers performed collective recitals of socially oriented poetry from the early 1920s onward. Later it followed Soviet revolutionary theaters by turning to the political revue, and what was known as “stage newspaper.” During the Nazi occupation, the Czech theaters of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were directly controlled by the Nazis, who imposed a harsh censorship and prohibited plays by authors who were racially or politically undesirable. Many theater people were persecuted or jailed because of their work or Jewish origin. Some theaters were closed down; others in larger cities were confiscated and given to German groups. During the occupation experimentation explosively increased in theater and opera, and works of the Czech classics were staged to strengthen national identity. Anti-Nazism was couched in parables in a sophisticated fashion. A number of professional and amateur avant-garde ensembles emerged, including the Divadélko pro 99 (Theater for 99, 1939–44), the Větrník (Windmill, 1941–46), and the Divadélko ve Smetanově muzeu (Theater in the Smetana Museum, 1941–45). They cultivated primarily free adaptations of poetry and prose, and grotesque stylized productions. Within the limitations imposed by censorship, the Prague National Theater tried to maintain a broad dramaturgical selection from contemporary and classical drama. Karel Dostal, staging world classics, remained a

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leading director, as did Jiří Frejka, staging Czech classics and contemporary authors (Klicpera, Václav Renč) and the repertoire of world comedies (Plautus, Goldoni, etc.). All theaters, except for the puppet stages, were closed down on September 1, 1944, after the announcement of “total war.” The artistic activity of prisoners in the Nazi camps was unique in the history of Czech culture. The inmates, among them the professionals Emil František Burian, Gustav Schorsch, and Nina Jirsíková, developed theater in Teresienstadt/Terezín, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, and Dachau. Cabarets, recitations, drama, and opera performances, as well as performances for children, took place under extreme conditions. Some plays were taken from regular theater repertoires, others were written expressly for performances in the camps.

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Fuzzy Borderlines: the Čapeks’ Robots, Insects, Women, and Men Veronika Ambros As Lubomir Doležel writes, Karel Čapek’s place is at the center of the moderns in Bohemia; he is flanked on one side by the compulsive storyteller Jaroslav Hašek, on the other by the constructor of the modern myth Franz Kafka. If this trinity strikes us as somewhat odd, we should remember that in Bohemia the borderline between fairytale and nightmare is fuzzy (27). In the “hybrid world” of Karel Čapek’s tales fictional space “shifts from the fairy tale world to the natural world and vice versa” (Doležel 23 and 24). Typical of the utopia that “pervades the whole intellectual spectrum of modernity from political philosophy to poetry and the arts” (Calinescu, 63), the often insular “nowhere” of the settings connotes additionally a non-specific time. Due to their interest in modern science, Karel and Josef Čapek “projected whole new creatures and environments onto an oddly familiar, non-existent landscape” (Miller, foreword in Kussi, n.p.), so that many of their works seem science fiction. The Čapeks, however, go beyond “the modern devaluation of the past and the growing importance of future,” by juxtaposing utopia with its parody, dystopia (Calinescu 63). They investigate the role of individual and collective memory because “without memory there would be no reality” (Karel Čapek, Povětroň 205). Both Čapeks were instrumental in shaping the modern Czech arts. Josef was above all a prominent artist and theorist of the Czech Avant-garde, who also worked as a journalist and a writer. Karel was a prolific essayist, the author of highly popular short stories, fairy-tales, and novels, particularly the remarkably innovative novel trilogy Hordubal, Povětroň (Meteor), and Obyčejný život (Ordinary Life; 1933–34). He was well known also for his science fiction novels Krakatit (1924) and Továrna na Absolutno (The Factory for the Absolute; 1922), as well as for the dystopic satire Válka s mloky (The War with the Newts; 1936). In addition to the joint authorship of dramatic texts and short stories, their cooperation produced a number of works in which Josef’s illustrations, stage designs, and costume designs complemented Karel’s texts. Karel, who received

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Figure 9. Karel Čapek’s Drawing of Dezső Kosztolányi, made in the Netherlands, on the Occasion of a PEN Club Congress. From Karel Čapek, Over Holland (On the Netherlands).Amsterdam: Van Holkema and Warendorf, 1933, p. 9.

his doctorate in philosophy, was interested in American Pragmatism, as well as in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. As a writer, he was attracted to English literature, especially to H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton. His Hovory s T. G. Masarykem (Conversations with T. G. Masaryk; 1928–35), President of the Czechoslovak state then, cast Karel as a representative of official art. Yet, his translations of French poetry (1920) and most of his plays reveal his poetic talent. He inspired the Avant-garde and altered modern Czech prosody. He could also draw skillfully (see Figure 9). The Čapeks always experimented with literary conventions. Their dramatic texts often parodied traditional genres and trends, they mocked medieval mystery and morality plays, as well as the techniques of commedia dell’arte and popular culture in general. They employed the devices of Expressionism and other contemporary movements, of fairy tales (anthropomorphic animals, artificial beings), of (often unsolved) mystery stories, and they used dialogues reminiscent of conversation comedies by Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Topics and techniques migrated from one work to another and often transgressed genre boundaries (from story to a play, from drama to a novel, or from a philosophical essay to a short story), or even boundaries of art forms (literature and fine arts). Some of their subjects are still topical, as are their means of creating anti-illusionist, mostly expressionist theater. Much of their work, positioned between high-brow literature and kitsch, remains controversial, “full of contradicting ideas coexisting at the same time, ideas that make us grin or laugh as we wish to clap our ears shut and flee” (Miller in Kussi, n.p.). The first one act play of the duo, Lásky hra osudná (The Fateful Game of Love; 1911), already exemplifies the manner in which they challenged the audience and the stage, following the

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revival of commedia dell’arte. Čapeks’ text mocks genre conventions by frustrating expectations. The classical triangle of two men wooing one woman, as well as the interrupted utterances and the shifts between prose and verse create the impression of an improvised text (Všetička 126) and seem to confirm the anticipated comic structure. But instead of the conventional happy end, the text concludes with the death of one of the suitors, parodying the commedia dell’arte by turning comedy into tragedy. Although the characters do not wear the traditional masks, the make-up covering some faces recalls their prototypes. By calling Dottore and Scaramouche “marionettes” (loutky) and the play itself a “rational puppetry” (rozumové marionetářství; qtd. in Černý, Premiéry 28), the authors shift toward a more topical theatricality (see Craig) and the topic of reason. By foregrounding their static characteristics, these puppets foreshadow robots and dehumanized human beings. Between Intellect and Intuition Bergsonian treatment of intellect and intuition resonates in Karel Čapek’s RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots, a Collective Drama with an Initial Comedy) as a conflict between artificial creatures and human beings. The plot shows the process by which people are dehumanized and robots are humanized. True to the utopian tradition, the action is set on an island. There, a factory produces robots, i.e., artificial human beings of the future conceived by the old Rossum (Americanized spelling of the Czech word rozum, i.e., intellect, reason), a scientist bent on imitating God. Čapek plays with the contrast between the mechanical and the living creatures, initially evoking Bergsonian laughter but also accentuating the affinity between the two seemingly incompatible groups. Another expression of this basic conflict is a spatially marked clash between the sexes: the action begins and ends in the male spaces of laboratory and office, while the middle parts are set in a prominently female space, Helena’s rooms. As is typical of old morality and expressionist plays, the male characters appear as various embodiments of reason, indicated by their names that denote professions and stereotypes (often lost in English translations). In contrast, the two female characters illustrate different facets of intuition and past. Helena’s charm evokes the mythic Helen of Troy but also questions the dominance of reason and the quest for progress, productivity, and efficiency. Nána (the nanny), a raisonneur like Fanka in Loupežník (The Robber; 1920) represents the wisdom passed down from generation to generation. She cautions everyone not to sin against God, who represents to her more than religion, moral values, and tradition. The utopia and comedy of the prologue contrast the dystopia and drama of the following three acts. In the third act, the revolting robots almost annihilate mankind and face their own extinction (Helena destroys the formula necessary to recreate the robots, while human beings are no longer able to reproduce). Two robots, however, fall in love with each other and possibly prevent a “universal” catastrophe. The only remaining human being, Alquist (whose name suggests alchemy as well as someone questioning everything), encourages in the end the lovers to replicate genesis, evoking thus the interpretation of scriptural events in medieval mystery plays. Although the action of RUR focuses on the human characters, both title and subtitle refer to a collective hero, the robots, a neologism Josef derived from the Czech word robota = drudgery. In contrast to the present use of the term, robots, for Čapek, are not mechanical creatures but rather

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biologically produced androids with great memory capacity (see Klaić Plot) and no past to remember. True products of reason, Čapek’s robots lack emotions and soul, they echo the Golem of the medieval Jewish tradition, the Homunculus in Goethe’s Faust, and Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein. They are also related to Gordon Craig’s notion that an actor is an Übermarionette, to Oskar Schlemmer’s experiments with actors as abstract shapes, and to the revival of interest in puppetry. As in The Robber, time plays a prominent role in RUR. The year of the play’s writing marks the beginning of the robots’ history. For the first spectators, their own time becomes past while the present of the play is set in the future. Like Mayakovsky in The Bedbug, Čapek explores in RUR the possibilities of the future while warning against the neglect of the past. Furthermore, setting the beginning of Rossum’s journey in his own time, he suggests that the October revolution may lead to dictatorships, blind belief in scientific and technological progress, Taylorism, and massproduction. Yet he offers a happy end in which love prevails instead of the mass destruction typical of expressionist pessimism. Between Fairy-Tale and Nightmare Ze života hmyzu (The Insect Play), a comedy jointly written by the brothers, indicates again a collective hero. The action focuses on the journey of a vagrant (tulák) through a forest, and his encounter with different insects. In spite of the authors’ claim of allegiance to an old mystery play, the work mixes again several genres: it is a satirical comedy mocking human vices, it is a fairy tale with both a tragic and an optimistic ending, and it is grotesque in the expressionist tradition. Like the pilgrim in Jan Amos Komenský’s Labyrint světa a ráj srdce (Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart; 1623), the vagrant guides the spectators in the prologue through the horrors of the fictional world. The play itself appears to externalize his satirical vision of butterflies, predators, and ants, which represent a snobbish upper-class, a close-minded middle-class, and a dictatorial system often regarded as a portrayal of either Taylorism or Communism. He enters their territory sequentially, act for act. Marking life cycles, the vagrant dies in the epilogue, following the death of his peculiar companion, the chrysalis. Two slugs with a strong lisp adopt his role and comment on his death, thus mixing comedy and tragedy, just as the first act brilliantly ridiculed the upper crust and simultaneously parodied modern poetry. At the very end (deviating from the original, more traditional ending that lets the vagrant wake up), a couple baptizes a baby, restoring thus a human perspective and an appreciation of ordinary life. The vagrant, whose poetic language negates his stereotype, turns from an observer into a protagonist, connecting the parts and framing the action. He forms “a bridge between the audience and the spectacle itself” (Harkins 76), providing, above all, a perspective from which to judge the fictional events. It is in this capacity that he occasionally participates in the action, most blatantly in the third act when he destroys the commander of the yellow ants’ army, this “ugly insect,” taking a stance against war and those who are responsible for it. Instances such as this serve also to foreground the play’s fictionality: the vagrant forces the spectator to see the familiar anew without revealing his function as a commentator. Like the chorus in antique tragedy, he connects the disjointed parts, while defamiliarizing also the action in a Brechtian manner.

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Another type of a hybrid world appears in Věc Makropulos (The Makropoulos Affair; 1922), which introduces the Faustian motif of eternal life in a blend of fairy tale, melodrama, comedy, and a court case. The story is based on a tale from the reign of Rudolf II, when, according to a legend, rabbi Yehuda ben Levi created the Golem, an artificial human being. Karel Čapek wrote a comedy that lampoons the consequences of attained immortality: his heroine, Elina Makropoulos, the daughter of the emperor’s doctor, received a potion that turned her into an immortal creature. Having been a beautiful opera singer with the same initials and many aliases for three-hundred years, she is getting tired of her fairy-tale existence. In the end, one of the characters destroys the formula for the mixture, as Helena in RUR burned the one used to produce robots. Leoš Janáček made this text into an eponymous opera. In 1923, Josef presented an expressionistic text, Země mnoha jmen (A Land of Many Names), in which utopia is confronted with dystopia, and the creation of a new land is followed by its destruction. According to František Černý, its staging used for the first time in Czech theater projections on stage. The pictures of the set design, with sketches for puppet-like characters seem to have supported the prevalence of dehumanized characters and the play’s allegoric tendency (Premiéry 235–54). Karel Čapek — Zoon Politikon In Bílá nemoc (The White Plague; 1930), Karel returned to the problems of inventions. In a fictional country, Galén, a doctor of the poor, has found a cure for a fast spreading disease that is affecting people over forty. When he proposes to trade his medication for the promise to stop wars, an ill despotic marshal agrees, but before they can seal the deal, the war-desiring masses trample the doctor to death. Čapek modifies here the RUR motif of preventing the war by destroying one of its leaders. This time the text takes a partisan opposition to the imminent political threat of National Socialism (reflected in German names such as Krüg and Sigelius, and the use of concentration camps to isolate sick people). Abandoning his former relativism, Karel Čapek presents a dramatic conflict between an ideal of humanity and the expansion of power. Action is here secondary to personified ideas and a clash of values, whose topicality was confirmed by audience responses. Černý calls the play’s staging one of the greatest performances of democratic Europe before World War II (Premiéry 360). Karel Čapek’s theater culminates in his last drama Matka (The Mother; 1938), which uses previously introduced techniques. An archetypal mother (her name, Dolores, connotes the Spanish Civil War, then raging) loses her husband and four sons to the “higher” causes of colonial interests, medical-technological research, and political battles. To protect the children of her country she gives her last son a gun to defend his homeland. Written during the civil war in Spain, when Hitler threatened with war and when Henlein supported Hitler in Czechoslovakia, Matka has often been praised as an openly anti-fascist work. Yet it goes beyond propaganda, for it deals with a drama inside the mother that Čapek externalized as a confrontation with her husband’s and sons’ ghosts (Harkins 152). The action seems to emanate from an interior monologue, in which the voices of her memory participate. The dead

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hardly differ from the living, for as long as they are present in the mother’s memory they are part of her reality. Matka, even more than Bílá nemoc, addresses the conflict between collective memory, i.e., historical discourse, and individual recollection. The male characters question the official accounts of their allegedly meaningful death and confront the spectator with their own sober reports about their missions. The technique resembles closely the confrontation of different points of view presented in Čapek’s novel trilogy, which corresponds to the relativist stance the Čapeks generally take. Here, as in The Makropoulos Affair, Čapek suggests that history is constitutive of the present by choosing the father’s study, kept by the mother as a museum, as the setting. The collection of objects in the room illustrates her idea of male heroism, foregrounding thus the difference between male and female views on courage. Unlike Mrs. Carrar in Brecht’s Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar (Señora Carrar’s Rifles), Čapek’s mother does not follow the example of her men to battle. Her connection with the external world is actually limited to an open window, and a radio that functions as a reporter, a commentator, and a narrator. The voices of the radio shape the mother’s discourse, so that her monologue acquires a dialogic quality. In the end she gives in to the news she hears, thus merging male and female valor. Although the mother is a guide through her inner world, the ghosts are sometimes present even when she is not, as if continuing her thoughts. The climax is reached when the characters abandon their passively observing position. Matka, in contrast to Bílá nemoc, is an appeal to fight instead of a warning. Reception The dramatic texts above all made the Čapeks fashionable European authors (see Moses) and the first Czech or Slovak playwrights to cross the ocean (Ambros). The international adoption of the concept of “robot” indicates how trendy RUR became. Like other weaker and overly narrative plays, it is now rarely performed, reduced to a schoolbook illustration of science fiction, fantasy, or Expressionism in drama. Most other dramatic texts of the Čapeks, however, belong to the core repertoire of the Czech stage. The mixture of philosophical inquiry and ordinary characters, embedded in texts that revive the old traditions of popular theater, still appeal to the audience. Karel Čapek’s dialogues inspired his friend Mukařovský to seminal studies. The legacy of the Čapeks stimulated postwar Czech playwrights, including Milan Kundera, Josef Topol, Pavel Kohout, and Václav Havel. Černý’s recent extensive survey of the dramatic work of both brothers in Premiéry usefully describes each play and its staging, but does not deal with their international reception, for instance the lifting of a silent ban on Čapeks’ allegedly bourgeois plays under Communism, thanks to a monograph by the Soviet scholar S. V. Nikol’skij. Biographies by Harkins, Bradbrook, and Thiele show that Karel Čapek is still of interest, not just as a writer of science fiction (see Suvin) but also for mocking established genres. The Čapek brothers questioned the theater tradition and showed how volatile aesthetic and moral norms are. Yet, they “made it possible to actually invent worlds, and with laughter in the

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bargain” (Miller, foreword in Kussi, n.p.). They activated the audience by presenting personified, often conflicting ideas, and by frustrating expectations. Their texts expose “[a]mbivalences, doubts and anxieties concerning the future [that] have shaped the dramatic vision since the early expressionists and other modernists, especially after the disaster of World War I (Klaić, Plot 3). They also foreshadow more recent treatments of memory in theater by Georg Tabori and Tadeusz Kantor, for example by using puppet-like creatures and objects.

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The Interbellum Emancipation of the Slovak Stage Dagmar Roberts The first professional Slovak National Theater was founded in 1920 in Bratislava, after Czechoslovakia became independent. The city was a new administrative center for Slovakia with a predominantly Hungarian and German population, so the Slovak theater had to struggle until the mid–30s with a limited audience, lack of a proper repertoire, and the shortage of theater professionals. The first actors of the Slovak National Theater were Czech. The first performances were staged in Czech or in inadequate Slovak by Czech actors. The Slovak National Theater hired a theater group from Eastern Bohemia, and five prospective Slovak actors attended crash acting courses in Prague. The first performances in opera and drama staged Czech authors, such as Bedřich Smetana and the brothers Mrštík. Jozef Gregor Tajovský’s Hriech (Sin) and V službe (In Service) were the first Slovak plays staged in the Slovak National Theater. In 1921, some actors of the Slovak National Theater created a traveling group called Marš, which performed throughout Slovakia in Slovak. In 1932, a separate Slovak-language theater group was formed in the National Theater. The Czech and Slovak groups performed alternatingly until 1938. A theater operated in Košice (with numerous breaks) between 1924 and 1930, and in the 1937–38 season. Fraňo Devínsky established a private Slovak Folk Theater in Trnava in 1941, but soon moved to Nitra. During the Slovak National Uprising in 1944, so-called “front theaters” were founded in Martin and Prešov. The first directors of the Slovak National Theater were Czechs: Janko Borodáč, who leaned towards Realism, and Ferdinand Hoffmann, who preferred Expressionism, were the pioneers of Slovak theater directing. Ján Budský and Ján Jamnický, both of whom worked as directors in the Slovak National Theater from the late 1930s onward, aimed at creating an experimental, synthetic theater. Drama between 1920 and 1935 tried and failed to catch up with the European developments. Jozef Gregor Tajovský and, to a lesser extent, Kvetoslav Florián Urbanovič, Ivan Stodola, and Vladimír Konštantín Hurban (known as “VHV” = Vladimír Hurban Vladimírov to distinguish himself from his cousin, Vladimír Hurban, both grandsons of Jozef Miloslav Hurban) wrote realist dramas, sometimes with naturalistic elements. Modernist and symbolist tendencies were rare, though present in some plays by Urbanovič, and Emil Rusko, and in Štefan Letz’s tragedy

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Magdaléna (1927). The Avant-garde was more visible in playwriting than in staging. Most of the expressionist dramas by VHV and the authors around the periodical Mladé Slovensko (Young Slovakia) were never performed. Ján Poničan’s futurist drama, Dva svety (Two Worlds; 1924), was unique. The most renowned author staged at the Slovak National Theater in the interwar period was Ivan Stodola, author of the tragedy Bačova žena (The Shepherd’s Wife; 1928) and the comedy Jožko Púčik a jeho kariéra (Jožko Púčik and His Career; 1931). Since the Slovak repertoire was rather limited until the late 1940s, the Slovak National Theater staged many plays by European authors. In the first decade of its existence it compensated for the lack of Slovak plays with Czech dramas. It was also supposed to “nationalize” theatrical life in Bratislava, which, until then had only German and Hungarian theaters. After 1918, efforts were made to replace German and Hungarian performances by Slovak/Czechoslovak ones. The most-frequently staged Czech authors at the Slovak National Theater were Karel and Josef Čapek. Other popular Czech authors were the brothers Mrštík, Jaroslav Vrchlický, Alois Jirásek, Josef Kajetán Tyl, Viktor Dyk, Lev Blatný, and Jiří Mahen. The list of Czech dramas staged in Bratislava until the split of occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 shows that the Czech contribution was heaviest in the 1920s. With the rise of the Slovak theater group, the number of Czech plays in the repertoire dropped significantly. Czech dramas were staged in the 1930s only if they were popular (Vrchlický and František Langer) or considered relevant (Karel Čapek). Although Czech drama contributed to the rise of a truly national theater, most of the repertoire in the Slovak National Theater consisted of world drama until the mid–1940s: several plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Molière, Chekhov, Strindberg, Hauptmann, and Pirandello, but also Imre Madách (The Tragedy of Man, staged in 1926) and Stanisław Przybyszewski. The significance of Hungarian and German Bratislava theaters dropped after 1918, but these national communities managed to preserve their culture until the end of the World War II. In the early 1920s, a German theater group performed in the building of the Slovak National Theater. Several regulations concerning days and times for performing in German were adopted. German performances were run only in summer, later only on Mondays and Tuesdays. German theaters performed also on other premises, and in 1925 a German Theater Association was established. The Austrian Burgtheater, Theater in der Josephstadt, Raimund-Theater, Deutsches Volkstheater and others, as well as German-speaking theater groups from Bohemia and Moravia, held regular performances in Bratislava, which was considered to be almost a suburb of Vienna. The city also hosted the first wave of German actor-emigrants after 1933. A shift in Slovak drama around 1935 coincided with the rise of Surrealism in poetry and the shift to mythic Naturalism in the Lyrical Prose School. During World War II, a highly lyrical, metaphorical, and spatio-temporally experimental verse drama emerged in Kazimír Bezek’s comedy Klietka (Cage; 1939); Rudolf Dilong’s tragedies Valin (1940) and Padajúce svetlo (Falling Light; 1941); Ján Poničan’s Štyria (The Four; 1942), and Peter Zvon’s Tanec nad plačom (A Dance over Tears; 1942, staged 1943). Poničan’s Štyria, staged by Ján Jamnický, radically departed from Realism by presenting a banal conversation of two couples on relationships and love. The movement of the characters on the stage emphasized harmony and dissonance, symmetry and asymmetry; the geometrical arrangement of the protagonists and the dynamics of their grouping refocused audience attention from utterances to gestures and movements. The plot was regularly interrupted by “He” and “She,” who read verse in the auditorium, thus trying to integrate stage and audience.

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Štyria also incorporated music by Chopin and a ballet. Jamnický’s aim was to create a synthetic theater, where lyrical mood dominated space and time, rendering subjective perceptions of time and creating an artificial, somewhat surreal sense of space. Focusing on mood and on poetic aspects of reality, Jamnický followed Russian avant-garde experiments. The “drama of ideas and schematic situations” developed during the last years of the war as a response to lyrical theater and verse drama. Flourishing especially in the interim period 1945–48, it aimed at replacing escapism with a responsible attitude towards societal issues, partially coinciding with the rise of European Existentialism after World War II. Július Barč-Ivan, a representative of this drama, wrote his best plays between 1943 and 1945: Matka (Mother; 1943), Neznámy (The Unknown; 1944), and Dvaja (The Two; 1945). Of those starting in the mid–1940s, Štefan Králik was significant both before and after 1948. Before the Communist takeover he published existentially flavored experimental plays like Hra bez lásky (Play without Love; 1947) and Hra o slobode (Play about Freedom; 1948), after 1948 he became an exemplary author of Socialist Realism.

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Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Clash on the Romanian Stage Marian Popescu, with Marcel Cornis-Pope After World War I, Transylvania was united with the Kingdom of Romania. The country experienced an intensive bourgeois and capitalist development. The theater repertoire was modernized during the 1920s and 30s under the influence of Dada and Surrealism (Tristan Tzara and Marcel Iancu) and echoes of Symbolism and Expressionism. Plays by Strindberg, Kaiser, Toller, Andreev, Schnitzler, Hasenclever were included in the repertoire, together with significant works by Romanian authors like Lucian Blaga, Adrian Maniu, Mihai Săulescu, G. Ciprian, and George Mihail Zamfirescu. Comedy remained the favorite of the public, but new dramas and authors (Ticu Arhip, Mihail Sorbul, Camil Petrescu, Victor Ion Popa, and Liviu Rebreanu), representing a variety of modern dramatistic approaches, captured the audiences and the press. In the interbellum Bucharest had ten theaters, and the repertoires responded to the interests of a bourgeois audience that preferred opera and musicals. The Bucharest National Theater was exposed to various political pressures since it was considered to have educational and propaganda power, but it succeeded in keeping its leading role in theater life. The 1930s were the most interesting period in modern Romanian theater, witnessing, as they did, open confrontations between a growing nationalism and a strong cosmopolitan movement towards European values. As Dumitru Micu, among others, has argued, the development of the interwar theater owes a lot to the work of multigenre, “total writers” like Lucian Blaga, Camil Petrescu, Popa, Zamfirescu, Mihail Sebastian, and Victor Papilian, who wrote also for the theater (312). Writers with a predominantly dramatic vocation, like Ciprian, Alexandru Kiriţescu, Mircea Ştefănescu, and Tudor Muşatescu,

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also enhanced the possibilities and popularity of the modern Romanian stage production. Typologically, the contributions of Blaga and Camil Petrescu are the most defining for the period, the former developing an expressionist mytho-poetic theater, the latter introducing in Romania an analytic, problematizing type of theater. The expressionist-mythic direction was illustrated also partly by Ciprian, Adrian Maniu, and somewhat later by Radu Stanca. The analytic-problematizing theater of Camil Petrescu was rediscovered only decades later by writers like Horia Lovinescu, Al. Sever, D. R. Popescu, Dumitru Solomon, Romulus Guga, Gheorghe Astaloş, and others, as they shook off the constraints of “socialist theater.” Other playwrights of the interwar period mixed genres and styles, as was the case of Mihail Sebastian whose work interplayed intellectual and social analysis with sentimentalism and farce. Camil Petrescu, a major playwright, novelist and essayist, Haig Acterian, director, organizer, and a younger friend of Gordon Craig, Popa, Paul Gusty, Ion Sava made also important contributions to the effort to modernize the structure, artistic profile, and repertory of Romanian theater. In addition to the Bucharest National Theater, the private theater companies Bulandra, Marioara Voiculescu-Ion Manolescu, Teatrul Mic (The Little Theater), Maria Ventura Theatre, and others asserted themselves, but World War II and its consequences undermined their efforts. Furthermore, all the major directors died during or in the aftermath of the war. Political repression hit hard the Jewish theater community: Jewish actors were deported to labor camps in 1940, but public pressure forced their return six months later. Censorship began to refashion the repertories, especially after the far right came to power in 1940–41. Many of the private companies closed, others survived until 1947, when the country came under Soviet rule.

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Institutionalization and Innovation in the Bulgarian Theater Joanna Spassova-Dikova In 1904, the National Assembly decided to build a venue for the National Theater, which was a key cultural institution under the authority of the Ministry of Education. The National Theater Company had played on the little stage of Slavjanska besseda until the new building designed by the famous Austrian architects Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer was inaugurated on January 3, 1907. The competition for the best Bulgarian contemporary play to open the new building was won by Anton Strašimirov’s Svekarva (Mother in Law) and staged in the spring of 1907. Ivan Vazov, Peyo Yavorov, and Petko Y. Todorov also wrote new plays that were subsequently staged. Bulgarian theater continued to cultivate the two main genres established in mid-nineteenth century: historical plays about past glory and comedies of everyday life. In addition, a new genre emerged in the early twentieth century: mytho-poetic drama. These were in a way prepared by some nineteenth-century romantic and historical pieces that incorporated elements of Bulgarian folklore and bucolic poetry, but modified by the national crisis of consciousness, spirit, and values

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that overtook Bulgarian society at the turn of the century. The need for great ideas and heroism led to a rebirth of mythological thinking with its universality, cosmogony, and fantasy. The dreams and enthusiasm released by the national liberation in 1878 soon vanished. The development of capitalism, poverty, insecurity, the emergence of bureaucracy, the careerism of the politicians brought disappointment and a decline of great expectations. The mytho-poetic dramas, although rare in Bulgarian theater culture, may be understood as manifestations of rebellion and resistance against the injustice of the established social order by means of projecting a fantastic world against the real one. Some pieces by Strašimirov and others contained fantastic elements, but the strongest representative of the mytho-poetic trend was Petko Yurdanov Todorov, who wanted to immerse his plays in dreams, fantasies, and beauty that opposed the gray, brutal, and politicized reality. His Zidari (Masons; 1902), Samodiva (Fairy; 1904), Zmeiova svatba (Dragon’s Wedding; 1910), and other plays depicted individual rebellions against society and its established norms with motives from folklore. The fairy and the dragon in Samodiva and Zmeiova svatba are mythical creatures. Todorov’s plays were staged by different directors and actors in the Sofia National Theater, often in a realistic style, even with naturalistic elements. They profoundly challenged the actors for they asked for artistic devices appropriate for the representation of charismatic and strong characters that came from magic worlds and were doomed to solitary struggle against others. The audiences and critics appreciated them as a new theatrical trend, with little interest in fostering innovations in stage directing, acting, and design. During his one-year tenure as administrative director in 1907, the writer, editor, and critic Penčo Slaveikov established a carefully composed repertory that consisted of European, Balkan, and national plays, with a good balance of classical and modern comedies, tragedies and other genres. Most of the actors were already graduates of universities and theater schools in Russia, Central- and Western Europe. The Balkan Wars and World War I hindered a normal functioning of the National Theater, although Geo Milev conducted some interesting experiments by introducing to Bulgarian artists and audience modern trends, especially German Expressionism. Opposing Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism on stage, Milev strove for a unity between external and inner forms of expression (scenery, costumes, light, music, acting, rhythm, etc.). Though he proclaimed that the performance had to achieve maximum effect with minimal devices, he sought a monumentality and spectacularity that resembled Max Reinhardt’s mass casts. Furthermore, Milev adopted Adolf Appia’s concept of rhythm, music, and light, and Gordon Craig’s notions of non-representational settings, atmospheric effects, and actors as Übermarionetten, as well as some of Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold’s achievements in bio-mechanics and constructivism. He adapted these notions to the Bulgarian cultural conditions in the staging of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex with amateurs in Stara Zagora in 1915, August Strindberg’s Dodsdansen (Dance of Death) in the National Theater in 1919, and Ernst Toller’s Masse-Mensch in the Renaissance Theater in 1923. In the post-World-War I period, the National Theater remained an emblem of Bulgaria’s cultural life and a model for the other theater companies in the capital and the provinces. The visit of the Moscow Art Theater in 1920 reinforced the impact of the Russian theater on Bulgarian acting style and the training that many actors had received in Russia. The appointment of Russian directors and their initiative to create drama schools in Bulgaria made psychological Realism on stage

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dominant. Bulgarian artists were receptive to the ideas that their Russian colleagues brought to Bulgaria from Stanislavsky and Nemirovitch-Danchenko on the psychology of acting. The audiences appreciated the simple and natural expressions advocated by the Moscow Art Theater. On February 10, 1923, the Bulgarian National Theater planned to celebrate the first theater performance in Bulgaria and the fifteenth anniversary of the first performance in the National Theater with a spectacle called “The Apotheosis of the Bulgarian Theater.” A petroleum lamp that was to link the past with the Theater’s birth during the Revival caused a fire that destroyed the building. The Theater reopened in 1929 with a performance of Todorov’s Zidari. The disaster ushered a new era in: after the reopening, the National Theater sent old actors away, appointed new ones, and engaged the first fairly professional directors. Nikolai Massalitinov began his directorship and pedagogical work by founding in 1925 a Drama School in the National Theater. This Russian artist, working in the psychological and realistic traditions of Malii Teatr and the Moscow Art Theater, became a key figure in the Bulgarian theater of the interwar period, succeeding in forming a reasonably integrated actor’s ensemble with strong individualities. His best productions were from the classical Russian and West-

Figure 10. From the performance of Zidari that opened the rebuilt National Theater. Dir. Hr. Zankov. Courtesy Joanna-Spassova-Dikova.

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European repertoire. Since he held that a national theater had to be based on national drama, he staged a great many contemporary Bulgarian plays, among them Stefan L. Kostov’s Golemanov (1928) and Yordan Yovkov’s Albena (1929) and Borjana (1932). Kostov wrote exclusively social and political comedies, while Yovkov’s dramas incorporated folklore and fantastic motives. Some of the authors performed at that time were actors from the National Theater; most of their realistic plays treated contemporary or recent problems. One of the best pieces of the period, however, was Georgi Raičev’s brilliant dramatic legend Elenovo tzarstvo (Deer’s Kingdom; 1929), which tells in the manner of mytho-poetic dramas how a girl sacrifices herself for the sake of a community’s happiness and undergoes a transformation into an animal. By the 1930s, most productions were staged by appointed professional directors, who had original ideas and were well-educated, either in Western Europe (Germany, Austria, France) or Russia. Some of them founded acting schools that also functioned as alternative experimental theaters. The theater critics also became more active and professional in the interwar period. Though writers of theater reviews and theoretical articles were literary critics who seldom had specific knowledge of the theater, they imposed more severe artistic criteria. Several theater journals were started. In the late 1930s, exchanges between the national theaters of Belgrade and Sofia and cultural links with Poland were initiated. Some of the left-wing directors and actors staged Soviet plays and founded workers’ theaters to protest against the repertory, censorship, and the conservative political orientation of the directors and the administrators. Some could continue working but most of them were fired from the state theaters. The period saw the emergence of a highly centralized net of regional and municipal theaters. Attendance dropped, censorship became more severe. The new, pro-German orientation manifested itself mainly in the staging of more German plays and the 1941 tour of the National Theater in Germany. Most Bulgarian intellectuals and artists supported the occupation of Macedonia, but Bulgaria’s joining World War II interrupted theater life.

Figure 11. Georgi Raičev, Elenovo zarstvo (1929). Dir. Y. Yakovlev, décor A. Popov. Bulgarian National Theater, 1934. Courtesy Joanna-Spassova-Dikova.

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Polish Modernist Drama Ewa Wąchocka Modern Polish drama was born in the 1890s within the new cultural, ideological, and artistic formation known as Young Poland, which developed two parallel models of theater: a naturalist and a symbolist one. The naturalists attempted to present a true reflection of specific social milieus and were most successful in portraying the proverbial kołtun (lowbrow), the philistine townsfolk. The most versatile representative of this poetics was Gabriela Zapolska, whose satires still constitute the core of Polish naturalist repertoire. Her most popular play, Moralność pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska; 1906), is a mordant satire on bourgeois hypocrisy, while Panna Maliczewska (Miss Maliczewska; 1910) deals with a young actress victimized by predatory males. Naturalism in Polish drama had to co-exist with emerging Modernism. Its veristic picture of reality was, therefore, often colored by impressionist moods and psychological analyses. The tendency towards symbolic superstructures and allegorical ornaments decisively warped “the photos of nature.” The Polemicists, Poets, and Philosophers of Young Poland The plays of Stanisław Przybyszewski, the leader of modernist bohemia, also bordered on Naturalism and Symbolism. He owed his international success to his original philosophy of art and courageous subject matter: Przybyszewski revealed the torments of a naked soul in lurid dramas of the battle between the sexes. However, the most memorable combinations of naturalist and symbolist poetics are to be found in the plays of Tadeusz Rittner, the canonized social and psychological comedies of Young Poland. Among the numerous works of this Polish-German writer the most remarkable are W małym domku (In a Small House; 1904), Głupi Jakub (Stupid James; 1910), and Wilki w nocy (Wolves at Night; 1916). The world of these plays with Chekhovian polytonal dramatic atmosphere is only delicately sketched. It is inhabited by people who expect more than the usual hum-drum existence, dreaming of beauty, high ideals, and moving experiences. Drama at the turn-of the-century was dominated by the artistic personality of Stanisław Wyspiański, who managed to combine tradition with innovation. Most of his work is infused with a romantic philosophy of history, articulated in terms of the issue of Polish independence, although he also engaged in a polemic with the romantic system of values in Wyzwolenie (Deliverance; 1903) and Akropolis (1904). Wyspiański emphasized tradition by means of ancient motifs and plots, which, as in Achilleis (1903) and Powrót Odysa (Odysseus’s Return; 1907), are not just Homeric paraphrases but also dramatic variants of Polish history. His best historical work, Noc listopadowa (November Night; 1904), treats the November 1830 uprising of the Poles against the Russians. Inherited concepts, ideas, and values are interwoven here with elements of Maeterlinck’s static drama, Wagner’s musical drama, Nietzsche’s ethical philosophy, and thematic and ideological motifs from modern painting. Out of this heterogeneous material Wyspiański forged an original dramatic structure that integrated the artistic means. Later, he transformed his

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Symbolism into the new style of Expressionism. In Wyspiański’s theater words represent only one component; in Wesele (The Wedding; 1901), for instance, words harmoniously combine with the dynamism of movement and gesture, the expression of solid shapes, and the color of light and sound. Thanks to these qualities, Wyspiański’s texts often assume the shape of an original scenic score that corresponds to the ideas of the great theater reform, the movement in European theater at the beginning of the twentieth century represented, among others, by Gordon Craig. The final stage of the Young Poland drama bears the stamp of Expressionism. Its influence is clearly seen in the works of Tadeusz Miciński, one of the most interesting although underestimated writers of the period. His Kniaź Patiomkin (Prince Potemkin; 1906), inscribes the events of the 1905 Russian revolution into symbolic fantasies and an original philosophy of history. W mrokach złotego pałacu, czyli Bazylissa Teofanu (In the Shades of the Gold Palace, or Basilissa Teofano; 1909) is an enormous fresco of a tenth-century Byzantium caught in the eternal conflict between good and evil. Loss of Synchrony In the interwar years, Polish drama was less responsive to European developments than poetry and prose. The specificity of the Polish situation, namely the weight of tradition, the dominance of models from national literature (though independence was only recent), and a reverence for the “prophetic” Romantic heritage limited the impact of the European theater reforms. The artistically and ideologically deeper variants of Naturalism did not catch on, nor did Ibsen’s Realism and modifications of realist techniques. Futurism and other avant-garde orientations had evident impact only on the drama of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz [Witkacy]. The Young Poland models still enjoyed popularity in the interwar years through Polish variants of Expressionism, which employed imitations of mystery plays in order to articulate social problems. Revolution, associated with universal issues, found its realization in a series of monumental works by Karol Hubert Rostworowski, among them Miłosierdzie (Charity; 1920), Straszne dzieci (Dreadful Children; 1922), and Zmartwychwstanie (Resurrection; 1923). Of the continued production of historical dramas only Stanisława Przybyszewska’s trilogy on the French Revolution is worth mentioning. Thermidor, first written in German in 1925, Dziewięćdziesiąty trzeci (Ninety-three; 1927), and Sprawa Dantona (The Danton Case), started in 1928, are reflections on the revolution that show full awareness of its political and historical mechanisms. These plays remained unrecognized during her life, in spite of her persistent efforts to publish and stage them. They were, however, staged later, as late as 1975. In the same line of descent we find Stefan Żeromski, a novelist who added to his early Róża (The Rose) and Sułkowski four other plays, including the bitter contemporary comedy Uciekła mi przepióreczka (A Quail Flew Away; 1924) that tried to adapt the main character’s romantic idealism to the reality of pre-war Poland. The most prominent figure of the realist movement, to which Żeromski undoubtedly belonged, was Jerzy Szaniawski. Adopting the Young Poland motif of existential anxiety, he enveloped ironic observations of contemporary problems and situations with the aura of poetic theater. His Żeglarz (Sailor; 1925), Adwokat i róże (Barrister and Roses; 1929), and Most (The Bridge; 1933) were regarded as the greatest events of interwar theater. His success was based on a subtle

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analysis of real psychological states, which he combined with a tendency to idealize, even to render unreal, his characters. This in turn enabled him to acknowledge his inability to provide a completely coherent assessment of human behavior. The post-war play Dwa teatry (Two Theaters; 1946), a discourse on the realistic and poetic models of theater, summarized Szaniawski’s experience. More widespread was the degradation of realist standards, the adoption of patterns of socio-psychological drama by trivial literature, farce, and boulevard comedy, which made up the repertoires of numerous theaters. Interesting attempts to refresh comedy by introducing scientific themes were undertaken by Bruno Winawer in Promienie FF (FF Rays; 1921) and by Antoni Cwojdziński, who popularized fashionable theories in Teoria Einsteina (1934) and Freuda teoria snów (Freud’s Theory of Dreams; 1937). As a result of tensions in public life, comedy turned to ideology and politics in the 1930s, for instance in Antoni Słonimski’s Rodzina (Family; 1933) and Murzyn warszawski (The Warsaw Negro; 1935), or in Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s Baba dziwo (The Strange Woman; 1938), an anti-totalitarian grotesque piece. The Last of the Avant-garde: Witkacy and Gombrowicz Witkacy was a unique figure of the interwar period. He stirred up a revolution in Polish drama, and was despised and misunderstood for it during his life. Today, Witkacy is regarded as one of the most influential creators of the European Avant-garde, a writer and thinker ahead of his time. He wrote nearly forty plays, mainly between 1918 and 1926, though the last one, Szewcy (The Shoemakers), dates from 1934. A third of these is lost, the rest was published as late as 1962. His dramaturgy developed from his philosophy, theory of culture, philosophy of history, and aesthetics, all of which formed a coherent system. It is within this speculative context that his paradoxical work becomes meaningful. The duality of being is the key notion of his system, expressed as a yearning to experience the metaphysical conditions of Unity in Multitude. Witkacy’s heroes are involved in a quest for metaphysical experiences in order grasp the Mystery of Existence. Since this quest is doomed to fail, the characters have to content themselves with substitutes such as eroticism, politics, and art, or with turning their lives into a theater of Pure Form, creating extraordinary make-belief situations as an ersatz metaphysics. The loss of metaphysics and the annihilation of the individual correspond to the decline of culture, social mechanization, and the trend to uniformity. Witkiewicz aspired to free drama from the burden of the naturalist tradition and the conventions of bourgeois theater by learning from the experience of Expressionism and Surrealism, and, above all, by implementing his own theory of Pure Form. The unrestrained composition of events, the departure from simple logic and probability, go hand in hand with the fantastic, the hyperbole, and the grotesque. However, we sense beyond these grotesque shapes an intellectual tension and a tragic torment. The last, forceful manifestation of avant-garde Polish drama is Witold Gombrowicz’s Iwona, księżniczka Burgunda (Ivona, Princess of Burgundia; 1938), in which the author inscribes his notion of interpersonal Form, both forming and deforming, defining and constraining, the structure of the grotesque and the pastiche of court intrigue. Gombrowicz made a breakthrough as a dramatist in exile with Ślub (The Marriage; 1947; published 1953), in which the dramatic explication

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of the Form takes the shape of dream poetics, a distorted dream about the homecoming of the main hero who much resembles Gombrowicz. This oneiric poetics expresses a philosophical and psychological opposition between creating and being created, formulated as a tragic conflict and a constant struggle against imposed forms of being. In his later Operetka (Operetta; 1966), Gombrowicz transposed this problem onto the plane of history, viewed through the prism of fashion, clothes, and costume. He met with approbation mostly as a prose writer, and his novels and diaries are still more popular than the plays, except for Operetka, which brought him back to Europe from his long Argentinian exile and established his international fame as a dramatist.

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Stage and Stage Design in Polish Modernist Theater Eleonora Udalska and Violetta Sajkiewicz

Wyspiański’s Monumental and Visual Theater The idea of a monumental theater, so central to the Polish tradition, was first formulated by Mickiewicz in his April 4, 1843 lecture on Slavic literature at the Collège de France, and this idea found a strong proponent around 1900 in Stanisław Wyspiański, a playwright, a painter, a glasspainter, as well as a theater director. Wyspiański added social prophecy to the romantic conception of theater and its mission. By drawing on folklore and moving between heaven and earth, his monumental theater was to revive the nation’s conscience. Much of Wyspiański’s dramatic inspiration came from the visual arts, from Jan Matejko’s historical canvasses, Jacek Malczewski’s symbolist works, as well as his own work as a painter. He gave dramatic roles (e.g., Stańczyk, Wernyhora, Rycerz, and Chochoł in Wesele) to figures depicted in paintings, and he animated the statues of Wawel Cathedral in Akropolis to create a privileged site of collective memory. In Wyzwolenie (Deliverance; 1903), Wyspiański opened the stage wings and assembled in a small space historical figures as well as representatives of all the classes in old Poland. He created a modern syncretic theater, boldly infringing on dramatic canons by surrendering linear plots, fusing reality with the world of imagination, and combining historical time with a mythical and a contemporary one. In Wyspiański’s theater light, color, and word had equal status. Indeed, by not recognizing divisions between the arts, he inaugurated modern Polish stage design. The painterly sets that he designed for his dramatic works were no mere backgrounds for the action but meaningful compositions that participated in the performance, as in the case of his realist stage design for Wesele (1901), of his symbolist design for Warszawianka (The Warsaw Girl; 1898), as well as the empty stage in the case of Wyzwolenie. Wyspiański inaugurated an era that definitely abandoned merely decorative setting, and his stage design came to seek a composition of stage space, costumes, props, and lighting that often incorporated the other arts as well. For Bolesław Śmiały

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(Bolesław the Brave; 1903) he produced a radically new combination of documentary and visionary elements, of archaeological facts and folklore. Wyspiański’s sets “harmoniously united with the dramatic text” and were “consistently subordinated to the leading idea of the performance” (Nowacki, 521). The attempt to fuse the romantic tradition with a new understanding of theater’s visual space remained a utopia, but Wyspiański inspired, among others, Leon Schiller, and his institutional theater, Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, who founded his Rhapsodic Theater in 1941, Konrad Swinarski, who staged in the 1960s and 70s Wyspiański’s romantic poetic dramas and plays in Cracow’s Stary Teatr, and, as we shall see below, Kazimierz Dejmek. Leon Schiller’s Innovations Leon Schiller, a friend of Gordon Craig, was familiar with the great theater reforms in Western Europe, and he cooperated in the 1920s with the great Polish stage designers Andrzej and Zbigniew Pronaszko and Wincenty Drabik in a quest for a modern national theater. His staging of Krasiński’s Nie-boska komedia, Wyspiański’s Achilleis (1926), Miciński’s Kniaź Patiomkin (1925), and Żeromski’s Róża (1926) incorporated the most valuable elements of Symbolism, Cubism, and Constructivism. Like Meyerhold and Piscator, he gave innovative interpretations to literary texts in order to address topical social issues; like Adolf Appia in Hellerau, he subjected spatial forms to the rhythm of light, gave sculpture-like models to characters, used the expressionist techniques of rhythmic crowds with expressive movements, gestures, and voice, and he constructed geometrized podiums and cubist volumes. All of Schiller’s productions were based on a unifying idea, often a political one. When Warsaw’s Bogusławski Theater closed down in 1926, Schiller continued to pursue monumental theater by staging dramas of Słowacki, Wyspiański, and Shakespeare. The idea of a national monumental theater built on myth and history found outstanding realization in 1931–34 with Andrzej Pronaszko’s stage sets for performing Mickiewicz’s Dziady in Lwów, Vilnius, and Warsaw. This staging marked a new theatrical interpretation of romantic and neo-romantic drama, by generating an ascetic theater (with three Golgotha-like crosses in the background) to treat such issues as heroism, sacrifice, and martyrdom in national history, and the status of art in an independent state. Schiller’s artistic career ended with the staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1946; his subsequent attempts to stage romantic plays were blocked by censorship. Schiller also staged in the interwar years old Polish mystery plays and ritual songs. In Juliusz Osterwa’s Reduta Theater he staged in 1923, with added interludes, Mikołaj of Wilkowiecko’s sixteenth-century mystery play Historyja o chwalebnym Zmartwychwstaniu Pańskim (The History of the Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord), which displayed the imaginative and expressive wealth of folk culture. In the Bogusławski Theater, Schiller produced in 1926 Pastorałka (Pastorale), a Christmas mystery play based on ritual songs. Dejmek continued this tradition in the postwar period, but combining it with a plebeian style. He staged Wilkowiecko’s play (1961) with Andrzej Stopka’s scenography in Łódź’s Nowy Theater, whereas in Warsaw’s National Theater he created spectacles with dialogues and interludes written in earlier centuries. His Dialogus de Passione albo Żałosna tragedyja o Męce Jezusa (Dialogue of the Passion, or the Terrible Tragedy

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of the Suffering of Jesus), a compilation of seventeenth-century Polish texts, was banned in 1969 but finally staged in 1975 and 1977. He also staged Uciechy staropolskie (Old Polish Pleasures) in 1980 and Gra o Narodzinach i Męce (Nativity and Passion Play) in 1982. Outdoor Theater Monumental theater stimulated outdoor theater performances. The tradition started when Teofil Trzciński staged in 1923 Jan Kochanowski’s sixteenth-century play Odprawa posłów greckich (The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys) in the courtyard of Wawel Castle, and it climaxed when Juliusz Osterwa produced in the court of the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius the Słowacki version of Calderón’s El príncipe constante (The Constant Prince). Performances of the play in various natural settings made the play immensely popular, even legendary. Other open air performances portrayed mythic national events, for instance the Hołd Pruski (The Teutonic Oath of Allegiance), which was based on a famous painting by Jan Matejko and played on the stairs of the Silesian Parliament in Katowice in 1933. Indoor stage productions and harvest festivals were also staged outdoors. Using authentic courts, squares, and streets popularized theater and brought to life important historical events for the general public. Outdoor theater has lived on with the Zamość Theatrical Summer, with Maryna Broniewska’s staging of Kochanowski’s Odprawa posłów greckich in Cracow’s Wawel Castle (1964), and with the annual Malta Festival in Poznań (1990–). In Search of an Intimate Community: Reduta Laboratory theater was another lively institution that emerged from the romantic tradition and the practice of the Cracow school. The most important such theater of the interwar period was Juliusz Osterwa’s and Mieczysław Limanowski’s aforementioned Reduta Theater, established in 1919 as a chamber stage of Warsaw’s Variety Theater. After becoming independent, Reduta moved to Vilnius in 1925 and started to engage in tours. Emphasizing poetic drama and ensemble acting, the Reduta prepared its productions in scrupulous analytic rehearsals, according to laboratory methods that resembled those of Stanislavski, within a monastic group life and a quest for truth. The most important productions, which incorporated symbolist and expressionist elements, included Żeromski’s Ponad śnieg (Above Snow; 1919) and Turoń (Bison; 1923), as well as plays by Władysław Orkan, Jerzy Szaniawski, Zygmunt Kawecki, and Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer. When Schiller joined Reduta’s board of directors, he staged his own Pastorałka and Wielkanoc (Easter), put on old plays, staged innovatively Wyspiański’s Wesele and Wyzwolenie in Vilnius, and staged in 1936 in Warsaw the first performance of Norwid’s Pierścień wielkiej damy (The Ring of the Great Lady). Reduta trained a number of actors and influenced such playwrights as Szaniawski and Żeromski. The tours served the idea that theater was an art to bring about national integration. In spite of a ban on theater during the Nazi occupation, alternative theater (in schools, in POW camps and concentration camps, and in units of the Polish Army in Hungary, the United

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Kingdom and the Soviet Union) kept theater’s educational and sacral function alive. Among the prominent productions of that period were Schiller’s staging of the mystery plays Pastorałka (1942), Wielkanoc (1943), and Gody weselne (Wedding Party; 1943) in the House of the Samaritans in Henryków, near Warsaw. Mieczysław Kotlarczyk’s Rhapsodic Theater in Cracow used poetry in Słowacki’s Król-Duch (King-Ghost) and in Jan Kasprowicz’s Hymny, a staging of hymns written by the poet during the first decade of the century in which Karol Wojtyła, the later Pope John Paul II, was one of the actors. Tadeusz Kantor’s Independent Theater staged Słowacki’s Balladyna in 1943 and Wyspiański’s Powrót Odysa in 1944. Theater of Images Theater of images, an old Polish tradition, entered into a close relationship with painting during the symbolist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially, as we have seen, in Wyspiański’s theater art. Wincenty Drabik, a designer especially devoted to romantic drama, assumed Wyspiański’s heritage by combining Expressionism with Polish folklore in staging Krasiński’s Nie-boska komedia in 1920 and Goethe’s Faust in 1923. He acquired fame as an author of painterly fairies composed with exceptional vigour, passion, and imagination, and his inclination towards monumentalism brought him close to Andrzej Pronaszko, who designed large surfaces of rhythmic platforms, treated costumes as sculptures, monumentalized the actor figures, and stiffened their movements. Pronaszko was a Cubist who went beyond conventions in search of a drama with abstract poetic structures, as in his designs for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Słowacki’s Sen Srebrny Salomei (Salome’s Silver Dream). Other Polish designers of the interwar period had similar predilections for a monumental theater. Feliks Krassowski, for instance, suggested to use an “expanding stage,” a Cubist scenery that added platforms and sets until they gradually covered the stage space. His ideas were occasionally implemented in the 1930s, for instance in the Reduta Theater. Wyspiański’s “colourful realism” was often used in Polish stage design during the 1920s and 30s. Władysław Daszewski, its most famous representative in staging comedies, often mocked the text or made an artistic joke of it, for instance in the staging of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1936). He would evoke historical theater conventions in staging eighteenth-century plays, for instance Wojciech Bogusławski’s Krakowiacy i Górale (Cracowians and Highlanders) in 1946, and Jan Potocki’s Parady (The Parades) in 1958.

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Popular Amusement and Avant-garde in the Polish Cabaret Dorota Fox Zielony Balonik (Green Balloon) was the first Polish cabaret to open, in 1905; it was followed a year later by the ephemeral Cracow cabaret Figliki – Teatr pod Marchołtem (Little Jokes; 1906), which revived the tradition of Polish Renaissance satire, and in 1908 by Arnold Szyfman’s Warsaw artistic and literary cabaret Momus (like Zielony Balonik, it closed in 1912). Following French and German cabarets, these pioneers built a Polish tradition with original productions. Zielony Balonik was established by a close group of artists in the Cracow bohemian circles as an improvisational entertainment. This elitist group, which used to meet in the Jan Michalik café, included the writers Tadeusz Żeleński-Boy and Adolf Nowaczyński, and the performers Teofil Trzciński and Witold Noskowski (Taper). The premières of new productions, usually improvised, were attended by invited guests that included the local establishment, professors and students from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Jagiellonian University, as well as actors and journalists. The program contained monologues, musical recitations, parodies, couplets, songs, caricatures with a satirical commentary, group festive songs known as kurdesz, and a typical satirical stage form, the szopka, in which figures around Christ’s crib were replaced by puppets of politicians or artists. Zielony Balonik used mild satire to ridicule the Cracow conservatives, infelicitous local artistic initiatives, and celebrated forms of cultural life; but its main goal was to entertain and spread laughter as a remedy for the frustration and dissatisfaction with provincial life. To a certain extent Zielony Balonik demystified bombastic modernist literature, undermined the neo-Romantic status of the artist as priest and prophet, and revived an old tradition in which the artist was a teaser, scoffer, and joker. Diversification Figliki and Momus represented a new type of non-elitist cabaret, which was open to a public that expected to see a well-prepared performance for its money. The texts were written mainly by young talented men of letters: Nowaczyński for Figliki, Tadeusz Ulanowski and Leon Choromański for Momus. More complex theatrical forms that entered the cabarets included stage miniatures, oneact plays, vaudeville, short operettas, and shadow plays. However, more and more texts were written by professional performers who specialized in a specific kind of repertoire or stage form, such as the sketch, the song, or the cabaret monologue: Leon Schiller was a monologist, reciter, and singer; Mary Mrozińska a Polish Ivette Guilbert. Unfortunately, the cabarets were charged with immorality in 1910, and fell into disrepute when Lvov students demonstrated chanting “Down with the Cabaret” and the press published sharp criticisms. At the end of World War I, new variety theaters opened in Warsaw. Their productions were mostly uninteresting; only Czarny Kot (Black Cat), Argus, Sfinks, and Miraż (Mirage) displayed some artistic ambitions. When Poland regained its independence, attempts were made to find new forms of entertainment, such as miniatures, miscellanies, and revues, in which the plot was only a pretext for solo performances. According to Żeleński-Boy and other critics, the last

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poetic cabaret was Pod Pikadorem (At Picador’s; 1918–19), modelled on the cafés of the Russian futurists. The poets of the Skamander Group, who supported it, used their spectacular shows mainly as self-advertising. The productions popularized poetry and promoted the poet as an active participant of every-day life. Pod Pikadorem was non-elitist, mass-oriented, and popular. Other post-war cabarets hastily embraced either the cinema (Miraż combined cabaret productions with film showing), or the theater (Czarny Kot moved towards a theater of miniatures), or the revue (Morskie Oko, Wielka Rewia), or even the music-hall (Rex), abandoning the conventions of the strictly literary and satirical cabaret. In the entertainment formula of the amalgamated cabaret and revue, ballet and sketch were united within the spirit and dramaturgy of revue, theatrical sets and lighting effects were adopted. Of the old formula only songs and recitations were left. The cabaret-like stages of the interwar period were arrestingly colorful. In Warsaw alone there were around seventy cinema-revues, revues, cabaret theaters, and music halls, including Qui Pro Quo (1919–32), a “cabaret-like” theater whose artists kept appearing in Banda, Cyganeria (La Bohème) and Cyrulik Warszawski (Warsaw Barber) and in the revue theaters Perskie Oko (Persian Eye). The more elitist artistic enterprises included the Dadaist theater Cricot in Cracow, and Różowa Kukułka (Pink Doll) in Poznań. The illegal stage of the leftist revolutionary Czerwona Latarnia (Red Lantern) was established in 1934. Anticipating Mass Culture The strength of the most popular theaters rested with their actors. Their names and pseudonyms, highlighted on the posters, were the main attraction for spectators that guaranteed excellent performance and good fun. The masters included the king of compères Fryderyk Járosy, Kazimierz Krukowski, Adolf Dymsza, Hanka Ordonówna, and Mira Zimińska. The cabarets were thus performances of actors and stars in rather small theaters that distinctly separated the stage from auditorium. The writers of these performances were of high caliber, but their role in the theater was weak during the later war years: Nowaczyński, who rejected the new cabarets, stopped writing for them, followed by Żeleński-Boy and Trzciński. But Konrad Tom from Momus, accompanied by such debutants as Andrzej Włast, Julian Tuwim, and Jan Brzechwa, became actively involved in the first Warsaw cabarets. In 1925, this circle of artists welcomed Marian Hemar, “magna pars of the Polish cabaret,” who began to shoulder the burden of numerous productions with Tuwim. In the 1930s, they were supported by Światopełk Karpiński and Janusz Minkiewicz, poets of the last Warsaw bohemian circles. Thanks to the cooperation of eminent writers, actors, and decorators the theatrical palette was rich. The mixed programs included acrobatic and team dances, sketches, revuettes, parodies and self-parodies, hits, jazz bands, revellers, and the most attractive form known as szmonces (Jewish quip), based on the Polish-Yiddish jargon and pure nonsense comic. Szmonces, presented usually as a monologue, a song, or a sketch, made use of simple linguistic mechanisms: unusual syntax, deliberate stylistic mistakes, modifications of fixed expressions, collocation of words from different registers and cultures, and the stylization of the Jewish-Polish language variety spoken by stereotypical Lopeks and Iceks — naturalized Jews living in Nalewki, a borough of Warsaw.

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The cabaret-revues responded to popular expectations, quickly offering satirical commentaries on topical events. They offered topical commentaries (journal-parlé) that ridiculed political actions and politicians in the face of censorship, often confining themselves to satire. This was a function of the szopki presented by Picador (1922–26) and Cyrulik Warszawski (1926–31). The openness of cabarets to every-day life, their ability to accompany the people of Warsaw in their political, social, and cultural lives, and the spectacular qualityof small-audience revues allowed cabarets to compete successfully with opera, operetta, theater, and at times even with cinema. Cabarets became the intelligentia’s most attractive form of entertainment, all the while pioneering mass culture. Cabarets and varieties thrived during World War II, but the Underground Theatrical Council prohibited actors to perform in official theaters and regarded acting in them as collaboration with the enemy.

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Yiddish Theater Michael C. Steinlauf Theater, associated with Roman and later Christian rituals, was prohibited in pre-modern Jewish societies. But many kinds of related performances were common, such as those of musicians and jesters in traditional wedding ceremonies and liturgical singers in the synagogue. There was also one exception to the prohibition: the carnival-like holiday of Purim, when Jewish artisans staged the purimshpil in the wealthier Jewish homes. These plays were ribald and strongly parodistic, mocking both local personages and biblical heroes. Traditional purimshpils continued to be performed in Poland and throughout East-Central Europe until World War II. In the nineteenth century, the Jewish experience of theater began to develop in secular contexts as well. Touched by the ideas of Jewish reformers, a Yiddish popular culture, often critical of Jewish orthodoxy, started to develop by mid-century. Literature intended for women and lowerclass men was distributed by peddlers in chapbook form, songs were written and performed by itinerant singers. As early as the 1830s, there is evidence of Yiddish theater performances in a Warsaw dancehall for mixed Jewish and Christian audiences (see Shatzky, Toeplitz, Raszewski). By the 1850s, groups of travelling performers, the so-called Broder Singers, performed in restaurants, cafés, and beer gardens throughout East-Central Europe. In the larger cities, Jews began attending non-Jewish theater as well. This was particularly true of Warsaw, where a group of Jewish financiers and industrialists had developed. This group sought entry into Polish high society through education and, occasionally, intermarriage; they identified themselves with Polish cultural values, became patrons of Polish literature and art, and regularly filled the front rows of the Polish State Theater. In Warsaw, capital of the Russian-occupied part of Poland, theater attendance was steeped in national meaning, particularly after the

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failed Polish uprising of 1863. In the ensuing repression, theater was the only public institution where the Polish language survived; accordingly, it became a focus of national passions and the object of a fashionable “theatromania.” As the population of Warsaw began to swell during the last decades of the nineteenth century through arrivals from small towns and peasant villages, a new urban audience began to crave entertainment, like its counterparts in other modern cities. In Polish theaters, especially in the newly popular “garden theaters,” the Jewish elite was joined by a lower-class audience that included Yiddish-speaking and traditionally dressed Jews: “Amidst a mixture of voices, languages, social classes, manners, moods, a veritable Tower of Babel of people linked only by the hope of relaxation, freedom and entertainment, one could hear also the dialect of Franciszkaner Gasse” in the Jewish quarter (Sienkiewicz, Chwila Obecna 1: 171–72). Warsaw, the Capital of Yiddish Theater A professional Yiddish theater created by Avrom Goldfaden burst upon the Jewish scene in the late 1870s. Goldfaden’s operettas — farces poking fun at Jewish “backwardness” in the name of “enlightenment,” and melodramas set in Jewish antiquity, all punctuated by spectacle and song — succeeded in marrying the purimshpil to Handel, Verdi, and Halévy, thereby creating a tradition that underlay the development of Yiddish theater for the rest of its subsequent history. Goldfaden took his theater from its birthplace in Romania to Odessa and then throughout Russia, including St. Petersburg. In the 1880s Goldfaden brought his plays to Warsaw, and they broke attendance records at its garden theaters. When Russian authorities banned performances in Yiddish, the actors performed in Polish to continuing acclaim. For two decades, Yiddish theater languished in the Russian Empire. During this period, many Yiddish actors, along with their audiences, emigrated to the West. Yiddish theater established itself in London and other large cities, and flourished above all in the huge Jewish immigrant community of the Lower East Side in New York. Unlike their audiences, the “wandering stars” of the Yiddish stage, as Sholem Aleichem called them, shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic. In 1905, amidst the first Russian revolution, Yiddish theater was legalized, along with the Yiddish press. Virtually overnight, Yiddish companies began performing at five different locations in Warsaw; by 1910 the Yiddish daily press had a circulation of two hundred thousand. A modern Jewish mass culture sprang into being, its capital being in Warsaw, where 350,000 Jews lived. Suddenly one could find not only the news of the world in Yiddish, but the serialized works of favorite authors, Yiddish theater schedules, and reviews. Newspaper readers, traditional and secular, rich and poor, began to constitute a new kind of community. Encouraged by the new Yiddish journalists, they found it increasingly natural to think of themselves as a modern nationality: they were dos yidishe folk (the Jewish people). The Jewish intelligentsia, whose members had often sought hitherto to assimilate into Polish culture, now increasingly “returned to the people.” Spearheading this movement was the Yiddish writer, activist, and culture hero Yitskhok Leybush (Isaac Leyb) Peretz. The new Jewish culture, Peretz proclaimed, must represent the Jewish people’s highest aesthetic and moral aspirations. But in 1905, when Peretz and his disciples visited the Yiddish theater,

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they were aghast. The performers were poorly educated, even illiterate; performing styles, stage sets, and audience behavior seemed grossly inappropriate; scripts and musical scores were plagiarized and spliced together from a variety of sources; the plays themselves, many from the popular New York Yiddish stage, were mixtures of comedy, farce, and melodrama, vulgarly and irretrievably scrambled. Theaters, it appears, had connections to the Jewish underworld; pimps and their women were a common sight in the front rows. Peretz and his followers declared war on this theater: attacking it as shund (trash), they preached a “new theater” that would be literary, artistic, and refined. At this moment, a huge talent emerged from the ranks of the professional Yiddish theater. Ester-Rokhl (Halperin) Kaminska, along with her husband Avrom-Yitskhok Kaminski, both from lower-class traditional backgrounds, had spent years performing under primitive conditions throughout the Russian Empire. In Warsaw, Kaminska discovered the Jacob Gordin plays that had become a sensation on the New York Yiddish stage. Gordin’s plays, filled with powerful roles, especially for women, were the first attempt in Yiddish theater to mirror contemporary social reality. In this repertoire Kaminska created legendary roles, none more celebrated than Mirele Efros, the “Jewish Queen Lear,” a traditional Jewish woman of nobility and strength ruined by her mercenary daughter-in-law. When Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, a square and somewhat masculine stage presence, a mother of three children prematurely aged by her nomad life, took on the role of Mirele, “generations of woman preachers (zogerins), generations of mothers spoke out of her” (Kappel 359). The Dybbuk Still, it required a new generation of better-educated performers to create the theater of which Peretz dreamed. The turning point came five years after his death, when on December 9, 1920 the recently formed Vilna Troupe opened S. An-Ski’s play The Dybbuk at the Elizeum Theater in Warsaw. The play is a tale of two young people promised to each other before their birth by their fathers. Years later, innocent of their fated link, Leah and Khonen meet and fall in love, but Leah’s father breaks his oath and betroths his daughter to another. As a result, Khonen dies, but his spirit (dybbuk) returns to possess the body of his beloved. After an awesome exorcism ritual, the dybbuk is driven out of Leah’s body, whereupon she, too, dies to rejoin her beloved. In the Warsaw production, the voices of the living and the dead mingled in the Song of Songs as the curtain slowly fell over Leah’s body. The Dybbuk inspired an unprecedented kind of frenzy. The Warsaw Yiddish press could not get its fill of the Dybbuk phenomenon, the so called Dybbukiada, Dybbuk cult and psychosis. For over a year, rich and poor, secular and orthodox, assimilationists and nationally-minded Jews, as well as a good numbers of Poles (particularly theater people) streamed into the Elizeum Theater, often on repeat visits, to sit quietly together, as Avrom Levinson wrote, “and watch the stage with bated breath.” Polish Jews at the beginning of a new era in their history, marked by war, revolution, and devastating pogroms on the one hand, and by the promise of a modern, urbanized life in a parliamentary nation-state on the other, seemed to respond most powerfully not to attacks on superstition in the name of Enlightenment nor to portrayals of social conflict, but to what

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contemporaries called a mystery play (misterye), a pageant rooted in folklore and the supernatural. For these Jewish audiences, The Dybbuk was a mythic evocation of the most elemental Jewish sense of place, the cemeteries, synagogues, courtyards, marketplaces, and landscapes of EastCentral Europe where Jews had lived for centuries. It was an affirmation of cultural and national identity all the more powerful for being implicit. During the interwar years, The Dybbuk laid the foundation for the development of a Yiddish dramatic theater of very high calibre. With companies such as the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater, founded by Zygmunt Turkow and Ester-Rokhl’s daughter, Ida Kaminska in 1924; the Warsaw New Yiddish Theater, organized by Jonas Turkow in 1929; Young Theater, founded by Michał Weichert in 1932; and the Vilna Troupe itself (under such directors as Dovid Herman, Yankev Shternberg and Jakub Rotbaum in the 1930s), it became possible for the Yiddish-speaking theater-goer to see dramatic productions of Yiddish classics, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Hugo, O’Neill, and Dreiser, artistically on a par with any in Europe. The new Yiddish directors and many of the actors had studied in Polish, Russian, and Western European drama schools; they were thoroughly at home in modern European culture and were assiduous students of contemporary Polish theater. True disciples of Peretz, their involvement in theater was part of a larger mission to shape a modern Jewish culture, or as Michał Weichert put it, to transform Yiddish theater into “a powerful weapon in the struggle for national, social, and human liberation” (Zikhroynes 2:20). Creating a Modern Theater Yiddish theater shared the permanent economic crisis common to all Yiddish cultural institutions. Contemporaries continually despaired at the lack of funding from either official Polish or Jewish community sources. As a result, Yiddish dramatic theater operated on a shoe-string, its disorganized, discontinuous existence punctuated by intense soul-searching and frequent recriminations. Yet precisely because it had so little to lose, this theater could occasionally devote itself to experiments that put it in the vanguard of contemporary theater art. Young Theater’s 1933 production of Bernhard Blume’s Boston (see Manger 132–33), a play about Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchists whose American murder trial had become an international cause celebre, is a case in point. Forced to work in a very small space that prohibited even a stage, Michał Weichert produced something unprecedented: a sequence of forty-four brief scenes illuminated by spotlights, separated by black-outs, staged on every side of the seated audience. In contrast to other European theaters, whose core audience was constituted of the middle and upper classes, the Yiddish theater continued to rely on the Jewish working class, which filled the shund theaters that vastly outnumbered the “better” venues. However, part of the new generation of working and lower middle class youth was driven by an intense hunger for modern culture and also regularly attended Yiddish dramatic theater. Visiting American Jews, accustomed to a scene of children accompanying their elders to the theater and announcing at the box office in English, “I’m sending my parents to your theater,” marvelled at the youth, enthusiasm, and sophistication of the Yiddish theater audience in Poland (see Mayzel). With over half of all Jewish children attending Polish public schools during the interwar period and younger Jews becoming fully bilingual, Jews also streamed into Polish theaters and often

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made up the majority of the audience. The number of Polish actors of Jewish descent was also on the increase. Linguistic assimilation did little to counteract the spread of virulent anti-Semitism, but at a time when Polish attitudes to the flourishing Jewish culture generally ranged from indifference to hostility, major figures in Polish theater attended and supported the work of their Yiddish counterparts. Aleksander Zelwerowicz, director of the Polish State Drama School, who understood Yiddish and lectured at the Yiddish Actors’ Union, often brought his seventy students to Yiddish performances (see Weichert, Zikhroynes 2: 310), and the celebrated Polish director Leon Schiller worked in 1938 with a Yiddish cast to stage in Warsaw Aron Tseytlin’s Yiddish version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Moreover, cultural borderlands continued to expand despite the reinforced ideological borders. One such borderland, was the cabaret (see pp. 203–205 above). At Warsaw establishments such as Qui Pro Quo and Morskie Oko the Jewish joke, monologue, and sketch known as szmonces became a new genre of entertainment, a “universal method of reporting about everyday life” and “the favorite means of communicating with the public” (Groński, kabarecie 43). At its best, the szmonces turned the pretentious Jewish assimilator or the harried Jewish tradesman into a universally accessible symbol of the dislocations of modern life; at its worst, it became a vulgar anti-Semitic caricature. At the same time, a sophisticated Yiddish kleynkunst theater also attracted a considerable audience. The first was Azazel, founded in Warsaw in 1926, followed by Ararat, established by the writer Moshe Broderzon in Łódź in 1927. It was Broderzon who discovered Shimen Dzhigan and Yisroel Shumakher, who went on to become the most celebrated Jewish comedy team in Poland. Another expanding borderland was Polish-language Jewish culture. Most highly developed was the Jewish press in Polish, especially the daily newspapers, but there were also numerous Polish-language Jewish schools and a growing literature in Polish written by and for Jews (see Prokop-Janiec). While assimilationists dreamed at the turn of the century that Polish literacy would turn Jews into “Poles of the Mosaic faith,” the Polish-Jewish culture of the interwar years largely reinforced Jewish national identity. This was the context in which Mark Arnshteyn [Andrzej Marek] brought to the stage in the late 1920s Polish versions of some popular works of Yiddish theater. Most highly praised were his productions of An-Ski’s The Dybbuk and H. Leivick’s The Golem. The latter, the first Polish theater production to make use of a circular stage, was a spectacle mounted in the Warsaw circus arena that employed a constructivist stage set and the 150-member choir of Warsaw’s Great Synagogue (see Steinlauf, “Mark Arnshteyn”). World War II and the Holocaust put an end to the millennial Jewish civilization of Poland in all its diversity, Jewish theater included. The overwhelming majority of its creators and most of the audience were murdered by the Nazis. Jakub Rotbaum continued to produce Yiddish theater in Łódź in the post-war period, and in Warsaw Ida Kaminska directed the Yiddish State Theater until she and much of the company emigrated from Poland in 1968, during a government-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign. The theater is, however, still active in Warsaw under Szymon Szurmiej’s directorship.

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The Stage in Independent Lithuania Audronė Girdzijauskaitė With the birth of the country’s independence, the first professional Lithuanian theater was established in December 1920 in the capital of Kaunas (Vilnius belonged to Poland between 1920 and 1939). The Valstybės teatras (State Theater) united opera, ballet and drama companies in its house. There were also some other theaters performing for longer or shorter periods in Kaunas and later in Šiauliai and Klaipėda. The founders of Lithuanian professional theater were directors educated in Russian theatrical schools or studios: Juozas Vaičkus, Antanas Sutkus, Konstantinas Glinskis, Borisas Dauguvietis, and others. About one third of the repertoire were Lithuanian plays, the rest contained European classics and contemporary drama: Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Słowacki, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello and others. Vincas Mykolaitis-Putīnas’s Valdovo sūnus (Son of the Ruler) and Vilius Storosta Vydūnas’s Prabočių šešėliai (Shadows of Ancestors) launched Lithuanian drama by offering romantic and philosophic evaluations of the struggle for liberation. Petras Vaičiūnas thematized in Prisikėlimas (Resurrection) and other plays urgent social and ethical issues. The first professional theater critic and modern playwright (founder of the Seminar of Theater History and Theory at the Vytautas Magnus University) was Balys Sruoga. Suceeding the older, Russian trained generation of directors and actors, the actors of the next generation were trained in the School of Performing Arts, established at the State Theater in Kaunas in 1924. Actors of the musical stage often followed up their Lithuanian training with studies in Paris, Berlin, or Milan. In the 1930s, Andrius Oleka-Žilinskas, an actor of the Moscow Art Theater Two and a disciple of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Evgeny Vachtangov, attempted to reform the Lithuanian stage by developing a model of directors’ theater. He invited the famous Russian actor Mikhail Chekhov to collaborate in educating players in the main principles of the Stanislavsky system, stimulating their emotional, ethical, and spiritual development. Actors graduating from the School of Performing Arts established in 1933 The Young Theater, which existed only for one year but became important for the Lithuanian theater. Vinvas Krėvė’s production of Andrius Oleka-Žilinskas’s Šarūnas (1929), Charles Dickens’s The Bells (1930), and Jerzy Żuławsky’s Sabbatai Cevi (1931), as well as Mikhail Chekhov’s staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1932) and Twelfth Night, and Nikolai Gogol’s Revizor (The Inspector General) marked a sharp turn towards conceptual direction, based on team work by director, stage designer, and composer. Some musicians actively participated in stage productions and became later composers of original operas and ballets. Both Andrius Oleka-Žilinskas and Mikhail Chekhov left Lithuania in the 1930s, but thanks to them new directors and theater pedagogues emerged: Romualdas Juknevičius and the actors Henrikas Kačinskas and Monika Mironaitė made up the nucleus of the newly established Vilnius Theater in 1940. Musical theater experienced an upsurge when the Russian ballet dancers Vera Nemtchinova, Anatoly Obukhov, and Nikolaj Zverev came to Lithuania and were then followed by young Lithuanian dancers. Western trained painters brought the ideas of Expressionism, Cubism, and Constructivism to Lithuania and had an impact on theater. Among them was Stasys

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Ušinskas, who founded in 1936 the first professional puppet theater. An original Lithuanian school of stage design emerged in the 1930s. Jewish theaters existed in Lithuania until the Nazi invasion in 1941. In 1916, still under the Russian regime, David Hermann organized the famous Vilna Troupe, which later also played abroad. Non-governmental professional, semi-professional, and amateur theaters existed both in the Vilnius region (under Polish rule until 1939) and in independent Lithuania. The Yiddish puppet theater Maidim (1932–41) played in Vilnius. Several Jewish theater studios and short-lived theater groups were active in Kaunas, later forming the basis of the Jewish State Theater that the Soviets established in Kaunas and Vilnius in 1940–41. Jewish actors played in the Vilnius Ghetto theater in 1942–43. During World War II, some theaters changed name but remained active in Vilnius, Kaunas, and the provinces by performing popular Lithuanian dramas and plays by foreign authors in Lithuanian.

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Kicking with Poetry: Female Trailblazers on the Latvian Stage Banuta Rubess In the last hundred years, two women have been catalysts of profound literary and political changes in Latvian literature. Aspazija (pseudonym of Elza Rozenberga) led the way to the first revolution of 1905, whereas Māra Zālīte rallied the masses during the political ferment of the 1980s. Both women did so with poetic dramas. Aspazija gave voice to the discontent of the Latvian intelligentsia with her erotic and rebellious poetry, exemplified in “Magones” (The Poppies; 1908): “The spirit of protest, The poppy,” the red poppy that “refuses to bend its back and be subservient like everything else in the fields”; Against a thousand “Yes” one lonesome “No! / You won’t last, / Proud and defiant, / Poppy!” (Kopoti raksti 1: 320). She wrote in a language that was barely recognized as literary, as a sculptor of Latvian literature when there was no Latvia, only a grouping of provinces on the margins of the Russian and German empires. She wrote plays in the 1890s when the only professional stage was the Riga Latvian Theater, run by Hermann Rode-Ebeling, a German director who spoke no Latvian, and who had been banished by the German Actors’ Union in Germany for criticizing his colleagues publicly (Hausmanis, “Latvijas rezija” 56). The Riga Latvian Theater featured lowgrade German plays (Volksstücke) and romantic fairy-tale plays. It is a measure of poverty in the local theater repertory that the first Latvian Shakespeare performance took place only in 1888. Aspazija tackled playwriting in this lacklustre environment, drawing inspiration from predominantly German sources. Her first piece, Atriebēja (The Avenging Woman), was written in 1887 but suppressed by the censor and published only in 1904 in St. Petersburg. The plot was a fantasy about the Latvian peasants’ revenge against the oppressive Baltic German barons, a story propelled by a raging woman. It could not be performed at the time because it rang with demands

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for freedom. Throughout the 1890s, Aspazija continued to write plays in a realist angry style reminiscent of Ibsen and Suderman, but she moved to poetic means of expression in her most significant play, Sidraba šķidrauts (The Silver Veil), written in 1901. Her ideas found their proper audience when Friedrich Podnieks established the New Latvian Theater in 1902 and premiered Sidraba šķidrauts on January 27, 1905, as a dramatic departure from the theater’s usual fare of operettas. The play was performed with melodramatic pathos, the direction was considered weak and the set design minimal, yet the performance was a sensation and sold out for all of its 25 performances. Sidraba šķidrauts tells the story of a young visionary woman, Guna, who is able to see the truth through a silver veil, and takes care of the poor in a kingdom involved in a meaningless war. She fearlessly names the despotic King Targals the source of all the kingdom’s misery: “I’ll show you the root of all your pain, and of the dreadful plague that has tortured you for years; See, there it is! (she points at the king)” (447). The graceful pointing hand and the daring words were enough to set the audience alight. The Latvian provinces, already embroiled in the 1905 revolution, were preoccupied with social-democratic ideas and resistance to the Czar, and, more specifically, engaged in a violent uprising against the Baltic German oligarchy. Sidraba šķidrauts premiered two weeks after a public massacre in the streets of Riga with incendiary lines: “When the hour strikes, all those who were small, downtrodden, nameless, come forth and become heroes” (446). The production’s effect went beyond literature, for it united and inspired a community of like-minded viewers who had no access to legitimate political power. By October 1905, these performances became the locus of political meetings; according to their anecdotic folklore, one night a man in a black mask appeared on stage, urging the audience to topple the autocratic government, smash the landowning class, and found a democracy. Soon after the last performance Aspazija fled to Switzerland with her husband, the revolutionary writer Jānis Rainis, to remain there in exile for fifteen years. If Aspazija raised the curtain on a revolution at the beginning of the century, Māra Zālīte did the same towards the end of it: Zālīte’s rock opera Lāčplēsis (Bearslayer) played in 1988 a similar role to that of Sidraba šķidrauts, though she was not forced to emigrate. Zālīte was already a popular poet with a nationalist voice throughout the Soviet era, but she was able to avoid repercussions. Her first plays in the 1980s tried to resolve political questions with mythic archetypes. Her rock opera took as its source a Latvian myth that had already inspired several Latvian literary works: Andrejs Pumpurs’s epic poem, Lāčplēsis (The Bearslayer; 1888), Jānis Rainis’s play, Uguns un nakts (Fire and Night; 1904-05), and Banuta Rubess’ musical, Varoņdarbi (Heroica; 1979). The bearslayer is a legendary Latvian hero who fights against the Black Knight, a symbol of oppression. His strength resides in his bear ears, his struggle with the knight is eternal. As a rock opera with music by Zigmārs Liepiņš, Lāčplēsis was performed with plenty of fog, lighting effects, and popular stars to become a political event, presented in huge sports stadiums to at least one third of Latvia’s population. Once again, a poetic theater performance became a rallying force of the nation. Once again, the world was seen through the eyes of a woman. In Māra Zālīte’s distinctly matriarchal perspective, Latvia is a small child playing at the crossroads. As the Bearslayer sings: “Under the cartwheels, under the horseshoes, Under the iron tracks, There’s a small child, Sand runs through its fingers like Time, That is our life, That is our freedom. Call me louder, child, call me! I can still hear you. I still have my language and my name. Call me, child. Call me louder” (Dzeja 188).

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The Silver Veil and Bearslayer played unique roles by fanning the heated political passions of their time with the stage artifice of flaming castles and churning fog machines. While Aspazija’s fictional violence turned into genuine arson against the Baltic German landowners, Zālīte’s play, which does not end violently, was a rallying cry for a peaceful struggle for independence.Though the passions of Aspazija’s era have passed, her characters and poetry still appear to us as complex and compelling. It remains to be seen whether, as time goes on, Zālīte’s text will prove equally powerful, even if the collective pathos of oppression no longer needs to be fanned.

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The Ebbs and Flows of Modernist Energy in Estonian Theater Jaak Rähesoo Both political and artistic factors contributed to the quick professionalization of Estonian theater around 1906. On the political front, the abortive Russian revolution of 1905 nevertheless brought along liberalization. On the artistic side, Ibsen and his followers led European drama to new heights and turned the stage into a focal point of social and esthetic debates. Every self-respecting nation now had to have a serious theater, as opposed to simple entertainment. Indeed, the imposing Art Nouveau buildings of these new Estonian companies, erected by means of nation-wide campaigns for donations (for no help came from the Tsarist central government or the still Germandominated municipalities), quickly became the visible symbols of national aspirations. They were planned as multi-functional “people’s houses” for various public gatherings, in addition to theater performances. Estonian culture has often boasted of its democratic character. While it would be an exaggeration to say that it has grown from native roots (it was rather “implanted” by a thin layer of national-minded intelligentsia), it certainly has exhibited fewer conspicuous class divisions than many older cultures. Still, the Modernist logic of accelerated development necessarily divided the audience into a more alert “avant-garde” and a more inert majority whose tastes started to diverge. In hindsight it is rather surprising how easily the public, especially its younger members, accepted the radical innovations of the Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia) group, who spearheaded the Estonian Modernist movement. Theater lagged somewhat behind the other arts. While literature and painting were already embracing the most recent international trends, the dominant mode in Estonian theater (especially in the work of Karl Menning, the leading stage director of the period) was still the sort of social-critical realism that Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne in Berlin had exemplified more than a decade earlier. Bernhard Linde, Gustav Suits, and other members of the Young Estonia group who idolized Stanislavsky, Gordon Craig, and Max Reinhardt, noted this somewhat indignantly in the collection Teatri-raamat (Theater Book; 1913). It is difficult to ascertain whether this comparative inertia was due mostly to the theater’s greater dependence on immediate public reception, or to the exigencies of early professionalism, for which this sort of realism seemed to offer more

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solid training. The first masterpieces of Estonian drama from that initial decade of professional theater, such as August Kitzberg’s Tuulte pöörises (In the Whirlwind; first performance 1906) and Libahunt (The Werewolf; 1911), or Eduard Vilde’s Tabamata ime (Elusive Miracle; 1913) and Pisuhänd (The Hobgoblin; 1914), were also cast in a predominantly realist mode. Political independence in 1918 tested the force and the limits of political control of artistic life in a democratic nation. Free now from the restrictions of Tsarist censorship and national oppression, the Estonian arts could hope for considerable state and municipal support. Material circumstances changed dramatically. Theaters were set up in all important centers so that a network of about ten regular repertory companies covered quite well the whole country. With certain modifications this network has continued to function to this day. The first period of independence also brought about a gradual improvement in stage technology, and a constant enhancement of professional standards. Growing attendance made it possible to cut the number of plays per season and give more time to rehearsals. By the end of the 1930s, Estonia had an entirely “normal” European theater that also included operas, ballets, and operettas. The social composition of the Estonian audience was noticeably more democratic than in many older theater countries, and the arrival of cinema did not lessen the popular appeal of the stage. As was to be expected, the share of native plays constantly increased, so that by the 1930s they already made up about one half of the total repertoire. It must be added, however, that of this mass of writing only A[nton] H[ansen] Tammsaare’s Biblical play Juudit (Judith; first performance 1921) and satirical allegory Kuningal on külm (The King Feels Cold; 1936), as well as Hugo Raudsepp’s comedies Mikumärdi (first performance 1929) and Vedelvorst (The Sluggard; 1932) could rival the scenic masterpieces of the pre-World War I decade — which shows that improved infrastructures do not automatically lead to better art. Nor did political independence immediately change the style of the artistic trends. For most of the 1920s the arts continued to experiment feverishly. When experiments also invaded the stage, theater turned somewhat belatedly first to Symbolism and then to brand-new Expressionism. A change, mostly under the slogan of a return to Realism, came only towards the end of the 1920s. It had no overt political reasons, though social conditions may have contributed: growing prosperity certainly strengthened middle-class conservatism and conformity. This development, which chimed with the retreat from experimentalism all over Europe in the thirties, was more pronounced in Estonia than in some other countries. One can speculate about its immanent artistic reasons. In older cultures, Modernism was in many ways a revolt against the past. Young Estonian culture did not have enough of a past to revolt against. It was as if artists had only now acquired time to fill in some of the background that had been visible in the rest of Europe. In the Estonian visual arts, Symbolism, Expressionism, and Cubism were anachronistically followed, then, by belated variations of Impressionism and Realism. In fiction, a host of dogmatically Zolaesque naturalist novels appeared. In poetry, regular forms replaced the much more experimental verse from around 1920. Estonian music, perhaps least influenced by Modernist tendencies, was largely developing along nineteenth-century lines. And in the theater, the most heavily used genres were modifications of folk plays for the villages, and drawing-room dramas or comedies for the urban settings. Despite the undeniable development towards greater professionalism and sophistication, the Estonian arts lost some of their former verve in the thirties, and in certain respects looked tamer and more provincial than in the twenties. Nevertheless, there were signs in the late thirties that

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Estonian culture was re-entering the Modernist paradigm. In Western Europe, Modernism came to be recognized as the mainstream of twentieth-century art in the years immediately following World War II. For East-Central Europe that road was blocked by Soviet occupation.

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Branko Gavella: The Director as Thinker Sibila Petlevski One of the most influential Croatian stage directors, a pedagogue and theoretician of acting, a critic and sociologist of theater, Gavella completed his studies in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1908 with a dissertation on the epistemological significance of judgment. He started his career as a reviewer for the Agramer Tagblatt (1910–14), a German language daily paper published in Austro-Hungarian Zagreb. His debut in staging came in 1914 with Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina) in Zagreb. Four years later, after traumatic war experiences on the Galician front, he became a member of the artistic committee of the Croatian National Theater and a deputy dramaturg. By 1920, Gavella had staged three operas, a few French comedies, his first Shakespeare, and about twenty plays by Croatian modernist authors of different programmatic and stylistic orientations. From Galicia, banned by the police in 1920, to the 1954 productions of Golgota and U logoru (In the Camp), he had the courage to direct plays by Miroslav Krleža, to whom he remained loyal throughout his long career. Gavella’s early Shakespeare productions were influenced by Max Reinhardt. With the productions of Ibsen’s Wild Duck (1918) and Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1919), Gavella paid tribute to scenic Symbolism, but he made a creative leap into Expressionism with the production of Josip Kosor’s Nietzschean Nepobjediva lađa (The Invincible Ship) in Zagreb in 1920, where he combined scenic modern style with expressionist acting — a new directing style (mostly related to his productions of Krleža’s dramatic work) that Nikola Batušić described as “deep Expressionism” (80). Actually, Gavella’s approach to Expressionism was rather close to Karl Heinz Martin’s search for the “expressive event” and the “deep essence” of the play. Symptomatic of Gavella’s new treatment of theater space was his production of Shakespeare’s Richard III (Zagreb 1923) with Ljubo Babić’s stage design, for which this Croatian painter and set designer received the Grand Prix at the 1925 First Exposition of Applied Arts in Paris. Gavella was the director of the Belgrade National Theater between 1925 and 1929, but after his trip to Moscow in 1928 he was forced to quit his position for political reasons. From that moment on he had no home stage and became an artistic exile: he worked for a while in Osijek then moved to Ljubljana, and from there to Brno, where he produced mostly operas. A short return to Zagreb for the theater season of 1935–36 pushed him into a deep depression because the political climate prevented him from staging his repertory preferences. He staged Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko in Milan’s La Scala in 1938, produced numerous operas in Brno, stayed in Zagreb for the

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period 1940 to autumn of 1943 (with a couple of guest engagements in Sarajevo), but then left for Vienna. He went to Prague illegally and stayed there until the end of World War II. He also produced operas in Bratislava and Moravska Ostrava. Gavella’s Ljubljana years (1947–49), spent in actors’ training and directing at the Slovenian National Theater, marked the beginning of his most intensively creative phase. After returning to Zagreb in 1954, Gavella staged an average of four theater productions a season, though he was already in his seventies. He set up foundations to introduce abroad the pedagogical model of the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Art, and took active part in the founding of the Zagreb Dramatic Theater, which now carries his name. Gavella’s collected articles and his papers on the theory of theater and acting (the essays published between 1928 and 1953, theoretical fragments written between 1930 and 1947) were posthumously published under the title Glumac i kazalište (Actor and Theater; 1967). They reveal the consistency of his aesthetic views on acting and the systematic nature of his “structural analyses” of theater, even though his papers are fragmentary. The mainspring of his theoretical thinking is the phenomenology of intersubjectivity in Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen. His analysis of the immanently social nature of acting brings his papers, especially his so called “Czech manuscript,” close to the poetics of immanent development, as argued by the Prague School of structuralism. I have shown in Kazalište suigre (see also Batušić and Blažević, and my “Prostor razmjene”) that Gavella’s principal theatrical notions such as aesthetic function, artistic material, intention, normative value, style, structure, sign, and Mitspiel, amount to a theater aesthetics that resembles reflections of the German theater scholar Max Herrmann: they share the idea of a Mitspiel, a participative interplay between actors and spectators, but the Croatian theoretician is more radical in his “structural” hermeneutic approach. Hrvatsko glumište (Croatian Theater; 1953) sums up Gavella’s efforts on the national stage by tracing the historical and structural changes in the Croatian style of acting. It represents for Croatian theater studies what Herbert Jhering’s Der Kampf ums Theater (Battle for the Theater; 1922) represents for Germany.

3. Theater under Socialism

Introduction Dragan Klaić At first glance, the history of theater under Socialism in East-Central Europe is a tedious repetition of repressive tactics and assaults by means of which the authorities attempted to discipline the stage and subject it to their own ideological dogmas and current political needs. Closer examination reveals a much more checkered record with repression levels going up and down from one country, one region, or even one city to another, and from one period to another. Against the record of repression stands a tremenduous investment in theater infrastructure, repair of the old and construction of the new venues, many new companies, professional schools, magazines, publishers, institutes, festivals, associations, all subsidized by the authorities. Through the total elimination of private intiative, all theater professionals became government employees with guaranteed income and all sorts of welfare provisions. Ample and steady investment in technology, production costs, tours, and low-priced tickets mark theater life under Socialism as much as prohibitions, multiple censorial filters, forced emendations, changes in the plays and the performances, and punitive blacklisting of those who transgressed the norms of the ideologically “sound” and politically acceptable. From the articles in this section a sketch of a colossal ideological defeat gradually emerges: despite all the investment, all pressure and repression, the communist authorities did not succeed anywhere to affirm and consolidate a stable socialist style of performance, one that would reflect and affirm its ideological tenets. Ideological notions of Socialist Realism in theater were derived from a vulgarized Stanislavskian corpus, twisted and bent to match the political jargon and a Manichean vision of the world, shaped by class struggle and the Cold War. Yet, in practice this was neither enough to impose the uniform political correctness the authorities desired, nor enough to articulate a coherent aesthetic system that would be applicable in practice and recognizable at first glance. The end result was heavy handed, boring, dry, and predictable: productions that chased the public away and demoralized the performing artists. After the beginning of de-Stalinization, energies were quickly recuperated and a tacit compromise between the authorities and the stage allowed in principle all sorts of realist, naturalist, and modernist stagings, as long as all too experimental innovations were kept at bay and political and moral standards of decency were respected. Humor, “constructive satire” (that is, generalized satire), even tragedy were acceptable. Harsh satire and outrageous experimentation were not. The human body demanded careful handling and no nudity was tolerated on stage. The language could be colloquial but not obscene. And tragedy was OK as long as it was backed by literary authorities like the Greeks, Shakespeare, Racine, and Schiller, but the absurdist tragic of Beckett clashed with the official optimistic vision of a socialist future. Waiting for Godot was consequently difficult to mount everywhere in the region, even in the supposedly liberal Yugoslavia, where the first attempt in 1958 ended with an outright ban.

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Censorship was in all countries, except Yugoslavia, formal and systematic; even worse, it was irrational and unpredictable, multifaceted (exercised by party organs, local and higher authorities) and could strike at any moment, even after a previously authorized premiere. Paradoxically, there was more tolerance or leverage in the provinces than in the capital cities, which explains the remarkable rise of the Kaposvár Theater in Hungary and the maneuvering space Jerzy Grotowski acquired in his miniscule theater in Opole (Poland). Ingenious theater directors and actors knew how to bring the desired message to the audiences with a wink and a grimasse, an eloquent gesture, or a quick glance aside. This alusive style was perfectly understood and much appreciated by the public and amply rewarded with applause. Careful post–1989 analyses of the critical theater showed that the muse of dissidence was first of all a Polish dame, that only in the Polish theater were there some instances of clearcut opposition to the very basic notions of Socialism. In all other countries theater people merely attempted to enlarge the realm of their artistic autonomy, to expand the ground of what was tolerated by the authorities, without seeking an outright political confrontation with the regime. And only in Poland — during the military regime, imposed in 1981 against the tide of the Solidarity unions — did theater create an autonomous artistic and culturalpolitical realm by performing in premises under the auspices of the Catholic Church and thus off limits for the censors and police. Classical dramatists of the past centuries turned out to be major allies of the performing artists during the socialist epoch. Classics had authority and unquestionable literary and artistic grandeur, even if they came from an aristocratic or bourgeois milieu. The complexity of their plays offered ground for all sorts of contemporary renderings, in which allusions and telling associations could be accented or suggested in the staging. Thus, as Jan Kott recalls, when a Warsaw Hamlet uttered in 1956 that all Denmark was a prison it was unanimously understood as a reference to the current Polish circumstances and greeted with stormy applause (Notebook 18–19). Analogously, comediographers of the past provided opportunities to laugh at the account of contemporary bosses and busybodies. The comedies and satiric plays of Jovan Popović Sterija, the father of Serbian drama, offered several generations of theater directors inspiration for the critique of professional patriots and upward climbing opportunists, whereas the corrupt, greedy and servile characters of Branislav Nušić were recognized as sleezy contemporaries and servile fellow travellers of Socialism, not only in Serbia and former Yugoslavia, but across the Slavic world where Sumnjivo lice (A Suspicious Person; 1887), Gospodja ministarka (The Cabinet Minister’s Wife; 1929) and Ožalošćena porodica (The Bereaved Family; 1934) were frequently performed. The introduction of foreign contemporary dramatic literature was limited and sometimes significantly delayed. Censorship remained most sensitive to the contemporary domestic plays and subjected them and their initial staging to utmost scrutiny. This controlling impulse could reach paranoid proportions, for instance in Albania, where Enver Xoxha’s dictatorship stifled the entire cultural life and artists received harsh camp imprisonment for slightest offenses or even remote suspicions of disloyalty. In Yugoslavia, another extreme of the socialist practice, informal and anonymous meddling of the party officials in theater did occur, but in the 1970s and 80s contemporary domestic drama became the most popular part of the repertory. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary popular dramatists ended on the blacklist; the plays of Mrożek, Głowacki, Havel, Kohout, and Eörsi could be staged only abroad. In Romania, Eugene Ionescu’s plays written

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after his transplantation to France were rarely performed, and even submitted to a tacit ban after Ionescu’s harsh criticism of Ceauşescu’s regime. What kept the theater going were primarily prominent director personalities, standing strong at the head of their repertory companies, and using the tacit help of some more liberal allies in the government and party hierarchy. They accepted periodically a compromise under the pressure of a censor, but only after protracted negotiations. The shadow of the common menace created a sense of solidarity, a conspiratorial community of purpose, within the profession and with the audience, but jealousies and rivalries that are a normal part of backstage life could easily be turned into political denunciations. Some diversification of the mainstream and its uniform model of a large repertory theater company with hundreds of artistic, administrative, and technical staff in steady employment could be achieved with the mushrooming of theater and jazz clubs that combined, especially in Czechoslovakia and Poland, music, poetry, dramatic acts, and cabaret. Student theater often acquired more maneouvering space than the professional ones, and student theater festivals in Wrocław and Zagreb in the 1960s, alongside similar gatherings in Erlangen and Nancy, provided rare opportunities for students, some of them future professionals, to make initial professional contact across the Iron Curtain in a much more informal atmosphere than the stiff ITI gatherings allowed. Alternative theater was controlled by limiting access to the existing performing spaces; this control was so efficient that the record of semi-official performances in artist studios or similar places, including private homes and weekend cottages, remains very scarce. There was nominal official support for theater exchanges between the socialist countries, but this did not lead to significant innovations. The most important transnational magnet force during the 1960s was Jerzy Grotowski, who established his experimental Theater of 13 Rows in the small Silesian town of Opole in 1959. The hall could accommodate around a hundred people but was usually half empty and performances were not given too often. Grotowski received his training in theater directing in Cracow and Moscow, but refused to enter the habitual career that would ultimately lead to the prestigious main stages of repertory companies in Warsaw and Cracow. He preferred instead the isolation of Opole with its freedom of experimentation, unencumbered by interferences. Grotowski’s aesthetics was deeply inspired by Indian cultures and non-European performative and meditative traditions, but it was permeated also by Catholic concepts and a strong sense of Polish classical literature with its cult of martyrdom. Productions were refined in a series of versions and a never-ending work in progress; they stressed physical training, demanded utmost mental concentration from the performers, and sought spectator epiphanies. Grotowski attracted international attention mainly through the indefatigable proselytizing of his loyal follower Eugenio Barba, who dropped his study of film directing in Warsaw to work with Grotowski, and who could travel around Europe with his Italian passport. As Barba describes in his memoirs, The Land of Ashes and Diamonds (1999), he sought to alert the theater world to the miracle of Opole. And the world took notice: by the mid–1960s the first Western visitors made their pilgrimage to Opole and published articles at home about Grotowski. In 1965 Grotowski succeeded to relocate to nearby Wrocław, a bigger town of regular festivals and 2–3 repertory theater companies, from where he made his first tours with his companions through Europe and the USA. Under a new name, Theater Laboratorium his productions created an immense impact and instigated countless followers and imitators, especially through a new version of the 1962 preformance of Wyspiański’s Akropolis, followed by Słowacki’s reworking of Calderón’s El príncipe

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constante (The Constant Prince) and Apocalypsis cum figuris, a stage production not based on any particular text. Even though less than hundred people could attend each performance of Theater Laboratorium, its influence grew rapidly, especially after the publication of Grotowski’s basic texts and interviews in Towards the Poor Theater (1968) in several languages, and Raymonde Temkine’s book Grotowski (1968). Despite international success, Grotowski quickly lost interest in staging plays and theater performances and engaged from 1969 in a series of participative exercises and exploration of rituals that led him from Poland to a nomadic existence and ultimately to a residence at the University of California, Davis and to Centro per la sperimentazione e la ricerca teatrale in Pontendera near Florence, where he died, a lonely guru but a vital legend. The Theater Laboratorium closed officially in 1982 under the military regime, and was resurrected in the post-communist Poland as a center for the study of Grotowski. Yet, his lasting influence in Poland was limited to few experimental initiatives, such as the company Gardzeniece that moved to the country side in 1980s and sought inspiration for its work in the traditions of rural life. Many other theater artists, who, before or after Grotowski, got exhausted from careful posturing, pretension, surveillance, required rituals of loyalty, pressures and bans, could also opt sometimes for emigration — if they received a passport. Going abroad was (Yugoslavia being again a case apart) a reward for loyalty, yet in some cases issuing a passport was an easy way for the authorities to get rid of some troublesome artists. Mrożek moved to Paris and then further to Mexico. Other authors and directors followed this path, seeking alternative opportunities in Western Europe and in Northern America. Romania, for example, lost through expatriation an entire generation of innovative stage directors from Liviu Ciulei to David Esrig and Andrei Şerban. Kantor pioneered “one foot” exile by staying in Cracow and preparing his productions there but performing with his Cricot 2 company only abroad. Wajda alternated between theater work at home and film directing in international co-productions. Some sought foreign grants to get out at least for a while without burning any bridges behind them. When Socialism collapsed in 1989–90, they had to consider whether to go back, and if so at what price. Many returned, but some only for a short visit, one of many to follow. Despite occasional critical stances, theater had a modest, practically insignificant role in toppling of the socialist regimes across East-Central Europe but it did provide appropriate platforms to celebrate the end of an epoch and the dawn of liberty. In these euphoric post-revolutionary days and weeks theater launched its dissident heroes like Havel into new political roles and was undoubtedly happy with itself, its prospects, and its own liberated, jubilant audience. There was little anticipatory imagination for the challenges that “wild capitalism” would bring along in the ensuing months and years.

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The Short Interlude of a Liberal Czech Theater Libor Vodička

1945–1948: Transition After the end of the World War II, social and political reforms began to be implemented in Czechoslovakia, but forty years of communist rule followed after three years of limited democracy. With the expulsion of most Germans and a part of the Hungarians, Czech and Slovak culture developed in isolation from German culture and was homogenized ethnically and, later, ideologically. Nationalism, aroused by the traumas of the Nazi occupation, expressed itself primarily in the revival of symbols from the nineteenth-century National Revival mythology (Pynsent Questions), in the cult of national martyrdom and Messianism, as well as in a rising wave of Slavophilism, especially Russophilism. A statist, centralized theater system was established to serve communist ideology and political propaganda. As early as 1945, all theatrical concessions and production licenses were canceled, and a Theater Council was formed within the Ministry of Education and Enlightenment, with communist theater professionals exercising the greatest influence. In the first two seasons after liberation, the social upheavals kept the audience away from theater, but this was offset by state subsidies that financed the buildup of a “popular democratic” national culture. The Ministry implemented this policy with administrative means, by setting up permanent Czech companies in former German-language municipal theaters (Liberec, Teplice, Ústí nad Labem, and Opava) and in those that had Czech touring companies (Zlín, Přerov, etc.). The system of yearly subscriptions was for a while abandoned as a relict of “petty bourgeois” culture (see E.F. Burian, “Návrh”). After liberation, works of the authors proscribed during the occupation (Edmond Konrád, František Langer, Karel Čapek) returned to the stage, and the most important directors of the pre-war Avant-garde were engaged on large and prestigious stages: Jindřich Honzl in the Prague National Theater, E. F. Burian in the National Theater in Brno, Jiří Frejka in the Municipal Theater in Vinohrady. Of the younger generation, the director Alfréd Radok, the conductor and director Václav Kašlík, and the stage designer Josef Svoboda worked in the newly-founded Theater of May 5, housed in the building of the former Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague. A few experimental theaters renewed their activities, and new professional stages, such as the Realist Theater in Prague and the Free Theater in Brno were established by younger artists. Modernist approaches were replaced by representations of realistically conceived details, an orientation towards description, analysis, social reporting, and an interest in the psychological motivation of individuals, argued from the point of view of “social functionality” (see Träger). “Educational elements” were foregrounded. Nevertheless, interest in Existentialism led to the staging of works by Sartre, Max Frisch, and Jean Anouilh, a dramatization of Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men (1945), as well as the production of original dramas: Olga Scheinpflugová’s Guyana (1945) and Viděla jsem boha (I Saw God; 1946), Edmond Konrád’s drama of the French Revolution Skřivan a smršť (The Skylark and the Whirlwind; 1946), and Jiří Mucha’s wartime drama

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U Zlatého věku (The Golden Age; 1947). Existentialism influenced Alfréd Radok’s expressively tuned dramatic parable Vesnice žen (Village of Women; 1945), and Ferdinand Peroutka’s Oblak a valčík (The Cloud and the Waltz; 1947). The communist critics and artists replaced existentialist pessimism with the constructive optimism of Socialist Realism, which soon became the binding norm in aesthetics and education (see Hájek, Pokorný). Immediately after the liberation, Soviet dramas enjoyed great popularity among theater artists and a large part of the audience; works by Alexej Arbuzov, Maxim Gorki, Valentin Katajev, Konstantin Simonov, and others became models for the Czech and Slovak theaters (see Trensky). 1948–68: “Building Communism” After the change of regime in 1948, the Communists developed a representative culture, ostentatiously displayed in processions and parades, rallies, celebratory gatherings, funeral commemorations, lantern processions, sports festivals, and spartakiades. There was even a macabre element of theatricality in the “staged” political trials, in public self-criticisms, and other propaganda activities. Following the 1948 theater law, a Council for Theater and Dramaturgy and a Commission for Theatrical Propaganda were set up, responsible for setting the obligatory percentage of plays in the theater repertoire based on origin (domestic, Soviet, “popular democratic,” and the “other,” meaning classical and progressive works of Western provenance). The centralized control over theater and literary life was supposed to promote the ideal of a new man for the benefit of the new generation (see Paul). Several non-conforming theaters (Theater of May 5th, Theater of Satire, and others) were suspended; a number of artists were marginalized because of their refusal to adapt, and their work was censored. Some were imprisoned, others were forced underground, fell silent, went into exile, and even committed suicide (for this aspect, and in general, see Jarka M. Burian, Modern Czech Theater) Between 1948 and 1956, more than 150 original new plays were staged in the Czech theaters — predominantly historical drama and tragedy, factory production drama, and drama of the countryside. At the peak of Socialist Realism, during the “cult of personality,” plays featured past and present foreign communists, such as Lenin, Stalin (see Or [Ornest]) and the Czech communists Julius Fučík, Klement Gottwald, and Antonín Zápotocký. The style of the productions was also ideologically shaped. The avant-garde approaches of the interwar period were prohibited; their practitioners, generally labeled as “Trotskyites” and “subversive elements,” were ejected. The director was expected to follow an “objective” idea and guide the actors through the canon of a confused acting method, based on misunderstood ideas of Stanislavsky. Set design was expected to be in the descriptive realist style of the nineteenth century. By 1952–53, the brutality of the Czechoslovak form of Stalinism destroyed all revolutionary illusion, enthusiasm, and political faith, while theater audiences declined and schematic dramaturgy, based on fixed typology (the unconvinced fellow traveler, the wise observer, the victim of class struggle, etc.) was unable to produce a “positive hero.” Around 1953, plots about workers, war resistance, class conflict, and collective struggle yielded some ground to stories with more personal and psychological features. A number of critics, many theater artists, and even some functionaries of the state-regulated theater administration felt the need to revitalize the dramatic

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arts; they called for “constructive” satire, for the portrayal of “real” rather than ideologized life, and for a renewal of the theater by replacing illusionist realism with stage poetry. State and party directives gradually lost their power. In 1954, Jan Werich returned to the stage and revived with Miroslav Horníček the original repertoire of the Liberated Theater, with topical satiric dialogues such as Caesar (1955) and Balada z hadrů (Ballad of Rags; 1957). E. F. Burian, who strongly supported the regime at the time, acknowledged his interwar work and revived in 1954 from the original repertoire of the D-Theater a dramatization of Hašek’s Švejk, and an assembly of Czech songs and folk poetry, Vojna (War), written in 1955 by Burian himself. The young theater generation growing up in the late 1950s was influenced by the “re-discovery” of the interwar Avant-garde (Poetism, Surrealism, jazz), the political satire and cabaret of the Liberated Theater, the theater of the absurd (translations of Ionesco, Beckett, later Pinter), and Brecht’s epic theater. Small stages such as Divadlo Na zábradlí (Theater on the Balustrades 1958), Satirické divadlo Večerní Brno (Satirical Theater Brno at Dusk; 1959), and Semafor (1959) created a whole movement. Similarly, new programs of poetic, psychological, and political theater were adopted on the major stages by the directors Alfréd Radok, Otomar Krejča, Jaromír Pleskot, and Miroslav Macháček in the National Theater of Prague; by Jan Kačer and Ladislav Smoček in Prague’s Drama Club; by Miloš Hynšt and Evžen Sokolovský in the Brno State Theater; and by Miroslav Pásek in Hradec Králové. Through the 1960s, theaters continued to develop further in this direction and the regime’s control gradually loosened, allowing more creative freedom. Culture continued to have an official function and substantial authority, and theater played an irreplaceable role in it. The repertory gradually opened up for most the important international authors, and Czech drama reached its post-war peak with Josef Topol’s Konec masopustu (The End of the Carnival; 1963) and Kočka na kolejích (Cat on the Rails; 1965), Václav Havel’s Zahradní slavnost (The Garden Party; 1963), and Vyrozumění (The Memorandum; 1965), as well as with the works of Pavel Kohout, Milan Kundera, Oldřich Daněk, Milan Uhde and others. Thanks mainly to the editors Jaroslav Vostrý and Milan Lukeš, the journal Divadlo (Theater; 1949–70) became in the 1960s the most important vehicle for the theoretical and practical ideas of Czech theater. New publications also contributed in a major way: the journal Světová literature (International Literature) was founded in 1956, the Divadelní noviny (Theater News) in 1957; new editions of modern plays in Malá řada (Small Series) by the theater agency Dilia also had an important influence. By the mid–1960s, dozens of small, amateur, and semi-professional theaters and theater clubs came into existence, where independent opinions could be expressed. Young artists strove for spontaneity, directness, and freedom of thought, which led to a new and popular stage genre known as “text-appeal” or literary cabaret. Cabaret with songs and recital became a very popular art form, especially with the actors and singers Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr, who presented on July 18, 1962, Jonáš a tingl-tangl at the Semafor Theater. Absurdist theater was performed in the Theater on the Balustrades (1962–68) under the artistic leadership of Jan Grossman, who staged Jarry’s Ubu roi (May 16, 1964) and Kafka’s The Trial (May 26, 1966) with Václav Havel as dramaturg. Large official theaters joined in this lively development. Far from representing a conservative opposition to the small stages, they chose similar expressive means and even treated the same social-critical themes. Political theater, with accent on arguments and analysis, Mayakovskyian or

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“Brechtian” productions, theater of the absurd (Dürrenmatt), as well as topical interpretations of Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, reflected the social and political tensions in Czech society. Exacerbated sensitivities to the subtle texture of private incidents and fatal inner dislocations of individuals, often presented in terms of the tragic mechanisms of social and historical topoi, found an expression in the Prague National Theater. The highlights were Alfréd Radok’s staging of John Osborne’s The Entertainer (December 20, 1957) and Frederic Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (March 4, 1967), as well as the work of Otomar Krejča, who later moved to the Divadlo za branou (Theater beyond the Gate), staging Topol’s Cat on the Rails (1965) and de Musset and Sophocles (see Černý Krejča, and Hedbávný). 1968–86: Repression as Normalization The military invasion by the Soviet Union and its allies in August 1968 and the ensuing political crisis hit theater hard. Brutal repression followed, and the wave of emigrants included Radok, Kundera, Kohout, Vratislav Blažek, and Ludvík Aškenazy. The directors Krejča, Evald Schorm, and Jan Grossman, the dramatists Topol, Havel, Uhde, and many others were dismissed, excluded from employment, even banned from any kind of activity or publishing (see Goetz-Stankiewicz, The Silenced Theatre). Many theaters were closed, or, as in the case of the Theater beyond the Gate, Semafor, Kladivadlo (Hammer Theater) and others, “re-organized.” The harsh intervention of the political authorities in the guise of “normalization” hit even amateur theaters: in Ostrava, the amateur players of the group Waterloo (1968–70) were arrested and tried. Censorship was reintroduced; some authors and works needed several levels of approval. Official culture in its newly purged form abandoned the search for philosophic and aesthetic foundations; it became, once more, a means of political propaganda with a Stalinist tinge. Only outside the major centers and in private, where control could not be constant and perfect, was it possible to pursue some sort of free culture. Hence amateur and semi-professional theaters became important in the early 1970s: Bilé divadlo (White Theater) and Studio pohybového divadla (Studio of Movement Theater) in Prague; Ivan Vyskočil’s Nedivadlo (Un-theater); the unlicensed premiere in 1975 of Václav Havel’s Žebrácká opera (Beggars’ Opera) in the Divadlo na tahu (Theater on the Rounds); Homer’s Odyssey (1979) in the Brno Studio, directed by Zdeněk Pospíšil. In the 1980s, the Pražská pětka (Prague five) little theaters — Křeč (Spasm), Vpřed! (Forward!), Kolotoč (Roundabout), Mimóza, and Sklep (Cellar) — emerged, together with director Petr Lébl, who worked with amateurs, and Jan Antonín Pitínský, who worked at the Brno Ochotnický kroužek (Amateur Circle). Replenishing the program of author- and poetic theaters, a number of small professional stages emerged: the Studio Y in Liberec and Prague; the Theater on the Balustrades in Prague; the Činoherní Studio (Drama Studio) in Ústí nad Labem; the Divadlo Husa na provázku (Theater Goose on a String) in Brno, whose name had to be changed in 1969 to Divadlo na provázku (Theater on a String); the Hanácké divadlo or HAdivadlo (Theater of the Hana Region or HAtheater) in Prostějov and in Brno. They developed alternatives to the “legal” theater, building on achievements of the 1960s, sometimes with financial difficulties, and risking compromises such as interventions in the dramaturgy and participation in state and Party celebrations.

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The unofficial, unlicensed culture was literally driven “underground” and could evolve only in private, as was the case with the “living-room theater” of Vlasta Chramostová. After the affair of the rock group Plastic People of the Universe (1976), culminating in the conviction of its members and the founding of the human rights movement Charter 77, such private activities became even more difficult. The repression unleashed during the “normalization” period substantially restricted the production of original drama. One possibility to escape from censorship was to dramatize or adapt lyrical and narrative texts, for instance Bohumil Hrabal’s prose. Some dramatists published their plays only in samizdat or émigréé publishing houses, which meant that their plays could only be performed abroad. This was the case with Havel’s Largo desolato (1984), Audience (1975), and Pokoušení (Temptation; 1985), as well as for Topol’s Sbohem Sokrate! (Goodbye Socrates!) from 1976. It was not until the 1980s that original dramas returned to the stage with Karel Steigerwald’s Tatarská pouť (The Tatar Feast; 1988) and Neapolská choroba (The Neapolitan Disease; 1988), and Daniela Fischerová’s Hodina mezi psem a vlkem (The Hour between the Dog and the Wolf; 1979) and Báj (Legend; 1987). Directors that based their theater on movement and the use of objects rather than texts — Čtibor Turba in the Cirkus Alfred, and Boleslav Polívka in the Theater on a String, staging Am a Ea, Pépe, and Trosečník (Shipwrecked) — had better chances to avoid direct censorship and to defend themselves against the interventions of the political authorities. Non-verbal processes, including music and puppetry, were often used also in the text-based theater of directors Jan Schmid, Eva Talská, and Petr Scherhaufter, who accomplished remarkable syntheses of genres on small stages. 1986–89: From Perestroika to the Velvet Revolution Gorbachev’s perestroika in the second half of the 1980s and the subsequent political crisis of 1988–89 weakened self-censorship and subsequently official censorship, culminating in the fall of the Communist regime in November 1989. In the second half of the 1980s, Theater on a String, HAtheater, and some other theater groups developed programmatic pathways for civic protest against Communism by engaging in co-productions and para-theater projects, as well as participating in international festivals. Several manifestations used the weakening of the regime to prefigure a different future. They included the “Joint Project on the Theme of Paths (Crossroads — Timetables — Meetings)” launched by the Divadlo na okraji (Theater on the Fringe), the Theater on a String, and the HAtheater Studio Y in 1984; the three “Theater in Movement” (1973, 1982, and 1987) festivals; the international theater pilgrimage through Europe of the Mír Caravane (Peace Caravan); regular meetings with representatives of Polish alternative stages, such as the Teatr 77, and the Teatr Ósmego dnia (Theater of the Eighth Day); and the productions of Res publica in the Realist Theater of Zdeněk Nejedlý in Prague in 1988–89. The growing civic activity culminated in the Velvet Revolution: initiated by students and theater workers, it was carried out to a great extent in the spirit of street theater in manifestations, gatherings, concerts, and student happenings, as a kind of boisterous popular carnival (see Oslzlý).

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Slovak Drama: Reconciling the Absurd with Socialism Dagmar Roberts The nationalization of theaters, advocated since 1944, became a law in 1948. The Bratislava Academy of Theater and Musical Arts was established in 1949. In the 1950s, Ján Skalka, Štefan Králik, Ján Solovič, Ivan Bukovčan, Peter Karvaš and others wrote plays about the Slovak National Uprising, or about working in factories and collective farms. Drama was exclusively realistic, modelled on Soviet patterns. Peter Karvaš began his dramatic career by writing radio plays during the war, under a pseudonym since he was of Jewish origin. He became a renowned young playwright after the war when the plays were listed under his real name. Meteor (1945), Návrat do života (Return to Life; 1946), and Bašta (Bastion; 1948) are examinations of characters in laboratory-like situations. After writing plays in the 1950s according to the socialist realist canon, Karvaš moved towards the theater of the absurd and grotesque in Veľká parochňa (Big Wig; 1964), Experiment Damokles (1966), and Absolútny zákaz (Absolute Ban; 1969). Leopold Lahola [Leopold Arje Friedmann] wrote plays in the 1940s that show affinity with the drama of ideas. He emigrated in 1949 to Israel and subsequently to Germany and stopped writing, but resumed writing in the late 1960s when his works were no longer banned in Czechoslovakia. His Štyri strany sveta (Four Sides of the World; 1947) deals with a typical theme of the period: the “betrayal of intellectuals” during World War II. Atentát (1949), based on the assassination of the Nazi governor of Bohemia in 1942, combined a revolutionary spirit with Christian ideas and was rejected by the critics for this reason. Inferno (1968) investigated characters in the critical situation of an earthquake. Juraj Váh [Henrich Herzog] made his debut in 1948 with Ticho (Silence), a play that uses the classical unities to deal with the deportation of Jews. The 1960s were marked by the theater of the absurd. Rudolf Skukálek’s Hodinky (A Watch; 1963) was the first Slovak drama of the absurd, but his influence on Slovak drama became marginal when he emigrated to Germany. Nevertheless, the emergence of a Slovak theater of the absurd raised the question whether absurdity could be experienced in Socialism — a topic that Peter Karvaš examined in 1969 from a socialist perspective in Zamyšlení nad dramaturgií (Reflection on Dramaturgy). Arguing that absurdity was not indigenous to socialist society but imported into it, Karvaš saw it as a post-war reaction to violence and the institutionalization of life. Although some theater critics claimed later that Karvaš’s plays had an affinity with the theater of the absurd, he himself never completely renounced traditional drama composition. The formal features of the absurd theater in his plays merely show that he was aware of its existence. Cabaret acts by Milan Lasica and Július Satinský, and smaller, alternative performances also emerged in the 1960, but only in Bratislava. Divadlo na Korze (Theater on the Promenade), founded in 1964 as Divadlo poezie (Theater of Poetry) caught up with the small Prague theaters and presented between 1968 and 1971 a stream of innovative performances of plays by Sławomir Mrożek, Samuel Beckett, and others, as well as cabarets, musicals, and pantomimes. Tatra Revue, the most significant Slovak cabaret, was founded in 1958, and staged thirty-nine premieres during

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its twelve-year existence, offering a venue of political satire, cabaret, revues, and variety shows. The Tatra Revue was closed for “ideological” reasons in 1970, Divadlo na korze in 1971. Ján Solovič, Ivan Bukovčan, and Štefan Králik wrote plays in the 1970s that supported the “normalization” imposed after the suppression of the Prague Spring. The theater of the 1980s reflected a general stagnation. The Bratislava-based Divadlo u Rolanda (Theater at Roland), which functioned between 1971 and 1988 and hosted numerous small theaters groups, was among the few that offered room for experiments. The new authors who emerged, mostly in the 1970s, included Mikuláš Kočan, Osvald Záhradnik, Peter Kováčik, Ľubomír Feldek, and Stanislav Štepka. Feldek’s intellectual plays used parody to get their message across. Štepka continued the cabaret tradition and used amateur, naïve, and stylized theater based on folklore.

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Communism and After in Romanian Theater Marian Popescu After the communist takeover, and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of Romania in 1947, a broad theater network was established according to the Soviet model. Some forty companies were created, six of which (against four previously) had the status of a National Theater. Publishing houses began to launch theater series but the government and party authorities systematically censored the plays and the productions. Stanislavsky’s method was imposed as the only way to create theater. At the end of the 1950s and early 60s a group of theater directors, including Liviu Ciulei, David Esrig, Radu Penciulescu, Vlad Mugur, Valeriu Moisescu, and Lucian Pintilie, abandoned Socialist Realism and pleaded for a “re-theatricalization of theater” (see Radu Stanca; also Liviu Ciulei’s manifesto “Reteatralizarea”). Their productions, mainly of classic plays, re-vitalized the theater community and appealed to the audiences, but only until 1971. Ceauşescu, who had come to power in 1965 and allowed a modest thaw, returned in 1971 from a visit to China and North Korea, determined to stop the mild liberalization and reinforce oppression and censorship. The young theater director Andrei Şerban decided to stay in the West and gained quickly international recognition abroad, and so did Liviu Ciulei (known for his work with the Guthrie Theater and the Arena Stage in the USA) and Lucian Pintilie, who eventually turned also to film-making. Penciulescu, Esrig, Mugur, and Lucian Giurchescu also chose exile. From the 1970s onward, theater professionals were forced into complicity with the censorial bodies and had their productions frequently modified. This was the case with Pintilie’s staging of Gogol’s The Inspector General in 1972 and in many other cases during the 1970s and 80s (see Marian Popescu, The Stage). Those directors who stayed in the country, like Cătălina Buzoianu, worked under difficult conditions: they had restricted access to information and little freedom of movement, and they were rarely allowed to travel, especially not to tour abroad. With Silviu

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Purcărete, Mihai Măniuţiu, Alex Darie, Gábor Tompa, Alexandru Dabija, and Victor Ioan Frunză a new generation of directors emerged in the early 1980s, which supplied the artistic leaders after the overthrow of the Ceauşescu regime in 1989. They are now challenged by a younger generation of theatre directors like Radu Afrim and Sorin Militaru. Drama authors of 1950s and early 60s applied the Soviet canon of Socialist Realism both in comedy and drama. In the early 1960s, however, Teodor Mazilu, Ion Băieşu, Dumitru Solomon, Iosif Naghiu, Marin Sorescu, Dumitru Radu Popescu, Alexandru Sever, Romulus Guga, emerged with important plays. Some major plawrights, like Sorescu, came under the influence of the Absurd and contributed to what has been called Eastern Absurdism. Increased nationalism under Ceauşescu led to a mandatory quota of at least 50% Romanian plays in the repertoire, leading to the staging of a plethora of propaganda pieces. This undermined the public confidence in original Romanian dramas, a negative attitude that is still felt. Among the authors emerging in the 1980s, Matei Vişniec, who left the country in 1988, had some international success with Angajare de clovn (Clowns for Hire; 1993). After Ceauşescu’s fall, a new theater organization called UNITER was created, and its publishing department, UNITEXT, took up the challenge of promoting at home and abroad new authors like Vlad Zografi, Alina Mungiu, Petre Barbu, Alina Nelega, and Radu Macrinici. But the younger generation was caught in a difficult transition after 1989: the theaters did not change their structures while subsidies became significantly reduced. The pressures of the new market economy hit theaters in a hard way and creative space for alternative theater remained and remains very limited. Act Theatre in Bucharest, led by actor Marcel Iureş, and Green Hours, based in a cellar club, are still successful private theaters. The last decade of the twentieth century meant also a great move towards European theater and the occasional return of famous theater directors like Şerban, Esrig, and Penciulescu. After the end of censorship — see Marian Popescu, Oglinda spartă (The Broken Mirror) on this long process — and thanks to the efforts of UNITER and some official support, many artists and companies travelled to the West. Purcărete, Tompa, Măniuţiu, and other major Romanian theater directors began to work abroad and have gained international recognition.

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Mandatory Socialist Models vs. Stylistic Eclecticism on the Bulgarian Stage Joanna Spassova-Dikova After the military coup of September 1944, power in Bulgaria was concentrated in the hands of a leftist political coalition, the Otečestven front. Gradually, the Communist Party succeeded in monopolizing power and creating a regime on the Soviet model. In 1946, the administrative director of the National Theater, Trifon Kunev, a member of the Agrarian opposition party, was arrested; his party chief was executed in 1947. Georgi Stamatov, an actor at the National Theater, was fired

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in 1951 for criticizing the authorities but was later rehabilitated. Artists were blacklisted, sent into exile, or forced to repent publicly; their rehabilitation often followed only decades later. In the first years after World War II there were few changes in the repertoire and the cast of the National Theater. A new generation of professional directors started to work, most of whom had experience in the workers’ theaters before the war or in amateur companies. Some of the productions they staged were experimental, but such “non-realistic” productions were proclaimed formalist and rejected by the emerging party critics who judged everything from an ideological point of view. Mandatory Models, Murky Interpretations Communist ideology created mandatory models, handed down from higher party echelons through books, resolutions, articles, decrees, instructions, and ordinances. Theater artists had to know the norms and to create images according to prescribed patterns. Although the canons were strict, not everything was defined. The political instructions were often general and vague, allowing for different interpretations. In the process of translation and stage adaptation artists inevitably made certain corrections according to the specifics of their art and their own understanding. There was not much freedom for creativity, and the theater practitioners had fears and doubts as to whether they had correctly read the directives. The organs of control, in turn, were aesthetically or politically often incompetent and haunted by their own fears. Due to such ambiguous attitudes coming from above and below, from subjects inside and outside the theater, certain hybrid politico-aesthetic micro-canons emerged, which artists followed, next to the grand Canon. Theater language was adapted to the political text, and party instructions were applied to theater’s specific sign system. Yet some innovation, expressed through allegories and allusions, could occasionally slip through and reach the audience. In most cases, authorities blocked such attempts immediately and reprimanded or fired the artists. The repertory was exclusively composed of contemporary socialist Bulgarian and Soviet drama, all of which propagandized the main communist ideologemes. One special type of normative play, staged during the severest Stalinist years, was directed against scientists and intellectuals who aided enemies abroad, beyond the Iron Curtain. These plays reinforced the cultural purge, supporting the attempt to prohibit contacts with the West. Partiinost (belonging to the party), klassovost (belonging to the class), and narodnost (belonging to the people) served as the basis of the socialist plays and were encoded in the texts. All heroes were divided according to a few main indicators: gender; age; class (workers, peasants, intelligentsia, or capitalists); epoch (before or after the socialist revolution); builders or destroyers (enemies); communists or non-communists. Certain images were obligatory on stage, and reflected the simple pyramidal structure of the society: party leader, party heroes, and the masses. Theater had to circulate images of the “new people,” who were usually represented quite allegorically since they were personifications of ideological abstract concepts. The concepts determined the specific manner of their expression. The party models for theater were based on strictly defined rules. Socialist Realism in theater was officially derived from Stanislavsky’s system, which was taught in an ideologically edited and refashioned form in the State Theater Academy, founded in 1948. In July 1953, an extended and intensive discussion took place in Sofia on the role of Stanislavsky’s system in theater; as a result,

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the system was imposed as the only method for acting and directing. Elements of the Brechtian model were included in the practice only in the 1960s. Yet, despite efforts by the authorities, no single style or aesthetic conception prevailed in the theater. A careful analysis of Socialist Realism must conclude that no general realistic style existed. Instead, the productions were eclectic and multi-styled, within a strictly hierarchic and simplified image system, which brought together on different levels and in a specific manner realism and ideological convention. Monumental, mono-dimensional, sculptural, and everyday expressions curiously intermingled. No new styles or codes were invented, merely a selection was made from the already existing and familiar features. Features borrowed from Naturalism, Classicism, Academism, Realism, Romanticism, and Symbolism were recognizable in “socialist art.” The permanent censor, an appointed Artistic Council, was charged with selecting the repertory, casting the roles, and accepting or rejecting productions. Representatives of the party attended the dress-rehearsal night. Another means of party censorship were the National Theater Reviews, initiated in 1949 by the Committee of Science, Art, and Culture, which combined governmental and party monitoring. Theater, the official journal of the Union of Bulgarian Theater Artists since 1946, published all the normative instructions, theoretical articles, reviews, and criticisms. Like theaters in the capital, provincial companies adopted the official policy on theater. Escapist Fantasies A slight easing of regulations ensued in the mid–1950s. Artists demanded that more classical plays be included in the repertoire, and the young directors Leon Daniel, Villy Zankov, and Julia Ognianova started to experiment in Burgas with the staging of classic works, which were then performed in the 1960s and 70s all over the country. In the 1960s, productions of normative socialist Bulgarian drama started to alternate with pieces based on fairy-tales or parables with allegorical and fantastic elements. These plays, largely post-romantic artistic interpretations written in the Bulgarian mytho-poetic mode that developed in the early twentieth century (see pp. 192–93 above), focused on individual freedom and longing for miracles. There was an attempt to link Earth to the Cosmos, so that the unfettered spirit could tear itself away from the cruel world around and undertake fantasy journeys. Valery Petrov’s Kogato rozite tanzuvat (When the Roses Dance; 1961), and Ivan Radoev’s Čovekojadkata (The She-Cannibal; 1975) and Čudo (Miracle; 1982) employed allusions, metaphors, and allegoric images. Yordan Radičkov was one of the most original Bulgarian playwrights during the second half of the twentieth century. His plays encoded in the text fantastic, folkloristic, mythological, and magic elements in such a way that they remained enigmatic and complex for the party elite. Performances of some of his plays, replete with metaphors, miracles, catastrophes, and allusions, were occasionally censored, prompting debates on the benefit or harm of such departures from realism in a socialist society. Yet the authorities did not dare ban outright the productions for fear of showing their own ignorance and misunderstanding Radičkov’s strange philosophical and biblical world. In Sumatoha (Tumult; 1967), Ianuari (1973), Lazaritza (1977), Opit za letene (An Attempt to Fly; 1979), Obraz i podobie (Image and Likeness; 1986) and other plays, Radičkov investigated

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the relationship between human beings, time, nature, and the cosmic world. Confronting life and death, the known and unknown, order and chaos, earthly life and extraterrestrial existence, he used folklore and fantastic images, as well as motives from Christian mythology. Theater directors expressed their criticism of the communist system by staging Radičkov’s plays as allegories and parables. He was named “the Kafka of Sofia” and a “theater heretic” because of his irony, his use of the grotesque, his criticism, as well as his non-conformism and eccentricity, which broke with many official dramaturgical and staging norms and allowed the building of a poetic world of miracles and freedom. Radičkov thus gave theater artists a weapon to combat uniformity and control. Comedy, previously rare in socialist culture, was revived with the foundation of the Theater of Satire in Sofia (1957). In the 1970s, comedies like Rimska banja (Roman Bath; 1974), Sako ot velur (The Velvet Jacket; 1976), Reis (The Bus Ride; 1979) by Stanislav Stratiev became very popular. Dramas such as Konstantin Illiev’s Velikdensko vino (Easter Wine; 1978) and Odisei patuva za Itaca (The Odyssey: a Voyage to Ithaca; 1985); Stefan Zanev’s Procesat sreštu bogomilite (The Trial against the Bogomils; 1969) and Poslednata nošt na Sokrat (The Last Night of Socrates; 1986); and Nedyalko Yordanov’s Mata-Hari (1982) often treated contemporary problems by going back into the historical past. These timid protests against suppression allowed the public to participate in unmasking the defects of the present. The state theaters of the capital were occasionally of great importance: the National Theater for Youth, the Theater of the National Army, the Theater of Satire, the Salsa i Smjah, the Theater Sofia, and the Theater 199, all had occasionally great seasons. In the 1970s, the tradition of the small chamber stages and café theaters came about. Occasionally, the experiments with the repertoire, with new genres, with theater language, and with the principles of staging and acting went further in the provinces than in the capital city because it was easier to trick the censor there. Some brave productions were banned. Director Villy Zankov, for instance, had problems with the authorities when staging expressionist productions. For all its daring, Bulgarian theater had only a minor role in bringing down the communist regime in 1989: it just followed the inevitable political and cultural processes stimulated by the perestroika in the Soviet Union.

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Enver-Hoxha’s Dictatorship Stifles Albanian Theater Robert Elsie By the late 1940s, most of the Albanian playwrights of the pre-war period had either been executed (like Ndre Zadeja), or imprisoned (like Etëhem Haxhiademi, Kristo Floqi, Ndoc Nikaj, and Vinçenc Prennushi). This unprecedented wave of persecution of Albanian intellectuals unnerved all surviving writers or would-be playwrights of the new generation. The political turmoil of the immediate post-war years, and the manoeuvring rise and fall of the various political leaders and

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factions within the communist party, added to the sense of insecurity that virtually paralyzed all creative forces in the country. By the time dictator Enver Hoxha was securely in the saddle and had established a modicum of political stability, he also created in Albania a cultural vacuum that lasted well into the 1960s. Albanian theater was, therefore, very slow to develop in the post-war period despite its obvious usefulness as a means of education, propaganda, and political persuasion. It was, nonetheless, in the post-war years when subsidized state theaters and state ensembles were established in most major cities. This institutionalization of Albanian theater went hand in hand with the conscious eradication of the amateur groups of the past that might have eluded state and party control. By the 1960s, amateur theater in Albania had all but disappeared — one of the many cultural losses of the period. The post-war professional theater of Socialist Realism is said to have its immediate origins in the amateur theater groups of the partisan movement in Albania from 1942 to 1944, but its roots go back to the ensembles of the twenties and thirties. The amateur groups of the partisan movement that travelled the country during the late war years entertained the partisans and endeavored to instruct the peasantry about the ideals of, and need for, a communist revolution in the country. It was a political theater, a mixture of polemics, heroism, nationalism, sentimentality, and satire. Among the early authors of partisan and socialist theater were Zihni Sako, Gjikë Kuqali, and Besim Levonja, the latter remembered for his comedy Prefekti (The Prefect; 1948). After the communist takeover in November 1944, Albanian theater, like Albanian prose and poetry, was reshaped to conform to the doctrines of Socialist Realism and Ždanovism. Accordingly, in the fifties it fell heavily under the influence of Soviet models, primarily the works of Russian dramatists. Although some weak reflexes of the great theatrical traditions of Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater and of Erwin Piscator of Berlin may have been felt in Albania, the declamatory style and the heavy-handed use of political propaganda still made most plays of the fifties and sixties quite insufferable. A new start for the theater of Socialist Realism was made by Kolë Jakova with the heroic drama Halili e Hajrija (1950), which portrays the struggle of the northern Albanian Kelmendi clan, led by Halil Garrija, a figure from Albanian folk literature, against Sulejman Pasha in the sixteenth century. The dramatic techniques of this first memorable post-war Albanian drama are questionable, though the structural weaknesses of the play are compensated for to a certain extent by the moving heroism and patriotic sentiment of the scene in which the play’s protagonist faces death. Of greater quality and more widely admired was Jakova’s drama Toka jonë (Our Land; 1955). The protagonist of the play is a 43 years old mother of two who is forced to flee from her native village when a landowner sullies her reputation in order to seize her land. Her return home and her struggle to regain her rights in a hostile environment are facilitated by the initial agrarian reform in the autumn of 1946. Spiro Çomora, a noted playwright, satirical poet, and humorist of the sixties is remembered for his comedies Karnavalet e Korçës (The Carnivals of Korça; 1961), and Dy me zero (Two to Nothing; 1960). The action in the former takes place in Korça in 1936 and revolves around the indefatigable attempts by a wealthy but miserly merchant to marry his daughter off as cheaply as possible. The playwrights of these early years include Sulejman Pitarka, Ndrekë Luca, Jonuz Dini, and Andrea Skanjeti, who is remembered and subsequently persecuted for his Nora, heroina e bjeshkve (Nora, Heroine of the Mountain Pastures; 1961), set in the years 1632–39.

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Isolation and a Cultural Revolution The second great blow to be dealt to Albanian theater after the eradication of the amateur groups was the banning of all foreign works from the repertory. The Albanian public had never had much opportunity to see contemporary European theater at all, although a number of classics had been translated into Albanian and performed on stage. Molière, Shakespeare and Schiller, for instance, had been enjoyed in educated circles. Even such classics, however, fell out of political favor during the Cultural Revolution (1965–69) and in the years following the Purge of the Liberals (1973), when virtually all Western culture was considered bourgeois and decadent. As a result of the purge, Chinese-style revolutionary drama was to hold sway on Albanian stages and on television for quite a few years. The dramatist who best reflects the proclivities of this period is Loni Papa. His noted drama, Cuca e maleve (The Mountain Lass; 1967), portrays a woman’s fight for equality among the feudal mountain tribes of northern Albania in 1949. The play was particularly effective during the late sixties and early seventies when the Party’s campaign for women’s emancipation in Albania was in full swing. Cuca e maleve is perhaps the most obvious Albanian reflection of Chinese revolutionary theater and opera under Mao Tse-Tung. Like many of its Chinese counterparts it was made into an opera. Dramatist Fadil Paçrami, though of Moslem origin, was educated by the Franciscans and subsequently sent by them to Bologna to study medicine. After World War II, he worked in the communist youth movement, became deputy minister of education and culture under Sejfulla Malëshova, and, from 1948 to 1957, editor in chief of the daily newspaper Zëri i Popullit (The Voice of the People). In 1965–66 he served as Minister of Culture and the Arts, and from 1971 to 1973 in parliament. Accordingly, Paçrami’s plays of the period (thirteen dramas up to 1973) are well within the confines set by Socialist Realism. At the Fourth Plenary Session of the Central Committee on June 26–28, 1973, Fadil Paçrami and Todi Lubonja, head of Albanian radio and television, were singled out by Enver Hoxha in a drive against liberal and foreign influence in Albanian culture. Relieved of all his positions, Fadil Paçrami was arrested in October 1975 and spent an initial eighteen months in a Tirana prison awaiting trial, suffering the very same fate that other intellectuals had suffered under Hoxha’s rule. In March 1977, he was convicted of sabotage in culture for having introduced foreign influences and, like Socrates, for having corrupted the youth — not to mention the standard charges of agitation and propaganda. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison and released in March 1991. The Paçrami-Lubonja purge of 1973 led to the ousting of many other figures, not only of prose writers and artists but also of dramatists. Minush Jero had been criticized in 1969 by Enver Hoxha for his play Njolla të murrmë (Grey Stains; 1968), although it had won first prize at the National Theater Festival that year. He endeavoured to correct his ideological shortcomings with the revolutionary drama Të pamposhtur (The Unyielding Ones; 1971), but to no avail. Together with the play’s director, Mihallaq Luarasi of the Çajupi Theater in Korça, Jero was arrested on April 30, 1973 and was imprisoned until December 28, 1978. Also condemned at the Fourth Plenary Session of 1973 were Naum Prifti’s manuscript “Rrethimi i bardhë” (The White Siege), which remained unpublished, and Fatos Arapi’s Drama e një partizani pa emër (Drama of a Nameless Partisan; 1962). All plays and stagings were subsequently reviewed for their ideological purity, and anything found to be modernistic, liberal, or foreign was immediately banned. The talented

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director Kujtim Spahivogli was denounced as an anarchist and dispatched to the countryside to work as a cement-mixer. Even stage designers were thrown into labor camps for modernistic decorations. This period of revolutionary art, as defined and interpreted by the Albanian Party of Labor or, more precisely, by Enver Hoxha and his cohorts, caused a major setback to the advancement of Albanian theater in the seventies. Some progress was made from about 1982 onwards, though Albanian drama still remains a definitely neglected genre. In the final years of the dictatorship, there were ten well-attended professional theaters in Albania and, in addition, about fifteen variety theaters and a puppet theater. The quality of acting and staging improved substantially, in particular on the best stages: the Teatri Popullor (People’s Theater) of Tirana, the Teatri Migjeni (Migjeni Theater) of Shkodra, and the Teatri A. Z. Çajupi (Çajupi Theater) of Korça. Nonetheless, the subject matter remained dull by Western standards. Throughout almost half a century of “people’s power,” theater was always subjected to a much greater political control and censorship than prose or poetry, and thus never really had a chance to flourish on its own. If a volume of prose in the seventies and eighties had to go through the hands of ten to fifteen editors-censors, a play had to be read by at least thirty such experts, and anything that might possibly be construed as critical or controversial was removed. The spirit of non-conformism, so ubiquitous in Western theater and culture in general, was unthinkable, as were individualists whose ideas could provoke and even outrage their audience. For obvious political reasons, Albanian playwrights were very reticent or, to do them justice, were unable to utilize the power of the stage to its fullest and to provoke their audiences into reflection with real material and with the sort of scandalous stage productions that Western theater-goers have become quite addicted to. Instead, they stuck to a bland mixture of edifying morality plays and historical dramas, full of patriotic pathos and heavy-handed political messages. Though the excellent quality of stage directing and acting managed to compensate to an extent, the result of this political interference was such sterility in Albanian theater that Albanian drama can, even today, vie neither in quality nor in quantity with poetry and prose. Modern Albanian theater (see further Elsie, “Theatre”; Hoxha; Lambertz; Shita and Mekuli) has yet to emerge.

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From Provincial Backwaters to Budapest and World Reputation László Bérczes In 1968 two talented young men, Gábor Székely and Gábor Zsámbéki, graduated in theater directing from the Budapest Theater Academy, and signed their contracts with two provincial theaters, in towns that then seemed Hungarian cultural backwater: Szolnok and Kaposvár. Routinely, one could expect from them a few remarkable productions to start with, then some mediocre work; subsequently, their fate would be either a gradual dissolution in the provincial brew, or, if they displayed talent and sufficient conformity, they would end up in Budapest, in one of those conservative

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industrial establishments of the capital’s theater life. And the latter is, indeed, what happened: they did make a few notable productions, and even if it took ten years, they ultimately made their way back to Budapest, both became leaders of the Nemzeti Színház (National Theater) in 1978, and, after their resignation in 1982, directors of the Katona József Színház in Budapest. Yet their story conforms only superficially to the standard plot. During their years in the province they made excellent use of the relative freedom of the 1970s and 80s, as well as of their own talent and that of others; along the way they changed the Hungarian theater landscape. At the beginning of 1970s, theater and the general artistic life in Hungary and in other parts of Eastern Europe entered a nearly comatose state. After the 1968 Prague Spring and turmoil in Poland, intellectuals were gagged or otherwise persecuted in practically all so-called socialist countries. Yet in Hungary, in “the gayest barrack” of the Soviet camp, careful observers could detect signs of intellectual life and freedom of sorts, fuelled not in the least by pride about 1956 and remorse felt over betraying the Czechs in 1968. In 1971, Miklós Jancsó, Károly Makk, István Szabó, and Zoltán Huszárik were preparing to shoot their best films, and there were already a handful of “amateur” companies that provided an alternative to the stale and lifeless establishment theater. These innovative groups included the Halász company, soon to depart for New York and world fame (Squat Theater, later Love Theater); Studió K, preparing for the epoch-making production of Woyzeck; and the Szegedi Egyetemi Színpad (Szeged University Stage), lead by István Paál, whose Petőfi-rock and Kőműves Kelemen were to win the admiration even of Grotowski. The Kaposvár Miracle What seems obvious today, namely that the early 1970s functioned as a perfect melting pot, was hardly self-evident back then. Nor could anyone foresee at the time that out of the three Seagull productions running simultaneously in the country, almost nobody should remember today the Budapest one because it faded with time against the freshness of the Chekhov production of Székely in Szolnok and that of Zsámbéki in Kaposvár. As it turned out, these productions of a play about making theater set an agenda that the two fellow graduates and their colleagues would follow. The two Gábors subsequently spent three years “in the middle of nowhere.” The town “looked hopelessly run-down […] I had never encountered so many false voices, such aimless frivolity, and such unwarranted triviality on stage,” remembers Székely the first time he met the company (Hajónapló, 1996/2). Zsámbéki’s experience was little different: “There were few actors in Kaposvár I would have liked to work with. I met the most talented members of the company when they were stupefied by alcohol, so I saw little hope of ever engaging them in real conversation” (Mihályi 41). It is all the more remarkable that three years later they both felt their company was ready for a production that was not only their critique of current manners in the establishment theater, but also their claim to the right of making a different kind of theater, illustrated in the very making of it, as it were. Their idiom was radical, but free of the blind simplifications so characteristic of rebels. While Zsámbéki employed a caustic political discourse, he also tried to give nuanced portraits of people and the world, in all their variety and richness. And this is true not only of him, but also of his colleagues and successors, especially László Babarczy, Tamás Ascher, and János

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Ács. The Szolnok theater also tried to keep up the spirit after the departure of Székely in 1978, but was less successful and could not maintain for long the standards that Kaposvár sustained even in the hardest of times. Within a few years, by the mid-seventies, one of the least significant provincial playhouses in one of the dullest towns became the country’s best theater. This happened in the last twenty years of East-European communism, in a period of thaw, when film and theater were allowed to become increasingly free media for political discourse that could otherwise not reach the public. Artistic productions could expect but three kinds of treatment from the regime: support, absolute ban, or being “tolerated.” Most Kaposvár productions were tolerated, due the town’s location. Kaposvár (and Szolnok, as well as Kecskemét, which also staged important productions then) counted as the absolute backwater in Hungary, without a university and hence supposedly without a perceptive audience. These productions, which most likely could never have reached the stage in Budapest, soon turned the Csiky Gergely Színház in the provincial town of Kaposvár into a cult site, to which hundreds would make their pilgrimage on a performance night: “As we were driving down to Kaposvár, we were overtaking buses crammed with young people. One, two, … a dozen. When we got to the theater, it turned out they were mostly students, many from the Karl Marx University of Economics, down for a performance of Marat/Sade. In the tightly packed theater, before a receptive young audience, the production acquired a new dimension and became a cultic celebration” (Mihályi 487). In reality, these pilgrimages were political demonstrations, as the company’s occasional guest-performances in the capital proved. It was typical of the regime’s wavering policy that the company was usually not allowed to play in the capital itself, only, at best, in Gödöllő, a little town thirty kilometers away. The regime had manoeuvered itself into a hopeless cul-de-sac and had to face a scandal, whether it banned or allowed the performance. That a Kaposvár production meant more than just theater became evident in 1977, when a huge crowd attempted to enter the Vígszínház in the centre of Budapest, wanting to see István Szőke’s production of Ostrovsky’s Forest (Erdő), László Babarczy’s direction of Troilus and Cressida, and, especially, Tamás Ascher’s interpretation of a Hungarian operetta from the fifties, Állami áruház (State Department Store; see Barabás); mounted police had to disperse the frustrated crowd without tickets. Tamás Ascher, probably the most outstanding Hungarian director in the seventies and eighties, achieved in this operetta what had become the mark of the best Kaposvár productions: an indissoluble amalgam of politics, inherent in the here-and-now of theater, and an aesthetics of artistic professionalism. He and his fellow-directors (Zsámbéki, Babarczy, Ács and others), as well as the prominent writer and dissident István Eörsi who was dramaturge at the theater in 1977–82, were not led by exclusively political considerations; indeed, their primary motivation was not political at all. As Ascher stated about Állami áruház, “Operetta is essentially mythical. Schematic arts used mythologies, having to present a received ready-made fake reality as real, since the representation of genuine reality was forbidden. And the best genre to elaborate on this myth is operetta […] There was neither political anger in me, nor resentment towards the past, only an immense curiosity” (Mihályi 448). In Kaposvár, curiosity, honesty, and professionalism turned almost innocently into politics, as it did later in the Katona József Színház. The most successful productions of the period did not stage the best contemporary plays, partly because contemporary Western dramatists belonged to the category “hardly tolerated” (though,

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especially in Kaposvár and Szolnok, Beckett, Pinter, Albee, and other mostly English-language authors were produced), but most importantly because Hungary became a home for what could be called, greatly simplifying, “director’s theater”: the quality of the production ultimately depended upon the interpretation, or even, the world-view of the director. As will be apparent when compared to the Katona József Színház, Kaposvár, as all provincial theaters, had to cater to a diversity of tastes. It had to produce operetta, cheap comedy, classics, contemporary Western playwrights, East-Europeans, etc. Állami áruház and the great Hungarian classic operetta Csárdáskirálynő (The Csardas Queen) that János Mohácsi, member of a new generation directed later, as well as Pinocchio and The Nutcracker for children were staged from the same aesthetic-ideological vantage point as Chekhov’s Ivanov, Bulgakov’s The Purple Island, or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Katona’s Rise The international recognition that came in 1981 was all the more valuable as Hungarian theater had been practically unknown abroad — discounting formal cultural exchanges with the other communist countries and the foreign success of the amateur companies (Studió K., Szegedi Egyetemi Színpad, Halász). Ács’s production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, which won the first prize at the Belgrade BITEF festival in 1981, was made by a key figure of the Szegedi Egyetemi Színpad in the seventies. The production’s progress from an imminent ban to a European success already took place in the new epoch, after Zsámbéki and Székely were made directors of the Budapest National Theater in 1978. They took along the best of their old teams and formed the best company in Hungary. For some time it seemed that the two deserted provincial playhouses would collapse, but Marat/Sade proved that Kaposvár under the leadership of Babarczy could keep alive. It has remained one of the best workshop houses ever since. By 1981, the Nemzeti Színház became the focus of a political battle that Zsámbéki, Székely, and Ascher could not possibly win. The Nemzeti Színház had been exposed to a barrage of political interests ever since its conception in the nineteenth century, but this time the conflict came to an unexpectedly good resolution. What happened behind the scenes was typically East-Central European: the Katona József Színház was established as a “by-product” in the struggle between two ideologists during the period of the thaw, György Aczél, a cunning follower of the old strict party line, and Imre Pozsgay, an adamant reformer. Pozsgay had to concede Nemzeti Színház to the conservatives but he was allowed to establish a new small theater as a compensation. What counted as a defeat in the petty political struggles was a victory for theater, because, in the words of a later critic, “a company of a shared perspective and ideals could start to work free of artistic compromises” (Sándor “Korforduló”). The first production was Zsámbéki’s staging of a Chekhov comedy, Lesij (The Gnome), in 1982; in the next years Russian and Soviet authors kept providing much of the repertory: Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Platonov, and The Cherry Orchard; Bulgakov’s Escape and Dog’s Heart; Gogol’s The Inspector General; and Venedikt Yerofeev’s Walpurgis Night. The remaining segment consisted of Shakespeare and other European classics (Molière, Kleist, and Goldoni), twentieth-century drama (Jarry, Pirandello, Brecht, and Pinter), and, of course, Hungarians, including Milán Füst, Péter Kárpáti’s Akárki (Everyman), and Lajos Parti Nagy’s Catullus and

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Mauzóleum. Katona, being in the capital, could afford dropping operettas and lowbrow plays; it did not need to cater to diverses audiences (though, as we saw in Kaposvár, this does not always lead to bad results). In Budapest, the directors of the Katona could refine to perfection a performance style they called lyrical realism. Naturally, there were essential differences among its most important directors, Ascher, Székely, Zsámbéki, Ács, and later on Péter Gothár and Gábor Máté. Realism was fostered not only by scenery and costumes, but also by scrupulous adherence to the text, with dramaturgy underpinned by a close psychological study of the characters, and conscientious work by the actors, who relied on these insights. All this was due to the presence and absence of certain traditions. Hungarian theater hardly partook in the avant-garde experiments of the early twentieth century, and it had no contact with those theatrical traditions in neighboring Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia that had developed their peculiar forms of stylish expression. The indigeneous tradition, which put great value on following the text and using the actor as the central component of the performance, was widely observed, however. This might well have led to a boring, ideologically tepid bourgeois theater (as was the case in the sixties), but the relative freedom of the 1970s offered a chance for the development of a peculiarly Hungarian, lyrically realist theater. In the course of 1980s, this theater gained international recognition with Székely’s Catullus, Zsámbéki’s Ubu Roi and The Inspector General, and, probably the greatest Hungarian theater production ever, Ascher’s The Three Sisters. The Katona József Színház has changed greatly since its foundation almost twenty years ago. The most radical change was Székely’s resignation in 1989. Five years later, he founded the Új Színház (New Theater) and took over many good actors from the Katona. This provided Katona an occasion to infuse new blood; since 1991 its new and young members have been able to use also a studio for free experimentation. The company now has two stages with very different repertoires: in the old Katona classics are produced with reliable quality, while the studio, Kamra, features productions of a “young” spirit, mostly of contemporary Hungarian drama. The proverbial first seven years when theaters are said to make their best productions are long over, but the Csiky Gergely Színház in Kaposvár and Katona József Színház in Budapest are still immensely important in the Hungarian theater.

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After Witkacy and Gombrowicz: Faces of Postwar-Polish Drama Ewa Wąchocka Post-war Polish literature inherited two traditions: the realist, psychological, and symbolic drama, and the avant-garde drama, represented mainly by Witkacy. Political conditions interrupted the continuity of the avant-garde strand even before Socialist Realism began to rule around 1949. The only theater that maintained the avant-garde tradition under Stalinist cultural policies was

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the “smallest theater in the world,” Konstanty I. Gałczyński’s Zielona gęś (The Green Goose; 1946–50), which presented a series of satirical scenes, poetic jokes, and gags based on popular associations. It poked fun at Polish national vices, stereotypes of Polish mythology, current problems, history, and literature. The main line of development was, however, that of Realism, which took on the great themes of war and current interest. The most interesting play was Leon Kruczkowski’s Niemcy (The Germans; 1949), a critical account of German society viewed from within or, more generally, an examination of any society under totalitarian control. The Thaw Ushers Absurdism In The major breakthrough came in 1956, after the hegemony of Socialist Realism weakened and the cultural-political conditions of the Thaw allowed a turn towards abstraction. Plays took the form of parables, or even allegories; social, political, and historical themes found their expression in abstract concepts and metaphors. The new technique of “historical costume” emerged to outsmart the censorship by discussing the present through historical analogies and allusions. It was Jerzy Broszkiewicz who most actively employed the new form of political and historical metaphor in Imiona władzy (Names of Power; 1957) and Jonasz i błazen (Jonas and Jester; 1962), although in retrospect the best play seems to be Kruczkowski’s Śmierć gubernatora (The Governor’s Death; 1961), a consistent study of power and morality. A radical shift to the absurd took place with the premieres of Sławomir Mrożek’s Policja (The Police; 1958) and Tadeusz Różewicz’s Kartoteka (The Card File; 1960), which were severely critical as well as comic-sinister representations of social reality. Moreover they renewed the avant-garde tradition. In the late 1950s and early 60s, the dramaturgy of the grotesque became popular in close affiliation with the Theater of the Absurd. The playwrights of this trend desisted from direct mimetic representations of reality in favor of artificial, simulated, and completely arbitrary ones. This was accompanied by clear structural modifications: the plot was replaced by situations and characters by puppets, while explicit utterances practically disappeared. Yet the movement was hardly homogenous. These substantial differences are best seen when we contrast Różewicz with Mrożek, the open fragmentary form of drama with a highly finished form based on cause-andeffect. Mrożek pursued a cold and premeditated satirical grotesque, in which the absurd results from apparently fantastic and paradoxical situations, logically presented in their entirety. This is the case with Policja and the one-act plays Karol (1961), Strip-tease (1961), and Zabawa (The Party; 1962). Mrożek’s works correspond to the style of mockery and grotesque perfected by Witkiewicz, Gałczyński, and Gombrowicz. The sharp realist observations in Mrożek’s early plays become transformed and condensed into a model situation in which the ideas of totalitarian ideology and interpersonal relations, deprived of their elementary features, are reduced to final consequences. This is how Mrożek reflects on the contemporary contradictions in Męczeństwo Piotra Oheya (The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey; 1959) and other one-act plays that foreground imposed manipulation, appearances, and demagogic rhetoric — in short, the inauthenticity of social and individual life. Indyk (Turkey; 1960) and Śmierć porucznika (Death of the Lieutenant; 1963) reveal in the same way the burden of hypocritical national and social traditions, the relics of a national mythology rooted in romantic literature.

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Pushing a situation to its limits, Mrożek provoked unexpectedly comic effects, yet the image of the world thus produced acquired cruel and macabre accents. This is the case with Tango (1964), in which Mrożek presents the dramatic history of the Polish intelligentsia in the decades 1920–60 by means of mixing comic, farcical, and tragic elements. We may also say that Tango is a family drama that traces European civilization from liberalism to totalitarianism. In his later works, Mrożek enriched simple one-dimensional situations and parabolic models with social and historical facts as in Pieszo (On Foot; 1980) and Portret (Portrait; 1987), as well as in Emigranci (Émigrés; 1974), which takes an ironic view of the exiles who fled from tyranny only to confront the paradoxes of freedom. Różewicz experimented with drama, breaking its traditional forms and principles, and used a free montage of scenes that are apparently unconnected and unfinished. He created plays out of fragments in daily life, newspapers, and conventional clichés; he conceived them as collages from the refuse heap of modern civilization. His works resemble screenplays, scripts, outlines of theater plays. Like scores, they need to be filled with stage matter. Opposing classical and present-day avant-garde theater, Różewicz formulated a program of his own. As exemplified by Akt przerywany (The Interrupted Act; 1964), he sought a realistic and poetic theater that spoke of the world as it is, relied on facts, and questioned conventions. All the major elements of this theater were already present in Kartoteka (1968): a main character “of unspecified age, profession, and appearance,” a room that is also a street, a dialogue made up of banal exchanges, pieces of poetry, and word lists. Kartoteka is a fragmentary biography of a disaffected Everyman. In Stara kobieta wysiaduje (The Old Woman Broods; 1968), a post-apocalyptic journey through humanity’s experience, Różewicz used an apparently incomplete form with frequent reference to the collage technique to diagnose the crumbling of civilization. He engaged in a dialogue with European culture in Grupa Laokoona (The Laokoon Group; 1961), and with literature in Na czworakach (On All Fours; 1971). Różewicz explored morality, general alienation in the contemporary world, and the problems of body and gender in Białe małżeństwo (White Marriage; 1974). His experiments led to the elimination of typical action and word, thus ultimately to silence. Yet, through his unremitting dialogue with tradition, Różewicz tried to revive in Do piachu (Dead and Buried; 1972) the most ancient form of European theater by creating at the same time a contemporary tragedy. Closer to Reality A broad realism is evident in the works of the 1960s that broach the moral issues of alienation and suffering, difficult choices, and the search for truth. Typically, however, existential and relativist philosophies are interwoven with surrealist elements that are made acute by means of brutal scenes. Ireneusz Iredyński, an important playwright preoccupied with analyses of evil, crime, and deviation, displays this approach by means of a “theater of cruelty” in Jasełka moderne (A Modern Nativity Play; 1962) and Żegnaj, Judaszu (Farewell Judas; 1965). In the early 1970s, playwrights abandoned quasi-realistic animations of reality and returned to more traditional techniques and direct representations of the world. Mrożek’s Emigranci and his later Pieszo attached much importance to realist representations of events and people. Różewicz gave an accurate account of a real human life in Do piachu (Dead and Buried; 1979), showing

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the torment of a brutish young peasant executed for rape by his partisan unit during World War II. One can observe a similar poetics in his Pułapka (The Trap; 1982), where the rhythm of life sets the rhythm of the action. In the 1980s, a new wave of historical drama emerged with Tomasz Łubieński’s Zegary (The Clocks; 1968) and Koczowisko (The Camping-Place; 1974), as well as with Jerzy S. Sito’s Polonez (The Polonaise; 1978). The shifts that followed the imposition and ending of the Martial Law (1981–83) were stylistically and ideologically far from homogenous. Janusz Głowacki left the country, settled in the United States, and became successful there with Antygona w Nowym Jorku (Antigone in New York; 1992), whereas Tadeusz Słobodzianek stayed in the country and elaborated on material from ancient rural cultures. After 1989, censorship was abolished and Polish theater became free. But with the sudden disappearance of its oppositional role, democratic theater found itself now without clear function or direction. Important plays dealing with the post–1989 situations have yet to appear. Polish cultural identity is undergoing a radical redefinition, and dramatists must now find their place in a changed world.

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Wyspiański’s Offsprings Eleonora Udalska The Independent Theater that the painter-director Tadeusz Kantor founded in 1943–44 became a site of significant artistic discoveries. Impressed by Symbolism, Constructivism, and Bauhaus, Kantor followed Cricot Theater and laid the foundations of his great Theater of Death with the staging of Słowacki’s Balladyna in 1943 and Wyspiański’s Powrót Odysa (Odysseus’s Return) in 1944. He continued this line of theater in Cricot II from 1955 until his death with productions accompanied by theoretical manifestoes. The productions, based on Witkiewicz’s works, formed a vanguard proposal for an autonomous and creative theater of images, arising from Kantor’s deep reflection on his own biographical and cultural entanglement: the reality of a little town with a Catholic church and a synagogue, a Catholic and a Jewish cemetery, with rituals of two religions. This reflection linked up with an analysis of the utopias in the twentieth-century avant-garde movements of Constructivism, Surrealism, and Dadaism, leading to the heart of his approach: the use of actor-mannequins. For Kantor, theater became an art to master the past via forms of cognition in collective and individual memory. His productions invited the public to participate in a rite called “transsubstantiation” or “resurrection” that expressed fears and visions of destroying individuals and whole nations. His childhood experience led him to fill the room with sacred and ritual objects of Christianity and Judaism. The spectators heard tunes of both religions and looked at the canonical and everyday clothes of both. These were not just standard props but the very basis of Kantor’s Theater of Love and Death. The theater director, always present himself on the stage, guided the

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spectators’ imagination to the archetypes of both cultures: histories of destruction and atrocities, tragedy and comedy, carnal and spiritual elements in flickers of memory, the funny and the lyrical, the vulgar and the profound. Confronting the artist’s experience engaged spectators with national myths, the tragic events in two world wars, the Holocaust, soldiers’ deaths, and various forms of contemporary totalitarianisms. Józef Szajna’s theater group, which assumed its mature form in the Studio Theater of Warsaw (1972–81), borrowed its aesthetics from painting. The productions were marked by Szajna’s personality, by his imagination shaped by war experiences, kinship with the avant-garde, and a pursuit of total theater. The “theater of images” attached artificial limbs to the actor — a dummy, a hand, or a mannequin’s leg — transforming them into images of total destruction and devaluation in contemporary civilization. The theater did not animate roles but inanimate objects: dummies and phantoms of the imagination. This was Szajna’s vision of reality, his anxiety. He dressed his actors in coarse garments and made them walk on plastic sheets that covered the acting space, wear gas-masks and display deformed human bodies. Deprived of aura, of the sacred and the magical, Szajna’s art manifested itself in the plasticity of things that carried no literal meanings, only ambiguous metaphors and connotations. Knocking against the limits of theater as an art, Szajna’s stage was imbued with a fear of an empty heaven and an equally empty earth for which nobody bore any responsibility. As in Beckett’s plays, in Szajna’s productions time was infinite, and the images, filled with the artist’s fear, pulsated with a rhythm of their own. The Polish theater of images included also Leszek Mądzik’s Scena Plastyczna KUL, founded in 1970 in Lublin. Mądzik’s theater, which resists definitions or descriptions, sprang from Christian metaphysics and touched upon life and death, love and pain, earthly and eternal life. All productions reiterated motifs that the emotional state and the experiences of the artist dictated. What changed were the images containing a dramaturgy of light, a texture of matter, color and spatial depth, dusk and darkness. However, such enumerations of motifs oversimplify Mądzik’s theater since the productions integrated darkness and light, space and solid objects, motionless statues and actors, piercing music (or rather acoustic space) and natural sounds. Ultimately, stage action merely occasioned associations, challenging the viewers to make sense of it. Kantor, Szajna, and Mądzik departed from traditional theatrical narration by focusing on the artist as a subject creating images via pulsating rhythms of memory (Kantor), on projecting waves of nightmares from the subconscious (Szajna), and on creating a variety of signs for religious and cultural archetypes (Mądzik). Polyphonic art, initiated by Wyspiański, was pursued also in the mainstream repertory theater of Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Krystian Lupa, and Jerzy Jarocki, as well as in independent theaters, such as Wojciech Krukowski’s Academy of Motion, in which the performers’ movements were associated with fire, paper, sculpture, music, and other items. Jerzy Jarocki: The Centrality of the Director Jerzy Jarocki studied at the Faculty of Acting of Cracow’s Theater Academy and at the Faculty of Directing in Moscow, where he staged in 1957 Brecht’s Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule) at a workshop. He made his debut at the Stanisław Wyspiański Theater in Katowice on July 21, 1957 with Bruno Jasieński’s Bal Manekinów, and continued there with plays

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by John Osborne, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O’Neill. Critics recognized his excellent theatrical technique and sensitivity to the text when he staged plays by Stanisław Mrożek, Anton Chekhov, and Leon Kruczkowski. Jarocki staged on June 6, 1960 the world premiere of Gombrowicz’s Ślub (Wedding) in the student theater at the Silesian Technical University, but the censors shut it down after only four performances. Jarocki has been developing traditional forms in new shape with the Stary Theater in Cracow since 1962, but he has also produced plays in Warsaw, Szczecin, and Wrocław. The latter became a special source of inspiration and creativity for him, and led to his most interesting recent productions. Avant-garde movements tend to reject the structure of institutional theater, but Jarocki has shown that structure still plays a vital role in contemporary culture. Staging Polish contemporary drama and classical works on a high artistic level, he helped introducing Polish theater in Europe. Jarocki is such an extraordinary reader of dramatic texts that each of his new productions engages both critics and theoreticians. Theater being an analysis of the human condition for him, he concentrates not on ingenious formal solutions but on characters, their rhythm, their timbre of voice, and the dynamics of their social and family relations. The power of his productions enchants the audience, and his careful readings of texts by Gombrowicz, Witkiewicz, Różewicz, and Mrożek open new interpretive possibilities. Whereas theater often feeds on literary theory, Jarocki’s productions uncover unnoticed meanings that force literary theorists to reflection. He repeatedly returns to his favorite writers, especially Chekhov and the above mentioned Polish authors, to reread and reinterpret their works and find new questions in them. Many of his earlier performances were regarded as a strong protest against the political violence of the 1980s. His recent productions represent a quest to unravel the secret of texts. Jarocki is above theatrical fashions and able to have long-range working relations with people who share his ideals. He is most concerned with the actors, for he believes that directing is a hidden art that gets embodied in individual actors. Always seeking new formal and spatial solutions, as well as new relations between the stage and the audience, Jarocki stimulates some to protest, others to reflect, write, and take a different look at the world. His enormous artistic output includes over 150 productions in Polish and foreign theaters, TV productions, supervising students’ graduation performances, and producing montages and adaptations of texts. Many of these activities have received awards in Poland and abroad.

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The Visual Richness of the Polish Stage Violetta Sajkiewicz The imposition of Socialist Realism in 1949 brought about a servitude of the director, the theater, and the public, as well as an obligation to orient “stage design not to the text of plays but to the didaskalia [stage instructions]” (Kosiński 21). However, not all designers limited themselves to

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copying authentic interiors and props; many, like Aleksander Jędrzejewski and Wiesław Lange, resorted to a kind of “synthetic realism.” The first signs of Tachism, Abstractionism, and Surrealism appeared on the Polish stage in 1953 and soon came to dominate it in both the Warsaw and the Cracow schools of design. Stage designers from the Cracow school showed a certain indifference to developments in dramaturgy (Fik 265) and promptly reacted to new trends in painting, especially avant-garde painting. Most of them wanted to remain independent of the other contributors to the production, a fact that critics often considered as “a hegemony of plastic arts” in theater. In their quest for domination, the young stage designers, especially Kantor, Szajna, and Wojciech Krakowski, tried to assume the director’s job. In the 1950s, Kantor designed synthetic sets for staging Shaw’s Saint Joan (1956), Anouilh’s Antigone (1957), and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1961), operating with shortcut and abstract forms loosely related to the text. In these works he revealed a conscious will to confront the problems of staging, to penetrate texts, and to define individual acting situations by means of the plastic arts (Fik 267). Szajna’s early productions of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in 1956, and Franz Werfel’s Jacobowsky und der Oberst (Jacobowsky and the Colonel) in 1957, used astonishingly expressive sets made of abstract forms and shocking costumes, which created unusual moods. The less radical Krakowski worked on content and made unrestrained use of collage and photographic enlargement techniques, as well as of authentic materials, when staging Henry Montherlant’s Port Royal (1957) and Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1966). He was a precursor of neo-naturalism in Polish stage design, a trend continued, for instance, in Krystyna Zachwatowicz’s staging of Gombrowicz’s Ślub in 1973. Staging Gałczyński’s Noc cudów (The Night of Wonders; 1955) and other plays, Jerzy Skarżyński and Lidia Minticz-Skarżyńska, also from the Cracow school, combined a grotesquesurrealist approach to the composition of the stage space with reduced expression, psychological abbreviations, and a synthesis of characters by means of masks, costumes, and puppets. Surrealist inspiration was also evident in Andrzej Kreütz-Majewski’s sets for musical stagings of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Diably z Loudon / The Devils of Loudon / Die Teufels von Laudun in 1979 and Karol Szymanowski’s Król Roger (King Roger) in 1983. In contrast to their Cracow colleagues, the students of the Warsaw school designers Władysław Daszewski and Jan Golus shared the idea of working on the level of the text, with sensitivity to the shape of words and the drama’s mood. Jan Kosiński, the most mature of them, avoided detailed characterizations but also opposed productions in unspecified arbitrary sceneries. He was among the few who did not adopt new styles and fashions of painting but used photographic and filmic techniques, for instance in designing Mickiewicz’s Dziady (1955) and Sartre’s Les mouches (1957). The architectural trend was represented in the Warsaw school by Zofia Wierchowicz, a designer of “machines for acting” in Shakespeare’s plays: wooden boards connected with the stage by means of centrally-placed stairs, alluding to the Elizabethan stage. By contrast, the neo-realist Ewa Starowiejska mostly produced stage designs for plays of psychological realism. Although the Warsaw school approached drama with great reverence and the Cracow school found support in painting styles, they also sought inspiration in folklore. Outstanding representatives of this trend were Andrzej Stopka and Zenobiusz Strzelecki, the master of persiflage. They realized their own artistic version of national theater by finding inspiration in Old Polish drama, folk architecture, and the tradition of the Christmas manger. This was also the tradition adopted

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by Adam Kilian, who enjoyed using such natural materials as wood, wicker, straw, both in puppet performances and in dramatic ones like Wyspiański’s Wesele (1963). These materials of folk art were widely used also by the artists of the Poznań “Marcinek” Puppet Theater and others. As in the case of Konrad Swinarski, Wajda, Grzegorzewski, and Lupa, stage design in Polish theater was often done by directors who were themselves graduates of a school of art: Grzegorzewski and Barbara Hanicka, a stage designer collaborating with him since 1983, keep using worthless props like piano cases, tram pantographs, old-fashioned cameras, and aeroplane wings that interfere with the form and structure of acting as well as with sounds and the spoken word. As in the 1978 production of Różewicz’s Śmierć w starych dekoracjach (Death amidst Old Stage Props), their preformances take place in various nooks and corners of theaters, including the stairs, cloakrooms, smoking rooms, and the lobby, which reverses the traditional relations between stage and audience. Spatial arrangement is very important also for Lupa, who has been using spatial enclaves such as an attic, the board of a luxurious ship or, as in the 1988 staging of Robert Musil’s Die Schwärmer (The Revellers), rooms that function as an extension of the occupants’ psyche. Worn floor boards, damp patches on the walls, and shabby furniture remind the audience of the inevitable passage of time. The end of the communist regime in 1989 did not mark a break in Polish stage design, for those who made their debut in the late 1950s are still active. Yet, with Dorota Morawetz, Małgorzata Szczęśniak, and others a new generation of artists has appeared. In spite of stylistic differences, the core of Polish stage design remains the same: the heritage of Wyspiański is to use color, metaphors, and other visual elements to endow Polish drama with poetic features.

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Independence Brings International Recognition to Lithuanian Directors Audronė Girdzijauskaitė Lithuanian playwriting moved through several stages after 1945: the first one fell under the cult of Stalin and involved the so-called “Non-conflict Theory” — an idealization of Soviet reality and rigorous ideological censorship. The second stage came with the ideological Thaw under Khrushchev; in the sixties and seventies dramaturgs guardedly criticized the Soviet system and searched for new forms of expression, examining the problems that individuals and the Lithuanian nation were facing. During the Soviet regime, authorities required that theaters produce many Russian classics and ideologically oriented Soviet drama. Strict censorship compelled playwriting, stage direction, and acting to follow the method of Socialist Realism. The majority of pre-war Lithuanian drama and most of the new drama from Western Europe could not be included in the repertory and were replaced with glorifications of Soviet society. Directors sometimes succeeded in revealing deeper psychological insights, but experiments were usually rejected.

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In the 1960s, dramatists started to probe more boldly into individual experiences and complicated relations within society. Examples are Juozas Grušas’s Barbora Radvilaitė (1972) and Unija (Union; 1978); Kazys Saja’s Mamutų medžioklė (Hunting for Mammoths; 1969) and his series of parabolic plays in Mažosios pjesės: Maniakas (Short Plays: Maniac; 1969); Justinas Marcinkevičius’s historical trilogy, Mindaugas (1968), Katedra (Cathedral; 1971), and Mažvydas (1977); and Juozas Glinskis’s Grasos namai (House of Menace; 1971). These dramas metaphorically spoke about the present, suggested new interpretations of Lithuanian history, and sometimes invited reflections about contemporary society. Lithuania experienced in this decade the influence of Western playwrights like Camus, Genet, and Dürrenmatt, as well as the impact of Polish theater, especially that of Sławomir Mrożek. In the 1970s, the most prominent theater directors were Juozas Miltinis and Jonas Jurašas. Miltinis worked in Panevėžys and staged mostly productions based on Western dramaturgy (see Sakalauskas). Jurašas, working in Kaunas, distinguished himself with powerful productions of Lithuanian and Russian playwrights (see Girdzijauskaitė). The directors of a new generation, schooled in Moscow and Leningrad, tried to renew the stage methods and the theatrical language. When Jonas Vaitkus, Rimas Tuminas, and Eimuntas Nekrošius returned from their studies in Russia, they became leaders of the Lithuanian theater and raised it to European standards (Marcinkevičiūtė “Nekrošius”). Once the country became independent in 1990, their rendering of classics gained international recognition. Oskaras Koršunovas, Gintaras Varnas, and others, the first graduates of theater directing at the Lithuanian Music Academy, followed them and also toured abroad. In the late 1950s, companies of pantomime, established by the Latvian Modris Tenison, creatively collaborated with drama theaters. Balys Lukošius and Stasys Ratkevičius established professional puppets theaters, and Vitalijus Mazūras modernized the tradition. In 1988, students picked up the tradition of the “Szopa Akademicka” that flourished in pre-war period at Vilnius University by establishing in Vilnius the satiric stage Šėpa (Wardrobe), which was enormously successful during the Lithuanian national revival — especially with the production of Liudvikas Jakimavičius’s Revoliucijos lopšinės (Lullabies of the Revolution; 1989). But with the disappearance of their main critical target, the Lithuanian playwrights fell silent after 1990. The need for a conceptual and aesthetic reorientation of dramaturgy was generally felt, and the traditional theater system soon started, indeed, to undergo a transformation. Next to the state-run theaters new private ones emerged, among them Eimuntas Nekrošius’s company Meno fortas and Oskaras Koršunovas’s Theater (OKT) (see Vasinauskaitė). The Open Society Fund of Lithuania has encouraged the writing and publication of new dramas; they reached their audience in public readings first. Today, there are approximately twenty state and municipal theaters in Lithuania, covering all major towns and cities. The Baltic Theater Spring Festival, which brought together theaters from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Belarus for about three decades, has disappeared. The Lithuanian International Theater Festival (LIFE), which featured productions from abroad between 1993 and 2001, was also discontinued due to lack of funding, but a new international festival, Sirene, brings to Vilnius prominent international productions every year and advances the debate about the dysfunctional theater system, inherited from the Soviet period.

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Estonian Theater Loosens the Soviet Straightjacket Jaak Rähesoo The Soviet occupation in 1940 introduced a fifteen-year period of almost total darkness through the war and the Stalinist terror. The war also brought about a hitherto unprecedented division of Estonian culture into a home branch and an exiled one, as numerous people who remembered the atrocities of the first Soviet year in 1940–41 fled to the West in 1944. The percentage of artists and intellectuals among the exiles was disproportionately high, and in some cultural fields, notably literature, work in exile was for the next twenty years much more important than home production. Nothing of the sort happened in the theater, however, as the small and scattered exile communities were not able to support professional companies and their theater became restricted to amateur undertakings. During the same period, terror politics ruled unabated at home, preventing the emergence of any autonomous, self-regulating artistic activity. The repertoire of the theaters was inundated with lifeless Soviet plays, leaving the few acceptable classics to please the public. Living under the constant threat of ideological accusations that could easily result in physical repression, stage directors found it safer to copy officially approved Moscow or Leningrad productions. It remained for the actors to find some enlivening touches, and it was because of them that people went to the theater, if they went at all. The best one can say about the dark Stalinist years is that the Estonian nation, its culture, and its theater survived the terror. After Stalin’s death in 1953, a decade of slow recovery followed. The theater repertoire widened and admitted more classics and contemporary Western authors. In general, a tacitly but carefully kept numerical balance between Soviet and foreign plays still had to be maintained. Its fluctuations indicated well the ever-changing relationship between liberalism and dogmatism in Party politics. Compared to the rigid Stalinist times, Soviet playwrights now had more leeway, and their characters started to look like live people, at least in their private sphere. During the remainder of the Soviet period, the arts developed a culture of hints and allusions that had already permeated everyday life. Whereas allusions would have been too dangerous in Stalinist times, for suspicion was enough to bring about grave consequences, now it became possible, to a limited extent at least, to argue with censors and authorities whether something illicit was implied in the play or not. Playwrights and theaters were mostly ready to take the risk, and audiences quickly learned to decipher allusions. Stylistically, Estonian theater turned against Stalinist pompousness and artificiality. The main tendency led towards authentic realism, but attempts were also made to achieve greater poetic freedom, often by creating a kind of lyrical realism that foregrounded the poetry of everyday feelings and events. For Estonian theater this meant a return to a pre-war style, for poetic realism had been the broad trend of the 1930s. Bertolt Brecht was a more novel influence. Although he had impeccable Communist political credentials, his theoretical views were treated with suspicion by the avowedly Stanislavskian theater establishment in the Soviet Union. The leading Estonian theater directors of the period, Voldemar Panso and Kaarel Ird, were among the first to introduce Brecht to the Soviet stages.

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Lenient Authorities and Critical Audiences The young artists of the 1960s were less traumatized by the tragedy of the Soviet occupation. The changes they initiated were not connected to any political turn of events, they even ran counter to the dominant political trend, the slow beginning of the Brezhnev repression after Nikita Khrushchev’s removal in 1964. While rampant Stalinist totalitarianism had smothered cultural self-regulation, Brezhnev’s tottering totalitarianism could at best only curb it. The political background for this renewal in the Estonian arts is to be found in a growing differentiation of cultural policies throughout the Soviet Union. Modernist trends were considered attractive everywhere in the “Eastern bloc” for they seemed manifestations of artistic freedom, or even of Freedom. But whether Modernism could break through depended on the leniency of local authorities. In the Baltic countries, where cultural self-identification with the West had become even stronger under Soviet occupation, local authorities chose to ignore less dangerous forms of opposition. Thus artistic developments here often resembled those in Poland, Hungary, Romania and some other East European “people’s democracies” than those in Russia proper. Abstract painting, atonal music, free verse, and stream of consciousness prose, all banned in Moscow and Leningrad, were quietly tolerated in the Baltics. Characteristically, the process began in the less ideological (i. e., less logocentric) and more formal arts of music and painting. In literature, poetry with its agehonored claim to subjectivity was the first to undergo a radical change while the more “objective” and popular arts of fiction and drama lagged behind. Writers, especially poets, were the first to push theater towards this revolution. In the late 1960s a sudden (and short-lived) wave of non-realist plays emerged, which may be described as a local variant of the theater of the absurd that was still an exciting novelty in Estonia. For playwrights, the techniques and procedures in the theater of the absurd opened the possibility of considerable thematic extension. Everyday realism, circumscribed by all kinds of taboo subjects, was now felt to be too narrow and constrictive. Non-realist presentation gave the writer a chance to talk about wider existential problems and, in some form of allegory, also about the brutality and grotesqueness of totalitarian rule. Most of these plays received only moderately innovative productions. But the best of them, Paul-Eerik Rummo’s Tuhkatriinumäng (Cinderella Game), an ironic re-interpretation of the known fairy tale, did become a landmark of the 1969 theater revolution. That revolution was associated with the names of the young stage directors Evald Hermaküla and Jaan Tooming. Although the increasingly imaginative stagings in the previous decade had actually anticipated their innovations, the first impression at least was that of a radical break. It found its expression in the freedom with which play texts were often treated, in the aggressiveness and physicality of stage action, and in heavy reliance on symbols and metaphors. The aggressiveness reflected a hysterical rage born out of a feeling of political hopelessness after the Prague Spring had been crushed. But for a wide section of the public, which may have shared this rage, its theatrical form became a source of annoyance. Since many theater people also felt repulsed, the innovators had to face more than the ever-suspicious authorities. The support of an older theater leader, Kaarel Ird, proved crucial. Although he had his own objections to this kind of aggressive acting, he employed Hermaküla and Tooming in his Vanemuine theater in the university town of Tartu and defended them against attacks. Since one could not start an experimental studio in the

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Soviet system, the only option was to work with a group of like-minded actors within the structure of an institutional theater: for a decade the Vanemuine became the most exciting Estonian stage. The tension between the avant-garde and the wider public in the young Estonian culture during the first quarter of the century considerably weakened in the 1930s and almost disappeared during the first decades of Soviet occupation but spectacularly reappeared in all arts of the 1960s. Although people generally sympathized with the artists in their struggle with the authorities, the “language problems” of new art proved to be a great obstacle, and protests against the “vagaries” of modern trends followed. Once again, the renewal pursued by younger people brought about a generational conflict. Some of the younger writers supported the theater avant-garde in the underground publication Thespis in 1972–73. Artists, musicians, and writers had some access to work produced elsewhere in the world, but the young Estonian experimentalists in theater could only read books and articles by and about Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook, the American avant-garde groups, and the like. With the exception of a few works by Jerzy Grotowski, seen on tourist trips to Poland, they had no direct experience of the great innovative productions of the time, which may have helped in avoiding mechanical copying. In retrospect, it appears all the more surprising how well their efforts harmonized with the contemporary international trends, and how exceptional they were against the general Soviet background. Theatrical renewal in Moscow and Leningrad could not compare with the radicalism of Estonian experiments. The theater revolution involved the arrival of a new generation of stage directors, though Hermaküla and Tooming remained relatively isolated at first. Only Kaarin Raid, who had established her reputation with some lyrical and delicately psychological productions, switched temporarily over to their physical and metaphorical style. Gradually, however, individual features and tricks of the new trend were adopted by other directors and became part and parcel of a common theatrical language that the public also learned to understand. Final recognition came between 1976 and 1983, when Jaan Tooming staged one of the most sustained achievements of Estonian theater, a series of monumental productions based on classic Estonian authors (Tammsaare, Kitzberg, Vilde) with some excursions into world literature (Jerzy Andrzejewski, Aleksis Kivi, Maxim Gorky). All productions occasioned “total theater,” in which lighting, music, and expressive acting all combined to give a unified effect. This vaguely religious theater pointed to various Oriental and Occidental spiritual or folkloristic traditions, and actively satirized all manifestations of human oppression, greed, hypocrisy, and vanity. The hard-won recognition also occasioned, however, a growing feeling, abroad as well, that the metaphorical-physical trend had exhausted itself. The formerly dominant realist and psychological mode partially returned, enriched now by various symbolic features and interpretive liberties. This happened also in Estonian drama, where the flurry of near-absurdist plays in the late 1960s quickly passed and was replaced by more conventional procedures. The change was best evident in Püha Susanna (Saint Susanna; 1974) and other works by Enn Vetemaa, the most popular dramatist of the 1970s, as well as in Vaino Vahing’s Suvekool (Summer School; 1972) and Rein Saluri’s Külalised (Guests; 1974). Among stage directors, the foremost exponent of the social-psychological trend was Mikk Mikiver, whose work resonated with the new interest in history and national “roots.” Mikiver’s productions of plays by classic and contemporary Estonian authors — notable among the latter was Jaan Kruusvall’s Pilvede värvid (The Colors of

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Clouds; 1983) — formed probably the most important chapter in the history of Estonian theater in the 1980s. From the outside, the theatrical landscape looked pretty good then. Theaters usually had full houses, and a run of 40 or 50 for a drama production was considered to be average. Nevertheless, a feeling of tiredness and disorientation was creeping in. At the same time, social, national, and ecological problems were becoming increasingly acute until they finally erupted during Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1988. Three years of arduous struggle followed, during which the arts actively participated and many artists became full-time politicians. In 1991, the Soviet empire finally collapsed, leading to Estonia’s renewed independence. Censorship was abolished; subjects, authors, and plays previously banned now reached the stage. Works dealing with Stalinist deportations, like Jaan Kruusvall’s Vaikuse vallamaja (The Parish-House of Vaikuse; 1987) and Rein Saluri’s Minek (Going; 1988), especially engaged public attention. However, once the novelty of speaking out had passed, the rush of political events left the arts somewhat in the shadows. In particular, theater as a public art had to rethink its role. After years of expressing, however allusively, opposition to Soviet rule, it now had to obtain a new function. This became even more urgent when a period of economic transition from a centralized system to market forces set in. Ticket prices rose considerably and soon became unaffordable to a large section of the former theater-goers. The acute economic and artistic crisis fortunately did not last long. Estonia has been one of the economic success stories of the former Eastern Europe, and the arts have rapidly re-oriented their courses. In the theater, the main achievement has been to keep intact a system of ten state-supported professional companies that cover reasonably the whole country. More specialized needs and individual projects have been financed by sponsors and foundations. Estonian theater seems to have settled into a period of relative stability.

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Ideological Critique and Moral Rectitude in Slovene Dramas Lado Kralj The Slovenian National Theater reopened after the end of World War II with a play by Ivan Cankar, the greatest playwright of the domestic tradition. The next play produced was by Alexander Kornejčuk, the well-known contemporary Soviet playwright, and the following one by Molière. Cankar, Kornejčuk, and Molière — this was the typical repertory of Slovenian theaters in the first years of socialism. Cankar conveniently served as one pillar in the new theater because his social criticism was considered to be close to the ideas of Socialism. Still, he wrote his plays at the turn of the century, mostly following Ibsen in a strict realist manner. In the socialist system, Cankar was ceremoniously allowed to stay on the repertory as a reminder of what had happened to the Slovenian people in the past, in times of social injustice and capitalism. The title of the Cankar play that opened the new era, Za narodov blagor (For the Benefit of the People), was to

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be understood ironically, for the play criticized the hypocrisy of the Slovene political parties, all of which claimed to work for the benefit of the people but actually sought their own benefit. The message of the production was clear: no more selfish antagonisms between the parties, since there was going to be one party only. Kornejčuk, in turn, exemplified the doctrine of Socialist Realism, namely that playwrights were to treat but not criticize the present since all social problems had been successfully and definitely solved already. The task of the playwright was to encourage the people in their everyday struggle for a better future by reinforcing their faith. Since Slovenian playwrights were generally reluctant to follow suit, Soviet plays had to carry the new mission of the theater until 1948, when the Yugoslav Communist Party split from the Soviet one. Socialist Realism did not disappear at once, so Slovenian playwrights tried to evade it by turning to less political, private themes. And Molière, the third writer, stood for canonized and impeccable dramatic values, confirmed by tradition, just as Shakespeare did. Literally all the dramatic works of these two authors were produced season after season in socialist Slovenia. In choosing them one could make no mistake, though producing them in a modernized form was inadmissible since their historically fixed values were considered inviolable. Expressionism Rejected The socialist regime did not approve of expressionist art and banned it immediately after seizing power in 1945, proscribing especially its literature, for Socialism always attributed greater persuasive power to the written or spoken word than to visual signs. The rejection was motivated, in part, by some embarrassing analogies between Expressionism and the related Avant-garde movements on the one hand, and the two totalitarian ideologies arising in the interwar years, Nazism and Communism, on the other. Avant-garde extremism and utopianism manifested expectations and demands that were not unfamiliar to the discourse of the totalitarianism: they both urged the creation of a New Man, a New Spirit, and a New Empire. Furthermore, the avant-gardists wanted to aestheticize everyday life, and they manipulated the crowds in order to achieve this. The Party leaders realized eventually that they could handle the role of the aesthetic demiurge themselves. Since the Party would not tolerate a rival who also claimed to be revolutionary but rejected all forms of discipline, it aggressively destroyed the avant-garde movements in a way that was familiar by then: Expressionism was banned by the communists just as it had been burned by the Nazis, allegedly because of its distorted disharmonious form, its “aesthetics of ugliness” (Groys). In Yugoslavia, the role of Ždanov, the Soviet exterminator of “formalisms,” was given to Radovan Zogović, who called avant-garde literature mud, rot, epileptic automatism, and the putrid contraband meat of bourgeois decadence. As for Expressionism, he banned it explicitly (542). According to the principles of the federal state, Slovenia had its own high Party official to handle literary matters, Boris Ziherl, who managed to keep the prohibition work until the mid-fifties by calling Expressionism “incompatible with the materialistic worldview” (6). Since research on expressionist literature was not tolerated, the first two studies on it, written by the prominent Slovenian literary historians Lino Legiša and Anton Slodnjak, were published just over the border, in Trieste, Italy.

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The opening came gradually. In 1954, Slavko Grum’s Dogodek v mestu Gogi (An Incident in the Town of Goga; 1931) was performed again and subsequently recognized as one of the best Slovenian plays; a selection of his works came out three years later. In 1967, two more important books appeared: Integrali (Integrals) by the avant-garde poet Srečko Kosovel, who was recognized as one of the most important Slovenian poets, and the selected works of the playwright and prose writer Stanko Majcen. But the rehabilitation remained incomplete: Ivan Mrak’s most important expressionist play, Obločnica, ki se rojeva (The Birth of an Arc-Light), which was performed prior to the war, disappeared and was forgotten until the text was found and printed in 1987. The mechanisms of fear and suppression were very successful and long lasting. Contemporary Plays Contemporary playwrights from abroad were introduced by the end of the 1950s, especially in small fringe theaters that were then springing up, in a process that Filip Kalan [Kumbatovič], a respected theater scholar, described as the “Europeanization of the Slovenian theater” (30). He had in mind the high professional standards in the interwar period, but many wanted to understand this as a call to re-enter the broad and open spaces of European theater life. Primož Kozak, Dominik Smole, Peter Božič, Dane Zajc, Gregor Strniša, and other important new playwrights criticized the way the Party was governing the country, although indirectly, by way of allusions or mythological and geographical metaphors. Reading the dramatic work of Primož Kozak one can feel hard-core Socialism ticking. Kozak was a member of the editorial board and for a while even editor-in-chief of the dissident periodical Perspektive, which criticized the Party from its own Marxist and Hegelian positions, combining them eventually with Heidegger’s and Sartre’s ideas. The Party regarded the resultant perspective as heretic, while the writers reproached the Party that it arrogantly disregarded the individual human beings, i. e., they claimed that dogmatism persevered even after the Yugoslav communists bolted from the Soviet block in 1948. The periodical was banned in the hectic year of 1964, during the high tide of repression following the ultimatum of an important party leader: “First we will arrange your total political isolation, we will destroy you publicly in the eyes of society, and only then will we ban the periodical” (Inkret 8). Strikingly, this line appeared in Kozak’s plays even before it was uttered by the real-life Party leader. There, moral punishment (defamation and disrepute, deprivation of social support, if necessary with forged evidence), is followed by deprivation of work, job, freedom, and eventually of life. Kozak did not choose Slovenia or Yugoslavia as his settings but had in mind much of East-Central Europe: his fictional world includes those countries that were engaged in an armed struggle for national liberation during World War II but, in the course of it, had to submit to Stalinism. Afera (An Affair), staged in 1961, takes place in a guerrilla headquarters in Piedmont, Northern Italy after the fall of fascism in 1943, when some Italians, encouraged by Moscow, began to fight against the Germans. Dialogi (Dialogues), staged in 1962, takes place in a secret police prison somewhere in Hungary in the early fifties, when Rákosi carried out his Stalinist purges. And Kongres (The Congress), staged in 1968, takes place at the time the play was published and performed, at a University, probably that of Ljubljana.

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In the conflict between the Party’s iron discipline and individual needs, the Party pays regard only to the magnificence of “history,” requiring that it be worshiped in a quasi-religious manner. In The Affair, the Commissar sent from the higher command investigates the quarrel in the guerrilla headquarters regarding the methods and aims of the struggle against the Germans, and he resolves the problem by eliminating some of the commanders. In Dialogues, the secret police interrogates and accuses of sabotage a journalist and a professor of classical philology who protest against the decision to shut down two important schools of the University. At the end, a new order from above sets the prisoners free and jails the interrogators. And in Congress, university professors demand that science have a more decisive role in the university management than politics. The Party’s stormy reaction leads to student demonstrations and riots that make the lives of the professors at the end worse off than before. Nearly all of Kozak’s characters are intellectuals and Party members who rise to the high ranks of the Party and secret police, or become dissidents. The orders of the Party must be obeyed and the end justifies the means. According to the well-known practices of Stalinism, brute pressure and terror are used to break the individual, and bizarre conspiracies are conjured up to frame the disobedient comrades. Kozak’s dogmatic characters feel responsible to history only. The dissidents, who usually are personal acquaintances of the interrogators, are strikingly naive about the physical consequences of their disputes with the Party authority, and they are very surprised when sooner or later human flesh is endangered. Dušan Jovanović began writing around 1969, when Kozak stopped. He continued this criticism of ideological monopoly and Party power, but in a much more aggressive and sarcastic form. His numerous plays waver between the grotesque irony of the Theater of the Absurd and Brechtian documentary drama. His intentionally transparent design is actually a mock disguise. Norci (Madmen), a parody of a serious political play in which clinical lunatics blasphemously impersonate dignified revolutionaries, is a telling example. Jovanović, both a successful playwright and a theater director, has become the most important playwright of contemporary Slovenian theater. Jovanović played a key role in the late seventies, when his plays, especially Osvoboditev Skopja (The Liberation of Skopje; 1978) and Karamazovi (The Karamazovs; 1980), broke societal taboos. The former takes place in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, during its German and Bulgarian occupation in World War II and its liberation by communist partisans. The events are seen through the eyes of a six-year old boy, which substantially modifies the official black and white interpretation of recent history. Children and most of the civilians perceive war as sheer hell, stripped of heroism and patriotic glory. The struggle for physical survival makes people hysterical, mean, and dangerous, even towards their closest relatives and friends. They collaborate with the occupier, turn into informers, and prostitute themselves to survive. When at the very end of the play a partisan liberator says to the six-year-old protagonist “My son, I do not understand you at all,” the words reveal that different perceptions of the war have produced an insurmountable generation gap. Karamazovi pries open a taboo: the Goli otok (Barren Island) concentration camp. After 1948, when Yugoslavia split from the Soviet block, the communists loyal to the Soviet camp were imprisoned there and exposed to a most brutal self-criticism and reeducation that killed at least 4000 people. Jovanović roughly follows the plot of Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, foregrounding the generation gap between a father and his three sons. The father pays with his life

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for his strong belief in a political idea, whereas his sons growing up in the sixties are completely apolitical and follow private and even trivial pursuits inspired by consumerism. The grandiose political ideals find no replacement. Drago Jančar has articulated his criticism of the socialist regime in rather realistic structures, but his plays demand allegorical interpretations. In Disident Arnož in njegovi (Dissident Arnož and His Lot; 1982), which takes place in 1830, when Slovenia was still part of the Habsburg Empire, a professor of theology gets fed up with police harrassment and emigrates with his students and followers to America to establish a colony. But the New World of unlimited opportunities leaves him dissatisfied, because it is too pragmatic and vulgar, exclusively oriented towards material goods. Veliki briljantni valček (The Great Brilliant Waltz; 1985) is located in a modern psychiatric ward. Following a healing method that advocates shaping reality according to the patients’ delusions, the protagonist has his leg cut off because he imagines to be a nineteenth-century revolutionary who lost his leg. Rudi Šeligo focuses on semi-rural and semi-urbanized characters who are unable to evade the omnipresent and trivial Party control of their every-day life, made especially repressive by its petty bourgeois mentality. There seems to be only one way out, namely by regressing into archaic myths and rites. Šeligo wants to re-establish with such heroes the primordial, ritual or, as he calls it, “magical” function of theater. In Čarovnica iz Zgornje Davče (The Witch of the Upper Davča; 1977), a young wife suffers for her naive openness to nature. In Svatba (The Wedding; 1981), a young couple living close to the magic powers of nature get only a humiliating mock wedding because others see them as mentally retarded. In Ana (1984) and Volčji čas ljubezni (The Wolfish Time of Love; 1988), Šeligo concentrates on a woman whose liveliness deviates from her dull surroundings, and he assigns her even an active role in the monstrous mechanism of a global communist revolution. Theater Censorship In the first decade after World War II no censorship was literally necessary since the power and presence of the Communist Party “in the hearts of the people” was so overwhelming that nothing “improper” had a chance to emerge. The first known instance of publicly banning a production showed that absolute power suffered its first defeat. Jože Javoršek presented in Povečevalno steklo (The Magnifying Glass; 1956) a country led by xenophobic and stupid people. He was influenced by the writers of the Theater of the Absurd whom at that time he also translated and introduced into fringe theaters. After six performances, The Magnifying Glass was abruptly and silently removed from the stage of the Slovenian National Theater. The regime apparently realized after the event that some characters may impersonate leaders in the Central Committee, which was especially blasphemous because they were represented as monks and their spiritual leader as an abbot. The ban led to student demonstrations. In the sixties the demands for more artistic freedom intensified. Theater people were obviously gaining ground, but the regime’s techniques were also getting more sophisticated. In 1964, the fringe theater Oder 57 (Stage 57) produced Marjan Rožanc’s Topla greda (Hotbed), which exposed the complete failure of an agricultural policy that turned farm owners into pauperized farm

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workers, by employing them in state-owned co-operatives, called zadruga. The latter followed the Soviet models of the kolkhoz and sovkhoz. Fifteen minutes into the opening night, it became evident that the audience included many farm workers who were raging with indignation because of the alleged lies told on stage. They were, of course, farm workers bussed in by the police from the nearby co-operatives. Their rage was so loud and persistent that the actors finally had to quit the stage. The newspaper campaign of the next month supported the “justified” revolt of the working people, and the public prosecutor felt compelled to charge the company with “spreading false and alarming information, presenting contemporary reality in a false way, and attacking the principles of the Constitution” (Inkret 3). He demanded that the play be banned and all printed copies be confiscated, and the court complied. Twenty years later, in 1984, some theater people wanted to stage the play again. Rožanc asked the court to lift the ban but the request was turned down. Official censorship never existed in Slovenia and the rest of Yugoslavia; the prohibitions were always disguised, or executed in secret. In the early eighties so-called Program Boards were introduced to approve the repertory and cast. They consisted of about fifteen members, some coming from the theater, others representing the various social and cultural strata. The boards met about three times a season to deliberate. Their manner of operation may be exemplified with the Slovenian National Theater’s attempt to stage Robert Bolt’s State of Revolution, which treats in Bolt’s typical epic and biographical manner the last months of Lenin’s life and Stalin’s emergence as his successor. The artistic director presented the board the script; some members read the English original, others read the extensive summary of each scene that was prepared for them. All members found the play interesting and approved it; the complete repertory was subsequently approved by the Ministry of Culture as well. Months later, while the board was discussing the cast at its following meeting, a young woman suddenly declared that she had afterthoughts for she had carefully checked history books and found out that the play’s allegations were completely false and misleading. The artistic director tried to object but she was persistent and got agitated. After a while a respectable writer of the older generation, Ivan Potrč, began to cry, real tears running slowly down his cheeks: while fighting for freedom, he stated, he never thought that at some future point he would have to suffer the insults of a shameful “pamphlet” such as Bolt’s script. Some members of the board began asking for explanations, got very upset, and felt used. Others tried unsuccessfully to reason and calm down the situation. Finally the chairperson interrupted the session and postponed the issue for the following meeting. At that meeting the members voted to reject the play by a fair margin. The writer of the present article experienced these events in October 1979 as the artistic director of the Slovenian National Theater. As it turned out, rumors spread by the Central Committee of the Party down to the local cells intimated that the name Bolt was an acronym hiding an international anti-socialist organization specializing in propaganda warfare. It was useless to argue that the National Theater had already successfully produced another play by the same author, A Man for All Seasons: the rumors and the unrest persisted. By and by the real reason became clear: drawing an analogy between Lenin and Stalin was simply inadmissible. Never mind that the Yugoslav government had officially rejected Stalin as a “bad guy” long ago; Lenin, along with Marx, had to remain the “good guy,” one of the founders of the global communist idea. Lenin was the last nostalgic link with Communism at a time when many were longing to turn away from it. Should audiences lose their faith in Lenin, anarchy might follow — this is how some leaders saw the matter.

Lado Kralj

256 Approaching the End of the Socialist Era

In 1990, Socialism was officially dethroned in Slovenia’s multiparty elections, and in 1991 the country declared its independence from the rest of Yugoslavia. Did the theater anticipate these far-reaching events? It did, but not so explicitly and not so often as in other parts of Yugoslavia. An obvious anticipation is to be found in Jovanović’s comedy Jasnovidka ali Dan mrtvih (The Clairvoyant Woman, or All Souls’ Day; 1987), in which political leaders hold on to their acquired power at all cost, displaying mere grotesque traces of revolutionary idealism and socialist ethics. The same year, Jovanović wrote the very different Zid, jezero (Wall, Lake), which markedly retreats from all great political and public themes by concentrating on private life, marital crisis, love, jealousy, and occult phenomena. We are offered an ironical shot at melodrama, suggesting that the minds of the people are already far away from the themes of socialism. Similarly, Jančar treats strictly private matters in Klementov padec (Klement’s Fall; 1988): the amorous troubles of a historical figure, a mountain climber and Nietzschean philosopher of the 1930s, whose fall from a cliff was probably a suicide. No more great public themes. Zalezujoč Godota (Stakeout on Godot; 1989), another play that Jančar wrote a year later, is a parody of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which two aging secret-service men still do their habitual work of spying but no longer know on whom and for what reason. Ivo Svetina’s Šeherazada (Sheherazade; 1989), a very successful play, shunned social or historical themes altogether and indulged in sheer sensuality, an ecstasy of body and mind inspired by the tales of the Arabian Nights. The end of Socialism was also predicted by the avant-garde artist Dragan Živadinov, who began his controversial productions in 1984. First named “Theater of the Sisters Scipion Nasice,” his theater steadily and elusively changed its name to “Zenith the Drama Observatory,” “Noordung the Cosmo-Kinetic Laboratory,” etc., which was a way of building up a mythology of its own. Živadinov’s physical theater was part of a broader Gesamtskunstwerk direction, which comprised, in addition to theater, rock music (Leibach), and the visual art of the Neue Slowenische Kunst movement (NSK). Its main concern was to analyse the totalitarian regimes and their mass appeal; NSK maintained and demonstrated, sometimes very convincingly, that the iconographies and emotional foundations of Hitler’s Nazi state and the Yugoslav socialist states were startlingly similar. Živadinov’s 1986 production of the unpublished “Krst pod Triglavom” (Baptism beneath the Triglav Mountain), which was written collectively by the group, offered a monumental and megalomaniac tribute to Slovenian nationalism. And in the 1988 production of the similarly unpublished “Rdeči pilot” (The Red Pilot), which was based on Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the performance takes place in a remote part of a railway station at night, in a cattle car into which the audience is being squeezed and locked. The spectators hear shouts and running steps outside, and sudden strikes with iron rods against the car walls. As Dragan Klaić observed, the scene might recall memories of Auschwitz or forecast the gruesome local wars that were soon going to take place in Yugoslavia (“Ponovno” 53).

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Ingenious Dramatic Strategies Reach across the Yugoslav Theater Space Aleksandra Jovićević By the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 60s, Yugoslav dramatists made a switch from poetic Realism towards more contemplative plays, which rewrote Greek myths in order to address the contemporary intellectual, political, and cultural climate. One of the first plays in this new”key” was Oto Bihalji-Merin’s Nevidljiva kapija (The Invisible Gate; 1956), which used devices introduced a decade earlier by Anouilh, Cocteau, Sartre, and Camus yet unknown to Yugoslav audiences. The main character, Antigone, belongs to the resistance movement during World War II and is a girlfriend of a revolutionary. She also mourns the death of her father, a collaborationist and reactionary. Merin’s play, somewhat confusing in its attempt to avoid a realistic story development, marked the beginning of a line in Yugoslav drama of the 1960s and 70s that questioned and individualized classic mythology, and presented contemporary problems through ironic interpretations of familiar myths. Another line of metaphoric and quasi-historical farces ran parallel, with plays by Antun Šoljan, Borislav Pekić, Nedeljko Fabrio, and Ivan Supek. The mythological or pseudo-historic framework of these plays, used as a device to avoid censorship, offered witty allusions to the present, appreciated by a public that was eagerly engaged in an exciting intellectual game of cognition and complicity with the performers. Mythological Paraphrases and Fictive Worlds Jovan Hristić wrote three plays based on Greek myth and drama. In Čiste ruke (Clean Hands; 1961), he rationalises the Oedipus myth so that his hero reaches existential self-realization that only the gods possess in Sophocles’s play. The young shepherd Oedipus struggles to keep his hands clean, not kill his father and not go to bed with his mother, thus opening a question of moral importance: should one avoid human responsibility in order to keep one’s conscience impeccably clean, or should one pursue one’s destiny in spite of the resultant bloody stains in one’s life? Hristić’s Oedipus does not get involved in “real” life and becomes a kind of Sartrean’s néant, or, rather what he was before in his life in the mountains, nothing. Polemically posed against Sartre’s Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands; 1948), Hristić’s play gives a remarkable answer to the hypothetical question, what would have happened to Oedipus had he refused to kill Laius? Hristić dared invoke in the 60s the relationship of myth to history, reality to legend, human freedom to its limits, and individuals to the community. Hristić used the same method in Orest (1962), bringing a subjective view and a philosophical perspective to bear on a well-known myth. Orestes would like to revenge the death of his father but hesitates because he sees around him people who are “look-alikes” of those who killed Agamemnon. He can hate them only when he imagines them in the moment they committed the crime. Since his memory is not vivid enough, his revenge becomes absurd: Orestes leaves without accomplishing his deed and the tragedy turns into a grotesque vision of itself. In spite of the

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serious subject, the play could also be understood as an absurd comedy, because of its modern and simple but not simplified language, and its dialogues full of ironic twists. Hristić, first and foremost a poet and an essayist, used this method of playwriting to introduce his personal vision, his contempt for the world surrounding him. In Sedmorica, kako bismo ih danas čitali (The Seven as We Would Read Them Today; 1969), he distorted Greek myth even further, engaging in a meta-parody of it. However, this play showed the limitations of his method of deconstructing classical plays and turning them into modern day parables, a method Hristić also chose in his previous play, Savanarola i njegovi prijatelji (Savonarola and His Friends; 1965), by focusing on the millenarian Florentine preacher to explore individual charisma and collective frenzy. Another Yugoslav poet and playwright, Velimir Lukić, reinvented mythological environments to be able to write political satires replete with allusions and ambiguities. He started with verse paraphrases of Iphighenia’s and Philoctetus’s myths, in Okamenjeno more (Stony Sea; 1962) and I smrt dolazi na Lemno (Death Comes to Lemnos; 1970) respectively, but he preferred to create his own imaginary kingdoms in which people are turned into paradigms, theses and anti-theses, of his political obsessions. In Dugi život kralja Osvalda (The Long Life of King Oswald; 1962), the empty royal uniform serves as a symbol of power that rules tyrannically. The idea is also present in Lukić’s other plays of the period: Bertove kočije ili Sibila (Berth’s Coach or Sybil; 1963), Valpurgijska noć (Walpurgis Night; 1964), and Afera nedužne Anabele (The Affair of Innocent Annabella; 1970), as if he were rewriting the same play about totalitarian power, tyrants, corrupt ministers, and failed revolutionaries, whose rebellion proves to be senseless since the regime continues under the guise of eternal harmony. Lukić’s morally didactic and politically polemical plays are written in a neoclassical style and a controlled precise language. The characters tend to be reduced to grotesque simplifications, moving along the geometrical paths of the play’s structure and uttering phrases like marionettes without brains. Lukić continued along this line in Zavera ili dugo praskozorje (Conspiracy or a Long Daybreak; 1974) and Zla noć (Wicked Night; 1975), obsessed with political power and using the ambiance of ancient Rome and some imagined country respectively, but in a less absurd and farcical manner. These later plays, which lack the humor of the previous ones, mark the darkening of his vision and his contempt for a world dominated by corrupt people and their petty lies. Paradoxically, Lukić realized this vision while remaining for many years in leading positions at the National Theater in Belgrade. Silent Censorship Jovan Hristić’s “lively” reinterpretation of Greek mythology and Velimir Lukić’s invented, grim mythology of cyclic state tyranny and terror created a public space for coded commentaries on Yugoslav society. The country had no institutionalized censorship. Since power shifted back and forth between the Party’s conservative and liberal factions, with frequent changes in the political climate, what was tolerated at one moment became prohibited the next. Furthermore, the federal structure of the country and increasing rivalry between the Party elites and their bureaucratic bodies in the six federal republics, led to varying standards: a publication banned in one republic could

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be published in another one, a banned production could be transferred to one of the other republics and could even win a prize at a festival there. Finally, alternative theaters would be tolerated as long as they had no country-wide impact and public. But informal political censorship had great power in restricting the intellectual and artistic freedom of Yugoslav theater artists. According to some recent statistics and research done on dissident theater (see Theater and Censorship in Yugoslavia), more than seventy theater productions were banned and censored in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1989, but only twice by means of court orders. Plays and productions were often banned before the opening, or in the midst of the rehearsals (an intervention always executed silently and invisibly to the public), but almost no documents or traces survive of these cases. Since the regime was aware that it would be sooner or later criticized for censuring interventions, it preferred to act silently and anonymously, more subtly than by means of public stigmatization. There are hardly any official records of banishment, signed documents, material traces. In short, nothing tangible survives, only hints, rumors, indirect proofs, and dubious witnesses that prefer to keep silent or “do not remember well.” Most Yugoslav theater professionals accepted this invisible censorship as a fact of life, even if it made theater look tame and conformist, an ally of the state machine. There was no hard-core dissidence, no real underground theater, except for a few distinct dissident voices of considerable outreach. Intertextual Grotesques The cas célèbre of Yugoslav theater dissidence was the Croatian playwright Ivo Brešan, whose four early plays faced problems with theater censorship inside and outside of Croatia, since they offered a gloomy view of the post-war conditions and accused communist ideology of narrowmindedness and oppression. As in many similar cases, these plays were never officially proscribed. If they were attacked publicly, it was under the guise of aesthetic norm, and they were then quietly removed from the repertories, or banned in the midst of rehearsals. First such case was Brešan’s Predstava ‘Hamleta’ u selu Mrduša Donja (Performance of ‘Hamlet’ in the Village of Lower Jerkwater), a tragic farce premiered in 1971 that received major national awards. But in 1973, when a more conservative communist line prevailed, the production was attacked on Croatian television for being ideologically “unsuitable,” and this instigated a number of unsigned polemical articles that appeared in the Croatian press. Soon afterwards the play was taken off the repertories in many theaters, except in Theater ITD in Zagreb and Kamerni teatar in Sarajevo, where it played for ten years, reaching 300 performances. In 1973, the film director Krsto Papić turned the play into a film that won a number of national and international awards but never had a large distribution. The campaign was part of a more general ideological attack on the Yugoslav film noire, which allegedly depicted Yugoslav reality in a dark and critical manner. Brešan’s second play, the Faustian parable, Nečastivi na filozofskom fakultetu (The Devil at the School of Philosophy), was supposed to be produced at the ITD when his Hamlet was attacked and the political pressures on the ideologically unreliable university professors increased. The theater decided that it would be better not to produce the play, and the rehearsals were stopped, albeit the production was almost ready for the opening. The publication of the play in the Croatian theater journal Prolog started new polemics and prevented its productions in Croatia. It was

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eventually produced for the first time in Ljubljana (1981), then in Belgrade (1985), and finally in several cities throughout Yugoslavia, though its Zagreb premiere came only in 1989. Brešan’s third play, Smrt predsjednika kućnog savjeta (The Death of a President of the Tenants Association), published in 1978 also in Prolog, was supposed to have its first opening in the Belgrade Drama Theater in 1979, but its manager feared it might be politically controversial and decided to postpone the production for better times — which never arrived. The decision almost swayed the people in Zagreb’s Gavella Theater, who were already rehearsing the production, to follow suit but they finally decided to go ahead, and the play opened in 1979, without apparent political consequences. Brešan’s fourth banned play, Vidjenje Isusa Hrista u kasarni VP 2507 (The Apparition of Jesus Christ at the Military Post 2507), joined Hamlet and Devil to form a trilogy. Written in 1973, it could not be produced in mainstream theaters. A production by the Belgrade amateurs in 1984 was quickly “withdrawn” when it provoked angry reactions from the military and the partisan veterans. Finally it was staged at the Belgrade youth theater Boško Buha in 1988. Brešan defines the plays of his trilogy as “grotesque tragedies” forming a meta-discourse on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust, and the medieval passion plays of Christ and Satan, respectively. They are set in the earthly realities of a small village, a faculty of philosophy, and military barracks. The three great original myths are “Balkanized” by being reset in banal everyday life. These “anthropological experiments” shed a new light on contemporary characters that become artistically interesting and take on their true dramatic intensity only when seen via the corresponding characters and relationships in the originals, as for instance when the villagers of Lower Jerkwater impersonate Danish courtiers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The language of the characters, a rough dialect, is contrasted with the literary quotations and ideological, often confusing, Party slogans, producing hilarious clashes of parlances and jargons. Brešan shows peasants who turn against artists and intellectuals, and he plays in an ironic way with the communist notion that workers and peasants should never trust educated people, which of course irritated the Party leaders. The tragic and pessimistic endings, defined as “theater dynamite,” contributed to the decisions to ban them. The Performance of “Hamlet” closes with a grotesque mass scene, in which the positive hero is definitively defeated and evil triumphs. The Devil at the School of Philosophy closes with a joint orgy of a group of priests and politicians, watched helplessly by the modern Faust, a professor of Marxism and a member of the Party, since the Devil has imprisoned him in the body of a silent worker. In The Apparition of Jesus Christ the resistance to “theatralize” reality is even greater, though in the end it becomes clear that the “real” characters cannot avoid the destinies of the characters they play on stage. A colonel who tries to teach his soldiers a lesson on the falsity of religion ultimately sees how his subordinate is crucified. In spite of all the problems he had with his early plays, Brešan continued to write in the same key, playing with theatrical archetypes. His Arheološka iskapanja kod sela Dilj (Archeological Excavation Near the Village Dilj; 1981) could be considered as the author’s parable on the years when his Hamlet had been officially banned. Here, in a form of “dramatic archeology,” he brings to the fore the tragic character Heraclites who wants to reconstruct and preserve the imaginary city of “Platonopolis,” while a retired military officer wants to build a modern industrial plant on the same site in the name of socialist progress. In 1983, Brešan wrote Anera, a retelling of Racine’s Phèdre in a political key: the characters become victims of their immediate political environment rather

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than predetermined destinies. Finally, Brešan uses in Hidrocentrala u Suhom dolu (Hydroelectric Power Station in Suhi-Do; 1985) Molière’s Tartuffe as a pre-text, replacing fake Christian devotion with the social hypocrisy of communist ideology. These later plays were performed without obstacles and censorship because Yugoslavia’s political climate became gradually more tolerant after President Tito’s death in 1980. But Hidrocentrala did not have the success of Brešan’s early plays. By the mid-eighties a more direct theater discourse made the mask of neo-mythology obsolete. A Dissident Communist The Serbian author Aleksandar Popović could also be seen as a dissident playwright although he never considered himself as one, simply because he was never arrested, or officially banned. Nevertheless, seven out of Popović’s forty plays were banned under various circumstances and at various times. Popović had been a staunch leftist all his life, an unorthodox even, maverick communist, but also a populist. As a young man, he spent three years on the detention island Goli otok (Barren Island), supposedly for pro-Stalinist sympathies. Subsequently he was placed under surveillance, investigated, and often taken to the police station for “informal conversations,” in which the police tried to warn, corrupt, and frighten him. Several times he went through what he called a “civic death,” without a passport and a place to live, blacklisted, outlawed, excluded from the repertories, and avoided by friends. But he never considered leaving the country because he wanted, as he used to say, to share the common fate of his people. Popović was so prolific that he became the most produced playwright in Yugoslavia and he received many prizes for his work. In contrast to Ivo Brešan, whose plays were translated and performed in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Russia, and Bulgaria, Popović employed a complicated language of puns and locally relevant surrealist allusions that were unsuited for translation, and so he got no recognition abroad. Popović never stopped working, not even when he was blacklisted. During one of these periods, in the early seventies, he founded the informal theater group AP with several young people who performed his Tajna veza (Secret Connection; 1974) and Ružičasta noć (Pink Night; 1976) without subsidies at various Belgrade locations from which they were repeatedly evicted. No texts or other records of their performances survive. AP did get, however, invited to Parma’s 1974 alternative theater festival. Popović’s poetic plays, written sometimes in verse, deal with the fate of unimportant people at the periphery of cities and the margins of society, mixing everyday humor with the grotesque, farce, and poetry. As a communist and anti-Titoist, Popović could not, however, avoid being politically critical. This is particularly true of his seven banned plays, in which various political metaphors are inscribed. Razvojni put Bore šnajdera (The Development of Bora, the Taylor), Popović’s most popular farce about a dictator, was removed from the repertory of Atelier 212 after three performances, presumably because the main characters resembled in many ways Tito and his wife Jovanka. A small scandal occurred at the opening because the female protagonist, actress Maja Čučković, wore Jovanka’s hair style. The production was promptly and without public reaction terminated after a phone-call from a politician. A year later, Atelier 212, then Belgrade’s most popular theater, went on a successful tour to the United States with productions of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and and Popović’s Razvojni put Bore.

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A year later, Ljubomir Draškić rehearsed Popović’s Druga vrata levo (Second Door Left), a play that deals with the 1968 student revolt. The external members of the Program Board (see p. 255 above) of the Atelier 212 thought that the play opposed the official interpretation of the student revolt, and asked the “inside” members to vote against it. They prevailed and there was no premiere, but the play was also staged in Zagreb and was entered in the Sterijino pozorje (an important theater festival of national drama in Novi Sad), in a single, late-night performance of the alternative program. The history of Yugoslav drama and theater is full of such cases. Even when no one got arrested, officially persecuted, or fired, theater suffered considerable damage. How many ideas, initiatives, and experiments had been thwarted this way? Impossible to determine. We do know about the humiliations of “self-censorship,” of the tongue-tied inability to defend oneself, of apathy, of reluctance to get engaged. “This is not the opportune time” and other similar phrases were often used to justify the conformism, cowardice, and self-censorship that affected authors, theater artists, managers, and critics. Much energy was wasted on avoiding obstacles and adjusting to new circumstances, on exerting one’s survival skills. The experience discouraged the following generations of Yugoslav theater makers. Only Brešan, Popović, and few other authors maintained their integrity and creative fortitude against overwhelming pressure. Theater as Society’s Metaphor In the 1980s, theater in Yugoslavia became a forum for public self-examination, political critique, and oppositional attitude, despite occasional censorial interventions. As mentioned above, theater contributed to a climate of collective soul-searching and greater political tolerance after Tito’s death in 1980. The stage became the place to raise sensitive issues before they could be tackled in the media or by political and governmental organizations. Theater broke ideological and political taboos, and instigated previously shunned open discussions, becoming thus a force in democratizing public life. Yugoslav playwrights and directors often tended to saturate their work with intertextual allusions, engaging in adaptations and parodist paraphrases of classical plays. This implicit dialogue with the traditional dramatic repertory included discussions on the question of how the theater as an artistic and public institution is affected by often traumatic political and social upheavals. Several plays chose the theater milieu as the setting for social action, confirming thus that the stage was a mirror to and a metaphor of society. Thus, Brešan’s Hamlet degrades Shakespeare’s cultural icon by placing it in the context of the god-forsaken village of Lower Jerkwater that is driven by ideological dogmas and the primitivism of the amateur performers. Brešan presents the staging of Hamlet in a satiric light, as an emancipatory cultural endeavor that cannot be sustained intellectually, artistically, or ethically but helps nevertheless reveal the power relations in the village and the atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and power manipulation behind the communist sloganeering. Brešan uses colorful and crude language to depict both the mentality and the dialect of the rural community, achieving comic effects by juxtaposing this dialect with Shakespeare’s literary rhetoric and the bombastic phrases of contemporary politics. The tragicomic transformation of this great, allegedly “capitalist” tragedy into a progressive socialist morality play slips into a parody

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of the classic and a satire of the performers. “Balkanizing” Shakespeare gradually leads to a tragic grotesquery. Instead of Fortinbras’s redemptive entry, the mesmerized villagers are drawn in the final scene into a kolo, a folk dance that celebrates here the prevalence of evil, of abusive power and deceit, marking Brešan’s deep resignation and lack of faith in the ethical and civilizational advancement of the socialist project. In Igrajte tumor v glavi, ali onesnaženje zraka (Play Tumor in the Head, or the Pollution of Air; 1971), Dušan Jovanović, a Slovenian playwright and director, paraphrased and deconstructed Pirandellian experiments with madness, illusion, power, and the kaleidoscopic nature of theater itself. Jovanović further elaborated here his notion of ludicism, a multiple level game that erases the border line between theater and life, illusion and reality. Ludicism was for Jovanović an attempt to affirm theater as an autonomous performing art (between “pre-planned” improvisation, physical theater, and modern-day ritual), in which the dramatic text would be used only as a pre-text for the production, allowing the actors and the audience to take unexpected liberties with it. Introduced as a manifesto, incorporated in Predstave ne bo (There Will Be No Performance; 1963) and Norci (Madmen; 1968), and developed in practice with his performance group Pupilija Ferkeverk, ludicism helped Jovanović enter an implicit polemic with ideological and aesthetic conventions, and dogmas of the Yugoslav (more specifically Slovene) literary and theater tradition after World War II. Jovanović’s later Osvoboditev Skopja and The Karamazovs (see p. 253 above) created controversy when Ljubiša Ristić staged them, but Igrajte tumor provoked a “small scale revolution” when it was published (1971), and, especially, when Ristić staged it in Celje (1975). Not knowing how to classify it, critics defined the play as a sort of Ionesco anti-drama. Aesthetically, Jovanović “recapitulated” his earlier explorations of the relationship between theater, literature, and reality, and of the dual subject of artistic creation and audience’s perceptions of it. He challenged the popular notion that theater was a place of social entertainment and official high culture, the shrine of national identity, and repository of great literature. Socially, he addressed questions of manipulation, power, and repression, turning the public space of the theater into a secret laboratory of avant-garde conspirators, in which the clash between conservatives and innovators could be replayed with dead seriousness. In the first act, news of an uproar in the national theater reaches a newspaper editorial office in the form of a trickle of contradicting rumors: the young and arrogant avant-garde artists allegedly threw out the older distinguished artists and occupied the building. What actually happens there is a matter of wild speculation that mixes political paranoia with pornographic imagination. The second act presents the avant-gardists in the frenzy of ritualistic experiments, which become a manipulative power competition between the director and the dramaturg. The third act mixes reality and illusion and resolutely transgresses the threshold between comic and grotesque, intensifying the latter to its extreme. The “game-playing” slowly takes over, the aesthetic and personal differences become blurred, and everyone becomes an actor, even an undercover policeman and a journalist, who sneak into the theater to investigate what is happening there. In an ultimate turn of “total theater,” all visible and invisible boundaries are trespassed and no one can distinguish “reality” from theatrical illusion. In the end, the actresses appear with buckets of glue, and, as if in a ritual, all characters spill glue over themselves, smearing it on their bodies, helping each other, laughing, playing, and singing. As they start to be glued to each other, they enter a final game,

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which, according to Jovanović, has to be an endless source of joy and pleasure, a triumph of ludic energy over ideologies, esthetic concepts, and theater dogmas. Images of Theater Subordination Slobodan Šnajder’s Hrvatski Faust (Croatian Faust; 1982) combines historic facts and literary paraphrase, placing itself in a meta-dialogue with Goethe’s original, and with ideological interpretations of “the Faustian” prototype. The play dramatizes a historic moment of World War II, when three actors who had just performed in the premiere of Goethe’s Faust in Zagreb’s Croatian National Theater, ran off to join Tito’s partisans. The 1942 production of Faust was staged as a symbolic gesture of the newly formed Independent State of Croatia (set up under Nazi patronage in 1941) and was supposed to symbolize its entry into the “new European culture” of the Nazis. The action of Šnajder’s play alternates between rehearsals of Goethe’s play and the backstage tensions of a theater ensemble that is being purged, nazified, and forced to support an atrocious regime. Šnajder noted in his preface that the Croatian Faust shows that theater can operate well even when driven by some “state reason.” He asserted that the social context of the 1942 Faust portrayed the link between theater and state power, the often indirect connection of great art to political violence. His Faust concerned itself with the genocide carried out by the Croatian Nazis, the Ustasha. While the production of Faust creates the theatrical illusion of a complete Ustasha control, scenes from the play turn into a terrifying parody, a sort of “danse macabre,” not only of Goethe’s work, but also of its appropriation by the regime. The theater and the crimes perpetrated in its environment (the murder of the actors playing Mephisto and Margaret; the Walpurgis Night of the execution scene in the Jasenovac concentration camp) are played out against each other, mutually contradicting but also magnifying each other. In the finale, after the liberation and the triumphant arrival of the communists to power, a new Faust is brought to stage. The Commissar expects him to serve under new circumstances, to submit himself to an ideological purpose, to make his art and the repertory subservient to a political program and its rhetoric. The actor who interpreted Faust but then joined the partisans appears at the end of the war on the winning side, but is revealed as a “Faustian” loser who is once again unable to shake off political control. Šnajder uses an elaborate language: the jargon of the Ustasha movement that preaches racial and linguistic purity is followed at the end by the typical discourse of the victorious socialist revolution. On the semantic level, the action of the play constantly multiplies its levels and meanings; Ustasha’s slang is distorted and subverted by quotations from Goethe, the actor’s seemingly “private” conversations, and the codified language of the communist conspiracy. Focusing on a specific episode in theater history, Šnajder’s play deconstructs the ideology and the political and cultural practice of Croatian nationalism during its most radical phase, the Ustasha regime. While the play was resented by many Croatian nationalists, it was successfully staged in the Croatian cities of Split and Varaždin, as well as in Belgrade, Germany, Austria, and some other countries — but never in its locus originalis, the Croat National Theater in Zagreb, where the Ustasha Faust premiered in March 1942. In the newly independent Croatia, after 1991, the play became a political taboo and Šnajder a non-stageable author, at least until the end of the Franjo Tuđman regime (1999).

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In Serbia, several theater professionals active under the German occupation were put on trial after World War II, and condemned to a temporary loss of civil rights. At least two actors were executed immediately after the liberation. The moral responsibility of actors in time of war is the theme of Putujuće pozorište Šopalović (The Strolling Theater Šopalović; 1985), written by the well-known Serbian poet Ljubomir Simović in the style of poetic realism. The play depicts a group of third-rate strolling players who arrive in a provincial Serbian town during the German occupation to give a performance of Schiller’s Die Räuber. The local people dislike the humble actors, while the occupying authorities and their stooges are suspicious of them. Simović plays with the popular and romantic notion of actors as “grown-up children,” presenting them as innocent, unaware of the harsh realities of the occupation. But this naiveté protects them from being contaminated by the atmosphere of terror, so that they are able to intimate a touch of humanity and heroism: “Under the circumstances of Simović’s play, the inadequacies of the theater become its advantages, almost its virtue” (Klaić, “Obsessed” 15). For the main actor, animated by his Schillerian role, theater is larger than life, which enables him to rise to a heroic stature when his playful gesture is interpreted as an act of resistance. In an anti-climactic ending, however, the actors, who are submitted to all kinds of torture and atrocities by the occupiers and their collaborators, still cannot grasp the gruesomeness of reality. They continue to be devoted to their calling and its overblown myths, failing to establish an ethical benchmark to measure the degree of social disintegration and collective victimization. The play reveals theater’s ineptitude in a society in which overwhelming violence has destroyed people’s capacity for moral judgment.

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Epilogue: After Socialism Dragan Klaić In the 1990s, after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia and the escalation of armed conflicts on its territory, theater professionals had once again an opportunity to test their artistic autonomy and sense of moral responsibility in relation to political contingencies, propagandistic pressures, and a rhetoric of hate that resemble those revealed by Šnajder in Croatian Faust and Simović in The Strolling Theater Šopalović. Theater productions staged in the besieged city of Sarajevo in 1992–95 offered primers of civic encouragement and communal solidarity, while some other stage work created in the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s could not resist propagandistic functionalization. Elsewhere in the post-socialist world, theater entered a phase of stagnation and disorientation after the explosive winter of discontent in 1989–90. The end of the socialist regime meant first of all the end of censorship and a freedom in repertory policy, but simultaneously brought an end of government generosity in allocating subsidies. While practically no theater company was completely de-funded, subsidies quickly lost pace against the inflation, and the new market

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economy imposed new pressures. Theater found itself poor, barely covering modest to miserable salaries, sometimes with delay, and essential running costs. For new productions, funds had to be solicited from sponsors of a newly emerging “wild capitalism,” or by means of earning income through dubious practices, mainly through subleting theater space, lobby, offices, even the stage for commercial events. Tours, even in the vicinity, became prohibitively expensive. Yet raising the price of theater tickets remained risky because the most loyal public — intellectuals, students, teachers — were making little money in the new economy and everyone was busy rearranging family budgets to pursue new consumer options (Western cars and new gadgets) and, especially, travel abroad. For a while, theaters were almost empty because the spectacle was on the streets, in the parliament, on television, in the papers, freed from the grip of censorship. Slowly, the loyal part of the public returned but, in general, theaters staged fewer productions and gave fewer performances for a stagnating audience. The competition of repertory theaters with the commercial entertainment ventures became fierce. In some provincial cities with only one repertory company theater life lost continuity, diversity, and quality. The competition with the globalized cultural industry, the proliferation of TV entertainment channels, private radio stations, video clubs, and discos have shifted, especially among young people, the tastes, preferences, and patterns of spending free time. The nationalist rhetoric returned with calls to sustain national cultural traditions on the stage and elsewhere, but made little inroads and could not develop an effective influence on cultural policy. In the competition of ideologies, that of the free market kept a dominant position, and produced the predictable cultural consequences of uniformization, commercialization, and dominance of entertainment over art. The institutional malaise and passivity of the repertory companies engulfed individual creators as well. The “transition” (to what actually?) has been especially hard on the playwrights, who lost pace in the accelerated change and found out that their old plays, once rejected by (self)censorship, lost all topicality and could not make it from the drawer to the stage. The writing of new plays eluded them in the overwhelming confusion and reversal of values, expectations, and interests. If they write new plays at all, they have difficulty putting them on stage because the new repertory privileges the finally uncensored modern classics, contemporary Western work, and fashionable fare from Yasmina Reza to the British neo-kitchen sink drama (Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill). Works by the domestic authors are staged, if at all, chiefly on small stages and for a few performances only. Only few playwrights from the post-communist countries acquired some European stature throughout the 1990s, among them Janusz Głowacki (Poland), Khristo Boytčev, (Bulgaria) and especially Biljana Srbljanović (Serbia). As mentioned earlier (p. 241 above), Głowacki became successful in New York and elsewhere with Antigone in New York (1992); his Czwarta siostra (The Fourth Sister), a response to Chekhov, has been premiered in 2000 in Wrocław. Boytčev’s Polkovnikat ptiza (The Colonel Bird; 1996) won the British Council International New Playwriting Award in 1999. Biljana Srbljanović, who had already over 140 productions abroad, wrote among others Belgrade Trilogy (1997) and Pad (The Fall; 2000). Diverse new initiatives emerged after 1989 in East-Central Europe: studios, small companies, festivals, research labs, and publications form an independent sector; not supported by steady government subsidy, they depend on international co-operation, foundations, and ultimately some incidental government aid. Innovative tendencies display a clear orientation towards the young

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intellectual public of big cities and a desire to partake in the growing European stream of tours, coproductions, and collaborative ventures. Throughout the 1990s, this alternative sector benefited from the substantial support of George Soros’s Open Society Institute and its national affiliate foundations, not so much in the essential infrastructure as in the funding of mobility across the region and the European continent. Other private foundations and governmental cultural institutes, such as the British Council, Pro Helvetia, the Goethe Institute, and French cultural centers, have contributed to overcoming East-Central Europe’s long cultural isolation from the Western world, by bringing companies, plays, and individual artists to the growing number of festivals, which they also support. Festivals, which had chiefly manifestational and representational functions in the socialist era, became platforms to advance the new artistic practices, professional discourses, and new talents, and to further international cooperation and mobility in an odd coexistence of rejuvenated old programs and new initiatives. With some fifteen post-socialist years gone by, one sees an increased diversity in the life and organization of theater, and some substantial differences between the cities and the countries of the region. If the old model of bulky repertory theater companies still prevails in capitals and in the smaller cities that often lack inspiration, productivity and self-assurance, commercial ventures seek a new wealthy audience with Broadway copies and, occasionally, with an original domestic product. An encouraging topography of new initiatives and places marks the region: the open new venue of the Prague Archa Theater (recently seriously damaged by floods and restored), and the Tanec Praha modern dance festival; the Estonian Stage Production, the Estonian Dance Information Center and the private Van Kraal Theater in Tallinn; the Trafo stage for contemporary dance in Budapest; the Center for cultural decontamination and Rex, once oppositional bulwarks, are now critical platforms in Belgrade; the Dramski center in Zagreb; the Kapelica media lab in Ljubljana; the Malta site-specific theater festival in Poznań, the Dialogue drama festival in Wrocław; an international theater festival in Sibiu and a global experimental theater festival organized by the Impossible Theater Company in Cluj; Red House debate and production center in Sofia; the New Latvian Theater Institute in Riga; the Siren festival in Vilnius; the Baltic Seas cultural center in Gdańsk, and many other festivals, productions, and presenting sites, sometime specialized and often interdisciplinary in their profile and programming. All of them are increasingly connected with their European and North-American counterparts, often on tour, frequently featured at the international festivals, sometime supported by the European Union’s cultural subsides in partnership with other European co-producers, but only sporadically anchored in the cultural system of the public authorities. Cultural policies need major renewal and re-appraisal in all post-socialist countries, which implies a critical stance with respect to the inherited heavy institutional burden, and openness towards project-based production units and dynamic innovative organizations, in some cases also private-public partnerships. The post-communist political parties have shown little enthusiasm to engage in a systematic restructuring of the inherited cultural system, and politicians who closed hundreds of factories and layed off thousands of workers show reluctance to close theater venues and disband repertory companies. This respect for the theater is older than Communism and reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the stage was an exemplary institution of national emancipation. And yet, theater totters and stumbles in the present, lacking a clearly articulated ideological mission: after serving the national emancipation, Modernism, revolution,

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and “Socialism,” theater appears as a confused artistic force without a clear mandate. It is torn between tradition and commercial opportunities, postmodernist experimentation and a tentative, yet undefined role in a globalized culture and cultural industry. The current trials and tribulations of the stage could be resolved by a new sense of urgency, but the new theater will have to emerge from an increasingly complex civic society, full of its own contradictions and uncertainties, torn by socio-economic stratification, ambivalent about European integration, and disoriented by the cultural consequences of the economic globalization.

Part III. Forging Primal Pasts: The Uses of Folklore

Introduction: Folklore and National Awakening John Neubauer (with Marcel Cornis-Pope on Master Manole and Romanian Folklore) In Ismail Kadare’s novel, The Three-Arched Bridge (written 1976–78), “a collector of folktales and customs” (85) forms part of a “foreign” team charged with the construction of a bridge across the river Ujana e Keqe. Although the events take place in 1377, under the shadow of an Ottoman invasion, and the narrator is a medieval monk, Kadare portrays the bridge construction as a capitalist invasion of a small community that clashes with the interests of a local company called “Boats and Rafts.” When the bridge construction runs into mysterious and unexpected sabotage, the local people superstitiously blame “naiads and water nymphs” (55) but the management concludes it was the work of “Boats and Rafts.” The narrator Gjon and the collector of folktales engage in lengthy discussions on folk ballads, focusing especially on the one that relates the immurement of a woman during the building of Shkodër castle (89). Interpreting the story from every possible angle, the two men are shocked to realize that the legend may be relevant to the building of the bridge. The abrupt departure of the collector concludes the dialogue but soon “a horde of bards” shows up at the village inn to sing a revised version of the legend, in which the immurement occurs during the building of a bridge rather than a castle. Recognizing immediately the collector’s hand in the revised ballad, Gjon concludes that the collector of tales “knew something about bridge building, perhaps as much as the master-in-chief” (105). He is proven right: the singing of the new ballad gradually prepares the village for the necessity of a human sacrifice, and one of the villagers, Murrash Zenebisha, finally concludes a contract with the company concerning his immurement. The contract is carried out and the bridge gets completed, though contrary to the original plans its final function becomes to serve as a thoroughfare for the invading Turkish armies. Kadare positions the story as a capitalist rather than a nationalist one, yet his portrayal of how the ballad of immurement is misused becomes a perfect (and very likely unintended) allegory of the nineteenth-century “discovery” and (ab)uses of folklore: just as the fictional collector rewrites the ancient ballad to aid his company’s bridge construction, so too, nineteenth-century philologists and folklorists put the recuperated texts to use in nation building. The onus of Part III in our volume is to describe this historical process in East-Central Europe.

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“The origin of the study of folk songs is marked by a hoax — Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’” (Šišmanov, săčinenyia 2: 18)

James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Scottish Highlands (1760) and Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem (1762) inaugurated a romantic preoccupation with folk poetry, which had a particularly deep impact in the Eastern part of Europe (see Leerssen). They stimulated here, throughout the nineteenth century, efforts to recuperate lost ethnic cultures, efforts that became more often than not manipulations and even forgeries rather than recuperations of “authentic” ancient materials. The process of searching for authenticity by contaminating folklore starts with Macpherson’s “faithful translation” of the “ancient bard” Ossian, which contains drastic editorial interventions and forgeries. By a trick of history, Macpherson’s pseudo-Ossian became the voice of authenticity for one of the first (pre)romantic heroes, Goethe’s Werther. One of Macpherson’s first important East-European inspirations was the Viaggio in Dalmazia (see ECE 1: 294–306), published in 1774 by the Italian abbot Alberto Fortis to show that the Dalmatian “Morlach” culture was comparable to Macpherson’s Gaelic one. Goethe became fascinated with the prose translation of a poem in Friedrich Werthes’s partial German translation of Fortis’s book, rewrote it in verse (Goethe 1.1: 276–78), and Herder included this latest version in his two-volume Volkslieder (Folk Songs; 1778–79) under the title “Klaggesang von der edlen Frauen des Asan Aga” (Dirge for the Noble Women of Asan Aga; Sämtliche 25: 295–98). The Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian folk songs in Herder’s Volkslieder powerfully stimulated folksong collecting in the Eastern part of Europe. This familiar story about the beginnings of European folk-song collecting is distinctly transnational, but interest in folk songs and folk epics took a more nationalist turn in the early nineteenth century. In Germany, the Napoleonic wars and the struggle for German unification inspired a turn towards a submerged national heritage, leading to the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–08), Achim von Arnim’s and Clemens Brentano’s collection of folk songs; a revival of interest in the medieval Nibelungenlied, which was based on an older oral tradition and generated lengthy discussions on national myths and heroic epics; and, last but not least, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s publication of Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812–15), Deutsche Sagen (1816–18), and Deutsche Mythologie (1835). The spectacular emergence of South Slavic, especially Serbian, folk poetry was related to uprisings against the waning Ottoman Empire. The key figures here were Jernej Kopitar, a Slovenian philologist living in Vienna, and Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, a young Serb who fled the Ottoman suppression and settled in Vienna to engage under the guidance of Kopitar in vast projects of folklore and linguistics. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and the Serbian Folksongs Kopitar was the great mediator between German and the Slavic studies in linguistics and folklore. While he maintained an extensive correspondence with German philologists and published several articles in Friedrich Schlegel’s journal Deutsches Museum, he attracted to Vienna young Slavists and helped them start. The first important products of his inspiration were the Mala

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prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pjesnarica (A Small Book of Slaveno-Serbian Folk Songs of the Common People; 1814) with Slav-Serbian songs that Vuk and others reconstructed from memory, and the Narodna srbska pjesnarica (Book of Serbian Folk Poetry; 1815), published by Karadžić. Vuk’s preface to the former (Wilson 90–94) relates that a Russian and a German song-book (the latter probably a posthumously published version of Herder’s Volkslieder) led him to ask: “Did our people never have its (sic) national songs? Or did it once have them [… but] has rejected and forgotten them” (Wilson 91)? The answer was, of course, that they survived orally in the pristine countryside but had to be collected and recorded by listening to herders and other simple people who were as yet “uncontaminated” by the learned and the foreign tongues (Wilson 92–93). The songs had to be rescued for they “have preserved and still preserve among the common people the name and essence of the Serbia of former times” (Wilson 94). Reading Karadžić’s publications, folklorists, poets, and scholars from other East-Central European nations came to ask the same questions he asked, and they launched a search for their own heritage, albeit often by different and sometimes by devious means. Vuk’s conclusion echoes both Herder’s folk-song ideology and Friedrich Schlegel’s aforementioned Vienna lectures. Kopitar, who was intimately familiar with both, became Vuk’s publicity agent among Germans. He translated the Pjesnarica into German, sent it in 1815 with a dedication to Goethe, and he convinced Jacob Grimm, who was temporarily in Vienna, to publish that same year a review of it. Grimm’s praise was superlative: he knew of no people who could display “such a consummate wealth of love-songs, except for Solomon’s Song of Songs in the Scriptures. […] Of all Slavonic races, the Serbs are by virtue of their language (so rich and suitable for poetry) the most blessed with poems, songs, and stories” (Wilson 113). Karadžić then widely traveled in the Balkan Peninsula and recorded songs by various singers, many of them blind. The resultant four-volume Narodna srbska pjesnarica (1823–33) had to be published in Leipzig because of objections from the Orthodox Metropolitan Stefan Stratimirović. Jacob Grimm’s review of the third volume in the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen on November 5, 1823 (Wilson 390–94) was as enthusiastic as his first one: he found the poetic images incomparable and the style of the songs vivid, pure, and noble. This, together with Vuk’s visits to Goethe in 1823 and 1824, Goethe’s 1825 comments on the Serbian songs, his publication of two translated songs in Über Kunst und Altertum (see Goethe, 13.1: 408–18 and 865–69), and Therese Albertine Luise von Jacob’s two-volume translation (Karadžić Volkslieder) assured the international success of the Serbian folk songs. The Western reception also included John Bowring’s Narodne srpske pjesme — Servian Popular Poetry (1827), and Prosper Merimée’s anonymously published collection, La Guzla (1827), which claimed to contain translations of Illyrian and Morlach folk poems. The hoax managed to fool a great many people, including Pushkin, before Merimée confessed the forgery in the second edition of 1840. The Serb material continued to engage the scholarly interest of Béla Bartók, Milman Parry, and Albert Lord (The Singer of Tales) in the twentieth century. The Narodna srbska pjesnarica has an extraordinary range of time, mood, gender, and ethnicity. Vuk’s second volume, “Oldest Heroic Songs,” included songs from the time of the Kosovo battle of 1389 and songs about Prince Marko Kraljević, who was already a vassal of the Sultan. Most songs with pre-historic, pre-Christian, and mythic material were included in the first volume, “Women’s Songs,” mostly lyric poems not yet in the typical form of the Serb songs, the deseterci (decasyllabic lines). The third volume, “Heroic Songs from the Middle Period,” contained poems

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about the haiduks (outlaws) and other songs set during the Ottoman occupation, while the fourth one, “Heroic Songs of the Recent Times of the War for Freedom,” contained songs relating to the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century insurrections against the Turks. The songs thus covered a mythic past and reached into most recent history, though the historical events and figures were often used, of course, merely to create a fictional poetic cosmos. The folk-song material was common good circulating in the Balkans, and some of the songs were recorded already earlier; Vuk’s versions were often deeply stamped by the singer’s personality. Indeed, Vuk’s collection is distinguished, as Jacob Grimm noted already, by having been “recorded from the living voice of the people” and not from dusty archives (Wilson 390). Furthermore, while many nineteenth-century collections effaced the concrete individual input through anonymity, considerable personal information is available on some of Vuk’s singers. His most important performers were Tešan Podgurović, Filip Višnjić, a blind gusle player, and several blind old women. Podgurović, whom Vuk considered his “first and best” recitalist (he did not sing), mostly performed comic and haiduk songs. He was an unruly haiduk and freedom fighter, finally killed in a brawl. The highly respected Višnjić provided Vuk with the core songs of the Narodna srbska pjesnarica. The main women singers were the blind Jeca, the blind Stepanija, and another unnamed blind woman, sometimes referred to as Živena (see Holton and Mihailovich 4–6, Wilson 106–108, and Koljević 89–90, 311–14, and 319). Asking, as we do in this introduction, what the relationship was between the “discovery” of folklore and the rise of nationalism, we need to focus not on Vuk’s intentions but on the actual ways his work fuelled nationalism. Albert Lord, for one, held that a strong Serbian nationalism existed already prior to the folklore revival, and “national awakening did not come through the folk poetry” (“Nationalism” 268). While this may be true, the “appropriation” of folk poetry undeniably fuelled nationalism. In light of recent events, Milne Holton and Vasa D. Mihailovich introduce their new volume of translations from Vuk’s collections more carefully. In their broader view, Vuk redefined South Slavic and Serbian nationalism by shifting its core meaning from “a shared Orthodox Christian faith and the literary tradition that faith had generated” to the language and poetry of the “great raja,” i.e., the Balkan Christian peasantry under Ottoman rule: “It was the language spoken by that raja that Vuk privileged by establishing its textuality. And it would be the poetry of the language that Vuk would offer to give legitimacy to the language itself” (Holton and Mihailovich 2–3). Still, national sentiments heated up when the national identity of a figure whose name in Bulgarian is Krali Marko, in Serbian Marko Kraljević, and in Macedonian Marko Kralevike was debated. Furthermore, Karadžić himself suggested already in his Dodatak (1822) that the Bulgarian epic songs had been adopted from the Serbian ones, and this led to endless disputes. The broadening that Holton and Mihailovich attribute to Vuk’s concept of folk and nation stands in curious contrast with very the title of their volume, Songs of the Serbian People, even if their preface confronts the problem more squarely but still not in a very satisfactory way: “We are fully aware that the Croats, the Bosnians, the Macedonians, and the Bulgarians lay legitimate claim to their share of this body of poetry and to the history it embodies. We have called the poems ‘Serbian’ in reference to a nation and its language, never to any modern state” (xi). The cover photo of the volume depicts the aged Vuk with a battery of awards, many of which are Serbian.

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Immuring Folk Poetry in the National Culture To whom does a folk poem actually belong? In the case of a highly complex and mixed region like East-Central Europe, where motifs and forms used to cross easily linguistic barriers, the question is difficult to answer, as Vilmos Voigt’s article (pp. 323–24 below) illustrates. János Kriza’s Transylvanian-Hungarian folk-poetry collection Vadrózsák (1863) contained a Hungarian version of immurement, the ballad “Kőmíves Kelemenné” (Mason Kelemen’s Wife). The Romanian Julian Grozescu promptly sent a letter to the Budapest newspaper Fővárosi Lapok, in which he guardedly cited as “common knowledge” that the Hungarians had no folk epics and ballads: “Kőmíves Kelemenné” (and other ballads in Vadrózsák) was a translation with Magyarized names of the Romanian ballad about building the monastery at Argeş. The older Romanian ballad was based on the belief (widely held among Romanians but not among Székelys) that a damned soul haunts every larger building (489). Grozescu’s letter released what Voigt calls Heidenrösleinkrawall (The Row about the Wild Rose). Versions of the ballad were, indeed, printed well before Vadrózsák. Vuk published a Serb version of it, “Zidanje Skadra” (The Building of Skadar), in the second volume of his collection (Holton and Mihailovich 78–86). Goethe published a German translation of it but found its spirit “superstitiously barbaric” (13.1: 411 and 467). Vasile Alecsandri printed in his Poezii poporale in 1853 a Romanian version, the ballad “Mănăstirea Argeşului” (The Monastery of Argeş; 2: 1 ff). Another version carries the title “Meşterul Manole.” In these, as well as in the overwhelming number of other folk poetry versions a woman, usually a mother, is sacrificed. To whom, indeed, does such a ballad belong? Where did the ballad originate? Priority in printing says nothing, of course, about the ethnic affiliation of the bard that first recited or sang the story. Lazare Sainéan (Lazăr Şăineanu), the first author to attempt a synthetic treatment of the immurement motif in Eastern Europe, carefully refrained from raising the question of chronological priority, though he set definite aesthetic priorities (“Les rites”; 1902). He claimed that although the immurement of living creatures during construction was a global phenomenon, only in Eastern Europe did the ritual acquire great poetic significance (395). He singled out the Serbian and Romanian versions for their beauty and originality; the Romanian and the New-Greek versions he regarded as expressions of a general belief that the shadow of a human being must be immured to secure the foundations (370); the Bulgarian ones he regarded as fragmentary, the Albanian ones as pale imitations of the Greek and Serbian ones; and the Hungarian ones, following Grozescu, as “echoes” of the Romanian ones (360). Though not everybody shared Sainéan’s view, the Romanian versions did come to serve as emblems of the nation’s spiritual disposition. In these versions the royal church in the medieval capital of Walachia, Curtea de Argeş, demands the immuring of the master mason’s virtuous wife, but Manole, the master builder, and the other masons are also sent to their death by the Black Prince, who commissioned the church and who now wants to prevent the building of a yet more glorious monastery elsewhere. Sainéan found it curious that the masons should be punished for something that was demanded of them (most other versions do not punish the masons), and he saw in this paradox a fusion of antique and Christian elements (378). George Călinescu and others have interpreted the ballad as Romania’s constitutive aesthetic myth that emphasized the importance of individual sacrifice in acts of artistic creation, while Mircea Eliade argued in Comentarii

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Figure 12. Micaela Eleutheriade, Ana’s Immurement. 1949.

la legenda meşterului Manole (Commentaries on the Legend of Master Manole; 1943) that the immuring of a beloved member of the mason’s family reconciles the cosmic with the human, and the other with the self: “Projected by her ritual death onto a different cosmic plane from that on which she had existed as a human being, the Master’s wife is destined to know a permanence not permitted man as such” (116–17). Failing to ask why a woman, Manole’s wife, had to be sacrificed, Eliade turned her death into an ungendered national archetype: “The presence of death at the center of Romanian folk spirituality does not indicate a pessimistic vision of the world, an absence of élan vital, of a psychic deficiency of some sort. […] The Romanian does not seek death, nor does he long for it, but neither does he fear it” (Comentarii 131). In the final analysis, Eliade considered the Romanian version of the ballad as the best one, and its “valorization of ritual death” (Comentarii 133) as a logical and creative Romanian response to an unkind historical destiny (Ricketts 1146–47). We find a similarly national, though less metaphysical interpretation of the immurement legend in Kadare’s earlier discussed The Three-Arched Bridge, which is not only a modern rewriting of the folk poem but also a site at which that original folk ballad is interpreted in a fictional context, like the parable of the doorkeeper in Kafka’s The Castle, which is followed by a series of attempted interpretations. In Kadare’s novel, the interpretations focus on the agreement of the masons that the wife who first appears at the building site will have to be sacrificed. In this version (as well as in the Hungarian one and many others) two of the three mason brothers tell their wives not to come, and only the third one keeps the promise they all made to a “wise old man” (90), not

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to divulge anything at home. Albanian culture has such a high regard for “Besa” (=Promise) that according to the narrator’s fellow monks its centrality in the ballad proves its Albanian authorship (91). The foreign “collector of folktales and customs” invents all kinds of alternative explanations in order not to read into the story a breaking of a besa, presumably because he and his company will want to extract a contractual promise from a villager to submit willingly to immurement. Kadare’s novel reaffirms that keeping a promise is a key feature of Albanian national culture (though it may be argued that it ironically undermines what it treasures as a national expression). Eliade’s valorization of “ritual death” as deeply Romanian and Kadare’s valorization of besa as profoundly Albanian attribute national features to folk ballads that have only gendered but no explicit national markers. Immurement, the ballads’ motif, is therefore also a metaphor for the nationalist mobilization of folk poetry: writers have time and again extracted from texts such as the one on the immured wife national-metaphysical features, thereby “immuring” in the fabric of the national edifice something that is supposed to distinguish it from others. Yet such edifices of fiction — Déva castle in the Hungarian version, a bridge over the river Arta in the Greek version, the fortress of Shkodra/Scutari in the Albanian version, and the monastery at Argeş in the Romanian version — were built on grounds criss-crossed by a European, even worldwide, rhizome of folk poetry, and they were not conceived originally as national symbols. The list of modern works of “high” literature that “recycle” the ballads of immuring is too long to rehearse here. Suffice to mention Petko Y. Todorov’s Bulgarian drama Zidari (Masons; 1900; see Fig. 9, p. 194), Árpád Tóth’s poem “Invokáció Csokonai Vitéz Mihályhoz” (Invocation to Csokonai Vitéz Mihály), in which immuring symbolizes sacrifices in building a more beautiful Hungarian future (Tóth, Összes művei 1: 73); the Greek national opera Protomastoras (The Master Builder; 1915/29/40), based on a libretto by Nikos Kazantzakis and set to music by Manolis Kalomiris. The Romanian authors Nicolae Iorga, Lucian Blaga, and Octavian Goga approached the legend in Eliade’s manner. Blaga’s play Meşterul Manole (Master Manole; 1927) is an expressionist drama that pits artistic will against hostile cosmic forces, and the value of life against passionate self-sacrifice. Marin Sorescu, however, focused his play Matca (The Matrix/Cradle of Water; 1976) on the sacrificial mother, elevating her from a mere “building material” to a significant participant in a cosmic drama (she dies in the flood waters but manages to save her new-born baby). Vuk’s Impact in the Southern Half of East-Central Europe Paradoxically, efforts at national appropriations of folk poetry ran parallel to its transnational circulation. Folk-poetry collection was a genuinely international phenomenon that furthered inter-national cooperation and circulation, often involving German, French, Italian, and other “foreigners” in the collecting and publishing of vernacular folk poetry, especially in Albania (see p. 335 below) and the Baltic countries. For instance, the Latvian Literary Society of mostly German intellectuals urged the collection of the Latvian dainas; Krišjānis Barons, founder of their modern study, attended the university in Tartu/Dorpat, Estonia; the Estonian Kalevipoeg was first published in a bilingual edition (see below). Emil Korytko, editor of the five-volume Şlovénske péşmi, krajnskiga naróda (Slavic Poems of the Krain People; 1839–44), and the first to demand Slovenian linguistic and cultural autonomy, was a Polish exile living in Ljubljana. The first to collect Slovene folk-poetry (around 1775) was actually Marko Pohlin (mentioned earlier as a

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linguist), but his manuscript was never published, and only few of its poems survived — in German translation. After Pohlin, Valentin Vodnik and the Ljubljana group around Baron Žiga Zois, an amateur scientist and scholar, started to collect folk songs systematically. As in all other areas of Bulgarian culture, foreigners were also in the forefront of collecting and publishing Bulgarian folk poems. Thus, Vuk’s Dodatak (1822) gave, as the full title indicates, special place to Bulgarian folk poems, and some of these were then taken over in Čelakovský’s Czech Slovanské národní písně (1822–27). The Bulgarians themselves started to publish Bulgarian folk poems only in the 1850s, but these, and even the great collections of Stefan Verković (1860) and of the Miladinov brothers (1861), had to be published abroad. In Hungary, the Serbian-Hungarian poet Mihály Vitkovics responded to Vuk’s reform of Serbian orthography and to his collecting of folk songs already in 1819. In his essay on the Serbian language (“A szerbus, vagy Rác nyelvrűl”), he explained to Hungarian readers the difference between Old Church Slavonic and everyday Serbian, pleading for a more general acceptance of the latter. Vuk’s 1814 grammar he found too short (Vitkovics 429), but he reacted positively to Vuk’s first folk song collections of 1814 and 1815, and he even made a sample translation from it (431 f). Indeed, Vitkovics translated in the following decade several Serb folk poems, among them the “Želja djevojčina” (The Girl’s Wish), which became popular in Hungarian under Vitkovics’s title “Ha én forrás volnék” (If I Were a Spring; Vitkovics 45). Here and in other translations, Vitkovics attempted to follow the rhythm of the Serb poem without, however, adopting the original decasyllabic lines. Others after Vitkovics, for instance József Bajza and, especially, Mihály Vörösmarty, took over the deseterac in several of their own poems. Writing such Hungarian poems in the manner of Serbian folk poems came to be called “szerbus manier” (see Fried, délszláv). Karadžić’s recovery of the Serbian songs is a great example for both the national and international functions of folk-poetry collection: it involved genuine international circulation and cooperation and yet became a powerful stimulus for nationalism, not only in Serbia. Via Vuk’s work, the Serbs suddenly acquired a glorious poetic image of their past, which became the envy of all other ethnic groups and aspiring nations. In Schlegel’s sense (see p. 347), the possession of poetic memories of ancient times raised the nation’s reputation in the eyes and judgment of foreign observers. Indeed, a wave of admiration for folk poetry, above all for epic narratives, swept over Europe, and this, in turn, produced “ancient” treasures to stun the world. Constructing a national past became a universal goal, for each people of East-Central Europe wanted to acquire historical legitimation via founding myths and national epics. When no epic poems could be found, they had to be pieced together from shorter poems, often written by a representative national poet of the nineteenth century — or simply forged. In the central and southern part of Eastern Europe the desire to emulate the Serbian example was predominant. By common consent, Romanticism introduced the concepts of “originality,” “genius,” and “authenticity” that still govern our legal notions of authorship and intellectual property. Folk poetry calls these notions into question, not simply because its author and origin are usually shrouded in mist, but because nineteenth-century philologists often deliberately mystified them to such a degree that we may as well regard Romanticism as the modern source of inauthenticity and forgery: collecting, editing, and publishing folk poetry have confounded the process of finding and constructing, authorship and editorship. Paradoxically, the blurring of originality and imitation was usually motivated by a search for buried “genuine” folk poetry and a lost ethnic consciousness.

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How deeply the desire for national lyrics and epics was rooted in the national awakening movements is best illustrated with the notorious case of the “ancient manuscripts” that Václav Hanka and his associates had forged (see also Pynsent’s article, pp. 366–77 below). Hanka, originally a pupil and enthusiastic supporter of Dobrovský, went to Vienna in 1814, where he became a follower of Kopitar. Upon his return to Prague, he “discovered” on September 16, 1817, in Dvůr Králové a manuscript with six ballads and eight shorter songs (Rukopis Kralovédvorský = The Králův Dvůr Manuscript). The following year, somebody mailed to Count Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky, Lord High Castellan of the Prague Castle, two small parchments: the first contained a few lines entitled “The Decree of Domestic Laws,” the second, a longer text entitled “Libuše’s Judgment.” The texts were claimed to be discovered in Zelená Hora and subsequently acquired the designation “Zelenohorský Manuscripts.” Several other small documents emerged in the next decade, retrospectively recognized as forgeries to support the authenticity of the Královédvorsky and Zelenohorský texts. Most nineteenth-century Czech intellectuals, artists, and politicians believed in the authenticity of the manuscripts on patriotic grounds: they seemed to put the Czechs on a par with the Serbs, and they expressed a strong anti-German sentiment suited for the Czech movement for independence. The great historian, František Palacký, noted in his diary in 1819 in spite of some doubts: “With inexpressible joy I read the Královédvorský Manuscript for the first time early this summer, together with my dear Šafárik. How you have been transfigured in your glory, O Motherland! Once more you have held high your noble head and nations look to you with admiration” (Otáhal 254 slightly modified). As if echoing Schlegel, Václav Alois Svoboda wrote in the introduction to the second edition of the manuscripts that Czech writers writing in Czech used to feel “painfully the lack of ancient national songs,” for such songs were the necessary origin and foundation of all national culture (Otáhal 252). Kopitar had his doubts, and Dobrovský concluded after his examination of the Zelenohorský Manuscript in 1823 that the authors were “forgers driven by excessive patriotism and hatred for the Germans” (Otáhal 254). But he believed in the authenticity of the Královédvorsky Manuscript. As he wrote to Kopitar on February 11, 1827: “I wish we had more poems like the ones in the Královédvorsky Manuscript. We have otherwise, unfortunately, nothing national that could compare with the Serb songs and the old Russian stories” (Kopitar, Briefwechsel 596). Still, Dobrovský was viciously and personally attacked for his “unpatriotic” doubts, and nobody dared defend him. By 1840, Palacký suppressed his earlier doubts and convinced the more cautious Šafárik to write jointly Die ältesten Denkmäler der böhmischen Sprache (The Oldest Monuments of the Czech Language), which rejected Dobrovský’s views and declared the manuscripts to be authentic. The cultural-political authority of the Hanka manuscripts remained sacrosanct throughout nineteenth-century Bohemia and even beyond its borders: Mickiewicz, for instance, never doubted the authenticity of the Královédvorsky Manuscript, and devoted over ten of his lectures at the Collège de France to it. Austrian scholars raised some questions about the authenticity of the manuscripts in the late 1850s but they were dismissed in Bohemia as politically inspired. The fortieth anniversary of the “discovery” was celebrated with a book by ten leading poets, among them Jan Neruda. The concluding great national vision in Bedřich Smetana’s opera Libuše was based on the Zelenohorský Manuscript (see Otahál 249–50 for other examples). Even a modernist journal with

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cosmopolitan orientation would adopt as its title Lumír (1873–77), the name of a mythic Czech hero in Hanka’s forged manuscript. The first Czech and Moravian critics who raised some questions in the 1870s were slandered and silenced. Jan Gebauer’s definitive disproof of the authenticity in Tomáš Masaryk’s journal Athenaeum (1886) started to sway public opinion, but Masaryk still had to chastise writers and journalists who preferred a national myth to truth: “What kind of a land is this, if people who mask their brutality and ignorance behind the banner of the nation can publicly slander anyone who is committed […] to the truth out of what is surely the noblest patriotism? Should literary charlatans be the arbiters of national questions?” (Otáhal 269) In response, some people condemned Masaryk as a “repulsive traitor,” and even prominent writers like Jan Neruda and Eliška Krásnohorská joined the attacks on him, albeit in a more civilized manner. The controversy around the Hanka manuscripts exemplifies how deeply literature and literary scholarship were implicated in the evolution of nineteenth-century nationalism. Other, less important cases abound. In Bulgaria, for instance, Stefan Verković published in 1874–81 a collection of songs that spoke about an ancient homeland in the East, the emigration of the Slavs from India, and ancient gods. Verković claimed that these Veda Slovena (Slavic Vedas) stem from prehistoric and pre-Christian times and were recorded “from the Macedonian-Rhodopi Bulgarian Pomaks.” By 1903, it became evident that Verković was the dupe of a school teacher who forged the songs. János Arany, the leading Hungarian poet, dealt differently with the problem of missing national epics. After reading an 1856 Hungarian translation of the Královédvorský Manuscript, he exclaimed in a letter of April 22, 1857: “Powerful remnants of a folk poetry from the distant dawn. Only we have nothing!! We must produce mythology, must produce ancient epics — otherwise empty spaces and deserts” (Összes művei 10: 609). In 1860, Arany asked in his essay “Naiv eposzunk” (Our Folk Epos) why such epics did not exist in Hungarian, and he concluded that they did, indeed, exist at some point but were crowded out by sober chronicles. What should the unhappy descendants to do? Arany warned against the imitation of foreign models lest they bring with them foreign mentalities (Összes művei 10: 272–74). This foreshadows the solution that Arany was to seek by writing his own epos, Buda halála (Buda’s Death), which tells how Attila assumed power by killing Buda, his older brother and legitimate king. Buda halála was to constitute the first part of a never completed vast epic cycle on the rise and fall of Attila and its aftermath. Linking this myth to the Nibelungenlied, on the one hand, and to a mythic foundational story about the Székely prince Csaba, on the other, Arany wanted to legitimize the Hungarians in their present home through their kinship with the Huns and through an integration of their myth into the Germanic sagas. The Northern Orbit Karadžić’s collected poems and the effect of his work apparently did not reach the Baltic countries, though Adam Mickiewicz made good use of them in Paris, during his lectures at the Collège de France. They may have entered the Baltic area via Peter Otto von Goetze’s Serbische Volkslieder in’s Deutsche übertragen (Serbian Folk Songs Translated into German), published in St. Petersburg (1827), and the 1830 volume of translations Serviska folksånger (Serbian Folk Songs) by the Finnish-Swedish romantic poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg, which was indebted to that of

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von Goetze (see Sihvo). Folklorists and literary scholars seem to have taken little interest in this intriguing piece of reception history. Be it as it may, interest in folk poetry did, of course, sweep the Baltic region in the nineteenth century. As we saw, Baltic folk poems were already represented in Herder’s collection. We can, therefore, speak next to the Southern circuit of a second, Baltic circuit of nineteenth-century folk-poetry collection and construction. In the latter, the Finnish Kalevala played in the 1830s and 40s a role that was comparable to that of Vuk’s Serbian songs in the South — with one crucial difference. Contrary to Vuk, Elias Lönnrot integrated the folk songs he had collected and endowed them with a plot. This then served as a model for the Estonian Kalevipoeg (Kalevipoeg; see Ülo Valk’s article on Estonian folklore, pp. 285–89 below), which was collected and integrated by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald between 1836 and 1861 and published in 1857–61. The relation of the Kalevipoeg to Andrejs Pumpurs’s Latvian Lāčplēsis (Bearslayer; 1888), also an integrated epic, remains unclear. These Northern and Southern circuits apparently did not communicate with each other throughout the nineteenth century. They tended to focus on two different genres that we may characterize with Macpherson’s two publications, Fragments of Ancient Poetry and Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem: the first “fragmentary,” the other an epic narrative. The Southern circuit collected lyric poems, epic fragments, and short heroic songs, but no great foundational epics. In the preface to his first volume, Vuk envisioned the possibility that after much more collecting someone may sift through the poems “and write some poems himself according to the taste and manner of his race, and thus out of all these small collections create one big whole” (Wilson 93). Following up on this, Johann Severin Vater, one of Vuk’s strong supporters in Germany, suggested in 1824 that the chronologically ordered deeds of Marko Kraljević would constitute “a certain life of this good, honest and pious hero (!)” (Karadžić, kleine serbische Grammatik LIX), and in 1845 Jacob Grimm also suggested to Vuk that the songs on Marko could be fused into a longer epic poem, but Vuk ignored the suggestion (Wilson 95), apparently because he was well aware that Marko’s image in the poems was unstable and inconsistent and often less than heroic (see below). The philologists of the Northern circuit had no such reservations. Next to great collections of songs — such as Barons’s six-volume Latviju daīnas (Latvian Folksongs; 1894–1915) — they boldly constructed great foundational national epics, assuming thus a quasi-authorial role that went well beyond that of the collector. II. The National Institutionalization of Folk Poetry The nineteenth-century folk-poetry collections relied on diverse sources, had concrete local and regional specificity, and often contained several variants. But the collecting was usually undertaken to show the unity and “essence” of an ethnic group or nation. In order to function as a unifying force, folk poetry had to be (1) linguistically standardized, (2) (re)constructed so that its texts and heroes became moral, religious, and national exemplars, and (3) fitted into the history and theory of national literature so as to inspire “high literature.” By means of such reworkings, folk poetry became institutionalized, at times as part of literary scholarship at others in newly emerging institutions for folklore. The reverential preservation, enshrining, codification, and canonization of folk art was entrusted to the modern museums, libraries, university departments and chairs, school

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curricula, and textbooks. The closing section of this introduction will outline the above-mentioned three aspects of institutionalizing folk poetry. Linguistic Standardization Language reform and folklore collection both wanted to refine, standardize, and codify the vernacular. These tasks were usually entrusted to language societies and later to National Academies. But the language revivals were fed by two conflicting impulses: to evolve a standardized modern language and to re-construct an idealized primeval one, best preserved in rural language. Both the archaic and the modern aspirations rejected heterogeneity and dialect, for these threatened the norms of efficiency and purity. Folk-poetry collectors faced, therefore, a scientific problem: their drive towards unity and cohesion was undergirded by a belief in systems but ran head on against the demand to be faithful to the language of the oral performers found in field work, accuracy in recording what was heard. Recitals in dialect endangered the postulated national linguistic unity by deviating from the freshly codified and standardized language. “Back to the (healthy and pristine) spoken folk language” and “write as you speak and read as is written” was not only a principle of Vuk but also a frequent slogan of language reformers who fought either a dominant foreign language and culture (German, Russian, Turkish; or for that matter Hungarian, Polish, and Czech) or an outdated linguistic tradition like Old Slavonic. Karadžić originally wanted modern writers to use the dialect of their native region, but this impractical principle threatened the very project of national unity (and struggle against foreign oppression) that language reform was to serve. As our article on Transylvania shows (ECE 2: 260–61), the Hungarian János Kriza had to confront a similar problem when preparing his pioneering folk-song collection Vadrózsák (1863). He admitted in his foreword that by seeking the finest nuances of dialect and intonation he injured perhaps the “expression” of genuine “Székelyness” (Kriza 36). Put in modern terms, he sensed a conflict between langue, standardized language, and parole, the spoken language: the uniform language of a hypothetical “Székelyness” clashed with a language concept based on the heterogeneity of dialects and intonations. In the aftermath of the failed 1848–49 revolution, the choice was politically loaded. As Kriza wrote, the political tragedy forced “the reanimated soul of the nation to descend deeper into itself” in order to “fortify and solidify the very roots of its own national essence against destructive dangers” (34). The collection was to cement national identity, but Kriza’s desire to accommodate the various Transylvanian dialects undermined both the cohesion of his material and the postulated unique national creativity behind it, unintentionally suggesting both heterogeneity within Transylvania and a difference between genuine “Székelyness” and essential Hungarianness. High culture removed from folklore what it considered as alien, as well as primitive, lewd, and obscene. The aestheticizing of folklore introduced a nationalist and moral censorship that actually suppressed pre-modern lower-class life. At the same time, imitations of folk poetry by high culture adopted terms, expressions, and styles that were alien to it. Thus, for instance, the Bulgarian poet Khristo Botev wrote in his folkloric “Hadji Dimitar” (1873) that minstrels sang of Hadji after he was killed in the fight for national freedom (Butler, Bulgarica 463–65) — yet the modern concept of national political freedom was alien to Bulgarian folk poetry.

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Folklore Characters Recordings of the oral tradition were supposed to supply the nation with model characters but were able to do so only at the price of falsification. Rather than exemplary, the male heroes of folk songs and epics were often drunk, barbaric, and lewd, as well as brutal with their wives. They had to be sanitized, aestheticized, censured, and partly repressed to become serviceable for a Christian-national ideology. Thus, the figures of the outlaw (see vol. 4 of our History), which populate both the folklore and the “high literature” of Eastern Europe, did not fit easily into moral and national agendas, for the historical as well as the imaginary outlaws were inherently ambiguous characters. Nationalist, right-wing, and communist regimes refashioned, however, the Slovak Jánošík, the Hungarian Sándor Rózsa, the Ukrainian Cossacks, or the various national Haiduks (Hajduti) into East-European Robin Hoods, into morally upright heroes who helped the poor and fought for national liberty. As Berkes writes, František Ladislav Čelakovský’s “Russian” poems mimic their original medieval epics but the motifs and episodes are almost exclusively the products of his own imagination. The Czech imitation turns Čurila Plenkovič, a filthy rich womanizer in Russian legends, into a brave hero, because the pan-Slav pantheon can accommodate only characters with exemplary morals (see p. 304 below). The rich transnational literature on the figure of Marko Kraljević (Krali Marko) excellently shows how complex folklore heroes are. The historical Prince (Kraljević) became the King of Prilep (1371–94) when his father died in the Battle of Marica (1371), but submitted to Sultan Murad II as a vassal in 1385. As such, he should have fought on the Turkish side in the Battle of Kosovo (1389), but for obscure reasons he apparently did not. However, he died in the Battle of Rovine (Walachia) while fighting for the Turks. Marko’s vassalage did not predestine him for the role of a hero and great patriot. All of the folk songs acknowledge with remarkable candor that he was an ally of the Sultan, though they offer a very inconsistent image of him. In one song, Marko murders his brother in a quarrel over a booty (see Koljević 53–57), while in another variant his brother is murdered by somebody else, and Marko takes revenge by killing nine Turks and blinding a girl (Koljević 76–77). In one Bulgarian song Marko’s wife (Markovica) gets kidnapped, while in another one Marko kidnaps Filip’s wife and kills his mother. Filip goes after him, fights him and wins. Marko is a superb hero on a mythic horse, but also a trickster, a drunkard, a scoundrel, and an unfaithful husband. He fights foreigners in one version and associates with them in another one; he may attend a wedding party or peacefully drink wine with people who appear as his enemies in others. Karadžić was wise not to follow the advice to unite the material in a single epic. Many of Marko’s adventures are, indeed, humorous, mock-heroic, or just cruel. Goethe regarded him as the greatest and invincible Serbian hero who was nevertheless a crude and barbaric Scythian when compared to Hercules (13.1: 411). The contradictions in the lore on Marko may have two main reasons. Variants of the same motif (e.g., of the “kidnapped wife”) may differ because they were sung by different singers, in different languages, and under different national, social, and historical situations. The other, more fundamental reasons is that a vassal figure must, almost by definition, play an ambiguous political and moral role. One of the most famous songs about him, “Marko Kraljević and Mina of Kostur” (Holton and Mihailovich 183–93), shows very well the heterodoxy of the material. It consists of

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three parts: a brief prologue with his mother, a long middle section that tells of Marko’s heroic deeds in the service of the Sultan, and the final adventure, in which he, dressed as a monk, takes revenge on Mina of Kostur, who devastated his house, crushed Marko’s mother, and kidnapped his wife Jela. Here, Marko carries out heroic deeds in the Sultan’s service against the Arabs and as part of a personal revenge against Mina of Kostur. Neither of the two is a patriotic act against the enemy of Marko’s people. Indeed, Marko’s relation with the Sultan, his foster father, is friendly. The song upgrades his vassal position by showing how much the Sultan is dependent on Marko’s bravery, but by letting Marko fight some distant, almost mythic Arabs, it avoids the touchy question, what would happen if he were commanded to combat his Serbian, Macedonia, or Slavic brethren (a dilemma that many Slavs and Romanians confronted when they often had to fight for the Monarchy but against their own people during World War I). As to the revenge against Mina: the Sultan supports this with three-hundred janissaries, for Mina is a feuding war lord who usurps his power, an opponent of the Sultan rather than a personification of Ottoman power. Other stories may represent Marko’s heroism in a slightly different light, but hardly any of them embodies the kind of nationalism that swept Serbia and the other countries of the region during the nineteenth century. Marko’s counterparts, Beg Kostadin, Filip the Magyar, Alil-Aga, and others may be ethnically marked, but the confrontations with them are only marginally (if at all) generic. He fights individuals rather than representatives of some national enemy. The nationalist ideologies that seized the Marko legends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to ignore such ambiguities and contradictions in his behavior. By suppressing Marko’s weaknesses and vices, poets have transformed him into an immaculate national hero. Blatantly reductive readings of the folk songs thus allowed Marko’s glorification and canonization in all nineteenth-century South-Slavic literatures. In Serbia, for instance, Jovan Sterija Popović wrote a play on Marko that includes the hymn Ustaj, ustaj, Srbine! (“Rise, Rise, Serb!”), whereas the Croatian Petar Preradović wrote several works that glorify him (see Lord, “Nationalism” 270– 71, 274). Most Bulgarian nationalist writers, scholars, and politicians conveniently overlooked the contradictions in the folk poetry and turned Marko into a model of national unity. Ivan Vazov, the great national poet, extolled Marko as the Balkan Roland (2: 85), as a symbol of his nation’s fight against all oppressors. Botev, Karavelov, and the other poets of the founding generation took a similar attitude. These nationalist glorifications of Marko continued under the communist regimes, which regarded heroic folk poetry as a fountain and foundation of all national literature. With little adjustments, the national idol now also became a hero of class struggle in textbooks and popular literature. Of course, not everybody was happy with such a hagiography. Some early-twentieth-century poets and scholars were puzzled that folk poetry should glorify an ethically unreliable vassal who actually cared little for his people. The poet Penčo Slaveikov, for instance, was highly critical of the Bulgarian Krali Marko figure, and Bojan Penev, quoting Bulgarian proverbs, concluded that Marko “drinks wine, while his children walk barefoot” (1: 117). However, systematic studies of the discrepancy between Marko’s many-faceted image in the oral tradition and his idealized figure within nationalist and communist ideologies have started only recently. Only now is it becoming fully evident how thoroughly these ideologies have blanched the unruly “messiness” of the figure in history and folklore.

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Folk Poetry, High Literature, National Literary Histories The Croatian epic Smrt Smail-age Čengića (Čengić Aga’s Death; 1846) by Ivan Mažuranić on the murder of a Turkish local potentate, and the Serbian-Montenegrin epic Gorski Vijenac (Mountain Wreath; 1847) by Petar Petrović Njegoš on the (historically inauthentic) massacre of Montenegrin renegades at the end of the eighteenth century both heavily relied on oral traditions but expressed a nationalism, whose fanaticism far exceeds what we find in folk poetry. This is particularly the case with Gorski Vijenac, which was cast in the decasyllabic form (deseterac), the dominant verse form of Vuk’s collections. Njegoš’s epic comes close to folk poetry in the lyrical Kolo sections sung by a chorus, but the poet’s Christian Montenegrins speak with rough intolerance to their Moslem brothers: “Your Mohammed gave you a stupid head! May your souls be accursed forever, Turks, / for deluging the land in its own blood! / One manger is too small for two horses” (36); “What a bad stench from these Turkish turncoats” (44). In the end, the hesitating Bishop Danilo gives in and the Christians savagely massacre the much more tolerant Montenegrin Moslims. While we find nothing like this in folk songs, the fanaticism in Njegoš’s epic became for many a national emblem: Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is said to have memorized Gorski Vijenac, and Milovan Đilas praised the epic poem “as a conceptual synthesis and poetic expression of our destiny: the Serbian destiny under absolute laws, human resistance to cosmic evil, the lyrical expression of a national drama — our people in song” (Njegoš 372). The cultivation of folk poetry imposed certain expectations with respect to modern poets. Manifestations and consequences of this demand were varied and ubiquitous. As we have seen, Čelakovský published volumes with “echoes” of folk poetry, whereas Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová absorbed, each in their own way, a certain folk style in their own personal one (see pp. 305–309 below). In Hungary, Sándor Petőfi turned folk style into a personal, plebeian, populist, and national voice, which, in turn, was adopted by a host of imitators called the Petőfieskedők. In Croatia, the journal Kolo published folk-style patriotic poetry by Petar Preradović and Stanko Vraz; in Serbia, Jovan Sterija Popović published in 1830 the play Nahod Simeon (The Foundling Simeon), which Albert Lord has called “a landmark in the ‘cult of the folk poetry’” (281); it was followed by Laza Kostić’s Maksim Crnojević (1864), based on an epic song about the hero in Vuk’s collection. In the nineteenth century, folk poetry became institutionalized within institutions of literature, or, mindful of the different cultural and communicative function of oral literature, within specific institutions of its own. The father of Bulgarian literary scholarship, Alexander T. Balan, understood that oral literature existed “in the living and changeable speech of the people, and passing from mouth to mouth it was transmitted from generation to generation, without ever stopping to change” (Bălgarska literatura 7), yet he classified both folklore and letters as “spiritual works,” without considering that “verbal literature” was an oxymoron. Literary history was to provide a rhetorical bridge between them: the spoken word was the first culture of a folk, whereas letters appeared in its later development. Everything fitted into a coherent teleological progress from nature to culture, from a first expression to later ones. The quasi-metaphysical folk manifested, expressed, and invented itself in ever new ways. Individual creation belonged to a later evolutionary stage. Similarly, Petar Odjakov claimed in his Poetics that folklore was at the origin of the literary history, its “first age” (perviy vozrast). Accordingly, it constituted the first volume

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in Božan Angelov’s and Mihail Arnaudov’s Bulgarian literary history (see p. 329 below). The Bulgarian modernist Penčo Slaveikov (see pp. 327–28 below) set up a modernist “counter-tradition” against his immediate nationalist predecessors by reverting to the folk songs as vessels of the pre-historic “dark” and “authentically Bulgarian” soul of his people. Such nationalist “primordializations” of folklore were time and again supported by universal generic claims, for instance Mikhail Bakhtin’s view that “the novel’s roots must ultimately be sought in folklore” (Dialogic 38) or Vladimir Propp’s proto-structuralist analyses of folk tales. But positing folk poetry at the origin of a national culture means to disregard the oral culture that continued to flourish after the introduction of writing and printing, down to the present. The Serbian folk songs, for instance, were not only relics of a distant past but also a still living and creative tradition at the time that Vuk started to collect them. Indeed, folk epics often cover large temporal spans of history, including periods when high and written literature had already been in existence. Many forms of folk poetry were, indeed, older than print, other forms of oral literature continued to live on, and yet other ones emerged in modern times. This ever-presence of oral literature presented a challenge to the literary historians, who had problems locating it in the temporal spectrum. Many of them excluded oral poetry from literary history. The Hungarian modernist Antal Szerb, for instance, excluded folk poetry from his history of Hungarian literature in order to link “high” literature to its European context rather than to its presumed native roots (see p. 389 below). János Horváth, though of different convictions, argued that oral literature entered history only once it was philologically recorded (Irodalmunk 63 f). George Călinescu dedicated only one short subsection of his voluminous Romanian literary history to folk poetry. The communist aesthetic credo, Socialist Realism, reinforced the privileged position that folk poetry assumed in the nineteenth century and continued to regard folk poetry as a foundation of all literature. National literature, like Anteus, had to return periodically to the nourishing and sustaining soil of folk poetry. Adopting a populist and nationalist position, Communism tried to counterbalance this way the negative effects of its imperial and international thrust, to render national legitimation to its system, and to claim it was resuscitating a pre-capitalist, even pre-historic society. As Ion Dodu Bălan, a member of the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee, wrote in a characteristically populist manner: “For several centuries, the Romanians’ specific artistic and literary expression that have survived all hardships were embodied in folk art and folklore, crystallizing the essential elements of Romanian spirituality, and subsequently handed down to the cultured arts and literature” (Concise History of Romanian Literature 5) Folk culture and folk poetry were idealized not only by nationalists and communists, but also by those (including even Béla Bartók) who rejected part or all of modern culture and industrialized society. Though folk culture was often censured for its “vulgarity” in dress, diet, body movement, sexuality, hygiene, and superstition (see Sujecka’s article pp. 338–43 below), it became over-valorized as a spontaneous expression of the genius and creativity of the people. The cultivation of songs, customs and rituals, oral narrative and singing, were generally replaced towards the end of the nineteenth century by their recording, museal preservation, reading and interpretation, academic study, or inclusion in the intertextual games of high literature. But the nationalist and communist regimes generously funded also dance groups, choirs, and other performing associations to legitimize the system through the folk — as long as such cultivations

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did not feed anti-Soviet nationalism, for instance in the Baltic countries. The problems created by folklore in the Soviet system were rooted in the contradiction of the nineteenth-century nationalist revival of folk poetry: it attempted to transform a context-dependent, changing, and ephemeral folk culture into a unique and invariable Great National Heritage. As a national classic, folk poetry was bound in hard cover and became enshrined by the written word. What once had regional or local significance became national property, turned into a symbolic capital of the entire nation. The quest for a uniquely national folk poetry inevitably led to the marginalization and displacement of the ethnically “impure” and “alien” folk poetry of the minorities.

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Levels of Institutionalization in Estonian Folklore Ülo Valk

Creating an Ideological Framework for “High Cultures”: Attention to Folklore Christianization in the thirteenth century tied Estonia to the realm of European civilization. It introduced social stratification that coincided with ethnic and linguistic borders as the German landlords formed the nobility and Estonians became the peasants who worked for the manors. In the seventeenth century, Estonia went under the jurisdiction of the Swedish crown and Lutheran reformation was systematically carried through in all parishes. In 1632, the University of Tartu (Academia Gustaviana) was founded. In 1700, the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, started the Nordic War and with the peace treaty of 1721 Estonia became incorporated into the Russian Empire. The local Baltic German landlords maintained their political and cultural domination. From their point of view, the Estonian peasants were the exotic “others,” whose folklore and customs were worthy of documentation and research. The intellectual climate of eighteenth-century Estonia was shaped by the ideas of religious Pietism, and rationalist Enlightenment that aimed at the education and the civilizing of the local peasants. August Wilhelm Hupel, a man of the early Enlightenment, published some data on Estonian customs and belief in Topographische Nachrichten von Lief- und Ehstland (1774–82). He sent Estonian songs to Johann Gottfried von Herder, who published them in his Volkslieder (1778). Herder’s enthusiasm about the “folk” and their poetry spread among Estonian intellectuals, who were fascinated by the ideas of Romanticism and started the quest for the ancient oral heritage of the Estonian people. One can detect a terminological shift in the discourse about oral traditions: by the middle of the nineteenth century the Estonian peasants were turned from superstitious and idolatrous savages into a people with a rich cultural heritage worth discovering. Folklore became the main element in the literary canon of the new Estonian nation in the making.

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Early Nation-Builders: The Quest for Ancient Heritage and the Epic The Estonian Learned Society, established in 1838 in Tartu, became the central institution for collecting and studying folklore. Some native Estonians who had received academic education at the University of Tartu (Dorpat) became active members of it. In 1839, Friedrich Robert Faehlmann delivered a speech before the Society about the legends of the mythical hero and giant Kalevipoeg (“son of Kalev”), outlining the basic events of a would-be epic. His greatest contribution to Estonian literature became the romantic collection of myths Esthnische Sagen, published in 1840 in German but based on motifs in Estonian folklore. After Faehlmann’s death in 1850, Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald completed the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg. Its twenty songs are based on Estonian folklore but Kreutzwald imposed upon them a biography to combine different episodes into a coherent narrative. He translated the legends about Kalevipoeg from prose to verse and historicized the hero (originally a giant of nature) by depicting him as a thirteenth-century Estonian king fighting against the German crusaders. Kalevipoeg also makes two trips to hell, where he defeats and chains the Devil. He thus assumes the role of Christ, who, according to apocryphal writings, also descended to the inferno and chained Satan. Kreutzwald established his creative control over the diverse folkloric and literary sources of the epic by introducing a monological narrative voice. This monological voice and its distinctive style mark the Kalevipoeg’s major differences with respect to the Finnish Kalevala. The strong narratorial position brings Kalevipoeg closer to literature than Kalevala, whose composer Elias Lönnrot remained in the background, giving the work the character of a “folkloric” epic. The Estonian and Finnish epics had an impact on Andrejs Pumpurs’s Latvian epic Lāčplēsis (The Bear Slayer; 1888), which blends Latvian folktales, legends, wedding songs, and other forms of folklore into a heroic narrative that was to provide an ideological function for nationalism. Pumpurs sought to express his nation’s aspirations to rid itself of the Baltic German landlords who dominated Latvia and regarded its people as lacking authentic culture (Kruks 5). Romantic visions of an ancient independent Estonia and of Kalevipoeg as a national hero became important at the end of the nineteenth century, when ideas about the Estonian nation gained currency. The epic started to function as a nation-building force, acquiring the status of the most valuable book of Estonian literature, next to the Bible. This is largely due to Faehlmann’s and Kreutzwald’s romantic desire to fashion a pantheon of gods in Estonian national mythology modeled after the classical myths. Nineteenth-century Estonian folk religion synthesized the basic doctrines of Christianity with a belief in the spirits of nature and it posited close connections between the living and the dead. The new literary myths focused, however, on the primordial time of creation and imagined heroic life in ancient, pre-Christian Estonia. Knowledge about the new national pantheon spread through popular literature, which influenced oral traditions and which is preserved in the collections of the Estonian Folklore Archives. By the end of the nineteenth century, orality and literacy were intertwined in Estonia to such an extent that folklore could no longer be conceptualized as a purely oral heritage, intact and separate from the printed word. The national mythology provided Estonians with an imagined heritage that laid the nation’s foundation.

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From Oral to Written Folklore Large-scale collection and written documentation of Estonian folklore started in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1888, pastor Dr. Jakob Hurt appealed to the readers of Estonian newspapers to write down the folklore of their region. This was the age of social modernization, marked by urbanization, industrialization, commercial revolution, and the rise of capitalism — all of which transformed peasant culture. The spread of education, belief in progress, science, and civilization changed the mentality of the rural and urban population. As in other European countries, the birth of folkloristics in Estonia was connected to permanent changes in rural society; the decline of the traditional peasant world became idealized as the foundation of the emerging nation. Folklore collection had to save it from oblivion and store it as a resource for the culture of the future. Hurt produced a folklore collection consisting of 162 manuscript volumes (about 122,000 pages). He introduced the principles of philological accuracy and laid the foundations for a scholarly analysis of Estonian folklore by stressing that folklore should be recorded without any alterations as to dialect and contents. Of his projected large series, the “Monumenta Estoniae Antiquae,” he could publish, due to financial difficulties, only two volumes of folksongs from the parishes Põlva and Kolga-Jaani, titled Vana kannel (The Old Harp). The “Monumenta” series was resumed, however, in the twentieth century, and now includes also proverbs, riddles, and legends, as well as folksongs. The scholarly editions found very few readers, but were complemented since the end of the nineteenth century with hundreds of cheap popular editions of Estonian folklore. They had a wide distribution and shaped popular knowledge about folklore as an ancestral heritage. Estonian Folkloristics during the First Period of Independence The University of Tartu went through substantial changes after Estonia achieved independence in 1918. The language of teaching became Estonian, and several new chairs, including one for Estonian and Comparative Folklore, were founded. The first professor of folklore, Walter Anderson, taught at Tartu between 1919 and 1939 and moved subsequently to Königsberg and Kiel. Under his leadership the philological approach of working with texts in archives had come to dominate Estonian folkloristics. Anderson’s interests ranged from the comparative study of fairy tales to the poetics of Estonian folk songs, from children’s traditions to theoretical issues in folklore. Estonian folkloristics was influenced by the historic-geographic method, known also as the Finnish method. Anderson, one of its exponents and developers, continued to exert authority beyond the historical period of his activity. In 1927, the Estonian Folklore Archives were founded in Tartu as part of the Estonian National Museum. The latter had been established in 1909 in order to collect objects of peasant culture. Systematizing folkloric items and preparing their publication became one of the central aims of folklore scholarship. To put some order in the textual jumble of thousands of recordings, the diversity of folklore was reduced to sets of tales and songs — to types that appear in many versions. Thus, archival and editorial needs dictated typological approaches to folklore. Since the dominant historic-geographic school studied the spread of folklore in time and space, the regional aspects of Estonian folklore were more widely discussed than its social and cultural

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contexts, which were regarded as mere background information to the folklore manuscripts (see Kuutma and Jaago). The Decades of Soviet Occupation, 1945–1991: Preservation and National Pursuits Some folklorists left Estonia during World War II in order to escape Communist terror, while others were arrested by the Soviets. Maintaining the huge folklore archives and continuing the discipline under the new ideological conditions became important tasks for those who were able to keep on working. The Estonian Folklore Archives became the Department of Folklore within the Fr. R. Kreutzwald Literary Museum, which indicated a shift towards the institutional domination of literature studies. At Tartu University too, folklore studies were incorporated in the literature program in order to follow the Soviet system of higher education, which was standardized all over the USSR. Nevertheless, it was possible to specialize in Estonian folklore. Anderson, who had left for Germany, remained a classic of folkloristics in Estonia, whereas folklore teaching was taken over by his pupil and successor Eduard Laugaste. The latter studied Estonian folk songs and the history of folklore studies; he published legends about giants and mythical heroes. The Marxist evolutionary approach interpreted folklore as a typical manifestation of peasant culture and a historical prelude to literature. The romantic notion that folklore was a vanishing remnant of the past seemed more topical than ever, since the official ideology claimed that society was rapidly changing during the revolutionary turn from Capitalism to Communism. Thus, fieldwork to Estonian parishes was organized annually in order to produce new recordings of old songs and tales. But according to the official view, popular culture was not dying out but rather thriving as a result of revolutionary changes in society; folklorists were expected to document these new forms of Socialist folklore. In 1947, an Estonian Language and Literature Institute was founded in Tallinn as part of the Soviet Estonian Academy of Sciences. Marxist ideology postulated the importance of studying the culture of the working people and thus the new institute included a Department of Folklore — the third research center in Estonia. Theoretically and methodologically, the geographic-historical and comparative school dominated; the systematization of the increasing folklore collections and the preparation of scholarly publications of folklore manuscripts remained the main task. As communist ideology suppressed the small national cultures, and intense Russification restricted the uses of Estonian language, folklore and folkloristics maintained their functions as upholders of national identity and hence were potentially dangerous for the Communist Party. Several song and dance ensembles emerged that played traditional music and performed folklore on stage to represent the “old” Estonian heritage. The Post-1991 Years: Towards a New Understanding of Folklore Estonia regained her independence in 1991 and carried out several reforms. In 1993, the chair of Estonian and Comparative Folklore became an independent institution at the University of Tartu, offering an academic program all the way to the PhD. Lecture courses and seminars cover now the

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theory and history of folkloristics, poetics and typology of folk songs, the minor genres such as proverbs and riddles, folk tales and legends, contemporary folklore, family traditions, and popular religion and customs. Fieldwork, as part of the academic training, teaches students how to create material for research by conducting interviews and observing folklore in its social contexts. Today, most Estonian professional folklorists work at the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu: either in the Department of Folkloristics or in the Estonian Folklore Archives. A few folklorists are employed by the Department of Literature and Folklore at the University of Tartu. In 1996, two online journals were founded at the Estonian Literary Museum: “Folklore: An Electronic Journal of Folklore” (in English) and Mäetagused (in Estonian). The same year, the university started to publish the series “Studies in Folklore and Popular Religion,” which was in 2003 renamed as “Studies in Folk Culture” in order to broaden its scope and include works by ethnologists. The Estonian Folklore Archives contain today more than 1,300,000 manuscript pages (including Hurt’s collections and other older ones), not only in Estonian but also in Latvian, Lithuanian, German, Russian, Yiddish, Roma, and some other languages. While the digitalization of the collections has started, systematizing data and preparing text publications are still among the priorities of folklorists. Traditionally, most studies had focused on the spread of the oral traditions in the country-side, but today urban folklore is also recorded. The Estonian Folklore Archives organize fieldwork every year; in recent years expeditions have been organized even to the Estonian settlements in Siberia. Historically (since the times of Baltic-German Estophiles) Estonian folkloristics has been connected with the research traditions of Germany and Finland. More recently, contacts with other Western countries have developed, especially with the Nordic countries and the USA. Estonian folklore, once interpreted as a prelude to written literature and a vestige of ancient times, is today considered as part of those cultural and social processes within which its meanings are embedded. In contemporary scholarship, Estonian folklore and literature are seen as two distinct fields of research and forms of discourse that overlap to some extent and are in intertextual relation with each other. Folklore is no longer understood as a corpus of old texts hidden in the archives, published in books, or still remembered by a few elderly people. It is seen as a dynamic cultural process supported by tradition but involving creativity. It has not disappeared with the emergence of written literature, but thrives in contemporary urban culture, including mass media, internet, and film, and in institutional forms such as schools, congregations of churches, and professional circles. Just as in former times, folklore also spreads through face-to-face communication in small groups.

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Mythologizing Contemporary Baltic Consciousness Endre Bojtár The word “Baltic” has four, sometimes inseparable meanings: (1) in a geographical sense a person who lives on the shore of the Baltic Sea; (2) in a political sense, a citizen of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania; (3) in a linguistic-philological sense it refers only to Latvians and Lithuanians, as well as to several now extinct and assimilated languages and dialects (above all Prussian, which has some written legacy); and (4) in an ethnic sense it may mean any of the three above, depending on the context. The strict philological sense, which I shall use, excludes Estonian, because it belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, whereas Latvian and Lithuanian constitute a separate, and actually the most archaic, branch of the surviving Indo-European language family. This is especially true of Lithuanian, though it may seem to the uninitiated as a Slavic language with Latin suffixes. Prussian, undoubtedly the most archaic language, has a grammatical framework similar to that of Sanskrit (we have of Prussian a few fragments and about 2300 words altogether at our disposal, but unfortunately no complete paradigm of conjugation or declension). That Latvian and Lithuanian should be the closest surviving tongues of the original proto-Indo-European is most probably due to their historical isolation from the rest of Europe in the geographical sense. Their development without alien linguistic influences clearly proves that the Baltic people used to be together with the ancestors of the Latins, Aryans, Greeks, Slavs, Germans, and others in the so-called Indo-European Homeland. As to where that homeland was, how long it lasted, and when it broke up, there are many theories in circulation. At one point the Balts seceded from the Indo-European community and lived together (for a disputed period, in a disputed region). Later the Western Balts, the ancestors of the Prussians, seceded from that tribe, and only the Eastern Balts, the ancestors of the Latvians and Lithuanians remained together. The ancestors of the Western Balts left the rest around 1,000 B.C. (around 500 B.C. according to others). We know that they populated from that time on the area of present-day Kaliningrad and the area south of it. The Eastern Balts started to occupy their present-day homeland in the sixth and seventh century, and the two languages parted around the ninth. The Eastern and Western Baltic tribes never formed a common Baltic union again, and their histories ran separate courses though they were neighbors. Common Baltic history came to an end around 1,000–500 B.C. The Prussians became extinct or assimilated, leaving, until 1947, only their name to the lands they had once inhabited. From the fourteenth century onward, “Prussian” denoted German-speaking Germans, Poles, and a diminishing number of Baltic Prussian peasants that inhabited Prussland-Preussen. In the sixteenth century, the conflict between Poland and the Ordenstaat (the state of the Order of the Teutonic Knights) led to the formation of the first Lutheran state, the Prussian Grand Duchy (Herzogtum Preussen), which, as a guardian of the Protestant spirit, was keen to provide the remaining Prussians with a Script in their own language. Thus German priests translated and published three editions of Luther’s catechism in Prussian. This, and two slim, handwritten volumes of a German-Prussian dictionary form the core of Prussian written records.

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These efforts could not prevent the disappearance of the Prussian people by the end of the seventeenth century. The Schwertbrüder (Brothers of the Sword; later renamed the Livonian Order) conquered the later Latvia and Estonia. They colonized, baptized, and gradually enserfed the indigenous population, reducing their identity to an ethnic one, which remained politically dormant until the late-nineteenth century. The native tribes were absorbed into the social and cultural structure of Western Christendom in the High Middle Ages before they could develop their own political system. But even this ethnic identity is highly questionable, for the Lettons, Kurs, Latgals, Zemgals, Sels, the Finnic Livs, and other Latvian tribes evolved into a separate nation under German rule in the seventeenth century. The term “Latvian” (latvis) was established then to distinguish the Latvian speaking population from the other Livonians, who were called Undeutsch (not-German) until the twentieth century. The notion of “Latvia” came about even later, at the end of the nineteenth century. The Latvians followed their German rulers and also converted to Lutheranism in the sixteenth century. Only the Lithuanians succeeded in establishing a viable state of their own in the Middle Ages. A native chief, Mindaugas, converted to Latin Christianity in mid-thirteenth century and was crowned King with papal authorization, but when he was killed by political opponents the Lithuanians returned to the pagan customs of their ancestors. During the fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Europe’s last pagan state, resisted the assaults of the Teutonic Order and even expanded eastward when the Tatars receded. With the absorption of considerable East-Slav territory, Lithuania became a major power in East Europe. The extensive state, whose rulers and ethnic core remained pagan, became a cultural battleground between Latin influences and the Orthodoxy of the incorporated East Slav population. The conflict was resolved in 1386, when Grand Duke Jogaila (in Polish Jagiełło), threatened by the Teutonic Knights in the West and Muscovite power in the East, entered into a dynastic union with Poland by marrying Jadwyga, the crown princess of Poland, and agreed to baptize his pagan Lithuanian subjects. Lithuania’s personal union with Poland, never clearly defined politically, functioned as long as Jogaila ruled Poland as Władysław II, and his cousin, the Grand Duke Vytautas, ruled Lithuania, which was then the biggest empire of Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the outskirts of Moscow to Poland. Balys Sruoga’s verse drama Milžino paunksmė (The Shade of the Giant; 1932) commemorates Vytautas at the five-hundredth anniversary of his death (1430) as a reflective “giant” with a philosophical disposition. The Union of Lublin regularized in 1569 the Polish-Lithuanian personal union into a formal constitutional arrangement, turning the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom into a new Commonwealth structure, the Rzeczpospolita, with a joint sovereign and legislature. It came to an end in 1795 with the partition that almost completely subjugated Lithuania and the Latvian territories to Russian rule. When the independent Lithuanian and Latvian republics were established in 1918, the national identity of Latvians and Lithuanians emerged. At the time of their conversion to Christianity, the Latvians were conquered by the Order of Knights and could not establish themselves as a legitimate and separate nation. The first, sixteenth-century Latvian texts were written by German priests, and until the second half of the nineteenth century almost all Latvian texts were written or translated by German authors: a German priest, Ernst Glück, translated the bible (1685, 1689), while another one, Gotthardus Fridericus Stenders [Old Stenders], is regarded as the founder of Latvian literature in the late-eighteenth

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century. A Latvian identity emerged only after the bulk of Latvian peasants had received elementary education. A repeated and late conversion to Christianity was the main obstacle to the development of a Lithuanian national identity based on a vernacular written culture. It could have emerged in midthirteenth century when Mindaugas was converted to Christianity, but the Lithuanians failed to seize the opportunity. Since the size of their tribal society and organization required no written culture, they were unable to rule a growing territory inhabited mainly by non-Lithuanian Christians. This written culture could have been other than Lithuanian. After all, almost all the Western texts were written in Latin until the twelfth century and Latin was universally equated with literacy then. Had the late baptism of Mindaugas lasted, Lithuanian culture could have followed France, Bohemia, Poland, or Hungary, and the first Lithuanian texts could have been born in the shadow of a Latin literacy. By the time of Lithuania’s second Christianization, the country was a multi-ethnic empire with 9 million inhabitants, of whom 8 million were orthodox Eastern Slavs speaking a language of their own, a version of Chancellery Slavonic similar to modern White Russian, which became the official Lithuanian language. The original meaning of Lithuanian, meaning citizens of Lithuania speaking the Lithuanian language, had dissolved into a broader notion denoting people who lived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. All the Polish, Lithuanian, White Russian, and Russian inhabitants of Lithuania, as well as their languages, were unanimously called Lithuanian by foreigners. Following the union of Poland and Lithuania and the gradual integration of the Eastern Slavonic territories into the Muscovite Empire, the East-Slavonic dialect became superfluous and was replaced by Polish. It was used by a largely Polonized Lithuanian nobility that was culturally indistinguishable from its Polish counterpart. As in Latvia, the peasants were Christianized by force and enserfed to a nobility that could not speak their language. Lithuanian literacy emerged only in the sixteenth century, and national consciousness only in the early nineteenth. Even then it was weakened by an interesting historical phenomenon, the total absence of the present. The Lithuanians had a heroic past and a blurred vision of the future (involving far-fetched dreams of radical freedom-fighters demanding no more than autonomy within the Russian Empire), but they fought against Russian oppression in order to restore a Polish statehood — even though Poland was no political entity! The Balts assumed thus very different roles on the stage of European history: the Prussians left only their names to serve as a caption for a later German drama, whereas the Latvians were reduced in that play to mere silent extras. From the thirteenth century onward only the Lithuanians were given serious roles, for two-hundred years even the lead role — though their words had to be dubbed since written Lithuanian culture emerged later. When in 1569, and later in 1795, new plays were staged, their part also diminished and they finally had to serve as extras, just like the Latvians. In the decades around 1900, just when the Latvian and Lithuanian political nations were emerging, there was in this sense virtually no difference between the two nations. We need not follow Miroslav Hroch, who claims in Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe that the Lithuanian and Latvian national developments differed. The three phases of the national movement he identifies (scholarly interest, patriotic agitation, rise of a mass national movement) occurred in Lithuania and Latvia at the same time and in the same fashion, reaffirming Ernest Gellner’s thesis that the nation is the product of nationalism.

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Genuine national consciousness emerged in these countries after 1918, but was suppressed during the Soviet regime until independence was regained in 1989–90. Building a national consciousness is linked to creating a sense of historical continuity, since ethnicity in the broader sense is just that sense of belonging to a particular historical community. The Balts had at their disposal one main element of historical continuity: their archaic languages. For this reason, pursuing Baltic studies during the Soviet era smelled of dissent. In the 1970s, the rector of the Vilnius Pedagogical College denounced a lecturer of historical linguistics for claiming that the Russian language had lost the Indo-European “s” suffix while the Lithuanian had preserved it. Such a scandal could not happen to a great language like Russian, not even thousands of years ago. Even nowadays the Balts don’t take their language lightly. In Latvia, misplaced accents and bad grammar in publications can lead to fines from the state language department. But continuity of language is far from enough to create a national consciousness. The main question is whether the ancient common language and its continuity through present-day Lithuanian and Latvian suffice to presume the continuity and survival of other language-related spheres of consciousness. Could this common Baltic language keep together all spheres of consciousness for a thousand years, if the community fell to pieces long ago? Do all language families have their branch mythology and folklore? Are there Finno-Ugric, Roman, Slavic, German mythologies and folklores? Of the two possible answers, the followers of the historical method, who use authentic sources, choose the negative one. Latvian and Lithuanian folklore — hundreds of thousands of lyric songs, dainas, recorded in the nineteenth century — provides no information on Baltic prehistory. The same goes for mythology, which designates on the one hand a body of myths, on the other a sum of materials dealing with those myths. In the first sense Baltic mythology hardly exists: we have one genuine pagan God, the Lithuanian Perkūnas (the Latvian Pērkons), the God of thunder, some words from a pagan cult, and one single Lithuanian mythological narrative in Russian. But in the second sense of the word, the works of mythologists reveal a Baltic Olympus swarming with gods. In Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev’s fascinating The Myths of the World’s Nations, Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov give 5 Latvian, 13 Lithuanian, 18 Prussian and 7 Baltic entries for separate Gods, quite apart from the smaller mythological figures. Approximately the same gods appear in Astrīda Iltnere’s Latvian mythological encyclopedia. This abundance of gods is created by scholars of the “ethnographic method” (as Henryk Łowmiański put it in Zagadnienie politeizmu słowiańskiego, 661), who classify the various folklores and mythologies by language families. In order to fabricate ancient folklore and mythology you only have to identify them with language and then use them as each other’s sources. Since the Baltic languages of the Indo-European language group existed for 4,000 years, the followers of the ethnographic method claim that Baltic mythology is just as old. Maria Gimbutienė, one of the leading Lithuanian-American “myth archaeologists,” holds that “some elements of the myths preserved in the folksongs date back as far as 6,000 years” (“Popularizations” 204). As evidence for these claims, she cites anything committed to paper by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century chroniclers, who, involved as they were in fights between Polish Catholicism, German Protestantism, and Slavonic Orthodoxy, had very different ideological convictions. Above all, she counts as evidence what nineteenth-century romantic authors invented. This approach then takes at face value information synthesized and presented only and exclusively

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by foreigners: by Jan Długosz, the father of Polish historiography, and Aenas Silvius Piccolomini, a German who became Pope Pius II in the fifteenth century; by the Polish Maciej Stryjkowski, the author of the most comprehensive Lithuanian chronicle at the end of the sixteenth century; by (Old) Stenders, the German priest who created Latvian mythology out of the blue in the second half of the eighteenth century; by the Polish Teodor Narbutt, who devoted the first book of his gigantic nine-volume history of the Lithuanian nation exclusively to Baltic mythology. None of these spoke Baltic. All they did was to translate and mutilate names from Greek and Roman mythology, or, even worse, to present pure fantasy. In twentieth century Latvia and Lithuania national consciousness absorbed this vast material without critical scrutiny and has become saturated with folklore and mythology. Mythological figures fill not only books but also everyday life, from street names to names of consumer products. A strange historical continuity has thereby been constructed: national consciousness in the Baltic nations seems to have direct links to prehistory instead of problematizing its continuity with the past, as is the case in German history between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This lends an air of fusty conservatism to present-day Latvian and Lithuanian public and intellectual life. In Latvia and Lithuania, then, national consciousness is profoundly “mythologized,” in part because it had only language as building material in reconstructing tradition and continuity. The other reason is that modernization in Lithuania and, to a lesser extent in Latvia, was carried out by the Soviet system. The Bolsheviks, while modernizing material life, pushed the intellectuals, the creators of culture towards conservativism. Modern meant Soviet, and in the eyes of patriots (and every decent person was a patriot) ancient rural society seemed an ideal. In the late sixties and early seventies, the Lithuanian opposition expressed its anti-Soviet sentiments in three trends. The first, liberal-cosmopolitan one was represented by the individual stance of the poet Tomas Venclova (a contributor to this literary history), who, expelled from Lithuania in 1976, teaches today at Yale University. The second was represented by an intellectually less potent Catholic Church. The third one was the Ramuva Society, which existed for a few years after 1969 and assembled some of the best brains of the country. Its name originated from a fourteenth-century chronicle and allegedly referred to a pagan Prussian sanctuary. The Ramuva members attempted to resurrect a pagan past: they organized ethnographic expeditions to the countryside, formed small folk-dance groups, sang dainas, and so on and so forth. Later on, during the Brezhnev years of stagnation, the Ramuva group dissolved, partly by itself partly through KGB intervention. After independence, the lives of most former Ramuva members took interesting turns, following totally different paths. Some of them, however, tried to capitalize on the name and the one-time program of the Society to further their own particular political interests. They tried to register as a pagan church in order to get state subsidies, but were turned down by the socialist government in August 1996. Should they ever succeed, they will only come second: in the summer of 1996, the Latvian parliament recognized the pagan Latvian church as an official religion — a religion that has never existed before. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only recognized pre-Christian pagan church in Europe. In the last five-six years the situation has apparently been changing. Now that Latvia and Lithuania have joined the European Union it makes less and less sense to fashion pre-history and mythology as a national source. The social question is turning into a purely scholarly one.

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National and International Traits in the Latvian Trickster Velns Karl E. Jirgens Velns, the Latvian Devil/Trickster frequently appears in folk-tales and the dainas, the traditional Latvian folk-songs. The latter, approximately one-and-a half million in total, offer an on-going narrative chronicle of gods and goddesses and an integrated system of cultural ways and spiritual values. At the turn of the nineteenth century, they were collected by Krišjānis Barons (Latvju Dainas). The Tales of the Velns are included in the Latviešu Tautas Pasakas Izlase (Latvian FolkTale Reader; 1956), edited by A. Alksnites et al., and Latviešu Tautas Pasakas, Brīnumu Pasakas (Latvian Folk Tales and Tales of Wonder; 1966), edited by Kārlis Arājs. Ojārs Jēgens’s collection from 1953 contains exclusively stories about the Velns/Devil. He also appears in Anna Brigadere’s folk-tale plays, Kārlis Krauze’s folk tale about the wise servant and the Devil (1927), and many other works. Some tales show the importance of self-control and wit in the face of adversity during Latvia’s occupation by foreign powers; tales of the Velns and his devilish mother were also used as satiric attacks against foreign landlords. The protagonist’s soul is seldom contested in these tales, for sin or original sin play no role in the dainas and Latvian folk-tales about the Velns. Other stories are concerned with breaking a pact of servitude and achieving liberation, usually by defeating the Velns by outwitting or killing him and his family. The action generally features an orphan, a youngest son, a gypsy-like traveler, or some other impoverished individual who must “go to the Devil” for employment. Tadeuš Puisans in “Ko mums stāsta tautas pasaku velns?” (What Do Tales of the Devil Tell Us?) and Varian Vīķe-Freiberga in Dzintara Kalna: Apceres par Latviešu Tautasdziesmām (On Amber Mountain: Essays on Latvian Folk Songs) have shown that the preChristian Latvian cosmologies and world-views are based on the cycles of nature. The Velns’s self-centered and rapacious behavior is often at odds with the natural flux. He can be the source of unexpected luck or gain, but only for those who can keep their wits and exercise self-control: only those who overcome themselves and their own individual weaknesses can win. Through calm, a fortunate few can beat the Devil at his own game. These tales become then object lessons, a form of cultural education through wit or laughter. In versions that were created during Germany’s occupation of Latvia, some opponents to the Velns resemble the Germanic “Foolish Hans,” but the Velns is more often overcome by protagonists who have received knowledge or empowerment through some act of kindness, typically granted through a mystic enabler figure. The recitation of these folk-stories and songs became a ritual by which the oppressed could explain or ease their humiliation at the hand of oppressive colonists. The stories suggest that an individual could overcome through diligence all adversity, even the Velns himself. Often relying on language-play, puns, jokes, and other forms of linguistic humor, these tales represent dramas in which wit is a weapon. In the Latvian tradition, Velns stories take place in agrarian contexts and they typically address a mercantile system featuring overlord and underdog. They invert the status quo of the hierarchical feudal order in order to address social injustice within a fictive context. Jung’s notion of the Devil as a psychologem or archetypal manifestation of the “shadow” or the instinctive and unmitigated part of the psyche is relevant here. As Jung notes, the trickster “is

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obviously a ‘psychologem,’ an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level” (“On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure” 200). From a psychoanalytical perspective, the misremembering, slips of the tongue, and faux pas committed by the Velns reveal the unconscious desires of the “id” (Freud), the “shadow” (Jung), or the “imaginary” (Lacan). Such primal or unconscious desires typically work through language. Indeed, Latvian tales about the Velns often turn on linguistic twists and polysemic significations. From both psychological and mythological perspectives, encounters with the Velns are indirectly encounters with one’s own dark-side or “shadow.” The Velns, the Latvian Devil cum Trickster, can be thought of as poised at the crossroads of the secular and the spiritual. He has some of the features of a pagan deity, of an animal, a human being, a hero, and a buffoon; he serves both good and evil, and functions as denier and affirmer, destroyer and creator. For example, the water that collects in the footsteps of the Velns is said to have healing properties. The Velns not only tricks others but often gets tricked, and this may be largely because of his failure to recognize the collective consciousness and the socializing functions of taboos and protocol. A typical Latvian example is the tale “Ražas Dalīšana” (Dividing the Harvest; Jēgens 5–6 ), a story that appears in several versions but generally features a good farmer, or even God himself, and the Velns, who one day shares the plowing of a piece of land in order to plant potatoes. An abundance of healthy green leaves soon appears above ground, and when the question of dividing the harvest is raised the Velns greedily requests the green and waxing top half for himself. “As you wish,” replies the Lord. The Velns congratulates himself on what he believes to be a clever deal until he realizes that the worth of a potato lies underground. So, when it comes to the next harvest the Velns claims the “bottom half” for himself and leaves the top to the Lord. But the Lord planted wheat this time, and the Velns becomes, once more, his own dupe. In another folk-tale he agrees that he should get the horns, hoofs, and offal of a slaughtered bull, while the protagonist collects the hide, meat, and organs. In general, the Velns can be thought of as possessing a double character: he is enabler and adversary, God and Satan, Heracles and Hermes, Apollo and Dionysius, Prometheus and Epimetheus, Thor and Loki, Indra and Vritra. The Velns possesses neither social nor moral values, and so is subject to his own desires and appetites, the site from which unsocialized desire emanates. While injustice is abolished by eliminating ambivalence in the Book of Job or Plato’s Republic, the Velns or Trickster perpetuates ambivalent postures; the ambivalence persists within the dyads of the Indo-European Latvian tradition, as well as in the Christian tradition, where God and Devil are antinomian elements conjoined within a ritual based on the cycles of nature. Some similarities exist between the Latvian dyad Velns (Devil) / Dievs (God) and the Vedic demon-serpent Vritra who battles the benevolent god Indra. The creative and destructive facets of the Velns survive from a pre-Christian Latvian culture. The Velns of the pre-Christian Latvian tales is a self-serving petty-demon or Trickster in pursuit of instant self-gratification. His failure to comprehend the mores of society reveals, however, cultural values. By projecting material desires against a backdrop of spiritual values, folk-stories and folk-songs about the Velns appeal to a communal social consciousness as well as to the personal ethos of the listener. Paul Radin, who has written extensively on North American aboriginal Trickster-figures, has suggested in his “Prefatory Note” to The Trickster that from an allegorical perspective Trickster figures of the world can be thought of as a speculum mentis, a hypothetical

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situation of a human experience thrust into an alien environment struggling to gain understanding in order to become socialized (xxiv). Some North American aboriginal Trickster-figures (e.g., Wadjunkaga, Coyote, Weeseegajak, Nanaboujou, and Iktomikto) resemble each other, but the similarities are accompanied by differences. Lewis Hyde has pursued these comparisons further in Trickster Makes This World. The Baltic Velns is distinct, for he is not to be underestimated and commands respect as an occasionally absurd, but sometimes lethal opponent. Robert Graves’s mythological investigations help identify cross-cultural counterparts to the Latvian Velns in Hermes and Loki. In Nordic myths, Loki was originally both helpful and destructive, and primarily perceived as a God of mischief. He used specious arguments and deceptive promises in order to beguile others, for instance Thor, the God of Thunder, whom he disarmed and delivered into the hands of his enemy, the giant Geirröd. Loki’s adventures were recorded by the skalds (keepers of the myths), who wrote poetry in Scandinavia during the ninth and tenth centuries. He was first conceived of as a fire-demon and is depicted as a highly erotic figure with numerous affairs. Similarly, the Latvian Velns is often a rapacious figure who steals away women, often daughters of some Lord or King, or even the Sun itself. The Velns is an “earth diver,” an elemental chthonic figure also associated with fire and water, whereas his adversaries, Dievs or God and Perkons (Thunder), relate to personifications of the Sky, Sun, Moon, and Lightning. With the arrival of Christianity, Loki emerged as a kind of superior demon, whose legend fused a pagan Devil figure with the Christian concept of Satan. The Latvian Velns figures in the surviving pagan stories of what was Europe’s last pagan culture. He resembles Hermes (or Mercury), who is also associated with fertility and sexuality through phallic snake imagery. These cross-cultural connections have been explored by a number of writers. According to Graves, Mercury is associated with the little finger in chiromancy (palm reading); furthermore, the fore-finger and ear-finger or little finger held up together signify the “Devil’s blessing,” a gesture still used by Frisian Islanders as an invocation to the “Horned God” of the witches, with his lucky right horn and his unlucky left expressing his powers for good and evil” (Goddess 197). Marija Gimbutas/Gimbutienė has shown that the Latvian and Lithuanian Velns/Velinas resemble Hermes/Mercury (Language of the Goddess). According to Stanley Diamond, the dyad of good and evil suggested by the horns is akin to the dyad of God and Satan in the Book of Job (Radin xi). But the dyad is fused in the Velns into a single being that functions as both creator and destroyer without shifting his shape. Karl (Károly) Kerényi suggests that the Trickster also shares affinities with Prometheus, whose cunning over-reaches itself and is punished by the gods. His imprudence is personified by his foolish brother, Epimetheus (Radin 181). The Velns serves Promethean functions by offering people useful practices and tools, such as animal husbandry, the applications of fire, as well as the scythe and sickle. In some Lithuanian tales the Velinas captures and locks up underground the Sun’s daughter (see Beldava). But the Lithuanian Velinas is only capable of knowing what people say aloud, not what they think, for he does not possess divine omniscience (Greimas 114). Roman Jakobson points out that the Slavic agrarian deity Velos or Veles is a rustic and mischievous roustabout wandering the farmlands notably where animal husbandry is practiced. The Latvian word Velns reveals interesting affinities with the words vēlēt (wish) and veļ (spirit), suggesting desire and other-worldliness. Similar affinities are also evident in the Lithuanian Velinas. Etymology also suggests connections to the Nordic Valhalla which in the Old Norse

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refers to the hall of the slain. However, the activities of the Velns in Latvian tales do not explicitly suggest existence beyond the physical world.

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The Ideal of Folk Culture in the Literature of the Czech National Rebirth Tamás Berkes The cultivation of folklore, the search for the naïve, for the primordial ancestors represented a sentimental undercurrent in the Enlightenment; Rousseau’s vision of a natural man anticipates later admirations of folk culture. Herder, whose notion of national culture was based on popular culture and folklore, found the ancient lost values among the innocent village folk. As a cultural movement, literary folklore replaced ancient mythology with popular traditions, for, so it claimed, traces of the human virtues may be found in the autochthon culture of poetry, mythology, and folk songs. Protection and development of a national character led Herder from his earlier interest in antiquity to his later collection of folk songs and ballads. Romanticism did not just oppose the Enlightenment; it also continued it by various means. East-Central European pre-Romanticism was embedded within the Age of Enlightenment because it incorporated not only those trends that moved away from Classicism but also those that markedly opposed it: we may regard the “new sensitivity” of Ossianism (related to sensualist philosophy) and the Sturm und Drang period of the young Goethe and Schiller as expressions of sentimentalism. However, German culture considerably shifted its ideals during the Napoleonic wars: in opposition to the French national ideal of a single and indivisible political state it developed a new linguistic-cultural definition of nationhood. The later Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, its best-known advocates, separated the sense of national belonging from the — politically active and conscious — social ideals of the individual. They perceived nationhood as an organic whole, a collective personality, and replaced “Nation” with “Volk.” Nations existing as “Volk” possessed, according to their notion, inalienable intrinsic values, all with their own, specific worth. This is what they sought in language, folk culture, folklore-based customs, and, last but not least, in the idealized distant past that had not yet been spoiled by civilization and liberal individualism. In East-Central Europe, early-nineteenth-century Romanticism claimed folk attributes as its foundation and this may be seen as a continuation of the pre-Romanticism within the Enlightenment, with the addition of romantic traits and an ethnically based national ideology. This comprehensive literary and cultural trend should not, however, be confused with the region’s true Romanticism, which emerged in the 1830s, developing for a while parallel to pre-Romanticism. Eastern-European pre-Romanticism did not take over the poetic practices of the later German romantics, only their cultural anthropology, in which “individualization” related primarily to the ethnic group rather than to the individual person. Following Herder, every ethnic group was regarded as an individual, a collective personality endowed with a totally unique culture, based on

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the continuity or eternal essence of the national character. Herder’s reception in East-Central Europe served to strengthen further the collective over its individual counterpart, reducing thus the freedom of the individual while invoking the actual or presumed interests of the Nation. Theories of genius, subjectivism, deep internal conflicts, and the tragic despair of rebellious characters have no place in this ideology. East-Central European pre-Romanticism does not turn towards the inner self but draws stimulus from the poetic riches of peoples who have preserved archaic conditions. This explains why the naïve character and emotional rebellion of East-Central European pre-Romanticism is a stylistic rhetoric that evades the real conflicts and the risks of the creative imagination, eschewing the tragedy that stems from the full-scale conflict of values. It is rather pessimistic and searches for solutions and life strategies characterized by compromise.

The Czech Rebirth The half-century prior to the social landslide of 1848 holds a special significance for the self-image of modern Czech culture, and for transmitting part of the cultural tradition that continues to this day. The literary culture of the Czech Rebirth (obrození) has been etched deep into the national consciousness because of its importance and intellectual quality, and cultural posterity has continued to deepen and mystify its ideology. The Czech scholarship that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century was a subculture of the slowly developing intellectual elite, which the institutions of the national awakening (the National Museum, the Matice, the Church, various journals, schools, etc.) conveyed to society, albeit well-filtered. National awakening and growing self-consciousness were the key features of the belles-lettres. The majority of the Czech intellectual elite received a German upbringing and imbibed German culture: choosing a Czech identity was an individual and far from obvious decision. Since the elite’s concept of the Nation was based on a linguistic conception inspired by German Romanticism, the choice was a challenge to tradition. The leaders of the nationalist movement stayed away from the provincial patriotism of society at large, and separated the concept of the nation from that of the historical Czech State. Saddled with a sense of their weakness, they subordinated their own interests to the interests of the Nation. This limitation on identity brought about a rift in the newly emerging Czech culture. Staunchly rejecting the cult of the free romantic character, the leaders of the nationalist movement wanted to serve the building of Czech culture. The new direction that emerged after the first, enlightened generation of national awakeners, was personified by the linguist Josef Jakub Jungmann. His work embodied a shift in Czech culture towards a linguistic-national perception that derived from folk roots. In the 1820s, Jan Kollár’s lyrical pan-Slavism, František Ladislav Čelakovský’s anthology of folk poetry, and Václav Hanka’s manuscript forgeries all served as inspiring models for the maturing Czech literary culture. Scholars did not only search for legitimate documents in “ancient relics,” they also attempted to ascertain the original character of Czech “folk culture” from literary mystifications. The concept of “folk culture” (lidovost) is so intertwined with both the real and mystified elements of Czech Rebirth, that in the 1950s — when the presumed “main thread” of Czech culture was re-canonized — this idea became the motto of the nationalistically motivated communist interpretation of the

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past advocated by Zdeněk Nejedlý. Nejedlý’s theories were explained in professional terminology by two of the era’s greatest literary experts, Jan Mukařovský and Felix Vodička (Mukařovský, “Lidovost” 193–97). Nejedlý’s ideological construction had, of course, its own social-historical background. Its Achilles heel, which Czech scholars were unwilling to admit for a long time, was that the ethnically mixed society of the countries belonging to the Czech Crown had kept their provincial patriotic consciousness until the middle of the nineteenth century, which provided an integrative force even when linguistic nationalism was slowly expanding. Prior to 1848, the language-based “nation-awakeners” argued unsuccessfully that the country was divided into two opposed blocks — Czechs and Germans — because the ethnically organized groups were actually just two extremes of the same folk culture. Paradoxically thus, a small group of Czech intellectuals attempted to “awaken” a society that was, however, practically untouched by nationalist ideology. Finding a philological, prosodic, and institutional framework for literary scholarship was a very slow and uncertain development. To speed up the process, cultural ideals and ideological models were needed to strengthen the people’s emotional bond to the nationalist program. History was the most important tool, for it inspired the literate and theater-going public with images of the Nation’s glorious past, reminding them simultaneously of their obligations to the bleak present. The famous manuscript forgery associated with Hanka, which gave the most successful stimulus to the Czech national movement of rebirth, was also a product of historicist thinking. The process was very similar to the emergence and popularization of Slavic cohesion, which projected an idyllic ancient Slavic past and a divided but potentially powerful Slavic present onto a utopian future. The inspiring ideals as well as the act of rebirth were interwoven with elements of mythical thinking. As Valdimír Macura argues, the cultural scholarship of the Rebirth was much more strongly linked to myths and folklore than modern views tend to suggest. He points out that the birth of Czech culture was perceived as a “resurrection” or “reanimation” of a mythical hero (Znamení zrodu 90–92). Jungmann and his followers wanted society to accept the culture they had created as normal. The new concept was so strongly moral that scientific considerations did not suffice even in deciding on linguistic issues. The endless discussions on grammar and prosody sought for a key to interpret the national character. In the eyes of Jungmann’s followers, language was a “value” rather than a “fact.” That Jungmann identified “homeland” with “nation” and “language” is evident in his famous defense of language, published already in 1806: “Without a love for our language, love of the homeland, and with it of the nation, is inconceivable” (Spisy 52). This was then far from obvious, in part because the countries of the Czech Crown — the “homeland” — included from a linguistic point of view not one but two nations, namely Czech and German. Jungmann later worked out a whole theory, based on classicist idealism and pan-Slavism, to explain that the Czech language was closer to Latin and Greek than to German. Inspired by the ideal of Slavonic unity, Jungmann made linguistic cohesion the main — and actually the only — attribute of patriotism. He thought that of all the modern European languages the Slavonic ones have remained closest to the antique heritage, and that they were still close to the “Indian” (Sanskrit) roots of ancient, pre-European culture (Macura, Znamení zrodu 54). The goals of the Czech Rebirth show in this respect only minor differences with similar movements elsewhere in East-Central Europe: the sacralization of language was not a uniquely Czech phenomenon.

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The main literary message of the Czech Rebirth did not coincide with any of the basic literary trends of the era. Until the end of the 1820s, Classicism, which was never pure, became increasingly modified by pre-romantic tastes and continued as the leading ideal. Sentimentalism, which developed parallel to Classicism, also had a strong impact on the culture of Czech Rebirth, because the philosophical implications of Rousseau, Herder, and Ossianism were at an early stage and directly incorporated into the nationalist movement. Biedermeier expressed the ruling mentality of the three decades prior to 1848 in the everyday life of Austro-German and Czech society, but its effect can be followed throughout the greater part of East-Central Europe. Its origins are usually explained on mental and/or socio-historical grounds. On the one hand, it can easily be explained by the emergence of an ever-more common patriotic strain in the petit bourgeoisie, whose ambitious hero — appearing from the boundaries set out for him by life in the country — aspires to master the seemingly cultured, sentimental, genteel, and factitious manners of the upper classes. On the other hand, Biedermeier’s conservatism and resignation emerged from the authoritarian-political and paradoxical belief according to which the envisaged goals of the nationalist movement were only attainable within very constrained boundaries and merely one step at a time. The central figure of the Czech Rebirth was not the poet but the scholar and the popular writer. The poets were sometimes scholars — and the other way around. Kollár’s lyrical prose entitled Slávy dcera (Slava’s Daughter) went through various adaptations and abridgements, and finally turned into a scholarly work. The original poetic experience paled gradually with each new edition, and the final version of the work can be seen as a draft for the mythologized ideology of the national awakening (Macura, Znamení zrodu 22, 93). František Palacký and Pavel Josef Šafárik, author of Slovanské starožitnosti (Slavic Antiquities; 1837), began as poets and literary theoreticians, and they preserved some of their aesthetic predilections even at the peak of their scholarly careers. The aestheticizing and idealizing character of their scholarship suited social needs. The blending of literature and scholarship is obvious in Palacký’s masterwork, his history of Bohemia until 1526, which can be regarded as a Czech national epic poem (Macura 22). Translations also had a quasi-scholarly significance in the creation of the new “literariness.” Jungmann interpreted the work of Herder and the Slovenian Jernej Kopitar, and he also translated Milton’s Paradise Lost, which acquired a special role in the creation and normalization of the Czech literary language. The poets of the Czech Rebirth conformed to the evolving norm: they assumed a role in literature’s distribution and in satisfying the thirst for culture. František Ladislav Čelakovský, the most famous (although actually only moderately talented) poet of his time, reinforced the popular fallacy of linking a sentimental and Biedermeier interpretation of folklore to the normative definition of the national character; he did so by imitating, by writing “echoes” of folk songs and folk literature. His amateurish folklorist followers, the conservative catholic priest-poets František Sušil, Josef Vlastimil Kamarýt, František Jaroslav Kamenický, Jan z Hvĕzdy, and others who formed the core of the national awakening assumed automatically that everything of the folk was of the nation. The cult of the people’s spontaneous creativity was turned into an artificially simple style of verse. The didacticism of this poetry was illustrated with aesthetic contrivances, and complemented by idyllic country art, wine-drinking songs, and all other forms of culture deemed to be “folksy.” These were naïve urban mental images of country life. A unique iconography of flower

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motifs pervaded all this literature, serving desires for erotic communication and satisfying the coded requirements of a national program that was conceived of as a kind of gardening (Macura, Znamení zrodu 23–32). Václav Hanka’s Rukopis Královédvorský (Dvůr Králové Manuscript) is not only the most significant poetic work of these decades and the most influential work in nineteenth-century Czech cultural history, but also a clear indicator that the literature of the Czech rebirth did not emerge from an existing culture but produced its own by means of fiction. Mystification is a mighty cultural power, and Hanka became one of the most important forces in shaping the new Czech culture (Macura, Znamení zrodu 128). Like others, he made a creative contribution with his forgery to the making of the Czech distant past, and thus he was actually dealing with the present rather than the past.

Čelakovský’s “Echo” of Folk Poetry By relating “originality” to “nationality” East-Central European folklore philology combined romantic individual self-validation with representations of alleged national traits. The writers of the Czech Rebirth regarded folk poetry as an ancient evidence for a “national character” that had paled over the centuries. Friedrich Schlegel distinguished in his Vienna lectures of 1812 between two kinds of folk poetry: poetic fragments that recalled a vanished heroic and knightly world that was suppressed by later revolutions or forgotten when bourgeois forms of life emerged, and songs that the folk created in later times for its own pleasure, poems that did not lack originality and spirit but were above all well crafted (Kritische 6: 364). The young Hanka arrived in 1813 in Vienna with a letter of recommendation from his mentor, Dobrovský, which allowed him to join Kopitar, a friend of Schlegel who enthusiastically studied the forgotten treasures of folk tradition and the literary relics of the early Middle Ages. Two years later, Vuk Karadžić revolutionized the study of folk poetry with the Mala prostonarodna slaveno-serbska pesnarica, which suggested to many that folk culture had nation-building powers. Hanka quickly proposed in an article to translate Karadžić’s Serbian poems and to undertake similar collections of Czech songs: It would be most desirable if a few good Patriots tried to collect our lovely folksongs and led thus the Czechs back to the Slav treasures of song that they have largely abandoned, at least in the cities, due to their copying of the hard sounds in German songs. Our old songs surely deserve to serve as the standard for today’s composers. (Závodský 147–48)

With this encouragement, Čelakovský compiled and published material in the first volume of Slovanské národní písně (Slav Folk Songs; 1822–27) that Hanka, Karel Sudimír Šnajdr, and Šafárik had already partly collected. He translated folk poetry from related Slavic peoples and printed them facing the original. These artificial compilations of folk songs disregarded the differences in style and content but demonstrated Slavic cohesion. The completed three-volume edition fulfilled also the needs of Czech literature at the time. Jaroslav Langer expressed a generally held

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view in 1832 when he remarked that Čelakovský’s folksongs and Hanka’s old manuscripts (considered authentic then) had the greatest impact on the new Czech poetry (114). Čelakovský’s letters to his friend Josef Vlastimil Kamarýt, who helped with the compiling, indicate the evolution of his thought: I am sure you have by now acquired many a little folk flower, but I am just beginning to get to like this national poetry. I read Herder’s Stimmen der Völker not so long ago: perhaps not surprisingly, the Slav songs are the most beautiful of the lot. Check them out! (Korrespondence 50) I hope to receive back soon my folksong volume from the censors, and this makes me even happier than does the publication of my own [poetic] works. There is nothing greater than folk poetry. The Greeks! Ossian! What else could they be but folk songs? (Korrespondence 127)

The motto of Čelakovský’s second volume is “Folk poetry offers today’s poets what the ancient chronicles provided for serious story-writing” (Slovanské 173). Yet this poetry reflects a Baroque peasant or village culture, not any older Czech (let alone Slav) way of life. Much of the folk poetry collected throughout East-Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century consists of artificial folk songs that come from seventeenth and eighteenth-century handwritten songbooks and hymnals. “Folk” in general parlance was actually a synonym for the light, naïve, and popular culture that had little to do with authentic folklore. The poets of the time considered it a sign of greatest recognition if their compositions could be heard from the lips of the people. Hence Čelakovský included in his book some folk-style poems by his fellow writers, even one by himself, though without naming the author. In the first phase of the Czech cultural Rebirth, Čelakovský put forward a program that based modern national poetry on folklore: poets who wanted to express the folk were supposed to include a maximum of “archaic” elements of peasant culture. Thus Čelakovský, a literary scholar of high culture, proposed to refashion the folk material in order to suit the new aesthetics. Real folk songs were not particularly popular then, because of their alleged irregularity and lack of harmony. A stable middle ground between “coarseness” and “superfluous prettiness” was to provide equilibrium and the way back to the Nation’s unspoiled childhood. Čelakovský found the “real taste” of antiquity in the ideal of a fictive community close to nature. The Czech poets, like others in the region, needed the ideal of folk poetry to further their unstated political program, the social and national emancipation of the lower classes. Folk literature became the source and veritable thesaurus of national moral reform. Poets were now praised for their ability to merge with the collective, not for their individual inventiveness. Čelakovský’s Ohlas písní ruských (Echoes of Russian Songs; 1829) was a smashing success for evoking the spirit of Russian folk songs and epic poems, though it contained entirely his own writing. The idea of “echo poetry,” introduced through Čelakovský’s work, is somewhat misleading because it suggests mimicry. We know from the author’s letters that the phrase refers to the title of Herder’s projected revision of his Volkslieder, posthumously published under the title Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of the People in Songs). According to Čelakovský’s aesthetics, all poetry must echo such “voices of people. Actually, “his “echo poems” were recreations and free adaptations, in which his own contribution was decisive. As we have seen, Čelakovský’s “Rus-

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sian” poems, for instance, contain very few concrete traces of Russian folk poetry. Imitating the formal style of the “bilina” (epic poetry of the Middle Ages), he uses almost exclusively motifs and episodes of his own imagination. Ilja Muromec, the superhuman hero of many folksongs, appears here as a common crusader, who kills only three tartar bandits. Čurila Plenkovič, a filthy rich womanizer in Russian legends, is turned in the Czech version into a brave hero, because the panSlav pantheon could accommodate only exemplary characters. Tsars, Lords, and Boyars appear in Čelakovský’s songs alongside peasants, merchants, and Cossacks, as well as the Russian masses in their Sunday best. Saturated with Russophile adulations, the cycle idealizes the strength and greatness of the Russian Empire that defeated the Turks, and emphasizes the need to strengthen the Monarchy’s Slavic peoples. By the end of the 1830s, Čelakovský had reached the peak of his career. In 1834, he was made editor of the government’s official newspaper, to which he added the literary supplement, the Česká Včela. It quickly became an independent journal. Assured of financial security, he married his abiding love from Strakonice, to whom he wrote those first poems that were later included in his Růže stolista (The Hundred-Petalled Rose; 1840). In 1835, he was appointed professor in the Department of Czech Studies at Prague University, but his rising career suddenly came to an end due to an article he published late that year, which clashed with his often proudly declared pro-Russian feelings: when Tsar Nicholas gave an offensive speech in newly occupied Warsaw, Čelakovský satirically compared his entry with those of the Tatar Khans. Hanka, with whom the poet had financial and literary differences, denounced him at the Russian Embassy in Vienna, and Čelakovský was dismissed from all of his jobs when the Russians launched a formal complaint to the Austrian government. Čelakovský first had to support his family with help from friends, but in 1838 he was offered a librarian position by Count Rudolph Kinský, who sympathized with the patriotic movement. In 1840, he published next to the mentioned Růže stolista his Ohlas písní českých (Echoes of Czech Songs), a volume he had been working on for some time. The Ohlas, mixed as to genre, content, and art, contained his best poem, “Toman a lesní panna” (Toman and the Woodland Fairy), which renders a folkloric sense of ominous foreboding by means of an astonishing rhythmic technique. Toman, a young peasant, discovers his girl’s infidelity and is seduced by the woodland fairy; he drops lifeless in the ecstasy of her passion. The tragedy is not due to his girl’s infidelity (she is only a veiled phantom), but to Toman’s mind that endows his broken heart with demonic power. The basic clash occurs between Toman’s older sister and the fairy, between the loving family and destructive passion. The fairy has no supernatural force here, she merely personifies the hostile world, which only a dispassionate family happiness can resist. The older sister embodies a contemporary morality that Růže stolista advocates: deference, resignation, and hard work. Nevertheless, tragedy lurks in Čelakovský’s poetic silences. In 1842, Čelakovský became professor of Slavonic Studies at the Silesian University of Wrocław (which then belonged to Prussia), but his poetic vein dried up and he published thereafter almost only Slavonic philological studies. Towards the end of his life he returned to Prague and published his Mudrosloví národu slovanského ve příslovích (The Wisdom of the Slav Nation in Proverbs; 1852), for which he had collected material for several decades. This volume, he suggested, would help us understand the ancient single-nation Slavic philosophy of life. In agreement with the German theorists, who wanted to revitalize the dormant knowledge of folk

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heritage, Čelakovský valued the wisdom of proverbs. Folk wisdom incorporated the “spirit of the people” and depicted the Slavs as a “nation of great value and strong moral feeling.” According to Čelakovský, proverbs give the Czechs, compared to the Germans, a proud self-awareness (Závodský 572). Erben: Folk Culture and Romantic Resignation The genuine folk elements receive more intense coloring in Karel Jaromír Erben’s collection of folksongs and stories, though his goal, too, was to lend monumental expression to the national character. He entered literary life in the mid–1830s, together with Karel Hynek Mácha’s romantic circle. His first poems gained the attention of Palacký, who provided him with academic responsibilities and helped him gain a job as a civil servant in the Czech Scientific Society. In 1851, he was elected as Prague’s city archivist. He spent his life in quiet, tireless work, staying away from public battles. He overcame his moderate, almost shy behavior only on two occasions, both of which became important signposts in his literary career. In 1834, he mocked Čelakovský’s Russian “echoes,” parodying them as the artistically worthless forgeries of a choleric personality. In 1842, he dismissed Mácha’s romantic titanism because this individual rebellion, stemming from a “modern maladjustment,” threatened the unique national unity and its realization in a literary program of originality. Much of his oeuvre may be seen as an ongoing dispute with his prematurely deceased rival. Though Čelakovský’s sharp critic, Erben paradoxically continued his predecessor’s program while improving his artistic method. He rejected “echo poetry” and refused to play the role of a folk poet who writes about the people and for the people while donning the garments of the commoners. Following in the footsteps of the Grimm brothers, he looked in the folk songs for the original soul of the nation, seeking to reconstruct from the collected variants the ideal form that was closest to the ancient one. Individual voices had to be understood as spontaneous creative expressions of the collective. Folk poetry, just as language, traditions, and beliefs, was for him the product of communal life. Yet Erben did not dismiss individual creativity: he found it acceptable if it made an artistic use of folklore’s language. Poets should put to good use the potentialities of language, but only after “prolonged polishing.” Next to his epochal collection of folk songs and stories, Erben also published a volume of his own poetry, Kytice z pověstí národních (Garland of National Folk Tales; 1853), which he polished for over twenty years. Already his contemporaries considered it a highlight of Czech literature. Erben’s first large collection was Písně národní v Čechách (Folksongs in Bohemia), 550 songs published in three volumes between 1841 and 1845. This was the first collection, after František Sušil’s Moravské národní písně (Moravian Folksongs; 1835), which also contained musical notes. In the third volume, Erben related the concept of the folk song to the definition of the Nation. In his view, the individual character of the songs was determined by the feeling of the Nation, which in turn stems from the national spirit (soul) that welded word and melody. Folksongs, he believed, were formed throughout the “whole Slav Nation.” when words sprouted from, or were born together with, music. In a letter of 1843 to his friend Karel Vladislav Zap, Erben explained that, by publishing folk songs and stories, and the charting Slavic mythology, he wished to create a “sys-

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tematic image of the Czech Nation” (Dolanský 60). He planned to elaborate on the “naturalistic religiousness” of the Slavs in an academic fashion, and wanted to depict the old Slavic customs as a process of human life “from the cradle to the grave,” searching for their ancient, mythical origins. His project, “Obyčeje národu českého” (The Customs of the Czech Nation), would have been an anthology of all folk literature, but was never published in this form (Dolanský 57–60). The complete material of his folksong collection, Prostonárodní české písně a řikadla (Czech Songs and Sayings of the Simple Folk; 1864) already contains some 2,200 songs and is regarded today as the most comprehensive encyclopedia of Czech popular life prior to 1848. In Erben’s compilation of stories fairy tales rich with magic elements predominate. They became known only long after his death but now form part of Czech literature’s classical treasure. Erben’s studies of mythic nature were closely related both to his poetry and his literary program. He dismissed the Enlightenment’s “vanity,” ostentatiousness, and unimaginative intellectuality. He searched in religious legends for “beautiful and deep” meanings, naturalist symbolism, and folk philosophy. In the interpretation of national poetry he followed his idealist friend Karel Boleslav Štorch, who claimed that symbolism and myth were ancient forms of human knowledge that spiritual power can bring to life. Symbols expressed the “strength and unity” of subjectivity, while myths rose above subjectivity and revealed life’s special spaces (Jakobson, “Poznámky” 154). In “Philosophy and Our Literature” (1848), an outline of Erben’s approach, Štorch argued that folk memories served as the bases of Czech national philosophy. In contrast to speculative German thought, Czech philosophy had to rely on folk wisdom and “sober-minded peasant reasoning” to rise to the standards of the age (54–73). Hence Erben’s endeavor to discover and deepen the nation’s individualism by means of Czech poetry. In his view, two schools expressed the national character: one described social reality in concrete and nationally typical forms (František Jaromír Rubeš, Božena Nĕmcová), while the other, in which he included himself, appealed to folk memories in search of the core of the Czech national substance and its individual characteristics (Vodička 276). Erben expressed his concrete views on Czech literature only in “Literatura česka od god, 1841” (A Review of Czech Literature written in 1841), published in the Zagreb journal Kolo. He focused here on the national literature rather then the literary trends. Interestingly, Mácha had written similar notes in an unpublished paper nine years earlier. According to him, Czech literature was too isolated from the world; trends abroad seemed to sweep past it without being picked up. Erben’s view was the opposite: the overbearing effect of world literature was, according to him, directly responsible for the sorry state of Czech literature. Dobrovský’s adoption of German prosody, “linguistic purity,” and forced metric rhyme, all deviated from the correct path. It is here that he expressed his objections to Mácha’s poetry with the greatest vehemence: The spirit of modern tormentedness (Zerrissenheit) has started to manifest itself most recently, particularly by creeping into Czech poetry. This is a gloomy, anxious self-preening in images from the grave without a higher goal, an incessant complaining about a suffering whose cause we know not, a pursuit of long lost ideals, etc. But this spirit has found no genuine support from the greater part of our writers, and the nation has taken so little notice of it that it does not even know of its existence. Our nation has no quarrel to pick with God, the world, or with itself, for it has a healthy soul and lives its life with joy. Although it is easily moved and led to tears by the plight

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of others, it bears its own very real distresses without loud complaint and wailing, almost rashly in fact. […] If a Czech is up to his neck in trouble, he eases his soul by joking about his bad luck. (Vašák 156–57)

Erben’s own folk-like ballads drew on the themes and motifs of a supposedly “healthy” and “joyful” Czech folklore; they were, nevertheless, reminiscent of romantic mysticism and demons. In “Vrba” (Willow Tree), a worried husband discovers through a wise old woman that his wife’s body is lifeless at night because her soul lives in the old willow tree on the bank of the stream. He cuts down the tree and unwittingly kills his wife (Kytice 69–73). In “Vodník” (Water Gnome), some secret force draws a girl to wash by the lake. The lake’s water gnome pulls her down into his watery world, where captive human souls live under little upturned mugs, and forces her to marry him. When she is allowed to make a visit at home, her mother convinces her not to return to her monster husband. When the water gnome knocks in vain at the door, blood begins to seep in under it; when they open it, they find the beheaded little body of the child that the heroine bore to the water gnome (Kytice 61–68). Comparing Mácha’s and Erben’s oeuvres has been a favorite topic of Czech literary studies since the 1930s, to which important writers like Jakobson, Mukařovský, Šalda, and Vodička have contributed. Mukařovský applied the oft-cited term “antipodes” to the poets, while Jakobson contrasted the “philogenetic” Erben with the “ontogenetic” Mácha. Both structuralist scholars characterized Erben’s oeuvre as romantic and Mácha’s “revolutionary” Romanticism as “resigned” (Vodička 271). Šalda distinguished between revolutionary and conservative Romanticism by regarding them as different poetic expressions of the feeling of horror (“Poznámky” 329–30). Finally, Vojtěch Jirát employed in Erben čili Majestát zákona (Erben: the Law of Superiority; 1944) the concept of Biedermeier to claim that Erben’s work expressed superiority by “quietly” but “forcefully” confronting romantic aesthetics (32). The writers of the Rebirth itself claimed, however, that Mácha distanced himself from the goals defined by the mantra of national awakening, while Erben sacrificed his entire life for building a communal myth. In this he really became the antipode of Mácha, who created his own individual myths and enigmas. Erben’s poetic oeuvre is relatively small but its literary importance is hard to overestimate. Kytice contains only thirteen poems, many of which he kept revising for years. The first version of the oldest one was written in 1834. The short, introductory poem reveals the symbolic meaning of the volume’s title: a small thyme plant growing on the grave of a dead mother reminds her children of her breath. The collection is a small garland of similar flowers that conjures up the image of a vanished homeland. The opening and closing poems patriotically encase the ballads; they convey the existential fear that people have in a world they no longer understand. These are not folk ballads. Although they follow their style, their form and internal structure are romantic. The atmosphere is tense and often forbiddingly tragic, characterized by ambivalent desires and hopes, bad omens and stifling fear. Everyday life is saturated with mystic enigmas that express not only the power of fate over human will, but also the logic of crime and punishment. Individual interests clash with the cold, hard laws of an archaic world order that pre-determines human fate and demands unquestioning obedience. This ancient order is embedded in the communal spirit of the nation, which is endowed with natural power. In Erben’s work nature is man’s worst enemy, not his comfort. Neither mythical pagan beliefs nor Christian morals protect human

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beings against nature, although the latter do at least offer some advice. “Štědrý Den” (Christmas Day) invokes Christmas traditions but echoes Mácha’s words: “life is but a dream.” An innocent girl dies when she searches for her destiny in a hole in the ice of a lake, not as a punishment for believing in superstition but because death is her fate. The final verses are bereft of a Christian metaphysics. As Jakobson concluded: “we are the playthings of fate […] get reconciled with your destiny when it seems to you that you have only ‘half a life’” (158). Erben’s best ballad, “Svatební košile” (Wedding-Shirt; 1843), a horror story not without his usual moralizing, avoids a tragic ending. The ballad-like rhythm and dialogue reveal the menacing reality of this double-faced tale and endow it with direction as well as visible strength. The girl follows the ghost of her dead fiancé at an ever more frantic pace but finally eludes death after having faced the empire of the dead. Her prayer to the Virgin Mary, which brought about her ordeal, saves her life in the end. A mythical power almost destroyed her, though she did nothing wrong. This sense of unpredictable danger raises Erben’s poetry above his age. Němcová: Folk Culture and Biedermeier The prose fiction of the National Rebirth lagged for a long time behind poetry and non-fiction prose. In Česká Včela, Květy, and other elitist periodicals, entertaining topics, and historical as well as didactic prose prevailed. Only the two most gifted prose writers, Josef Kajetán Tyl and Karel Sabina, achieved a breakthrough, but even they failed to portray the world in a fluent style. Božena Němcová’s Babička (Grandma; 1855) successfully combined literary folk style with depictions of an idyllic village life. Babička has often been called a forerunner of Realism, though Němcová’s work is actually a series of nostalgic village images that bring to life a wealth of folk customs. Suffering from the restrictions of her age, this uninhibited woman writer of legendary beauty conjured up the idyllic country of her childhood to find harmony, serenity, and an ideal society amidst the calamities of her own world. The story, based on autobiographical elements, takes place in an isolated small village; its hero is a grandmother (modeled after Němcová’s own) who becomes an ideal of rational simplicity and all-conquering love. Biedermeier intimacy and sentiment combine here with realistic depictions of the surroundings. Noble ideals harmonize with family values and passive loyalty, but they entail resignation, a surrender of hope in order to become free. The narrator’s greatest ambition is to reconcile the ideal and the real. She leads back into a fairy-tale dream, but everyday life never ceases to provide sober corrections. The deeply conservative heroine believes in God unwaveringly and honestly; her strength has not been weakened by the over-sophistication of culture. The idyll so created is, however, frail and limited: the harmony is not without dangers and inconsistencies (Tureček 20). It is a fragile idyll that advocates wise resignation. The “Viktorka” episode, an embedded story, makes clear the extent to which primeval forces threaten the idyll. A demonic soldier gets a girl under his spell, seduces her, and drives her into the maelstrom of insanity. The topos suggests that inexplicable dormant urges in us are as threatening as outside forces. When people step outside the safe circles of the community they expose themselves to demonic powers. Destructive love, arising from erotic fascination, can only destroy a free character. “Viktorka” (in which the past is also bracketed) provides a contrast to the

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main storyline: Grandma and Krisla also attach their lives to an enlisted soldier but their idyllic life protects them against tragedy. The highpoint of the “Viktorka” tale is a child murder, whose memory haunts the main story as well, so that Grandma forbids the children from going anywhere near the water. Since the border between idyll and decay is permeable, the heroes of the idyll must be permanently on their guard against evil (Rothe 30–31). “Viktorka” does not shatter Babička’s frame, which foregrounds nature’s order and maps its rhythm, while following the repetitive habitual order of village life. The Grandma identifies herself with this rhythm and order, is part of nature herself. Orderliness follows a cyclic structure: a day’s cycle fits into the cycle of a year and into the cycle of life from birth to death. The “happy ending” closes a fulfilled life, the harmonic unity of which stems not only from the order of nature but also from the heroine’s simple, naïve, and unerring belief in God as a guarantor of that order (Maidl 397–98). This belief is not individual but participates in a collective experience within which Christian teachings, superstitions, and folk customs interact. They share perhaps pagan roots, although they are probably more directly related to devout folk ideals. This idealized collective tradition fits into the period’s mythic concept, which regarded village folk as the healthy core of the nation (Sedmidubský 33–34). It pervades Babička, confirming the ethnic concept of the nation. Babička’s society is not simply idyllic; it is the direct result of a reconciliation and equalization that is rooted in a Biedermeier conception of society. Like the Hungarian Mór Jókai and the Polish Zygmunt Krasiński, Němcová assumes that the various classes can cooperate, and social injustices may be resolved by means of collaboration and reconciliation. Very much like Jókai, she sets a philanthropic noble against a bourgeois parvenu in Pohorská vesnice (Mountain Village; 1856), and she makes the humble old woman of Babička practically the confidant of the duchess of the local estate. The harmony of the patriarchal idyll emerges from the acceptance of a difficult human fate but is endangered by even the slightest rebellion. So Babička fits neither Romanticism nor Realism. Němcová’s Národní báchorky a pověsti (Folk Stories and Legends; 1845–47) is still widely read today. She drew from the knowledge she gained of folklore during her travels, and expanded on it with her own ideas. She wrote in the manner of her people, thus adopting a form of literary role-playing. Throughout East-Central Europe, folk ideology cultivated the concept of the folk and folk poetry, but did not couple the cultivation with sociological and empirical analyses. This folk ideology adhered to the axiomatic viewpoint that the folk automatically functioned as a conveyor of values (Margócsy 22). We may safely dismiss the assumption that folk poetry had preserved the ancient Czech way of life during the “nationless” era following the Battle of White Mountain (1620). The poets of the early nineteenth century could not simply echo folk poetry. The notion that folk and literature are genetically and axiologically interlinked was part of the period’s literary ideology. The authors of this ideology wanted to shape Czech culture by turning the enhanced, restyled, and retouched peasant values into a national ideal..

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Folklore in the Making of Slovak Literature Dagmar Roberts Academic interest in folklore came with the rise of modern nations and nationalist movements. In “A Speech to the Slavs” (1817) Pavel Josef Šafárik encouraged the Slovak people to collect folk songs, and he followed this up with Písně světské lidu slovenského v Uhřích (Secular Songs of the Slovak Folk in Hungary; 1823). Jan Kollár’s extremely influential Národnie zpievanky čili Písně světské Slovákův v Uhrách (The National Songs, or Secular Songs of Slovaks in Hungary; 1834–35) contained mythological and historical songs in the first volume (divided into themes such as youth, beauty, love, flowers, work, farmers, shepherds, crafts and war), and genres (ballads, romances, fairy tales, plays, rites, music, dance, satirical songs, and student songs) in the second. The collection became a classic “textbook” for the Romantics, and served as a compendium of topics and motifs. Whereas pre-Romanticism valorized folklore by editing, and imitating it, Romanticism perceived it as a manifestation not only of folk talent but also of poetry and poetic styles as such. Ľudovít Štúr’s chief work on folklore, O národních písních a pověstech plemen slovanských (On the National Songs and Stories of the Slavic Tribes; 1853) was based on his Hegelian conviction that Slavic folklore (and especially poetry) was the highest form of art because it achieved a perfect harmony of spirit and matter and was, in this respect, comparable to ancient Greek art (Štúr, Slovanská 41). Štúr’s ideals were represented by folklore, Christianity, and Slavic culture. He renounced the western literary tradition, Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s poetry included. Most romantic writers made a creative use of folklore. Janko Kráľ, for example, used it as material for his own creative experiments: he reproduced a fragment from folk poetry in “Zabitý” (Killed); combined fragments into a new composition in “Zverbovaný” (Recruited); gave a modified folklore motif a traditional folklore setting in “Zakliata panna vo Váhu a divný Janko” (Enchanted Maid in the Váh and Strange Johnny); adapted folklore narration in “Kríž a čiapka” (Cross and Cap); and he changed a magic fairy tale into the Messianic poem “Rozprávka o chorom kráľovi” (The Fairy Tale of the Sick King). Folklore influenced the use of metaphors, language, verse, and composition, as well as the romantic genre system. Romantic writers adopted folk songs and ballads to express romantic moods and themes, and they used proverbs as examples of condensed folk wisdom and speech. Until about 1960, Slovak Romanticism was considered to be inspired exclusively by folklore (Čepan Kontúry and Kochol “literatura”). Imitation of folklore was common in the second half of the nineteenth century. Peter BellaHoral, for example, published numerous folk-song imitations throughout the 1860s, and Ondrej Bella used folklore models in his collection Piesne (1880). The Czech writer Božena Němcová collected Slovak fairy tales and stories during her travels in Slovakia (1852–55), published them in 1857, and used them in her stories Pohorská vesnice (Mountain Village; 1856) and Chyže pod horami (A Cottage below the Mountains; 1858). Realism shifted the focus to folk speech. Ján Kalinčiak, for instance, widely used proverbs as a means of characterizing his protagonists; others observed local customs, festivals, and rites

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to situate their stories. Terézia Vansová, for example, subtitled her story “Julinka” as “How They Entertained,” while Elena Maróthy-Šoltésová called one of her first stories “Preparations for a Wedding.” The leading figure of Slovak Realism, Jozef Gregor Tajovský, started his career by collecting and writing down folk customs in Chlieb u Slovákov (Bread with Slovaks; 1900) and Hľadali poklady (They Looked for Treasures; 1896). His first stories, as well as his Ženský zákon and other early plays, imitate folk narration. Pavol Dobšinský’s collection of popular fairy tales (1880–83), Adolf Peter Záturecký’s compilation of Slovak proverbs, adages, and sayings (1897), and Ľudovít Vladimir Rizner’s overview of Slovak folklore (1897) helped found Slovak ethnology, to which the Czech Jiří Polívka significantly contributed later by editing five volumes of Slovak fairy tales (1923–31). Electoral songs, a minor genre, also made use of folklore towards the end of the century. Used in or before elections by usually anonymous authors disguised as folk bards, they expressed community sentiments with rhetorical means rather than metaphors. The increased interest in ballads at the turn of the century expressed perhaps the gloomy outlook common then throughout Europe. Solitude, miscommunication, tragic destiny, unhappy love, or social injustice — all these ballad themes became relevant in Slovak fin-de-siècle literature. Ivan Krasko and other poets of the Slovak Modern School turned away from social issues, and focused instead on the self and its social disillusionment. Their Weltschmerz fed on ballad gloom. In Slovakia, the fin-de-siècle had a limited and rather deflected echo. In contrast to Prague (see ECE 1: 348–63), Slovakia had no artistic decadence movement, but Slovak Modernism, as its predecessors, repeatedly returned to folk literature for new inspiration. As Štefan Krčméry writes in his historical survey, Slovak literature went through cycles by opening to modern incentives and then returning to its folk literature. The modernist turn involved a stylization of lyric poetry and a lyrical stylization of prose. We may observe this in the “ornamental prose” of the 1920s, the Naturism of the late 1930s and early 40s, the reinvigoration of lyricism in Vincent Šikula’s fiction in 1960s, Peter Jaroš’s and Ladislav Ballek’s novels of the late 1970s and early 80s, and in sporadic manifestations in the 1990s, for instance in the work of Rút Lichnerová. The folklore revival was especially intensive in the late 1920s, when neo-Romanticism was on the rise and Slovak literature had already passed through several waves of the Avant-garde. Weariness of avant-garde experiments and concern for the native tradition led to concerted efforts to preserve folklore and to re-introduce it into elite literature. Krčméry, for instance, perceived Slovak literature not only in philosophical and sociological but also ethnological terms, and he agreed with Štúr that folk art was the highest artistic ideal. His influential reflections on folklore and literature from the 1920s and 30s were republished in his Dejiny literatúry slovenskej (History of Slovak Literature; 1976) and Estetické reflexie (1975). Krčméry, as well as Maša Haľamová used folklore motifs and folkloric ballad and song in their own poetry. The folklore revival led to an idealization of the traditional village and its moral purity; the repeated confrontations between the ruralists and urbanites in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s were won by the former. The trend, set in the ruralist poetry of Valentín Beniak and František Hečko, continued with the Neo-Symbolic “poetry of returns” in the works of Andrej Plávka and Ján Kostra. These debutants of the late 1930s and early 1940s became prodigal sons and abandoned the literary world in order to revive domestic rural and folklore traditions. Kostra, especially in his second collection, Moja rodná (My Native Land; 1939), pays homage to his homeland through numerous personifications. In Tri prúty Liptova (Three Saplings/Rods of Liptov; 1942),

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Plávka was inspired by the beauty, values, history, and rich language of his native region, Liptov. Neo-Symbolist poetry represented thus a counterbalance to the dominant Surrealism. Prose shifted towards myth. The critic František Miko divided fiction writers of the 1930s and early 40s into “farmers” (e.g., Jozef Cíger Hronský) and “shepherds” (e.g., František Švantner), who had distinct lifestyles, characters, and values. The influence of Norwegian and Swedish literature, and French “regionalism,” along with local folklore traditions, led from 1937 onward to the rise of Slovak Naturism or Lyrical Prose School, in which folklore was the source of characters, setting, and plot: Ľudo Ondrejov reinvigorated the figure of Jánošík, the noble robber, Margita Figuli turned to legends, František Švantner wrote ballads, and Dobroslav Chrobák cultivated the fairy tale (see Čepan, naturizmu). The communist “Poetry of Construction” of the early 1950s as well as the anti-Soviet productions of 1968 adopted folk speech, ballads, satirical prose, and fables. The most common genres in 1968 and 1989 were folk songs with modified lyrics, nursery rhymes, and the satirical adaptation of classical poems. Thus, for instance, the fate of Alexander Dubček, leader during the Prague Spring, was read in terms of Ján Botto’s epic poem on Jánošík’s death. Such “urban folklore” was, however, mostly mediated via Prague. According to the communist literary scholars, folklore was democratic and plebeian, hence the main inspiration of literature. This led to more systematic studies of folklore. Research in the 1950s and 60s focused especially on Romantic poetry and its folkloric connections: Viktor Kochol studied the poetry of the Štúrists (1956), Július Noge Slovak Romantic prose (1969), and Cyril Kraus the Slovak ballads of Romanticism (1966). In the second volume of their History of Slovak Literature (1960), Kochol and his collaborators listed the folklore sources, and studied their influence on literature. Viliam Marčok focused on magic fairy tales in O ľudovej próze (On Folk Fiction; 1978), and in Estetika a poetika ľudovej poézie (Aesthetics and Poetics of Folk Poetry; 1980) he discussed, according to his stated Marxist methodology, the historical relation of people to reality in folk arts. He focused on parallels between nature and subject, which he regarded as a typical feature of folk poetry. His collaboration with ethnographers like Milan Leščák produced numerous articles in the 1970s and 80s on the folkloric forms of nineteenth-century literature, which partially relied on the work of pioneering Slovak ethnographers like Andrej Melicherčík or Ján Michálek. Dionýz Ďurišin and Peter Liba proposed five areas for the study of folklore and literature: (1) their parallel existence, (2) their co-existence, (3) their integration, (4) literary adaptations of folklore, and folklore adjustments to literary trends, and finally, (5) the “secondary existence of folklore” (folklorization), with literature assuming the functions of folklore (see Liba). The interplay between post-1948 Slovak literature and folklore has been studied systematically only in Liba’s mentioned work on Šikula’s prose. Liba points out that his narrators resemble rhapsodists and bards, that folkloric narrative perspectives also influence his concept of time and modulate the rhythm of events, and that conflicts and contrasts in his fiction remind one of folkloric situations or interpretations. Liba’s analysis of Rudolf Sloboda’s fiction focuses on features that may come from folklore: the biblical and folkloric motif of a return home; a reaffirmation of traditional lifestyles and values; elements of myth, dream, and fairy tale; the utilization of folk songs and proverbs; and emphasis on rituals, religion, local culture, and folk humor. Sloboda, according to Liba, integrates numerous layers of historical, cultural, and literary tradition.

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Several authors, for instance Ján Johanides in Balada o vkladnej knižke (Ballad on a Bankbook) and Najsmutnejšia oravská balada (The Saddest Ballad from Orava), used legends and ballads; others, like Ladislav Ballek and Peter Jaroš use folklore in historical fiction. Contemporary prose writers like Anton Habovštiak and Ján Štiavnický mostly utilize folklore themes in regional literature and village stories, but Štefan Moravčík and others also appeal to folklore language. Milan Ferko’s Otváranie studničiek (Opening of Wells; 1988) exemplifies “literary folklore,” i.e., folklore adapted to literature. Today, folklore appears in poetry, in artful fairy tales, and in fables, especially for children. In the 1990s, folklore also served as a means of national mythologizing (Vladimír, Milan, and Andrej Ferko) or parodying national myths (Pavel Vilikovský, Peter Pišťanek) The myths are centered on stereotypical historical figures such as the Slavic prince (or king) Svätopluk, Matúš Čák Trenčiansky, Jánošík, and Ľudovít Štúr, or on certain social groups, such as the tinkers (a term for traditional Slovak craftsmen used a derogatory way for all Slovaks). Mythologizing supported the search for national identity after 1993, the healing of a traditional Slovak inferiority complex, and the founding of independent Slovakia. The most attractive works of mythologizing include Ivan Hudec’s Báje a mýty starých Slovanov (Myths and Legends of the Old Slavs; 1994), Ako divé husi (Like Wild Geese; 1994) by Vladimír Ferko and his son Andrej, and Staré povesti slovenské (Old Slovak Tales; 1990) by Vladimír’s brother, Milan. Old tales, myths, and legends belong to the treasure house of nations that claim to have a history. That many of them were created in Slovakia ad hoc was the subject of numerous parodies, among them Pavel Vilikovský’s Eskalácia citu (Escalation of Feeling) and Večne je zelený (Forever Green), both 1989, and Peter Pišťanek’s Mladý Dônč (Young Dônč; 1993). Vilikovský deconstructs national heroism in the belief that mythologizing kills the person celebrated. His parodies of national myths deliberately focus on their human aspects, emphasizing emotions and physical reactions. Focusing on vices rather than virtues, Pišťanek utilizes black humor to portray morbidity and grotesqueness in his protagonists. Parodies of folk songs and poems are also used in political satire, for instance in a TV show by Milan Markovič and Ján Štrasser, who also published the satirical volume Dvojhra (Double; 2000). The plays of Stanislav Štepka, founding director, actor, and the principal playwright of Radošinské naivné divadlo (Naive Theater from Radošina; 1963– ), mix Slovak folk traditions and dialects with farce and commedia dell’arte.

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The Question of Folklore in Romanian Literary Culture Marcel Cornis-Pope (with Otilia Hedeşan on St. Friday) While other literatures profited from the styles of Classicism and the Renaissance, Romanian literature, without remaining free of the impulses from Athens, Byzantium and Rome, rose upon the generous foundation of folklore and grew primarily out of its substance. […] Folklore basically generated a marked classical character […] thus proving Lessing’s opinion (in Laokoon) that, in their stage as a young culture, all people spontaneously follow the principles of classical beauty. (Ciopraga 23)

1. The Debate on the Location of Folklore in Romanian Literature Folklore (particularly oral poetry and narrative) has played an important role in the formation and canonization of national Romanian literature. As early as 1840, the magazine of the novelist-historian Mihail Kogălniceanu, Dacia literară (Literary Dacia; January-June 1840), called for an original Romanian literature inspired by national history, folk culture, and local mores (March 19, 1840, p. 1). By means of publications in Dacia literară, and some of his own fiction that drew on local subjects, Kogălniceanu inaugurated a national-popular direction in Romanian literature, turning folklore into a literary theme. The foundational figures of nineteenth-century Romanian literature resorted to folklore to legitimize their pioneering work. The great romantic poet Mihai Eminescu collected a significant amount of folk literature and reworked folk styles and motifs in his own poetry and prose (see Mihailescu in ECE vol. 4). Eminescu’s fantastic novella Sărmanul Dionis (Wretched Dionysus; 1873) blended native (oral) and foreign fantastic strains, pursuing new configurations “within a framework of the extraordinary” (Ciopraga 125). Eminescu’s fusion of Romanian folklore with classic myths and Oriental initiatory doctrines paved the way for the fantastic writers of the twentieth century, from Mihail Sadoveanu, who valorized the epic-archetypal potential of folk ballads, and Vasile Voiculescu, who rediscovered the metaphysical-oneiric aspects of folk myth, to Mircea Eliade who emphasized the hermeneutic and political value of the popular fantastic. A Western-inspired concept of nationhood also played an important role in this phase of canonization, infusing East-Central European literary cultures “with a new sense of purposiveness,” while also giving rise to competitive forms of nationalism that emphasized “exclusivity and factors of divisiveness as a way of protecting the nation” (Schöpflin 26). That the model of national canonization came from the West complicated the identitarian impetus. Thus, the Romanian novel emerged in mid-nineteenth century as a synthesis of local storytelling traditions (historical chronicles, popular narratives, folktales) and foreign influences. Romanian criticism has traditionally argued that folk (oral) culture played a fundamental role in the genesis of a national Romanian literature. In his historiographic works, beginning with Istoria literaturii române în secolul al XVIII-lea (History of Romanian Literature in the Eighteenth

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Century; 1901), Nicolae Iorga offered the first overarching grand narrative of Romanian literature, maintaining that it grew organically and spontaneously from the soil of local traditions and folklore in confluence with developments in South-Eastern and Western Europe. In the 1930s, Nae Ionescu deplored the cosmopolitan spirit of Bucharest, arguing that its chief characteristic was its “lack of national roots” and “loss of contact,” especially with the Eastern Orthodox, folknourished native tradition (146–48). Ionescu went so far as to recommend closing the Romanian borders and decoupling Romania from world politics and foreign borrowings (287). Nae Ionescu’s position inspired forms of “messianic nationalism” that advocated Romania’s return to the imagined totality of a national spirit with roots in folklore. Ironically, his position also appealed to “a group of cosmopolitan Bucharest intellectuals” (Verdery 258), Constantin Noica, Mircea Eliade, and Emil Cioran. During the last decade of his life, Noica used his mountain retreat on the border of Southern Transylvania to promote a philosophy that revalorized, especially in Sentimentul românesc al fiinţei (The Romanian Sentiment of Being; 1978), the philosophic creativity sedimented in the Romanian culture from folktales to Eminescu and beyond. In the 1970s and early ’80s, the “protochronists” — a group of writers looking everywhere for Romanian anticipations of Western trends — translated Noica’s interest in a Romanian philosophic substratum into an ethnophilosophy that valorized unconditionally the reservoirs of Romanian spirituality, oral or written. But Noica’s philosophy also suggested a Socratic model of socio-cultural exchange outside the channels controlled by the communist state, which attracted a group of young writers with anti-establishment and, to some extent, anti-nationalist views. Departing from their master’s proud assertion of marginality as a preserver of cultural values, Noica’s followers (Gabriel Liiceanu and Andrei Pleşu, among others) advocated an ethics of engagement and cultural resistance against the Party’s encroaching ideology. By contrast to Noica, who kept a firm hold on Romanian traditions, Cioran advocated after his transplantation to Paris a proud surrender of his national identity and language (ECE 2: 438–40). As Cioran put it in Bréviaire des vaincus (Breviary of the Vanquished Ones), in a eulogy of his adoptive Paris: I did not insult you by thinking of other homelands, I did not abase myself by seeking ecstasy in my roots or in the nostalgias of blood. I silenced in my blood the rumblings of generations of plowmen bent over the stilt and no lament of a Danube peasant comes to trouble the minuet of doubt that your clouds are dancing. I folded the pride of my wanderings into your absence of homeland, and my despair — hymn against time — adorns itself with a bloodied halo. (93)

This passage suggests that Cioran’s proclaimed detachment from the rural, folk-inspired culture of his native country did not obliterate his nostalgia for origins. Like Gombrowicz, Cioran integrated himself in the European circuit not in spite but because of his specific ethnic origins. After World War II, in the second (nationalist) phase of Romanian Communism, official literary history emphasized the idea of an organic Romanian literature nourished by folk traditions. As the critic and Central Party Committee member Ion Dodu Bălan wrote in a Concise History of Romanian Literature intended for foreign consumption: “For several centuries, the Romanians’ specific artistic and literary expression that have survived all hardships were embodied in folk art and folklore, crystallizing the essential elements of Romanian spirituality, and subsequently

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handed down to the cultured arts and literature” (5). In Bălan’s hyperbolic vision, shared partly by Ciopraga (see the epigraph of this article), Romanian folklore “held the place of humanism and classicism” during the earlier centuries (8). All great Romanian writers from Ioan Budai-Deleanu and Mihai Eminescu onward (Bălan’s first published essay was on the influence of folklore on contemporary poetry) had synthesized in their work folk values and thinking. Bălan also invested folklore with class-conscious features: the doinas or plaintive songs were, for him, “an existential modality of the many and the downtrodden” (9) with ethnic-ontological values. The famous narrative ballad Mioriţa (see below) provided “not only a philosophic outlook on man and the world, on life and death, but also a true spiritual geography of Romania, with its mountains of ideas and aspirations, with its rivers of tears, with its meadows of melancholy and forests of torment, swept by the winds and blizzards of fate and history” (18). There have been dissenting voices in Romanian criticism that called into question the primacy of the indigenous material. Critic and novelist Eugen Lovinescu encouraged a creative “synchronization” of Romanian literature with the liberal-urban cultures of the West through his influential magazine Sburătorul (The Goblin/Incubus; 1919–1927) and the ample histories of modern Romanian civilization and literature he published in the 1920s. In lieu of rural traditionalism, he advocated “sincere efforts of exploration and innovation” and an emphasis on “the poetry of the urban environment” (Istoria literaturii 4: 282). While not discarding the idea of a “Romanian style,” he argued that smaller literatures needed to look for models outside themselves, models that could lead from simulation to internal stimulation. Likewise, in his Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent (History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present; 1940), George Călinescu wrote that Romanians “now have a rich enough literature not to exaggerate the value of folk poetry” (61). Therefore, Călinescu’s 948-page history dedicated only one subsection to a discussion of folk poetry. Călinescu acknowledged the debt that writers like Vasile Alecsandri and Ion Creangă owed to folk creations: the former collected and reworked folk material in his anthology of folk poetry (Poezii poporale; 1852–53) and in some of his own literature; the latter drew copiously on folklore both in his autobiographical Amintiri din copilărie (Memories of My Boyhood; 1881–88) and in his fairy tales. Still, Călinescu regarded Creangă not as a “folklorist” but as an erudite humorist in the manner of Anton Pann and Rabelais, who both reconstructed and parodied the traditional folk ethos (430). Echoing the distinction that Sadoveanu made between the literary and documentary value of folklore — “Not every folk production has value, only because it is popular. For the student of philology and folklore it may have value in itself; I as writer am interested only in its brilliance” (qtd. in Micu 12) — Călinescu argued that the literary historian should focus only on the literary value of oral creations, on their impact as formal models. Thus, in Estetica basmului (The Aesthetics of the Fairy Tale; 1965), Călinescu praised the fairy tale as a multi-faceted genre, capable of mixing mythology, ethics, science, and moral observation. Lovinescu and Călinescu anticipate the more recent critiques of national narratives that overrate the importance of indigenous elements in the formation of a national culture. The example of Călinescu’s monumental history, which sought to establish a Romanian literary tradition on the strength of foundational writers rather than on a fluid, less formalized oral culture, was followed in two conflicting ways by post-World War II critics (see Spiridon’s article pp. 392–94 below). One direction retained the monumental model, organizing the history of Romanian literature around a grand narrative that emphasized literature’s progressive emancipation and democratization in

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accord with the Communist Party doctrine. This grand narrative repositioned folklore (mass culture) at the center of the development, reversing Călinescu’s emphasis on the importance of selfconscious aesthetic creation. Predictably, this type of history took the form of mediocre official compilations that displaced individual authorship, as in the three-volume Istoria literaturii române (1968–73) authored by a “collective.” However, the Lovinescu-Călinescu model also inspired a number of critical histories, especially Ion Negoiţescu’s Istoria literaturii române (1991), which emphasized the importance of innovative aesthetic production, offering a narrative of ruptures and renewals. In Negoiţescu’s history, the indigenous (rural or folk roots) of the foundational figures of Romanian literature are deemphasized and interplayed with West-European models. Thus, the “national poet” Mihai Eminescu is revealed to be also as a product of European Romanticism, and the folk-inspired Mihail Sadoveanu emerges also as a learned prose-parable writer. Not surprisingly, prior to the collapse of Communism, Negoiţescu was able to publish only fragments of his deconstructive rereadings of Romanian literary culture, in literary magazines. Post-1989 literary histories have been able to reconsider more openly the role of folklore in the formation of the literary canon, the question of national specificity, or the interplay between a national tradition and alternative cosmopolitan directions. The post-1989 transition was by no means smooth, involving also a resurgence of nationalism, ethnic and religious conflicts, and political polarization (see ECE 1: 39–82). Still, just like in Russia and other East European countries, the new literary histories managed to challenge the traditional emphasis on “a single, all-embracing narrative — national, religious, historic, political, or aesthetic” (Boym 228). Concerning the role of folklore, some of the new historical studies carefully differentiate folk creations from high or canonical art. As Dumitru Micu writes, the folk creator, as opposed to the individual writer, “does not claim originality but rather representativeness” (Istoria 8). He embodies — in the words of the nineteenth-century historian Nicolae Bălcescu — “ideas and sentiments of the time” (Cuvânt preliminariu). In this sense, folk culture represents an important source of inspiration for writers, but not the only one. 2. Folk Genres and Myths: Their Impact on Romanian Literary Culture Like the folklore of the neighboring countries, with which it maintained a continuous exchange, Romanian folklore is characterized by a rich array of genres and forms, from doine (songs of longing) to ballads, legends, riddles, proverbs, and tales, and from folk dances and rituals, to woodcarvings and folk architecture. What is transmitted in oral literature in infinite variants are a number of (stereo)typical situations, motifs (see Stith Thompson’s monumental Motif-Index of Folk Literature) and characters, or what Călinescu called “schemas.” Already in 1895, Lazăr Şăineanu proposed in Basmele române a typology of Romanian fairy tales in relation to the legends and tales of neighboring countries and of other Romance cultures. He divided fairy tales into mythic-fantastic, psychological, religious, and humorous, each section being subdivided further into cycles of “interdiction,” “heroic exploits,” etc. Some of these categories, as well as Şăineanu’s idea that fairy tales revolve around a small number of types on which each ethnic culture plays infinite variations (Basmele române 176), anticipate Vladimir Propp’s morphology of the fairy tale.

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Călinescu adopted Alecsandri’s division of Romanian folk poetry into “cântece bătrâneşti” (songs of old), “doine” (songs of longing) and “hore” (horas or dance songs), arguing that they represent “three types of the local spirit” (Istoria literaturii 61). The narrative ballads retell old histories revolving around haiduks, outlaws, rebellious shepherds, or anti-Turkish heroes. The doinas are lyrical creations concerned with erotic yearning, but expressing also the pain of solitude, estrangement, or unmourned death. The horas voice the jubilation of dance and contain erotic or satirical allusions, often in a dialogic structure (61–62). The last two types have their roots in rural culture; the ballads have a more mixed origin, associated with courtly and minstrel traditions. During the Romantic period, poets like C. A. Rosetti continued to have their works performed by “lăutari” (bands of folk musicians) rather than publish them. Prince Michael the Brave entered Alba Iulia/Gyulafehérvár at the end of his 1600 Transylvanian campaign accompanied by bands of musicians who intoned archaic historical ballads. According to Călinescu, folk poetry offered Romanian literature four constitutive myths. The first was that of Trajan and Dochia, which can be called the myth of Romanian ethno-genesis. In this myth, which interested many writers beginning with Gheorghe Asachi (ECE 2: 248), the Roman emperor Trajan pursued during his Dacian campaigns the beautiful daughter of King Decebal, Dochia. In Asachi’s version of this legend, Dochia şi Traian (Dochia and Trajan; 1836), Dochia is turned into a rock by the local god Zalmoxis in order to escape the pursuing Romans. In other versions, the beautiful shepherdess is united with the Roman emperor. In Eminescu’s own narrative of origins, various mythologies become amalgamated: the Dacian poet Ogur connects both to the Thracian god Zalmoxis and to the Nordic gods of Walhalla. Eminescu’s composite mythology is further enriched with Romanian folk elements, often endowing the protagonists with magic, fairy-tale characteristics. The second myth is connected to the ballad Mioriţa (The Ewe Lamb), published for the first time in Alecsandri’s folk collection. For Călinescu, this ballad represented the pastoral origin of the Romanian people, as well as the drama of its cosmic destiny. When the magic ewe-lamb warns her Moldavian shepherd of his impending death at the treacherous hands of his Walachian and Transylvanian colleagues, the Moldavian shepherd accepts his fate, leaving detailed instructions to his favorite ewe-lamb about how he should be buried in the bosom of nature. Mioriţa has been interpreted by Lucian Blaga and others — including the French historian Jules Michelet — as an expression of the Romanian ethos of resignation in the face of an oppressive historical destiny. In Spaţiul mioritic (Mioritic/Undulated Space; 1936), Blaga derived a whole theory of nationalarchetypal style from this folk ballad. Mircea Eliade saw in his study Zalmoxis, the Vanishing God (226–56) the shepherd’s acceptance of death not as a capitulation but rather as an acknowledgement of higher cosmic laws. The shepherd converts his imminent death into a mystical reunion with the cosmic world, a magic wedding that gives meaning to an incomprehensible historical destiny. The third myth is contained in the ballad of Meşterul Manole or Legenda mănăstirii Argeşului we have discussed in the introduction (pp. 273–74 above). The fourth myth is associated by Călinescu with the legend of Zburătorul (The Goblin/ Incubus). This erotic myth, present in many other cultures, received its first coherent Romanian expression in Ion Heliade Rădulescu’s poem of that title (1844). Heliade Rădulescu’s Zburătorul reenacts the myth in the confines of a village, whose heavy down-to-earth materiality (with herds of cattle returning home and fountains of milk

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flowing freely) is transfigured by a magic evening chant. This myth was subsequently adopted by many other writers. As Călinescu argued, in the absence of an early “literature of analysis” on the theme of love, Romanian poets were attracted by the “primitive” motif of the “invasion of erotic instinct” (Istoria 65). Together, the four myths “define four fundamental problems: the ethnogenesis of the Romanian people, the cosmic situation of man, the creation of culture, and sexuality” (65). There are other important folk motifs and typologies that have been worked into the texture of Romanian and neighboring literatures. The “haiduks” featured in the folk and high literature on both sides of the Danube (see Muthu, “‘Haiducul”). Reinvented and localized in the works of Lyuben Karavelov, Khristo Botev, Mihail Sadoveanu, Panait Istrati, and Zsigmond Móricz, the haiduks took on also the defense of the Danubian “frontier” from Turkish incursions (ECE 2: 238). Another mythic folk type, the crippled sage Nastradin Hodza (Hodza Nasruddin), transgressed national borders, being popular north and south of the Danube and also in the Near and Middle East. The Turks considered him one of theirs; in other cultures he was alternatively Christian and Muslim and took on the nationality of every country he dwelt in. His spiritual brothers were the equally resourceful Hitar Petar (Sly Peter) in Bulgaria and Păcala (Trickster) in Romania. Romanian folklore, like that of other Balkan countries, is rich in resourceful female characters that function as mythic archetypes. One example is that of Sf. Vineri (Saint Friday): this skinny old woman, sister of Sf. Miercuri (Saint Wednesday) and Sf. Duminică (Saint Sunday), is simultaneously good-willed and malevolent, protective and punishing, decorous and decrepit, devilish and Christian. In other words, she represents a caring and at the same time very demanding mother figure, at home in a female universe of birth, germination and crops, beauty and magic. On the nocturnal, negative side, she resembles Joimăriţa (embodiment of the preceding day, Joi = Thursday), a “demonic female character in Romanian mythology, patron of hemp and wool spinning” (Evseev 210). Either as a vampirical substitute for Joimăriţa, or as a protective mother figure, St. Friday remains connected to the cycle of the week, watching over its basic anthropological rhythms including feeding. She is the paragon of femaleness, prodigal in her gifts and relentless in applying corrections. More importantly, she is a kind of super-sign that dramatizes the inexhaustibility of folk types as they mediate between reality and imagination, human nature and supernatural creations. 3. Collectors, Interpreters, Rewriters As early as the mid-seventeenth-century, the Romanian Catholic bishop Ioan Caianu / Kájoni János put together a collection of Transylvanian folk songs (1634–42). Prince Dimitrie Cantemir relied on folklore in his Descriptio Moldaviae (Description of Moldavia; 1716) to document regional wedding and funeral customs. His satirical-allegorical novel, Istoria hieroglifică (Hieroglyphic History; 1705), drew on many learned and folk traditions, following occasionally the rhythms and phrasing of folk poetry. Through a commentator called “The Erudite,” Budai-Deleanu argued in Ţiganiada (The Gypsiad; written 1800) in favor of recording oral poetry produced by the humble and overlooked village artists. And Bălcescu based his monumental history, Românii supt MihaiVoievod Viteazul (Romanians under Prince Michael the Brave; 1878) on both oral legends and historical documents.

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Anton Pann was one of the earliest Romanian writers whose claim as a poet rests largely on his reworking of folk materials. As a collector/rewriter of folk poetry, his erudition was remarkable. Poezii populare (Folk Poems; 1846), Năzdrăvăniile lui Nastratin Hogea (Hodza Nasruddin’s Waggeries; 1853), and Culegere de proverburi sau Povestea vorbei (A Collections of Proverbs, or The History of the Word; 1847) bring together material from the Balkans and the larger Mediterranean area (Pann knew well Greek and Turkish). His texts are not accurate transcriptions of rural creations, but rewrites that blend the folk register with a self-conscious focus on the “linguistic” and “human comedy” (Călinescu, Istoria 215). Ion Creangă wrote a series of Poveşti (Fairy Tales) in the 1880s that drew on folk material but turned the genre into an ethnographic tale in which animals behave and speak like village characters. Călinescu was particularly impressed with Creangă’s dramatistic skills and his tendency to treat the fantastic “realistically, with great deal of rural local color” (Istoria 425, 426). The reader can immediately recognize in Creangă the conflicting identities of rural and urban, traditional and modern, “naive” and self-conscious characters. Călinescu finds a jovial “gratuity” in Creangă’s work that points ahead to a modernist aesthetics, and a type of chatty wisdom and “monologic performance, with only one actor” (Istoria 423) that takes us back to oral storytelling. Nică, the autobiographical protagonist of Creangă’s Amintiri, experiences all kinds of ruptures between the first-person narrating self and the experiencing self, between the mythic space of childhood, nourished by the imagery of oral fairy tales, and the alienating world of urban culture. The four parts of the book illustrate the shifts and readjustments of an individual and, by implication, of Romanian society, from patriarchal village culture (transmitted primarily through folklore) to middle-class urbanity (see Cosma 189–90). Like Creangă, George Coşbuc drew on folklore in his attempt to create a monograph of village culture, complete with its customs, rituals, and drama/comedy of the everyday. He also substituted classic mythological figures with archetypes found in Romanian folklore. His “classicism” is derived from a canonization of folklore and a refinement of the language of oral poetry. A major event in the canonization of folklore was the publication of Poezii poporale. Balade (Cântice bătrâneşti) adunate şi îndreptate de Vasile Alecsandri (Folk Poetry: Ballads [Songs of Old] collected and revised by V. A.) in 1852–53. Alecsandri’s collection of folk poetry had a major impact on Romanian literature, feeding the romantic-nationalist interest in local themes and forms, and stimulating more rigorous folkloric activities. Defending Alecsandri’s folk collection against those who deplored the writer’s sentimentalizing interventions in the collected texts, Titu Maiorescu argued that “Alecsandri, with his deep instinct as a national poet, found in folk poetry the richest spring of literary beauty that Romanian society could drink from, both directly and indirectly, through those writers of talent who understood its tastes” (138). Egged on by Alecsandri’s example, a number of Romanian writers published important collections and studies in the second half of the nineteenth century. G. Dem. Teodorescu brought out a collection of Poezii populare române (Romanian Folk Poetry; 1885); Tudor C. Pamfile explored Romanian mythology in Mitologie românească (1916) and Romanian folk feasts in Sărbătorile la români (1914); Petre Ispirescu published a comparative study of French and Romanian fairy tales (1877), as well as the important collection Legendele şi basmele românilor, ghicitori şi proverburi (The Legends and Fairy Tales of Romanians, Riddles and Proverbs; 1872–76).

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In multicultural Transylvania, folk collections reflected the varied ethnic traditions of the area. In 1856, Joseph Haltrich published Saxon folk tales and a year later Friedrich Müller a collection of Saxon legends. In 1859, Atanasie Marian Marienescu printed the first collection of Romanian carols and the first collection of folk ballads from Transylvania, while János Kriza published in 1863 his Vadrózsák (Wild Roses), an anthology of Transylvanian-Hungarian folk poetry. Not surprisingly, the collecting of folklore went hand in hand with the writing of the national narrative. Marienescu thought that folklore reinforced a people’s national identity more strongly than its history and language. The “father” of folklore studies, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, foregrounded in both his literary and scholarly work the Daco-Roman foundational narrative of Romania. In order to understand the national Weltanschaung of a people one had to study exhaustively its centuries of oral and written tradition. In his major work, esp. Cuvente den bătrâni (Words from Old; vol. 2, 1879), he attempted a typological systematization of folk genres and an articulation of the modern principles of folklore collection. These principles were followed and expanded by the ethnographer Moses Gaster who, in Literatura populară română (Romanian Folk Literature; 1883), studied the origin and circulation of various folk genres, especially folktales. They were also applied by Lazăr Şăineanu’s in the aforementioned Basmele române and by Sim[ion] Fl[orea] Marian in Sărbătorile la români (Romanian Festivals; 1898–1901). Other folkloric works, like C. Rădulescu-Codin’s monumental collection Cântece şi descântece ale poporului (Folk Songs and Chants), could appear only posthumously, in 1986. In the twentieth century, the study of folklore made significant advances through the comparative ethno-folkloristic work of Pericle and Tache Papahagi. Concerned with the neglect of the South Danubian Aromanian folklore, Pericle Papahagi published an important collection of Aromanian fairy tales, Basmele aromâne (1905). Tache Papahagi continued Pericle’s interest in Aromanian folklore, studying it in relationship to the Romanian folklore north of the Danube, in Folclor român comparat (Comparative Romanian Folklore; 1929). The Hungarian Béla Bartók collaborated with the Romanian musicologist Constantin Brăiloiu in collecting folk music, and based some of his own music on Romanian carols. After World War II, the archiving and study of folklore continued through a number of scholars formed in the interwar period. Their work received significant institutional support (an Institute of Folklore was organized in 1949, and folklore became an important object of study in universities), but was also undermined by rigid communist indoctrination that praised unconditionally the “genius of anonymous folk creators” and expected all literature to follow their commitment to social themes (their focus on the fate of the downtrodden) and to popular heroes (from past outlaws and haiduks to present-day communist crusaders). The best work of these scholars was published after Party control became less stringent. Ovidiu Bârlea’s Metoda de cercetare a folclorului (The Research Method of Folklore; 1969) distinguished folklore scholarship from other disciplines with which it had been associated (philology, ethnography, sociology), emphasizing the importance of aesthetics in folklore. His Poetică folclorică (Folkloric Poetics; 1979) described the specific norms that underlie folk creations, their system of creativity, and emotional-aesthetic effects. In Retorica folclorului. Poezia (The Rhetoric of Folklore: Poetry; 1978), Gheorghe Vrabie also gave priority to the aesthetic-rhetorical values of folk creations. He applied a similar stylisticrhetorical approach in Poetica Mioriţei. Studiu stilistic (The Poetics of Mioritza: A Stylistic Study;

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1984), focusing on the Romanian variants of this ballad under the different models they illustrate: mythic, ritualistic, and poematic. The study of folklore from the historically multicultural areas of Transylvania and the Banat also included work on the folk production of other ethnic groups. Ion Apostol Popescu published a collection of Armenian fairy tales in 1967. Jenő Kiss translated and edited several volumes of Romanian folk carols and ballads, and Sándor Kányádi translated and published Saxon and Yiddish folk poetry. Writers from Transylvania and the Banat were more susceptible to the tension between rural and urban values, folk tradition and modern innovation. The Saxon writers from Southern Transylvania, for example, moved away from the provincial tradition of Heimatliteratur in the early twentieth century, embracing the modernist currents coming from Austria and Germany. The writers from the Banat region were divided between an older generation that still followed traditional folk models in their literature written in Swabian dialect and the younger “Aktionsgruppe Banat” (ECE 2: 120–23) that pursued modernist urban models, feeling alienated from their small town and village roots. The twentieth-century literature of larger Romania was also divided between conflicting pulls, one towards a traditionalist-rural paradigm, and the other towards an urban-cosmopolitan one. Folklore continued to play an important role in the first paradigm but, paradoxically, it impacted also the modernist one, particularly through the emerging urban folklore that inspired a number of writers from Mateiu I. Caragiale to Mircea Eliade. The traditionalist-rural paradigm was represented comprehensively by Mihail Sadoveanu, who resorted to folklore to impart verisimilitude to his representation of regional settings, local dialects, and ethnographic customs. In Baltagul (The Hatchet; 1930) he went even further, absorbing/updating the plot of the folk ballad Mioriţa (The Ewe Lamb), constructing around it a tragic epic of pastoral life complete with a mystery plot and archetypal characters (peasants, shepherds, cattle-dealers). By contrast, Mircea Eliade’s fiction wavered between cosmopolitan urban settings (Paris, Berlin, and London) and a provincial Bucharest that provided the stage for his fantastic prose. In keeping with Eliade’s own analysis of the complex interplay between the sacred and the profane in Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), hidden under the provincial mundane surface of Bucharest is a city of secret happenings, infused with the magic of myth (Balkan and Indic) and folklore. Eliade’s later political-philosophic novel, Pe strada Mântuleasa (The Old Man and the Bureaucrats; 1970) emphasizes more clearly the redeeming role that mythopoetic narration can play against the “terror of history.” The protagonist of this novel, old Zaharia Fărâmă (Zaharia Crumb) mesmerizes his communist interrogators with fabulous, labyrinthine stories of the past. In his conversation with Claude-Henri Roquet, Eliade called attention to the larger implications of the mythodrama staged in his novel: I wanted to engineer a confrontation between two mythologies: the mythology of folklore, of the people, which is still alive, still welling up in the old man, and the mythology of the modern world, of technocracy. […] These two mythologies meet head on. The police try to discover the hidden meaning of all these stories. […] But they are also blinkered, they can only look for political secrets. […] They are incapable of imagining that there can be meaning outside the political field. (Ordeal 182)

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Eliade’s approach can be recognized in other novels published in the 1970s. Ştefan Bănulescu, for example, mixes folkloric realism with gothic fantasy, and archaic myth with contemporary political tragicomedy. Through him and other younger writers emerging in the 1980s, a strong tradition of fantasy, with roots in the surrealistic strain of folk poetry and significant later developments from Eminescu and Hasdeu to Eliade, returned to the forefront, challenging the dominance of Realism as a doctrine and narrative mode in Romanian literature.

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The Heidenrösleinkrawall (The Row about the Wild Rose): an 1864 Debate on the Origins of Folk Ballads Vilmos Voigt European folklore research in the strict sense of the word originated with the Germans. One of its very first lessons was to acknowledge the international dissemination of folk songs, folk tales, and, later, folk customs and other products of the folk tradition. Herder expressed already at the end of the eighteenth century this idea in Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of the Peoples in their Folk Songs), stressing also that the poetic work of various people have equal value. He did not publish as yet variants of the same song from various folk traditions. The Grimm brothers published in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen only German texts, but they were aware that the tales were part of an international network, and they asked their colleagues in the Circular (1815) to collect and publish tales in all parts of Europe. Once they became familiar with the first such books in the original or in German translation, for example Vuk Karadžić’s Serbian (1821) and Georg von Gaal’s Hungarian folk tales (1822), they stressed in their reviews the national similarities and stylistic differences. They interpreted the “originality” of the European folk in the framework of a “common Indo-European heritage”: folk tales were thought to reflect an old “mythology” ascribable to the Indo-European past. In a lengthy introduction to his translation of old Indian fables, the German philologist Theodor Benfey expressed in 1859 the opinion that the European folk tales had “migrated” from their original homeland, India. Benfey’s views were soon generally accepted by folklore scholars; criticism arose only decades later, and with respect to other genres of folk literature. János Kriza, a Unitarian bishop, started to collect folk ballads (and other genres) among the Székely Hungarians in Transylvania in the 1840s. Due to financial and other problems, he could publish the first volume only in 1863. Its title, Vadrózsák (Wild Roses), clearly reflects romantic German views about the beauty of peasant life. Pál Gyulai, a leading Hungarian literary critic, praised the unique beauty of the Székely ballads in enthusiastic essays, But Julian Grozescu, a Romanian homme de lettres who was also interested in folklore research, wrote the following year short articles in Romanian and Hungarian journals in Hungary, arguing that two of Kriza’s best known folk ballads, “Molnár Anna” and “Kőmíves Kelemenné” were translations from the

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Romanian narrative songs “Toma Alimoş” and “Mănăstirea Argeşului” (Monastery of Argeş), and near plagiarism. Several Hungarian literati refuted the accusation by demonstrating the existence of several Hungarian variants, and called for the collection of more Hungarian ballads. The polemics, which centered on the question “who stole” the ballads from the other people’s tradition, was not without nationalistic overtones. The Vadrózsa-per (Trial of the Wilde Rose) was later often mentioned in folklore research history both in Hungary and Romania (Alexics). In the rest of Europe nobody paid much attention to it. Adrian Fochi and Lajos Vargyas have demonstrated recently that both ballads are of international distribution, well known in different European folk traditions. Neither the Hungarian nor the Romanian texts are translations or stolen goods. “Molnár Anna” (Vargyas 2: 58–84) is about a soldier/knight/robber who asks a married woman to join him, but the woman discovers during the journey the corpses of the soldier’s previous victims and finally kills him. This ballad is known in more than 700 European variants (in French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Moravian, Romanian — about five variants —, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, and, of course, Hungarian). There have been seventy-eight registered Hungarian variants from all the Hungarian language areas. Folklorists differ as to how the ballad was actually disseminated, but it was known even in the Rhine valley during the Late Middle Ages, and traces of a German version are easily visible even in Hungarian variants. The Balkan variants seem to have evolved later. Hungarian scholars have tried to connect some of its motifs with Mountain Scythian [!] archaeological finds, stressing thus the extraordinary old background of the text, but this interpretation is controversial. West European scholars connect the text with the Halewijn/Harlequin figure. “Kőmíves Kelemenné” (Vargyas 2: 18–57) is about the world-wide motif of the necessary sacrifice in building a communal structure. The unfinished construction collapses, ostensibly because the masons did not sacrifice a human being, in most cases the wife of the chief mason. We know more than forty-five Hungarian variants, and the story in ballad form is well known in the Balkans in about five-hundred variants among Bulgarians, Romanians (in about fifty variants), Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Greeks, and others. It is quite interesting how folklorists in different countries interpret the origin and dissemination of the building-sacrifice narrative in the Balkans. According to the Greek professor Georgios Megas, the starting point was Greece, related to the building of a bridge over the river Arta. Bulgarian scholars accept the importance of the Arta Bridge variants but consider it as Bulgarian. Zihni Sako and other Albanian folklorists consider the original to be in prose form and, of course, Albanian, related to the building of the fortress at Shkodra (It. Scutari). Ion Taloş, following a long tradition among Romanian folklorists, claims that the dissemination started with the Romanian building of the monastery at Argeş (see also Eliade’s comments on this ballad, pp. 273–74 above). Vargyas finds the most archaic features in the Hungarian variants that deal with the building of the castle at Déva in Transylvania. Other folklorists refer to Mordvinian, Caucasian, and even Biblical parallels. If we accept that “old style” European folk ballads represent a genre, they must have a common history. Furthermore, ballad plots have different ways of spreading. Thus, the history of every well-known European folk ballad should be studied separately, paying thorough attention to the motifs, texts, stylistic elements etc. Vargyas lists earlier publications but foregrounds, of course, his own interpretation, from which the present article deviates in some details.

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Folklore as a Means to Demonstrate a Nation’s Existence: The Bulgarian Case Albena Hranova and Alexander Kiossev In Bulgaria, conditions for a slow political and cultural transformation first appeared in the early nineteenth century, when the former Bulgarian territory was within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. An independent Bulgarian State, the so-called Third Bulgarian Kingdom, was established only after the 1878 Russo-Turkish War. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, a large-scale Bulgarian National Revival evolved on this territory, somewhat later than its Greek and Serbian equivalents. Folklore, or, more precisely, the construction of folklore, played an important role in this process. It was a constitutive element in a number of institutions and institutional discourses, including cultural education, literature, political propaganda, and even the Uprising against the Turks in April 1876. The common slogan underlying these discourses was that “Europe should become aware of the existence of the Bulgarians.” The absence of a classical literary tradition that, for instance, “the wise Greeks” possessed, as well as of an entire spectrum of prestigious traditions in music, science, public life, press, publishing tradition, etc., was the source of an inferiority complex for the nascent Bulgarian nation. Nation-building was carried out on a “culture of absences,” against civilizational deficits that had to be overcome. Yet the discursive figure of “absent civilization” was conjoined with a desire to convert the absence into presence. The response to the complaint about civilizational deficits was that, upon closer look, Bulgarians were bound to find the oldest and most glorious cultural tradition, genuine folk literature and poetry. These had simply been forgotten, because the oblivious descendants had failed to pay them enough attention. According to this ideology, folklore and folk art were supposed to fill in and compensate for the absence of high literature with known authors. Folklore was seen as the great hidden oral tradition, a genius in potentia hidden in the depth of the folk. Hence the overwhelming collective desire of the Bulgarian intellectuals to have folklore recorded, i.e., translated into and published as high written poetry. As early as 1836, Atanas Kipilovski cried out while translating a book from Russian, “Oh, how I long to collect some Bulgarian songs and publish them!” (Kaidanov 203). A year later, the Ruthenian-Russian Slavist champion of the Bulgarian cause, Yuri Venelin, wrote to the Bulgarian writer Vasil Aprilov: “You are complaining, dear sir, that the Bulgarians have been forgotten […] The Greeks and the Serbs have not been forgotten by the enlightened European peoples because they themselves, trading and serving across Europe, wrote, spoke and shouted with ethnographic evidence about themselves” (O zarodyše 114–15). The cultural imperative of this quest for discovery, collection, and publication of folk products and heritage lasted throughout the nineteenth century. In 1872, the Bulgarian journalist, writer and folklorist Lyuben Karavelov wrote: “I would like to show everybody my people with their white cottages, with their songs and festive rites” (6: 389). A year earlier, Petar Odjakov, author of one of the earliest poetics in Bulgarian, offered in his book on writing songs and poetry, written under the guidance of Russian Slavists and published with the assistance of the Slavic Charity Committee,

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the typical definition that folklore was a “sign of existence”: “A people without songs, tales, or its own customs and legends is a dead rabble with neither spirit nor life. Were we to destroy all those popular pillars, we would soon see the people lost or assimilated into another people” (9). Folklore was thus displayed, preserved, and awarded the status of printed presence and public visibility. The first impetus came mainly from the outside, through the cultural missionaries of an already constituted romantic Slavic philology. The Bulgarian men of letters were encouraged by the considerable interest that some of the founding fathers of modern Slavic Philology, such as the Slovene Jernej Kopitar, the Slovak Pavel Josef Šafárik, the Serb Vuk Karadžić, and the Serbian writer Sima Milutinović showed for Bulgarian folklore. Venelin likewise collected songs and he outlined in his correspondence with Bulgarian writers a comprehensive program of folklore collection. The Russian Slavist Peter A. Bežonov published in Moscow a collection of Bulgarian folk songs in 1855. The Bosnian Stefan Verković published in Belgrade a collection of songs of the Macedonian Bulgarians in 1860. The authoritative nineteenth-century collection of Bulgarian folk songs by the brothers Dimitar and Konstantin Miladinov appeared in Zagreb in 1861, under the patronage and financing of the Croatian bishop Joseph Georg Strossmayer. Ivan Bogorov published the first Bulgarian collection of folk songs and proverbs, the Bălgarski narodni pesni i poslovitsi (Bulgarian Folk Songs and Proverbs), in 1842 in Pest. Between the 1840s and 1870s, folkloric materials appeared in diverse publications: in the periodicals of the National Revival; in collections; in songbooks (pesnopoyki); in books of verse that lumped together original works of an author and collected folk songs; in textbooks and dictionaries that included folklore examples and quotes in their definitions, their descriptive systems, or their illustrations for dialectological material; and in various eclectic compilations. The consistent interest in folklore may be traced foremost in the programmatic meta-language that we find in the vast correspondence between different Bulgarian writers, in a number of journalistic articles and prefaces, as well as in comprehensive projects. The most radical, romantic and mythologizing program was published by Georgi S. Rakovski under the title “Manual on How to Seek and Find the Oldest Features of Our Life, Language, Folk Generations, Our Old Rule, Our Glorious Past, Etc.” (1859). Consistent and sustained interest in folklore was also demonstrated in the folklore-collection programs of Petko Slaveikov and Lyuben Karavelov, who are now regarded as the founders of a positivistic academic scholarship on Bulgarian folklore. The cultural-political gesture of showing Europe that Bulgarians exist is not the only romantic foundational idea in the Bulgarian institutionalization of folklore. Other ideas include the aesthetization of folklore and its inclusion in “high,” artistic literature. Collectors first gave priority to folk songs, the Herderian Volkslied; attention to folk prose and proverbs was sporadic and intensified only later. Without having read Herder or Schiller, but embracing a romantic and philological ideology through channels of scholarship and personal contacts, Bulgarian collectors, men of letters, and folklorists interpreted folklore mostly as “natural” and “naive” poetry. Their attention to the “poetic” and “lyric” was rooted in the Bulgarian context: lyric poetry was the first genre to appear in modern Bulgarian literature and has remained, by tradition, the strongest and aesthetically most valuable one. This aestheticizing romantic emphasis is distinctly articulated by the Miladinov brothers, who claim in the preface to their collection that the songs “are striking with their unusual beauty and expressiveness” and that “the nation is a timeless and great bard.” Dobri Voinikov’s Rukovodstvo za slovesnost (Manual for Literature; 1874) reasserted the romantic

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creed that folk poetry was natural rather than artificial: “The beauty of this simple folk poetry is as natural as nature itself — without any artifice whatsoever. Our high culture poetry would need much time to revive before, based on and developed by folk (poetry), it improves to the point where it will surpass its natural beauty” (138). This last passage suggests that attributing aesthetic qualities to “folklore” logically leads to historical teleology. As naive and natural poetry, folklore is at the point of origin in the historicalevolutionist scheme, it is the pre-history of future Bulgarian literature. Petar Odjakov’s mentioned Poetics claimed that folklore is at the beginning of literary history; it is “the first age” (perviy vozrast) of the verbal art mastered by the Bulgarians. Other peoples have advanced further, but so will the Bulgarians. Explaining his rhetorical and poetic rules, Odjakov quoted many examples from Bulgarian folk songs, along with examples from Shakespeare, Schiller, Krylov and others. “Naive poetry” thus not only acquired an aesthetic and historical status, it also became a normative force. Odjakov claimed that “in all European schools folk literature is studied (on the basis) of songs and tales, even the new grammatical systems are based on folk songs” (13). This aestheticizing of folk poetry and its association with high literature acquires exemplary form at the close of the nineteenth century in studies by Penčo Slaveikov, the ideologue of Bulgarian Modernism, whose cultural views are a complex and heterogeneous amalgam of Nietzschean ideas (Slaveikov’s Übermensch is the heroic builder of a national spiritual culture), Wilhelm Wundt’s ethnopsychology, and Johannes Volkelt’s aesthetics. Slaveikov believed in the “genius” as an exponent of the folk soul, and, paradoxically, he advocated the Goethean adage that the classic is healthy and the romantic sick. In his 1899 study, Gyotevite pesni (Goethean Songs), he appealed to a German cultural narrative to support his view on Bulgaria: “Even in his youth, under the influence of Herder, who first dared utter in Germany the revealing words that true poetry is the simple, naive, non-artificial poetry, Goethe undertook to study folk songs” (4: 225). The polemical pathos with which Penčo Slaveikov reaffirmed the relation between genius and folk poetry distinguished it from the arguments of the early Bulgarian national revivalists. For them, folklore was important as a representation of Bulgaria’s problematic existence; for Slaveikov it was part of a modernist critique of a Bulgarian literature that had been in existence for more than sixty years, reinforced by cultural institutions. In “Narodnite lyubovni pesni” (Folk Love Songs; Săčineniya 5: 7–47) of 1902, in the “Bălgarskata narodna pessen” (The Bulgarian Folk Song; Săčineniya 5: 82–122) of 1904, and, especially, in the scandalous “Bălgarskata poeziya” (Bulgarian Poetry; Săčineniya 5: 156–205) of 1906, Slaveikov proclaimed that Bulgarian literature had been “provisional” (privremenna), incidental, and imitative of foreign models, a literature that had aspirations but was written by dubious talents for patriotic purposes and lacked true classic value. Against it, Slaveikov invented a modernist “counter-tradition” that would not grow out of the previous literary generation but draw a radical dividing line, boldly reverting to the pre-historic “dark” and “authentically Bulgarian” soul of the people, which “poured” into folk songs. The ambitions of the modernist circle Misăl (Thought), to which Slaveikov belonged along with Petko Y. Todorov and Peyo Yavorov, was to produce unmatched philosophical syntheses of the modern with Bulgarian folklore. The modern classic that Slaveikov was aspiring to be would be capable of discovering in the non-literary and nonpsychologizing folk songs underlying psychological plots, “eternal aesthetic structures,” hidden music, gentleness of tone and roundness (zakruglenost) of form” (5: 19); he found the same qualities in the works of Anacreon, Shakespeare, and Goethe (5: 9 and 12).

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Valuing folk songs as the Bulgarian contribution to humanity’s immortal spiritual heritage, Slaveikov deliberately blended in his series of epic poems Bulgarian folk-song motifs, classical ancient myths, intellectual plots about ancient hetaerae, as well as Western musicians, poets, and philosophers. Next to the folkloric narrative poems “Ralitsa,” (2: 256–264), “Čumavi” (PlagueStricken; 2: 216–21, and “Zmeynovo Libe” (Serpent’s Beloved; 2: 196–97), he wrote the philosophical poems “Frina” (2: 200–11), a Beethoven poem called “Cis-Mol” (2: 222–25), a Lenau poem titled “Uspokoeniy” (He Who Found Peace; 2: 231–237), and a poem on Shelley, “Surtse na surtsata” (Heart of Hearts; 2: 243–50). He wanted to eliminate the opposition between the philosophical and folkloric, or, following Schiller, between the “naïve” and the “sentimental.” Describing the implicit philosophical and psychological tone of Bulgarian love songs as “shy realism,” Slaveikov succeeded in distinguishing Bulgarian songs from the French, Italian, and, closer home, from the Serbian ones. Hence folklore was not only aestheticized but also proclaimed to be “counter-literature,” the profound, authentic source of future Bulgarian literature. The relation between “folklore” and “literature” prompted Slaveikov to publish in 1904 his own selection of “folk songs” in English under the title The Shade of the Balkans. In 1917, this was published in Bulgarian under the title Kniga na pesnite (A Book of Songs — after Heine’s Das Buch der Lieder), though so thoroughly rewritten that the line between editor and mystifier is blurred. As Slaveikov envisioned in 1903, folklore and literature would regain their lost unity in “the Promised Land of poetry, the unknown land where the proud and selfish painter meets with the naive folk poet before the altar of the creator of the requisite in transitory life: the Enlightened Dream” (5: 55). Penčo Slaveikov exemplifies only one evolutionary stage in the Bulgarian literary uses of folklore. One could write a comprehensive history of the methods and stylizations of folklore by other Bulgarian authors, such as Nikola Kozlev, Naiden Gerov, Petko Slaveikov, Ivan Vazov, Todor Vlaikov, Kiril Khristov, Petko Y. Todorov, Peyo Yavorov, and Tsanko Tserkovski. They vary from replacing the purely syllabic meter of folklore with syllabotonic versification, to experiments with rhyming, strophic and rhythmic techniques, and to attempts at creating psychological or philosophical conceptualizations. Parallel with the political use and academic institutionalization of folklore, a purely literary institutionalization took place. Essentially, this involved the inclusion of folklore in the historically variable intertextual games of elitist literature. Those games can be described as a history of stylistic formations and figures, and literary-ideological paradigms, in which folk songs acquire ever new form and content. This way they also acquire a new type of reader competence and receptive strategies. The most general features of this intertextual appropriation of folklore by high literature include literary uses driven by the mentioned inferiority complex, Modernist, Goethean, and Nietzschean readings, as well as variants in cosmopolitan Bulgarian Symbolism. In the 1920s and 1930s, folklore was put to interesting Avant-garde use in the poetry of Nikola Furnadžiev, the prose of Angel Karaliyčev, and the radical essays of Naiden Šeytanov, where it fed a “cosmology” and even “sexual cosmogony” of Bulgarian identity. Bulgarian literature produced yet another, quite peculiar, strategy of folklore usage: stripping it consistently of all verbal form in prose. The image of folklore in the classical twentieth-century prose of Elin Pelin, Yordan Yovkov, Nikolai Haitov, Genčo Stoev and others is entirely non-verbal: quotes from folklore are replaced by descriptions of how folk songs are experienced by singers and their listeners. In this prose, folklore thus reverts to its romantic “naturalness,” deprived of its own text. Folklore is perceived indirectly, not reflectively but bodily.

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Let us retrace the history and academic institutionalization of Bulgarian folklore. Collecting folk songs, tales, fables, and proverbs was one of the stated goals of the Bulgarian Literary Society, the prototype of the future Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, founded in Romania even before the 1878 Liberation, in September 28, 1869. With the establishment of the sovereign Bulgarian State after 1878, the collection and study of folklore was assigned to newly created institutions such as the University of Sofia, founded on October 1, 1888, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the National Ethnographic Museum, etc. The formidable periodical for folklore collection, Sbornik za narodni umotvoreniya (Collection of Folklore), was launched in 1889 and is still appearing, though with changing frequency and titles. The Sbornik was financed directly by the Ministry of National Education until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Academy of Sciences took it over. Its first volume, published in 1889, featured Ivan Šišmanov’s study “Značenieto i zadačite na našata etnografiya” (The Meaning and Tasks of Bulgarian Ethnography), the first major post-Liberation program of folklore studies. The historicizing of folklore was a consequence of its academic institutionalization within the late-nineteenth-century philological project, but it sparked recurrent debates about the question whether a field that was not historical should be historicized. Should the cyclic seasonal temporality of rural pre-modern communities be rewritten in terms of Grand National Narratives? Such a rewriting would involve implanting in the body of folklore national cultural ideologemes like liberty, national emancipation, patriotic heroism, and self-sacrifice, which are actually alien to folklore. In a similar way, folklore knows nothing of nationalism’s geography, is unfamiliar with Motherland, national territory, and similar notions. Recent research, such as Blagovest Zlatanov’s essay “Nacia i literatura v točkata na balkana” (Nation and Literature at the Crosspoint of the Balkan), shows that the Balkan Range, this symbolic, heroic, and sublime mountain in Bulgarian poetry, is absent from authentic folklore — yet folklorists and interpreters continue to identify it there, thereby injecting into the geography of folklore’s imaginary another figure, namely that of the heroic Motherland. Historicizing folklore creates even greater problems in raising the “technical” issue of periodization. Attempts at philological periodization were prompted by several commonplace presupposition: (1) that the death of “classical” folklore coincided with the time of its recording in the nineteenth century; (2) that the death of folklore coincided with the birth of modern Bulgarian literature; and, (3) that literature assumed the role of folklore because it was capable of producing collective identificatory models and values. Yet these presuppositions cannot deal with the belief that unrecorded folklore is much older than modern Bulgarian literature. Some Old Slavonic sources dating from the ninth and tenth centuries indicate the ancient origins of folklore, by calling some songs and rites as “diabolic” and “satanic” from an orthodox Christian perspective. But the texts they refer to are not on record. What, then, is the place of folklore in the grand literary-historical superstructure? Most Bulgarian literary histories regard folklore as a symbolic first volume in the national verbal culture. Alexander T. Balan’s Bălgarska literatura (1896) starts with folklore. Petar Odjakov claimed in his Science of Making Songs (1871) that folklore was at the origin of literary history, its “first age” (perviy vozrast). Folk poetry constitutes also the first volume in Božan Angelov’s and Mihail Arnaudov’s Bulgarian literary history (1921), though in his own book on Bulgarian literature (1923) Angelov places the chapter on folklore in the second part, after the chapter on Medieval

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Bulgarian literature. Petar Dinekov objected to this, arguing that such an insertion of folklore into literary history was “entirely superficial” (Vaprosi 279). Recording folklore and inserting it as a (questionable) first volume into a figurative National Historical Library endows it with a specific symbolism. Folklore thus becomes a powerful element of national literary identity. This is manifested even in the most primitive and clichéd biographical discourses according to which certain persons became writers because their mother sang folk songs to them in their childhood. The folk text should be self-sufficient and distinct from the literary one, yet it should function as a paper body in the utopian “whole” of the Bulgarian Library: it should be both generator and part of it; both its prerequisite and one of its sections; both its raison d’être and one of its volumes, verbal matter filling one of its shelves. To situate folklore in the Library is to situate it in time. The question of what types of relations are vested in the place of folklore in the Library prompted entire discourses that we may call “poetics of prepositions” because of the methodological role that prepositions assumed in them. In Boyan Ničev’s book (1971) this takes the form from-to, in Dinekov’s book (1978) it is between. Folklore and literature are collocated in paratactic critical macro-sentences which bind them together, or in hypotactic ones that stress the cultural difference of their textures. The collocation of folklore and literature is also a condition for the appearance of generative schemes. Ničev, in particular, assumes that folklore not only preceded, but also “generated” modern Bulgarian literature. His academic opponents respond that folklore and literature are not generatively related. The debate has a history: Boyan Penev asserted already in his positivistic History of New Bulgarian Literature that “just like the Russian and the Serbian, our folklore has not been a point of departure in the development of literature” (1: 117). Penev situates folklore “in the age that immediately precedes the Bulgarian National Revival” (1: 119–20), and Nikola Georgiev has argued recently that “in Bulgaria there was no transition from folklore to literature in the nineteenth century” (Tesisi 12). That Bulgarian folklorists have not yet written a history of their field complicates the problem. In his key work, Bălgarski folklor (Bulgarian Folklore; 1959), Dinekov claimed that the main task of Bulgarian folklore studies was to write the history of Bulgarian folk poetry (163). That he had to repeat the claim in his later books, Literaturni vaprosi (145) and Meždu folklora i literaturata (295), means that until 1978 at least this “main task” remained unfulfilled. Indeed, no history of Bulgarian folk poetry has been written to date. Folklore occupies a weak position in historiographical schemes because it has no written history of its own and is, therefore, subjected to a structuring from the perspective of Bulgarian literary history that is alien to folklore. This long academic debate became hopelessly deadlocked because traditional Bulgarian literary history was de facto periodized in terms of politics, i.e., structured along the milestones of national political history. But the folk text does not fit into such a scheme because, informed by cyclical time, its message does not comprise any signs that could be ordered in a diachronic teleology and provide knowledge about the events, names, and referents discussed in both literary and national histories. This is why printed folklore could find in the Bulgarian Library only a provisional place. As Dinekov also argued, folklore should be situated in literary history “for the time being, given the present state of Bulgarian Folklore Studies, only as a preliminary general sketch” (Vaprosi 295). We may sum up this extensive debate with a paradox: folklore existed before modern literature, as attested by Medieval literature, hence it has a history, but one that is yet unwritten (i.e.,

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non-manifested). Folklore has no manifest history because it has constantly erased the diachronic sign structure in its own semiosis, making it virtually impossible to write such a history. Lacking a history, folklore gets suppressed and inappropriately categorized in alien (literary) histories. It acquired a historical place when it was recorded in the second, modern part of literature, but, as Medieval Bulgarian literature attests, it cannot be situated there because it is older than modern literature. Though such a summary may sound today like a case study in narrative aphasia, it brings out the paradoxical tautologies and paralogisms of a poorly argued symbolization of folklore as the first volume in a Bulgarian National library. The protagonist of that Library, modern Bulgarian literature itself, is unable to endure readily the trauma of these tautologies and paradoxes, and the pre-modern cultural model of folklore cannot readily serve the institutional intentions of modern literature. This produces a contradiction between different strata of discourses and values within the realm of the romantic idea. Folklore embodies the entity folk and a collective voice; yet folklore is far removed from the romantic and Slavic pathos of the nineteenth century. As Penčo Slaveikov wrote already in 1904, “the songs of these people are populated by various prehistoric animals but not a single king; they recount events that never happened, not a single one is glorified by official history” (Săbrani săčineniya 5: 104). The figure of Krali Marko, a hero not only in Bulgarian but also in Southern Slav folklore in general, a character who traverses whole cycles of mythical, historical, heroic, and other folk songs, is a telling case of such hermeneutic and axiological contradictions arising out of the encounter between tradition and modernity. In the most popular plot, Krali Marko liberates “three chains of slaves.” But the raising of Krali Marko to heroic status baffles nationalist modernity: he was a real-life character from the fourteenth century who ruled the Prilep fortress and was a vassal of Sultan Bayazid I during the Turkish invasion. How and why folklore turned a Turkish vassal into a protector and liberator of the slaves has puzzled for decades Penčo Slaveikov, Penev, Arnaudov, Dinekov, and other scholars. Nationalist modernity expects to find in folklore a tradition that can reaffirm its own value system; it is incapable of dealing with cases where folklore glorifies the vassal (in modern political terms, “the national traitor”) and completely ignores, say, Patriarch Euthymius, the defender of the last Bulgarian capital of Turnovo, also in the fourteenth century. Folk texts deviate from the romantic idea of heroic history also in that none of its representative exemplar glorifies the April 1876 Uprising against the Turks, which is the major event in Bulgarian national modernity, and a central subject as well as value matrix in modern Bulgarian literature. Even nineteenth century writers realized that folk texts cannot exemplify the political ideas of modernity. The traumatic effect of this on literary discourse is particularly visible in the poetry and journalism of the leading poet of the Bulgarian National Revival, Khristo Botev, who was killed in the April 1876 Uprising. His texts, which identify folklore as “slave songs,” address furious imperatives at the level of collectivity; yet they foreground strategies that identify the modern nationalist discourse as a legacy from the collective voice of folklore. Botev projects the imaginary contents of folk songs unto his poetry, by writing, for instance, in his poetic masterpiece “Hadji Dimitar” that “the minstrel’s song shall rise” to the hero killed in the fight for national freedom (61). Folklore scholarship has established that folklore neither knows nor uses words like “freedom,” but the collective consciousness of literature continues to believe that folklore glorifies political freedom and its heroes. Thus if mystifiers like McPherson simply wrote folklore, then

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literature writes the contemporary collective notion of folklore, substituting folk messages with its own and assimilating folklore in its institutional capacity to build collective national identities. Another case of the rewriting of folklore is the figure of “the haiduk,” which is marked in folklore by contradictory values: “the forest weeps for Indje Voevode,” because he is a hero and protector of the people, but it also weeps because he robs and kills people. Both readers of folklore and post-nineteenth century literature popularize the first image and suppress the second, thus “cleansing” the haiduk of his roguish habit and turning him into a national hero. Literature presents this transformed image as inherited from folklore, but the rewritten haiduk as a prototype of the Bulgarian heroic character is actually a product of literature. Thus modern Bulgarian literature invents a number of rewriting strategies, forcing folk textuality to act in the discursive performance of modernity. The two largest scholarly institutions, the University and the Academy, curiously divided folklore among the disciplinary fields of nineteenth century Slavic philology. The Academy traditionally maintained that folklore belonged to ethnography: Folklore Studies were a department of its Ethnographical Institute until 1974, when a separate Institute of Folklore was established. For its part, the University associated Folklore with Literary Studies: the academic discipline of “Bulgarian Folklore” was separated from courses in history and Bulgarian literature only in 1948. Dinekov wrote its first university textbook, but “folklore” still remained within the Department of Bulgarian Literature. This disciplinary partitioning of folklore has led to incessant methodological debates, which flare up periodically. Two representative theoretical books from the 1970s, Narod i Pessen (People and Song; 1977) by Todor Khristov Živkov, then Director of the Institute of Folklore, and Bălgarskata narodna pessen (The Bulgarian Folk Song; 1976) by the leading literary theoretician, Nikola Georgiev, illustrate the point. Georgiev, an expert in the theory of lyric poetry working in the paradigms of Anglo-American New Criticism and the Prague School, practiced a decontextualized close reading of folk-song texts. For him, they are exemplars of typical lyric structures that display the ambivalence, contradiction, and logical vagueness of language, the familiar interplay of denotative and connotative meanings, as well as composition techniques (e.g., introduction, alternation, and intertwinement of motifs) that are generally typical of poetry as a literary genre. Georgiev forcefully pushed folklore towards Literary Studies. By contrast, Živkov interpreted folklore as “aesthetic culture” and as a social system for producing and disseminating information, information that reproduces the pre-modern community itself. He did not regard texts as autonomous but situated folklore in the intricate context of the local material and ritual environment of rural communities, related to the yearly cyclical calendar of labor activities and feasts. Živkov thus drew folklore towards anthropology, which became topical and even fashionable in Bulgaria at the time. These two positions ignited a bitter dispute between the young disciples of Živkov at the Institute of Folklore and of Georgiev in the Department of Bulgarian Studies at the University of Sofia. The dispute was fought out at academic seminars on “Reconstruction or Interpretation” in the early 1980s. The very title of the dispute indicated that the academic institutions and methods could not share folklore. They saw folklore only within their institutional frame; they constructed folklore in terms of the methodological divergence between literary studies and anthropology as two incompatible academic disciplines, though in the nineteenth century they were part of a synthetic historical-philological nationalist discipline.

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There are even deeper paradoxes behind this methodological and disciplinary division of folklore among institutions. Since the authenticity of folklore, its popular character, is a nationalist value, its description in an objective (external, non-indigenous) meta-language is problematic. Furthermore, the recording folklorists are likewise invariably “external” vis-à-vis their subject; their meta-language constructs and ideologically articulates some inarticulate cultural national “entity.” Those who pursue the ethnographic project on national grounds will question such violations of the romantic “national entity” by a global ethnographic enterprise. Their objections may be countered with meta-linguistic utopias that reconcile the “recorder” and the “singer,” the “knowledge of” and the “knowledge about” the people. This utopia, vested in a notion of the recorder as a heterogeneous and collective subject, is evident already in Šišmanov’s program: “Young and old alike, irrespective of gender and occupation, teachers, priests, students, inspectors, doctors, researchers, judges, philosophers, natural scientists, painters, etc. […] anyone can describe or study the people” (Izbrani săčineniya 2: 24–30). Such a utopian project expects the collective to reason about the collective. It covers up the effects of the alienating meta-language to the best of its ability. Thus, substituting the cultural parameters of folklore, printed and written modern culture creates, by presumption, conditions for constant debates on folklore, because its diverse scholarly, political, and aesthetic meta-languages dissent from each other and ultimately constitute different folklores. The various institutions and disciplinary modes of writing turn folk singing into a national myth. The imperative of collecting folk texts does not merely imply selection and categorization; the selections themselves are multiple, too. For example, folklore offers justification for both Slaveikov’s “shy realism” and Šeytanov’s “sexual cosmogony.” Literature, folklore studies, journalism, politics and the other institutional discourses all contribute only partially overlapping forms to the amorphous body of culture; they are all constructors of the grand synecdoches of Bulgarian folklore. The different institutionalizations of folklore have nevertheless one thing in common, namely that, with the exception of academic Folklore Studies and dialectology, they prefer codified and linguistically normalized variants of folk songs to dialectal variants. Though accurate folkloristic records must preserve the dialect of the utterance (those records are the source for historical linguistics and dialectology), the folk texts for mass audiences aim at popularization, learning by heart, inclusion in textbooks, and in state curricula. They are subjected to various degrees of editing and adjustment to the codified Bulgarian language. The preservation of dialectal features in records presumes that the odd and unfamiliar in the dialect is a sort of poeticism. The twelvevolume Bălgarsko narodno tvorčestvo (Bulgarian Folklore), compiled and edited in the 1960s by an academic team, normalized language. Printed collections of folk songs are representative selections, they are synecdoches of the “national entity.” They are invariably structured by axiological, aesthetic, thematic, regional, classificatory, or other principles; they select, classify and arrange a representative part of the romantically conceptualized whole of folklore from a particular perspective. As a result, compilers become to greater or lesser degree authors (which is fundamentally alien to their subject matter), and the meta-language institutionally reaffirms this authorship by means of such formulae as “the Miladinov brothers’ collection is better than that of Bežonov’s.”

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Yet the collection is representative in a fundamentally contradictory manner. The classificatory and representative aim of a compilation, which by definition presupposes a quest for invariants, trips over the very variability, mutability, and mobility of folklore, the recalcitrance of the particular. As a result, different variants of one and the same folk song may get classified in contradictory and even opposite genres and thematic categories — which, in turn, undermines the classificatory idea of the collection. For instance, a mention of the Turks makes a folk song variant automatically historical, whereas a variant of the same song that does not mention the Turks may land among “everyday songs.” The Bulgarian scholarly technique of establishing “cycles,” i.e., of placing various texts into a postulated common context, intended to increase and compose the volume of the covered material for decades. It is a compensatory figure of the fundamental hesitations and contradictions inherent in the synecdochal collection. Ever since the early nineteenth century, “cycles” have been used as a means of moving towards the scholarly dream of delineating a “Homeric” national epic. In Yuri Venelin’s, Stefan Verković’s, and Penčo Slaveikov’s writings, Bulgarian folklore is measured against Homer’s epics. The yearning for Homer, and epic form in general, is a particular case of the yearning to constitute a prestigious eternal Bulgarian treasury of literature, which would be both modern and ancient. This dream of constructing a cycle, of integrity and classical representativeness, was realized in 1971, when the Bulgarian Academy published the huge volume Bălgarski yunaški epos (Bulgarian Heroic Epics). The issue of choice (and the underlying institution of authorship) constantly sparks debates and accusations, both in literature and academic folklore studies, whether something was sung and heard but not recorded (the recorder deliberately omitted and failed to record everything), or, vice versa, when something absent was recorded (i.e., the recorder is mystifying). Of course, mystifying folklore is the ultimate degradation of authorship. Šišmanov believed that “the origin of the study of folk songs is marked by a hoax — by McPherson’s ‘Ossian’” (Izbrani săčineniya 2: 18). Indeed, Bulgaria has its own major case of mystification, similar to those of McPherson and Václav Hanka. In 1874 and 1881, Stefan Verković published Veda Slovena, a collection of songs from prehistoric and pre-Christian times about the ancient homeland, the emigration of the Slavs from India, the ancient gods, the mythical Orpheus, and similar themes. They were recorded, according to Verković, “from the Macedonian-Rhodopi Bulgarian Pomaks.” Veda Slovena created a sensation back in the late nineteenth century and turned into a great story for Slavic Studies. Most scholars — among them Vatroslav Jagić, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Pypin, and Josef Konstantin Jireček, as well as the leading Bulgarian scholars then, Šišmanov, Drinov, and Balan — did not believe in the authenticity of the songs and thought that Verković had been misled by his informant and true author of the Veda Slovena, the Bulgarian teacher and patriot I. Gologanov. The debate on Veda Slovena has continued ever since; the latest ground-testing debate took place in the early 1980s. In Lieu of a Conclusion Since 1989, however, taboos of high culture have radically lost their prestige and power in Bulgaria, and popular folk culture has taken its revenge. It has unexpectedly catapulted to the public

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scene something that previously lived in obscurity, namely an extremely popular dance-and-song culture known by the Turkish word chalga, a disco-variant of Bulgarian-Roma-Turkish songs that overstep not only the norms of “European taste” (that are in fact an imaginary construction of the Bulgarian elitist culture) and public decency but, all too often, legal norms as well. Emerging from the realm of the taboo, chalga is a kind of Balkan music that currently enjoys enormous popularity, and appeals to the Bulgarian recording industry. In various respects it is similar to the Serbian turbo-folk, to certain Greek popular “dog” songs, to the Romanian manale and the Polish discopolo. Its quasi-Oriental style easily blends rap, techno, or rock & roll techniques with the rhythm of the famous Oriental belly dance, the kyuchek, but also with the traditional (semi-)striptease, the “dancing around the pole.” The coarse texts are written in deliberately de-codified dialectal and vernacular Bulgarian, often faddish slang, full of Turkish words, idioms, and obscenities, with strong emphasis on the body, expressed by linguistic gestures. For the first time in the nationalist Bulgarian public sphere, some songs are sung directly in Turkish or in Romany by singers from those communities. These texts transgressively combine traditional sentimental love stories, naughty, erotic, and indecent songs, army folklore, prewar urban popular songs, with the countervalues of the criminal underworld, millionaires on credit, prostitution, and the so-called wrestlers (in popular parlance bortsi, the equivalent of a mobster or thug, since some of the newly founded security firms and insurance companies, which employ mostly former athletes and policemen, have branched out into racketeering). Thus, as in a return of the repressed, Oriental rural pre-modern cultures and their songs and dances have reappeared on the post-Communist public scene, this time seemingly not to be used but to use the current media and economic climate. In fact, this peculiar eclectic construct of the new cultural industry is very successful in the neo-liberal market and tends to conquer with its provocative and ambivalent charm the mediatized and populist public sphere. The transformation-marketing of this post-socialist heritage of the Oriental subculture (repressed, marginalized, and rendered invisible during the long period of nationalism) might now even displace the longsuffering national project of a purely Bulgarian, authentic, and European elitist culture from its dominant public position.

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The Rediscovery of Folk Literature in Albania Robert Elsie The literary and cultural awakening of the Albanian people in the second half of the nineteenth century was not simply a matter of using Albanian in schools and in the production and publication of artistic prose, poetry, and journalism. It also involved and depended upon a return to sources and a search for roots. Though written literature in Albanian had been sporadic and, due in great part to the torturous course of Albanian history, had not been able to reach its full potential,

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Albania’s folklore traditions, i.e., oral literature, had always made up for this deficiency. These constituted a rich cultural asset at the disposal of the ideologists of the Rilindja period of national awakening. National identity lay dormant in the country’s folklore, waiting to be rediscovered. The romantic movement in Europe had stimulated an interest in folklore traditions and oral literature. Albanian folk songs and folk tales caught the imagination not only of Albanian writers of the national awakening but also of foreign scholars and linguists in the nineteenth century. Indeed the earliest collection of Albanian oral literature, Albanesische Studien (Albanian Studies) was published in German by the Austrian consul Johann Georg von Hahn. Often considered the father of Albanian studies, Hahn traveled widely throughout Albania and the Balkans, and he appended folk songs, sayings and tales to his grammar of the Tosk dialect. Ten years later, he also published a collection of Greek and Albanian folk tales. The German physician Karl Heinrich Theodor Reinhold from Göttingen became acquainted with Albanian folklore from Albanian sailors while he was serving as a doctor in the Greek navy. He later published a noted collection of Albanian folk songs, tales, and sayings with an Albanian grammar in his Noctes Pelasgicae (Pelasgian Nights). In Italy, folk verse was compiled by various Arbëresh writers from the eighteenth century onwards; furthermore, the folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè published a selection of Albanian folk tales from Sicily in Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani (Sicilian Fables, Short Stories and Folk Tales). The French consul Auguste Dozon, who was stationed in Janina and Thessalonika, published Albanian folk tales and songs originally in his Manuel de la langue chkipe ou albanaise (Manual of the Shkip or Albanian language) and two years later in a special volume entitled Contes albanais, recueillis et traduits (Albanian Tales, Collected and Translated). The Czech linguist Jan Urban Jarnik, professor of Romance languages and literature, published Albanian folklore material from the Shkodra region in Zur albanischen Sprachenkunde (On Albanian Linguistics), and a collection of tales and anecdotes, again from Shkodra, in Příspěvky ku poznání nářečí albánských uveřejňuje (Contributions to the Knowledge of Albanian Dialects). Gustav Meyer, professor at the University of Graz, published fourteen Albanian tales in Albanische Märchen (Albanian Tales), and a selection of Tosk tales appended to his Albanian Grammar (1888). Much of his folklore material was republished in vols. 5 and 6 of his Albanesische Studien (Albanian Studies). Renowned Danish Indo-Europeanist Holger Pedersen, professor at the University of Copenhagen, visited Albania in 1893 to learn the language and to gather linguistic material. His Albanesische Texte mit Glossar (Albanian Texts with Glossary) contains thirty-five Albanian folk tales he recorded there and in Corfu. While foreign scholars first provided Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century with Albanian folklore, and thus set the pace for the scholarly study of Albanian oral literature, Albanian scholars directed their publications at their compatriots, fuelling the national awakening with a sense of tradition and identity. One of the early Albanian “discoverers” of this national heritage was Zef Jubani, known in Italian as Giuseppe Jubany, who is thought to have been born in Shkodra of an Albanian father and Maltese mother. After his studies at a school of commerce in Malta, where he stayed 1830–38 with his uncle, he returned to Shkodra and served for several years from 1848 onward as dragoman (interpreter) to Louis Hyacinthe Hécquard, the French consul in Shkodra, who was preparing a book on northern Albania. Hécquard was very interested in folklore and took the young Jubani with him on his exhausting journeys through the northern Albanian mountains. A number of the folk songs they collected appeared in French translation in Hécquard’s pioneering Histoire et description de la Haute Albanie ou Guégarie (History and Description of High

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Albania or Gegaria). Jubani’s own first collection of folklore, no doubt the original Albanian texts of the songs published by Hécquard, was unfortunately lost in the flood that devastated Shkodra on January 13, 1866. Jubani is best remembered for his Raccolta di canti popolari e rapsodie di poemi albanesi (Collection of Albanian Folk Songs and Rhapsodies), which constitutes the first collection of Geg folk songs, indeed the first work of folklore to be published by an Albanian from Albania itself. The second important Albanian collector of Albanian oral literature was the folklorist and nationalist Thimi Mitko of Korça, a prominent representative of the rising Albanian colony in Egypt. Mitko began to take an interest in folklore about 1859 while in Vienna. From Spiro Dine we know that Mitko had begun recording folklore material by 1866, providing folk songs, riddles, and tales for Demetrio Camarda’s collection. Mitko’s own collection of Albanian folklore, consisting of 505 folk songs, and 39 tales and popular sayings primarily from southern Albania, was finished in 1874 and published in Greek script four years later under the Greek title Albanikê melissa (The Albanian Bee); an Albanian translation was provided in the subtitle. A copy of the book is said to have been burned in public in Athens by Greek extremists. This was not only the first compilation of oral literature designed for the Albanian public, but also the first collection of genuinely scholarly interest. Sporadic earlier publications had not shown Albanian oral literature at its best nor presented its full geographical or thematic scope. Mitko endeavored to present and preserve the full national heritage of oral literature, compiling and classifying the material according to genres, including, for instance, sections on children’s songs, songs of seasonal festivities, love songs, wedding songs, funerary songs, epic and historical songs, as well as fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes. He also added an Albanian-Greek vocabulary. The Albanian Bee thus constituted a fundamental work on Albanian oral literature. However, the Romantic Movement and its interest in oral literature and folklore had waned by 1878 in Western Europe, and Mitko’s collection did not receive the international attention it deserved. It became better known only when Gjergj Pekmezi republished it in 1924, using the modern Albanian alphabet. Thimi Mitko’s endeavors were furthered by his fellow countryman Spiro Risto Dine from Vithkuq in the Korça region. Dine emigrated to Egypt in 1866, approximately one year after Thimi Mitko. The two met there and soon collaborated on Mitko’s collection. Dine himself is remembered for his only significant publication, the monumental collection of Albanian folklore and literature Valët e detit (The Waves of the Sea), whose title symbolizes the tempestuous course of Albania’s history and the successive waves of invasions that overwhelmed it. Its first part contains some of Dine’s own patriotic verse, none of which is particularly inspiring for the modern reader, as well as poetry by Koto Hoxhi, Thimi Thoma Kreji, Kostandin Kristoforidhi, Anastas Kullurioti, Loni Logori, Jani Vreto, and other writers and nationalist leaders of the Rilindja period. The second part of the work is devoted to folk literature, including love songs, wedding songs, funerary songs, light-hearted satirical verse, some religious and didactic verse, folk tales, aphorisms, rhymes, popular beliefs, and mythology. At the time of its publication, Valët e detit was the longest book printed in Albanian. Shtjefën Gjeçovi of Janjeva in Kosova was the first Albanian folklorist to collect oral literature in a more scholarly and systematic manner. In 1896, Gjeçovi was ordained as a priest of the Franciscan order and returned to Albania. He lived in a number of rugged mountain settlements in northern Albania, including Laç at the foot of the Kurbin Mountains, Gomsiqja east of Shkodra,

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Theth in the far north, and Rubik in the Mirdita district. He began compiling material on oral literature, tribal law, archeology, and folklore among the mountain tribes. Gjeçovi made his mark on Albanian culture through his monumental codification and publication of Albanian tribal law, the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (The Code of Lekë Dukagjini), which he published extensively in the Shkodra periodical Hylli i dritës (The Day-Star) from 1913 to 1924. This Code or Canon is a unique compilation of orally transmitted law that governed and regulated social behavior, indeed almost every facet of life among the tribes in the isolated and otherwise lawless terrain of the northern highlands of Albania. The code was strictly observed by the tribes and had priority over all other laws, ecclesiastic or secular, that were imposed in the mountains. The mountain tribes were able to preserve their identity and autonomy with the help of this ancient code, even though they were ostensibly part of the Ottoman Empire for five centuries. The Code of Lekë Dukagjini has been of great interest to historians, legal experts, and ethnographers, not only in Albania and Kosova but also abroad: the Scottish Albanologist Margaret Hasluck studied it in The Unwritten Law in Albania. It has been translated into Italian (1941), English (1989), and German (2001).

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“Sons of Black Death”: The Semantics of Foreignness in Twentieth-Century Bulgarian and Macedonian Writings Jolanta Sujecka The Macedonian and Bulgarian cultures are deeply rooted in folk traditions. Writers of every epoch and movement tend to borrow from the fund of folkloric images that constitutes the Balkan variant of classics. In the twentieth century, these images have been mythologized and demythologized. Folklore may not always be present in Macedonian and Bulgarian literary texts but it generally shapes people’s thoughts, and its effects can be observed even in non-literary documents: folk images shape the language of emotions and show the community’s state of awareness in periods of transition. Diseases belong to this permanent repertory of folklore images, foremost among them the plague, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, and the vague notion of pestilence. In considering the function of folkloric disease images in shaping culture, we shall focus on their relation to the figure of the stranger, which exists in non-canonical folklore as well as in literary texts that have already become twentieth-century classics. We treat disease images as documents of transition; their aesthetic value is of secondary importance. Facing History: The Tragedy of Domestic Fighting In contrast to religious stories or folk songs, the Bulgarian Avant-garde poetry of the 1920s transformed images of disease to fit the artistic conventions accepted by poets. In Asen Raztsvetnikov’s

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“Mor” (Pestilence; 1924), the illness that dominates part of the native space engenders a mood of fear: The barren emptiness of my country / the barren emptiness of mud / where poisoned villages die, / suffocating with smoke […] / It is there that for many years / malaria, consumption, typhoid, and scarlet fever / and their eternal companion, death, / have wandered about with quinine and candles, with incense and flowers. (Izbrani săčineniya 67, 70)

The concrete image of disease that Raztsvetnikov borrowed from folk poetry is endowed here with abstract meanings and symbolic dimensions that are alien to folk literature. The fatal diseases of malaria, typhoid, the plague, and cholera become indicators of a mortally sick nation. Raztvetnikov’s frightening indigenous lyrical landscape serves as a suggestive image for his lame and captive nation: “Trampled upon by your own folk and strangers, / exhausted, lame, and thrown to the ground, / among brutality and lust / you die every day” (71). The symbolism of the nation’s illness is questioned, however, through another image of the poem, which indicates that helplessness leads to revenge and bloodshed. The clash of meanings is based on the conventions of a religious tale: So be it: kill off the mercy that still remains in us / and what remains of human dignity and shame! / And in our souls, / let the animals [Strúvnitsa], digging in their claws, roar avidly for revenge and battle. / And when, furious in our bigotry, we rise and advance / with our forks and battle-axes, / may your requests for peace and mercy / become silent in the jaws of a bloody massacre! (71)

The sick nation becomes a bloodsucking beast, or rather a female bear lusting for blood. Strúvnitsa in folklore usually designates a hungry female bear or a bear feeding her young, both being rapacious. However, in the folklore of the Balkan Slavs such a bear is the symbol of fertility and maternity. A certain type of dragon (zmej) can appear before a shepherd as a loving female bear, but the female bear, Mečka-strúvnitsa, can also appear in a negative guise, representing the plague that God sends down to punish the community for its sins. In Raztvetnikov’s text health is not the opposite of illness, nor a state to be regained. Disease is no longer malaria or the plague but abstract and symbolic helplessness. The move from concrete to broader abstract meaning is accompanied by a reshaping of the neo-romantic cliché that governs the folklore canon in contemporary politics and urges the helpless to rise again in a final battle. It is inscribed in the image of a sick person that undertakes a battle for the people, one’s own folk as well as strangers. Raztsvetnikov’s lyrical “I” speaks of a native folk that suffers from a fatal disease; the stranger is the instigator of the disease and will be avenged by the sick. Raztsvetnikov’s poems from this period show the stranger in the image of Cain. They point toward the 1923 September Insurrection, which responded to the murder of Premier Aleksandar Stamboliyski and the Army League’s coup d’état against his legal government. The bloody suppression of the Insurrection led to a white terror. Raztsetnikov, Nikola Furnadžiev, Lamar [Laliu Marinov], and other “Septemberites” fought the right-wing notion of national unity with a combination of political slogans and artistic rebellion. The dominant image of Cain in Raztsvetnikov’s “Žertveni kladi” (Sacrificial Pyres; Izbrani săčineniya 54–55) symbolizes the military forces that turned against their brotherly insurgents and crushed the rebellion. The Cain image dominates

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Raztsvetnikov’s mentioned “Mor,” as well as the poems of Furnadžiev and Lamar, but it is absent from Furnadžiev’s “Gibel” (Extermination; 52–53) and Lamar’s “Cholera” (16–17). The latter two poets also presented the national tragedy by means of biblical and folk motifs, but their images tended to be concrete Bulgarian and Balkan ones. Furnadžiev’s “Gibel” and Lamar’s “Cholera” did not add any new meanings to the metaphor of illness, nor did they question the meanings that Raztsvetnikov ascribed to it. Furnadžiev and Lamar inserted the disease images in different artistic styles but, unlike Raztsvetnikov, they did not endow images with a new meaning. Illness receives a wider meaning in the poetry of the “Septemberites,” by indicating the nation’s helplessness, its infection by malaria, plague, and cholera. But whereas the threat comes in the folk tradition of the Balkan Slavs from outside, here it comes from within, symbolized by the figure of the brotherly Cain. Facing History: The Birth of a New National Identity In the Macedonian folklore of the 1940s, diseases do not form an independent image. Together with other canonical folklore topoi they create a broad semantic frame for defining strangers. In Rampo Levkata’s popular ballad from this period, named after the mountain “Babuna,” the plague is part of an image of bondage: Now loathsome bondage / the nation strangled. / Numerous tyrants have arrived, / Fascist, tsarist bloodsuckers, / Sons of black death. / Spy nets spread out / Terrible violence imposed / People deprived of everything, / Even bread. / Each day the dungeons get fuller / The nation is put in irons / To work for them / our children taken / children killed by the tyrant. / Babuna, why are you silent? / Call for reinforcements / strike them with the fire of lightening / the murderers of the nation / may they burn to death (64)

“Sons of black death” refers here to “numerous tyrants,” a conventional and characteristic folklore expression that acquires a contemporary political reference in “the fascist, tsarist bloodsuckers.” The expressions of tragedy and pain lead to a call for bloody revenge. Levkata was a partisan from around Prilep. “Sons of black death,” the most suggestive expression in the ballad, relies on a Christianized myth, deeply rooted in the Balkan Slavic religious tradition, involving the blood-thirsty female bear mentioned above. “Sons of black death” was frequently embedded in the cluster images of the Macedonian illegal press during the guerilla fights in the forties, such as “fašistički crni krvnici,” in which Krvnik refers to an aggressor or murderer, but it can also mean blood ties, as in the phrase “krvno srodstvo.” These clusters locate disease in the material world of the senses. Disease is sent by the Lord through his envoys, his harbingers. The “harbingers of pestilence,” of black death, are strangers to the community, but are somehow linked to it also through blood ties. Who are then the “sons of black death”? An explanation may be found in expressions that come from the press of that period: “nenasitnata fašistička lamija” (insatiable fascist dragon), “krvavi fašisti” (bloody fascists), “fašistička čuma” (fascist plague), and, particularly, “šopsko seme.” Šopi can be found in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Macedonia, but the meaning varies from country to

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country. Šop in Bulgaria refers to persons living on the outskirts of, or even within, Sofia, who are primitive and uneducated. In Serbia it refers to shepherds, while in Macedonia, it refers literally to persons living high up in the mountains, and figuratively to strangers. The Macedonian partisan press of the forties used the expression in the latter sense: Šopi or šopsko seme (semen) coincides with “the sons of black death,” meaning strangers. Associated with the highly expressive Fašistička čuma (fascist plague) and krvavi fašisti (bloody fascists), these are strangers to the rural community, believers in a fascist ideology that is foreign and hostile to the community. The fascist strangers occupying Macedonia are in the language of the folk a new black death. They are Germans, unrelated to the community, but also Slavic Bulgarians, “their local servants,” who are not foreign but “our own.” A similar role is performed by expressions based on the motif of the dragon (lamja), which represents external evil. In the traditional Balkan Slavic folklore, dragons connote oppression and persecution. Illness, as well as various mythical beasts originating from the Macedonian territory, bring together the community facing strangers, but they also mark the limitations of this communal consolidation. In shaping the Macedonian “we,” national identity is closely interwoven with social identity. And the language of folk expression manifests also negative identification; it defines the borderlines between ethnic groups that know who they do not want to be. Facing Ideology After the war, Communism represented the ideology that was foreign to the rural community. Živko Čingo’s grotesque story of the sixties, Bolesta na Atanas Ivanoski (The Illness of Atanas Ivanoski), covers the years just after World War II, the period of “revolutionary changes” in Macedonia. Although the illness in question is an integral part of the presented world, its role goes far beyond it, just as in the local folk tradition. At the beginning of the story, the atmosphere resembles that of a religious tale: “Days, maybe years ago, who knows, there was a time of illness. Nobody survived: neither those who were by the water, nor those who were at the foot of the mountain. Disease invaded the whole of Paskvelija, and it was terrible” (198). But in the next passage Čingo questions the folklore convention by continuing in the style of an official decree: In order to save the nation from disease, the committee has sent out a decree: burn the crops; tie up whoever has got rabies; those who have tuberculosis must come forward; shoot rabid cattle and be aware of what you are doing, keep calm, write up a report keeping to all the points, and, finally, stress that the nation must be told the truth (198)

This time we are told what the disease actually is. There are many, but the Paskvelija community is most frightened of the rabies. The tale interweaves the apocalyptic fear of an unknown pestilence with an official report on a disease that has been given a name. The inhabitants of Paskvelija enter the tale anonymously and their speech exposes the contrast between truth and behavior:

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Comrade Atanas Ivanoski arrives on a white horse from the county committee. He comes with a new decree, no. 121: Purchase everything. First: flour 9,800, meat 8,037, milk 2,500, And mutton fat 1,225 […] Second: collect the tax, and collect it in the expected time, or else […] Drums, trumpets, and a general turmoil. Silence. Comrade Atanas Ivanoski, a member of the council committee, also takes to his bed writhing in pain. (199)

Ivanoski, representative of the Communist Party and the main spokesman for revolutionary changes in Paskvelija, does not escape the disease, and his illness tests his Party comrades as to their preparedness for the revolution. Faced with the decision to choose modernity or tradition they are completely helpless: “There is no way to save Atanas Ivanoski. Unable to sleep, the whole Party is seeking for a way to save Atanas Ivanoski” (199). Since nothing is known about Comrade Ivanoski’s illness, only that it is serious and has all the symptoms of an incurable disease, the actions of his Party comrades are shaman incantations rather than a rational program for fighting epidemics as announced earlier: “Atanas Ivanoski, get up” encouraged Comrade Tacko in a quiet voice the weak-hearted Atanas Ivanoski. “Get up, the Party needs you,” he whispered into his ear, and once again he said, “get up, the Party needs you.” Who knows how many more times he woke him up this way. (199)

Since the ideological incantations do not help, they send for a witch according to good old peasant customs, and she suggests a radical treatment: “There is only one cure for him. Find him an untouched girl, a clean one. He has spoiled blood. His blood has to be mixed. Then he will get better” (201). Mixing blood seems to be a cure not only for the mortally ill comrade but generally for Čingo’s whole story. The untouched girl brought to Atanas Ivanoski happens to be the daughter of the revolution’s enemy. Her shaven head shows that she has been rejected by those that unquestioningly believe in the revolution. Blood mixing fuses the folk tale with an official decree, the fantastic with things that have acquired a name, tradition with innovation, heritage with new ideology. By means of blood mixing, the tale about Paskvelija questions the world of folk tradition without automatically accepting the new reality. Illness thus refers to the community’s reaction to what is new, to what is foreign with respect to its tradition. “Blood mixing” is the only cure at the disposal of a community that defends itself against the invading new ideology wanting exclusive domination. Čingo’s cure offers amalgamation, his grotesque vision mixes lyrical immediacy with satirical alienation. “Blood mixing” moves away from the ideal of purity towards the praise of variety. The cure that the author of the Paskvelija series presents seems to reject radical divisions between indigenous health and infectious strangers. In Conclusion We have examined three conceptions of illness in Bulgarian and Macedonian literary culture. In each case, illness functions in parables of foreignness. In the first one, the foreignness of the

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military divides the nation tragically. In the second one, the stranger is the occupier, in the third one, a new ideology is the culprit. Unequivocal figures of the stranger always bring about divisions between “us” and “them.” Illness in such cases is a hypostasis of the Other. In the tradition of the Balkan Slavs, folklore has the creative power of consolidating culture. Our examples show that motifs from the oral folk tradition can express the community’s mind when facing tragic and divisive events, facilitating the birth of a new national identity or a new ideology. But the examples also remind us that folklore perceives the world and a community’s own place in it by way of deeply rooted stereotypes of the Other.

Part IV. Literary Histories: Itineraries of National Self-Images

Introduction John Neubauer In scope and impact, literary histories may not rise to the level of importance of literary books and journals, censorship, theater, folklore, and other literary institutions we have discussed in this volume. Though literary scholars today show a renewed interest in problems of writing literary histories, the relevance of this for the contemporary cultural world at large is limited. And yet, we would not have engaged in the present project had we thought that literary histories have a merely trivial function in socio-cultural life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professorships and departments of native literature were founded mainly in order to produce literary histories, and these histories became not only the backbone of teaching that literature, but, above all, they became self-images of the nation. The contribution of literary histories to the “social construction of reality” was considerable. This contribution has diminished over time, yet the history of literary histories remains centrally important for a project like ours. On the more immediate level, the histories written in the past represent a foil against which ours is written. Put in different terms, the ambition of the present project is to reconsider and rewrite those histories. And such a rewriting is, in our view, necessary because the national self-images that past histories helped construct are still with us, even though they have outlived their original purpose and function. The national self-images of the last two centuries must be revised today, not only because of globalization and European integration, but above all because they continue to foment alienation, hostility, and aggression against minorities and against neighboring states. I “The historical viewpoint unites all the other ones, even in the fields of literature, philosophy, and art” (Friedrich Schlegel, Introduction to Deutsches Museum 1)

Was Kafka a Czech writer? Should Joseph Conrad and Eugène Ionesco be included in Polish and Romanian literary histories, respectively? Should the Hungarian and German theaters of Transylvania be regarded as part of Romania’s theater history? Should Jan Kollár — a Slovak who lived throughout his creative life in Pest and continued to write in Czech even after Slovak had been codified as a separate language — be included in Czech and Hungarian literary histories? Jaroslav Vlček was among the very few modern literary historians who asked whether literature in a country is not different from that country’s national literature (see p. 377 below).

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These are some of the questions that our project poses to traditional national literary histories, which have answered them overwhelmingly in the negative. The success of our regional literary history depends not just on the degree to which it is able to integrate the hitherto separate national literary histories, but, at least to an equal degree, on the impact it will have on future national literary histories. At issue is the question, to what extent those histories will be able to diversify their notion of what is “national.” We hope that at some point in the future the national adjectives (Czech, Romanian, Polish …) will refer to a geographical area rather than to specific languages, so that national literary histories would cease to be monolingual. Towards National Literary Histories Modern literary histories emerged from chronologically arranged bibliographical entries, the kind we find in Pál Wallaszky’s Conspectus reipublicae litterariae in Hungaria (1785), Sámuel Pápay’s A magyar literatúra esmérete (1808), Ulrich Ernst Zimmermann’s Versuch einer Geschichte der Lettischen Literatur (1812), Feliks Bentkowski’s Historiya literatury polskiey (1814), or Josef Jakub Jungmann’s Historie literatury české (1825). Petru Maior’s Istoria pentru începutul românilor in Dachia (History of the Beginning of Romanians in Dacia; 1812) also included a “Dissertation on the Old Literature of Romanians.” These histories were not yet genuinely narrative; Jungmann’s Historie, for example, listed the works chronologically and added for each age an introductory essay on its literature. Yet in two respects they were more inclusive than their discursive successors: they considered a variety of philosophical, historical, and scientific writings as literature, and, more importantly perhaps, some of these histories were multilingual, in the sense that they included works in several languages. Thus Wallaszky’s history included (in principle) all that was published “in Hungaria,” regardless the language in which it was written. Both of these principles were gradually abandoned in the course of the nineteenth century: more and more, national literary histories restricted themselves to imaginative literature written in the national vernacular. Wallaszky’s successor, Pápay, included in his history only texts written in the Hungarian language, although he still recognized a “universal” (egyetemes) Hungarian literature that went beyond imaginative texts. The same applies to Bentkowski’s Historiya. By the end of the century both exclusions became self-evident and needed no further explanation: “literature” became a collective term for imaginative literature (belles lettres, schöne Literatur, Dichtkunst), and standard literary histories came to be limited to a single language within a national border. Furthermore, historiographical and philosophical notions were developed to provide a rationale for connecting in a discursive and narrative manner the entries on individual writers and their works. Johann Gottfried Herder is usually considered as the main impulse behind the writing of the first national literary histories, but, for all his championing of the vernacular languages and their folk, Herder himself wrote universal rather than national histories, and he had no interest in (national or general) literary histories. Herder’s legacy to the writing of history was an overall model, organicism, which he did not invent himself but adopted from epigenetic biological models that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century (ECE 1: 1–18, and Neubauer, “The Idea of Europe”). This organicist model is present in Friedrich Schlegel’s first attempts at writing literary histories, notably in his Epochen der Dichtkunst (The Epochs of Poetry; 1800), perhaps the most important early history of literature: “In the Homeric plant we see, as it were, the origin of

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all poetry; the roots are lost to our sight but the blossoms and branches of the plant emerge from the night of Antiquity in incomparable splendor” (Kritische 2: 291). Note, however, that the biological-organic model interconnects here antiquity with modernity, and functions quite differently from the way it became embodied in later national histories, literary or otherwise. Indeed, August and Wilhelm Schlegel’s pioneering literary histories were not national but European and even broader. Arguably, they were indebted more to Friedrich Schiller’s famous inaugural lecture at the University of Jena, “Was heiβt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?” (What Is and to What End Does One Study Universal History; 1789) than to Herder’s particularistic notions on language and folk. By 1812, Friedrich’s ideological orientation radically changed: his supra-national Geschichte der alten und neuen Litteratur (History of the Old and the New Literature) foregrounded the nation. As Hans Eichner writes: “the follower of Fichte became a Catholic, the partisan of the French Revolution became its determined opponent, the European Cosmopolitan became a German patriot and an admirer of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” (Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische 6: xxi). Schlegel’s dedication of his lectures to Metternich reflected his newly acquired Catholic, conservative, and nationalist views. As he explained, he wanted to bridge the deep gulf between the literary and intellectual world, on the one hand, and “practical reality” on the other; he wanted to show “how decisively a nation’s spiritual culture (Geistesbildung) can intervene, often even in great global events and the fate of nations” (Kritische 6: 4). For Schlegel, literature was then no mere entertainment or a copy of the real world but a shaping political force. Schlegel defined the task further. He wanted to convince the high and mighty that literature was the epitome [Inbegriff] of a nation’s intellectual life (Kritische 6: 7). He diagnosed an eighteenth-century revival of the “national spirit” (6: 10), and concluded that literature’s task was to serve the state by glorifying the national past. For a nation’s development it was most important to “retain those great national memories of its distant origins that usually vanish. Poetry’s prime business is to preserve and to glorify these.” Such national memories constituted the most splendid part of a national heritage and raised the nation’s worth in the judgment of the world (6: 15f). For example, the Nibelungenlied was such a memory of the dim past in German national history, the “latest version” of ancient, quasi-mythic memories that were comparable to the Homeric epics (6: 169). While Friedrich narrowed thus the function of literature in his Vienna lectures, he also broadened his coverage by dedicating the fifth lecture to Indian literature, a section of the eighth one to Arabic and Persian poetry, and, most importantly for us, devoting much of the tenth lecture to the literature of “the most northern and the eastern people of Europe” (see also ECE 1: 519 about Schlegel and Sándor Kisfaludy’s “ancient romances”). Friedrich’s Vienna lectures were path braking, both for their historical and cultural breadth and their narrow national approach. In most of continental Europe, literature and literary scholarship acquired political justification and social as well as academic prestige by being touted as expressions of the nation’s soul. The crowning achievements of nineteenth-century literary scholarship were national literary histories that integrated the recuperated oral vernacular literature with the republished older texts, the story of the language revival, and glorifications of the canonized national poets. The resulting single national narratives claimed time and again and from country to country that they offered a history of the national soul, the facts, as Bronisław Chlebowski wrote, of “the historically analyzed content of the national soul” (Od Kochanowskiego 35). Since

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the unchanging essence of this national soul was presumed to grow in an organic way, the task of literary histories was to portray the development of the spirit of nation as it shows itself through the literary products” (Pavasars p. 359 below). Divided or suppressed people had a greater need to construct images of self-affirmation, and hence they started to produce their national literary histories relatively early. Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s five-volume Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (1835–42) spoke of a German national literature well before the country was unified under Prussia in 1870, Francesco De Sanctis’s history of Italian literature appeared in 1870, soon after Italy became unified, whereas the first great literary history of firmly established France, Gustave Lanson’s epochal work, was published only in 1895. Is it accidental that Lanson wrote his work when France’s selfimage was smarting from defeat by Prussia in 1870–71? This may also explain the relatively early emergence of Czech and Hungarian national literary histories. Franz Martin Pelzel [František Pelcel, Pelcl] and Josef Dobrovský registered “the existence of a body of literary texts” and established “a cultural past, an outline curriculum vitae” (Pynsent p. 368 below), at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The main events in the subsequent construction of a Czech literary canon were Josef Jakub Jungmann’s studies, a series of forgeries by Václav Hanka and his associates, and the works of František Palacký and Pavel Josef Šafárik [Pavol Jozef Šafařík]. In Hungary, the “father” of the national philology (see Dávidházi) was Ferenc Toldy [Schedel]. His introduction to the Handbuch der ungrischen Poesie (Handbook of the Hungarian Poetic Arts; 1828), a two-volume anthology of Hungarian literature in German, was the first genuinely discursive treatment of the subject. Toldy’s later and larger history in Hungarian, A magyar nemzeti irodalom története (History of the Hungarian National Literature), appeared in 1851, after the failed 1848–49 revolution, to legitimate the defeated nation by means of its (literary) history, a scholarly study without anger and bias (Dávidházi 569ff and 669ff). The positivist Polish literary historians who wrote in the decades after the defeat of the 1863 uprising wanted, like Toldy, to legitimate their nation. But Toldy’s conception was romantic, and in this sense he was much closer to those Polish literary historians who saw literature as an expression and embodiment of the nation’s soul. Indeed, this was the dominant historiographic conception in Poland throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Piotr Chmielowski remarked that, although he cannot “reconstruct the soul of the whole nation,” he will attempt to offer “hints about the changes it underwent, as reflected in the literature of the last nine centuries” (Historya 23). Antoni Małecki measured the success (or failure) of a literary work in terms of its harmony with the “national spirit,” whereas Chlebowski wanted to examine in his Literatura polska the development and the suffering of the nation’s soul. According to him, a history of Polish literature had to discover, grasp, and describe the nation’s soul. Of the many examples in other national literary histories we cite here only Anton Slodnjak’s history of Slovenian literature (1934; German translation 1958), whose master figure, according to Alenka Koron, “is an idealistically and metaphysically conceived national soul, which finds its expression in literature, and its affirmation in the latter’s development” (Dolinar and Juvan 201). Koron adds, thereby laying bare the solipsism of the entire enterprise: “Slodnjak conceives the national soul as autonomous and independent of alien influences.”

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Although the “grand narrative” of East-Central European national literary histories was set by conceptions of the national soul, considerable latitude remained as to what to include. At issue for our purposes is not so much whether the narrative included a broader cultural history, was based on biographies, or focused on the texts themselves. For us, the main question is rather whether the national narrative was embedded in a broader, European perspective or was restricted to the national tradition in the vernacular. Historical accounts of literature include not only literary histories, but also textbooks, annotated anthologies, biographical dictionaries of writers, and various other publications. Biographical dictionaries brake the overall narrative of literary histories, but they include biographical ”micro” narratives that often give an account also of the writer’s age. Such dictionaries were particularly popular after 1945. The Scriitori români (Romanian Writers; 1978) and other such dictionaries were ideologically less exposed because they were heavily positivistic, but they inevitably ran against censorship when they tried to include exiled or politically unacceptable writers. To remedy this shortcoming, revised dictionaries appeared in virtually all East-Central European countries after 1989 — witness the Dicţionarul Scriitorilor Români (Dictionary of Romanian Writers), coordinated by the scholars of the 1978 one — usually ahead of the new literary histories, which represented a greater intellectual challenge. Organicism in Literary History We have seen above how the new eighteenth-century ideas about organic life shaped Herder’s, Friedrich Schlegel’s, and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s notions of writing literary histories. These organicist notions remained active in nineteenth-century literary historiography, and became, as we shall now show with a few examples, a salient feature of populist thinking all over East-Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Nicolae Iorga (see p. 54 above) claimed in his history of eighteenth-century Romanian literature (1901) that Romanian literature grew organically from the soil of local traditions. But he later expanded the scope of his organic literary history by endowing his native culture with deep roots reaching back to Dacian, Roman, and Byzantine sources (Byzance après Byzance; 1935). If Iorga’s organicism may be called expansionist and inclusionary, that of Branko Vodnik is exclusionary. As Nenad Ivić writes (p. 398 below), Vodnik wanted to show in his history of Croatian literature (Povijest hrvatske književnosti; 1913) “the organic development of our old literature” (4) — by excluding everything he regarded as heterogeneous. Since Croatian literary history began, according to Vodnik, with the flourishing of Humanism and Renaissance in the free Dalmatian city-states, he excluded from it, for instance, Glagolitic literature, both because it was older and because it was not purely Croatian. Another effect of Vodnik’s approach was to suppress or minimize differences within the envisioned organic unity, for instance, between cities and their environments, between Dalmatia, Croatia proper, and Slavonia, between Dubrovnik and the other Dalmatian cities, or between standardized language and dialects. The hero of Vodnik’s historical narrative was ultimately an ahistorical, unchanging homogeneous subject, a Croatian nation reduced to an original city-state (Ivić p. 399 below). A similar a-temporal organicist concept emerged among exiled Ukrainians after World War II. Seeking a Ukrainian literary identity that was independent of the dominating Russian one, the populists asked for a Ukrainian literature

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“of and for the people”; Iurii Sherekh, for instance, postulated a “national-organic” style that expressed the uniquely Ukrainian experience and spirit (ECE 2: 419 and 423). In these and other cases the imposition of the biological metaphor on the history of literature served not literature itself but its subordination to the concept and the life of a nation. As the first important Slovenian literary historian, Ivan Grafenauer, wrote about post-1848 Slovenian literature in the first volume of his Zgodovina novejšega slovenskega slovstva (History of the New Slovene Literature; 1909): “The political aims of an awakening nation thus step into the foreground, so that literary art becomes their handmaiden. Literature and poetry have significance only as a patriotic work” (Grafenauer 2; qtd. in Dolinor and Juvan 59). Romantic organicist conceptions fulfilled this national function already during the first wave of national awakening in the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century organicist literary histories became particularly prominent in cultures whose national independence was, for historical and political reasons, slower to emerge. Because of this delay, curious hybrid forms developed that were absent in the first, more purely romantic phase of organicism; in the second wave, romantic organicist ideas came to coexist and mix with modernist notions advocating the aesthetic independence of artworks. The following passages from Slovenian literary histories exemplify these heterogeneous historiographical conceptions. The University of Ljubljana was founded, and literary history was introduced into its curriculum, only in 1919, after the Kingdom of the Serbs, Slovaks, and Slovenes was established. Assuming the chair of Slavic studies, Ivan Prijatelj defined the task of literary scholars in his inaugural lecture on December 10 in an exalted neo-romantic vision of organicism: Literature is the final expression of the spirit of a people at the highest stage of its development, when it has achieved the fullest degree of self-consciousness in the persons of its elect: the artists of the literary arts. Its creations […] unfold in an organic living developmental progression. […] The purpose of our field is to represent art as that organic, vital function of the nation through which the nation strives toward and seeks something. That something is called beauty. […T]he literary historian achieves this purpose only if he shows the living, meaningful development of individual authors, both within and among themselves, as they progress toward beauty; and he does so in the form of a dramatic tableau that holds up a mirror to the nation and, at the same time, serves as a beacon illuminating its path upward and forward. (Prijatelj 6–36; qtd. in Dolinar and Juvan 21–21 & 124–25)

Here, as in many other literary histories, aspects of biological organicism fuse with Hegelian notions of “developmental progression” and of art as one of the highest products of human culture. But Slodnjak inverts Grafenauer’s idea that literature is the “handmaiden” of the national idea, for in this passage all of the nation’s culture strives towards an aesthetic idea, that of “beauty.” We may not overstate the case if we assume that Slodnjak politically (and paradoxically) functionalizes here the symbolist idea that artistic beauty is an absolute. Of course, none of the French symbolist would have regarded striving towards that absolute as a national goal; this reinterpretation is characteristic of East-Central Europe. Indeed, in this region the Hegelian striving to ever higher cultural peaks was all too often coupled with the demand that folklore had to remain an eternal fountain from which every new generation of poets should imbibe. The highest and most individual achievements of modern literature had to be based on the folk. In romantic, populist, and Marxist literary histories high literature was judged by the degree

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to which it remained close to and expressed the spirit of the folk (or the soul of the nation). Such nativism was not, in principle, incompatible with transnational and transcultural conceptions of national literary history. As Béla Bartók and many others have argued, the materials and forms of folk poetry circulated throughout vast geographical areas, especially in Eastern Europe. But in practice the folkloric anchoring of a nation’s literary history meant excluding transnational mixing and interchange. Transnational Literary Histories The first transnational and European literary histories failed to catch on and became buried under the avalanche of national histories produced during the age of national awakening. The comparative and supra-national approach to literature that the Schlegel brothers pioneered at the beginning of their career became a secondary effect in the nineteenth century, a weak response to the national institutionalization of literature. Abel François Villemain, for instance, published his 1828–29 lectures at the Sorbonne under the title Cours de littérature française (Course on French Literature), even though he boasted in the first volume that, as the first chair holder at a public university, he set out to show that several originally contiguous literatures emerged from the same source and developed simultaneously, often approaching each other and never ceasing to communicate (v); only the title of the first volume, Littérature du moyen age, en France, Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre (Literature of the Medieval Age in France, Italy, Spain, and England), made clear that the study went well beyond French literature. The lectures that the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz gave as holder of the first Chaire de langue et littérature slave (Chair of the Slavic Language and Literature) at the Collège de France represented in some respects a new departure, because they opened up, oncer more, a transnational perspective. With admirable effort and vision, the Polish poet acquired a broad perspective on history as reflected through literature. Yet these lectures participated also in the national awakening movements of Eastern Europe, in the sense that they assumed a specifically Slavic (rather than Polish) perspective. The chair was awarded to Mickiewicz in December 1840 by the philosopher Victor Cousin, then Minister of Education, with the support of the strong “Polish lobby” in France. Cousin wanted to strengthen the traditional ties between France and Poland, but was wary of creating a pulpit for a nationalist propaganda against Russia, a main occupying force of Poland in the nineteenth century. When Mickiewicz lectured, Russia and Serbia were the only independent Slavic states. In the lectures delivered between December 1840 and June 1844, Mickiewicz offered a broad panorama of the various Slavic literatures, and he made an attempt to compare these to some Western literatures, mainly the French one. In this sense he made a pioneering attempt at comparative literature. But this genuinely supra-national initiative was considerably compromised in the first and the second lecture series (running until June 1842) by a pan-Slav nationalism. The Polish poet adopted here the notion of Slavic reciprocity that Jan Kollár formulated in his essay “O literární vzájemnosti”). Towards the end of his first lecture (December 22, 1840), Mickiewicz quoted Kollár: “All the peoples of Europe have said their last word, it is our turn to speak up” (Dzieła 8: 19). The Slavs, this “youthful tribe,” were called to offer an old and decaying Western civilization the opportunity to renew itself morally and spiritually. To be sure, Kollár’s pan-Slav nationalism did

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not harmonize well with Mickiewicz’s proud Polish nationalism, which led him to loath Russian despotism and admit love only for such oppositional Russian spirits as Pushkin. Mickiewicz’s first two lecture series contained much information on Slavic history, as well as on literary texts such as Hanka’s forgeries, which Mickiewicz considered authentic, and Vuk Karadžić’s Serbian folk songs, which contained in Mickiewicz’s view “fragments of a Slavic national epos” (lecture on February 26, 1841; Dzieła 8: 209). In the opening of the third series of lectures, on December 6, 1842, the lecturer announced that he would now give full attention to Polish literature, in answer to critics who accused him of subordinating it to the Russian one. Surely as a hint at the censorship in the Russian-occupied part of Poland, he remarked that Polish philosophic and socially engaged literature was not freely available and received no feedback from its native reading public. However, Mickiewicz came at that time under the influence of Andrzej Towiański, a Polish religious mystic who arrived in 1841 in Paris, and addressed the Polish emigrants in the Notre Dame cathedral . He founded a messianic circle in Paris, and attempted also to address Mickiewicz’s public, which included such notables as Charles Montalembert, George Sand, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Jules Michelet, and Edgar Quinet. Mickiewicz adopted Towiański’s notion that Poland had a messianic European mission. According to one of his last lectures (April 23, 1844), the legends, fables, and myths of the oral tradition, which he called “fossil literature” (littérature fossile), were still alive in the Slavic cultures, although this anonymous creation of the people came down to the “modern or messianic literature” of Polish Romanticism via an “alluvial literature” (littérature d’alluvion) dominated by foreign influence. To get rid of this “alluvial” contamination, old Slavic communal values and “fossil literature” had to be resuscitated. In this respect, Mickiewicz came to support by 1843–44 a conservative utopia. This was not, however, what brought him in conflict with the authorities. The main reason was that he criticized in his last set of lectures the “official church,” and he openly started to admire Napoleon (lithographs of his image were distributed among his listeners). The lectures became an embarrassment to the French government and he was asked to terminate them. Towiański was expelled from France, and Mickiewicz’s two-volume L’Église officielle et le Messianisme (The Official Church and Messianism; 1845), based on the lectures of the last two years, released a storm of protest among the poet’s friends and the French intelligentsia, who had little tolerance for messianic nationalism. The lectures, for all their initial merits, failed to become a foundation for a genuine supra-national perspective on literature. In the Eastern part of Europe, the first transnational and comparative approaches to literary history covered, like Mickiewicz’s lectures, various Slavic literatures. Perhaps the most valuable and liberal achievement among these was Aleksandr Nikolaevich Pypin’s Obzor istorii slavianskikh literatur (Survey of the History of the Slavic Literatures; 1865). But most of these histories followed a pan-Slavic nationalist line, and all of them ignored the non-Slavic literatures of the region. Since literary histories were in the service of national liberation, genuinely transnational literary histories of the region had to be written in one of the hegemonic languages, i.e., Russian, German, and, after 1867, Hungarian. Their use of a hegemonic language assured them a wider reading public, but, of course, they had their own explicit or implicit nationalist-imperial agendas. The 24-volume Die österreich-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Text and Image; 1885–1902), for instance, was an officially produced encyclopedic

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overview of the Dual-Monarchy’s culture, produced under the auspices of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and published in German as well as Hungarian. The project, whose major Hungarian authority was the novelist Mór Jókai, had a double-edged aim: to document and display cultural diversity and to use this diversity to celebrate the Monarchy and its imperial perspective. Only few attempts were made to compare or to construct a regional overview; the national contributions by different authors were printed separately. One of the rare exceptions, Samu Czambel’s article on Slovak literature (see p. 380 below), focused on the differences between the Czech and the Slovak languages, no doubt to counteract pan-Slavism, which official circles in Vienna and Budapest saw as the greatest cultural and political threat. The four-volume Egyetemes irodalomtörténet (Universal History of Literature; 1903–11) of Gusztáv Heinrich, professor of German in Budapest, was broader and more focused on literature. In contrast to most histories of world literature published in western countries, it devoted considerable attention to Eastern Europe. The fourth volume, which covered the literatures of the Slavic and Ural-Altaic languages, contained some substantial articles by important writers: Ivan Franko wrote its Ukranian (459–86), Aleksander Brückner its Polish (487–548), Arne Novák its Czech (561–618), Jozef Škultéty its Slovak (619–42), Ivan Prijatelj its Slovene (643–52), Pavle Popović its Serb and Croat (653–707), and Atanas Atanasov its Bulgarian (709–27) section. There was even an article on the literature of the Sorbs. Heinrich’s literary history, written in a minor language, reached only a limited public. Internationally more important were a number of projects published in Germany in German. The series Die Litteraturen des Ostens in Einzeldarstellungen (Literatures of the East, in Separate Volumes), published in Leipzig between 1901 and 1908, included volumes on the literary history of Romania by Gheorghe Alexici (1906), Hungary by Ignác Kont (1906), Bohemia by Jan Jakubec (1907), the older South Slavs by Matthias Murko (1908), and of Byzantine and New Greek literatures by Karl Dieterich (1902). However, no effort was made to integrate these volumes. The Byzantologist Dieterich subsequently published the first transnational literary history of the region written by a single author, Die osteuropäischen Literaturen in ihren Hauptströmungen vergleichend dargestellt (The Main Currents of the East-European Literatures in Comparative Presentation; 1911). Dieterich had also some interesting views and methods: folk poetry he treated in a regional section; he recognized that national literary histories were artificial abstractions in regions with mixed populations and cultures (Mischvölkern und Mischkulturen), and he made fun of race-psychologists who classified literature according to “pure” blood (9). It was surely not accidental that truncated Hungary produced during the interwar period a number of interesting, though flawed, transnational literary histories of the region. The first one, a plenary lecture that Sándor Eckhardt gave on May 22, 1931 at the first International Congress of Literary History, was entitled “Comparative Literary History in Central Europe.” The topic, chosen by the organizers of the Congress, was daring, but Eckhardt, Professor of French in Budapest, approached it full of illusions about Hungary’s leadership in the region. To be sure, he started with some parallel literary phenomena that the “cohabitation” of nations brought about (89): (1) the excessive search for national folk epics, the dream of every nation to come up with one of its own, and to forge or create one if the material could not be found, a phenomenon that Eckhardt illustrated with Václav Hanka, János Arany, and some Romanian cases (90–91); (2) the invention of a pre-Christian national mythology to illustrate the national soul (92); and (3) an enthusiasm for

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folk poetry leading to the emergence of a populist movement (népies mozgalom), which Eckhardt illustrated with the impact of Karadžić’s collection (whose authenticity he questioned). Following Jakob Bleyer, Eckhardt traced these parallels to a common source, German Romanticism, as mediated by Vienna (94). Eckhardt added, however, displaying his belief in Hungary’s cultural supremacy, that Hungarian culture possessed “sufficient force and authority” to become itself a center of radiating spiritual-cultural energy outward (95). The prestige of Hungarian literature, he claimed, pollinated the literary life of the neighbors since the Reformation, especially in the nineteenth century. The remainder of his talk (98 ff) illustrated the claim that Hungary, just as Vienna, had its own sphere of influence: it outlined the impact of Hungarian literature on Slovak, Romanian, Croatian, and Serbian literature. The two outstanding Hungarian transnational literary histories of the following decade, Mihály Babits’s Az európai irodalom története (History of European Literature; 1934–36) and Antal Szerb’s A világirodalom története (History of World Literature; 1941), avoided such a bias but ignored East-Central Europe’s literature, save for the two Polish Nobel-prize winners, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Władysław Stanisław Reymont. Curiously, both evoke Goethe’s notion of world literature, forgetting that Goethe himself was a keen reader, commentator, and publisher of Czech, Lithuanian, and Serbian folk poetry. For Babits, world literature was a single great “blood circulation”; national literatures were secondary phenomena that isolated themselves from this universal stream. Witnessing the rise of nationalism and the weakening of a common European identity in the 1930s, Babits considered his unified history of European literature as “conservative and even reactionary” (európai 7). Babits’s stand against nationalism and chauvinism was courageously liberal, but other aspects of his conception were, indeed, conservative. Much like T.S. Eliot, he saw European literature as a great and cohesive current running from Homer to his own day, but he excluded all literature in the “minor” languages from it simply because of their inaccessibility. Furthermore, he was critical of sociological and cultural approaches to literature because they stressed the local and temporal, and they interpreted literature as an expression of the community rather than the creativity of individual artists. For Babits, world literature was an aristocratic club of great writers; its history a ceaseless transnational dialogue of geniuses (11). Only biography was, according to him, relevant extra-textual information, for it contained, in Wilhelm Dilthey’s sense, literature’s experiential raw material (12). Some history and culture seeped into Babits’s work via biography, but his sensitive interpretations did remain culturally anemic. His alternative to sociological accounts of national literatures was a collection of “great works.” Babits’s opposition to chauvinism was, then, purchased at a heavy price, for it stripped literature not only of its national but also of its social and cultural dimensions. He disregarded the literature of the minor European languages, including most East-Central-European literatures, and he excluded all the ancient and modern literatures of the Eastern part of the continent, mainly because he believed that their spirit of collectivism was incompatible with the spirit of individualism ostensibly characteristic of European literature: “The Eastern exotic cultures are […] static and conservative. Their monuments are collective, frequently anonymous, creations and their great figures are not rebels but embodiments and representatives. What they represent is the separatist spirit of a closed community. In spite of appearances, the principle of individualism ties humanity together, the collectivist spirit divides it” (10). Babits also rejected what has since been called “modernist primitivism,” the turn to

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non-Western cultures. In a passage that may contain also a critique of Bartók’s and Kodály’s interest in Hungarian folk music, Babits remarked that it was “cultural indigestion” (kulturcsömör) and insecurity that led the literati to a nostalgic look at the distant and the barbaric (8). Szerb published his history of world literature seven years after his history of Hungarian literature (see pp. 388–89 below). He followed Babits by covering (in spite of his misleading title) only Europe, and by excluding minor writers as well as literatures in minor languages, including Hungarian. The latter move, Szerb admitted, was unjust but inevitable (világirodalom 8). He focused thus on internationally canonized works and he thought that the acquisition of literary taste meant recognizing that the great writers had been justly canonized (11). This belief in the intrinsic and unchanging value of literary works did not quite square, however, with Szerb’s interest in literature’s social and historical dimensions, and his conviction that literature was under certain cultural conditions a commodity and an expression of class consciousness (9). Thus aesthetic judgments did undergo historical fluctuations (11). One could also ask whether the increase in high-quality translations, also from the minor European languages, could not lead to revisions of the canon. The question is especially justified in view of the fact that Szerb’s history of literature in the last hundred years is so saturated with minor writers in the major European literatures that his study covers much more than the canonized works. Endre Bojtár’s article (pp. 419–27 below) provides a continuation (as well as a critical reexamination) of these reflections on the transnational literary histories of the region. For now we should add only that the national momentum of the nineteenth century drove literary histories with irresistible force towards monolingual and monocultural perspectives. Transnational histories or histories of minority literatures in multicultural areas have been rare. (For the latter, see positive examples in our discussion of Transylvania: ECE 2: 278). While literature and literary scholarship no longer have today the social force they possessed when Europe’s nations awakened, they continue to shape conceptions of national identity through their institutionalized narratives about their national past. It is the task of the twenty-first century to retell those nineteenth-century narratives from different perspectives.

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Shifting Ideologies in Estonia’s Literary Histories, Textbooks, and Anthologies Epp Annus, Luule Epner, and Jüri Talvet The first known attempt to write a history of Estonian literature dates back to 1824, when the clergyman Johann Heinrich Rosenplänter started to gather material for a book to be entitled “Critische Uebersicht der Esthnischen Literatur, von ihrem ersten Ursprunge bis zum Jahre 1843” (Critical Overview of the Estonian Literature from its Origins until 1843). He expanded the manuscript over the next twenty years but never completed the project.

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Dietrich Heinrich Jürgenson, a lecturer in Estonian philology at Tartu University, wrote the first published history of Estonian literature, a German text that appeared only posthumously, in 1843–1844; its second part, a systematized and annotated list of books, remained unfinished. The first foreign overview of Estonian literature, “Viron nykyisemmästä kirjallisuudesta” (On Estonian Contemporary Literature; 1856), was written in Finnish by the Finnish professor August Engelbrekt Ahlquist. The first literary history in Estonian was compiled by Juhan Kunder for use by Estonians “in school and at home,” as he himself indicated on the title page. Instead of aiming at a synthetic overview, Kunder surveyed the local folklore and sketched the portraits of eight important writers, together with a characterization of their work. Unfortunately, Kunder’s work, as well as the subsequent literary histories by Karl August Hermann and Tõnu Sander, was hastily written, theoretically inadequate, and factually unreliable. Readers accepted them, however, in lieu of better ones. Of the three early histories, that of Sander was perhaps the most promising, but he could complete only two out of the four planned volumes, and the story reached no further than the seventeenth century. Severe reviews forced Hermann to publish a brochure of supplements and corrections. The early-twentieth-century Estonian literary histories were author-centered and positivistic; they followed earlier models but surpassed them in stylistic sophistication. Mihkel Kampmann (Kampmaa), a school teacher, wrote the most important histories in the first half of the twentieth century: Eesti vanem ilukirjandus (1908) and Eesti kirjanduseloo peajooned (1912–36). Written in the spirit of Georg Brandes, they described the main literary currents, discussed the writers’ personality, and provided much contextual information. Kampmann saw the writer’s childhood and genealogy in a romantic light and he perceived literature and writers within a movement towards perfection. His subjective views, written in a colorful style, were delivered with a powerful, omniscient voice. He did make some attempt to present the writers, the process of writing, and the texts in a wider context, for instance by employing Romanticism, Realism and other transnational critical terms and naming their foreign representatives, but in discussing individual Estonian writers he avoided comparisons. While he took it for granted that Estonian literature reflected movements beyond the border, he looked upon particular Estonian writers in isolation. Estonian literary history writing reached eminence during the first era of independence (1918–40). Gustav Suits, a distinguished poet and professor of Estonian and general literature at Tartu University, presented his vision of Estonian literature in lectures and seminars. He published an anthology of Estonian Contemporary Verse, Eesti nüüdislüürika (1929) that outlined also his first concept of the main currents in Estonian poetry. Eesti kirjanduslugu (1953), which dealt with the nineteenth century, he could publish only in exile. The small production of scholarly publications was complemented by popular overviews addressed to a wider public and, most significantly, to schools. Karl Mihkla was a productive and influential author of textbooks. In general, the 1920s and 30s witnessed a shift from positivism to text-centered new criticism, signaling that literature began to emerge as an autonomous entity from its context. Literary influences and movements came to play the central role in descriptions of the literary scene. It was during this period of independence that the first histories of world literature appeared in the Estonian language. The first surveys of Western literatures, which came out in the 1930s, relied on longer biographicalpositivist literary histories in German, Russian, French, and English, and were mainly used in the secondary schools.

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Soviet occupation brought these developments to an abrupt halt. In the second half of the twentieth century, a sociologically-oriented, “vulgar Marxism” came to dominate Soviet Estonian literary studies. The Stalinist revaluation of literature led to the four-volume textbook for secondary schools, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu. Õpik keskkoolile (1954), compiled by Endel Sõgel and his associates. The complementary two-volume anthology Eesti luule antoloogia (1955) gave a distorted vision of Estonian literature because it left out poetry in exile. Since it was used for many years in secondary schools, young people acquired a narrow view of literature. The vulgar Marxist approach reinforced the positivist methodology but it began to lose its dominance with the onset of the Thaw in the 1960s. Older approaches resurfaced and the scene of literary studies became more pluralistic. The outcome was a peculiar bricolage of positivistic author-oriented description, vulgar Marxist ideology, new criticism, and Russian formalism, which was paraded under the banner of objective “literary science.” The Estonian version of the teamproduced communist literary histories was the five-volume Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu (1965–91). Compiled according to Soviet ideology, it was methodologically a mixture of author-centered positivism and text-centered new criticism. In accordance with the critical discourse of this era, Estonian literature’s relation to foreign literatures was considered in two parts: the first one dealt with the friendly and fruitful collaborations between the Soviet regimes, the second with the unworthy Other, the capitalist world. Once again, Estonian exile literature was excluded. Endel Nirk’s short literary history (1983) adopted the principles of those multi-volume histories. Western as well as Russian literature continued to be included in the humanities curricula at Estonian universities, and great efforts were made to translate Russian histories of Western literature. Though their quality was unequal and some of them had a strong ideological bias, they managed to cover all of Western literature from the ancient times until the post-World War II period in a reasonably systematic way. These publications included translations of histories by S. Artamonov/N. Samarin, Viktor Zhirmunski, and M. Yelizarova, as well as the volumes XVIII sajandi väliskirjandus (Eighteenth-Century Foreign Literature), Väliskirjandus XIX ja XX sajandi vahetusel (Foreign Literature at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century), and XX sajandi väliskirjandus (Twentieth-Century Foreign Literature). Written by Russian specialists of foreign national literatures, these volumes were based on traditional national principles. Introductory chapters conveying the ideological and social background were followed by overviews of the literary traditions in France, England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the US, and detailed analyses of major authors and works. Some of these manuals also contained shorter chapters on East European literature. Kalju Leht and Ott Ojamaa adapted in 1965 these histories in Väliskirjandus. Õpik keskkoolile (Foreign Literature: A Manual for Secondary Schools), which was then reprinted almost annually until 1988. Russian literature was taught apart from the rest of world literature, and covered by special secondary schools manuals. Yuri M. Lotman, leader of the Tartu School of Semiotics, wrote a history of Russian Romanticism for Estonian secondary schools, and he contributed, together with his equally prominent wife Zara Mints, to a manual on Russian nineteenth-century Realism. Karl Ristikivi’s Eesti kirjanduse lugu (History of Estonian Literature; 1954) and Arvo Mägi’s two-volume Lühike eesti kirjanduslugu (A Short History of Estonian Literature; 1965), both written and published in Swedish exile, did not introduce significant innovations, and, since they did not have access to all the sources, actually contained some minor factual errors. They escaped Marxist simplifications, but their exilic perspective, tinged with nostalgia, were attached to a

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pre-war tradition. Due to the authors’ isolation, these works could not, for instance, trace Estonian literature’s complex connections with the modernist currents, nor could they introduce new theoretical perspectives. Both of them are written, however, in an engaging, stylistically complex subjective tone that reflects their authors’ craft of fiction and first-hand experience with Estonia’s literary culture. Ristikivi, the most celebrated prose writer of the period, shaped a coherent narrative that is enjoyable to read. Henno Jänes collaborated with a group of exile Estonian writers to publish in Sweden Maailmakirjanduse peajooni (Main Features of World Literature; 1968), which surveyed works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe, twentieth-century English literature, and other select areas. Back in Soviet Estonia, the poet Paul Rummo completed in 1967 Eesti luule, an anthology of Estonian poetry he started to compile in the second half of the 1950s. The collection, which covers the period 1637–1965 and includes also several poets in exile, made many twentieth-century poems accessible and is the most extensive one to date. By presenting all modern currents, including the exiled one, it shaped the national understanding of literature and came to play a crucial role in the further development of Estonian poetry. Karl Muru, a long-time professor of literature at Tartu University, compiled the four-volume Sõnarine (1989–95), which follows Rummo’s aesthetic principle, based on a classical model of poetry. School textbooks, which normally tend to be conservative, proved more flexible and innovative than academic publications during the national rebuilding of the 1990s. Estonian literary history was partly revised in Pärt Lias’s textbook Eesti kirjandus (1996), which deals with the Soviet period, and in the volumes on Estonian poetry, prose, and drama 1905–1940 that Karl Muru, Maie Kalda, and Luule Epner published in 1996 and 1997. Tiit Hennoste’s “Hüpped modernismi poole” (1993–97), focused on the rise of Modernism. The turn of the century has brought a renaissance in literary studies. Epp Annus et al. published the 700-page Eesti Kirjanduslugu (History of Estonian Literature; 2001), which focuses on a limited number of authors and literary works but covers Estonian literature from folklore and the earliest texts until the end of 2000. Using contemporary theories of literature, the authors foreground the literary texts and minimize biographical information; they follow intertextual relationships within and across national borders; and they situate Estonian literature in the context of Modernism and Postmodernism. Kajar Pruul’s anthology Varjatud ilus haigus (Disguised Beautiful Disease; 2000), collects significant contemporary Estonian poetry, whereas Kajar Pruul’s and Darlene Reddaway’s Estonian Short Stories (1996) and Tuulelaeval valgusest on aerud: Windship with Oars of Light (2001), edited by Doris Kareva et al., bring Estonian literature in English translations. The former offers a selection written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s; Tuulelaeval is a bilingual edition of poems by ten celebrated twentieth-century poets. Both collections are accompanied by careful introductions that constitute thumbnail literary histories. In the 1990s a team of Estonian scholars led by Jüri Talvet published three volumes of world literary history for high-school use, which adopt comparative and genre principles rather than national ones. These first attempts at a world literary history in Estonian include also chapters on the literature of Latin-America, ancient China, India, and Iran. Russian and Finnish literature are no longer privileged, but integrated into world literature and related to Estonian culture.

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Latvian Literary Histories and Textbooks Agita Misāne Ulrich Ernst Zimmermann addressed the first history of Latvian literature, Versuch einer Geschichte der Lettischen Literatur (1812), mainly to the Baltic German reader. He provided reliable bio- and bibliographical data on the authors and publications in Latvian up to the early nineteenth century, but he did not discuss the literary works themselves. The first literary history by a Latvian in Latvian, Bernhards Dīriķis’s Latviešu rakstniecība (Latvian Writing; 1860) was strongly influenced by the Young Latvian movement (1850–70) and addressed the educated Latvians to promote their interest in the literature of their language and to further the participation of the ethnic Latvians in the “Latvianness” of literature. Like Zimmerman, whose work served as the main source, Dīriķis documented rather than discussed literary works and he generally refrained from making value judgments. He made no selections and did not refer to literary quality, probably out of respect for the young Latvian literature; he all but ignored the social context. Jānis Pavasars could publish only the first volume of his Latviešu rakstniecības vēsture (History of Latvian Writing; 1893). More nationalistically oriented than his predecessors, he sought to portray “the development of the spirit of the nation as it reveals itself through literary products” (Latviešu 4). He was the first to characterize the social and intellectual climate of the works, and he portrayed some authors with considerable skill. The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a plethora of textbook publications, due to the growth of Latvian literature, the increased number of ethnic Latvians in the state and private schools, as well as the rapid growth of private grammar schools. The Young Latvian movement had stimulated a desire for education among the growing middle-class ethnic Latvians. Latvian language and literature became mandatory subjects in the grammar schools and optional in the others. The acclaimed literary critic Teodors Zeiferts was the author of the first textbook, the Latviešu rakstniecības hrestomātija ar literatūrvēsturiskām piezîmêm (Annotated Excerpts from Latvian Writing; 1905–1907), which created the tradition of hrestomātija, still popular in Latvian schools. These textbooks combine biographical notes on the authors, discussions of their work, and fragments from their most important works. General introductions outline each period. In this sense, textbooks on Latvian literature have been actually literary histories. Jēkabs Līgotnis published in 1906 his Latviešu literatūra, and in 1908 a history of Latvian literature, Latviešu literatūras vēsture, that was reedited in 1911 for schools under the title Mazā latviešu literatūras vēsture (Short History of Latvian Literature). Roberts Klaustiņš, a literary critic and teacher, wrote the Latviešu rakstniecības vēsture skolām (History of Latvian Writing for Schools; 1907), while Vilis Plūdons, a teacher and one of the most prominent Latvian poets, published 1908–1909 his Latvju literatūras vēsture […] Vidusskolas kurss (Latvian Literary History […] Secondary School Curriculum). Līgotnis, Klaustiņš, and Plūdons were all heavily criticized in the press, but for different reasons. Līgotnis’ book was considered journalistic, factually inaccurate, and superficial in its analyses, while Klaustiņš and Plūdons were regarded as subjective in their choice of authors. Klaustiņš, for example, omitted major Latvian writers like

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Augusts Deglavs, Jānis Purapuķe, and Edvards Treimanis-Zvārgulis. Plūdons’s book contained a lengthy introduction on linguistics, history, and literary theory that made almost no reference to particular works. However, all three textbooks offered both detailed analyses and broad generalizations, constituting thus the first modern Latvian literary histories addressed to school pupils. Andrejs Upīts, who published in 1911 the first sociological history of modern Latvian literature, the Latviešu jaunākās rakstniecības vēsture (1885–1910), became later one of the most influential Latvian writers of the Soviet period and the foremost propagandist for the view that literature had to serve society. The proclamation of the independent Republic of Latvia in 1918 was followed by a spate of literary textbooks that attempted to re-contextualize literary history in the new political circumstances. Earlier textbooks were republished; Ludis Bērziņš, Jēkabs Lautenbahs-Jūsminš, and other eminent Latvian writers turned to textbook writing, and new authors like Kārlis Dziļleja, Rūdolfs Egle, and Kārlis Kārkliņš devoted themselves to the task. Zeiferts also published a three-volume Latviešu rakstniecības vēsture (Latvian Literary History; 1922–34), which was unique in its structuring of literary history along denominational lines: the first volume covered the “Catholic” and the second the “Lutheran” Times. He also established a manner of writing literary history that is still alive in Latvian intellectual circles and notable for the Latvian identity discourse: he included medieval authors writing in Latin and German, and folklore but switched when he came to mid-nineteenth century to literature in Latvian. Zeiferts’s history was encyclopedic and precise in details; it discussed individual authors, and made, especially for the earlier periods, broad generalizations on both social issues and literary development. The six-volume Latviešu literatūras vēsture (History of Latvian Literature; 1935–37) that Ludis Bērziņš edited is notable for its lengthy essays on the peculiarities of the Latvian language, Latvian anthropological types, mythology, folklore, aesthetics, taste, and the Latvian soul. Only one essay of the first volume, Kārlis Kārkliņš’s “The Essence and Importance of Literature,” deals with literature proper. This first team-authored history follows the pattern established by Zeiferts, although it contains a variety of judgments, styles of thought, and expressions. After Latvia’s incorporation in the Soviet Union all comprehensive works on Latvian literature were authored by teams. That no individual scholar was considered competent and reliable enough reflected not only the political circumstances but also the increasing insularity and specialization of literary studies. University education in the Soviet-Union was intolerant of alternative opinions and closed to Western scholarship, but was encyclopedic within the specialized field: studies at the university included vast reading lists (of what was permitted) but little attention was paid to analysis and to fields outside the students’ specialization. Those university graduates who remained within the academia became narrowly focused, and, in most cases, experts of a single author. Chief editorships were usually entrusted to scholars who had the best political connections, normally the directors of the Institute of Literature at the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Although focused on class struggle and “socio-economic formations,” the comprehensive literary histories of the Soviet Latvian period continued to adopt Zeifert’s structure: most of the many school textbooks of the Soviet period were hrestomātijas. University textbooks were usually abbreviated literary histories. The six-volume Latviešu literatūras vēsture (1959–62) that Ēvalds Sokols edited discusses folklore, “spiritual culture,” and the “literature of the feudal period” before proceeding to the individual authors, their lives, and their works, arranged chronologically and according to periods

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(Romanticism, Realism, etc.). Viktors Hausmanis’s latest, three-volume history of Latvian literature (1998–2001) follows the same structure but it has abandoned Marxist ideology. It excludes folklore but has a separate chapter on the Christianization of Latvia. The first personal history of Latvian literature, by the maverick writer and critic Guntis Berelis (1999) shows his taste and offers some generalizations.

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Sorrows and Glories of a Nation’s Soul: Polish Literary Histories Jolanta Jastrzębska The Polish Commission on National Education (1773–94), the first European Ministry of Education, attempted to put Enlightenment ideals into practice. Wanting to educate teachers, it established a chair of Polish literature at the University of Cracow in 1782, the first chair for literature in a Slavonic country. The University of L’viv (Lwów) followed suit by establishing a Chair in 1817, which, however, was filled only in 1826. As discussed by Ewa Paczoska (ECE 1: 254–57), the political division of Poland disrupted the teaching Polish literature. At the University of Warsaw, the program for Polish literature was established in 1818, and linked to comparative literature (Professor Ludwik Osiński) and history. At Cracow University, Polish language and literature actually emancipated themselves from history and ancient and modern European literature only in the 1830s. In 1909, a professorship of comparative literature was established in L’viv and filled by the important modernist poet Jan Kasprowicz. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in the history of Polish literature stimulated systematic surveys. The first such work was Feliks Bentkowski’s annotated bibliographical survey, Historiya literatury polskiey (1814), which included in the broad, eighteenth-century sense of literature also works from law, history, mathematics, physic, and other disciplines. Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki, Feliks Jan Majorkiewicz, Wacław Aleksander Maciejowski, Włodzimierz Spasowicz, and Julian Bartoszewicz followed Bentkowski with compilations that were little more than descriptive surveys of authors and works. Although they contained only rudimentary narratives and no text analyses, they proved to be invaluable for later bibliographies and interpretative studies. Spasowicz and others wrote in the 1870s and 80s Polish literary histories in German for instruction at the universities of Berlin, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere (see Szyrocki). Poland was divided and occupied by foreign powers during the nineteenth century, and the academic study of Polish literature was impossible during the first half of the century. The three parts of the former kingdom, especially the territories occupied by Russia and Prussia, suffered under severe cultural oppression. Galicia, annexed by Austria, had a more liberal administration: in 1867, Polish became its official language, and by the end of the century the universities of Cracow and L’viv flourished.

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Scholars specialized in classical or German philology began publishing works on Polish literature in the second half of the century. Hegel’s vision of mankind’s historical development, especially his notion that wars were inevitable and certain nations were chosen, served to explain Poland’s suffering under foreign occupation and offered a belief and a consolation that all humanity profited from the nation’s suffering. This patriotic notion of history led to a literary canon centered on the romantic writers Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, and Cyprian Norwid. Scholars explored the romantic notion of self-sacrifice for the good of the community by studying the romantic fictional characters, which became exemplary patriots and Polish models during World War II and the Communist period. The ideology of the romantic tradition was criticized, however, in Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (1937) and Stanisław Dygat’s Jezioro Bodeńskie (Lake Constance; 1946), which argued that sacrifice to the nation oppressed individualism, that people had the right to make their own choices and were no mere representatives of the Polish nation. Gombrowicz continued in his diary (Dziennik 1953–56) his often harsh criticism of Polish patriotism and its heroic myth. The romantic tradition established the national traits and the expressions of the “Polish soul” in literature. As Piotr Chmielowski remarked, “I cannot pretend that I can reconstruct the soul of the whole nation, but I shall attempt to offer some hints about the changes it underwent, as reflected in the literature of the last nine centuries” (Historya 23). How well a work grasped “Polishness” became an aesthetic criterion. Many scholars found the roots of Polish culture in a Slavonic past, though the Polish Slavophiles rejected Russian Slavophilism because of its hegemonic cultural and political aims. The early romantic scholar and poet Kazimierz Brodziński listed patriotic love, simplicity, moderation in sentiment, and attachment to idyllic nature as Slavonic traits. The impact of the Slavophile movement was especially apparent in Adam Mickiewicz’s lectures at the Collège de France (see pp. 351–52 above). Hippolyte Taine’s theory that the social milieu had a shaping function in literature and in the lives of writers became important for Spasowicz, Chmielowski and Chlebowski. The latter carried this view ad absurdum by arguing that the great forests of the Mazowsze region facilitated the writing of important sermons because they had to be delivered very loud to reach the audience. Reconstruction of a writer’s personality and psychology was considered as the first step in reconstructing the “soul” of the nation. Antoni Małecki, one of the first modern Polish literary historians, insisted on detailed studies of periods and authors, for he disliked surveys. Inspired by Hegel’s scheme of historical development, he distinguished three periods in the evolution of a nation, each corresponding to a literary genre. In the first period of the epic and “beauty,” the nation established itself as a state and found its individuality.” In the second, of lyric poetry, truth, and religion, the nation came to know itself and acquired self-awareness. Full consciousness would be reached in the period of goodness and drama. The Spirit would now be acting according to the “national will,” and the nation would become a historical subject. Małecki was professor of classical philology at the University of Cracow (1850–53) and the University of Innsbruck (1854–56) before assuming the chair of Polish language and literature at the University of L’viv (1856–74). Inspired by classical and modern German philology, he founded the L’viv philological school. He compared Polish works and their reception to those of other nations, tracing success or failure to the “national spirit.” Słowacki, Krasiński, and others

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were not well received because, in his view, they deviated from the positive and optimistic disposition of the Polish people. Chmielowski, also professor at the University of L’viv, wrote the first genuine Polish literary history, Historya literatury polskiej (1899–1900). As we have seen, this history of literature was to reflect the history of the Polish “soul”: relying on Taine’s environmental theory, Chmielowski postulated a close relationship between literary works and the nation’s life, and he believed he could explain this way why certain works were written at particular historical periods. He focused on select authors and the formal and thematic connections between them, but his history was structured by political periods: the literature of “Christian civilization” ran from the establishment of the Polish state and the introduction of Christianity to 1400; the second period, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, covered the Polish “res publica,” a constitutional monarchy led by the nobility and the Catholic Church. In the nineteenth century, which was for Chmielowski the most important period, literature had liberated itself from the traditional social classes and powers to express the ideas, feelings, and aspirations of the whole nation. Chmielowski argued in Metodyka historyi literatury polskiej (1900) that historical literary studies should adopt the methodology of historical scholarship, concentrating, however, on the “literary facts,” which were more important than victories, defeats, politics, and natural catastrophes. He discussed the notion of literature, the teaching of literature, and research on Polish literary history; he gave practical advice on collecting material, composing bibliographies, and on evaluating literature. At the beginnings of the twentieth century, distinguished scholars like Brückner, Chlebowski, Stanisław Tarnowski, Roman Pilat, Wilhelm Bruchnalski, and Ignacy Chrzanowski turned to the history of Polish literature. The importance of their work is attested by their republication in the 1970s and 80s. Tarnowski, professor at the University of Cracow, wrote a five-volume Historya literatury polskiej (1900) that ran until 1850. His chapters are defined by dates that mark the publication of an important work or an event in a writer’s life. Wanting to cover more than writers and their times, Bruchnalski gave exhaustive synopses of works and judged them. Although he did not believe that objective judgments were possible, he held that well-considered, scholarly assessments went beyond subjective opinion. Brückner taught at the University of L’viv (1878–81) and became professor of Slavonic languages and literatures at the University of Berlin (1881–1924). His Dzieje literatury polskiej w zarysie (Outline of the History of Polish Literature; 1903), a broad overview of Polish literary history from its beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century, dealt with literature’s historical background and European context. It focused on literary texts rather than biographies but became overburdened with quotations meant to exemplify style. Brückner wanted to show the splendor of the past and the tasks ahead for building the nation’s future. Writing for a wider public, he omitted footnotes and bibliographies. The abridged version of his survey, Literatura polska. Początki — Rozwój — Czasy ostatnie (Polish Literature. Beginnings, Development, The Recent Period; 1931), attempted to identify the features that distinguish Polish from other European literatures. Pilat taught at the University of L’viv in the 1870s and 80s. The five volumes of his history of Polish literature were published posthumously from his lecture notes by his students, many of whom became well-known scholars. Pilat gave much attention to the early period: the literature in Latin, the formation of the Polish state, and the introduction of Christianity. His study of the

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Church, its schools, its monasteries, and its libraries makes this history perhaps the most detailed study of the oldest Latin and Polish texts. Chlebowski wrote his Literatura polska for a Russian encyclopedia of Slavonic philology in the years 1912–14, but the Russian revolution and Chlebowski’s death prevented publication. Manfred Kridl published the work in 1923 and a new edition with a supplement appeared in 1935. Chlebowski, author of several earlier studies on specific problems and authors, focused here on his favorite nineteenth century, which was very painful in Poland. He wanted to show how traumatic experiences shaped the writers and their works, and, above all, to examine the development and the suffering of the nation’s soul. Hence chapter titles like “Najpotężniejsze wypowiedzenie się duszy polskiej, wstrząśniętej prez klęskę r. 1831” (The Most Vigorous Expression of the Polish Soul, in Shock after the Disaster of 1831; 127). Of the four sections, two dealt with the “growth” of literature in the homeland (1795–1830 and 1832–1864), one with literature abroad (1832– 1848), and one with the revival of spiritual life and literature (1864–1905). Chlebowski covered, for instance, the growing interest in the Slavonic peoples, folklore, the representation of “real life” in the novel, and scholarly research. He saw a bard and “spiritual leader” in Mickiewicz (127), and “the Polish soul’s tragedy” in Wyspiański’s theater (512). Like Chmielowski and others, Chlebowski relied on Taine’s theory that literature was determined by its historical and social environment. He advanced sometimes surprisingly accurate hypotheses about a writer’s life via careful textual analyses when biographical data was scant. He also recognized the influence of foreign writers on Polish literature. To be included in the history of Polish literature a work had to have, beyond artistic form and content, an impact on society; it had to treat important ideas and feelings “with power and beauty” (Od Kochanowskiego 33). Chlebowski did not write for the specialist only. He believed that literary history had an important social function, especially in a country like Poland that had been deprived of its political independence. Hence the clumsy subtitle of the first section: “The Development of Literature in a Country Divided in Three Politically Different Parts, in Relation to the Changes of the Polish Soul, Influenced by the Shocks and Changing Circumstances of the Nation’s Existence” (1). According to Chlebowski, a history of Polish literature had to discover, grasp, and describe the nation’s soul, but also inspire confidence in the nation and encourage great achievements. By contrast, Wilhelm Bruchnalski wanted to transform literary history into a science that dealt with the history of literary problems. Writing for scholars instead of the general public, he tried to show how the oldest Polish literary texts came about and how they were related to Latin, German, and Czech ones. Bruchnalski displayed the range and depth of his knowledge in monographs and refrained from writing comprehensive surveys. The motto of Ignacy Chrzanowski’s Historia literatury niepodległej Polski. 965–1795 (History of the Literature of Independent Poland, 965–1795; 1906) was Kazimierz Brodziński’s credo that each national literature contributed to the nation’s “moral existence,” which was, unlike politics, indestructible (Historia 5 & 837). Chrzanowski’s Historia, as well as his inaugural address at the University of Cracow in 1910, were to show that Polish literature was interwoven with the nation’s tragic fate, turning patriotism and social involvement into the highest literary value (Historia 10). He also studied the function of Christian values in Polish literature. Chrzanowski worked comparatively. In his view, Polish literature had learned much from the Czech one in the early days but finally surpassed it, just as it did all the other Slavonic literatures.

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Yet Polish literature did not reach the level of the Western literatures during its national independence, when it merely adopted Roman, Greek, Italian, French, and English models. Mickiewicz was the first to make a contribution to European literature on the level of Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, or Rousseau, but only after the country’s loss of independence. Chrzanowski was not afraid of generalizations: in his view, the golden age of wisdom and beauty in the sixteenth century started to decline in the seventeenth and reached a nadir in the eighteenth, though its last three decades brought “a renaissance of wisdom and beauty” (Historia 102). Chrzanowski expressed his opinions, preferences, and feelings with great enthusiasm and vivacity. His personal discourse may occasionally stretch scholarship but is always a pleasure to read. Juliusz Kleiner, Manfred Kridl, Czesław Miłosz, and Julian Krzyżanowski, important scholars as well as great personalities, followed him in accepting the challenge to write single-handedly Polish literary histories. Kleiner’s Zarys dziejów literatury polskiej (1932–39) is an outline of Polish literary history until the November Uprising of 1831, written with a didactic and patriotic aim. Kleiner wrote for young readers in a lively style, focusing on literary works rather than biographical facts, and frequently quoting from famous poems. As his foreword states, he wanted to accentuate “the spiritual difference” of the Polish nation, as well as “its connection to the whole of Europe.” His young reader was to see how Polish literature related to the foreign literatures, and when it attained a European level (8). The context of Kridl’s Literatura polska na tle rozwoju kultury (1945) and its revised translation, A Survey of Polish Literature and Culture (1956), is Polish Geistesgeschichte and social history. Kridl discusses not only literature but also historical and political events, the life of society, intellectual trends, education, and the arts, and he includes among the authors essayists, historians, and literary critics. The Nobel-prize winning poet and essayst Czesław Miłosz wrote his History of Polish Literature (1969) for his Berkeley students and a foreign general public. He admirably succeeded in his aim to avoid “scholarly dryness” and become “an impersonal machine computing data” (xv-xvi). Each chapter begins with a short sketch of the international and domestic political situation, and continues with the presentation of the literary period, its currents, and its chosen writers. Works and life are interlinked; the summaries and analyses are to the point. The eleven chapters correspond to well-known periods in European literature, though the last three portray typical Polish phenomena: “Young Poland,” “Independent Poland: 1918–1939,” and “World War II and the First Twenty Years of People’s Poland.” The latter includes émigré literature, which was omitted, however, in the 1993 Polish version because Miłosz felt that Polish readers had access to many specialized studies on the subject, whereas he only had an existential experience of it (Historia 9–10). Dzieje literatury polskiej (1972) and its English translation, A History of Polish Literature (1978), are the works of Julian Krzyżanowski, an erudite and extremely productive scholar with a profound knowledge of Polish literature, culture, and folklore. These histories cover Polish literature from its beginnings to the first interwar decades. Each chapter offers a general characterization of the period and its historical background, analyses of its important representatives, and accounts of the dynamics within the period, its literary criticism, and the flowering of a genre. Whereas Chlebowski gave his chapters emotion-laden titles, and other earlier historians saturated their presentations with dramatic and pathetic exclamations, Krzyżanowski wrote in an informative but somewhat dry manner, from a scholarly distance that eschewed subjective utterances. Not

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surprisingly, he rejected Chrzanowski’s belief that Polish literature’s basic feature was patriotism and that literature was “the honest teacher” of the nation. The highest function of literature, according to Krzyżanowski, was aesthetic, not didactic (History 664). Fewer and fewer single-author histories are being written in recent years. Many believe that the exponentially growing number of specialized studies on writers and literary periods could only be mastered by a team. Literatura polska 1918–1975 (1991–96) by Alina Brodzka, et al, as well as Artur Hutnikiewicz’s and Andrzej Lam’s Literatura polska XX wieku (2000) are such post-1989 joint projects, which cover only the twentieth century but include now also the Polish literature written abroad. While team-authored histories aim at objectivity and completeness, single-author monographs with personal visions of literary history are able to select their writers and works. Włodzimierz Maciąg’s Nasz wiek XX (1992), one of the few single-author monographs on twentieth-century Polish literature, combines thorough scholarship with an essayistic and pleasurable style. Maciąg regards twentieth-century literature as a coherent whole, in spite of its diversity of ideologies, literary programs, and styles. In his view, the most characteristic feature of twentieth-century humanism is a belief in a sovereign subject (156–58) that both desires and fears this freedom; it faces solitude, and is frequently unable to make choices. Maciąg analyzes a variety of literary expressions, and attempts to reconstruct “the spiritual image of the century” (375) by following the various attitudes toward Nazism, World War II, Marxism, and Christianity. Such a study could only be conceived and published after 1989. Maciąg reevaluates canonical writers from new theoretical perspectives, and reconstitutes the pages that communist censorship erased, especially on émigré literature.

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Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts Robert B. Pynsent To have a future one must have a past. In the late eighteenth century a people who considered itself a subject nation of the Habsburgs and considered language the chief mark of nationhood lived in the printed word. A history of literature was a curriculum vitae of a people’s spirit. It could be presented at an interview before the surrounding nations for them to judge whether it had a future as well as a past. Before Fichte stated that a people had to have a literature before it could be considered a nation, Josef Dobrovský, for example, seems to have worked that out for himself. Writing the literary history of one’s own nation is probably always a political enterprise, but especially if one’s nation is subject to a center dominated by another language. Writing a literary history, a history of the national spirit, constitutes the assertion of an independent culture. As Hans Robert Jauß states of the “patriarchs” of nineteenth-century literary history: “they saw their highest goal to be to represent on the basis of literary works the idea of national individuality on its

Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts 367 path to fulfillment” (144); the path led from “quasi-mythical beginnings to fulfillment in a national classical literature” (215; see also 67). The same is normally said of romantic historiography altogether. Jiří Štaif makes that one of the themes of his lively study of historians of Bohemia from the late Enlightenment to the end of the nineteenth century, entitled Historici, dějiny a společnost (Historians, History, and Society; 1997), that only lightly touches on literary matters, except the forged Manuscripts. The European romantic historical model was, Štaif writes, “to see scholarship as consisting in seeking a path to national identity” (214), and amongst the Czechs that searching for “identity” was chiefly “in the history of medieval Bohemia” (287). By his employment of that modern mythic concept “identity,” which of itself luxuriates in further mythopoeia, Štaif is willy-nilly suggesting that all romantic history of a single people constitutes the establishment of a national mythology. This is more intensely the case with literary history in its attempt to appreciate the workings of a permanent national mind over a period of hundreds of years. Political history had become, especially during the Enlightenment, document-based (the first modern Czech historian Franz Martin Pelzel [František Martin Pelcel] expressly delighted in this fact), these documents being chiefly documents of state, sovereigns’ letters, registry items, deeds and so forth; by contrast, the documents of a literary historian were, on the face of it, less practical. In addition, literary history has to deal with documents which may be fake, and too firm a belief in the unchanging nature of human imagination sometimes makes that difficult. For the literary historian each document, be it lyric poem, chronicle, romance or law-book, would provide evidence of the national spirit or, in the case of Czech writers, very often of a vitiated national spirit, for literary historical mythology is a dialogue. The historian approaches the document with his own mythic preconception of what it should contain and when the document presents something that does not comport with this mythology, the historian must find reasons for this deviance that can be fitted in with his preconception — or he must change his preconception, but change on the basis of analysis was uncommon in Czech literary historians before Jaroslav Vlček, the last major critic of the nineteenth century. “The achievement of nineteenth-century literary history,” writes Jauß, “stood and fell on the basis of the conviction that the idea of national individuality was the invisible part of every fact, and also that this idea made the form of history representable by a succession of literary works” (152). Each literary historian based his writing on three things, his predecessor(s), manuscripts and books discovered since his immediate predecessor, and his own understanding of national mythology. He had thus to enrich national mythology by demonstrating its continuum on the basis of an ever larger number of texts. This provides anyone trying to assess these histories with one problem in particular: it is sometimes not clear whether the literary historian has simply not read the work he is commenting on or that such an impression arises because of his method of deciding what represents the Czech spirit. Karel Tieftrunk’s literary history provides a particularly clear example of how this may work. For him the essence of the Czech national character expressed in writing is “pithiness.” Thus writers or works that are in keeping with national mythologies are pithy; that is, they are (or are written by someone) typically Czech, and thus good. His term for bad, un-Czech, is “prolix.” Of course, Tieftrunk does offer odd examples of a writer or work being both pithy and prolix, but he also attributes prolixity to a work that is distinctly pithy because he either has not read it or finds it ideologically distasteful. All myths are rational and useful, and like all narratives need form. A literary history tells a story and it is the author’s task to impose a pattern on that story.

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That pattern was normally optimistic. Even when a history relates the story of only Old or Old and Middle Czech literature, by displaying the glories of, say, medieval culture, one was promising the possibility of a glorious future; the readers will see what the true Czech mind is capable of and be convinced it will be capable of it again. Initially, it does not matter if some of the story is based on false documents — especially if these documents embody and evince the political tenets of modern times; indeed, that helps, initially, for it tells us what we need to hear. As scholarly research develops, fakes will be weeded out, but a pattern has been created for comprehending the hardy perennials that remain. When the whole of Middle Czech literature is included in a history, the reader will see how and why Czech literature went into decline and learn from that. A portrayal of decline, however accurate or inaccurate, appears to act as a therapeutic stimulus to resuscitation or renewal. That is the politics of nationalist literary history, nationalism itself, and nation (re-)building. That is politics altogether, the rebuilding of Czech(oslovak) “democracy” after Socialism, and in nineteenth-century Czech literary histories one will notice some slight and some distinct resemblances between the mythological analysis of the literature of the Counter-Reformation and that of the literature of particularly the final twenty years of the Communist-led Czechoslovak state. But it is politics altogether: Labor always claims it has to clear up the mess left by the Conservatives and vice versa. The party whose optimism is the more convincing wins. In a “discourse” on the need for a “cultural revolution” to give the Czechs, and any other nation in a similar position, the knowledge and capacity for thinking necessary to achieve cultural self-confidence and national autonomy or independence, the Revivalist Karel Sabina indicates this use of literary history in nation (re-)building: [H]istory becomes the school of life only when the phenomena it describes are generally recognized and its teachings become the property of all. What is the use of buried treasures? A nation can have sufficient such intellectual [duchovných] treasures for it to be reborn, but dead treasures neither enrich nor revive anyone. (Sabina, Duchovný 37)

Such treasures make the canon, and my essay traces the gradual establishment of a Czech literary canon, something that does not concern much the two Enlightenment scholars I treat briefly; they are most concerned with registering the existence of a body of literary texts, establishing a cultural past, an outline curriculum vitae. The first of these, Pelzel’s dictionary of Jesuit writers belongs to the oldest form of European literary historical writing, literary biography, ultimately derived from Suetonius. The second, Dobrovský’s history of Czech language and literature, is based on works rather than authors. This form of narrative history of literature has its origins in Renaissance (though one may find elements of it in the Middle Ages), but in Dobrovský’s history one sees the first signs of the influence of Herder’s conception of vernacular literary history: as Herder envisaged nations organically, rising from barbarism (childhood, youth), achieving civilization (manhood), and then falling into senility, so the vernacular literature, the product of individual geniuses emerging out of the genius or spirit of the nation, passes through these stages. The Herderian conception of literary history reaches its Czech peak with Tieftrunk’s Historie literatury české (History of Czech literature; 1876), which is the first history since the second version of Dobrovský’s to present a narrative account of all Czech literature up to the time of writing. Indeed, as far as I have been able to ascertain, it is the

Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts 369 only such history written in Czech before the twentieth century. Non-narrative, but bibliographical accounts had already been compiled before Tieftrunk, first by Josef Jakub Jungmann (1825) and, then, a little more discursively, by Alois Vojtěch Šembera (1869). Tieftrunk’s is also the first literary history to offer a history of Czech literary histories and to make a comment on, hardly to define, what literary history is: This discipline, which considers the intellectual [duševní] fruits of the nation and explains their connection with other manifestations of national life, is in essence a part of history as such, in particular cultural history. In the field of literature they [literary histories] are works of modest demeanor, products only of human ingenuity and that is why they have been ignored for so long. Literary history is among the newest branches of history. Our forebears did not know such histories; it was only at the end of the last century, when Czech nationality was awakening again, that leading cultivators of the Czech language began to turn their eyes also to literature and its history. (Historie 171)

To this day no one appears to have considered the history of Czech literary histories other than as marginal parts of general historiography (see especially, Kutnar & Marek, and Štaif, Historici), though analogous enterprises have been undertaken concerning other vernaculars, notably in Michael S. Batts’s A History of Histories of German Literature. I have restricted my account of histories of Czech literature to those works of “modest demeanor” written by Czechs up to the 1890s because I am concerned with their role in the national movement, and especially with their approach to the forged Manuscripts. By stopping in the 1890s, I am not suggesting that nationalist interpretations ceased with the nineteenth century. They certainly did not, even in the post-communist Czech Republic. By the twentieth century, however, a canon was established (and slowly expanded), and for much of the century writing literary history, apart from taking into account new discoveries, concentrated on rationalizing the canon in accordance with the ideology of the period. Furthermore, since World War II, faith in specialization and a debilitating emphasis on theory have generally lead to literary histories becoming de rigueur multi-authored volumes, or, more commonly still, dictionaries of literature. Generally speaking, then, histories of literature have lost their character of story-book (like, for example, Dobrovský’s) or political tract (for example, Sabina’s) and become more reference works. These reference works are designed almost exclusively for speakers of the language in which the literature described was written. That was not so at the end of the eighteenth century, which represented, actually coincidentally, an advantage for a linguistic community that was not politically, and thus culturally, dominant in its own land. It was not only a matter of establishing one’s own past, but also of having one’s curriculum vitae recognized internationally. Pelzel’s and Dobrovský’s literary historical works were designed for a readership within but also beyond the Bohemian Lands. In the Habsburg Monarchy of the second half of the eighteenth century the language of scholarship was changing from Latin to German, partly due to the new status given German by Maria Theresa’s school reforms and particularly Josephine bureaucratic centralization politics, and partly because of the emergence of Germany as a centre of ‘modern’ thought and scholarship. Czech was not a language of high culture, though some unsophisticated biblical exegesis was still conducted

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in Czech; history books, satirical poems, artisans’, midwives’ and farmers’ manuals were still being published in Czech. Chapbook production continued unabated, often in a language barely changed since their sixteenth-century original printings. Still the effects of the Counter-Reformation were perceptible; indeed, prayers for the destruction of heretical texts were still to be found in some missals printed as late as the 1850s. New works of literature were predominantly devotional in the late eighteenth century as they had been ever since the emergence of Czech as a literary language and would continue to be well into the 1830s. At the same time, the Enlightenment spirit of secularization was encouraging new ways of thinking that would change the approach to history, and that meant also the approach to literature. Slowly a biology was emerging that suggested that species had not always been the same. It was still a long way to Darwin, but the notion that man might be related to apes was dancing in the Enlightenment sunbeam, as was the notion that nations lived in recurrent patterns of ascendancy and degeneration, that nations were organic like plants or individual human beings. The mind of the genus Czech was worth examining. The period I am considering was dominated by the series of forged medieval manuscripts “discovered” between 1816 and 1849 (see also the introduction to Part III above). Dobrovský publicly rejected one of the two most influential of them immediately (and another forgery a little later) and Vlček involved himself in what should have been the final stage of the campaign to demonstrate the manuscripts’ inauthenticity. This campaign, centered on Athenaeum, a journal run by scholars at the new Czech-language university in Prague, was managed by the sociologist Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and led by the philologist Jan Gebauer and the historian Jaroslav Goll in 1886– 87. In fact, then, Czech literary history described a circle from the (at least partial) denial of the genuineness of the forged Manuscripts, through general acceptance by Czechs after Dobrovský’s death, to the Prague academics’ denial of the 1880s. That was not quite the end of the affair. The Battle of the Manuscripts flared up again between the two World Wars and the results of the final Prague criminal police’s investigation of the Manuscripts in the late 1960s were not published until after the fall of the Communist Party regime. There is yet another circle here, for it was the Prague police that instigated a campaign against the Manuscripts in the 1850s. The Manuscripts were: (1) 1816 Píseň pod Vyšehradem (Song Sung beneath Vyšehrad), “found” by Josef Linda; (2) 1817: a collection of narrative and lyric poems, Rukopis královédvorský/Königinhofer Handschrift (Dvůr Králové MS, henceforth RK) “found” by Václav Hanka; (3) 1818: Libušin soud (Libussa’s Judgment [-seat]), later known as Rukopis zelenohorský/Grünberger Handschrift (Zelená Hora MS, henceforth RZ), sent anonymously to the Bohemian Museum; (4) 1819: Milostná píseň krále Václava (Love-Song of King Wenceslas), ‘found’ by Jan Nepomuk Václav Zimmerman, two years later made state censor of Czech books; (5) 1827: approximately 900 new Czech glosses to the Mater Verborum dictionary, published by Hanka; (6) 1828: a Czech glossed translation of Psalm 109 and part of Psalm 145 and the fragment of an interlinear translation of St John’s Gospel, published by Hanka; (7) 1849: Libušino proroctví (Libussa’s Prophecy), also published by Hanka. The 1880s campaign was directed chiefly at the RK and RZ. Although these two, in particular the latter, had been fairly convincingly demonstrated to be forgeries earlier, they were publicly accepted as genuine; the rest had been recognized as forgeries, either immediately, like Hanka’s last effort, or gradually from the late 1850s onwards. The fact remains, however, that from the late 1810s to the 1880s surveys and interpretations of Czech literary development were founded on an extended confidence trick. The notion that the Czechs had been a particularly cultured nation since

Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts 371 pre-Christian times (the RZ, some poems in RK), which was a commonplace of nineteenth-century writing, proved to be a lie. It is, then, no wonder that the anti-Manuscripteer leader Masaryk arranged that the motto on the Czechoslovak presidential standard should be “Truth prevails”. The demonstration that the Manuscripts were fakes meant that Czech literary history had to be re-written. This re-writing did not involve simply giving the literature new beginnings, but also dispensing with a norm against which all “subsequent” literary works should be measured. Especially the RK was a “truly national treasure” (Jireček, Rukověť 1: 406–407), had become a “national dogma” (Štaif, Historici 232). It had been part of the nationalist faith that the RZ and most poems of the RK represented Czech culture before it was contaminated by Western culture. At the celebrations in Dvůr Králové marking the fiftieth anniversary of the RK’s “discovery,” a statue to one of the Manuscript’s heroes, the minstrel warrior Záboj, was erected and the foundation-stone laid for a theatre which bore the name of the discoverer Hanka and whose building was completed in 1874, only a few years before the main Battle began. Proving the RZ definitely to be a forgery also meant changing histories of Bohemia, ridding them of the picture of an ancient Slav or Bohemian legal system. Since the forger or forgers had also clearly been inspired by the Enlightenment historian Gelasius Dobner’s theory that, before Christianization, the Czechs/Slavs had had a particularly democratic society (Josef Johanides 160), the notion that the Czechs had also always been naturally democratic also took a knocking. In this case, however, the Romantic historian František Palacký’s demonstration of the democratic nature of Hussitism compensated for that. Štaif, however, points out that the Manuscripts were much “more important for Czech national history than Palacký’s assessment of Hussitism” because this assessment “was not unreservedly accepted” by historians (Štaif, “The Image” 93). Masaryk was a fervent propagator of many of Palacký’s ideas, though he modified some of them. It is not known how aware he was in 1886 of the consequences of his campaign, and Arnošt Kraus, a professor of German literature, is certainly exaggerating when he puts Masaryk’s support for Gebauer on the same level as his leading of Czech resistance to Austria-Hungary abroad during the Great War (10). Štaif writes that one cannot tell to what degree Masaryk was in the beginning aware that the Battle of the Manuscripts that he was leading would “not be a matter only of the courage to defend academic truth against extremely indignant public opinion or how far he himself understood these polemics as a tool for furthering the academic and social ambitions of the Athenaeum circle.” To be a antiManuscripteer was “to be set against the older generation of late Revivalist scholars” and, more significantly, to join in an attempt to “put Czech politics and national consciousness on different cultural historical foundations, which were in ever more apparent opposition to the stale forms of historicism and the intellectual indolence that all too frequently characterized the remnants of the original Romantic Revivalism” (Štaif, Historici 223). For the conservative nationalist scholars and critics, as the biologist and philosopher Emanuel Rádl writes, “the Manuscripts were an academic symbol of patriotism, but not part of a national view on the world, just as Huss was for them a great Czech, but it was evident to them that his teaching was not binding for anyone” (18). In Arnošt Kraus’s view the forged Manuscripts had poisoned Czech academic life for generations, and since the 1850s made Czech academics look ridiculous to foreigners (37–38). The Battle, however, had established the academic credentials of the teachers at the new Czech-language university in Prague (6). It had, so to speak, enabled the Czechs to begin to revive from the Revival.

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At least at the beginning of his literary studies, Dobrovský’s interest in literature derived from his interest in language altogether (he was a scholar of Oriental languages), and for most of his life, perhaps to the end of it, he could not see Czech becoming a language of high culture again. His successor, Josef Jungmann, not only believed it would, but did everything he could to ensure that it did. Still, the Czechs continued to perceive their language to be threatened by German, with renewed intensity after the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the imposition of neo-absolutism. In the 1860s, secondary schooling in Czech gradually became generally available and it was really only the generation whose entire education was in Czech that was convinced that Czech was, indeed, a language of high culture. By the late 1880s and the 1890s, when Vlček’s history of Czech literature began appearing, few Czechs had any doubt about the capacity of Czech to withstand German, and, indeed, they appeared to have stopped worrying about the complete displacement of Czech by German. Nonetheless, in the very year that the Athenaeum Battle began, the academic journalist Hubert Gordon Schauer published on December 20, 1886 (dated 1887) anonymously his article “Naše dvě otázky” (Our Two Questions). Here he asked whether the efforts of Jungmann and his associates had not been in vain, whether the Czechs actually had something to offer, especially by way of thought, and whether they might not be doing themselves and humankind a favor if they decided to attach themselves “to the intellectual life of a large nation,” that is the Germans (Schauer 9). This bombshell (which, coincidentally, seemed to cast doubt on the need for Czech-language universities) was, in the end, not as devastating to conservative nationalists as the Athenaeum articles, but it, too, helped change the face of Czech political thinking. By no means least important, it inspired a response in Masaryk: the messianic, Fichtean reinterpretation of the national movement known since Masaryk as the National Revival (obrození), instead of National Awakening (probuzení) or National Resurrection/Renascence (znovuzrození or vzkříšení). In Vlček’s work, which in this was also influenced by Karel Sabina, the history of literature had already become a history of ideas. In Jan Voborník’s history of post–1848 literature it had become a history of artistic expression. While over exactly a hundred years the writing of literary history developed with Vlček into a scholarly form which would still be acceptable today, the teaching of Czech literature at the university and at academies did not progress with such vigor. To be sure, the teaching of Czech language had been instituted at the military academy in Wiener Neustadt in 1751 (post filled 1752), at the Vienna military engineering academy in 1758, and at the Theresianum in 1773. The chair in Czech at Vienna University was founded in 1775, and in 1784 Czech teaching began in the Tiefenbach Moravian Institute for Noblemen (Josef Johanides 219). Furthermore, in 1793, the historian Pelzel became the first professor of Czech Language and Literature at Prague University (a good century before Oxford or Cambridge had such a post for English literature). Pelzel did some history and literature teaching, but his chief contribution was elementary instruction in the language, which he did in the first semester; he did literature reading, including legal and other state documents, in the second. The poet, grammarian and translator Jan Nejedlý, who took over from Pelzel in 1801, gave only the odd language classes, devoting his time mostly to his lucrative law practice. The holder of this post in Prague, who devoted himself largely to literature, Czech and (from 1849) Polish, was the satirical poet Jan Pravoslav Koubek, who taught Czech from 1839 onwards. According to Jan Erazim Sojka, in Pelzel’s day the chair was that of an Extraordinarius and Koubek had been the first to be an Ordinarius (298). No one ever took short-hand notes on his

Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts 373 lectures and so it is not entirely clear how he enthused his students so greatly (Sabina, “Koubek” 145). In these lectures he had apparently so strongly advocated the literary virtues of Karel Hynek Mácha, defended him against the judgment of the critical establishment, that the students adopted him as their “slogan,” hence in part the title Máj (May/Spring, after Mácha’s chief work) that the new Poetic Realist generation gave its anthologies (see Voborník 8). For forty years after Koubek there was no Czech literature department at Prague University. It was not until 1898 that the first full-time Dozentur devoted solely to Czech literature was established there (Bačkovský 204). The establishment of such posts as those in Vienna and Wiener Neustadt, even Prague, seems to Dobrovský not quite as significant as the activities of independent scholars. He writes in the first version of his literary history, his Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache (History of the Czech Language; 1791), of “the patriotic endeavors of a few scholars who have made it their business to encourage others to learn the Czech language by demonstrating its manifold uses, or, by distributing Czech works, to prevent the language falling into total decay” (55). That last phrase is important because it suggests that he had some slight hope for the language. For much of his life, Dobrovský corresponded with his old friend and fellow student of everything Slavonic, Josef Valentin Zlobický, who was professor of Czech Language and Literature at Vienna from 1775 onwards and who did much to encourage him in the writing of his Geschichte. Contrary to Dobrovský, Jungmann considered the contribution of the Wiener Neustadt academy to the awakening of Czech national consciousness considerable (Historie 354). Zlobický had been the first professor of Czech there before moving to Vienna University. By far the most imaginative modern Czech poet before Mácha, the shoemaker’s son Matěj Milota Zdirad Polák, a veteran of the Battle of Leipzig, taught there (1828–30); no longer interested in things Czech, he ended his life a demented major-general. Polák’s sons were taught there by the carpenter’s son who became a junior officer only on his appointment to the academy post, Tomáš Burian, a grammarian, lexicographer and military historian. Burian published an account of the teaching of Czech at the Academy in which he pointed out that the professor of Czech was junior in rank to the dancing master and the fencing master, but was senior to the teachers of French and Italian (Sabina, “Polák” 278). The man who prepared the way for the development of Czech literary history, and indeed remained an influence on it into the 1870s, was Pelzel. The spelling of his name is a slight problem. I use the form he used himself for his German works and, indeed, his Czech works until the 1790s when, for Czech works, he began using the form Pelcel; the now almost ubiquitous aberrant spelling “Pelcl” crept into Czech writing during the last third of the nineteenth century, that is, long after his death. Josef Jireček still consistently spells him Pelcel in source-references in his handbook of Old and Middle Czech literature (1875–76). It has become an ineluctable cliché to speak of Pelzel as a man who adopted the views of his masters, the great Bohemian families, the Sternbergs, but for most of his life the Nostitzes, as private tutor, librarian, and archivist. Actually, that is not true: he was a liberal-minded conservative who had enormous compassion for those who were not as fortunate as he was, but he disliked all forms of disorder. Initially he was a supporter of Joseph II’s reforms, but soon began to lose trust in them, to consider them harbingers of disorder. As very much an Enlightenment man he had little respect for monastic orders. He was also not only a Bohemian patriot, but also a Czech patriot. (Amongst his papers was found an epitaph for the prelate Ferdinand Kinderman von Schulstein, the Germanizing

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superintendent of Bohemian schools: “Here is the grave-digger of the Czech nation. / Patriots, just shit on his grave” [J. Pán’s note, Pelzel Paměti 140].) He was born into a not particularly welloff tradesman’s family in Rychnov (Reichenau) in Northern Bohemia and the way he instructs German-speakers to pronounce some words in his Czech grammar informs us that he spoke North Bohemian dialect all his life. He attended the Piarist grammar school in his native town and then a Jesuit one in Königgrätz (Hradec Králové), and thereafter he attended classes in various subjects at Prague University, completed no course, but was awarded a B.A. in 1754. In 1757 he moved to Vienna where he attended more courses in other subjects, but eventually returned to Prague to become a tutor in the Sternberg household in 1759. He joined the Nostitz household in 1765, and remained there until, almost sixty, he took up his professorship in 1793, thereby increasing his annual salary by 20% — which he needed because by now he had a large family. While he was at the Nostitzes, he became a close friend of the young Dobrovský, who also entered their employment; and at the Nostitzes’ masonic salon, Pelzel made the acquaintance of the rich, highly educated Transylvanian-born natural historian Ignaz von Born, who instigated a Private Learned Society (founded 1774, it eventually become Royal) and financed an academic weekly, Prager gelehrte Nachrichten (Prague Learned News, 1771–72), with which Pelzel was closely involved from the start; he was, then, at the heart of the beginning of the Revival. One probably learns most about Pelzel’s mind from his Paměti (Memoirs; 1931), which were written 1780–90 in German with the title Böhmische Chronik unter der Regierung des römischen Kaisers und Königs von Böhmen Josephus II (Bohemian Chronicle under the Rule of the [Holy] Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia Joseph II). Pelzel’s first contribution to literary history was his publication of another Baroque cleric’s defense of the Czech language, that of the Jesuit historian Bohuslaus Balbinus/Bohuslav Balbín. Pelzel gave it the title Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua Slavonica praecipue Bohemica (An Essay in Defense of the Slav Language, especially Czech); it was one of several works Balbín did not publish, in this case, did not intend to publish, in his life-time. There is no doubt whatsoever that Pelzel’s publication of this work in 1775 and the anger in high places the publication aroused provided a considerable stimulus to the National Revival. Historically speaking, however, the Dissertatio is most important as a demonstration that in some form or other Czech nationalist ideology, first formulated in the Dalimil chronicle (completed 1314), remained alive and well during the Counter-Reformation, at least amongst intellectuals. Although there is no evidence of a Czech nationalist movement during the Counter-Reformation such as there had been earlier, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Balbín’s Dissertatio is one of those works that makes any historian question whether a “revival” or, as the Revivalists themselves labeled it, “awakening” or “resurrection,” ever really came to pass except in the Revivalists’ minds. Of course one may not deny that there was a movement in the first half of the nineteenth century to restore to Czech its place as a language of high culture, and of course the writings primarily of Montesquieu and Herder, then Fichte, and the ideology of the French Revolution helped form an understanding of nation-ness that comported with the developments of political thinking (and the natural sciences), but that could be said of almost anywhere in Europe. To a considerable degree the Revival was a myth constructed by the Revivalists. It is probably not only because, in contrast to the older labels, the concept “Revival” became established in the 1890s (and “Revivalist” [obrozenec] for members of movement, in the 1900s) that the leading Czech theorist of nationalism, Hroch, now

Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts 375 puts the word “Revival” in inverted commas and that Štaif, too, feels so uncomfortable with the concept that at one point (Historici 65) he writes of “Revivalist Awakeners” (okruh obrozeneckých buditelů). Extracts from Balbín’s Dissertatio were published in Czech by the liberal journalist Karel Havlíček, but a complete translation did not appear until 1869; thus Pelzel’s edition of the Latin original was all that was available to patriots for almost 100 years. Balbín, writing probably in 1672, supplies something of the decay myth concomitant with all nationalism, as well as of the linguocentricity common to most Habsburg nationalisms in the following passage: I have myself seen how Bohemia, betrayed by those who aid foreigners and enemies of the land, is becoming weak, is falling, is being reduced to poverty. And I have heard many semi-educated people and ingrats blethering about casting shame on the whole nation and our forefathers. I have recently acquired a tract overflowing with contumely against the Slavonic tongue, minced meat greased with the oil of lies and manifold errors. Naturally I burned with what I consider just love for my country. (8–9)

Balbín also foreshadows Pelzel’s own, let alone nineteenth-century Czech nationalists’, hatred of Vienna. Bohemia had become the Habsburgs’ money-box: “the court of Vienna, tempted by the sweetness of Bohemian money, daily calls out with its insatiable gullet: ‘Bring us, bring us more!’” (40). It is perhaps not surprising that the Vienna court was upset with Pelzel’s publication and with the Prague censor for allowing it. Pelzel had expected trouble, though not perhaps as much as what came about. While organizing the publication he had arranged for half the print-run to be sent to Leipzig, and he employed a printer who knew no Latin. Furthermore, the title page was printed on a separate sheet of paper, not as part of a gathering (Josef Johanides 127). Once the Dissertatio was published, a high ranking official in Prague sent it to Vienna and there an official investigation began at the beginning of April, 1775. On April 12, Vienna ordered all copies to be confiscated, but the Court Censorship Commission’s decision of April 19 was less drastic. The Prague censor’s office was reprimanded subsequently and instructed never to permit any political publications whatsoever. The Commission did not wish to ban the book for fear that imposing a ban would drive people to get hold of a copy, read it, and believe that the portrayal of Bohemian circumstances in the 1670s was actually a covert representation of the state of the country in the 1770s. The Empress issued a decree on November 11, 1775, declaring that the Dissertatio should never be reprinted or translated; a further decree issued on January 16, 1779 stated that not only should the book never be reprinted, but that all copies at the printer’s or in circulation should be stamped and signed by a government official (Josef Johanides 131–44). This injunction could not be carried out but it did something towards ensuring that the book was widely read. After the three versions of Dobrovský’s history of Czech literature, a more political, more imaginative history appeared, that of Josef Jungmann (second edition, posthumously, 1851). Jungmann established a periodization of Czech literature that is still employed today, and, indeed, some of the judgments expressed in the introductory essays he wrote to each period, abhorred by the later nineteenth century, began to be partially accepted by Vlček, but gained wide acceptance only at the end of the twentieth century. The most blatant example of that is his assessment that Hussitism had constituted the beginning of a major decline in Czech belles-lettres. Jaroslav Vlček argues that this decline involved an ever higher proportion of Czech literature consisting of didactic works.

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Eventually, after the end of the nineteenth century, Vlček at least made beginning of demolishing the essential Revivalist mythicization of the Battle of the While Mountain in 1620, at which the Czech Protestant Estates were defeated, a battle whose political consequences led to the exiling or forced conversion to Roman Catholicism of a huge proportion of the Bohemian population, including nobles and much of the educated burgher elite. The Revivalist myth, which survived in the foundation myth of the Czechoslovak Republic and, indeed, in Marxist-Leninist historiography, was that with 1620 the Czech language and its literature became ever more speedily degenerate. In spite of the efforts of a few literary historians in the 1930s and 1940s, it was not until the late 1960s that it began to be recognized that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constituted a period in which writers began to knock down the barriers erected against literary imagination by tedious Protestant didacticism. Today it is more or less generally recognized that the only historically verifiable “revival” of Czech verse took place during the Counter-Reformation, and that the first great Czech poet of the nineteenth century was to a considerable extent inspired by the Baroque. The development of this view on Czech literary history was hindered by a view developed in the 1860s by the feminist novelist Karolína Světlá, amongst others, that the true Czech spirit lay in the offspring of Hussitism, the Unitas Fratrum (Bohemian Brethren) from the latter half of the fifteenth century. This view of Czech history was turned into a view on literary history by Jireček in his handbook of Old and Middle Czech literature, where any writer who was a member of the Unitas had “Br[other]” before his/her name. Because T. G. Masaryk made this notion the center of his 1890s political philosophy of Czech history, the notion, however vigorously attacked by some prominent intellectuals, stuck more or less fast until World War II. It was an attractive notion to those who believed in Baroque degeneration, for it allowed Czechs in exile (particularly Comenius and the historian Stránský) to be lonely literary stars shining down on the wretched, parched literary earth at home. After the 1886-87 Battle of the Manuscripts was over, Czech literary history had to be rewritten. Only one major literary historian persisted in asserting that the RK was genuine. That was Václav Flajšhans in his Písemnictví české slovem I obrazem od nejdávnějších dob až po naše časy (1901). Between the wars, however, Flajšhans was a chief anti-Manuscripteer when the extreme right, and eventually the Fascists, took up the Manuscript cause. After the Great War, the eminent occultist and dull poet Emanuel Lešehrad used RZ to prove that the Czechs had had secret societies from the very earliest times (13). What the manuscripts and their place in nineteenth-century works of literary history actually demonstrated practically, if not morally, was that it did not matter much if one based a literary history on a false starting point. The Manuscripts were an element in a national ideology, an element that could be easily dispensed with when it had served its apparently useful purpose of giving self-confidence first to an elite consisting of littérateurs and then to broad sections of the Czech-speaking population of the Bohemian Lands. The Manuscripts continued to be published and translated into Modern Czech throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, the views of the early literary historians still have an impact, even though the editors and translators are convinced the works are forgeries. The RK and RZ with their pre-romantic and romantic turns of phrase and their thoroughly Revivalist version of conventional Czech misoteutonism are still normally considered great verse. To a credulous early nineteenth-century reader that was certainly true, since here were early and late medieval poems containing the essential features of the ideolo-

Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History, National Revival, and the Forged Manuscripts 377 gy of their own time, expressed largely in the imagery of their time. Today, even if the reader does not recognize the Czech medieval, Russian, and Serbian sources for the poems, they still read like a somewhat amateur hodgepodge. To be sure, then, nineteenth-century Czech literary historians produced a false curriculum vitae for the nation, but in the end that had as little practical impact as stating that poet X died of consumption instead of tuberculosis or emphysema.

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Overcoming Czech and Hungarian Perspectives in Writing Slovak Literary Histories Dagmar Roberts Writing Slovak literary histories is full of pitfalls. Some of them are related to the general problems of small countries, others to the Slovak language and to the specifics of Slovak history, culture, and literature, which are saturated with politics and ideology. One central problem is that the state of Slovakia was born only in 1993 (discounting the Slovak Republic of 1939–1945, which was a Nazi-puppet). Slovak history is, therefore, linked to the Hungarian, Austrian, and AustroHungarian States, as well as to the Czechoslovak Republic. Can the Slavic Greater Moravia of the ninth century serve as a starting point and a guarantor of continuity in Slovak history? Are writers from “Upper Hungary,” say in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, Slovak? Should not one rather start with the rise of modern nations in the period of national awakening? Can writings in Latin, Hungarian, or German be included in Slovak literary history if the author came from what is present-day Slovakia? What is the place of the Czech linguistic tradition, if Czech served as the Slovak literary language until Anton Bernolák and after him Ľudovít Štúr produced the first codifications of standard Slovak in 1787 and 1843, respectively? Should the Czech writings of Slovak authors be included in Czech or in Slovak literature — or both? How should one respond to those literary historians of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries adhered to the concept of a single Czechoslovak literature? How did the theory of a single Czech/Czechoslovak literature (or language or nation) affect the concept of national literary history? Is there, as Jaroslav Vlček had asked, a “literature in Slovakia” that is different from “Slovak literature”? A further problem is periodization. Romanticism is usually seen as the founding period of Slovak literature, whereas Realism is assumed to be missing. Some scholars find the boundaries between Slovak Baroque, Classicism, and other older periods unclear. We do not understand as yet how twentieth-century Slovak literature absorbed major European trends, and we cannot explain why Slovak literary historiography tended to oscillate between positivistic and subjective interpretations. Today, literary studies are encumbered by the inaccessibility of many sources, by works that are out of print, by poor editing, and by a lack of discussion. It is with these questions in mind that we turn to the following history of Slovak literary historiography.

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Pál Wallaszky/Pavel Valaský (see also p. 346 above and p. 385 below ) was the first to put together a collection of bio- and bibliographical information on literary authors publishing in Hungary. His Conspectus reipublicae litterariae in Hungaria, published in 1785 in Pozsony/Bratislava and Leipzig, included literatures in all languages then within the borders of Hungary but listed no Slovak publications. Pursuing an alternative conception, Bohuslav Tablic published between 1806 and 1812 a four-part record of 77 Czechoslovak (sic!) writers in Hungary since the sixteenth century. Like Wallaszky, he included in the older sense of “literature” not only writers of fiction, poetry, and drama, but also authors of all sorts of non-fiction prose. Proceeding chronologically, he paid attention to the political, military, and economic conditions, and emphasized the importance of folk tradition in literary history. Tablic included short biographies, brief overviews of literary works, as well as original and translated poems (mostly from English and German). Tablic also published the first anthology of Slovak literature, the two-volume Slovenští veršovci (Slovak Poets; 1805– 1809), which included poems as well as anecdotes, tales, epistles, and odes. Pavol Jozef Šafárik (Pavel Josef Šafařík in Czech) ascribed an independent status to Slovak language and literature in some of his works, but in others, where he adopted a broader concept of Slavdom, he regarded them as belonging to a Czechoslovak culture. In an 1829 encyclopedia essay, for instance, he mentioned only Czech literature and spoke of a common Czech and Slovak literary language. Czech literature included, in his view, Slovaks writing in “Slovacized” Czech, even Anton Bernolák, who actually tried to establish an independent Slovak orthography. In his Geschichte der Slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten (History of the Slavic Language and Literature in All Dialects; 1826), Šafárik did recognize that the Slovak language had specific features, and he generally approved Bernolák’s codification of it. Using linguistic criteria, Šafárik discussed Slavic literatures separately here, although he regarded them as parts of a single entity. The introduction characterized the Slavs historically, philologically, and ethnographically. The main text treated the various South-Eastern and North-Western Slav languages and literatures, giving for every one of them historical and ethnographical information, a description of the language, and a sketch of their literary history. Šafárik’s Geschichte gave most attention to the Russian, Czech, and Polish literatures. The Slovaks he regarded as a unit within the North-Western Slavic group, with a separate language. He mentioned in his introduction Greater Moravia and emphasized that Upper Hungary was colonized by the Hussites in the fifteenth century. Šafárik’s discussion of Slovak literature was largely based on Tablic, though it included books published as late as 1825. Touching on the linguistic situation of Greater Moravia, he noted a subsequent “silence” that lasted until the fifteenth century, and emphasized the importance of the Czech language for the development of Slovak culture. He regretted that no songs survived from the fifteenth century to prove that Slovak literature existed already then. As a result, Šafárik’s Slovak literary history starts with the emergence of writers from the nobility in the later eighteenth century, and continues with the cultural efforts of Bernolák’s Catholic generation and the founding of an Institute of Czechoslovak language and literature at the Protestant lyceum of Bratislava in 1803. Šafárik continued to regard Slovak as a dialect of Czech in Slovanský národopis (Slavic Ethnology; 1842); he counted as Czechoslovak those writers who wrote in Czech or Czechoslovak. Šafárik’s interest in ethnography led him to collect and publish Písně světské lidu slovenského v Uhřích (Secular Songs of Slovak Folk in Hungary) in 1823.

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Počátkowé Českého básnjctvj obwzlásstĕ prozodye (The Beginnings of Czech Poetry, Especially of Prosody; 1818), a collaboration of the young Šafárik with František Palacký, mistakenly adopted quantitative verse and rejected the accented prosody that Dobrovský promoted. Šafárik also collaborated with Palacký in Die ältesten Denkmäler der Böhmischen Sprache (The Oldest Monuments of the Czech Language; 1840), which claimed to prove scientifically that The Judgment of Libuše and some other “discovered” old manuscripts were genuine. Here too, Dobrovský differed, for he wrote already on March 24, 1823 to Josef Linda that Libuše was a prank of people driven by excessive patriotism. Indeed, Šafárik and Palacký also had doubts in the early 1820s, but by the mid 1830s Palacký shifted his view, and in Die ältesten Denkmäler he seemed to have forced his view on Šafárik, who bitterly complained about this later (Otáhal 254–57). Jozef Miloslav Hurban was the first to publish articles on Slovak literary life in Štúr’s Slovaklanguage magazine Slovensko (1846–52). Following the Romantics, Hurban considered literature an expression of the national spirit, and he claimed that Slovak literature was unique because of the region and its people. Literature was a “language of language,” yet based on the language that people speak. Hurban’s historical overview abandoned the mere enumeration of facts. Instead, he used retrospective narrations and critical comments to show how the national spirit moved towards its highest manifestation in the romantic movement. Applying Hegelian as well as Herderian concepts of history, he believed that the Slavs, not the Germans, would bring mankind to perfection. Literary development was, for him, the manifestation of a national self-consciousness that appeared first in the Slovak authors of the seventeenth century. Ranking writers according to the intensity of their nationalism, he praised the followers of Bernolák and Štúr. Thus literature was to serve a national ideology, its task was to instill a Slovak consciousness in those lacking it. Jaroslav Vlček, the author of the first great modern histories of Slovak literature, was destined already by family background to move between Czech and Slovak perspectives, for his mother was Slovak and his father a Czech professor. In his Czech work, Literatura na Slovensku, její vznik, rozvoj, význam a úspěchy (Literature in Slovakia: Its Origin, Development, Importance, and Achievements; 1881), he gave Slovak literature a separate status though he did not regard Slovak as suitable for science. His Dejiny literatúry slovenskej (History of Slovak Literature), published nine years later, was an expanded, more detailed, and systematic treatment of the same subject, this time written in Slovak. Meanwhile, he changed his views on the status of Slovak literature and its relation to Czech. His first survey of Czech literature (1885), as well as his later, full-blown versions of it, included Bernolák and his generation, for Vlček considered them part of a common Czechoslovak literature, even if they had already been working towards a separate Slovak literary language. According to Tomáš Horváth, Vlček stressed the unity of Czech and Slovak literature to counteract Štúr’s schism; Czech and Slovak were in his eyes linked by a synecdoche (4). Vlček was interested in aesthetics and focused on the history of both forms and ideas, showing how ideas were reflected in literature. He linked literature to philosophy and social history, but he was also interested in the development of literary language. In order to be “scientific”, systematic, and objective, Vlček frequently quoted or paraphrased, though he usually introduced his quotations with emphatic comments. His ambition was to replace the romantic literary histories, to move, so to speak, from Hegel to Darwin. Of the two sections in Vlček’s Literatura na Slovensku, the treatment of Štúr’s era (1845– 80) is about ten times as long as that of Bernolák’s. Vlček did not share Hurban’s veneration of

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Romanticism and he omitted here all works written in Czech, including those of Jan Kollár and Šafárik. But in his Dejiny literatúry slovenskej, he reconsidered his views on Classicism, Romanticism, and particular authors and works. Vlček now included in his Slovak literary history Slovak writers who wrote in Czech. As Peter Zajac has pointed out in his article on Vlček, the historian was divided between the study of literary forms and a literary approach to social life (“Literatúra na Slovensku” 539). He tried his best to delimit the Slovak literary tradition by focusing on the absence of a state and by incorporating it into a broader historical perspective, but eventually he included Old Church Slavonic literature, as well as Latin, German, and Hungarian poetry written by authors coming from “upper Hungary.” The tensions in Vlček’s histories between Slovak and Czechoslovak approaches appear also in the Slovak literary histories written in Hungarian, though they portray them from a different ideological angle for a Hungarian-speaking audience. Three such histories may be mentioned: (1) the one in Imre Gáspár’s Hazánk tót népe (A tót nép, a tót költészet) (The Slovaks of Our Fatherland: Slovak People, Slovak Literature; 1879); (2) Samu Czambel’s short “A tót nyelv és irodalom” (Slovak Language and Literature), a contribution to the mentioned monumental and quasiofficial Az Osztrák-magyar Monarchia irásban és képben (The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Text and Image; 1899; see p. 353 above); and (3) Jozef Škultéty’s “A tót irodalom története” (History of Slovak Literature), a contribution to Gusztáv Heinrich’s Egyetemes irodalomtörténet (Universal History of Literature; 1911). Gáspár, a poet, and, as he claims, a close friend of the Slovak poet Andrej Sládkovič, wrote his book after the Hungarian authorities closed down the Matica slovenská and the journal Slovenské pohl’ady in 1875. He approved of these measures for he thought that they had become organs of agitation, but he pleaded for reinstalling them under Hungarian supervision and a “reliable” leadership to cut to the quick of pan-Slavism (14). Writing with a sense of Hungarian cultural and political superiority, Gáspár patronizingly remarked that the Slovaks had no history of their own (77), their legends did not originate in a national history, and their hero Jánosík was a borrowed figure (24–25). This allowed sympathy for his harmless Slovaks: “I love these loyal and tame people. The Slovak does not understand the language of revolution, we should never be afraid of him, we can count on him in good times and bad times. The Slovaks are a poetic nation with flutes, songs, mountains, and valleys” (41). Still, Gáspár gave ample attention to Jan Kollár’s angry poetry and he includes him in his anthology. The fear of pan-Slavism seems to inform also Czambel’s attempt to drive a wedge between Slovaks and Czechs. It had been, he claimed, a scholarly mistake and a popular misconception to regard the Slovak language and literature as subcategories of the Czech ones. Czambel even accused the Austrian government of aiding pan-Slavism, by supporting Kollár and the Czech language (436) — which in a sense it did, for in 1848 Vienna saw Hungary as the main enemy. The Hussite invasion of Upper Hungary was, according to Czambel, the main reason why Slovak history and literature had been interpreted from a Czech angle. Martin Hattala’s Štúrist Slovak grammars from the 1850s and 60s were for him the watershed, though he claimed that his own linguistic work tried to bring the Slovak language still closer to the language of the people. Accordingly, Czambel distinguished three periods in Slovak literary history: (1) the Czech/Slovak period starting around 1440 (possibly a century earlier); (2) a transition that began with Bernolák and culminated in the poetry of Ján Hollý; and, (3) a new period that started with the Bratislava

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conference of 1851. Sládkovič and Ján Botto were its main poets; Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Vlček its leading historians. Škultéty agreed with Czambel that the Czech influence on the Slovaks started with the Hussite invasion and expansion, but he regarded Kollár’s Slávy dcera as the culmination and end of Czech-Slovak language and literature. He regarded Ján Hollý as the founder of a new, genuinely Slovak literature: his epic Svatopluk (1833) about defeating the Germanic tribes, comparable to Mihály Vörösmarty’s Zalán futása and one of the greatest nation-founding works in the first half of the nineteenth century (625–26), had awakened the Slovaks and the Slavs. Hollý was the first to draw artistically the Slovak character, the Slovak nation, and Slovak history, expressing them with a Slovak imagination (627). The purest expression of the Slovak spirit was to be found, according to Škultéty, in the Slovak verses of Pavel Hviezdoslav (641–42). Slovak literature, although small, did not merely mirror greater literatures (641), for it was almost exclusively animated by the idea of the nation (642). Škultéty changed his view on Slovak nationalism after the birth of the Czechoslovak nation in 1918, for both his Stodvadsaťpäť rokov zo slovenského života (Hundred and Twenty-five Years of Slovak Life; 1920) and his Sketches from Slovak History (1930) assumed a Hungarian nationalist position. The former responded to the Slovak politician Milan Hodža, who believed in a unified Czechoslovakia and criticized Štúr’s “schism” of 1843 as a utilitarian and, possibly, pro-Hungarian political move. Sketches from Slovak History, written for American readers, was especially biased from a Hungarian point of view. The modernist generation at the turn of the century wrote articles and shorter essays on aesthetics and poetics rather than literary histories. But there was also František Votruba’s “Z novšej literatúry” (About the New Literature; 1909), which portrayed literature’s new sense of social function, and the new introversion in works by Janko Jesenský, Jozef Gregor Tajovský, and Ivan Krasko. Jesenský exemplifies best the new Slovak literary attitude during World War I. He was accused of treason and jailed for his alleged pan-Slavism at the outbreak of the war but was released and sent to the eastern front in 1915. He deserted in July of that year, and, after a short period as a prisoner-of-war, he became involved in establishing Czechoslovak legions in Russia (see ECE 1: 178). Early 1918 he was elected to the Czechoslovak National Council in exile, and it was in this capacity that he published in 1918 an outline of Slovak literary history for Slovaks and Czechs in Russia, which legitimized the idea of Czechoslovakia by focusing on the Czech-Slovak relations. As an integrationist, Jesenský held subsequently high positions in the Czechoslovak administration of the interwar years and he opposed the puppet Slovak Republic of 1939–45. Supporters of a unified Czechoslovakia considered the Slovak language as a branch of the Czech (or Czechoslovak) one. This was the case with one of the first surveys of Slovak literature after 1918, Pavel Bujnák’s Stručné dejiny literatúry československej po Štúra (A Brief History of Czechoslovak Literature until Štúr; 1923). Heavily influenced by Vlček, it distinguished between an early period of “literature in Slovakia” (until 1780) and a National Slovak Literature (1780 until mid-nineteenth century), dividing the rather short second period into three phases: (1) Enlightenment and shift towards the national idea, (2) Romanticism, or the flourishing of Slavic and Slovak ideas, and (3) Young Slovakia, or the Czechoslovak idea (Stručné dejiny 7). When calls for Slovak autonomy became louder in the 1930s, the status of the Slovak language, nation, and national literature became, once more, contested. Motivated by ideological and political

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considerations, Štefan Krčméry, Andrej Mráz, the Pole Władysław Bobek and others explored the distinguishing features of Slovak culture and concluded that Slovak literature was autonomous. Krčméry, a writer, critic, editor of the renewed Slovenské pohľady, and a secretary of the Matica slovenská, traced the unique features of Slovak culture in Prehľad dejín slovenskej literatúry a vzdelanosti (A Survey of Slovak Literary History and Education; 1920). His major history from the 1930s, published partially in 1943 and in its entirety only posthumously, in 1976, interpreted literature within philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic contexts. Influenced by Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce, Krčméry rejected Positivism and adopted an intuitionist position. Writing a literary history was for him a creative act at the juncture of the arts and the sciences that tried to grasp the rhythm of words, poets, and centuries from within (Dejiny 2: 407). Krčméry regarded Slovak literature as the aesthetic form of Slovak existence. He studied more thoroughly and systematically the older periods, and regarded twentieth-century literature a kind of appendix. Focusing on poetry as the expression of the national spirit, Krčméry had a lyrical concept of Slovak literature (“Povaha” 411). Writing from a nationalistic and subjective perspective, Krčméry, described the passing of generations and movements, offered brief portraits of authors, and interpreted major works. Andrej Sládkovič’s Marína was for him an “apotheosis of beauty” that mirrored “eternity in finitude, eternity in the moment” (Dejiny 2: 94) By fusing the poet’s heart with the universe, the poem was a call for life, and an expression of belief in God — an answer to Vlček, who had ironically compared Marína to a botanical garden and found Sládkovič a boring mystic (Slovensku 121). Bobek, a professor in Cracow, published three books on Slovak language, literature, and culture in the late 1930s. As he wrote in the foreword to Náčrt dejín slovenskej kultúry (Outline of the History of Slovak Culture; 1938), he wanted to show that the Slovaks had an independent history and culture. Slovak literature had no realist phase, for Romanticism and Realism, just as Baroque and Classicism, shaded into each other. Intent on showing the patriotism, nationalism, and spiritualism of Slovak literature, Bobek overemphasized its Slovakness, although he acknowledged that Slovak culture was a “buffer zone” exposed to all major European currents. Mráz, professor in Bratislava, started with a history of Slovak literature in German (1943), which was to show his small nation’s contribution to world literature. Slovak literature “embodied the nation’s penchant (Neigung) for an independent life, yet also mirrored the positive contributions that the Slovaks were making to the cultural community of the nations” (Literatur 8). According to Mráz, the literature of small nations was more embedded in life and was subject to more influences. His portrayal had a Germanic slant. Regarding Kollár, for instance, he foregrounded his German connections: his knowledge of Herder; his studies in Jena; his participation at the Wartburg festivity of the German Burschenschaft movement; his marriage to Friederika Schmidt; his contact with Goethe; and his final work in Vienna. He ignored Kollár’s concept of Slavic reciprocity. Mráz adjusted to the new political situation in 1945 with a lecture on Slavic reciprocity (Dnešný stav slovanskej vzájomnosti u Slovákov). His Dejiny slovenskej literatúry (History of Slovak Literature), published immediately after the Communist coup d’état in 1948, was later interpreted as a step towards a Marxist perspective. Mráz revised his opinion on proletarian, exiled, and silenced authors; he now considered Kollár as both a Slovak and a Czech poet; he discussed the notion of Slavic reciprocity, and disapproved of Štúr’s codification of the Slovak language. Aiming to go further than Vlček, Mráz gave a political history of Slovakia and a history of Slovak

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literary relations with other literatures. However, his view of the Czech-Slovak relations remained ambiguous, and he was heavily criticized for mixing questions of genre with political, social, cultural, and language issues. Albert Pražák, a Czech professor (reputedly a student of Vlček) who taught at Bratislava University and then at the Charles University of Prague, wrote the first part of his Dějiny slovenské literatury (History of Slovak Literature; 1950) in Czech in the 1940s. He linked the Slovaks to the Czechs rather than the Hungarians (10), and he regarded Czech history and literary history as the framework for Slovak culture. His planned division followed the shifts in the Czech-Slovak relations: his frame was Czech for the literature until the end of the eighteenth century, Czech and Slovak until 1867, Slovak until 1918, Czechoslovak between 1918 and 1939, Slovak during 1939–45, and quasi Slovak after 1945. After the Communist takeover, literary histories written in Slovakia had to be based on the Marxist-Leninist ideology. As in all “socialist” countries, an official, academic literary history, the five-volume Dejiny slovenskej literatúry (History of Slovak Literature) was launched in 1952 and published during the next decades. More useful was Oskár Čepan’s 1967 article on the postwar period, which divided the two decades into four stages, culminating with the new impulses coming from Structuralism, Existentialism, and the revival of the Avant-garde in the 1960s. Ján Béder’s history (1963), intended for university students, towed the Marxist line. The late 1960s gave rise to comparative studies, discussions on methodological pluralism, and theories of translation. Starting from structuralist theory and historical poetics, Dionýz Ďurišin wrote outlines of comparative literary histories in Slovakia (1979) and in the socialist countries (1986). Non-Marxist literary histories could be published only abroad after 1948. They include František Vnuk’s account of post-1948 Slovak literature, characteristically titled Sedemnásť neúrodných rokov (Seventeen Barren Years; 1965), and Jozef Kirschbaum’s Slovak Language and Literature (1975). In a chapter entitled “Slovak Literary History in Marxist and Western Interpretations,” the latter distinguished between three approaches to Slovak literary history: “nationalist” ones, Czechoslovak ones, and Marxist ones, written by collectives that included younger and “flexible” older scholars (43). The Marxist interpretations revalorized the national awakening and were closer to the nationalist approaches than to the Czechoslovak ones. Kirschbaum discussed periodization, the older epochs, and the question of including literatures in non-Slovak languages. Concerning Western studies of Slovak literary history, he argued that Western Slavists relied too much on Czech publications. He made another important contribution by including literature written under the Soviet regime, as well as literature, literary history, and criticism produced by émigrés in the diaspora. Unfortunately, Vnuk and Kirschbaum treated the Slovak State (1939–45), its president Jozef Tiso, and the fate of the Slovak Jews within a restorative, nationalistic, and antiSemitic agenda (Mešťan, 80, 85–86, 155, 188). Stanislav Šmatlák’s two-volume Dejiny slovenskej literatúry (History of Slovak Literature; 1988) originally included recent works, but the new edition of 1999 stops with 1945 and revises the Marxist-Leninist perspective only with respect to the first half of the twentieth century. After 1989, Slovak literary historians tried to rectify earlier biases by including exiled and formerly prohibited authors like Vladimír Petrík and Peter Cabadaj, but they focused on individual texts and did not reshape the national canon. Vladimír Mečiar’s regime (1993–98) transferred the traditional literary periodical, Slovenské pohľady, to the Matica slovenská in 1993 and unsuccessfully tried

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to do the same with the Historical Institute and the Institute of Slovak Literature at the Slovak Academy. The Literárne a informačné centrum, established to promote abroad the culture of independent Slovakia, published rather traditional Slovak literary histories in English and German by Petrík et al. The new, two-volume history of Slovak literature in the Russian language, edited by Alla Maškova and published in Moscow (1997–2003), contains information on formerly prohibited and exiled authors. The most recent Slovak literary studies, a handbook edited in 1998 by Viera Žemberová and a two-volume “panorama” of Slovak literature by Ladislav Čúzy et al. (2004–2005), address students and the general public; they offer new interpretations of individual works but no new approaches to Slovak literary history as a whole. Viliam Marčok and his contributors published in 2004 a sequel to Šmatlák’s project covering the period 1945–2000, which takes a “reconstructive and restorative approach” (Dejiny 10), presenting “unbiased facts” to reconstruct the processes of destruction and restore plurality (10–11). Basic historical research concentrates now on the literary periods and movements. Milan Hamada’s Zrod novodobej slovenskej kultúry (The Rise of Modern Slovak Culture; 1995) goes beyond literary history proper, covering the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the shift from Baroque to Classicism. Hamada pays attention to the development of ideas, institutions, and discusses major authors and their works in order to show the establishment of modern Slovak culture. The three-volume anthology Čítame slovenskú literatúru (We Read Slovak Literature; 1997–98) covers the second half of the twentieth century and includes authors, essays, and official proclamations, as well as silenced, dissenting, and samizdat authors. New histories of Slovak literature are slow to appear, due to general methodological problems as well as specific Slovak ones concerning periods and movements. As Peter Zajac notes, Slovak literary studies have neither settled old scores, nor created viable perspectives for the future (“O literárnovednej” 72–73).

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The Narrowing Scope of Hungarian Literary Histories John Neubauer János Horváth, the leading academic literary historian in Hungary during the first half of the twentieth century, sketched in 1908 the first history of Hungarian literary histories by observing that the Hungarian “literary mind” gradually “narrowed”: the first Hungarian literary histories, which included all kinds of discourses written in all kinds of languages, gradually gave way to histories that focused on literature proper written in the Hungarian language (fejlődéstörténete 46–48). The narrowing involved moving from “written in Hungary,” to “written in the Hungarian language,” to literature with “a national content,” and finally to “artistic works” (57). Horváth expanded this early sketch into a literary history of his own, but much of the manuscript remained unpublished until 1976. We shall trace this “narrowing” concept of Hungarian literature, without, however, ascribing to it the positive value that Horváth seems to attribute to it.

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Pál Wallaszky’s mentioned Conspectus (1785), the first rudimentary Hungarian literary history, is universal (egyetemes) because it recognizes only political borders (Horváth 46, 57) and includes all kinds of texts written in Hungary in any language. “Literature” is still understood here in a pre-romantic sense as a comprehensive term that covers all forms of writing, whereas “Hungarian” is understood topographically and linguistically. For Wallaszky, this topographical domain includes Croatia, Transylvania, and Dalmatia (XIII; Horváth 159). By 1808, during the early phase of the Hungarian revival, Sámuel Pápay included in his still rudimentary history only texts written in the Hungarian language. He recognized, however, a “universal,” i.e., multilingual Hungarian literature. Ferenc Toldy The first genuine literary historian in Hungary petitioned to have his name be changed from the German Schedel to the Hungarian Toldy at age forty-one, in 1846, during the last phase of the Hungarian revival. The German handbook of Hungarian literature he co-edited in 1828 (already under the name Toldy) outlined his later notions of literary history, but he was at that time a leading critic of the Hungarian romantic movement rather than a historian. He became the Secretary of the Hungarian Academy in 1835 (a post he held until 1861) and he launched with József Bajza and Mihály Vörösmarty the journal Athenaeum (1837–43). Toldy rejected the radicalism of the 1848–49 revolution, and moved from criticism to literary history after its defeat. Toldy’s first, incomplete Hungarian literary history, A magyar nemzeti irodalom története (1851), accepted Wallaszky’s and Pápay’s categories, but the expression “Hungarian national” in the title announces already that this literary history is Hungarian in a restricted sense. Toldy’s aim was to show the “continuity of the national spirit in language and literature,” though he still insisted that histories of literature had to refer also to the religious, cultural, and scientific conditions, as well as to the “foreign” influences” — by which he meant the non-Hungarian literary life within the national borders. Toldy included in his national history some “side glances at the fatherland’s general literature” but by now he definitely subordinated the inter-ethnic notion of a national literature to a national idea and to the aim to strengthen the nation’s self-consciousness (nemzeti irodalom 18). In this sense Horváth (fejlődéstörténete 47) is right: the notion of a “universal” Hungarian literary history became an empty concept for Toldy. In 1854, he published his university lectures on the history of Hungarian literature (A magyar költészet története); he became professor of Hungarian language and literature in Budapest in 1861. His two-volume textbook history, A magyar nemzeti irodalom története a legrégebbi időktől a jelenkorig rövid előadásban (1864–65) remained for several decades the standard high school text. From the 1867 Compromise to the Millennium In the 1860s, 70s, and 80s, the leading figure of literary life in Hungary was Pál Gyulai. A member of the circle around the writers János Arany and Zsigmond Kemény in the early 1860s, and a creative writer himself, he assumed in 1876 Toldy’s chair at the University of Budapest and

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became in 1879 President of the Kisfaludy Társaság. As a critic he favored the populist (népies) tradition of Petőfi and Arany (though he was critical of the Petőfi epigones) and was led by the “folk-nation” (nép-nemzet) concept that Hungarian literature could become European only if its national character was populist. He wrote no comprehensive literary histories and by the end of the century he lost touch with the newly emerging literary trends, though his populist preferences found many followers. Zsigmond Bodnár, a lonely and gradually embittered philosophical historian was among the few consistent opponents of Populism. His lengthy and remarkable introduction to the first volume of his Hungarian literary history (1891) distinguishes alternating reactionary and progressive periods. Periods of reaction favor everything that advances national life. They lead to a revival of the national language and the national customs, but suppress what is foreign: authority, discipline and order prevent us from embracing what is foreign, we close ourselves against it; we hate other customs and morals, and the result is anti-Semitism; such was the case in the fifteenth and seventeenth, and in the beginning and the second half of the nineteenth centuries. […] During times of reaction we make fun of, we mock at, we suppress the minorities; though it is equally true that in such times they hate us, too. (XXXVII) Today we live the days of reaction, the national idea is flooding the world, dictatorially ruling everywhere […] the national idea leads our society, political life, and law making; this is the idea that turns Russian Jews homeless. (XLII)

Bodnár prophetically diagnosed that the world was getting “closer and closer to the time when the national spirit will unleash upon the world a terrible war” (XLIII), but he saw social advantages in national cohesion: nationalism could, for a while, produce great economic and cultural progress. Reaction and its nationalism were, in his view, necessary means to protect and maintain the race against the disruptive forces of individualism and radical innovation: “The national idea, with its narrow-minded emotions and thinking, is the basis of our survival” (XLV). Hence the progressive and evolutionist Bodnár paradoxically accepted the chauvinism he found reactionary. The quasi-official literary historian of the 1896 celebrations of Hungary’s millennial existence was, of course, not Bodnár but Zsolt Beöthy, who published that year a collaborative twovolume history, as well as his own “little mirror” of Hungarian literary history. Beöthy started as a novelist and short story writer, subsequently published a high-school textbook on Hungarian literary history (1877–78) and a history of older Hungarian narratives (1885–87) — both landmarks testifying to his erudition and good taste. But in the histories he wrote for 1896 and later, Beöthy subordinated his literary sensitivity to a national-populist rhetoric. He gave greater attention than his predecessors to aesthetic values, but these were determined by a national ideology: he wanted to convey the “spiritual content, life, and operation of the Hungarian race” and to engender thereby “an appropriate national consciousness” (nemzeti irodalom 3). A “universal,” i.e., multi-lingual history of Hungarian literature was no longer possible. Like the general national self-celebration, Beöthy was blind to the ethnic drive towards self-determination that ultimately ruined the Monarchy and the kingdom of Hungary.

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Beöthy’s “little mirror” starts with an emblem of nationhood rather than a theoretical reflection: a lone Hungarian horseman on the Volga steppes guards against the ever-present enemies of his community: “He always had to depend on fighting, and since he owed almost everything to his daring and skill, the personal daring, directness, and combat readiness that fighting on the planes presupposed became and remained to this very day his personal traits and thus his ideal” (kis-tükre 3). The personal courage and fighting spirit of this proto-Hungarian had served his community: the external and inner life of the Hungarians was and is imbued with a commitment to the common welfare and national sentiment. Poetry, art, and science manifest these attitudes. Hungarian literature, in particular, was not just an expression of a patriotic spirit; it was the force that kept the national spirit alive in times of crisis (kis-tükre 182). Though Beöthy had a broad knowledge of foreign literature, his regard for general or comparative literature was low: world literature helped identify the impulses Hungarian literature had received from abroad, but only in order to compare the national contributions to the “international spiritual competition” (nemzeti irodalom 3). The Hungarians adopted ideas and forms from the more advanced West but adapted them to fit their national interest (kis-tükre 5). What role, if any, remained in this nationalist conception of Hungarian culture for those minorities that still had a marginal role in Toldy’s Hungary? Beöthy was aware that the Hungary of his time was by no means homogeneous, and that a considerable part of its population would not recognize in his Volga horseman a founding father. He criticized Gobineau’s theory that race was based on biology, by arguing that history, culture, and ethics determined a nation’s spiritual disposition. Beöthy’s solution for multiethnicity was, therefore, assimilation, based on the conviction that the Hungarian spiritual values were superior to those of the minorities: “the nation was formed through the unification of different races and grew by means of a continuous assimilation of foreign elements” (kis-tükre 5). Integration could only take place under the hegemony of Hungarian martial traits and ideals. The peaceful Ugric hunters and fishermen, the Italian and German immigrants, the Turks, the Cumanians, the Bulgarians, and all the others “were driven into the service of national unity”: the Hungarian “soil,” the Hungarian “race and its institutions,” and Hungary’s history sustained “the original Hungarian soul” (kis-tükre 6). Indeed, the foreigners had, in his view, adopted the Hungarian language and spirit: “We are witnessing a wondrous phenomenon: we hardly find another European nation that so intensively and almost continuously mixes most diverse ethnic elements; yet, in spite of all this, there is hardly another one that preserved so faithfully and unmistakably the spiritual type of the founding race” (kis-tükre 7). Thus Bodnár’s and Beöthy’s histories of Hungarian literature assumed that Hungarian culture was hegemonic. Bodnár, at least, understood that, although a national unity under Hungarian hegemony could temporarily avert internal chaos, it would most likely lead to an even more disastrous war. The less perceptive Beöthy became more popular and the “little mirror” underwent ten revised and enlarged editions within eleven years. Indeed, he became the leading conservative authority on literature during the first two decades of the twentieth century, even though he, too, gradually lost touch with the new literature that sought new inspiration from the West. Frigyes Riedl, who succeeded Gyulai in 1905, contributed to the 1896 celebrations the revised version of A magyar irodalom főirányai (Main Currents of Hungarian Literature), which was mainly a study of the Renaissance. In contrast to Beöthy, Riedl was a Europeanist who held that no literature develops in isolation: “We can secure and develop our independent national part

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against the currents of today’s European culture only in one manner: by learning as much as possible from the cultures abroad” (qtd in Sőtér, története 4: 991). In his unpublished university lectures and in a German study of 1908, Riedl also maintained that Hungarian literature was a nationsustaining force — “The masterpiece of the Hungarian folk was to form and sustain the Hungarian state; poetry becomes a means of sustaining the tribe” (qtd in Sőtér, története 4: 991) — yet he gradually turned against nationalism and chauvinism. As a courageous demystifier, Riedl showed that the Hun-Hungarian legends were not folklore but culled from foreign chronicles and books (hunmondák 20), and that the allegedly eighteenth-century “kuruc” ballads published by Kálmán Thaly were forgeries (see Riedl, kuruc). The Twentieth Century Horváth, whose outline we have followed, held Gyulai’s and Riedl’s chair between 1923 and 1948. The 1922–23 version of his history expanded but basically followed his 1905 outline, in spite of the vast political changes. This, usually interpreted as showing his consistency, is not unproblematic since it failed to reconsider Hungarian literature’s “universality” after the country’s truncation in 1919. Horváth now admitted the Latin-language literature into Hungarian literary history but continued to ignore the other foreign-language literatures that had been written on historical Hungarian soil. He did not even mention the handful of bilingual poets. Believing that the Hungarian literary mind consistently moved towards a national classicism, he could not muster great enthusiasm for the Modernism of the Nyugat generation. Of the remaining pre-1945 Hungarian literary histories, the biggest one, Jenő Pintér’s eightvolume treatment (1930–41), provides little more than summaries and richly annotated bibliographies. Seeking impartiality and the transmission of pure information, Pintér mainly systematized. Two other, more interesting histories from these decades, by Antal Szerb and Géza Féja, were written from opposing and highly personal angles. The outline of Szerb’s Magyar irodalomtörténet (Hungarian Literary History) won in 1930 a competition announced by the Erdélyi Helikon, a Transylvanian Hungarian cultural institution (see ECE 2: 271 ff). The remarkable guidelines for the competition asked for a study that would speak to all Hungarians, but especially to those who then constituted new minorities abroad; it should show the interaction of Hungarian literature with global currents while indicating its uniqueness; it should treat literature’s intellectual, social, and economic context; and, last but not least, it should rectify those injustices “that the enemies of literature and progress committed against certain writers, works, and movements” (Sándor Makkai’s foreword in Szerb, Magyar 7). The jury of Makkai, Károly Molter, and Mihály Babits unanimously awarded the prize to Szerb, who carried out the assignment with remarkable skill. His “salutation to the readers” justified the undertaking as a means to teach “cultural loyalty” to the Hungarians who now suddenly found themselves living in foreign countries (11), but the book was actually an essay against chauvinism. While most older approaches focused on what was regional, local, and national in order to show Hungarianness as “something originary, absolute, defiantly, and triumphantly Other” (Magyar 19), Szerb, following Riedl, presented Hungarian literature in a European context: “one can find all the phases of the European spirit, all its moves in this relatively small Hungarian literature.

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[…] Hungarian literature is a miniature copy of European literature. The Hungarian values are European values” (20). This meant a “Copernican revolution,” for it refocalized the perspective from introspection to looking out, and brought about a revaluation of poets and works: “not everybody is a great poet whose poems deal with the national idea” (20). To be sure, Szerb placed Hungarian literature in a Western rather than truly European context: apart from occasional references to Russian literature, he systematically ignored the literature from the Eastern part of Europe. Furthermore, as some of his first critics noted already (see Kállay in Wágner 177), he excluded from the national fund “the literature of the small nations living here, which remained without effect from the perspective of the total development, also because their languages were not known” (22). Szerb was more interested to speak to the Hungarian minorities in Transylvania and Slovakia (see his interview in Wágner 199–201) than to the minorities of the former Hungary — though his history received a warm welcome in the Transylvanian Saxon journal Klingsor (Wágner 201). His step towards a more “universal” Hungarian literature was limited: following Horváth, he discussed the Hungarian Latin literature and included the indigenous German literature “when it fulfilled an important cultural mediating service and was indeed part of the national culture” (22). Yet Szerb’s coverage was iconoclastic in another sense: he claimed that Hungarian literature emerged with the conversion of the Hungarians to Christianity in the tenth century. Hence, he boldly claimed, it was as much a “daughter of Latin literature” as French, Italian, and Spanish (31). In contrast to the Germanic people, Hungarians had no pagan culture and gods, for, Szerb argued, Hungary’s ancient legends were mostly written by courtly medieval monks, whereas its pagan gods were invented by dilettante nineteenth-century poets (27). We hear in this rejection of Beöthy’s Hungarian horseman at the Volga Szerb’s response to the rise of racial ideologies in 1930s: all attempts to follow German models in seeking a Hungarian culture on pagan, preChristian grounds were in his view ridiculous and repulsive (30). He went even further: following Horváth, he argued that “folklore, totemic animals, and folk tales” did not belong to the history of the Hungarian spirit, and did not express the “eidos of the folk” (30). Most progressive writers, artists, and intellectuals readily agreed with him in rejecting turulism (the right-wing myth about an allegedly ancient Hungarian eagle), but many folklorists and musicologists, even leftist ones, disagreed with his dismissal of folklore (see, for instance, Bence Szabolcsi and Géza Juhász in Wágner 50–51, 102–107 respectively). Szerb broadened the scope of literature by relying on intellectual as well as social history. The latter, rather than politics, led him to divide literary history into four broad ages: (1) church literature (from the beginning to mid-eighteenth century); (2) literature of the aristocracy (until the early nineteenth century); (3) literature of the nobility (roughly until 1900, subdivided into three periods); and (4) middle-class literature (23). Though Szerb presented literature in its intellectual and social context and sometimes indulged also in psychological speculation, his style was resolutely “literary”: he summarized the biographies in footnotes and concentrated on works rather than authors. His style was light, ironic, witty, and often even irreverent — for which he was accused of “frivolity.” Explicitly rejecting both the academic style and the platitudes of the national rhetoric — witness his devastating account of Beöthy’s rhetoric (410–11) — Szerb wanted to follow not just the essayism of recent German Geistesgeschichte but, even more, the “devout gossiping” of the old humanists, and the haute vulgarisation of the philosophes during the ancien régime, who “lectured to the marchionesses on the mysteries of the starry heavens” (24).

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Szerb’s history became a great success but inevitably provoked many readers. It offended the chauvinists and conservatives, the admirers of the canonized national poets, and the adepts of Gyulai and Beöthy (e.g., Wágner 63–64). Aladár Schöpflin (Wágner 77–81, 140), Ignotus (Wágner 136–40), other Nyugat writers, and most “progressive” intellectuals greeted it warmly, even if they regretted his views on folk poetry and music. The attacks, which immediately accused him even of betrayal (Wágner 76), became savage once the ultra-right wing targeted his History as “unpatriotic” in 1942 (Wágner 203–12), first hinting at, then explicitly publicizing that Szerb was a baptized Jew. After an interpellation in the parliament all copies were finally removed from the school libraries in January 1943 (Wágner 213, 218–22, 227). Censorship prevented protests against this never officially announced decision. Szerb, a fine essayist and novelist, published still a history of world literature in 1941 but was finally killed by the Hungarian Arrow Cross in 1945. Géza Féja’s reaction to Szerb’s history was a curious, lengthy, but not altogether hostile essay (Wágner 147–53) that focused on Szerb’s alleged ignorance of the Hungarian Protestant literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The opening sentence of the review, “Hungarian literature actually starts with the age of Reformation” (147), could be read as a sharpening of Szerb’s “Christian” view of Hungarian culture, were it not, that, as we realize reading Féja’s own Magyar Irodalomszemlélet (Hungarian View of Literature; 1942), in his opinion “the ancient Hungarian soul” liberated itself during the Reformation in order to take possession of Protestantism and fashioning it to its own image, “spilling Oriental-Hungarian elements into Calvinism” (Irodalomszemlélet 30). Indeed, Féja’s angry Irodalomszemlélet targets all those (he mentions Babits, Pintér, and Gyula Szekfű, but not Szerb) who had stressed Hungary’s adoptions from the West at the cost of ignoring, in his view, the originality and genius of the Hungarian soul and its fullest expression, literature (3–6). The unique sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant memoirs, letters, and sermons had not even been properly published (7–8). Accordingly, Féja demanded that the oriental, pre-Christian Hungarian culture be studied (8); that all truly Hungarian texts be published and literary histories give outlines of a specific, authentic, and timeless Hungarian ethics and aesthetic (10); that histories acknowledge the primacy of the folk over creative individuals (11–13); that folk poetry be acknowledged to be fully on the level of “artistic” (or “elite”) poetry (13); and that the Hungarian language be purged from the frightful corruptions introduced mainly by the assimilationists (14). Literary histories must present to the public “those works and sunken ages that manifest the taste, the elements, and the laws of the old Hungarian language” (15). In light of this quasi-racist glorification of an ancient Hungarian culture, it is surprising that Féja should also advocate closer ties to the peoples of Eastern Europe: “The most important task is to do research on the Hungarian-Turkish, the Hungarian-Polish, and the Hungarian South Slav relations, but our cultural policy after 1920 did not educate a new generation for this task; it forgot that we must at least orient ourselves in the region in which we live. It did not realize just how much our fate depends on the fate of Eastern Europe” (8 f). Féja regretted the 1867 Compromise with Austria and its consequences: “Our literary histories and our education did not choose the most salient features of our best known writers, but those that did not clash, perhaps agreed with, the spirit of 1867 (10). That spirit brought about a “narrowing” of the Hungarian mind (16): “Those working in the spirit of the 1867 Compromise have

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made the ancient Hungarians into primitive tribesmen, denying them the rich oral culture they had produced” (66). In Féja’s view, the Hungarian millennial celebrations (including, indeed, Beöthy) “preached assimilation” but induced no revival of interest in ancient Hungarian culture (71). This is where Féja’s chauvinism turned anti-Semitic. Distinguishing between non-Jewish and Jewish assimilationists (71 f), he alleged that the latter (with the exception of Sándor Bródy) were writing “for export,” the international bourgeois market: “the Hungarian Jewish writers provide the most glaring evidence for the failure of the Jewish assimilation; almost all of them became Ahasueruses of the spirit” (73). Even worse: “The solution of the Jewish question, its radical, stern, but humanitarian settling is an existential condition for the health of the Hungarian spirit, for as long as this question is unsettled the unassimilated Jews, with their material means and undeniable talent, will smuggle destructive ammunition into our spiritual life” (86). Literary Histories under the Communist Regime Féja’s reading of Hungarian literary history was rejected, of course, after 1945. During the Cold War, chauvinism was officially dead, though it survived under various guises. Féja’s fate indicates one such guise. Although he lived during the post-war decade in the provinces, he was eventually rehabilitated and he even received the József Attila prize in 1966. The reason: during the early 1930s, Féja was for a while closely associated with Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinsky, a later “progressive” martyr. Indeed, the link between Féja’s populism and socialist/communist ideas is evident in one of the final desiderata that he listed in the text we have discussed: “writers must organize a cultural community with the working classes, i.e., with the peasants, the intellectuals, the industrial workers, and the lower middle class” (87; see also pp. 117–18 above on Populism and the communists). Ideas related to Féja’s envisioned “cultural community” functioned as one of the many ideological guidelines for the six-volume literary history that István Sőtér and his associates at the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy published in 1964–66. The contributors included a number of highly qualified and internationally recognized scholars who, profiting from the ideological thaw in Hungary, were able to escape the worst kind of ideological blunders. To date, these volumes contain the most comprehensive, and often quite judicious and well-written Hungarian literary history. Nevertheless, they are guided by constantly reiterated and unshakable Marxist ideological assumptions that serve as a yardstick for meting out judgment: revolution carries the highest value; writers and critics are regarded most often than not as representatives of their class; middle-class writers are consistently depreciated or ignored. This holds true also for the histories written in English by Tibor Klaniczay and his teams. Loránt Czigány’s Oxford History of Hungarian Literature (1984) is a short but valuable overview produced in the West that includes in the last chapter a section on “Hungarian Literature Abroad.” After 1989, the most urgent task was to rewrite the textbooks used in secondary education. Ernő Kulcsár-Szabó’s hermeneutic approach to Hungarian literature (1995) covers only the 1945– 89 period. Meanwhile various new scholarly projects are on their way. One hopes that these will be free of past distortions, and open to the literature and culture of Hungary’s neighbors.

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The Career of Latecomers: Romanian Literary Histories Monica Spiridon Even a cursory glance at modern Romanian culture reveals a rather belated genesis of Romanian literary history. Over the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, the functions currently assigned to this scholarly genre have been assumed either by artistic manifestoes emphatically announced by literary magazines or by influential anthologies of critical essays. In Romania, the role of literary historians have for a long time been fulfilled by founders of prestigious literary groups, who were also editors-in-chief of a periodical. Thus, one should be aware of a deep gap between literary studies, on the one hand, and the academic curricula and text-books on the other. The historian, and later prominent politician, Mihail Kogălniceanu launched such a program in 1840, in the introduction to the first issue of his magazine, Dacia literară (Literary Dacia). Following the leading romantic ideas that young Romanian intellectuals adopted while studying in Paris, Kogălniceanu pleaded for a Romanian literature written in the vernacular and inspired by local history, and for the revival of oral poetry. To embody this program, the three issues of Dacia literara brought out a wide array of poems, short stories, novellas, travel diaries, essays and other genres. Titu Maiorescu, one of the most prominent Romanian literary critics, founded the cultural society Junimea (Youth; 1863–95), and published in Convorbiri literare (Literary Colloquies; 1867–1944), the literary magazine of the group, a series of studies that polemically reviewed the previous enthusiastic, pioneering, but uncritical age of Romanian literature. He evaluated the romantic literary programs according to aesthetic criteria that he sharply distinguished from ethical or political ones. For several decades, both Convorbiri literare and Junimea conducted a laborious and influential process of canonization. It was Maiorescu himself who discovered, edited, and finally canonized Mihai Eminescu as the national poet (or as the national myth), in the manner of Sándor Petőfi, Adam Mickiewicz, and the other great European romantics. Eugen Lovinescu’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane (1926–29) is actually an anthology of critical essays. But in Istoria civilizaţiei române moderne (History of Modern Romanian Civilization; 1924), Lovinescu scrutinized the belatedness of Romanian culture with respect to West-European standards, and he put forward an original strategy of cultural recuperation called synchronism. He founded the literary magazine Sburătorul (The Winged Spirit) and the homonymous literary group to promote the production of poetry and prose in tune with the main contemporary European tendencies. Lovinescu’s hypothesis concerning the continuous mutation of aesthetic values overtly opposed conceptions of a monologic national literary history, such as had already been attempted in Nicolae Iorga’s history of Romanian literature, the first one to display an over-arching narrative that emphasized the so-called organic and spontaneous growth of Romanian national literature from the soil of local spiritual tradition and folklore. Iorga related this process to two relevant backgrounds: the literature of the Romance languages and the South-East European geo-political area dominated by the perpetuation of the imperial Byzantine model. George Călinescu’s Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent (History of Romanian Literature from its Origins to the Present Times; 1941) wanted to canonize certain outer circles of writing in order to compensate for the lack of a core tradition in Romanian literature.

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Urged by the sense of a compelling necessity, he turned towards the great classics, of Mihai Eminescu, Ion Luca Caragiale, and Ioan Slavici in search for landmarks and formal writing standards. One may even say that Eminescu’s canonical figure of the national poet assumed for Călinescu the role that Shakespeare occupies in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. In Călinescu’s history of Romanian literature the Grand Narrative is the unbroken national literary flow since remote and glorious origins. An entire tradition of obscure forerunners and minor pioneers may come down to a single prestigious successor, which it does not actually produce though imply. If we look from the beginning to the end, from past to future, tradition comes out as latency and — should we say? — as a utopia. Looking from the later to the earlier, from the national poet Eminescu, for instance, the pre-classical writers gain a strictly relational value, not by what they effectively are, but by what they symbolically herald. In the wake of Călinescu, Romanian literary histories followed two opposite paths. On the one side, a long series of mediocre compilations followed his monumental model and eventually ended up producing the official volumes of Istoria literaturii române (1968–73), churned out by the propaganda machine of the Party and sponsored by the Romanian Academy. On the opposite side, Călinescu’s successors continued his asthetic emphasis but leaned towards doubt, suspicion, and deconstruction, stressing the moments of rupture, when major tectonic movements lead to salient renewals of the literary landscape. In this respect, Ion Negoiţescu’s Istoria literaturii române (1991) was a decisive turning point. Negoiţescu followed the stream of Romanian literature uphill, from the recent past to a couple of centuries back, and thus collapsed the elaborate balance between old and new that Călinescu could hardly maintain. Negoiţescu chose West-European canonical landmarks for every literary period: the French and the German Romantics, the programs of the French symbolists, the nineteenth-century urban novel. His system of reference automatically implies a secularization of Călinescu’s terms: the great authors lose their halo, their mythical dimensions, and become plain literary professionals. Negoiţescu praised the national myth, Eminescu, according to the romantic model of his own time; he judged Mihail Sadoveanu, a bookish prose-parable writer, in accordance with the standards of contemporary naturalist fiction; and he weighed Liviu Rebreanu, a creator of unmistakable rural worlds, by the norms of the urban European bourgeois novel. In such a literary history the center of gravity evidently shifted from the creative personality to the universe of the work that expresses a Zeitgeist. Coming after Călinescu, Negoiţescu tried to distil the literary from broadly conceived culture and to ground the canonical choices solidly on the literary text. Like Călinescu, Negoiţescu constructed his history in terms of a persistent tension between tradition and modernity in Romanian culture, albeit from an opposite direction. Contradicted, deconstructed, denied, Călinescu’s teleological dynamics remained operational, even if it was turned upside down. Negoiţescu published parts of his ongoing work between the mid-sixties and mid-seventies in scholarly journals and literary magazines, but his emphatic opposition to dogmatism, as well as his cosmopolitan and integrative vision, had to face strong official rejection and he never managed to get his book past the censors and published by a Romanian editor. Continuously harassed by the ruling power, Negoiţescu finally chose self-exile in Munich in the late seventies. His history could be published only after the political changeover, long after it could have had a genuine influence.

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Between the seventies and the nineties some seeds of a fresh start progressively took roots, heralding a significant shift away from the main stream of Romanian literary histories. Fighting ideological pressure, outstanding scholars like Paul Cornea, Eugen Negrici, Ioana Em. Petrescu, and Mihai Zamfir abruptly switched from traditional national narratives to histories of literary forms. The new beginnings opened the door for the most influential national literary history of the nineties, Nicolae Manolescu’s “critical” history of Romanian literature (1990). Manolescu assumes a rather scholarly pose, displaying his assumptions, norms, and arguments and putting them up for debate from the very beginning. His history is critical because he admits that his choice is one among many equally possible ones and should be justified accordingly. Manolescu’s history focuses on genres, stylistic expressions, types of discourse, images, themes, clichés, and other conventions that are ancillary to individual creation. These inform and shape the individual choices and are always double-edged: one side has to do with creation, and the other with reception. The dynamics of trans-individual elements that Manolescu follows in Romanian literature becomes an effective instrumental factor in molding the canon. If Călinescu emphasized the author and Negoiţescu the work, we now shift to the smallest canonical units identified as the literary forms, offspring of certain conventions widely accepted by the institution of literature over relatively long periods of time. The oppositions that shape Manolescu’s literary history include the written versus oral patterns, the scholarly versus popular conventions, and the sacred versus the secular style. Genres offer the ideal means for studying the ways in which models are imported and adopted to market requirements (production as well as reception models). Manolescu downgrades many writings traditionally overrated in the schools and promotes some others that were previously considered of a lower quality. In all of the mentioned national literary histories, a potentially explosive area remains unexamined: the literature from 1945 to the present. During the communist dictatorships, two alternative systems of values worked parallel and against each other: the so-called socialist canon, imposed by the regime, and the underground literary hierarchy, essentially, but not exclusively, governed by the aesthetic criteria of the outcast intelligentsia that managed to sabotage the official standards. The relationship between the two systems cannot simply be inverted by legitimating the former unofficial model. First of all, some of the writers built their literary reputation between 1945 and 1989 on tackling taboo subjects, on their penchant for allusive statement, and on the subversive potential of their work. Now they appear to have a strictly contextual value. Second, some of the writers accepted by the communist regime for extra-literary reasons only, must now be reevaluated. Finally several outstanding names do not appear on the canonized list because they preferred to write work that was unpublishable during the communist rule. The history of Romanian literary histories refutes the assumption, shrewdly but unconvincingly advocated by Harold Bloom, that values emerge spontaneously. The authors selected by literary histories do not survive on their own. Each name conceals the strong will of a canonical clerk who has strategic reasons for assigning it a certain role on the public stage of his time.

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Conceiving of a Croatian Literary Canon, 1900–1950 Nenad Ivić When we arrived, like a torrent, from the North, we reached, with lutes and without arms, even Constantinople. We were slaves and when we slaughtered everybody, we stopped before the shore, in front of the cities. We remained with the cattle in the villages. We stopped before gold and marble, before sails and oars, before distances, in front of might, in front of the World. (Miloš Crnjanski, Split 59)

Literary history includes more than literature proper. It comes into being and evolves in a precisely defined historical context, by which it is often shaped: it rescues, defines, narrates the literary past and helps shape, question, change, and occasionally subvert, the contemporary context. This complex interaction between history, historiographic practice, and history of literature has not been acknowledged by Croatian historiographers like Stjepan Antoljak or literary critics like Ivo Frangeš and Mirko Tomasović, who write monographs on particular authors, or festive and commemorative pieces. They refuse to read literary histories as texts (Perkins 29–30), to tackle literary history from the perspective of interacting political, cultural, and critical contexts, and principles of race, class, and gender. They are also reluctant to identify the ideological limits of their time by questioning its often fuzzy and suspect presuppositions and make use of the categories of culture instead of being used by them (Bercovitch viii). All this reticence confines the history of literature to the unreal and ideologically suspect laboratory of “science,” confirms its prestige as a crowning achievement of an impeccable academic carrier, and, obscuring its impact, permits its uncritical use in day to day politics. Every history of Croatia or Croatian literature begins with the theme of boundary. Thus Milorad Medini writes, “Centuries passed since our forefathers, guided and pushed by the Avars, found their homeland on the agreeable shores of the blue sea” (3), and Mihovil Kombol chimes in: “When Croats, while conquering their actual homeland, reached the vineyards and olive groves of the Adriatic” (9). This is an obligatory topos that marks the final settlement of the group and commemorates the appearance of Croats in history. Its endless repetition is far from reassuring, for it masks what was perhaps lived as a disruptive and traumatic experience by wandering groups reaching the ultimate limit of their travels. It delimits and maps the national territory, endowing it with a problematic stability; it homogenizes the group endowing it with a problematic unity; it serves as a starting point of a tale of national specificity: the grafting of a particular Slavic reed unto an olive tree under a blazing Mediterranean sun. There are some who, more out of habit than anything else, want to deny the value that the literature from Dalmatia and Dubrovnik really possesses. It is true that reading our old literary monuments can hardly satisfy the man who seeks in them the pleasure offered by contemporary writers of novels; but, Dante or Petrarca do not offer this pleasure, either. And yet, they remain what they are: literary champions of the Italian people. (Medini v)

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This is how in 1902 Medini begins his history of Croatian literature in Dalmatia and Dubrovnik. He defines the Croatian literary past as a series of monuments, scattered in a conflictual field where values are open to questioning, bordered by literary fields with monuments that are, as Dante and Petrarch show, so firmly established that they inspire continuous reverence. It is with a perception of danger and threat that Croatian literary history comes into being for Medini: the unnamed critic’s questioning is prompted by the aesthetic value exemplified by modern novels. Medini sets what he considers modern aesthetic judgments against old literature. The problem, as he sees it, resides in the unsuitability of applying modern criteria to ancient literary productions; it is to be resolved by following the well-trodden path of “great” national literatures. The Croatian literary past should be read not against but along the Italian-European one: Croatian literary monuments are to be explained to the public so that it can revere them as the Italian one presumably reveres its own. But the monumental status of old Croatian literature has not yet been established: “The study of the development of our literature, and the ideas preserved by it, has not yet begun, because the first task is to collect, present, and order what we have,” Medini concludes (v). His perspective harbors a deeply rooted contradiction: he considers the Croatian literary past (embracing not only literary monuments but also ideas) as stable, possessing intrinsic value; yet, since its development has yet to be studied, the stability will be produced by the historian who collects, presents, and orders the scattered raw material. The literary past is seen as both cooked and raw, valuable and valueless, stable and prone to destabilization: it is the task of the literary historian to eliminate instability and produce an univocal virile narrative (the Italian model, as seen by Medini, is exclusively male) that purports to establish the canon of Early Croatian literature. Characteristically, Medini claims to write a synthesis of scattered scholarly works aimed at the general public. The confirmed and established canon will have to educate the sensibility of the general public. Canonization entails more than inclusion and exclusion of particular works (LaCapra, Representing 20). In the case of Croatian literary history, it entails privileging some periods (Renaissance over Middle Ages), some languages or dialects as more adequate vehicles for literary expression (Dalmatian, Ragusean, or Latin over Slavic), some forms of worship (Glagolitic, i.e., conducted in local, Slavic language, over Latin), some forms of literary expression (poetry over prose), some forms of polity (the so-called free national states over foreign domination), some authorial instances (persons over groups), and some forms of culture (high over low). Medini chooses to write about Dalmatia and Dubrovnik, not merely because Dalmatian literature is rich. His choice is political: the literary tradition from Dubrovnik has to be declared as the most attractive, because it is, from a modern point of view, the most articulate voice of the literary past. Medini wants to construct a national literary history by maximizing the literary tradition from Dubrovnik, which represents high culture, and minimizing other, especially Slavic, components for belonging to low culture. The opening of Medini’s history can be taken as a mantra of Croatian literary history, a statement on the politics of storytelling that reveals a paradigm of scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century. The paradigm heavily depends on the construction of the Croatian past by turn-of-the-twentieth-century historians. What they constructed was a history of an endangered homogeneous nation, which lost and never quite recovered its statehood through the vicissitudes of history, and was, therefore, prey to Hungarian, Habsburg, Turkish, Venetian, and — last but not

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least — Serbian foes. They transformed the trauma of a stateless national history into a heroic act of perseverance. Vjekoslav Klaić, the most authoritative Croat historian at the turn of the century, sums it up neatly: When you study their [Croatian] history, you are constantly amazed by their endurance, their unbreakable resistance. From the moment the Croat set foot on the shores of the blue sea, for twelve centuries and more, he has defied every danger; with inexhaustible perseverance he protected and maintained his name, his individuality and his territory. (v)

This construct of heroism informs literary history, even if literary scholars seldom refer to the works of historians: if history is perceived as a lost and never recovered national freedom (of the nation-state), and if it is narrated to convey suffering, resistance, and perseverance under foreign domination, Medini’s “monuments of the literary past” tend to be interpreted as expressions of national resistance and perseverance. In a history perceived as a testimony of loss, culture (especially written, high culture) emerges as a trace of a past plenitude and a symptom of future hope. Croatian literary history recasts the problems of political history in literary terms. What historical treatises describe as a series of foreign foes and conquerors (Hungarians, Austrians, Venetians, Turks), becomes a series of threats endangering the literary monuments as privileged expressions of Croatian individuality and resilience. The unproblematic ideal of (bourgeois) culture, a homogeneous totality in which all citizens share the same ideas, norms, and values, becomes a peg unto which to hang a vindicating and de-traumatizing narrative. Literary history transforms the political trauma into a heroic cultural act; canonization mitigates and soothes the wounds, creating the impression that nothing really disruptive has occurred (LaCapra, Representing 23). Croatian literary history is to do what political history can hardly achieve if it is to remain a story of suffering: the history of canonized literature minimizes political disruptions and geographical divisions, establishes a smooth master narrative capable of serving as a surrogate history, and provides a founding myth for a homogenized national individuality. The riches of the sub-Roman world, situated across the Adriatic Sea, coveted by a wandering group, emerge in the twentieth century as a cultural model for a budding nation. The ultimate goal of the literary historian is to cross the mythical boundary and appropriate the coveted other, to turn the literary past of his own nation into an authoritative master-narrative (Megill 152) that is competitive with similar other ones. The historian repeats the founding act of history on the cultural level: he acts as mediator who finally accomplishes the age-old task to settle, stabilize, and civilize a nomad culture. To educate the literary sensibility of a public is to shape its political sense. We consider from Medini’s perspective three major works of Croatian literary historians, those of Branko Vodnik (1913), Slavko Ježić (1944) and Mihovil Kombol (1945). Just as Medini included only what he regarded as the formative period, the sixteenth century, so, too, Vodnik, Ježić, and Kombol wrote incomplete histories: the chronological boundaries and the included materials are governed not only by the professional interests of the authors and publishers but also by the story they want to narrate and the closure they aim at. Although they all claim to synthesize previous critical and historiographic records, their accounts remain uncritically dependent on them, repeating with variations the issues in the object of their studies and identifying the past with their own national “self” and “culture.” All three histories have been written under traumatic

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circumstances: the eve of World War I and the end of World War II. Giving an account of the literary past, these historians tried to come to terms with contemporary situations they perceived as disruptive: Vodnik with the ultimate crisis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ježić and Kombol (in a radically different manner) with the vicissitudes of the World War II and the emergence of the Nazi puppet state in Croatia. Careless writing, improper use of sources, absence of methodology, ugly political overtones make the reading — except perhaps in Kombol’s case — tedious but gratifying to the cultural historian, who seeks to uncover what the literary historians put in the head and the mouth of their portrayed writers. Branko Vodnik’s Organicism: A Provincial Savant Retells a Familiar Tale to a Provincial Public Vodnik’s tale of Croatian literature starts with humanism and ends with the last years of the eighteenth century; it wants to “show, in a truthful picture, the organic development of our old literature” (4). Although Vodnik does not state his methodological premises, the tenor of his work and scattered remarks show that he refrains from a history of literary works. Discussing Ivan Gundulić’s epic, Osman, he remarks that problems of composition are not relevant for literary history (237). Instead, he conceives literary history as chronologically and geographically ordered literary biographies, interspersed with short judgments on the works. He chooses his authors because they wrote; he sees literature as a stable and original production of known individuals. For Vodnik, what is not original work of a known individual does not quite belong to literary history. This is evident from the short introductory chapter on Glagolitic literature, written by philologist Vatroslav Jagić. Commissioned by Vodnik and placed at the beginning of his narrative, Jagić’s essay characterizes the writing of fifteenth century Glagolitic priests as “scarce and weak food for the soul […] when compared to the flourishing of Humanism in Italy and, to the certain extent, in Dalmatian cities” (Vodnik 32). Glagolitic texts are relegated to the introduction because, unlike Dalmatian humanism, they were unoriginal, mere traces of Slavic literacy. Jagić ends with a remark on “the innocent Slavic mass”: The world powers see in the innocent Slavic mass the reinforcement of Slavic national consciousness, which all the non-Slavic elements of the polity where Croats live fear greatly and try to suppress. Future will tell whether the Croats will be able to overcome and remove all those obstacles. (Vodnik 60)

The ambiguity as to whether the past or the present is meant is probably intentional. At a time of crisis in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Jagić seems to point to the necessity of forming a Croat nation-state, which alone can guarantee the development of a national consciousness. Hence his concern with the humanist Dalmatian cities. As Vodnik says later, the free Dalmatian city-states, especially Dubrovnik, were able to produce high quality literature through awareness of their “own spiritual force” (68). Jagić writes a prelude to Vodnik’s history, for his philological treatment of Glagolitic texts shows that Croatian literature can flourish only under political and national freedom.

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Vodnik adopts Jagić’s main tenets and transforms them into a narrative on the politics of influence. In his aperçu on medieval theater, he places Italian influences over Czech or German ones: true Croatian literature is written between Italy and the free Dalmatian cities, chiefly Dubrovnik and Hvar. Vodnik values this literature in relation to its contemporary Italian literature, at the expense of the other Slavic literatures: Croatian letters are the richest in the first century of their development. This literature produced some works that can compete successfully with the most beautiful contemporary Italian productions; it created the literary language which shows great artistic culture. It is characterized by some serious and original ideas. Amongst the Slavic literatures, ours was at this time unquestionably the first. But it covered only a limited territory: Dubrovnik and Dalmatia. (191)

Vodnik does not describe and compare the other Slavic literatures. His choice of Italian literature as a paragon has literary justifications but it is not innocent politically: at the beginning of the twentieth century, Italy was politically not as threatening as Hungary and Austria. Playing down Hungarian and German influences meant privileging centrifugal tendencies away from the AustroHungarian Empire. Vodnik’s disposition follows the conclusions of the historians, and reinforces with philological authority the exclusion of heterogeneous elements. The first victim of Vodnik’s organicist vision is Glagolitic literature. He excludes it as a heterogeneous Slavic component, but includes it as a trace of literacy: proper Croatian literary history begins with the flourishing of humanism and Renaissance in the free Dalmatian city-states. Vodnik did not question the correlation between national freedom, economic prosperity, and the flourishing of literature. Neither did he ask whether his Renaissance writers and poets considered themselves as participants in the project of national literature. He assumed that the Croatian national territory always covered roughly the same territory as in his own time. He suppressed or narratively homogenized potential disruptions, signs of heterogeneity, or symptoms of alternative solidarity — such as differences between cities and their environments, between Dalmatia, Croatia proper, and Slavonia, between Dubrovnik and other Dalmatian cities, between languages and dialects, or types of literacy and literature. But around his pool of Mediterranean light, some residual intermittent flickering indicates his silent political assumptions. The hero of Vodnik’s historical narrative is an unchanging subject without internal fissures or contradictions: a Croatian nation, reduced to its primeval form of a city-state. This concept is the product of a nineteenthcentury historiography that glorified the freedom of Dubrovnik and bewailed the domination of foreigners in other parts. Vodnik coupled this romantic view with artful, not artless, Realism (189). His highest praise for Marko Marulić, Petar Hektorović, Marin Držić, and other key Renaissance and humanist Croatian writers was that their work is characterized by Realism (108, 134, 167). He believed that Gundulić’s Osman, a mannerist epic, contained some of the most beautiful pages of literature and remained unfinished because Gundulić’s plan clashed with contemporary reality (243). Vodnik thus agreed with Medini that compared to the vigorous, simple Realism of the great Renaissance and Baroque writers modern novelists engaged in sickly pursuits.

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Vodnik’s “organicity” froze development into a single heroic feat. What he described was not development but epiphany, a sudden surge of literary light due to peculiar historical circumstances, identified with national freedom and, surprisingly, with capitalism’s “practical view of life” (80) that privileged Croatian as a language of everyday communication over Latin. His narrative alternates chapters on literature from Dubrovnik and Dalmatia with chapters on literacy and religiously inspired scribbling in other parts of the presumed national territory. Ominously he even included a short aperçu on Bosnian literature. This way, Vodnik included a primitive counterpoint to enhance the glory of literature from Dalmatia and Dubrovnik, which, however, he believed to have suddenly declined, when freedom and Mediterranean trade had vanished. His concluding chapter on Slavonic literature offers a bleak picture and reveals his didacticism and religious inspiration. His sense of closure, which mentions the Latin historical works of the eighteenth-century Slavonic polyhistor Antun Kanižlić, can be read as bridging the original boundary: the Latin inscriptions that Kanižlić diligently collected allude to a founding of national history and commemorate the cultural appropriation of the national territory. Vodnik’s mediating narrative duplicates the accomplishments of his beloved realist Croatian literati: the proposed canon endows the national literature with monumentality by grafting Croatian intellectual resources unto a Latin/Italian heritage. A Nazi Rector’s Quest for an Adequate Expression of the National Soul National independence, somewhat played down in Vodnik’s history, becomes the principal theme of Ježić’s voluminous history of Croatian literature from 1100 to 1941. The first chapter suggests the pre-history of his story: The medieval Croatian state, which was emerging from the second half of the seventh century, achieved at the end of the ninth century its complete independence (880) and became in the first quarter of tenth century (925) a powerful and independent kingdom, ruled by a national dynasty till the end of the eleventh century. (7)

This obsessive repetition of “independence” clashes with an admission on the same page that the first national king and his successors acknowledged the supreme authority of the Byzantine emperor. Furthermore, the term “independent Croatian state” indicates that Ježić, in contrast to Vodnik, selected his opening and terminal dates on blatantly political grounds: the battle at Gvozd (1097) and the proclamation of the Nezavisna država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia) on April 10, 1941. After briefly depicting the glory of the former golden age of national independence, Ježić proceeds to the traumatic death of the “last Croatian king,” the loss of national independence, and the breakup of the national territory by foreign conquerors. He concludes with the proclamation of the Nazi puppet state which, presumably, will restore the golden age. Ježić constructs his narrative as a final return to an original national bliss, characterized by general well being, love of a good ruler by his subjects, and good relations with the Catholic Church. His characterizations of the reign of Dmitar Zvonimir (13) find their repetition in the Nazi puppet state,

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in the chief literary and important political figure of Mile Budak, a lawyer, right-wing politician, organizer of the Ustasha movement, and finally, foreign minister in 1943. The tenor of Ježić’s history is adulation. Budak’s novel Ognjište (Domestic Fire) “achieved a goal of recent world literature, namely to depict racial and psychic characteristics of his own people and his own unity with it. […] In this work the writer has achieved the highest goal of Realism, the totally objective rendering of the subject, without even a shade of interference from the writer’s personality” (406). In Ježić’s view, “Budak becomes a Croatian classic and, through many translations in foreign tongues, the interpreter of the Croatian soul to the foreign world, which, unfortunately, is deprived of the possibility of enjoying his rich popular language” (406–407). This praise accurately indicates Ježić’s aspirations and criteria: as Vodnik and Medini before him, he wanted to establish a classical canon of Croatian literature. Like Vodnik, he considered Realism not as a period term but as the highest literary style. But contrary to Vodnik, who saw Croatian literature in a European context, Ježić’s context is the Aryan race. Though he constantly evinces rural parochialism in his choice of themes (Budak’s novel is set in the rural part of Croatia), he is certain that “Croatian popular literature has many common traits with the popular literature of other, especially Aryan (Indo-European) people, which they brought with them from their distant fatherland” (56). Ježić is not interested in specific writers and authors, even though he provides a wealth of mostly irrelevant information on them. Sure of their intentions, and of what their works mean, he merges their specificity and originality into a national soul. The literary canon is for him a totality of correct interpretations of the national Aryan soul throughout history. Huge, often inaccurate, historical tableaux commemorate the sufferings and heroism of Croats under foreign domination. Thus Ježić links the English-inspired anti-Nazi putsch in Belgrade (1941) with Yugoslavia’s involvement in World War II, and he sees the Ustasha proclamation in Zagreb as its direct consequence (398). Such historical accounts alternate in Ježić’s story with chronologically grouped biographies of writers. The historical tableaux are not just a backdrop for literary analysis, they often constitute the chief explanations for literary events. Except for Marko Marulić, Mile Budak and other great figures, the biographies are very short and often irrelevant, as in the case of the minor nineteenth-century writer Rikard Jorgovanić, who, we are told, had his leg amputated before dying (278). Plotting, normal in literary histories, serves also as a political strategy: Ježić’s narrative minimizes potentially disruptive originality and authorship, and subsumes them under the national soul that history expresses. He uncovers the national soul as an Aryan substratum of originality beneath European cultural sediments. The European, especially Italian, influences that Vodnik saw as catalysts in the flowering of national literature are transformed here into impediments to the national soul’s free expression. Ježić’s cultural history translates the political into the literary: Especially in the middle of the sixteenth century, our literati maintained cordial relations among themselves, exchanged thoughts, sent their works and even, as we saw, visited one another. Croatian literature is not just united by the same inspiration, same models, and the inexhaustible platform of popular literature; its unity is enhanced by cordial relations and personal friendships among the authors. (91)

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Only concord can prevail over enemies: with this barely disguised political message, which replaces the plague of discord among the historical Croatian grandees, Ježić rescues Croatian Renaissance from the clutches of foreign foes. Contrary to the unanimous verdict of the historians that Turkish domination was detrimental, Ježić emphasizes the good relations between the Turkish Moslem Croats and Croat Catholics, just as the Ustasha government tried to win over the Bosnian Moslems. Contrary to Vodnik, who saw Italians as politically unproblematic, Ježić sees the Italians as both foes and allies, beneficial and damaging, just as the Ustasha accepted Italian and German domination while constantly proclaiming its independence. Claiming to deal with literary problems, Ježić’s history is really about contemporary politics. It is an apologetic political tract, designed to ingratiate the professor with the Ustasha by depicting national history as a series of precedents for their rule. When Ježić sees the Croatian medieval state as factually independent, in spite of its dependence, he implicitly raises the status of the Ustasha state. The bloody Ustasha rule becomes this way the fulfillment of age-old national aspirations and efforts. But this optimistic closure can be read differently, for it unwittingly discloses an ironic turn. Texts can subvert intentions imposed on them, histories can contest their reduction: the disappearance of the Ustasha is foreshadowed in the destiny of the medieval Croatian kingdom. Ježić’s history can be read as expressing the fears of an Ustasha intellectual facing his imminent catastrophe after the fall of fascist Italy. Turris eburnea or Poetry Saves the Nation Mihovil Kombol wrote his pre-Enlightenment history of Croatian literature before World War II; he completed and improved it during the war, and published it in 1945. He focuses his relatively well written history more narrowly than Ježić: he pays greater attention to the specifics of literature; his historical aperçus are shorter and more functional; his descriptions of literary texts are more developed and his judgments more balanced. Kombol actually achieves what Vodnik wanted but did not accomplish: to depict the organic development of Croatian literature. While adopting Vodnik’s chronological boundaries, Kombol is critical of his predecessors: “they include a wealth of cultural and historical material, and, what’s even worse, they constantly confuse cultural and historical criteria with the criteria of literary history, because of fuzzy and imprecise views on literature and poetry” (5). Although he claims to write for a general public unaccustomed to scholarly discussions, he seems to have higher ambitions. What exactly are the literary, historical, and cultural criteria for Kombol, and what distinguishes one from the other? As with his predecessors, the answers are given by his praxis, because he, too, refrained from methodological reflections and believed that his writing sufficed as an answer. His introduction notwithstanding, he rewrites his predecessors instead of problematizing them. By pointing out that previous literary histories (he probably had above all Vodnik in mind) constantly confused cultural, historical, and literary criteria, Kombol indicated the main assumption of his story: literature is not history. Instead of expressing the history of a national soul, as Ježić thought, it expressed an a-historical individuality: Kombol recasts the problem of writing literary history in vaguely Crocean aesthetic terms. His main question is how individual writers succeeded in expressing the a-historical individuality in particular historical circumstances and by particular

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means. Reversing Ježić’s perspective, he establishes artistic value by a-historical criteria; he works from presumed aesthetic values toward the circumstances permitting their production. Kombol finishes his book with the announcement that in the works of the romantic poets Stanko Vraz, Petar Preradović, and Ivan Mažuranić “poetry will finally [once more] begin to speak in Croatian” (418). This reconfirms that he places poetry, as the expression of pure lyrical inspiration, at the top of his genre hierarchy. Kombol unifies his history by transforming poetry into the most original, artistic, and direct expression of the national psyche, even if it does not always operate on the cultural level of its community: Poetry will not always follow this gradual refinement of general literary culture [he is speaking about conditions in Renaissance Dalmatian cities]; the connoisseur of literature, or better the amateur of literature, will be more frequent than the real poet; and in the majority of works, literary tradition, foreign craftsmanship, and imitation will take the place of genuine inspiration. (81)

Concluding his analysis of hagiographic legends, Kombol finds that certain poetic feelings that are poetic, even if obscured by practical intentions, “can be found in descriptions of dramatic moments of human life” (35). Medieval religious poetry, he maintains, was born “not out of direct lyrical experience but out of the practical intention to influence souls in questions pertaining to religion” (48). Like Vodnik, Kombol sees Croatian sixteenth-century literature as a “small, but in some respects really rich, Renaissance literature, especially when compared with other literatures of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe” (61). The richness lies in the “emphasis on formal discipline in the classical spirit of contemporary aesthetics,” which rescues Croatian Renaissance from “the popular shapelessness of the Middle Ages.” These qualifications describe the organic development of Croatian literature as a maturation that starts with practical intentions and ends with genuine inspiration and lyrical experience. The maturation of Croatian literature seems to liberate poetry and authenticity from the clutches of everyday life. But Kombol’s Crocean emphasis on aesthetics and formal discipline is only apparent. Instead of shaping the context, aesthetic judgments serve to confirm it. The Croat fatherland, writes Kombol, “was divided between mighty neighbors, and, therefore, too feeble to permit, in the tragic historical maelstrom, the creation of a stable center capable of employing all national forces. [Consequently, the Croats] sought their fortunes in neighboring lands, offering them their heads and their hands” (63). The tormented history of the Croat nation makes a triumphant come-back, this time legitimized by a-historical assumptions about art. Like other literary histories that follow the model of De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–71), Kombol’s literary history depends on his notion of Croatian national history — no matter how “uncompromising” he considers his aesthetic judgments to be. Kombol wants to avoid Vodnik’s constant confusion of critical, literary, cultural, and historical criteria. He relies on the usual practice of his day: through a reversal characteristic of the literary historian, he uses history to understand le fait littéraire (Brioschi 120). Kombol partakes in a discursive community that takes its models from historical works, either by mimicking them, as Ježić did in his long historical chapters, or by tacitly accepting their assumptions. The accounts of writers and the judgments on their works, the grouping of the material in periods, and the classification of genres jell into a development only if narrated against the backdrop of a reliable national

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history. Though Kombol emphasizes literary criteria, his seemingly a-historical value judgments duplicate a Croatian political history that constantly affirms the freedom of Dubrovnik (Šišić 383), and loudly claims that “Dalmatians had opportunity to see that they are united with Croatia by interests stronger than those related to ecclesiastical organization, namely trade and politics; they had opportunity to see that their autonomy and position is better safeguarded in union with Croatia than under the domination of power-thirsty Venice” (Šišić 137–38). In this political history the freedom of city-states combines with centripetal national interests. In Kombol’s view, Renaissance literature owed its glamour not simply to the concentration of interesting literary personalities but also to the freedom of the city-state, which offered a stable environment. Similarly, Marulić, who came from Split, did not write dark poetry only because his religious inspiration was detrimental to his poetic fantasy; this was also due to the Venetian domination over his home town. Šiško Menčetić, who came from free Dubrovnik, was “with all his conventionality, more readable in his shorter poems, inspired by the tradition of strambotti and reminiscent of the simple expressions of enthusiasm and of joys and sorrows of popular poetry (Kombol 98). He seems to be saved by this popular poetry. Kombol values Menčetić’s poetry because of his free hometown, even though he was inspired by the strambotti that came from Italy and domineering Venice. Art and craft, derivation and originality, are correlated in Kombol’s history to a political history that sees the Croatian national past as a series of foreign dominations and struggles against them. Under the cover of an aesthetic ideal, Kombol follows a determined historical discourse on the opposition between foreign domination and national freedom. Following a literary and historical tradition that claims an organic unity for Croatian literature and history, he sees literary development as an epiphenomenon on the development of the nation-state and its spirit. With Kombol, history of literature returns to the task proposed by Medini, though he no longer regards Realism as a crowning achievement of literary expression. Old literature should inspire lofty feelings in the Croatian people; true poetic inspiration spans centuries and obliterates disruptions. Ironically, the endangered monuments of the national past finally find their true foundation once again with help from much maligned Italy.

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Serbia: the Widening Rift between Criticism and Literary Histories Svetlana Slapšak, Guido Snel, and John Neubauer Serbian literary history has been deeply involved in ideological debates on language and on the aesthetic value of ideological narratives from its very beginnings in the nineteenth century. The institutional and ideological status of literary histories was confirmed by the extreme pressure that communist and nationalist ideologies exerted on its production. Serbian literary histories have always been framed, exposing a pre-existent formula of history and a concept of development whose result has always already been achieved. In the didactic, nationalist tone of nineteenth-

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century literary histories literary criticism functioned as a discourse proposing values, but in the later twentieth century ideological pressures uncoupled criticism and literary history by isolating academic institutions: literary history, especially of older periods, found refuge in the ivory tower of academia; contact with modern and ideologically sensitive topics was sure to produce reactions from the public or the regime. In the course of the twentieth century, Serbian literary history became part of Yugoslav and South-Slavic literary histories. The heydays of the Yugoslav project in literary history seem to have been the interwar period, when leading Serbian literary historians postulated the existence of a larger, supranational Yugoslav literary tradition that derived its alleged unity from the “reorientation of high culture throughout the South Slavic lands away from religion and toward folk poetry” (Wachtel 95). The 1954 Novi Sad agreement on a common linguistic standard, the so-called Novosadski dogovor, stated that the national language of the Serbs, Croats, and Montenegrins is a single one with two pronunciations, that both scripts, the Latin and the Cyrillic, were of equal weight, and that the language had a common orthography. Literature and literary history were not mentioned, so that after World War II there was space both for Yugoslav literary histories and for separate national literary histories. Pavle Solarić’s Pominak knjižeski (Literary Record; 1810) is usually regarded as the first attempt at Serbian (and Croatian) literary history. This catalogue of Slavonic books printed in Venice is a precise description of books in the Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts; it also includes a voluminous introduction to the Serbian and Croatian literatures, called “Illyrian” by the author. Lazar Bojić published in 1815 four biographies of Serbian contemporary authors with a short introduction. He composed a list of dead and living authors, proposing to divide Serbian literary history into an old (Medieval) period and a new one that started in the late sixteenth century. Đorđe Magarašević, who lived in Novi Sad, which was then under Hungarian rule and more developed culturally and intellectually than Belgrade, was the first to tackle the question of literary history in a more consistent way. In his three letters about Serbian literature published in the Serbski letopis, Magarašević made a distinction between universal literary history, literary history of a certain epoch, and national literary history of the “fatherland.” He participated in the debates between the proponents of the vernacular and those of the Slavonic-Serbian language (an uncoded, free mixture of church Slavonic and Russian, with many foreign terms unintelligible for common speakers and readers), and he considered Dositej Obradović the first modern Serbian writer, though he also accepted some of Vuk Karadžić’s ideas on the vernacular language “revolution.” According to Magarašević, national literature could not be written in a dead or artificial language, only in a living everyday one, because literature was the mirror of the nation, its culture, its literacy, and its character. Imitating old literary models could be rewarding and illuminating but could not match the original because it lacked a national context, language, and subject. Božidar Petranović’s ambitious history of world literature (1858), conceived at least fifteen years before its publication, proposed a radically different and more elaborate historical concept of literature. Petranović published Part I as a book, and fragments of Part II in literary periodicals; in an announcement of his book he explained that the national culture had neglected literary history (Petranović “Rukovodstvo”). His overview included ancient Jewish, Chinese, Indian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Paleo-Christian literature. Petranović was a lonely figure, but by the end of the nineteenth century several historians of literature defended his global approach,

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arguing that it was necessary for a good understanding of national literature. By the early twentieth century, this led to the founding of a Department of World Literature in the Belgrade School of Philosophy; its first professor was Svetomir Nikolajević, later Professor in the School of Philology at the University of Belgrade. Both Magarašević and Petranović supported a national literature, but the former insisted on originality and regionality while the latter on a broader global perspective. Their conflict was more evident in literary criticism, but it had an impact on literary history as well. Stojan Novaković, a great philologist, historian, and politician, wrote the first conceptually precise history of Serbian literature (1867), covering the centuries from the Middle Ages to the author’s own time. His core topics were the development of South Slavic literacy, the cultural development of the nation, and the relation between oral and written literature. In his view, literature is “a photographer and a philosopher of its time” — a rather daring metaphor for his age. Novaković compiled also the first Serbian bibliography of literature (1869); his historical and archival interests are best represented by a study on nineteenth-century booksellers and readers (1900), which anticipates concepts of reception theory. His work had a clear structure and was philologically accurate; he subscribed, however, to the organicist idea that a national literature was a developing whole, and to the mimetic principle that literature and reality mirrored each other. Jovan Skerlić revolutionized the Serbian literary scene around the turn of the nineteenth century as a young dashing critic, historian of literature, politician, and polemicist. Although he died at the age of thirty-seven, Skerlić managed to complete an impressive work that links criticism and literary history. He received his doctorate in Lausanne, became professor of French literature at the Belgrade high school, then professor of Serbian literature at the University of Belgrade, member of the parliament, and founder of several literary magazines. His political sympathies made him an ally of the Serbian socialist Svetozar Marković, another short-lived literary and political thinker, whose biography Skerlić came to write. Skerlić viewed literature in terms of his political beliefs, and he adopted some aesthetic ideas from his Belgrade professor, Bogdan Popović. His main intellectual sources were, however, French: his Lausanne professor, Georges Renard, and Hippolyte Taine. He invested much energy in persuading the Serbian intellectuals that they needed to communicate with foreign cultures, especially the French one. Thus he entered the recurrent and unfailingly superficial Serbian debates between stereotypical provincial and international positions. For Skerlić, the main goal of literature was democratization, hence literature itself had to be democratized. Though he did not follow Svetozar Marković’s utilitarian ideas on literature, he believed that literature was linked to progress. He published a seminal literary history of eighteenth-century Serbian Literature (1909). Skerlić had a great talent for rhetoric and for describing the lives and works of literary authors. His literary histories consisted of critical essays on authors, accounts of the socio-historic context, and text analyses. Bio- bibliographical data would follow this critical nucleus. Skerlić’s unique talent for integrating, his tendency to epitomize, condense, and classify according to a precise, pre-fabricated historical roster, usually succeeded in synthesizing the individual pieces into a convincing whole. Through Skerlić, literary history became a literary genre in Serbia. Independent of the formalist and aesthetic school, which regained dominance after his death through Bogdan Popović, Skerlić attributed a mission to literature that was international rather than exclusively national,

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as well as socio-political, spiritual, and ultimately pedagogic one, to educate for democracy. At different moments in Serbia’s troubled modern history, nationalists would seek in his literary histories for useful formulas, but in vain. Skerlić often wrote about national programs, but he placed them always in a Balkan space that was larger than future Yugoslavia, and in a European context. His Istorija nove srpske književnosti (History of New Serbian Literature) included “writers who undoubtedly felt Serbian. Croatian and Serbian literatures are the literatures of one people and one language, and yet, they are two literatures. This is a paradox, an anachronism, a proof of our cultural backwardness, but such is the case” (12). Biased towards rationalist and realist poetics, Skerlić was sometimes quite cruel, for instance when dealing with the romantic Laza Kostić, the highly talented and versatile conservative Stevan Sremac, or the less cultured but powerful poet Vladislav Petković-Dis. He had no genuine interest in early literary history, folklore, and oral tradition. His seminal overview of the Serbian press (1911) offers somewhat of a paradigm of his intellectual choices, research methods, and scholarly achievements. Skrelić deeply influenced the avant-garde generation just before and after World War I. His premature death and the conservatism of his peers in the interwar academy generated an admiration for his creative energy and intellectual power that remained intact even in the ideological environment of post-World War II Yugoslavia. Skerlić’s powerful vision of literature as a vehicle of democratic progress remains unchallenged in Serbian literary history. The brothers Bogdan and Pavle Popović ruled the Belgrade literary academia between the two wars: Bogdan imposed aesthetic values, and Pavle developed by the end of his life a scholarly, Serbian-centered view of Yugoslav literature. Both were French-oriented. Pavle complemented Skrelić’s work by publishing an overview of Serbian literature (1913) that emphasized early literary history and the oral tradition. His method of literary history combined archival research, philological polemics, a comparative perspective, and solid historical knowledge. Pavle’s critical discourse, inspired by Sainte-Beuve, gave a touch of elegant and witty lightness to anecdotal narratives, and was adopted by a number of younger critics and essayists. He grew into an authoritarian figure of Serbian academia but was less present in public than his brother. His literary history and his numerous specialized studies on nineteenth-century Serbian theater and other matters were considered a standard for more than sixty years, along with Skerlić’s work, which was, to be sure, ideologically more attractive. Pavle Popović published in Cambridge his Jugoslovenska književnost. Književnost Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca (Yugoslav Literature: Literature of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, 1918). As he wrote somewhat defensively in the introduction, it was written during World War I without access to home libraries; as such it was “a minor effort to present the literature of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a unity”; in the discussion of contemporary Croat and Slovene literatures he had to rely sometimes on the judgments of others. Nevertheless, by 1930 the book went through five editions. The conservative aesthetic ideas in Bogdan Popović’s often reprinted anthology of newer Serbian poetry (1911) were ridiculed in the non-academic and avant-garde literary circles, especially by the brilliant and multi-talented Stanislav Vinaver (see ECE 1: 414–16), who published in 1920 a hilarious parody of it, the Pantologija novije srpske pelengirike (Panthology of Newer Serbian Absintholyrics [or: Peasant Trousers]). During the interwar period, several histories of

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Serbian or Yugoslav literature were written for use in the educational institutions of all Yugoslavia. Such, for instance, was the Marxist history of Yugoslav literature that Miloš Savković wrote for high schools (1932–38). Antun Barac published in 1954 his earlier-written study of Yugoslav literature, which paid little attention to the demands of ideological correctness. Covering the main languages and literary trends, it is certainly the most adequately structured of them all. Indeed, writing literary history became risky after World War II because of ideological pressures and their unpredictable turns, for instance on account of the break with the Soviet Union in June 1948. Fluctuations of the Yugoslav canon due to internal politics and conflicting views on how to define language and national identity represented another problem. Liminal, transnational, and mixed phenomena were marginalized by the academy and the intelligentsia and subjected to rather stiff rules of “political correctness” by the intellectual hirelings of the Communist Party. In the academia, most opponents of the regime were nationalists. Since literary history was less scrutinized by the anonymous Party readers than the politically more dangerous disciplines of philosophy and social sciences, academic literary historians were able to preserve a peculiar double role as members of a silent intellectual majority and as internally recognized champions of national ideas. Predrag Palavestra’s book on postwar Serbian literature (1972), a loose collection of essays rather than a theoretically structured literary history, exemplifies the arbitrary control of the Party: it was attacked, mildly, because one member of the nomenclature felt personally offended by it. Palavestra later tried to show that Serbia had a critical literature that resisted the ideology of the regime, but he tended to praise nationalist and conservative authors like Dobrica Ćosić, Antonije Isaković, Matija Bećković, Branislav Crnčević, and Dragoslav Mihajlović, all of whom became actively engaged in promoting Serbian nationalism and pro-war discourse while arguing for the impossibility of a multiethnic Yugoslavia. Palavestra has recently published a book on the Jewish writers in Serbian literature (1998), which concludes the survey with the claim: “There has been no rejection or anti-Semitism, because all writers who wrote in Serbian enjoyed a position of equality, making their individual moral and intellectual contributions to the common structure of Serbian spiritual culture” (176). Apart from the question whether this adequately reflects the historical experience, one may ask whether a “common structure of Serbian spiritual culture” is not, after all, an exclusionary notion. Jovan Deretić’s history of Serbian literature, published after Tito’s death in 1983, is the only recent history that can compare with the works of Skerlić and Pavle Popović. Deretić, professor in Belgrade, combines historical and generic perspectives, without explaining their rationale. The literature after World War II, for instance, is presented along strict genre divisions that avoid risky questions about the literary movements, institutions, schools, and the impact of ideology on literature. Romanticism is superficially explained in terms of the personalities and national awakening; Realism is viewed in terms of an ideological divide between socialists and conservatives, which becomes irrelevant to problems during the communist decades. The chapter on Modernism avoids touching its Serbo-Croat aspects and includes the unrelated post-World War I patriotic literature, while the section on Expressionism covers all avant-garde movements after World War I. Deretić documents well most of his topics and uses the rich results of research in the sub-disciplines, especially in mediaeval and oral literature. In this sense, his literary history outlines a somewhat schematic but precise historical development that ends, surprisingly, with unenthusiastic conclusions.

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The hidden final message intimates that Serbian literature has abandoned its Yugoslav matrix. This could be read as pointing to its presumed superiority, and was certainly one of the reasons why Deretić’s work was crowned in the 1980s with major awards and republished in a shorter edition for the schools, a pocket edition, and other variants. Compared to Pavle Popović, Deretić works less comparatively, partly because he has a more limited knowledge of Western and Balkan literatures, partly because he believes in Serbian literature’s uniqueness. In this respect, his work opposes Skerlić’s, and partly also Popović’s, historical and national ideology. Deretić showed no interest in reevaluating women’s writing or shifting the canon ever so slightly to include hitherto unappreciated or forgotten women writers. He considered no minority authors from Serbia. The Yugoslav school and university system granted adequate space for the constituent national literatures, but endless debates took place, especially when the Party position became somewhat softer in the sixties, on the Serbo-Croatian language “contracts” and the choice between Latin and Cyrillic characters. From the eighties onward, the Slovenian national movement started to demand that Serbo-Croatian language and literature should no longer be taught in the school system, or be taught only with restrictions. The movement to reduce or bluntly negate the other national literatures became grotesque shortly before and during the Yugoslav war: joint Yugoslav bibliographical publications ceased, university departments of the “enemies” (Serbian in Slovenia and Croatia, Slovenian in Serbia) were closed down or reduced to nominal existence, new histories of national literatures, most of them short-lived and inappropriate, were quickly patched together. Dictionaries of “differences” were hastily produced, Slovenian and Croatian national and university libraries disposed of books published in the “enemy” languages, and book purchases from the other former Yugoslav cultures were, of course, almost immediately stopped. The Yugoslav cultural space was dismantled with plenty distasteful enthusiasm on all warring sides, and intellectually shameful new national histories were constructed. The resultant vacuum necessitates the founding of institutions without state and collective pressure, so that ideologically less biased theoretical and historical research on these intertwined literatures, languages, and histories may one day become possible.

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Albanian Literary History: A Communist Primeur Robert Elsie Interest in the historical development of Albanian literature was first evident in attempts to collect and study oral literature during the romantic movement of the nineteenth century. The first substantial history of Albanian literature as such was a manual of Albanian literature by the ItaloAlbanian scholar Alberto Straticò (1896). His chapter, “First Monuments of Albanian Literature,” provided an overview of the early texts, not all of a purely literary nature, to the extent that they were known and understood at the time. Straticò’s section on “folk songs” constitutes a solid

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introduction to the various genres of Albanian oral literature. Finally, the chapter “Albanian writers” deals both with some early writers like Frang Bardhi and Pjetër Bogdani (Gjon Buzuku and Pjetër Budi were unknown to him), and the writers of the Italo-Albanian tradition: Giulio Variboba, Francesco Antonio Santori, Girolamo De Rada, Giuseppe Serembe, and others. For Straticò, Albanian literature was Arbëresh (Italo-Albanian) literature. He does not mention at all the rising figures of nineteenth-century literature in Albania itself. No history of Albanian literature was published in Albania before the communist period, though several school readers and anthologies appeared in the early decades of the century. The Albanian Literary Commission (Komisia letrare shqype) published a reader for middle schools (1920), and five years later the Franciscan scholar Justin Rrota published a somewhat more sophisticated reader for middle schools. These endeavors culminated in the 1941 masterful two-volume anthology of Albanian writers (Ressuli, Shkrimtarët shqiptarë), compiled by the Scutarine scholars Ernest Koliqi, Namik Ressuli, and Karl Gurakuqi, which provided bio- and bibliographical introductions to each writer. It is still studied with great interest today. The first reliable and comprehensive history of Albanian literature was published in 1932, in Italian, by Gaetano Petrotta, professor of Albanian studies at the University of Palermo. It surveys literature written in Albanian from the earliest texts to 1930, and also includes oral literature and a section on the development of Albanian studies as a field of scholarship. Petrotta published in 1950 a second, much shorter, history, which was up to date, more concise, and better structured. It is particularly useful for the independence period, 1912–39. The first study of Albanian literature in English was published in 1955 by the British scholar Stuart E. Mann, author of Albanian dictionaries, grammars, and linguistic studies. His Albanian literature contains a wealth of information on Albanian writers but is limited in scope and ends with World War II. Eminently readable and well structured is the Italian history of Albanian literature by Giuseppe Schirò Jr. (1959), which covers Albanian letters up to World War II with an extensive treatment of Arbëresh literature to that date. In Albania itself, scholarly activity took some time to recover from the mass persecution of Albanian intellectuals in the early years of Stalinism. The new institutions in Tirana, among them the University of Tirana, an Institute of Linguistics and Literature, and the Academy of Sciences, bore fruit with time. A major achievement for the period was the history of Albanian literature published in 1959–60 by the Albanian Academy of Sciences under the direction of Dhimitër Shuteriqi. It covers Albanian letters from the sixteenth century up to the 1930s, but suffers, as do virtually all other books published in Tirana during the communist dictatorship, from a strong political and nationalist bias. The tendency to divide all Albanian writers and works, even those of earlier centuries, into absolute good (progressive, i.e., left-wing, patriotic) and bad (reactionary, i.e., right-wing, unpatriotic), had disastrous consequences. Shuteriqi’s Historia e letërsisë shqiptare (1983), a revised and expanded version of the former was substantially more accurate and detailed, but it suffered just as much from extremist ideology. Major authors such as Gjergj Fishta and Ernest Koliqi were mentioned for the first time, though given a dismissive treatment. The literature of Kosova was completely ignored for it was too dangerous a subject. The 1970s saw the publication of a number of major studies on Albanian literature, although none of them can be considered a literary history as such. Ernest Koliqi, in Italian exile, published in 1972 Saggi di letteratura albanese, a collection of scholarly articles on various chapters of

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Albanian literature. Arshi Pipa of the University of Minnesota, another leading exiled scholar, published in 1978 his Albanian Literature: Social Perspectives, which contains useful information on various periods. Modern literature from Albania, though not from Kosova, is also covered by Pipa’s insightful Contemporary Albanian literature (1991). For early Albanian literature up to 1700, the Storia della letteratura albanese by Giuseppe Ferrari of the University of Bari must be mentioned. For modern letters in Albania up to the mid-seventies, one may also consult the official Historia e letërsisë shqiptare të realizmit socialist (History of the Albanian Literature of Socialist Realism; 1978), which was written under the direction of Koço Bihiku with extreme, at times hilarious, political bias. Bihiku’s History of Albanian literature (also available in French, Italian, and Russian translations) concentrates on socialist realist literature up to 1977, seen from an exalted Party perspective. It provides extremely varied coverage and consciously excludes both the many great authors of the twenties and thirties who were ostracized from the Albanian Parnassus, and all the literature of Kosova. Rexhep Qosja’s three-volume history of Albanian Romanticism (1984–86) provides a good survey of nineteenth-century nationalism in Albanian literature. In 1987, a few years before her death, the great Russian Albanologist Agnija Vasil’evna Desnickaja published a study on Albanian literature and language, of which about half is devoted to the development of Albanian letters. The most wide-ranging and detailed survey of Albanian letters to date is Robert Elsie’s Albanian Literature: A Short History (2005), which gives extensive coverage to virtually all currents of written Albanian literature from the beginning to 1990 and endeavors to be objective and comprehensive, including not only the literature of Albania, but also that of Kosova and the diaspora. An Albanian translation appeared in 2006.

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National Identity and the Textbooks of Literary History: the Case of Bulgaria Alexander Kiossev The sum of all spiritual works created and possessed by a people […] is called Literature. (A. Balan, Bălgarska literatura 1)

Alexander Balan, the young Rector of Sofia University, compiled and published in 1896 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city, the first university textbook on Bulgarian literary history, intended as a manual for secondary and special schools. He opened his book with a definition of literature (see the epigraph above), which implied that it would tell students not only “what literature is” but also “what a nation is.” The textbook was a disciplinary and disciplining text of positivist science, which rhetorically assumed that accumulated knowledge was simple, clear, neutral, and

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objective. The issues and problems that had stirred the nascent Bulgarian nation for roughly a century seemed resolved, the answers were apparently taken for granted. The debates on what was national had already been settled and used in the creation of a solid national body of knowledge. What is the role of such academic texts in constituting “imagined communities”? How do they relate to literature itself and to literature’s own formative contribution to the nation? On the surface of it, textbooks on literary history are secondary, even tertiary in value. If any discourse has a nation-constructing function, it is literature itself rather than the comments, descriptions, bibliographies, histories, textbooks, and manuals on it. Let us, then, first consider literature’s own multi-functional role in nation building. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities considers how the novel constructs a unified, homogenous public-audience. Anderson believes that by means of the fictional construction of a “homogenous national audience” literature offers to the consolidating multitude of individuals (who do not know each other and most likely will never meet) a model of sharing and mutual existence in modern, “homogeneous, and empty time” (37). The construction provides an imagined simultaneity for historically distant individuals, groups, and social strata, which is a precondition for the making of a modern and homogeneous national-historical subject. People traversing through time will generate “historic” events. The second nation-forming function of literature, often stressed in theoretical research, is its plot-yielding capacity. It has been argued that the novel is especially capable of generating schemes of “grand” and “heroic” narratives,” and that it has time and again produced primordial plot charts for the rise, culmination, and fall of unified collectives. Modern novels also generate symbolic forms of an unfinished present, constructing thus what Jürgen Habermas calls the “openness of modern time,” the privileged status of the present as “young” and of the “most recent” time that discloses itself to a future ceaselessly flooding in (15). Within the framework of this linear and open temporal model, the literary plot compares and harmonizes the individual and the collective, supplying models for the relationship between two “destinies”: the emancipation of the individual and of the nation. Some literary theorists believe that this narrative assumes even the role of a totalizing scheme for the emerging new, modern, and heterogeneous social environment, which is a mixture of classes, strata, ethnic communities, languages, cultures, and viewpoints. It is exactly the heteroglossic novel that is capable of uniting the time of origin with profane everyday life, and, simultaneously, of bringing together under the concept of nation a variety of classes, social groups, and communities, including those that had never before access to public representation. As Timothy Brennan writes, nations are “imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role. And the rise of European nationalism coincides especially with one form of literature — the novel” (49). Brennan valorizes Mikhail Bakhtin’s view that the novel accommodates wide-ranging styles belonging to alien and often conflicting social languages and attitudes, but he charges that the Russian theorist and Georg Lukács “exhaust their analyses at the starting points.” Bakhtin’s claim that the novel is always related to the decomposition of stable verbal and ideological systems and the rise of polyglot worlds disregards the historical fact that the modern novel emerged and flourished when nationalism gradually imposed the monoglossia of the vernacular in state after state (Brennan 54–55). Indeed, the novel is complicit in constructing this modern state.

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Homi K. Bhabha’s article “DissemiNation” has similar reservations about Bakhtin’s theory. Starting with the observation that the “language of national belonging comes laden with atavistic apologues,” Bhabha cites Bakhtin’s comments on Goethe’s distinction between “organic Italian” and ordinary German time (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 294–95; Bakhtin, “Bildungsroman” 31–32). Bakhtin suggests that the “total victory of the realistic” with Goethe (36) surmounted what was “ghostly, terrifying, and unaccountable” in the past, in order to merge past and present, “blossoming into an authentic fullness of time” and achieving an “essential link between the past and present” (“Bildungsroman” 36). Bhabha rhetorically responds: “But what kind of ‘present’ is this if it is a consistent process of surmounting the ghostly time of repetition? Can this national time-space be as fixed or as immediately visible as Bakhtin claims” (295)? That present cleansed of ghosts is, for Bhabha, replete with the Freudian uncanny (with a multitude of past viewpoints, with suppressed but possible stories, and with the dialectics of master and slave in the politics of signification). A national space cannot be read “as achieved only in the fullness of time.” Bhabha questions whether the emergence of a national perspective “can ever articulate its ‘representative’ authority in the fullness of narrative time, and visual synchrony of the sign that Bakhtin proposes” (295). The nation finds its founding values, identity, and sustenance in the “classical discourse” that ontologically binds people and literature. It acquires its prestigious emblems for the sake of the foreign view. The models of cultural existence dwell in the Works of the Word, in the possession of their Eternity, Greatness, Glory, and Visibility. According to this rhetoric of classics, people cannot legitimate their existence; if the founding values of the Word are not in place, the folk remains inexistent. For this rhetoric, the classics acquire the function of a “mundane religion”: their function in modern national culture proves unexpectedly analogous to the legitimizing and ontological function of the sacred in pre-modern cultures. Literature as classics also implies a temporality that differs from the one described by Anderson. The “time of geniuses and masterpieces” seems to belong to a different modality; it is apparently detached not only from the empty homogeneity of empirical time but also from the plotted and narrated time of heroic national histories. It locates works and authors in an ideal duration, in a sphere of permanence; yet, unlike the sacred time of pre-modern cultures, the divine sanction of this medium is unclear and should, therefore, be called quasi-transcendent. Classic works and authors are, as Sainte-Beuve puts it, “modern and antique, contemporaries of all epochs” (42). More than a century later, Hans Georg Gadamer chimes in: Classic works and authors “rise above the variances of swelling time and its changing tastes […] they represent a consciousness of what has a permanent existence, of what cannot get lost, of what has meaning independent of all temporal circumstances” (272). We see here also another feature of the rhetoric of the classic: in the paradoxical/ideal dimension of modern time, in its Gadamerian timeless present and simultaneity of every present, the works exist in “unity,” in “homogeneous togetherness.” Here, as in our motto from Balan, literature is a “sum” of all spiritual works. The time of geniuses and masterpieces implies a unifying and homogenizing chronotope that differs from Anderson’s homogenized present of newspapers and novels. The paradoxical “non-absolute absoluteness” of classic time, the prestigious “togetherness” of classics constantly grows with new geniuses and masterpieces, being open to new achievements and new “spiritual works,” new expressions of the individual and national Spirit. A classic is, according to Sainte-Beuve, “a writer who has enriched the human spirit, has truly augmented

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its treasury, who has moved it a step forward” (42). Thus, for “the rhetoric of the classic” the time of geniuses and masterpieces has a cumulative character: the key metaphor of treasury suggests, contrary to the unattainable sacred transcendence, that wealth is immersed in empirical history and keeps growing by raising the subject to higher contributions. We can now articulate our thesis: positivistic literary textbooks tend to normalize and institutionalize a lofty romantic rhetoric, a “discourse of the classics.” The textbooks endow this discourse with worn-out metaphors, institutionalized and conventionalized clichés; they endow romantic notions of literature and nation with positivist, academic, and pedagogic principles. The resultant hybrid stabilizes the notion of “national literature” and turns it into a special emblem, a legitimation of national identity. Constructing a Missing Tradition The philologists who started Bulgarian studies in the middle of the nineteenth century believed that careful scrutiny would disclose an old and most glorious Bulgarian literature and language, which ungrateful successors and the unenlightened public have forgotten because they could make no sense of them. As Dimitar Ts. Kotzov wrote on the first page of Nova Bălgaria on December 17, 1876: The Shakespeares, Goethes, Dantes, Decartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseaus, etc. on whom other nationalities pride themselves, also exist in our midst. If foreign youth bows in respect before its own fine creations, we are also entitled to bow before the fine creations of our own artists. But are we really doing it? Our creators are always bad and worthless for us, and what is foreign is good and praiseworthy; yet we should respect first and foremost our own, so that we may have a proper idea and respect also for things foreign. Be it as it may, let us first have some discussion on the poetic gift of one of our young people. We are talking here of Mr. Ivan Vazov, who by dint of his poetic gift and genius surpasses every and all poets so far known in this country (qtd. in Vazov, Săbrani săčineniya 19: 560–61)

Vazov, a future leader of Bulgarian Modernism, graciously declined the honor of mourning in 1883 the shortage of Bulgarian literary classics: “What do we have that is Ours, Our Own, Eternal?” Tomorrow, another observer may say, “the Bulgarians do not exist!” (Săbrani săčineniya 19: 154). The attitudes expressed in this exchange were rather typical. Creative writers like Vazov were usually aware of the paucity, even total absence of national cultural achievements, while academic archivists, philologists, and critics claimed that a precious heritage existed and ought to be revered, kept safe, and made subject of propaganda. Philologists had a positive professional attitude towards all texts collected, read, and interpreted: everything created was precious and valuable for it sustained their profession, which could not survive without it. Whether anything of national worth actually existed was secondary to the formal cultivation of a national heritage. The value of what was collected, stored, classified, revered, and interpreted by historians, philologists, and ethnographers was an a priori, assumed by virtue of sheer professional necessity.

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This assembling and revering of the cultural heritage was a European phenomenon. The Bulgarians just had to listen to the whisper coming from abroad: we have it all if we look for it, collect it, and revere it. The help from abroad came concretely when Vuk Karadžić published a Bulgarian folk song in his Narodna srbska pjesnarica (Serbian Folk Songs; 1815) and added twenty-seven others to it in the Dodatak (Supplement; 1822). The matter was taken up by the emerging Slavic scholars. Josef Šafárik’s book on the Slavic languages and literatures (Geschichte, 1826) dedicated three pages to Bulgarian literature. In the following decades, Bulgarian literature received international attention in articles, studies, and histories by Yuri Venelin, Šafárik, Ivan Sreznevski, A[leksandr Nikolaevich] Pypin, and P. A. Sirku. In turn, the first Bulgarian bibliographies and literary histories were addressed to the world rather than to the native audience. The import of philological models and works resulted in a corresponding export, which did not remain unnoticed. As Pypin, one of the first historians of the Slavic literatures, remarked in 1865: “The Bulgarians found out with patriotic complacency that the first monuments of Slavic Christendom belong to them” (qtd. in Petko Todorov, Slavyanite 36). The first such Bulgarian inventories were prepared under the direct guidance of foreign Slavists. Dimităr Mutev published in 1852 at Sreznevski’s request the first Bulgarian bibliography with thirty titles: Spisak na bălgarskite knigi na novozaraždaemata ce bălgarska pismenost v XIX vek (A List of Bulgarian Books of the Newly Born Bulgarian Letters in the Nineteenth Century). Šafárik, who instructed Bulgarian scholars, realized the significance of such lists. According to a comment he quoted in a letter to Václav Hanka from the journal Lumír: “such lists for other literatures may justly be called insignificant, but it is different in the case of the new Bulgarian letters: there they merit all our full attention […] if these young eager men succeed in presenting such a list to the public, they may help the newly emerging Bulgarian literature more than anything else could” (Korespondence 1: 148). Indeed, the inventory of valuable names was regarded as a sine qua non for creating the plot of literary history. Without such a list of authors and works the Bulgarian story could not unfold. Vasil Stoyanov’s first genuine account of Bulgarian literary history, “Literatura Bulharska,” appeared in Prague, together with the inventories and bibliographies that grew out of Šafárik’s bibliographical project. The heydays of the philologists came after the founding of the Bulgarian universities. The lecturers had to satisfy the demands of teaching, they had to supply new courses and curricula, textbooks, and chrestomathies (textbook anthologies); on a more general level, there was a need for streamlined academic disciplines based on clear-cut subjects. The very institution of philology was part of the newly emerged Bulgarian state and its cultural policy; the philologists had to produce, as an emergency matter, the first literary histories. They constructed academic literary canons prior to answering the questions posed by writers and critics whether “Bulgarian literature” was actually in place, and, if so, whether it had gained a stature and value that deserved its own history. The literary histories designed to meet the demands of the academic institutions were descriptive, concise (which often implied stupendous collecting and bibliographic research), and, at first glance, neutral in values. They followed nineteenth-century positivist models.

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Literary and National History A study of Balan’s work shows that university studies of literature and their textbooks were mighty agents in constructing a totalizing national and nationalist subject. National literature, the heritage, the sum of spiritual works, are constructions rather then given objects of philology. The construction of this institution and discourse lasted in Bulgaria roughly forty years, from 1880 until 1920. It successfully united the positivist discourse of textbooks on literary history and the institutional practices of literary and library scholarship, leading to the establishment of universities, faculties, university chairs, lecture courses, library collections, and inventories. The first units established in the Bulgarian National University (1888) were the humanities. Balan compiled the first textbook as part of his duty to provide a reader for the students. Until then, only poorly circulated, scant, and ineffective historic reviews of literature existed, which could not function as university handbooks for Bulgarian literature. They included Vazov’s and Konstantin Veličkov’s Kratăk istoričeski pregled (Brief Historical Review; 1884), Georgi D. Popov’s Kratăk istoričeski pregled (Brief Historical Review; 1886), and Dimităr Marinov’s Istoria na bălgarskata literatura (History of Bulgarian Literature; 1887). Balan’s method was imitated by Mosko Moskov in Istoria nа bălgarskata literatura (History of Bulgarian Literature; 1895), by D. Mirčev in Kratko rukovodstvo po bălgarska literatura (Short Manual of Bulgarian Literature; 1907), which Balan accused of plagiarism, A. Michailova’s Istoria na novobulgarskata literatura (History of New Bulgarian Literature; 1921), and Božan Angelov’s Bălgarskata literatura (Bulgarian Literature; 1923), which was a revised and expanded translation of a Russian text. The end of the positivist period in Bulgarian literary studies coincided with the establishment and stabilizing of the national universities and libraries. Bibliographies and inventories of the nineteenth-century Bulgarian classics had been produced since the 1850s. In late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they already served the developing National Library. Two other large libraries were set up, in Plovdiv and at the University of Sofia. A law of 1897 decreed that all books published in the country should be deposited in the People’s [National] Library. The Education Act of 1909 gave a more comprehensive task to the national libraries and demanded higher qualifications from the library staff (Manafova 104–105). Balan’s mentioned inventory was followed by two similar works. We shall focus now on the rhetorical strategies, and show how the Bulgarian textbooks modified the major clichés and tropes of the mentioned “classic discourse.” The historical rhetoric of Balan’s Manual and his foreword to the bulky Opis na izdaniyata (Inventory of Publications; 1906) deserve special attention. Balan provided for the Manual, the first Bulgarian university textbook, an authoritative international Slavist and philological framework. Securing thus institutional authority, the Manual hid Balan’s lofty but hackneyed metaphors behind established positivist terms. His metaphors almost disappeared, turned into “catachreses” in the positivist discourse. But their literal meanings clearly show that the age of philologism (coinciding with the age of bourgeois ethos) described literature in terms of the classic capitalist notions of labor, producer, product, wealth, and storage. The metaphors of Balan’s literary discourse, variants of these capitalist terms, presented the cultural enterprise of the Bulgarian spirit as creation, works to be possessed, and spiritual products. Behind these conventional tropes of the day, we can recognize a facet of the romantic

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ideology that involves another modality: non-empirical time. Through the prism of the classics discourse the writer is not merely a producer but Author, Genius, and Divine Creator; the spiritual labor of Creation results in a Work, a Masterpiece, an imitation of God’s creation. Deposits, banks, and wealth turn thereby into priceless golden stocks, invaluable treasures, and immortal contributions. Next to the rhetoric of literary “science,” Balan readily adopted also an inflated romantic language. In his philology, literature articulates a double rhetoric, wavering between the capitalist material world (he coined the neologism tvorba: creation or work) and the romantic vision of the classics. As the subtitle of Balan’s bibliographic inventory shows, literature was for him a scattered multitude of books, brochures, newspapers, magazines, atlases, charters, notes, and images, yet it was for him also a quasi-metaphysical entity, a unified Literature and Book, a sublime manifestation of the Bulgarian spirit. The logocentric metaphors of unity and presence, essence, invisibly and spiritual origin, govern and totalize the multitude of divergent genres. The philological story of literature unfolds as a narrative of controversy and transgression that recounts literature’s fate and progress. Like Ulysses who visited the world beyond and returned, literature is a multitude of facts but also a manifestation of national spiritual unity. At times it finds itself in the empirical world, at other times it epitomizes the inexplicable essence, the metaphysical depths of the national spirit. This double valorizing reproduces modern national society’s logical and institutional contradictions. Literature assists in regulating profound contradictions between community and the individual, Self and Other, history and eternity, the phenomena and essence, daily life and history, aggression and culture. Following the textbook tradition, Balan’s “scripture” implements such symbolic regulations when telling how Bulgarian literature was born and how it evolved. This narrative brings together what is incompatible, fitting heterogeneous cultural complexes into its framework. Once absorbed into the narrative, the variances diminish and all parts become elements of an evolving national literature. Balan, the diligent collector, recognizes on the empirical level the specificity of all the books, brochures, newspapers, and other publications, yet once inserted into his literary history they all become manifestations of the national spirit. In retrospect, within history, they prove equivalent and united, they fit the evolution and its periods (Stefanov 26). National literature gains coherence when it homogenizes the heterogeneous cultural complexes and the fluctuations of time. As Boyko Penčev has shown in “Cares over a Delivery,” such histories paper over the gaps and discontinuities. Plot acquires compactness and temporal continuity, it homogenizes literary facts, delineates a line of progress, and injects meaning into the heterogeneous literary past from the ideal horizon of a bright future. This process merges folklore into literature, though Balan knows that the cultural and communicative function of folklore is very different from that of modern literature. He understands that oral literature as verbal art does not produce works (i.e., decontextualized written artifacts), for manifestations of a verbal culture “exist in the living and changeable speech of the people,” they pass “from mouth to mouth, are forwarded from generation to generation, and never stop changing” (Bălgarska literatura 7). Yet Balan classifies folklore and letters under the joint category of “spiritual works,” disregarding that “verbal literature” is an oxymoron. Literary history provides for Balan a rhetorical bridge between orality and written literature. The spoken word is the first culture of a folk; letters appear in culture’s later phases. Everything fits into a coherent teleological progression from nature to culture, from a first expression to a later one. The quasi-metaphysical

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folk manifests, expresses, proclaims, asserts, and invents itself in new ways. Individual creation belongs to a later evolutionary stage. This plot of literary history and the grand narrative of the emerging nation do not function in the same way. The two narratives are closely related yet different. Literary history, unlike national history, is not supposed to unfold in historic time but rather dialectically reconstitute its linear and open flow into a “confluence of all epochs,” a “modern antiquity” or, indeed, into Balan’s “sum of spiritual works.” The logocentric metaphors of literary discourse carry the metaphysics of presence, they want to illuminate and make evident a national essence. This is well illustrated in a passage from Ivan Radoslavov’s Bulgarian literary history (1935). The discourse of the classics performs here, too, its subversive romantic operations: as a good successor of Balan, Radoslavov also evokes the authority of academic philology. Once more, literary history paradoxically elevates the past by integrating it with a radiant present and future: Bulgaria’s future word is hidden in [literary history] […] it penetrates the dark forests of the past, it is the torch that shines light on the destiny of a tribe. By means of it we take stock of what we have done, assess the present day, set out the goals of the future. The legacy of the predecessors who have built and created rests in the letters, as in a sacred tabernacle. Without literature, there is no continuity. (7)

In the rhetoric of this discourse, literature hides and discloses the truth of national being. In historiographical and political history, in political and ideological texts, the folk sets itself free, proves itself, gains independence, commits heroic exploits, and rises or falls. But in literary history temporality is repeatedly transcended by the ideal time of the classics, within which the folk expresses its spirit. Though it incorporates a certain historical progress, historical events are secondary from the perspective of the classics: the manifestations of the national spirit are fixed and durable treasures, fruits, and jewels. Literary history evokes both the phenomena and the essence, but in the end it transcends political history and the overall empirical time flow of modernity. In practice, both histories legitimate the national: university textbooks complement the modern historical narrative and the project of progress with a quaint mundane metaphysics that occasionally assumes compensatory functions. Radoslavov’s narrative of Literature and Spirit carries out such compensatory and therapeutic tasks. As a member of a generation traumatized by Bulgaria’s heavy military defeats in the struggle for the “national ideal” during the Balkan Wars and World War I, he wanted to turn the unheroic narrative into a heroic one. The actual defeats in the nation’s political and military history were unimportant because in his mind the national destiny was played out in terms of creative agonies on an ideal field, not on the battle ground: What reminds us still of the once raging elements of destruction? Of the Attilas and the Tamerlanes? The desert storms and winds have scattered the dust of the great empires […]. Woe to the nation whose iron muscles and manly virtues have been dedicated solely to violence and the dark predatory instincts! (5–6)

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In seeking authority, the literary narrative thus associates the heroic fight for national freedom with destruction and barbarism. By means of a rhetorical reversal, Radoslavov redefines the meaning of wars, battles, and defeats; “fight,” the central ideologem of every narrative of emancipation, acquires a new meaning: Only fight on the battlefield of the Spirit gives the fallen victims power and honor […]. We had already our Austerlitz and Waterloo. The Bulgarian nation anticipates the revelation of its spirit and the discovery of its prophet […]. Let us create! Bring about spiritual acts! Here is an ideal for our time and also for generations to come. (6)

The creative, literary revelation of the national spirit is to become thus a substitute for the politico-national grand narrative, replacing the self-destructive acts of war on the battlefields. But the creative acts can at times revert, and convert the plot into a national rhetoric. The distance between the literary and the national narratives remains narrow; since their rhetorical energies can be exchanged, their combination becomes a reliable tool for legitimating the nation.

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Pitfalls in Writing a Regional Literary History of East-Central Europe Endre Bojtár Comparative literary historiography has produced until now a rather meager harvest in the region. Before briefly surveying the little that has been published, it may be worthwhile to ask what the reasons for this shortcoming may be, and even to raise (somewhat sacrilegiously) some fundamental doubts about the feasibility of the genre. This may be useful even if the two introductory essays in volume 1 of this History (by Marcel Cornis-Pope/John Neubauer and Paul Robert Magocsi) have largely done this and I have only to complement their arguments with somewhat different accents. Doubts about a comparative literary history of the region have three sources. The first, theoretical one, pertains also to national literary histories. It is this doubt that led René Wellek to speak even of “The Fall of Literary History” (1973). Literary historiography does not enhance our understanding of literature because it places its accent on history: strictly speaking and pointedly formulated, literary history is not a scholarly discipline of literature but a servant of history writing. With the weakening of the teleologies that used to guide the pen of literary historians, namely the national idea, and, subsequently, the idea of an ideal socialist-communist society, Wellek’s doomsday prophecy has become ever more timely. National literary histories seem to have become impossible and even the very idea of national literatures seems to be fading. As Ákos Szilágyi observes with respect to Hungarian literature, it exists by now only in the plural, because “the outdated national literatures are replaced with individual literatures that are formally on equal footing” (2).

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The history of reception, the remedy that Hans Robert Jauss’s reception aesthetics offers, may perhaps help somehow national literary histories (although I know of no literary history that is based on reception theory) but it is of no help in the case of comparative literature, which encompasses only the singular effect of individual works and artists on other works, writers, and literatures — effects that do not constitute a continuous process. All the problems and failures of (comparative) literary history are in the end due to the fact that the essential objects of literary study are individual artistic works and the experiences they give rise to, but these have no history. An unbridgeable gulf separates the literary work from all historical generalizations about literature. As Arnold Hauser writes: Artistic styles, achievements, and personalities are, as all historical phenomena, unique. What remains permanent in them or repeats itself belongs to those of their features that are historically least interesting and relevant. Typologically similar constellations do arise in the course of history, but none that are completely identical with each other. Accordingly, one can speak, at best, only of a more or less imprecise generalizing typology of artistic phenomena, which, however, never does justice to the fine branching of the true development. (355)

Furthermore, the higher the generalization (the more literatures we compare), the thinner the conclusions about their common features will be. They will perhaps be useful in enabling neighboring countries to live in peace with each other, but, however important and commendable this may be, it will not, let us admit, be a contribution to literary aesthetics but rather a study in literature’s external context. As the two editors of this History admit, the “primary inspiration for our project is an ethical imperative,” to move “a transnational public towards morally and politically desirable consensus” (ECE 1: 15) A second doubt concerning regional syntheses relates to the impossibility of unequivocally defining a region. As the geographer Heinrich Schmitthener wrote, geographical regions are like historical periods, for it is impossible to find a single principle that would objectively divide them (195 and 200); his geographer colleague Magocsi agrees: “geographic features do not isolate EastCentral Europe” (ECE 1: 19). This does not mean that our concepts of regions are mere fancy, it only implies that regions or civilizations depend on the perspective taken (Veyne 58). Those who rely on arguments from the sciences (based on geology, topography, climate, flora, etc.) and insist on the objectivity of facts, may easily arrive at a rejection of various historical generalizations. László Péter, a historian in London, writes, for instance: Central Europe, which does not exist in any form in the present and is unlikely to come to life in the future, does not seem to have a past either. The claim that it existed once upon a time dissolves on closer examination. Believers in the Central European idea rather arbitrarily select from a large number of possible borders a single frontier and read a regional identity into the past. Perhaps the idea has run its natural course. Perhaps, having lost its genuine political function, it will subside (as it did twice on earlier occasions). Ideas, of course, never completely disappear, and it is unlikely that Central Europe ever will. As a ghost it may have lingered on long enough, however, to induce historians to allow it to rest. (111)

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Zoran Konstantinović and Fridrun Rinner come (obviously unintentionally) close to this when in their Eine Literaturgeschichte Mitteleuropas (A Literary History of Central Europe; 2003) they define Central Europe as a “cultural concept, whose development can be objectively verified (9). “Objective” is an empty word here, for everything can be verified, supported with facts, and this way we can arrive at best only at the wisdom “everything is relative.” The true objectivity of “intentional objects” (the intentionale Gegenstände of the phenomenologists), for instance of literary works or national and comparative literary histories, can be guaranteed only by an openly assumed and confessed subjectivity, not by the objectivity of facts. Depending on the historian’s subjective perspective, the East-European region may include Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Albania, Greece, as well as Finland, the Baltic countries, Russia, the Ukraine, or White Russia. Our Department, which has been in existence since 1986 within the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (to my knowledge the only place where institutionally organized comparative research is carried out on the region’s literature), has for these reasons chosen the purely pragmatic term “Central and Eastern Europe,” which is not based on any grandiose a priori idea. Everything from Germany/Austria to Russia, from Finland to Greece, can be fitted into it, depending on the given researcher, the concrete topic, and the period. The volumes published by Magdolna Balogh and Tamás Berkes, some in cooperation with other members of the Institute, give their conceptual vagueness notwithstanding a general curve for the literary history of the Central and East European region, and have actually been used as textbooks in universities. A further complicating factor is that the region’s culture, especially its “elite” culture, is mostly Western, while its political-economic structure and general “life” is Eastern. This is why economic historians, who privilege the “base,” include the largest part of the region in Eastern Europe, while the humanists, who observe the superstructure, regard it with equal justification as part of the West. As the excellent historian Pál Engel wrote with quite a bit of (self)irony: typical for Central Europe is that the region “lies mostly in Eastern Europe but would prefer lying in Western Europe” (108). A very general survey of the region’s definition by historians (and by the literary historians that rely on them) shows that the region was originally split into East and West, or, in the bureaucratic language of the Monarchy, into “Zisleithania” and “Transleithania” (meaning East and West of the Leitha river). In these definitions Western Europe was usually synonymous with Europe as a whole. This is what Klemens Metternich meant with his famous remark: “Asia begins at the end of the Landstrasse” — which rhymes with Tomas Venclova’s bon mot from the 1980s: “In Eastern Europe, that is in Western Asia.” Jakob Bleyer, professor in Cluj/Kolozsvár and subsequently in Budapest, developed in the early years of the twentieth century the extreme Wiener Tor theory that every cultural/literary development originates in German culture and slides down along a West/ East decline (kulturelles Gefälle), arriving in Eastern Europe via the filter of Vienna (Vajda, Wien 20–21). I believe this is true if we generally substitute West for Germany. The bipartite division continued throughout the cold war and survived even the collapse of the Berlin Wall, since the 1989–91 change of power meant that the Germans and Austrians “permanently” joined the West, while the Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Belarus the East. Many of Samuel Huntington’s followers believe that the civilization border moved to the East, now cutting into half the mid-Europe that lies between the Germans and the Russians, even disregarding

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national and ethnic boundaries. Some believe that Western Europe no longer ends at the Leitha, but, dividing Hungary, at the Danube (which would mean that Hungary’s trans-Danubian territory belongs to the East); others draw the line within Romania (Transylvania and the Banat belonging to Central Europe, the rest of Romania to the Balkans). Since all definitions and demarcations of the region (Mitteleuropa, Zwischeneuropa, Südosteuropa, East-Central Europe, Central-Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Europe, etc) include Hungary, it is perhaps not surprising that the problem has been most widely discussed there. Éva Ring has compiled a full anthology of twentieth-century views; Ferenc L. Lendvai’s monograph treats the issue from the beginning to the early 1990s. Two articles by Csaba Dupcsik offer good contemporary summaries. János Mátyás Kovács’s article, “Westerweiterung: Zur Metamorphose des Traums von Mitteleuropa” (Expanding the West: On the Metamorphosis of the Mitteleuropa Dream), places the concept in the context of globalization and the expansion of the European Union; he suggests that literary scholars had resuscitated the term before it became adopted by writers in the 1980s (see ECE 1: 5). The discussions reveal that it was not history that gave meaning to the concept but rather the political interests of the day, which were more often than not determined by the great powers outside the region. Witness the only definition that does not include Hungary, the Europe Centrale concept invented by the French in the early 1920s and propagated by a weekly published under that name by the government of Czechoslovakia, which included only the countries of the Little Antant (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia) with the argument that the Hungarians were merely a servant nation (Hilfsvolk) of the Germans (actually of the Prussians). The concept continues to have a political coloring. “Central Europe” was revived in the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian intelligentsia in the 1970s and 80s in a version cleansed of Germans and, above all, of Russians. But this notion, which had an obviously anti-Russian edge, lost its attraction after the turnover, when it was felt “we are back in Europe” (read Western Europe). Today, the most eager Central Europeans are those who have been relegated to the margin by the center, namely the European Union. In Vilnius, Almis Grybauskas has been editing since 1998 a yearbook in Lithuanian with the title Vidurio Europa (Central Europe). The first issue reveals that Central Europe includes (or should include) not only the Lithuanians (whose most important historical legitimation is that the Jagello house, which also produced Polish, Czech, and Hungarian kings, was of Lithuanian origin), but also the Latvians and the Belarus, who live under terrible circumstances. The Romanians represent another example. Until quite recently, they were typically aloof and unwilling to cooperate even with the Hungarians, the other non-Slav people of the region, by claiming, on linguistic grounds, to be the advanced troops of the French and of the civilized West. But in the mid 1990s Adriana Babeţi and Cornel Ungureanu have started the A treia Europa (Third Europe) foundation and a yearbook with the same title to propagate in Romania the idea of Central Europe. The third problem of a regional comparatism is practical: it concerns the lack of experts. Only few (literary) historians exist with first-hand knowledge of more than one of the region’s literatures. The main source of the trouble is a world-wide shortage in training experts. The Central European University in Budapest, which has otherwise fulfilled a pioneering role in postgraduate education, has, for instance, been unable to establish a chair for comparative literature, and its program in art history has withered. Merely one volume emerged, The Comparable and the Incomparable (1996), edited by Endre Bojtár.

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In view of all this, it is not surprising that there are few comprehensive treatments of the subject. I shall disregard the general histories, of which Lonnie R. Johnson gives a good recent summary in Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (1996), although he includes the Orthodox countries in Central Europe and, contrary to his own classification, excludes the three Baltic countries from it. Josef Macůrek’s unjustly forgotten excellent book Dějepisectví evropského východu (Historiography of the European East; 1946) has to be mentioned, because it contains a serious conception of cultural history and a rich bibliography. I know only of three publications that attempt to cover the whole literary history of the region from the beginnings to the author’s days. The first is Die osteuropäischen Literaturen in ihren Hauptströmungen vergleichend dargestellt (The Main Currents of the East-European Literatures in Comparative Presentation; 1911) by Karl Dieterich, a Byzantologist in Leipzig, who foregrounded the ideology of the German Reich. Because of his inadequate linguistic knowledge he had to rely on secondary sources, probably taking most of his data from the series Die Litteraturen des Ostens in Einzeldarstellungen, which contains separate East-European literary histories by various authors (see p. 353 above). The second overview is László Gáldi’s incomplete sketch from 1947. Incomparably more ambitious is Konstantinović’s and Rinner’s mentioned literary history of Central Europe, which is based on several decades of research and deserves our full recognition. This, as the authors claim, first attempt to write a coherent literary history of Mitteleuropa (11), is, perhaps necessarily, unsuccessful. It is a parallel presentation of a few national literatures from antiquity down to our days that disregards the question whether these had concrete connections among and effects on one another. Some of these parallels, selected by means of eclectic criteria (writers, works, style periods, historical events), make sense, but others remind us of René Etiemble’s pun: comparaison n’est pas raison (roughly: “comparison does not lead anywhere” or “comparison has no rationale”). We are offered bird’s-eye views that contain black patches. Due to linguistic and other limitations, the authors had to treat Hungarian literature, for instance, by relying on arbitrarily chosen secondary literature. Romanian, Ukrainian, and Belarus literature are barely mentioned (the latter two perhaps because they are not considered to belong to Mitteleuropa), and the three Baltic literatures are excluded, as if they did not exist. Nevertheless, I wish to emphasize that the book’s pioneering virtues overshadow all its shortcomings. A few periodic publications in three major languages need to be mentioned also as potential materials for future (unattainable?) syntheses of the region’s culture. Hugo Meltzl, professor at the university of Kolozsvár/Cluj, edited between 1877 and 1888 the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, a journal that used for the first time “comparative” in its title, and published articles in about twenty languages (Vajda “Acta Comparationis”). The Archivum Europae Centro-Orientalis appeared between 1935 and 1944 in Budapest, and Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture, edited from 1983 to the mid-1990s by Ladislav Matejka in the US, is a veritable treasure chest for the region’s cultural history, especially in the modern period. We need to discuss also studies that do not cover all the literatures of the region, only subgroups of it from a particular angle. Slavic literary studies often adopted a linguistic point of view, and tried to square the circle. As Werner Krauss wrote: Linguistics could brilliantly demonstrate the inner relationship within the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, but its dominance led, in truth, to the fabrication of corresponding literary

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The view that Krauss criticizes would logically lead to positing Finno-Ugric, Romance, Slavic, Germanic and other folklore, mythology, and even literature. But it is highly questionable whether other forms of culture can be parasitic upon, or, to put it more gently, could share the existence and continuity of language. Is a postulated common Ursprache a sufficiently solid bond to sustain the unity of other forms of culture over thousands of years, even long after the disintegration of their societies? From a comparative point of view it is much more fruitful to assume that geographically distant societies on the same level of development necessarily construct similar ideological systems that do not necessarily have common origins. This is what moved Károly Kerényi to write that “comparative examinations of mythological material must accept as an axiom that language relatedness should not be presumed between peoples whose mythologies are being compared, neither should similarities in mythology lead us to such conclusions” (18). Criticizing his old friend Roman Jakobson, who presumed that a common Slavic folklore and a common Slavic Ursprache brought about something like a common Slavic literature, Dmitrij Čiževskij questioned the “internationalism” of folklore research that covered a whole language family: The commonality of folkloric pre-conditions connects not only the Slavs, but goes far beyond the borders of the families of Slavic peoples, and the intertwining threads lead not only to other IndoGermanic peoples, but also the neighbors of the Slavs with completely different origins and languages, and even further to almost all the peoples of the world. Excellent examples can be taken from every work in the field of comparative research of tales and myths. (“Einige Probleme” 2)

To be sure, the Slavic literary relations are not limited to such linguistic and ideological (e.g., pan-Slav) perspectives; easier comprehension of each other and translatability resulted in frequent interrelations and mutual enrichment. Čiževskij’s comparative history of the Slavic literatures (1968) is still the best treatment of the topic. How misleading the linguistic relations can be is immediately evident if we compare the three Baltic literatures. The Latvian and the Lithuanian languages jointly form the Baltic language group, but Latvian literature is much closer to the literature of the Finno-Ugric Estonian language (both belonged to the north-German cultural sphere) than to the Lithuanian one, which was influenced more by the Central- and East-European Polish literature (Bojtár Foreword 233–66). Hence overviews of literary history that mix the principle of linguistic relation with that of geography are not Balt but baltistic. In Giacomo Devoto’s volume, Storia delle letterature baltiche (History of the Baltic Literatures; 1963), the articles of Ants Oras (Estonian), Ernests Blese (Latvian), and Alfred Senn (Lithuanian) merely give separate literary histories, while Radegast Parolek’s Srovnávací dějiny baltických literatur (Comparative History of the Baltic Literatures; 1978) and Friedrich Scholz’s Die Literaturen des Baltikums: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung (The Literatures of the Baltics: Their Origin and Development; 1990) have merely listed parallel lexical data for the three literatures, according to traditional notions of trends and periods (whereby, curiously, the editor adopted a Soviet value system). The yearbook Balto-slavyanskie issledovaniya, published in

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Moscow from 1974 to the mid-1990s, was primarily a forum for Slavic and Baltic linguistics, but offers much valuable material on cultural history, especially in studies by Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov. National-political questions play a role in dividing the region into subunits. Cultures that coexist for a longer time in the same state or political system will obviously develop common features. Claudio Magris, Carl E. Schorske, and others are probably right to claim that something like a common Habsburg-Monarchy culture existed. This is more evident in the arts that depend on the state (architecture, public sculptures, etc). In literature, it manifested itself partly in the enormous and decisive effect that the great German tradition exerted on the “minor” literatures of the empire, pushing the vernacular literatures in the background, partly in the pool of themes, topoi, genres, and styles that writers, mostly unknown to each other, had shared. Sometimes we come across surprising similarities and parallels. The old Ferenc Herczeg, for instance, gave the following satirical image of the Monarchy’s generals in Újvidék (Novi Sad): General T-y, possessor of the Monarchy’s most martial moustache, marched daily with a carbine into the pastry shop, and he kept his gun, loaded with five bullets, readily available while sullenly drinking his coffee with whipped-cream, in case the waitresses start an offensive […] The other general, whom they dug up from retirement when the war was declared, served his Kaiser by hanging around on the street unseen, and jumping unto the scene with a thunder when he discovered an irregularity on a military uniform […] for instance, he severely chastized for not wearing gloves a badly wounded captain of the artillery, who was carried by his soldiers on their shoulders back over the Száva river (Emlékezései 28–29)

This reminds us of the panopticum of Monarchy officers in Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk, even if the two authors were totally different. Witness the following passage: Colonel Kraus was known among the officers for his passion for halting people. He regarded saluting as something on which the success of the war depended and on which the whole power of the army was built. “A soldier must put his soul into his salute,” he used to say. It was the finest kind of corporal’s mysticism. He saw to it that those who saluted did so according to the smaller niceties of the instructions, accurately and with dignity. He lay in wait for all who passed him, from infantryman up to lieutenant-colonel. If any infantryman saluted casually as though when he touched his cap he were saying “God bless” the colonel took him straight off to the barracks for punishment. For him it was no excuse to say: “I did not see you, sir.” “A soldier,” he used to say, “must pick out his superior officer in a crowd and think of nothing else but carrying out the duties which are prescribed in service orders. When he falls on the battlefield he must salute before he dies. Anybody who doesn’t know how to salute, pretends he doesn’t see me, or salutes casually I regard as vermin.” (204)

If we add to this the image of the Habsburg Monarchy as Kakania in Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften, especially the figure of Stumm von Bordwehr, we have assembled a neat typology

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of Monarchy literature — or history. The example also shows that there are no inherently comparatist subjects, that everything can be set in parallel with everything else. Comparisons are set by the historian, and their degree of reliability and insight are determined by the quality of the results. At the Eastern end, the literatures of the so called European socialist countries constituted some kind of community that was forced upon them by their states. But a gradual shift came about. Its beginning may be dated with the 1962 ICLA conference in Budapest on the literatures of Eastern Europe, which first broke through the iron curtain separating Western and Eastern literary scholarships (see Sőtér et al. for some still useful conference material). The Soviet volumes on the East-European literary community were constructed in terms of parallel articles that introduced the individual national literatures and, occasionally, added to them introductory generalizations. Such was the case with Hudozhestvennaya forma v literaturakh socialisticheskikh stran (Artistic Form in the Literature of the Socialist Countries; 1969), Literatura evropejskih stran socialisticheskogo sodruzhestva (The Literature of the European Countries of the Friendly Socialist Community; 1983), and the Istoricheskiy roman v literaturakh socialisticheskikh stran Evropy (The Historical Novel in the Literature of Europe’s Socialist Countries; 1989), edited by Pavel Maksimovich Toper and Natalia Borisovna Yakovleva. Dionýz Ďurišin’s highly selective ideological volume introducing “socialist comparative literature” (1986) is constructed in the same manner. The frankly ideological concept of “socialist literatures” was later replaced by the more camouflaged term “Eastern Europe.” For a while it seemed that this shift was marked in the Soviet union by a change to the designation “Central- and Southeastern Europe,” but recent Russian studies, for instance Victor Horev’s Istorija literatur Vostochnoj Evropi posle vtoroj mirovoj vojni: 1945/1980 (History of East-European Literature after World War II, 1945–1980) reverted to “Eastern Europe.” The changes in labeling reflected institutional reorganizations. The “Institute for Slavic Studies” of Soviet Union’s Academy was renamed in 1968 the “Institute for Slavic and Balkan Studies” and became the home also for studying the Albanian, Greek, Hungarian, and Romanian cultures. The Institute was rebaptized in 1998 to “Slavic Studies,” but the study of these cultures remained an independent subunit labeled “Central and Southeastern Europe.” Similar changes occurred in other countries of the former Soviet bloc: the political implications of the term “Central Europe” made it first fashionable, but meanwhile the more neutral “Central and Eastern Europe” has gained terrain. The transition is evident in László Sziklay’s cautious title, “East of Europe.” I myself have used Eastern Europe in my short book East European Avant-garde Literature (Hungarian original 1977), but in my 1986 book on the Enlightenment and Romanticism I switched to “Central and Eastern Europe,” as did my colleagues and students at my Institute, Magdolna Balogh, Tamás Berkes, and Péter Krasztev. Finally, we have to mention yet another possible sub-region, the Balkans, which recently moved into the foreground of discussion through Maria Todorova’s book about it (1997). John Neubauer has persuasively questioned in “The Idea of Europe” Todorova’s confrontation of “Balkan” with “Central Europe” or “East-Central Europe,” but in a more recent overview, “Historische Vermächtnisse,” she allows for the use of South-Eastern Europe as a more neutral equivalent of Balkan. Of course, as soon as we talk about a Balkan culture we realize how amorphous the concept is. What literatures, for instance, belong to it? Obviously the Serbian. The Croatian? After all, it has, for a while, been written in the same language. Going a step further, should we include in it

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all the literatures that were written in the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo and the Hungarian of the Voivodina? Is Danilo Kiš also a Balkan writer? Although he wrote mostly in the Serbian language, he was a spiritual kin of Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Péter Esterházy. Evidently, Balkan or South-Eastern Europe raise the same questions of categorization, classification, and invention as historical forms of literature, for instance the Jewish literature that was written in Yiddish, Hebrew, or national vernaculars, or the neo-Latin literature that flourished until well into the nineteenth century. Such questions and doubts emerge because the people who had lived and live here, and perhaps most the literary works about them, possess a multiple identity. However we call the 1945–89 community of the region (Central Europe, Eastern Europe, socialist countries, etc.), and however much that region functioned as a concentration camp or a jail, its passing also brought losses. The culture was also able to generate common values, at times in resisting the official cultural policies at others in exploiting the slogans that glorified “the community of the people building socialism.” The jail offered an opportunity to get to know the inmates better. After the fall of communism, it is as if all of them had happily gone home and secluded themselves in their humble abodes (if they had one — if not, they devoted their energies to building one). Meanwhile, the common experiences have evaporated almost overnight, which makes the new structures invented by the European Union empty, bereft of cultural content. The most important and urgent task, the ethical imperative, for all of us would be to fill this void — against all the obstacles listed above. The geopolitical situation is more advantageous than it has been for a very long time. Only the ubiquitous reawakening of a self-destructive nationalism could block the overcoming, or at least the diminishing, of what István Bibó had called the “misery of the small Eastern European states.”

WORKS CITED Note on Documentation and Translation

We give the full original title for all works mentioned in the text, 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. The list of 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 East-Central European 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 and available, by the original date of publication, followed by the place, the publisher, and the year of publication of the edition used in our volume. Where needed, we list both the original and a translation. References in the text are always documented to the edition listed first. We have made no systematic effort to find all existing translations. 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 for 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,

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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. Collective volumes without an editor Listed alphabetically under the original title. Transliteration We have continued to use the standard transliteration for Serbian, but with Bulgarian we have switched from the system we have used in our first two volumes to a more authentic and representative spelling that uses č (for “ch”), š (“sh”), and ž (for “zh”). Place-Names With a few exceptions, we list place-names according to the language and spelling of the publication. Our short Gazetteer translates these to the name used in the country where they are now located. Publishers We have standardized the name of a publisher according to current practices if it appears under different names and in different languages (e.g., “Buda: Royal UP”). We have also eliminated from the publisher’s name the initials and first name, as well as words meaning “publisher” or “press,” except for cases where this would have necessitated a major reorganization of the reference. Plays Principally listed according to their publication. Where sensible and available, we also list the date and place of the first night’s performance. 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.

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Operas Listed under the composer’s name, and, wherever we could ascertain, with the date and place of the first night’s performance. Other considerations 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). Unless stated otherwise, translations in this volume are provided by the authors of the individual articles. The editors have made sure these translations are consistent across the range of articles.

Works Cited

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Appendix

List of Contributors to Volume 3

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, Professor, Slavic Languages & Literature, University of Toronto, Canada Epp Annus, Under & Tuglas Literary Center, Estonian Academy of Science, Tallinn, Estonia Nikola Batušić, Professor Emeritus of Theater Studies, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia László Bérczes, stage director, dramaturg, editor, and teacher at the Bárka Theater, Budapest, Hungary Tamás Berkes, Senior Researcher, Institute of Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary Endre Bojtár, Professor and Department Head, Institute of Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary Włodimierz Bolecki, Professor, Institute of Literary Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Tomislav Brlek, Junior Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Zagreb, Croatia Marcel Cornis-Pope, Professor of English and Director of Media, Art, and Text Ph.D. Program, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA Jan Čulík, Senior Lecturer, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Glasgow University, United Kingdom Robert Elsie, freelance scholar and translator, Olzheim, Germany Luule Epner, Professor of Theater Research and Literary Theory, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Dorota Fox, Lecturer, Division of Theater Studies Knowledge, Institute of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Philology, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, Culture, Philosophy and Arts Research Institute, Vilnius Lithuania Otilia Hedeşan, Professor, Department of Romanian Literature, Western University, Timişoara, Romania Albena Hranova, Associate Professor, Department of Bulgarian Literature, Plovdiv University, Plovdiv, Bulgaria Ondřej Hučín, Dramaturg, J. K. Tyl Theater, Pilzen, Czech Republic Zoltán Imre, Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Nenad Ivić, Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

492

List of Contributors to Volume 3

Jolanta Jastrzębska, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, The Netherlands Karl E. Jirgens, Associate Professor and Head, Department of English Language, Literature & Creative Writing, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada Aleksandra Jovićević, School of Drama, University of the Arts, Belgrade, Serbia Violeta Kelertas, Associate Professor, Endowed Chair of Lithuanian Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Alexander Kiossev, Professor of History of Culture, Department for Cultural Studies, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Dragan Klaić, independent theater scholar and cultural analyst. Permanent Fellow of Felix Meritis, Amsterdam; teaches arts and cultural policy at Leiden University Lado Kralj, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Kees Mercks, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Agita Misāne, Research Associate, Latvian Academy of Sciences, Riga, Latvia John Neubauer, Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Inna Peleva, Associate Professor, Department of Theory and History of Literature, University of Plovdiv, Plovdiv, Bulgaria Sibila Petlevski, Associate Professor, Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia Marian Popescu, Professor of Theater, University of Sibiu, Romania Robert Pynsent, Professor, School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London, United Kingdom Jaak Rähesoo, free-lance critic and translator, Tallinn, Estonia Dagmar Roberts, Assistant Professor, Department of Slovak Literature and Literary Studies, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia Banuta Rubess, Free-lance writer and director, Riga, Latvia Violetta Sajkiewicz, Lecturer, Division of Theater Studies Knowledge, Institute of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Philology, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland 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 Joanna Minkova Spassova-Dikova, Associated Professor, Theory and History of Theatre, Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria Monica Spiridon, Professor and Director, Center for Communication Studies, University of Bucharest, Romania Michael Steinlauf, Associate Professor of History, Gratz College, Melrose Park, PA, USA Neil Stewart, Assistant Professor, Slavic Department, University of Bonn, Germany Jolanta Natalia Sujecka, Professor, Center for Studies on the Classical Tradition in Poland and East-Central Europe, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland

List of Contributors to Volume 3

493

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Professor, Central-Eurasian Studies and Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA; Professor of Comparative Literature, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary József Szili, Professor Emeritus, Miskolc University, Miskolc-Egyetemváros, Miskolc, Hungary Jüri Talvet, Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Eleonora Udalska, Professor Emeritus, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland Kersti Unt, Lecturer, Estonian Literature, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Ülo Valk, Professor of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Libor Vodička, Lecturer, Department of Theater, University of Brno, Brno, The Czech Republic Vilmos Voigt, Professor of Folklore, Director of Institute of Ethnography, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Ewa Wąchocka, Professor, Head, Division of Theater Studies Knowledge, Institute of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Philology, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland

Table of contents, Volume I

Table of Contents

vi

Editors’ Preface

xi

Preface by the General Editor of the Literary History Project

xiii

Note on Documentation and Translation

xvii

In Preparation

xix

Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, “General Introduction”

1

Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Geography of East-Central Europe”

19

PART I Nodes of political time Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Introduction 1. 1989 Marcel Cornis-Pope, “From Resistance to Reformulation” Włodimierz Bolecki, “1989 in Poland: Continuity and Caesura” Epp Annus and Robert Hughes, “Reversals of the Postmodern and the Late Soviet Simulacrum in the Baltic Countries — with Exemplifications from Estonian Literature” Monica Spiridon, “Models of Literary and Cultural Identity on the Margins of (Post)Modernity: the Case of pre–1989 Romania” Péter Krasztev, “Quoting Instead of Living: Postmodern Literature before and after the Changes in East-Central Europe” 2.

3.

33 39 39 51 54 65 70

1956/1968 Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer with Jolanta Jastrzębska, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Svetlana Slapšak, and Alfred Thomas, “Revolt, Suppression, and Liberalization in Post-Stalinist East-Central Europe

83

1948 Tomislav Z. Longinović, Dagmar Roberts, Tomas Venclova, John Neubauer, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Introduction: The Culture of Revolutionary Terror” Letiţia Guran and Alexandru Ştefan, “Romanian Literature under Stalinism” Renata Jambrešić Kirin, “The Retraumatization of the 1948 Communist Purges in Yugoslav Literary Culture”

107

83

107 112 124

Table of contents, Volume I

496

Alexander Kiossev, with Boyko Penchev, “Heritage and Inheritors: the Literary Canon in Totalitarian Bulgaria” 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

1945 John Neubauer with Marcel Cornis Pope, Mieczysław Dąbrowski, George Grabowicz, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Svetlana Slapšak, Guido Snel, Marcena Sokolowska-Paryż, and Tomas Venclova, “1945”

132 143 143

1918 John Neubauer with Marcel Cornis-Pope, Dagmar Roberts, and Guido Snel, “Overview” Margaret R. Higonnet, “Women Writers and the War Experience: 1918 as Transition” Guido Snel, “The Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip: The 1914 Sarajevo Assault in Fiction, History, and Three Monuments” Katherine Arens, “Beyond Vienna 1900: Habsburg Identities in Central Europe” Veronika Ambros, “The Great War as a Monstrous Carnival: Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk” Dorota Kielak, “Polish Literature of World War I: Consciousness of a Breakthtrough”

177

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

241

1848 John Neubauer with Mircea Anghelescu, Gábor Gángó, Kees Mercks, Dagmar Roberts, Dinko Župan, “1848”

263

1776/1789 John Neubauer, “Introduction” Larry Wolff, “The Spirit of 1776: Polish and Dalmatian Declarations of Philosophical Independence” Svetlana Slapšak, “The Cultural Legacy of Empires in Eastern Europe” Vilmos Voigt, “The Jacobin Movement in Hungary (1792–95)” Dagmar Roberts, “1776 and 1789 in Slovakia” Inna Peleva, “1789 and Bulgarian Culture”

293 293

177 191 202 216 228 236

241

263

294 307 311 313 315

PART II Histories of literary form 1.

John Neubauer, Introduction

321

Shifting periods and trends Roman Koropeckyj, “Between Classicism and Romanticism: The Year 1820 in Polish Literature”

325 325

Table of contents, Volume I

2.

3.

4.

497

Péter Krasztev, “From Modernization to Modernist Literature” Robert B. Pynsent, “Czech Decadence” Endre Bojtár, “The Avant-Garde in East-Central European Literature”

332 348 364

Shifting genres Diana Kuprel, “Literary Reportage: Between and beyond Art and Fact” Guido Snel, “Gardens of the Mind, Places for Doubt: Fictionalized Autobiography in East-Central Europe” George G. Grabowicz, “Subversion and Self-Assertion: The Role of Kotliarevshchyna in Russian-Ukrainian Literary Relations” Miro Mašek, “Poeticizing Prose in Croatian and Serbian Modernism” Svetlana Slapšak, “Stanislav Vinaver: Subversion of, or Intervention in Literary History?” Galin Tihanov, “The Birth of Modern Literary Theory in East-Central Europe” Arent van Nieukerken, “Polish Poetry in the Twentieth Century” Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Antony Polonsky, “Polish-Jewish Literature: An Outline” Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Shifting Perspectives and Voices in the Romanian Novel” Boyko Penchev, “Forms of the Bulgarian Novel”

375 375

The historical novel John Neubauer, “Introduction” Sándor Hites, “The Hungarian Historical Novel in Regional Context” Jasmina Lukić, “Recent Historical Novels and Historiographic Metafiction in the Balkans” Igor Grdina, “The Historical Novel in Slovenian Literature” Marcel Cornis-Pope, “The Search for a Modern, Problematizing Historical Consciousness: Romanian Historical Fiction and Family Cycles” Zofia Mitosek, “The Family Novel in East-Central Europe, Illustrated with Works by Isaac B. Singer and Włodzimierz Odojewski” Histories of multimedia constructions John Neubauer, “Introduction” John Neubauer, “National Operas in East-Central Europe” Dina Iordanova, “East-Central European Cinema and Literary History” Nevena Daković, “The Silent Tale of Fury: Stalinism in Yugoslav Cinema” Katherine Arens, “Central Europe’s Catastrophes on Film: The Case of István Szabó”

386 401 409 414 416 424 435 441 456 463 463 467 480 493 499 505 513 513 514 524 541 548

Works Cited

559

Index of East-Central European Names

623

List of Contributors

645

Table of Contents Volume II

Editors’ Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Note on Documentation and Translation

xiii

Table of contents, Volume 1

xv

In Preparation

xix

Introduction: Mapping the Literary Interfaces of East-Central Europe Marcel Cornis-Pope 1.

Cities as sites of hybrid literary identity and multicultural production

–

Introduction: Representing East-Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities – Marcel Cornis-Pope Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna: the Myth of Division and the Myth of Connection – Tomas Venclova The Tartu/Tallinn Dialectic in Estonian Letters and Culture – Tiina A. Kirss – Postscript on a Marginocentric Experiment: The Frontier School of Tartu – Jüri Talvet Monuments and the Literary Culture of Riga – Irina Novikova Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce: A Testing Ground for Pluralism – Amy Colin, with Peter Rychlo on post–1940 Czernowitz ‘The City That Is No More, the City That Will Stand Forever’: Danzig/Gdańsk as Homeland in the Writings of Günter Grass, Paweł Huelle, and Stefan Chwin – Katarzyna Jerzak On the Borders of Mighty Empires: Bucharest, City of Merging Paradigms – Monica Spiridon Literary Production in Marginocentric Cultural Node: The Case of Timişoara – Marcel Cornis-Pope with John Neubauer and Nicolae Harsanyi Plovdiv: The Text of the City vs. the Texts of Literature – Alexander Kiossev The Torn Soul of a City: Trieste as a Center of Polyphonic Culture and Literature – Anna Campanile Topographies of Literary Culture in Budapest – John Neubauer and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák Prague: Magnetic Fields or the Staging of the Avant-Garde – Veronika Ambros Cities in Ashkenaz: Sites of Identity, Cultural Production, Utopic or Dystopic Visions I. Jewish Visions of the City – Seth L. Wolitz

– – – – – – – – – – – –

1

9 11 28 37 40 57 77 93 105 124 145 162 176 182 182

Table of contents, Volume II

500 II. III. IV. V. VI. 2.

Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania – Seth L. Wolitz Kiev: City in Ashkenaz – Seth L. Wolitz The Hebrew Literary Circle in Odessa – Zilla Jane Goodman St. Petersburg in the Russian Jewish Literary Imagination – Brian Horowitz Jewish Warsaw – Seth L. Wolitz with Zilla Jane Goodman

Regional sites of cultural hybridization Introduction: Literature in Multicultural Corridors and Regions – Marcel CornisPope A.

B.

C.

The Literary Cultures of the Danubian Corridor Mapping the Danubian Literary Mosaic – Marcel Cornis-Pope with Nikola Petković (on Kyselak and Krleža) Upstream and Downstream the Danube – John Neubaeur The Intercultural Corridor of the ‘Other’ Danube – Roxana M. Verona Regions as Cultural Interfaces Transylvania’s Literary Cultures: Rivalry and Interaction – John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, with Sándor Kibédi-Varga and Nicolae Harsanyi The Hybrid Soil of the Balkans: A Topography of Albanian Literature – Robert Elsie Up and Down in Croatian Literary Geography: The Case of the Krugovaši – Vladimir Biti Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in East-Central Europe – Seth L. Wolitz Representing Transnational (Real or Imaginary) Regional Spaces The Return of Pannonia as Imaginary Topos and Space of Homelessness – Guido Snel Jan Lam and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Galicia in the Historical Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Writers – Agnieszka Nance Macedonia in Bulgarian Literature – Inna Peleva Transformations of Imagined Landscapes: Istra and Šavrinija as Intercultural Narratives – Sabina Mihelj

3.

The literary reconstruction of East-central Europe’s imagined communities: Native to diasporic

–

Introduction: Crossing Geographic and Cultural Boundaries, Reinventing Literary Identities – Marcel Cornis-Pope Kafka, Švejk, and the Butcher’s Wife, or Postcommunism/Postcolonialism and Central Europe – Nikola Petković

–

185 188 194 195 200

213

217 224 232

245 283 301 314

333 344 357 364

375 376

Table of contents, Volume II – – –

–

Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople and the Spatial Construction of Bulgarian National Identity in the Nineteenth Century – Boyko Penchev Paradoxical Renaissance Abroad: Ukrainian Émigré Literature, 1945–1950 – George G. Grabowicz Paris as a Constitutive East-Central European Topos: The Case of Polish and Romanian Literatures – The Manifold Faces of Romanian Paris – Monica Spiridon – Paris and the Polish Emigration – Agnieszka Gutthy – Syllogisms of Exile: Cioran and Gombrowicz in Paris – Katarzyna Jerzak A Tragic One-Way Ticket to Universality: Bucharest–Paris–Auschwitz, or the Case of Benjamin Fundoianu – Florin Berindeanu

501

390 413 428 428 433 436 443

Works Cited

453

Index of East-Central European Names: Volume 2

495

List of Contributors

511

Gazetteer

Brassó = Braşov Constantinople = Istanbul Cernăuţi = Chernivtsi Czerniowce = Chernivtsi Chernowitz = Chernivtsi Danzig = Gdańsk Dorpat = Tartu Grosswardein = Oradea Hermannstadt = Sibiu Kaschau = Košice Kassa = Košice Kolozsvár = Cluj-Napoca Kronstadt = Braşov Lai[y]bach = Ljubljana Lemberg = L’viv Leningrad = St. Petersburg Litmeritz = Litomĕřice Lőcse = Lev[w]oča Lvov = L’viv Lwów = L’viv

Marosvásárhely = Târgu Mureş Mitau = Jelgava Nagyszeben = Sibiu Nagyszombat = Trnava Nagyvárad = Oradea Pozsony = Bratislava Prešporok = Bratislava Pressb[p]urg = Bratislava Ruse = Ruschuk Skadar = Shkodra Szabadka = Subotica Temeschburg = Timişoara Temesvár = Timişoara Trst = Trieste Tsarigrad = Istanbul Újvidék = Novi Sad Vilna = Vilnius Wacow = Vác Wilno = Vilnius

Index of East-Central European Names

A Ács, János (b. 1949) 236, 238 Acterian, Haig (1904–1943) 192 Aczél, György (1917–1991) 59, 237 Aczél, Tamás (1921–1994) 121 Adámek, Bohumil (1848–1915) 157 Adler, Yankl (1895–1949) 35, 52 Ady, Endre (1877–1919) 23, 50, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 82, 85, 119 Afrim, Radu (b. 1968) 228 Alecsandri, Vasile (1818/21–1890) 167, 273, 316, 318, 320 Aleichem, Sholem [Sholem Yakov Rabinowitz] (1859–1916) 206 Aleksić, Dragan (1901–1958) 25, 27, 28 Alexici, Gheorghe (1864–1936) 353 Alliksaar, Artur (1923–1966) 60, 87 Alunāns, Ādolf (1848–1912) 7 Alunāns, Juris (1832–1864) 15 Alver, Betti (1906–1989) 35, 87 Ambrus, Zoltán (1861–1932) 49, 176 Anderson, Walter (1885–1962) 287, 288 Andrzejewski, Jerzy (1909–1983) 249 Angelov, Božan (1873–1958) 284, 329, 416 An-Ski, S[emen] [Solomon Akimovitch Rappaport] (1863–1930) 209 Antoljak, Stjepan (1909–1996) 395 Aprilov, Vasil (1789–1847) 325 Aputis, Juozas (b. 1936) 130, 131, 132

Arany, János (1817–1882) 16, 18, 71, 278, 353, 385, 386 Arapi, Fatos (b. 1930) 233 Arbes, Jakub (1840–1914) 97 Arhip, Ticu (1891–1965) 191 Arnaudov, Mihail (1878–1978) 284, 329, 331 Arnshteyn, Mark [Andrzej Marek] (c.1879–1943) 209 Asachi, Gheorghe (1788–1869) 6, 166, 318 Asch, Sholem (1880–1957) 79 Ascher, Tamás (b. 1949) 325, 236, 237, 238 Aškenazy, Ludvík (1921–1986) 224 Aškerc, Anton (1856–1912) 50 Aspazija [Elza Rozenberga] (1865–1943) 20, 46, 47, 51, 211, 212, 213 Astaloş, Gheorghe (b. 1933) 192 Atanasov, Atanas (?–?) 353 B Babarczy, László (b. 1941) 235, 236, 237 Babeţi, Adriana (b. 1949) 422 Babić, Ljubo (1890–1974) 215 Babits, Mihály (1883–1941) 18, 23, 26, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82, 120, 354, 355, 388, 390 Bačkovský, František (1854–1908) 373 Baczyński, Krzysztof Kamil (1921–1944) 35 Băieşu, Ion (1933–1992) 228 Bajcsy-Zsilinsky, Endre (1886– 1944) 391 Bajza, Jozef Ignác (1755–1836) 45

Bajza, József (1804–1858) 46, 111, 112, 276, 385 Balan, Alexander T. (1859–1959) 283, 329, 334, 411, 416, 417, 418 Bălan, Ion Dodu (b. 1929) 284, 315, 316 Balázs, Béla (1884–1949) 27, 115 Balbín, Bohuslav [Bohuslaus Balbinus] (1621–1688) 374, 375 Bălcescu, Nicolae (1819–1852) 317, 319 Ballek, Ladislav (b. 1941) 311, 313 Baltag, Cezar (1939–1997) 59 Bałucki, Michał (1837–1901) 162 Bánóczy, László (1884–1969) 177 Bănulescu, Ştefan (b. 1929) 59, 323 Barac, Antun (1894–1955) 408 Barańczak, Stanisław (b. 1946) 135 Barbu, Ion [Dan Barbilian] (1895–1961) 80 Barbu, Petre (b. 1962) 228 Barč-Ivan, Július (1909–1953) 191 Bardhi, Frang (1606–1643) 410 Bariţiu, Gheorghe (1812–1893) 45 Bârlea, Ovidiu (1917–1990) 321 Barons, Krišjānis (1835–1923) 10, 275, 295 Barta, Sándor (1897–1938) 27, 29 Bartók, Béla (1881–1945) 54, 271, 284, 321, 351, 355 Bartoš, Jan (1893–1946) 179 Bartoszewicz, Julian (1821–1870) 361 Bass, Eduard (1888–1946) 179 Bećković, Matije (b. 1939) 408 Béder, Ján (1917–1965) 383 Bella, Ondrej (1851–1903) 310

506 Bella-Horal, Peter (1842–1919) 310 Benador, Ury [Simon Moise Grinberg] (1895–1971) 81 Bendl, Karel (1838–1897) 157 Benedek, Marcell (1885–1969) 177 Beneš, Eduard (1884–1948) 97, 98, 100, 102 Beneš, Jan (b. 1936) 108 Beniak, Valentín (1894–1973) 113, 311 Bentkowski, Feliks (1781–1852) 346, 361 Beöthy, Zsolt (1848–1922) 386, 387, 389, 390, 391 Beránek, Míla (1888–1937) 179 Berelis, Guntis (b. 1961) 361 Bergelson, Dovid (1884–1952) 35 Bernolák, Anton (1762–1813) 12, 44, 112, 377, 378, 379, 380 Bērziņa, Aina (b. 1927?) 142 Bērziņš, Ludis (1870–1965) 360 Berzsenyi, Dániel (1776–1836) Bessenyei, György (1747–1811) 13 Bezek, Kazimír (1908–1952) 190 Białoszewski, Miron (1922–1983) 135 Bibó, István (1911–1979) 118, 427 Biebl, Konstantin (1898–1951) 103 Bieliauskas, Alfonsas (b. 1923) 130 Bihalji, Pavle (1898–1941) 40 Bihalji-Merin, Oto (1904–1993) 257 Bihiku, Koço (b. 1927) 411 Bílek, František (1872–1941) 68 Birnbaum, Nathan (1864–1937) 13 Blaga, Lucian (1895–1961) 82, 83, 117, 191, 192, 275, 318 Blandiana, Ana [Otilia ComanRusan] (b. 1942) 59 Blatný, Lev (1894–1930) 190 Blažek, Vratislav (1925–1973) 224 Blažková, Jaroslava (b. 1933) 113 Blecher, Marcel (1909–1938) 81 Bleyer, Jakob (1874–1933) 354, 421 Bliziński, Józef (1827–1993) 162 Bložė, Vytautas (b. 1930) 128

Index of East-Central European Names Bobek, Władysław (1902–1942) 382 Bodnár, Zsigmond (1839–1907) 386, 387 Bogdani, Pjetër (c. 1630–1689) 410 Bogorov, Ivan Andreev (1820– 1892) 10, 44, 326 Bogusławski, Wojciech (1757– 1829) 202 Bohorič, Adam (c. 1520–1598) 12 Bojić, Lazar (1791–1859) 405 Bolintineanu, Dimitrie (1819– 1872) 16 Bolzano, Bernard (1781–1848) 96 Born, Ignaz von (1742–1791) 374 Borodáč, Janko (1892–1964) 34, 189 Borový, František (1874–1936) 51 Bortnyik, Sándor (1893–1976) 29 Botev, Khristo [Hristo] (1848– 1876) 17, 44, 280, 282, 319, 331 Botta, Dan (1907–1958) 83, 381 Botto, Ján (1829–1881) 312 Boytčev, Khristo (b. 1950) 266 Bozděch, Emanuel (1841–1889) 157 Božič, Peter (b. 1932) 252 Brăiloiu, Constantin (1893–1958) 321 Brâncuşi, Constantin [Brancusi] (1876–1957) 31 Braunerová, Zdenka (1858–1934) 68 Brešan, Ivo (b. 1936) 259, 260, 261, 262 Březina, Otokar [Václav Ignác Jebavý] (1868–1929) 26, 66, 68 Brigadere, Anna (1861–1933) 295 Broderzon, Moshe (1890–1956) 209 Bródy, Sándor (1863–1924) 391 Brodziński, Kazimierz (1791– 1835) 362, 264 Broniewska, Maryna (1911–1989) 201 Broszkiewicz, Jerzy (1922–1993) 239

Bruchnalski, Wilhelm (1859–1938) 363, 364 Brückner, Aleksander (1856–1939) 353, 363 Brzechwa, Jan [Jan Lesman] (1898–1966) 204 Bucuţă, Emanoil (1887–1946) 52 Budai-Deleanu, Ioan (1760–1820) 316, 319 Budak, Mile (1889–1945) 401 Budi, Pjetër (1566–1622) 410 Budský, Jozef (1911–1989) 189 Bujnák, Pavel (1882–1933) 381 Bujor, Paul (1862–1952) 54 Bukovčan, Iván (1921–1975) 226 Burian, Emil František (1904– 1959) 21, 171, 180, 182, 183, 221, 223 Burian, Tomáš (1802–1874) 373 Burian, Vlasta (1891–1962) 179 Bútora, Martin (b. 1944) 114 Buzoianu, Cătălina (b. 1938) 227 Buzuku, Gjon (15??–15??) 410 C Cabadaj, Peter (b. 1966) 383 Caianu, Ioan [János Kájoni] (1629–1687) 319 Çajupi, Andon Zako (1866–1930) 92 Čaks, Aleksandrs [Aleksandrs Čadarainis] (1901–1950) 53 Călinescu, George (1899–1965) 55, 82, 273, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 392 Călinescu, Matei (b. 1934) 84, 284, 393, 394 Camarda, Demetrio (1821–1882) 337 Cankar, Ivan (1876–1918) 50, 250 Cantemir, Prince Dimitrie (1673–1723) 319 Čapek, Josef (1887–1945) 21, 51, 66, 179, 180, 183, 184, 190 Čapek, Karel (1890–1938) 21, 51, 66, 79, 172, 179, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190, 221

Index of East-Central European Names Caragea, Prince Ioan Gheorghe (1745–1845) 166 Caragiale, Costache (1815–1877) 167 Caragiale, Ion Luca (1850–1912) 51, 166, 167 Caragiale, Mateiu I. (1885–1936) 83, 322 Caraion, Ion [Stelian Diaconescu] (1923–1986) 36, 59, 393 Castelic, Miha (1796–1868) 46 Ceauşescu, Nicolae (1918–1989) 59, 84, 219, 227, 228 Čech, Svatopluk (1846–1908) 50 Čelakovský František Ladislav (1799–1852) 95, 276, 281, 283, 299, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305 Červený, Jiří (1887–1962) 179 Cesarec, August (1893–1941) 53 Chalupka, Ján (1791–1871) 158 Chęciński, Jan (1826–1874) 161 Chekhov, Mikhail (1891–1955) 47, 210 Chlebowski, Bronisław (1846– 1918) 347, 348, 362, 363, 364, 365 Chmielowski, Piotr (1848–1904) 348, 362, 363, 364 Chocholoušek, Prokop (1819– 1864) 96 Choromański, Leon (1872–1953) 203 Chramostová, Vlasta (b. 1926) 225 Chrobák, Dobroslav (1907–1951) 36, 312 Chrzanowski, Ignacy (1866–1940) 363, 364, 365, 366 Čintulov, Dobri (1822–1886) 15 Cíger Hronský, Jozef (1896–1960) 312 Čingo, Živko (1935–1987) 341, 342 Ciopraga, Constantin (b. 1916) 316 Cioran, Emil M. (1911–1995) 3, 117, 315 Ciprian, G. [Gheorghe Constantinescu] (1883–1968) 191, 192

Ciulei, Liviu (b. 1923) 220, 227 Čiževskij, Dmitrij [Chyzhevs’kyi, Dmytro; Tschizewskij, Dmitrij] (1894–1977) 424 Clementis, Vladimir (1902–1952) 36, 52, 91, 113 Comenius [Jan Amos Komenský] 1592–1670) 186, 376 Çomora, Spiro (1918–1973) 232 Coresi, Deacon (1510–1581) 39 Cornea, Paul (b. 1924) 394 Coşbuc, George (1866–1918) 45, 54, 320 Ćosić, Dobrica (b. 1921) 408 Cotruş, Aron (1891–1957) 54 Crainic, Nichifor ([Ion Dobre] 1889–1972) 52, 82 Creangă, Ion (1837–1889) 316, 320 Crnčević, Branislav (b. 1933) 408 Crnjanski, Miloš (1893–1977) 25, 395 Csaplovics János (1780–1847) 2 Csicsery-Rónay, István (b. 1917) 123 Csuka, Zoltán (1901–1984) 73 Čučković, Maja (1935–1997) 261 Cucu, D. I. (?–?) 52 Cviková, Jana (b. 1963) 91 Cwojdziński, Antoni (1896–1972) 198 Czambel, Samu (1856–1909) 353, 380, 381 Czerniawski, Adam (b. 1934) 58 Czuczor, Gergely (1800–1866) 5 D Dabija, Alexandru (b. 1955) 228 Dajnko, Peter (1787–1873) 12 Dalčev, Atanas (1904–1977) 53 Damian, S[ami] (b. 1930) 59 Daněk, Oldřich (1927–2000) 223 Daniel, Leon (b. 1927) 230 Darie, Alexandru (b. 1959) 228 Darvas, József (1912–1973) 118 Daszewski, Władysław (1902– 1971) 202, 244

507 Dauguvietis, Borisas (1895–1949) 210 Daukantas, Simonas (1793–1864) 10 Daukša, Mikalojus [Mikołaj Dauksza] (c. 1527–1613) 10 Davidović, Dimitrije (1789–1838) 43 Debelyanov, Dimčo (1887–1916) 53 Deglavs, Augusts (1862–1922) 55, 360 Dejmek, Kazimierz (1924–2002) 200 Demeter, Dimitrije (1811–1872) 42, 173, 174 Demetz, Hans (1895–1984) 180 Deml, Jakub (1878–1961) 97 Deretić, Jovan (b. 1934) 408, 409 Devínsky, Fraňo (1898–1946) 189 Đilas, Milovan (1911–1995) 37, 58, 283 Dilong, Rudolf (1905–1986) 190 Dine, Spiro Risto (1846–1922) 337 Dinekov, Petar (1910–1992) 330, 331, 332 Dinescu, Mircea (b. 1950) 59 Dini of Shkodra, Jonuz (1925– 1982) 232 Dinu, Gheorghe [Stephan Roll] (1903–1974) 31, 32 Dīriķis, Bernhards (1831–1892) 359 Dlouhý, František (1852–1912) 64 Długosz, Jan (1415–1480) 294 Dobner, Gelasius (1719–1790) 371 Döbrentei, Gábor (1786–1851) 45 Dobroplodni, Sava (1820–1994) 168 Dobrovský, Josef (1753–1829) 11, 12, 14, 277, 302, 306, 348, 366, 368, 369, 370, 372, 373, 374, 375, 379 Dobšinský, Pavol (1828–1885) 90, 311 Dohnány, Mikuláš (1824–1852) 158 Domokos, Géza (b. 1928) 59

508 Dor, Milo [Milutin Doroslovac] (1923–2005) 3 Đorđević, Jovan (1826–1900) 7 Dostal, Karel (1884–1966) 106, 182 Drabik, Wincenty (1881–1933) 200, 202 Draškić, Ljubomir (b. 1940) 262 Drašković, Janko (1770–1856) 16 Drinov, Marin (1838–1906) 334 Drumev Vassil (1841–1901) 168 Držić, Marin (1508?–1567) 399 Dubček, Alexander (1921–1992) 37, 312 Dučić, Jovan (1871–1943) 79 Durdík, Josef (1837–1902) 157 Ďurišin, Dionýz (1929–1997) 312, 383, 426 Dvořák, Antonín (1841–1904) 157 Dygat, Stanisław (1914–1978) 362 Dyk, Viktor (1877–1931) 66, 178, 179, 190 Dymsza, Adolf (1900–1975) 204 Dzhigan [Dzigan], Shimen (1905–1980) 209 Dziļleja, Kārlis (1891–1963) 360 E Eckhardt, Sándor (1890–1969) 353, 354 Eftimiu, Victor (1889–1972) 79 Egle, Rūdolfs (1889–1947) 360 Elen, Jarko (1895–1978) 91 Eleutheriade, Micaela (1900–1982) 274 Eliade, Mircea (1907–1986) 58, 117, 273, 314, 315, 318, 322, 323, 324 Eller, Kalle (b. 1939) 88 Eminescu, Mihai (1850–1889) 14, 17, 51, 314, 316, 317, 318, 323, 392, 393 Emőd, Tamás (1888–1938) 23 Engelmüller, Karel (1872–1850) 68 Eörsi, István (1931–2005) 218, 236 Eötvös, József (1813–1871) 44 Eötvös, Károly (1884–1953) 117

Index of East-Central European Names Erben, Karel Jaromír (1811–1870) 283, 305, 306, 307, 308 Erdélyi, József (1896–1978) 54, 117 Erkel, Ferenc (1810–1893) 8, 17 Esrig, David (b. 1935) 220, 227, 228 Esterházy, Péter (b. 1950) 427 Euthymius, Patriarch of Turnovo (1317–1402) 331 F Fabrio, Nedeljko (b. 1937) 257 Faehlmann, Friedrich Robert (1798–1850) 15, 16, 286 Faludy, György (1910–2006) 36, 58 Fándly, Juráj (1750–1811) 111, 112 Fehér, Ferenc (1933–1994) 37 Féja, Géza (1900–1978) 54, 388, 390, 391 Fejérpataky-Belopotocký, Gašpar (1794–1874) 158 Feldek, Ľubomír (b. 1936) 227 Fenyő, Miksa (1877–1972) 50, 71 Ferko, Andrej (b. 1955) 313 Ferko, Milan (b. 1929) 313 Ferko, Vladimír (b. 1925) 313 Fibich, Zdeněk (1850–1900) 157 Figuli, Margita (1909–1995) 36, 113, 312 Fischerová, Daniela (b. 1948) 225 Fishta, Gjergj (1871–1940) 21, 60, 92, 93, 410 Flajšhans, Václav (1866–1950) 376 Floqi, Kristo (1873–1951) 231 Florin, Theo (1908–1973) 113 Fogarasi, János (1801–1878) 5 Fotinov, Konstantin Georgiev (1790–1858) 44 Francisci, Ján (1822–1905) 90, 158 Frangeš, Ivo (1920–2003) 395 Franko, Ivan (1856–1916) 354 Frashëri, Naim (1846–1900) 44 Frashëri, Sami (1850–1904) 10 Fredro, Aleksander (1793–1876) 161

Frejka, Jiří (1904–1952) 30, 181, 183, 221 Frič, Josef Václav (1829–1890) 96, 157 Frunză, Victor Ioan (b. 1957) 228 Fučík, Julius (1903–1943) 103, 222 Fuks, Ladislav (1923–1994) 109 Fundoianu/Fondane, Benjamin [Wexler] (1898–1944) 25, 31, 82 Furnadžiev, Nikola (1903–1968) 328, 339, 340 Füst, Milán (1888–1967) 237 Futurista, Ferenc (1891–1947) 179 G Gaal, Georg von (1783–1855) 323 Gaál, Gábor (1891–1954) 56 Gábor, Andor (1884–1953) 23, 115 Gailit, August (1891–1960) 35 Gaj, Ljudevit (1809–1872) 11, 42, 44, 46 Gál, István (1912–1982) 73 Gałczyński, Konstanty Ildefons (1905–1953) 32, 239 Gáldi, László (1910–1974) 423 Gáspár, Imre (1854–1910) 380 Gašpar, Tido Jozef (1893–1972) 113 Gaster, Moses (1856–1939) 321 Gavella, Branko (1885–1962) 21, 34, 144, 171, 172, 215, 216 Gebauer, Jan (1838–1907) 278, 370, 371 Geda, Sigitas (b. 1943) 128 Gelléri, Andor Endre (1906–1945) 115 Georgiev, Nikola (b. 1937) 330, 332 Gergely, Sándor (1896–1966) 115 Gerov, Naiden (1823–1900) 14, 15, 328 Giedroyć, Jerzy (1906–2000) 57 Giurchescu, Lucian (b. 1929) 227 Gjeçovi, Shtjefën (1874–1929) 337, 338 Glinskis, Konstantinas (1886– 1938) 210, 246

Index of East-Central European Names Głowacki, Janusz (b. 1938) 218, 241, 266 Glück, Ernst (1652–1705) 291 Goga, Octavian (1891–1938) 51, 53, 54, 117, 275 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich (1809– 1852) 156, 157, 164, 178, 210, 227, 238 Goldfaden, Avrom [Abraham] (1840–1908) 206 Goldstücker, Eduard (1913–2000) 36, 37 Goll, Jaroslav (1846–1929) 27, 370 Gologanov, Ivan (1839–1895) 334 Golus, Jan (1895–1964) 244 Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–1969) 57, 137, 198, 199, 239, 243, 244, 315, 362 Gomułka Władysław (1905–1982) 57 Gordin, Jacob (1853–1909) 207 Górski, Artur (1870–1959) 20 Goszczyński, Seweryn (1801– 1876) 161 Gött, Johann (1810–1888) 40 Gothár, Péter (b. 1947) 238 Gottwald, Klement (1896–1953) 106, 222 Govekar, Fran (1871–1949) 50 Grafenauer, Ivan (1880–1964) 350 Granauskas, Romualdas (b. 1939) 132 Gražytė-Maziliauskienė, Ilona (1933–2001) 130 Greenberg, Uri Zvi (1896–1981) 52 Greimas, Algirdas Julius (1917– 1992) 297 Grossman, Jan (1925–1993) 223, 224 Grotowski, Jerzy (1933–1999) 218, 219, 220, 249 Grozescu, Julian (1838–1872) 273, 323 Grum, Slavko (1901–1949) 252 Gruša, Jiří (b. 1938) 100 Grušas, Juozas (1901–1986) 246

Grydzewski, Mieczysław (1864– 1970) 52, 57 Grygar, Mojmír (b. 1929) 103, 110 Grzegorzewski, Jerzy (b. 1939) 242, 245 Gudaitis-Guzeviçius, Aleksandras (1908–1969) 168 Guga, Romulus (1939–1983) 192, 228 Gundulić, Ivan (1588–1638) 42, 398, 399 Gurakuqi, Karl (1895–1971) 410 Gusty, Paul (1859–1944) 192 Gyr, Radu [Radu Demetrescu] (1905–1975) 82 Gyulai, Pál (1826–1909) 71, 323, 385, 387, 388, 390 H Haas, Pavel (1899–1944) 180 Habovštiak, Anton (1924–2004) 313 Hadžić, Jovan (1799–1869) 41 Hahn, Johann Georg von (1811– 1869) 336 Haitov, Nikolai (b. 1919) 328 Hakiu, Nexhat (1914–1978) 93 Haľamová, Maša (1908–1995) 311 Halas, František (1901–1949) 103 Halász, Gábor (1901–1945) 78, 115 Hálek, Vítězslav (1835–1874) 157 Halitzky, András Frigyes (1753– 1830) 6 Haltrich, Josef (1822–1886) 321 Hamada, Milan (b. 1933) 113, 384 Hamuljak, Martin (1789–1859) 16 Hamvas, Béla (1897–1968) 78 Hanicka, Barbara (b. 1952) 245 Hanka, Václav (1791–1861) 16, 42, 50, 155, 277, 299, 300, 302, 303, 304, 334, 348, 352, 353, 370, 371, 415 Hasdeu, B[ogdan] P[etriceicu] (1838–1907) 167, 321, 323 Hašek, Jaroslav (1883–1923) 23, 24, 179, 182, 183, 223, 425 Hašler, Karel (1879–1941) 179

509 Határ, Győző (1914–2006) 36 Hattala, Martin (1821–1903) 380 Hauser, Arnold (1892–1978) 420 Hausmanis, Viktors (b. 1931) 361 Havel, Václav (b. 1936) 32, 60, 98, 100, 104, 109, 188, 218, 220, 223, 224, 225 Havlíček, Karel (1821–1856) 46, 96, 375 Haxhiademi, Etëhem (1902–1965) 231 Heckenast, Gusztáv (1811–1878) 40 Hečko, František (1905–1960) 113, 311 Heinrich, Gusztáv (1845–1922) 380 Hektorović, Petar (1487–1572) 399 Heliade Rădulescu, Ion (1802– 1871) 45, 46, 166, 318 Heller, Ágnes (b. 1929) 37, 120 Heltai, Gáspár (c. 1520–1575) 39 Hemar, Marian (1901–1972) 204 Henlein, Konrad (1898–1945) 187 Hennoste, Tiit (b. 1953) 358 Herczeg, Ferenc (1863–1954) 425 Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw (1919–2000) 57 Hermaküla, Evald (1941–2000) 248, 249 Herman, Dovid [David Hermann] (1876–1930) 212 Hermann, Karl August (1851– 1909) 356 Hevesi, Sándor (1873–1939) 21, 161, 177 Hevesy, Iván (1893–1966) 28, 29 Hilar, Karel Hugo (1885–1935) 179 Hilbert, Jaroslav (1871–1936) 178 Hlaváček, Karel (1874–1898) 65, 66, 68, 69 Hodža, Michal Miloslav (1811– 1870) 16 Hodža, Milan (1878–1944) 381 Hoffmann, Ferdinand (1908–1972) 34, 189

Index of East-Central European Names

510 Hofman, Vlastislav (1884–1964) 179 Holan, Vladimír (1905–1980) 104 Holban, Anton (1902–1937) 81, 83 Hollý, Ján (1785–1849) 12, 44, 380, 381 Hollý, Jozef (1879–1912) 159 Holub, Miroslav (1923–1998) 109 Honterus, Johannes (1498–1548) 39 Honzl, Jindřich (1894–1953) 30, 181, 221 Hora, Josef (1891–1945) 103 Horáková, Milada (1901–1950) 103 Horníček, Miroslav (1918–2003) 223 Horthy, Miklós (1868–1957) 75, 76 Horváth, Iván (1904–1960) 36 Horváth, János (1878–1961) 71, 119, 284, 384, 385, 388, 389 Horváth, Márton (1906–1987) 119, 120, 122, 125 Horváthová, Marína Oľga (1859– 1947) 112, 158, 234 Hoxha, Enver (1908–1985) 93, 232, 233 Hoxhi, Koto (1824–1895) 337 Hrabal, Bohumil (1914–1997) 56, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 225 Hristić, Jovan (1933–2002) 57, 257, 258 Hrubín, František (1910–1971) 98 Hrúz, Pavel (b. 1941) 114 Hudec, Ivan (b. 1947) 313 Hupel, August Wilhelm (1737– 1819) 285 Hurban, Jozef Miloslav (1817– 1888) 14, 44, 89, 90, 379, 381 Hurban, Vladimír Konštantín (1884–1950) 189, 190 Hurban-Vajanský, Svetozár (1847–1916) 79, 90, 112 Hurt, Jakob (1839–1907) 286 Hus, Jan (c.1370–1415) 156 Husák, Gustáv (1913–1991) 38, 100

Huszárik, Zoltán (1931–1981) 235 Hvĕzdy, Jan z (1803–1853) 301 Hviezdoslav, Pavel [Országh] (1849–1921) 3, 24, 79, 381 Hynšt, Miloš (b. 1921) 223 I Iancu [Janco], Marcel (1895–1984) 23, 31, 52, 191 Ierunca, Virgil (1920–2006) 58 Ignjatović, Jakov (1822–1889) 2 Ignotus [Hugo Veigelsberg] (1869–1949) 50, 71, 72, 74, 77, 177, 390 Ikonomov, Theodosi (1836–1871) 168 Illés, Béla (1895–1974) 115, 122 Illiev, Konstantin (b. 1937) 321 Illyés, Gyula (1902–1983) 37, 54, 71, 116, 118, 123 Ionescu, Eugen [Ionesco, Eugène] (1909–1994) 32, 55, 263 Ionescu, Nae (1890–1940) 218, 315 Iorga, Nicolae (1871–1940) 45, 54, 55, 275, 315, 349, 392 Iorgulescu, Mircea (b. 1943) 59 Ird, Kaarel (1909–1986) 247, 248 Iredyński, Ireneusz (1939–1985) 240 Irtel, Pavel Mikhaylovich [Freiherr von Brenndorff] (1896–1979) 33 Isac, Emil (1886–1954) 78, 83 Isaković, Anatonije (1923–2002) 408 Isotamm, Johnny B. (b. 1939) 60, 88 Ispirescu, Petre (1830–1887) 41, 320 Istóczy, Győző (1842–1915) 117 Istrati, Panait (1884–1935) 319 Iureş, Marcel (b. 1951) 228 Ivaşcu, George (1911–1988) 59 J Jadwyga, Queen of Poland (1374–1399) 291

Jagić, Vatroslav (1838–1923) 334, 398, 399 Jakimavičius, Liudvikas (b.1959) 246 Jakobson, Roman (1896–1982) 32, 33, 47, 306, 307, 308, 424 Jakova, Kolë (b. 1916) 232 Jakubec, Jan (1862–1936) 353 Jamnický, Ján (1908–1972) 189, 190, 191 Janáček, Leoš (1853–1928) 8, 180, 187 Jančar, Drago (b. 1948) 254, 256 Jancsó, Miklós (b. 1921) 235 Jarnik, Jan Urban (1848–1923) 336 Jarocki, Jerzy (b. 1926) 242, 243 Jaroš, Peter (b. 1940) 311, 313 Járosy, Fryderyk (1890–1960) 204 Jasieński, Bruno (1902–1939) 28, 29, 32, 52, 242 Jastrun, Mieczysław (1903–1983) 56 Jászi, Oszkár (1875–1957) 50, 72, 73 Javoršek, Jože [Jože Brejc] (1920–1990) 254 Jędrzejewski, Aleksander (1903– 1974) 244 Jékely, Zoltán (1913–1982) 123 Jeleński, Konstanty A. [Jelenski, Constantin] (1922–1987) 57 Jeřábek, František Věnceslav (1836–1893) 157 Jero, Minush (b. 1932) 233 Jesenský, Janko (1874–1945) 112, 381 Ježek, Jaroslav (1906–1942) 181 Ježić, Slavko (1895–1969) 397, 398, 400, 401, 402, 403 Jirásek, Alois (1851–1930) 179, 190 Jirát, Vojtěch (1902–1945) 307 Jireček, Hermenegild (1827–1909) 42 Jireček, Josef (1825–1888) 371, 373, 376 Jireček, Konstantin Josef (1854– 1918) 14, 334

Index of East-Central European Names Jirsíková, Nina (1910–1978) 183 Johanides, Ján (b. 1934) 313 Jókai, Mór (1825–1904) 309, 354 Joó, Tibor (1901–1945) 115 Jorgovanić, Rikard (1853–1880) 401 Joseph, Viceroy [Nádor] (1776– 1847) 151 Jósika, Miklós (1794–1865) 44 Jovanović, Dušan (b. 1939) 253, 256, 263 József, Attila (1905–1937) 119 Jubani, Zef [Giuseppe Jubany] (1818–1880) 336, 337 Juhász, Géza (1894–1968) 389 Juknevičius, Romualdas (1906– 1963) 210 Jungmann, Josef Jakub (1773– 1847) 12, 41, 42, 95, 155, 299, 300, 301, 346, 348, 369, 372, 373, 375 Juráňová, Jana (b. 1957) 91 Jurašas, Jonas (b. 1936) 246 Jürgenson, Dietrich Heinrich (1804–1841) 356 Jurkovičová, Anička (1824–1905) 158 Juske, Ants (b. 1956) 88 K Kaalep, Ain (b. 1926) 87 Kačer, Jan (b. 1936) 223 Kačinskas, Henrikas (1903–1986) 210 Kadare, Ismail (b. 1936) 269, 274, 275 Kadlečík, Ivan (b. 1938) 114 Kaffka, Margit (1880–1918) 78 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924) 183, 223, 231, 274, 345, 427 Kalan, Filip [F. Kumbatovič] (1910–1989) 252 Kalandra, Záviš (1902–1950) 36 Kalanta, Romas (1953–1972) 130 Kalda, Maie (b 1929) 358 Kalinčiak, Ján (1822–1871) 90, 158, 310 Kállai, Ernő (1890–1954) 27

Kállay, Miklós (1885–1955) 389 Kálmán, Emmerich [Imre] (1882–1953) 388 Kamarýt, Josef Vlastimil (1797– 1833) 301, 303 Kamenický, František Jaroslav (1806–1869) 301 Kamínek, Karel (1868–1915) 68 Kaminska, Ester-Rokhl [Halperin] (1870–1926) 207, 208 Kaminska, Ida (1899–1980) 208, 209 Kaminski, Avrom-Yitskhok (1867–1918) 207 Kampmann [Kampmaa], Mihkel (1867–1943) 356 Kangro, Bernard (1910–1994) 35, 58, 86 Kanižlić, Antun (1699–1777) 400 Kantor, Tadeusz (1915–1990) 189, 202, 220, 241, 242, 244 Kányádi, Sándor (b. 1929) 322 Kaplinski, Jaan (b. 1941) 87 Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović (1787– 1864) 10, 11, 14, 16, 44, 47, 48, 270, 271, 272, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 284 302, 323, 326, 352, 354, 405, 415 Karaliyčev, Angel (1902–1972) 328 Karásek ze Lvovic, Cyprián (1524–1574) 64 Karásek [ze Lvovic], Jiří (1871– 1951) 51, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 177 Karavelov, Lyuben (1834–1879) 44, 282, 319, 325, 326 Karinthy, Frigyes (1887–1938) 21 Kārkliņš Kārlis (1888–1961) 360 Kármán, József (1769–1795) 45 Károlyi, Mihály (1875–1955) 26, 75 Kárpáti, Péter (b. 1961) 237 Karpiński, Światopełk (1909– 1940) 204 Karvaš, Peter (1920–1999) 113, 226 Kaška, Jan (1810–1869) 155

511 Kašlík,Václav (1917–1989) 221 Kasprowicz, Jan (1860–1926) 50, 53, 162, 202, 361 Kassák, Lajos (1887–1967) 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 52, 55, 76, 115, 120, 122, 123 Katona, József (1791–1830) 152 Kaudzīte, Matīss (1848–1926) 15 Kaudzīte, Reinis (1839–1920) 15 Kawecki, Zygmunt (1876–1955) 201 Kazinczy, Ferenc (1759–1831) 13, 14, 17, 18, 40 Kemény, Zsigmond (1814–1875) 385 Képes, Géza (1909–1989) 77 Kerényi, Károly [Karl] (1897– 1973) 297, 424 Keszi, Imre (1910–1974) 121, 122 Keturakis [Juozas Vilkutaitis] (1864–1903) 163 Khristov, Kiril (1875–1944) 328 Kilian, Adam (b. 1923) 245 Kindermann von Schulstein, Ferdinand (1744–1801) 373 Kinsk‎ý, Rudolph (1802–1836) 42, 304 Kipilovski, Atanas (1802–1870) 325 Király, István (1921–1989) 118, 119 Kiriţescu, Alexandru (1888–1961) 191 Kirschbaum, Jozef (1913–1993) 383 Kiš, Danilo (1935–1989) 3, 427 Kis, János (b. 1943) 37 Kisch, Egon Erwin (1885–1946) 23, 179 Kisfaludy, Károly (1788–1830) 5, 40, 45, 347 Kisfaludy, Sándor (1772–1844) 40 Kisielewski, Jan August (1876– 1918) 162 Kiss, János (1770–1846) 152 Kiss, Jenő (1912–1996) 322 Kiss, József (1843–1921) 49

512 Kitzberg, August (1855–1927) 165, 214, 249 Klaić, Vjekoslav (1849–1929) 397 Klaniczay, Tibor (1923–1992) 391 Klaustiņš, Roberts (1875–1962) 359 Kleiner, Juliusz (1886–1957) 365 Kletskin, Boris Arkadyevitsh (1875–1937) 40 Klicpera, Václav Kliment (1792– 1859) 155, 157, 182, 183 Klimas, Ramūnas (1945–2004) 133 Kner, Izidor (1860–1935) 40 Kober, Ignác Leopold (1825–1966) 39 Kobliha, František (1877–1962) 68 Kočan, Mikuláš (b. 1946) 227 Kochanowski, Jan (1530–1584) 17, 201 Kodály, Zoltán (1882–1967) 355 Kodolányi, János (1899–1969) 54, 117 Koestler, Arthur (1905–1983) 22, 57 Kogălniceanu, Mihail (1817–1891) 7, 45, 314, 392 Kohout, Pavel (b. 1928) 37, 98, 188, 218, 223, 224 Koidula, Lydia (1843–1886) 7, 15, 165 Kokona, Vedat (1913–1998) 93 Kołakowski, Leszek (b. 1927) 57 Kolář, Jiří (1914–2002) 104, 157 Kolár, Josef Jiří (1812–1896) 156 Kölcsey, Ferenc (1790–1838) 17, 18 Koliqi, Ernest (1903–1975) 93, 410 Kollár, Jan (1793–1852) 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 42, 45, 89, 95, 299, 301, 310, 345, 351, 380, 382 Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky, Franz Anton (1778–1861) 277 Kombol, Mihovil (1883–1955) 395, 397, 398, 402, 403, 404 Komlós, Aladár (1892–1980) 78 Kon, Geca (1873–1941) 40 Konitza, Faik bey (1875–1942) 51, 92

Index of East-Central European Names Konrád, Edmond (1889–1957) 180, 221 Konstantinov, Aleko (1863–1897) 21 Kont, Ignác (1856–1912) 353 Konwicki, Tadeusz (b. 1926) 136 Kopecký, Václav (1897–1961) 97, 102 Kopitar, Jernej [Bartholomäus] (1780–1844) 10, 43, 47, 270, 271, 277, 301, 302, 326 Koršunovas, Oskaras (b. 1969) 246 Korytko, Emil (1813–1839) 275 Korzeniowski, Józef (1797–1863) 159 Kós, Károly (1883–1977) 54 Kosiński, Jan (1916–1974) 244 Kosor, Josip (1879–1961) 215 Kosovel, Srečko (1904–1926) 252 Kossuth, Lajos (1802–1894) 40, 116 Kosterka, Hugo (1867–1956) 64, 70 Kostić, Laza (1841–1910) 283, 407 Kostov, Stefan L. (1879–1939) 195 Kostra, Ján (1910–1975) 311 Kosztolányi, Dezső (1885–1936) 16, 22, 23, 78, 119, 120, 121, 184 Kotlarczyk, Mieczysław (1908– 1978) 200, 202 Kott, Jan (1914–2001) 56, 218 Kotzov, Dimitar Ts. (?–?) 414 Koubek, Jan Pravoslav (1805– 1854) 372, 373 Kouřil, Miroslav (1911–1984) 182 Kováčik, Peter (b. 1936) 227 Kovács, Béla (1908–1959) 122 Kovács, Imre (1913–1980) 122 Kozák, Jan (1921–1995) 100 Kozak, Primož (1929–1981) 252, 253 Kozlev, Nikola (1824–1902) 328 Koźmian, Stanisław (1836–1922) 48 Krakowski, Wojciech (1927–1991) 244

Kráľ, Janko (1822–1876) 14, 113, 310 Králik, Štefan (1909–1983) 191, 226, 227 Kramerius, Václav Matĕj (1753– 1808) 39 Krasauskas, Stasys (1929–1977) 129 Krasiński, Zygmunt (1812–1859) 160, 179, 200, 202, 309, 362 Krasko, Ivan [Botto, Jan] (1876– 1958) 311, 381 Krásnohorská, Eliška (1847–1926) 278 Krassowski, Feliks (1895–1967) 202 Krăstev, Krăstyu (1866–1919) 50 Kratochvíl, Zdeněk (1883–1961) 22 Kraus, Arnošt Vilém (1859–1943) 371 Krauze, Kārlis (1904–1941) 295 Krčméry, Štefan (1892–1955) 78, 79, 311, 382 Krejča, Otomar (b. 1921) 223, 224 Krejčí, František Václav (1867– 1941) 64 Kreji, Thimi Thoma (18?–18??) 337 Kreütz-Majewski, Andrzej (b. 1936) 244 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold (1803–1882) 15, 279, 286 Krėvė, Vincas (1882–1954) 210 Kridl, Manfred (1882–1957) 364, 365 Kristof, Agota (b. 1935) 3 Kristoforidhi, Konstandin (1826– 1895) 92, 337 Kriza, János (1811–1875) 273, 280, 321, 323 Krleža, Miroslav (1893–1981) 21, 53, 85, 172, 215 Kronvalds, Atis (1837–1875) 10 Kross, Jaan (b. 1920) 87 Kruczkowski, Leon (1900–1962) 239, 243 Krúdy, Gyula (1878–1933) 55

Index of East-Central European Names Krukowski, Kazimierz (1901– 1984) 204 Krukowski, Wojciech (b. 1944) 242 Kruusvall, Jaan (b.1940) 249, 250 Kryl, Karel (1944–1994) 110 Krzyżanowski, Julian (1892–1976) 365, 366 Kullurioti, Anastas (1822–1887) 44, 337 Kun, Béla (1886–1938) 26 Kunder, Juhan (1852–1888) 165, 356 Kundera, Milan (b. 1929) 3, 98, 109, 137, 188, 223, 224 Kunev, Trifon (1880–1954) 228 Kuqali, Gjikë (1921–1944) 232 Kuteli, Mitrush (1907–1967) 93 Kuzmány, Karol (1806–1866) 89 Kvapil, Jaroslav (1868–1950) 21, 171, 178, 179 Kvapilová, Hana (1860–1907) 179 Kyçyku, Ardian-Christian (b. 1969) 94 Kymantaitė, Kazimiera (1909– 1999) L Ladislas IV Vasa (1595–1648) 162 Lahola, Leopold [Leopol Arje Friedmann] (1918–1968) 226 Lamar [Laliu Marinov] (1898– 1974) 339, 340 Lampe, Evgen (1874–1918) 50 Lange, Wiesław (1914–1988) 244 Langer, František (1888–1965) 79, 180, 190, 221 Langer, Jaroslav (1806–1846) 302 Lasica, Milan (b. 1940) 226 Laugaste, Eduard (1909–1994) 288 Lautenbahs-Jūsminš, Jēkabs (1847–1928) 360 Lautenschläger, Karl (1843–1906) 175 Lébl, Petr (1965–1999) 224 Legiša, Lino (1908–1980) 251 Lehotská, Johana (1810–1849) 112

Leivick, H. [Leyvik Halper] (1888–1962) 209 Leka, Arian (b. 1966) 94 Lepik, Kalju (1920–1999) 86 Lešetický z Lešehradu, Emanuel (1877–1955) 376 Leśmian, Bolesław (1877–1937) 50 Letz, Štefan (1900–1960) 189 Levinson, Avrom (?–?) 207 Levkata, Rampo [Rampo Levkov] (1909–1942) 340 Levkin, Andrei Viktorovich (b. 1954) 60 Levonja, Besim (1922–1968) 232 Levstik, Fran (1831–1887) 43, 46 Lias, Pärt (b. 1940) 358 Liba, Peter (b. 1931) 312 Lichard, Daniel (1812–1882) 89 Lichnerová, Rút (b. 1951) 311 Liepiņš, Zigmārs (b. 1952) 212 Līgotnis, Jēkabs (1874–1942) 359 Liiceanu, Gabriel (b. 1942) 315 Limanowski, Mieczysław (1876–1948) 201 Linda, Josef (1789–1834) 370, 379 Linde, Samuel [Bogumił] Gottlieb (1771–1847) 10, 213 Logori, Loni (1871–1929) 337 Lom, Stanislav (1883–1967) 180 Longen, Emil Artur (1885–1936) 22, 179 Lönnrot, Elias (1802–1884) 16, 279, 286 Losonczy, Géza (1917–1957) 119, 121, 122 Lotman, Yuri M. (1922–1993) 357 Lovinescu, Eugen (1881–1943) 36, 55, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 316, 317, 392 Lovinescu, Horia (1917–1983) 192 Łowmiański, Henryk (1903–1989) 293 Luarasi, Mihallaq (b. 1929) 233 Łubieński, Tomasz (b. 1938) 241 Lubonja, Fatos (b. 1951) 94 Lubonja, Todi (b. 1923) 233

513 Luca, Gherasim (1913–1994) 20, 25, 30, 32 Luca, Ndrekë (1927–1993) 232 Lukáč, Emil Boleslav (1900–1979) 52, 78, 91 113 Lukács, György [Georg] (1885– 1971) 27, 50, 57, 72, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 177 Lukácsy, Sándor (1923–2001) 120 Lukeš, Milan (b. 1933) 223 Lukić, Velimir (1936–1996) 258 Lukošius, Balys (1900–1987) 246 Lupa, Krystian (b. 1943) 242, 245 M Macedonski, Alexandru (1854– 1920) 20, 50 Mácha, Karel Hynek (1810–1836) 17, 155, 156, 182, 305, 306, 307, 308, 373 Macháček, Miroslav (1922–1991) 223 Macháček, Simeon Karel (1799– 1846) 42 Machar, Josef Svatopluk (1864– 1942) 64 Maciejowski, Wacław Aleksander (c. 1792–1883) 361 Macrinici, Radu (b. 1964) 228 Macůrek, Josef (1901–1992) 423 Mácza, János (1893–1974) 27 Madách, Imre (1823–1864) 52, 153, 190 Mądzik, Leszek (b. 1945) 242 Magarašević, Georgije [Đorđe] (1793–1830) 41, 405, 406 Mägi, Arvo (b. 1913) 357 Mahen, Jiří (1882–1939) 179, 190 Maior, Petru (1760–1821) 13, 45, 47, 346 Maiorescu, Titu (1840–1917) 16, 45, 51, 320, 392 Majcen, Stanko (1888–1970) 252 Majerová, Marie [Marie Bartošová] (1882–1967) 51 Majláth, János (1786–1855) 2

514 Majorkiewicz, Feliks Jan (1820– 1847) 361 Makk, Károly (b. 1925) 235 Makkai, Sándor (1890–1951) 388 Makovický, Dušan (1866–1921) 112 Malczewski, Jacek (1854–1929) 199 Małecki, Antoni (1821–1913) 348, 362 Malëshova, Sejfulla (1901–1971) 233 Mandrović, Adam (1839–1912) 144, 169 Manea, Norman (b. 1936) 59 Maniu, Adrian (1891–1968) 82, 191, 192 Maniu, Iuliu (1873–1953) 54 Măniuţiu, Mihai (b. 1954) 228 Manolescu, Nicolae (b. 1939) 59, 84, 394 Márai, Sándor (1900–1989) 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Marcinkevičius, Justinas (b. 1930) 246 Marčok, Viliam (b. 1935) 312, 384 Maretić, Tomislav (1854–1938) 11 Marian, Sim[ion] Fl[orea] (1847–1907) 321 Marienescu, Atanasie Marian (1830–1915) 321 Marinov, Dimitur (1846–1940) 416 Marjanović, Luka (1844–1920) 42 Markish, Peretz (1895–1952) 52 Marko, Prince [Kraljević; Krali Marko] (1335–1394) 181, 271 Marko, Petro (1913–1991) 93 Markovič, Milan (b. 1940) 313 Marković, Svetozar (1846–1875) 406 Maróthy-Šoltésová, Elena (1855–1939) 90, 311 Marten, Miloš (1883–1917) 70 Martin, Mircea (b. 1940) 59, 90, 112 Martinkus, Vytautas (b. 1943) 132 Martinů, Bohuslav (1890–1959) 180, 182

Index of East-Central European Names Marulić, Marko (1450–1524) 399, 404 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue (1850– 1937) 90, 97, 98, 100, 184, 278, 370, 371, 372, 376 Masing Uku (1909–1985) 87 Massalitinov, Nikolai (1880–1961) 194 Máté, Gábor (b. 1955) 238 Matejka, Ladislav (b. 1919) 423 Matejko, Jan (1838–1893) 199, 201 Mathesius, Vilém (1882–1945) 32 Matoš, Antun Gustav (1873–1914) 50 Matúška, Janko (1821–1877) 158 Maxy, M[ax] H[erman] (1895– 1971) 31 Mazilu, Teodor (1930–1980) 228 Mažuranić Ivan (1814–1890) 283, 403 Mazūras, Vitalijus (b. 1934) 246 Mečiar, Vladimír (b. 1942) 383 Mécs, László (1895–1978) 79 Medini, Milorad (1874–1938) 395, 396, 397, 399, 404 Mednis, Ojara (b. 1929) 142 Mednyánszky, Alajos (1784–1844) 2 Megas, Georgios (1893–1976) 324 Meksi, Mira (b. 1960) 94 Mekuli, Esad (1916–1993) 93 Melantrich, Jiří (1511–1580) 39 Melicherčík, Andrej (1917–1966) 312 Méliusz, József (1909–1995) 55 Meltzl, Hugo (1846–1908) 51, 423 Menčetić, Šiško (1457–1527) 404 Menčík, Ferdinand (1853–1916) 96 Menning, Karl (1974–1941) 213 Meras, Icchokas (b. 1934) 126, 127 Méray, Tibor (b. 1925) 58, 116, 121 Merilaas, Kersti (1913–1986) 87 Merxhani, Branko (1894–1981) 93 Meschendörfer, Adolf (1877–1963) 51 Metelko, Franc (1789–1860) 12

Michael the Brave [Mihai Viteazul] (1558–1601) 318 Michailova, A. (?–?) 416 Michálek, Ján (b. 1935) 203, 312 Micić, Ljubomir (1895–1971) 25, 27, 52 Miciński, Tadeusz (1873–1918) 50, 162, 197, 200 Mickiewicz, Adam (1798–1855) 17, 42, 44, 159, 160, 199, 200, 244, 277, 278, 351, 352, 362, 364, 365, 392 Micu, Dumitru (b. 1928) 191, 317 Micu-Klein, Samuil (1754–1806) 13, 47 Mieželaitis, Eduardas (1919–1997) 129 Migjeni [Millosh Gjergj Nikolla] (1911–1938) 93 Mihăescu, Gib [Gheorghe] I. (1894–1935) 81, 82, 83 Mihajlović, Dragoslav (b. 1930) 408 Mihkla, Karl (1901–1980) 356 Mikelinskas, Jonas (b. 1922) 130 Mikiver, Mikk (b. 1937) 249 Miko, František (b. 1920) 312 Mikołaj of Wilkowiecko (1524?– 1601) 200 Mikovec, Ferdinand Břetislav (1826–1862) 156 Mikulėnaitė, Ema (b. 1935) 133 Miladinov, Dimitar (1810–1862) 276, 326, 333 Miladinov, Konstantin (1830– 1862) 15, 276, 326, 333 Miletić, Stjepan (1868–1908) 21, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176 Milev, Geo (1895–1925) 21, 53, 171, 193 Militaru, Sorin (b. 1968) 228 Millo, Matei (1814–1896) 167 Miłosz, Czesław (1911–2004) 29, 35, 57, 137, 365 Miltinis, Juozas (1907–1994) 246 Milutinović, Sima Sarajlija (1791–1847) 44, 326 Mináč, Vladimir (1922–1996) 113

Index of East-Central European Names Mindaugas [Mendog], King of Lithuania (?–1263) 291 Mindszenty, Cardinal József (1892–1975) 124 Minkiewicz, Janusz (1914–1981) 204 Minticz-Skarżyńska, Lidia (1920–1994) 244 Mints, Zara (1927–1990) 357 Minulescu, Ion (1881–1944) 22, 83 Mirčev, Dimitar (?–?) 416 Miriam [Zenon Przesmycki] (1868–1927) 50 Mironaitė, Monika (1913–2000) 210 Mitana, Dušan (b. 1946) 114 Mitko, Thimi (1820–1890) 92, 337 Mittay, László (1893–1962) 29 Mňačko, Ladislav (1919–1994) 113 Mohácsi, János (b. 1959) 237 Moholy-Nagy, László (1895–1946) 25, 27, 85 Moisescu, Valeriu (b. 1932) 227 Molnár, Antal (1890–1983) 78 Molnár, Ferenc (1878–1952) 22, 23, 55, 172 Molter, Károly (1890–1981) 388 Moniuszko, Stanisław (1819–1872) 157, 161 Moravčík, Štefan (b. 1943) 313, 319 Morawetz, Dorota (b. 1954) 245 Móricz, Zsigmond (1879–1942) 54, 55, 73, 76, 77 Moskov, Mosko (1863–1947) 416 Mrak, Ivan (1906–1986) 252 Mráz, Andrej (1904–1964) 382 Mrożek, Sławomir (b. 1930) 32, 218, 220, 226, 239, 240, 243, 246 Mrozińska, Mary (1887–1921) 203 Mrštík, Alois (1861–1925) 178, 189 Mrštík, Vilém (1863–1912) 178, 189, 190 Mucha, Jiří (1915–1991) 221 Mugur, Vlad (1927–2001) 227

Mukařovský, Jan (1891–1975) 32, 188, 300, 307 Müller, Friedrich (1828–1915) 321 Mungiu, Alina (b. 1964) 228 Murko, Matthias (1861–1952) 353 Muru, Karl (b. 1927) 358 Muşatescu, Tudor (1903–1970) 191 Mušicki, Lukijan (1777–1837) 41, 44 Muškatirović, Jovan (1743?–1809) 2 Mutafov, Čavdar (1889–1954) 35, 53 Mutev, Dimităr (1818–1864) 415 Mykolaitis-Putīnas, Vincas (1893–1967) 128, 210 N Naghiu, Iosif (1932–2003) 228 Nagy, Ágnes Nemes (1922–1991) 115 Nagy, Endre (1877–1938) 23 Nagy, Ferenc (1903–1979) 122, 124 Nagy, Imre (1896–1958) 119 Nagy, Lajos Parti (b. 1953) 237 Nagy, László (B.) (1927–1973) 119 Narbutt, Teodor [Teodoras Narbutas] (1784–1864) 294 Naum, Gellu (1915–2001) 30, 32 Neagu, Fănuş (b. 1932) 59 Negoiţescu, Ion (1921–1993) 84, 317, 393, 394 Negrici, Eugen (b. 1941) 394 Nejedlý, Jan (1776–1834) 372 Nejedlý, Zdenĕk (1878–1962) 102, 225, 300 Nekrošius, Eimuntas (b. 1952) 246 Nelega [Cadariu], Alina (b. 1960) 228 Němcová, Božena (1820–1862) 42, 53, 283, 306, 308, 309, 310 Németh, László (1901–1975) 54, 118, 119, 122, 123 Neruda, Jan (1834–1891) 157, 277, 278 Nesaule, Agate (b. 1938) 142

515 Neumann, František (1874–1929) 180 Neumann, Stanislav Kostka (1875– 1947) 50, 51, 67, 68, 69, 103 Nezval, Vítězslav (1900–1958) 28, 30, 32, 51, 181 Ničev, Boyan (1930–1997) 330 Niit, Ellen (b. 1928) 87 Nikaj, Nadoc (1864–1951) 231 Nikolajević, Svetomir (1844–1922) 406 Nirk, Endel (b 1925) 357 Njegoš, Petar Petrović (1813– 1851) 17, 283 Noica, Constantin (1909–1987) 315 Noll, Karel (1880–1928) 27 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil (1821– 1883) 160, 362 Noskowski, Witold [Taper] (1874–1939) 203 Novák, Arne (1880–1939) 353 Novak, Slobodan (b. 1924) 84 Novaković, Stojan (1842–1915) 406 Novomeský, Ladislav (1904–1976) 36, 113 Nowaczyński, Adolf (1876–1944) 22, 203, 204 Nušić, Branislav (1864–1938) 218 Nyírő, József (1889–1953) 54 O Obradović, Dositej (1739–1811) 15, 44, 45, 405 Obrenović, Miloš (1780–1860) 11 Odjakov, Petar (1834–1906) 283, 325, 327, 329 Odojewski, Włodzimierz (b. 1930) 136 Odyniec, Antoni Edward (1804– 1885) 163 Ognianova, Julia (b. 1923) 230 Okáli, Daniel (1903–1987) 36, 90, 91, 113 Oleka-Žilinskas, Andrius (1893– 1948) 210 Ondrejov, Ľudo (1901–1962) 312

516 Ordonówna, Hanka (1902/1904– 1950) 204 Orkan,Władysław (1875–1930) 201 Örley, István (1913–1945) 115 Ortutay, Gyula (1910–1978) 118 Orzeszkowa, Eliza (1841–1910) 49 Osiński, Ludwik (1775–1838) 361 Ossoliński, Józef Maksymilian (1748–1826) 43 Osterwa, Juliusz (1885–1947) 200, 201 Ostrčil, Otakar (1879–1935) 180 Osvald, František Richard (1845–1926) 90 Osvát, Ernő (1876–1929) 50, 71, 72, 73 Otto, Jan (1841–1916) 39 P Paál, István (1942–1998) 235 Paçrami, Fadil (b. 1922) 233 Palacký, František (1798–1876) 12, 14, 41, 42, 277, 301, 348, 371, 379 Palárik, Jan (1822–1870) 89, 112, 158 Palasovszky, Ödön (1899–1980) 28, 29 Palavestra, Pedrag (b. 1930) 408 Palkovič, Juraj (1769–1850) 6, 7, 89 Pamfile, Tudor C. (1883–1921) 320 Pană, Saşa (1902–1981) 32, 52 Pándi, Pál [Kardos] (1926–1987) 119 Panizza, Oskar (1853–1921) 70 Pann, Anton (1797–1854) 316, 320 Pannonius, Janus (1434–1472) 18 Panso, Voldemar (1920–1977) 247 Pap, Károly (1897–1945) 115 Papa, Loni (b. 1932) 233 Papadat-Bengescu, Hortensia (1876–1955) 80, 81, 83 Papahagi, Pericle (1872–1943) 321 Papahagi, Tache (1892–1977) 321 Pápay, Sámuel (1770–1827) 346, 385

Index of East-Central European Names Papić, Krsto (b. 1933) 259 Papilian, Victor (1888–1956) 191 Pásek, Miroslav (1920–1990) 223 Pastier, Oleg (b. 1952) 114 Pavasars, Jānis [Jānis Veismanis] (1867–1913) 359 Pável, Konstantin (?–?) 78 Pavlov, Todor (1890–1977) 24 Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Maria (1891–1945) 198 Pawlikowski, Tadeusz (1861– 1915) 162 Pecka, Karel (1928–1997) 36, 103, 108 Peiper, Tadeusz (1891–1969) 28, 52 Pekić, Borislav (1930–1992) 257 Pekmezi, Gjergj (1872–1938) 337 Pelcel [Pelzel, Pelcl], František Martin (1734?–1801) 6, 11, 14, 348, 367, 368, 369, 372, 373, 374, 375 Pelēcis, Aleksandrs (1920–1995) 139, 141, 142 Pelin, Elin (1877–1949) 328 Penciulescu, Radu (b. 1930) 227, 228 Penderecki, Krzysztof (b. 1933) 244 Penev, Boyan (1882–1927) 282, 330, 331 Peniķis, Andrejs (b. 1956) 139 Peretz, Isaac Leyb [Yishtok Leybush] (1852–1915) 52, 206 Peroutka, Ferdinand (1895–1978) 222 Petkov, Botyo (1815–1869) 14 Petković-Dis, Vladislav (1880– 1917) 407 Petőfi, Sándor (1823–1849) 17, 18, 53, 71, 116, 119, 283, 386, 392 Petranović, Božidar (1809–1874) 405, 406 Petrescu, Camil (1894–1957) 21, 81, 83, 191, 192 Petrescu, Cezar (1892–1961) 52, 82, 83

Petrescu, Ioana Em. (1941–1990) 394 Petrík, Vladimír (b. 1929) 383, 384 Petrov, Valery (b. 1920) 230 Picek, Václav Jaromír (1812–1869) 42 Pilat, Roman (1846–1906) 363 Pilinszky, János (1921–1981) 56, 115, 123 Pillat, Ion (1891–1945) 82 Pintér, Jenő (1881–1940) 388, 390 Pintilie, Lucian (b. 1933) 227 Pipa, Arshi (1920–1997) 93, 411 Pipa, Myzafer (?–?) 93 Pishurka, Krastjo (1823–1875) 168 Pišťanek, Peter (b. 1960) 313 Pitarka, Sulejman (b. 1924) 232 Pitínský, Jan Antonín (b. 1956) 224 Plávka, Andrej (1907–1982) 311, 312 Pleskot, Jaromír (b. 1922) 223 Pleşu, Andrei (b. 1948) 315 Plūdons, Vilis (1874–1940) 359 Podgurović, Tešan (ca. 1775–1815) 272 Podnieks, Friedrich (?–?) 212 Pohlin, Marko (1735–1801) 10, 275, 276 Polák, Matěj Milota Zdirad (1788–1856) 373 Polívka, Boleslav (b. 1949) 225 Polívka, Jiří (1858–1933) 311 Poljanski, Branko Ve (1898–1947) 27, 29 Poniatowski, Stanisław August, king (1732–1798) 7 Poničan, Ján (1902–1978) 113, 190 Ponická, Hana (b. 1922) 114 Popa, Victor Ion (1885–1946) 191, 192 Popescu, D[umitru] R[adu] (b. 1935) 192 Popescu, Ion Apostol (1920–1984) 322 Popov, Georgi D. (?–?) 416 Popović, Aleksandar (1929–1996) 261, 262

Index of East-Central European Names Popović, Bogdan (1863–1945) 406, 407 Popović, Jovan Sterija (1806– 1856) 218, 282, 283 Popović, Pavle (1868–1939) 353, 407, 408, 409 Pospíšil, Zdeněk (1944–1993) 224 Potocki, Jan (1761–1815) 202 Potrč, Ivan (1913–1993) 255 Pozsgay, Imre (b. 1933) 237 Pražák, Albert (1880–1956) 375, 383 Preda, Marin (1922–1980) 59 Preissová, Gabriela (1862–1946) 178, 180 Prennushi, Vinçenc (1885–1949) 231 Preradović, Petar (1818–1872) 14, 282, 283, 403 Prešeren, France (1800–1849) 14, 17, 46 Prifti, Naum R. (b. 1932) 233 Priimägi, Linnar (b. 1954) 88 Prijatelj, Ivan (1875–1937) 350, 353 Princip, Gavrilo (1894–1918) 283 Procházka, Arnošt (1869–1925) 51, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70 Prohászka, Lajos (1897–1963) 123 Pronaszko, Andrzej (1888–1961) 200, 202 Pronaszko, Zbigniew (1885–1958) 200 Prus, Bolesław [Aleksander Głowacki] (1847–1912) 34, 46, 49, 55 Przyboś, Julian (1901–1970) 52 Przybyszewska, Stanisława (1901–1935) 197 Przybyszewski, Stanisław (1868– 1927) 2, 20, 21, 50, 52, 66, 162, 171, 178, 190, 196 Pujman, Ferdinand (1889–1961) 180 Pumpurs, Andrejs (1841–1901) 212, 279, 286 Purapuķe, Jānis (1864–1902) 360 Purcărete, Silviu (b. 1950) 228

Q Qosja, Rexhep (b. 1936) 411 R Rába, György (b. 1924) 77 Rada, Girolamo de (1814–1903) 410 Radičević, Branco (1824–1853) 14 Radičkov, Yordan (1929–2004) 230, 231 Rádl, Emanuel (1873–1942) 371 Radlinský, Andrej (1817–1879) 89 Radnóti, Miklós (1909–1944) 115 Radoev, Ivan (1927–1994) 230 Radok, Alfréd (1914–1976) 221, 222, 223, 224 Radoslavov, Ivan (1880–1969) 418, 419 Rădulescu-Codin, C[onstantin] (1875–1926) 321 Raić, Ivo (1881–1931) 175 Raičev, Georgi (1882–1947) 195 Raicu, Lucian [Lucian Leibovici] (b. 1934) 59, 84 Raid, Kaarin (b. 1942) 249 Rainis, Jānis [Jānis Pliekšāns] (1865–1929) 7, 20, 51, 212 Rajk, László (1909–1949) 124 Rákóczi, Ferenc II (1676–1735) 116 Rákosi, Mátyás (1892–1972) 116, 122, 124, 252 Rakovski, Georgi S[toikov] (1821–1867) 44, 326 Rapacki, Wincenty (1840–1924) 162 Rašín, Alois (1867–1923) 97 Ratkevičius, Stasys (b. 1917) 246 Raudsepp, Hugo (1883–1952) 214 Raztsvetnikov, Asen (1897–1951) 338, 339, 340 Rebreanu, Liviu (1885–1944) 3, 24, 54, 80, 191, 393 Reiman, Villem (1861–1917) 53 Reményi, József (1891–1956) 77 Renč, Václav (1911–1973) 183 Ressuli, Namik (1908–1985) 410

517 Révai, József (1898–1959) 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124 Révai Leó (1844–1909) 40 Révai, Miklós (1750–1807) 6, 13 Révai Samu (1833–1908) 40 Révay, József (1905–1945) 115 Reymont, Władysław Stanisław (1867–1925) 53, 354 Riedl, Frigyes (1856–1921) 387, 388 Rilski, Neofit [Nikola Poppetrov Benin] (1793–1881) 10 Ristić, Ljubiša (b. 1947) 263 Ristikivi, Karl (1912–1977) 86, 357, 358 Rittner, Tadeusz (1873–1921) 196 Rizner, Ľudovít Vladimír (1849– 1913) 311 Rode-Ebeling, Hermann (1846– 1906) 7, 211 Rosenplänter, Johann Heinrich (1782–1846) 355 Rosetti, C[onstantin] A. (1816– 1885) 318 Rostworowski, Karol Hubert (1877–1938) 197 Rotbaum, Jakub (1901–1994) 208, 209 Roy, Vladimir (1885–1936) 78 Rožanc, Marjan (1930–1990) 254, 255 Różewicz, Tadeusz (b. 1921) 32, 239, 240, 243, 245 Rózsavölgyi, Gyula (1822–1860) 40 Rrota, Justin (1889–1964) 410 Rubeš, František Jaromír (1814– 1853) 212, 306 Rudas, László (1885–1950) 124 Rummo, Paul (1909–1981) 358 Rummo, Paul-Eerik (b. 1942) 87, 248 Rusko, Emil (1900–1961) 189 Rydel, Lucjan (1870–1918) 162 S Sabina, Karel (1813–1877) 96, 155, 308, 368, 369, 372, 373

518 Sadoveanu, Mihail (1880–1961) 24, 54, 167, 314, 316, 317, 319, 322, 393 Šafárik [Šafařík], Pavel [Pavol] Josef [Jozef] (1795–1861) 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 41, 42, 44, 95, 277, 301, 302, 310, 326, 334, 348, 378, 379, 380, 415 Şăineanu, Lazăr [Lazar Schein] (1859–1934) 273, 317, 321 Saja, Kazys (b. 1936) 246 Sako, Zihni (1912–1981) 232, 324 Šalda F[rantišek X[aver] (1867– 1937) 64, 180, 307 Šaltenis, Saulius (b. 1945) 133 Saluri, Rein (b. 1939) 249, 250 Šamberk, František Ferdinand (1838–1904) 157 Sander, Tõnu (1868–1894) 356 Sang, August (1914–1969) 87 Santori, Francesco Antonio (1819–1894) 410 Sarbievius, Matthias Casimirus [Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz] (1595–1640) 163 Sárközi, György (1899–1945) 115 Satinský, Július (1941–2002) 226 Săulescu, Mihai (1888–1916) 191 Sava, Ion (1900–1947) 192 Šavelis, Rimantas (b. 1942) 133 Savković, Miloš (1899–1943) 408 Schauer, Hubert Gordon (1862– 1892) 372 Schedius, Lajos (1768–1847) 2 Scheinpflugová, Olga (1902–1968) 221 Schenk, Eduard von (1788–1841) 152 Scherhaufter, Petr (1942–1999) 225 Schiller, Leon [Schiller de Schildenfeld, Leon Jerzy] (1887–1954) 21, 171, 200, 203, 209 Schmid, Jan (b. 1936) 225 Schöpflin, Aladár (1872–1950) 71, 390 Schorm, Evald (1931–1988) 224

Index of East-Central European Names Schorsch, Gustav (1918–1945) 183 Schulz, Bruno (1892–1942) 52, 427 Sebastian, Mihail [Iosif Hechter] (1907–1945) 191, 192 Šegedin, Petar (1909–1998) 85 Seifert, Jaroslav (1901–1986) 28, 30, 32, 97, 103, 104 Šeligo, Rudi (1935–2004) 254 Šembera, Alois Vojtěch (1807– 1882) 369 Semper, Johannes (1892–1970) 35, 79 Šenoa, August (1838–1881) 42, 50, 173, 174 Şerban, Andrei (b. 1943) 220, 227, 228 Serembe, Giuseppe (1844–1901) 410 Sever, Al[exandru] (b. 1922) 192, 228 Severyanin, Igor [Igor Vasilyevich Lotarev] (1887–1941) 33 Šeytanov, Naiden (1890–1970) 328, 333 Sherekh, Iurii (1908–2002) 350 Šišmanov, Ivan D. (1862–1928) 334 Sholem Aleykhem [Sholem Rabinovitsh] (1859–1916) 41, 206 Shumakher [Szumacher], Yisroel (1908–1961) 209 Shuteriqi, Dhimitër (1915–2003) 410 Shternberg, Yankev (1890–1973) 208 Shvarts, Marek (1892–1962) 35, 52 Sienkiewicz, Henryk (1846–1916) 16, 34, 46, 206, 354 Sigismund III Vasa, King [Zygmund Waza-Jagellon] (1566–1632) 162 Šikula, Vincent (1936–2001) 311, 312 Šimečka, Milan (1930–1990) 114 Šimić, A[ntun] B[ranko] (1898– 1925) 85

Simović, Ljubomir (b. 1936) 265 Şincai, Gheorghe (1754–1816) 13, 47 Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904– 1991) 52 Singer, Israel Joshua (1893–1944) 52 Sinka, István (1897–1969) 117 Sirácky, Andrej (1900–1988) 91 Šišmanov, Ivan D. (1862–1928) 329, 333, 334 Sito, Jerzy Stanisław (b. 1934) 241 Skalka, Ján (1900–1982) 226 Skanjeti, Andrea (1906–1992) 232 Škarvan, Albert (1869–1926) 112 Skarżyński, Jerzy (1924–2004) 244 Skerlić, Jovan (1877–1914) 406, 407, 408, 409 Škroup, František (1801–1862) 155 Skukálek, Rudolf (b. 1931) 113, 226 Škultéty, Jozef (1853–1948) 90, 112, 353, 380, 381 Skupa, Josef (1892–1957) 180 Škvorecký, Josef (b. 1924) 58, 100, 103, 104 Šládkovič, Andrej (1820–1872) 45, 79, 158, 380, 381, 382 Slamnig, Ivan (b. 1930) 84 Slánský, Rudolf [Rudolf Salzmann] (1901–1952) 103, 106 Slaveikov, Penčo (1866–1912) 50, 193, 282, 284, 327, 328, 331, 333 Slaveikov, Petko R[ačev] (1827– 1895) 326, 334 Slavici, Ioan (1848–1925) 393 Šlitr, Jiří (1924–1969) 223 Sloboda, Rudolf (1938–1995) 114, 312 Słobodzianek, Tadeusz (b. 1955) 241 Slodnjak, Anton (1899–1983) 251, 348, 350 Słonimski, Antoni (1895–1976) 35, 52, 198

Index of East-Central European Names Słowacki, Juliusz (1809–1849) 157, 159, 200, 202, 219, 241, 362 Sluckis, Mykolas (b. 1928) 130 Šmaha, Josef (1848–1915) 178 Šmatlák, Stanislav (b. 1925) 383, 384 Smetana, Bedřich (1824–1884) 157, 189, 277 Smetona, Antanas (1874–1944) 125 Smoček, Ladislav (b. 1932) 223 Smole, Dominik (1929–1992) 252 Smrek, Ján (1898–1982) 52, 91, 113 Šnajder, Slobodan (b. 1948) 264, 265 Šnajdr, Karel Sudimír (1766–1835) 302 Socec, Ioan V. (1830–1896) 41 Sõgel, Endel (1922–1998) 357 Sojka, Jan Erazim (1828–1887) 372 Sokolovský, Evžen (1925–1998) 223 Sokols, Ēvalds (1901–1965) 360 Solarić, Pavle (1779–1821) 405 Šoljan, Antun (1932–1993) 84, 257 Solomon, Dumitru (b. 1932) 192, 228 Solovič, Ján (b. 1934) 226, 227 Sorbul, Mihail [M. Smolsky] (1885–1966) 191 Sorescu, Marin (1936–1996) 59, 228, 275 Sőtér, István (1913–1988) 388, 391, 426 Šotola. Jiří (1924–1989) 109 Sova, Antonín (1864–1928) 64 Spahivogli, Kujtim (1932–1987) 234 Spasowicz, Włodzimierz (1829– 1906) 361, 362 Spasse, Sterjo (1918–1989) 93 Šrámek, Fráňa (1877–1952) 179 Srbljanović, Biljana (b. 1970) 266 Sremac, Stevan (1855–1906) 407

Sruoga, Balys (1896–1947) 142, 210, 291 Stamatov, Georgi (1893–1963) 228 Stamboliyski, Aleksandar (1879– 1923) 339 Stanca, Radu (1920–1962) 192 Stańczyk (ca.1480–1560) 48 Starowiejska, Ewa (b. 1930) 244 Ştefănescu, Mircea (1898–1983) 191 Steigerwald, Karel (b. 1945) 225 Stenders, Gotthardus Fridericus [Old Stenders] (1714–1796) 291 Štěpánek, Jan Nepomuk (1783– 1844) 154, 155 Stephanie the younger, Gottlieb (1741–1800) 154 Štepka, Stanislav (b. 1944) 227, 313 Stere, Constantin (1865–1936) 54 Sterian, Paul (1904–1984) 83 Stern Anatol (1899–1968) 28, 29 Štiavnický, Ján (1937–1993) 313 Stodola, Ivan (1888–1977) 36, 113, 189, 190 Stoev, Genčo (1925–2002) 328 Štolba, Josef (1846–1930) 157 Štoll, Ladislav (1902–1981) 103 Stopka, Andrzej (1904–1973) 200, 244 Štorch, Karel Boleslav (1812– 1868) 306 Štorch-Marien, Otokar (1897– 1974) 51 Stoyanov, Vasil [Velio] D. (1839–1910) 415 Strašimirov, Anton (1872–1937) 169, 192, 193 Štrasser, Ján (b. 1946) 313 Straticò, Alberto (1863–1926) 409, 410 Stratiev, Stanislav (1941–2000) 231 Stratimirović, Stefan (1790–1836) 47, 271 Stritar, Josip (1836–1923) 46 Strniša, Gregor (1930–1987) 252

519 Strossmayer, Joseph Georg [Josip Juraj] (1815–1905) 326 Stroupežnický, Ladislav (1850– 1892) 178 Stryjkowski, Maciej (1547–after 1582) 294 Strzelecki, Zenobiusz (1915–1987) 244 Štúr, Ľudovít (1815–1856) 12, 16, 43, 46, 89, 158, 310, 377, 379, 381, 382 Štúr, Samuel (1818–1861) 90, 311 Štýrský, Jindřich (1899–1942) 30 Šubert, František Adolf (1849– 1915) 178 Suchý, Jiří (b. 1931) 98, 223 Suits, Gustav (1883–1956) 55, 86, 213, 356 Supek, Ivan (b. 1915) 257 Sušil, František (1804–1868) 301, 305 Sutkus, Antanas (1892–1968) 210 Švanda, Pavel (1825–1891) 157 Švantner, František (1912–1950) 36, 312 Svetina, Ivo (b. 1948) 256 Světlá, Karolína (1830–1899) 376 Svoboda, Josef (b. 1920) 221 Svoboda, Václav Alois (1791– 1849) 277 Świętochowski, Aleksander (1849–1938) 48, 49, 161 Swinarski, Konrad (1929–1975) 200, 245 Szabó, Árpád (1913–2001) 119, 120 Szabó, Dezső (1879–1945) 53, 54, 73, 77, 78 Szabó, István (b. 1938) 235 Szabó, László Cs. (1905–1984) 77 Szabó, Lőrinc (1900–1957) 77 Szabolcsi, Bence (1899–1973) 389 Szabolcsi, Miklós (1921–2000) 119 Szajna, Józef (b. 1922) 242, 243 Szaniawski, Jerzy (1886–1970) 197, 198, 201 Szczęśniak, Małgorzata (b. 1954) 245

520 Széchenyi, Ferenc (1754–1820) 5 Széchenyi, István (1791–1860) 5, 18, 19, 44, 49, 151 Székely, Gábor (b. 1944) 234, 235, 237, 238 Szekfű, Gyula (1883–1955) 390 Szemere, Pál (1785–1861) 45 Szép, Ernő (1884–1953) 22, 23 Szerb, Antal (1901–1945) 115, 284, 354, 388, 389, 390 Szigeti, József (b. 1921) 118 Szőke, István (b. 1942) 236 Szujski, Józef (1835–1883) 48 Szurmiej, Szymon (b. 1923) 209 Szyfman, Arnold (1882–1967) 22, 203 Szymanowski, Karol (1883–1937) 180, 244 Szymborska, Wisława (b. 1923) 57 Szyrocki, Marian (1928–1992) 361 T Tablic, Bohuslav (1769–1832) 45, 112, 378 Tábori, György [George Tabori] (b. 1914) 189 Tajovský, Jozef Gregor (1874– 1940) 159, 189, 311, 381 Taloş, Ion (b. 1934) 324 Talská, Eva (b. 1944) 225 Talvik, Heiti (1904–1947) 35, 86 Tammsaare, A[nton] H[ansen] (1878–1940) 214, 249 Tarnowski, Stanisław (1837–1917) 48, 363 Tatarka, Dominik (1913–1989) 113, 114 Ťažký, Ladislav (b. 1924) 113 Teige, Karel (1900–1951) 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 103, 181 Tekelija-Popović, Sava (1761– 1842) 41, 44 Tenison, Modris (?–?) 246 Teodorescu, G. Dem. (1849–1900) 320 Tetmajer, Kazimierz Przerwa(1865–1940) 50, 201 Thaly, Kálmán (1839–1909) 388

Index of East-Central European Names Tieftrunk, Karel (1829–1897) 367, 368, 369 Tigrid, Pavel (1917–2003) 58 Timrava [Božena Slančíková] (1867–1950) 112 Tiso, Jozef (1887–1947) 113, 383 Tisza, István (1861–1918) 72, 117 Tito [Josip Bros] (1892–1980) 37, 261, 408 Todorov, Petko Y[urdanov] (1879–1916) 169, 192, 193, 194, 275, 327, 328, 415 Tokin, Boško (1894–1953) 27 Toldy, Ferenc [Schedel, Franz] (1805–1875) 45, 348, 385, 387 Tolnai, Simon (1868–1944) 40 Tom, Konrad (1887–1957) 204 Tomasović, Mirko (b. 1938) 395 Tomingas, Juhan (1949–1998) 88 Tomiš, Karol (b. 1929) 78 Tompa, Gábor (b. 1957) 228 Tõnisson, Jaan (1868–1942) 53 Tooming, Jaan (b. 1946) 248, 249 Topol, Josef (b. 1935) 98, 188, 223, 224, 225 Tótfalusy Kis, Miklós (1650?– 1702) 39 Tóth, Árpád (1886–1928) 275 Towiański, Andrzej (1799–1878) 352 Toyen, Marie [Cerminova] (1902–1980) 30 Trattner, János Tamás (1789–1824) 40 Trayanov, Teodor (1882–1945) 53 Treimanis-Zvārgulis, Edvards (1866–1950) 360 Trost, D[olfi] (1916–1966) 20, 25 Tröster, František (1904–1968) 181 Trúchly-Sytniansky, Andrej (1841–1916) 90 Trzciński Teofil (1878–1952) 201, 203, 204 Tserkovski, Tsanko (1869–1926) 328 Tseytlin [Zeitlin], Aaron (1898– 1973) 52, 209

Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna (1892–1941) 47 Tuđman, Franjo (1922–1999) 264 Tudoran, Dorin (b. 1945) 59 Tuglas, Friedebert (1886–1971) 24, 35, 51, 87 Tuminas, Rimas (b. 1952) 246 Turba, Čtibor (b. 1944) 225 Turinský, František (1797–1852) 155 Turkow, Jonas (1898–1988) 208 Turkow, Zygmunt (1896–1970) 208 Tuwim, Julian (1894–1953) 35, 52, 204 Tyl, Josef Kajetán (1808–1856) 96, 155, 156, 157, 190, 308 Tzara, Tristan [Sami Rosenstock] (1896–1963) 3, 23, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 82, 191 U Uhde, Milan (b. 1936) 223, 224 Ujević, Tin (1891–1955) 85 Ujvári, Erzsébet (1899–1940) 27 Ulanowski, Tadeusz (1872–1942) 203 Under, Marie (1883–1980) 35, 86 Ungureanu, Cornel (b. 1943) 422 Upīts, Andrejs (1877–1970) 360 Urban, Milo (1904–1982) 113 Urbánek, Ferko (1859–1934) 159 Urbanovič, Kvetoslav Florián (1885–1963) 189 Urmuz ([Demetru DemetrescuBuzău] (1883–1923) 25, 82 Ušinskas, Stasys (1905–1974) 211 V Văcărescu, Alecu (1769–1819) 14 Văcărescu, Ienăchiţă (1740–1797) 14 Văcărescu, Nicolae (1784–1825) 14 Vaculík, Ludvík (b. 1926) 37, 38, 60, 100, 102, 109 Váh, Juraj [Henrich Herzog] (1925–1976) 226

Index of East-Central European Names Vahing, Vaino (b. 1940) 249 Vaičiūnas, Petras (1890–1959) 210 Vaičkus, Juozas (1885–1935) 210 Vaitkus, Jonas (b. 1944) 246 Valdemārs, Krišjānis (1825–1891) 10 Vályi, András K. (1764–1801) 6 Vámoš, Gejza (1901–1956) 91 Vanaga, Melanija (1905–1997) 142 Vančura, Vladislav (1891–1942) 181 Vansová, Terézia (1857–1942) 90, 311 Varga, Béla (1903–2003) 122 Vargyas, Lajos (b. 1914) 324 Variboba, Giulio (1724–1788) 410 Varnas, Gintaras (b. 1961) 246 Vazov, Ivan (1850–1921) 44, 169, 192, 282, 328, 414, 416 Velea, Nicolae (1936–1981) 59 Veličkov, Konstantin (1855–1907) 416 Venclova, Tomas (b. 1937) 127, 294 421 Veres, Péter (1897–1970) 117 Venelin, Yuri Ivanovič [Georgi Hutza] (1802–1839) 326, 334, 415 Verković, Stefan (1827–1893) 44, 276, 278, 326, 334 Verseghy, Ferenc (1757–1822) 40 Vértes, György (1902–1976) 118 Vetemaa, Enn (b. 1936) 249 Vīķe-Freiberga, Vaira (b. 1937) 295 Viktorin, Jozef Karol (1822–1874) 12, 90 Vilde, Eduard (1865–1933) 214, 249 Vilikovský, Jan (1904–1946) Vilikovský, Pavel (b. 1941) 91, 114, 313 Vinaver, Stanislav (1891–1955) 407 Vincenz, Stanisław (1888–1971) 57 Vinea, Ion (1895–1964) 31, 52, 83 Virág, Benedek (1754–1830) 40

Visnapuu, Henrik (1890–1951) 35, 53 Vişniec, Matei (b. 1956) 228 Višnjić, Filip (1767–1834) 272 Vitkovics, Mihály [Vitković, Mihailo] (1778–1829) 2, 14, 276 Vlahuţă, Al[exandru] (1858–1919) 45, 54 Vlaikov, Todor (1865–1943) 328 Vlček, Jaroslav (1860–1930) 345, 367, 370, 372, 375, 376, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383 Vlček, Václav (1839–1908) 157 Vnuk, František (b. 1926) 383 Voborník, Jan (1854–1946) 372, 373 Vodička, Felix (1909–1974) 300, 307 Vodnik, Branko (1879–1926) 349, 397, 398, 399, 400, 402, 403 Vodnik, Valentin (1758–1819) 276 Voiculescu, Vasile (1884–1963) 314 Voinikov, Dobri (1833–1878) 47, 168, 326 Vojan, Eduard (1853–1920) 179 Voronca, Ilarie [Eduard Marcus] (1903–1946) 31 Vörösmarty, Mihály (1800–1855) 17, 18, 19, 45, 151, 152, 276, 381, 385 Voskovec, Jiří (1905–1981) 21, 30, 181 Vostrý, Jaroslav (b. 1931) 223 Votruba, František (1880–1953) 381 Vrabie, Gheorghe (1908–1991) 321 Vraz, Stanko (1810–1851) 12, 42, 283, 403 Vrchlický, Jaroslav (1853–1912) 50, 157, 179, 190 Vreto, Jani (1820–1900) 44, 337 Všehrd, Viktorin Kornel ze (1460–1520) 42 Vydūnas, Vilius Storosta (1868– 1953) 210 Vyskočil, Ivan (b. 1929) 224

521 Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania (1350?–1430) 291 W Wajda, Andrzej (b. 1926) 220, 245 Wallaszky, Pál [Pavel Valaský] (1742–1824) 346, 378, 385 Wandurski, Witold (1891–1937) 28, 32 Wat, Aleksander (1900–1967) 28, 29, 34 Ważyk, Adam (1905–1982) 56 Weichert, Micha (1890–1967) 30, 208, 209 Weidmann, Paul (1748–1828) 154 Weil, Jiří (1900–1959) 102 Weiss, Manfred (1857–1922) 118 Wellek, René (1903–1995) 419 Weöres, Sándor (1913–1989) 115, 118, 122 Werich, Jan (1905–1980) 21, 29, 181, 223 Werthes, Friedrich August Clemens (1748–1817) 270 Wesselényi, Miklós, the younger (1796–1850) 44 Wierchowicz, Zofia (1924–1978) 244 Wierzyński, Kazimierz (1894– 1969) 57, 79 Winawer, Bruno (1883–1944) 198 Wirpsza, Witold (1918–1985) 136 Wiślicki, Adam (1836–1913) 49 Witkiewicz [Witkacy], Stanisław Ignacy (1885–1939) 21, 25, 27, 29, 32, 35, 172, 197, 198, 239, 241, 243 Władysław II, King of Poland [Jogaila (Jagiełło), Grand Duke of Lithuania] (1348–1434) 291 Włast, Andrzej (1895–1941/1942) 204 Wodzicki, Ludwik (1834–1894) 48 Wójcicki, Kazimierz Władysław (1807–1879) 361 Wojtyła, Karol [Pope John Paul II] (1920–2005) 202 Wolfner, József (1856–1932) 40

522 Wolker, Jiří (1900–1924) 103 Wyspiański, Stanisław (1869– 1907) 20, 21, 50, 161, 162, 171, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 219, 241, 242, 245, 364 X Xoxha, Enver (1908–1985) 218 Y Yavorov, Peyo K[račolov] (1878– 1914) 192, 327, 328 Ybl, Miklós (1814–1891) 9 Yordanov, Nedyalko (b. 1940) 231 Yovkov, Yordan (1880–1937) 195, 328 Z Zaborowski, Tymon (1799–1828) 159 Záborský, Jonáš (1812–1876) 43, 89, 112 Zachwatowicz, Krystyna (b. 1930) 244 Zadeja, Ndre (1891–1945) 231 Zahradníček, Jan (1905–1960) 36, 103 Záhradnik, Osvald (b. 1932) 227 Zajc, Dane (b. 1929) 252 Zālīte, Māra (b. 1956) 211, 212, 213

Index of East-Central European Names Zamenhof, Ludovic Lazarus [Ludwik Lejzer, Ludwik Łazarz] (1859–1917) 13 Zamfir, Mihai (b. 1940) 394 Zamfirescu, George Mihail (1892–1939) 191 Zanev, Stefan (b. 1936) 231 Zankov, Villy (b. 1924) 230, 231 Zap, Karel Vladislav (1812–1871) 305 Zapolska, Gabriela (1857–1921) 196 Zápotocký, Antonín (1884–1957) 106, 222 Záturecký, Adolf Peter (1837– 1904) 311 Zeiferts, Teodors (1865–1929) 359, 360 Żeleński[-Boy], Tadeusz (1874– 1941) 22, 34, 203, 204 Zelwerowicz, Aleksander (1877– 1955) 209 Zemlinsky, Alexander von (1872–1942) 180 Żeromski, Stefan (1864–1925) 24, 34, 197, 200, 201 Zeyer, Julius (1841–1901) 50, 66 Zhitlovski, Khayim (1865–1943) 13 Ziherl, Boris (1910–1975) 251 Zillich, Heinrich (1898–1988) 52

Zimińska-Sygietyńska, Mira (1901–1997) 204 Zimmerman, Jan Nepomuk Václav (1788–1836) 370 Zimmermann, Ulrich Ernst (1772–1820) 346, 359 Zítek, Ota (1872–1955) 180 Živadinov, Dragan (b. 1960) 256 Živkov, Todor Khristov (1911– 1998) 332 Zlobický, Josef Valentin (1743– 1810) 373 Zogović, Radovan (1907–1986) 251 Zografi, Vlad (b. 1960) 228 Zogu, Ahmet (1895–1961) 92 Zois, Žiga (1747–1819) 276 Żółkiewski, Stefan (1911–1991) 34, 56 Zsámbéki, Gábor (b. 1943) 234, 235, 236, 237, 238 Żuławsky, Jerzy (1874–1915) 210 Župančić, Oton (1878–1949) 50 Zvon, Peter [Vladimir Sykora] (1913–1942) 190 Zvonimir, Dmitar (?–1089) 400

In the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication:

XXII 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. Volume III: The making and remaking of literary institutions. xiii, 522 pp. [Subseries on Literary Cultures 3] XXI Eysteinsson, Astradur and Vivian Liska (eds.): Modernism. Editorial Assistant: Anke Brouwers, Vanessa Joosen, Dirk Van Hulle and Katrien Vloeberghs. xii, 1022 pp. + index (2 vols.). Expected September 2007 XX 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. Volume II. 2006. xiv, 512 pp. [Subseries on Literary Cultures 2] 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. Volume I. 2004. xx, 648 pp. [Subseries on Literary Cultures 1] XVIII Sondrup, Steven P. and Virgil Nemoianu (eds.): Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding borders. In collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. 2004. viii, 477 pp. XVII Esterhammer, Angela (ed.): Romantic Poetry. 2002. xii, 537 pp. XVI Knabe, Peter-Eckhard, Roland Mortier and François Moureau (eds.): L'Aube de la Modernité 1680-1760. 2002. viii, 554 pp. XV Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch-speaking regions. 2001. x, 672 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. 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. XII Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. 1997. xviii, 398 pp. XI Bertens, Hans and Douwe W. Fokkema (eds.): International Postmodernism. Theory and literary practice. 1997. xvi, 581 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. IX Gillespie, Gerald (ed.): Romantic Drama. 1993. xvi, 516 pp. VIII Garber, Frederick (ed.): Romantic Irony. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1988. 395 pp. 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). (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest594 pp. Expected Out of print VI:2 European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Volume 2. 1986. VI:1 European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Volume 1. 1986. V Weisgerber, Jean (réd.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume II: Théorie. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1986. 704 pp. IV Weisgerber, Jean (réd.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume I: Histoire. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1986. 622 pp. III Vajda, György M. † (réd.): Le Tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820. Les genres en vers des lumières au romantisme. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1982. 684 pp. II Balakian, Anna (ed.): The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1984. 732 pp. I Weisstein, Ulrich (ed.): Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest Expected Out of print

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 (Vol. XX in the main series) Volume III (Vol. XXII in the main series) 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.