Postcolonial Europe? essays on post-communist literatures and cultures 9789004303843, 9789004303850

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Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft Series Editor Norbert Bachleitner (University of Vienna) Editorial Assistance Paul Ferstl Rudolf Pölzer Founded by Alberto Martino Editorial Board Francis Claudon (Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne University) Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) Achim Hölter (University of Vienna) Klaus Ley ( Johannes Gutenburg University of Mainz) John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) Alfred Noe (University of Vienna) Manfred Pfister (Free University of Berlin) Sven H. Rossel (University of Vienna)

VOLUME 186 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/favl

Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures Edited by

Dobrota Pucherová Róbert Gáfrik

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The publication of this book was co-financed by the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences and the International Visegrad Fund as part of the Small Grant Project no. 11340281, ‘Constructing National/Cultural Identities in Central Europe—Postmodern and Postcolonial Perspectives.’ Copyeditor: Melinda Reidinger. Cover illustration: Yerbossyn Meldibekov, Mutation. Lenin, Giacometti, Genghis Khan, Lumumba. 2009. Bronze. Three: 30 x 30 x 15 cm, one: 35 x 30 x 15 cm. © Yerbossyn Meldibekov. Permission to reproduce the image granted by the artist. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944840

ISSN 0929-6999 ISBN 978-90-04-30384-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-30385-0 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik Introduction: Which Postcolonial Europe?

9 11

Part I: Post-Communist, Post-Socialist, Post-Soviet, Post-Dependence: Preliminary Considerations on East-Central European Un-Homing Madina Tlostanova Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing

27

Benedikts Kalnačs Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options: The Baltic Experience

47

Cristina Sandru Joined at the Hip? About Post-Communism in a (Revised) Postcolonial Mode

65

Emilia Kledzik Inventing Postcolonial Poland: Strategies of Domestication

85

Part II: The Ghosts of the Past: Post-Communist Rewriting of National Histories Bogdan Ştefănescu Filling in the Historical Blanks: A Tropology of the Void in Postcommunist and Postcolonial Reconstructions of Identity

107

Adriana Raducanu Confessions from the Dead: Reading Ismail Kadare’s Spiritus as a ‘Post-Communist Gothic’ Novel

121

Dobrota Pucherová Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-)Communist Literature

139

6 Natalie Paoli ‘Let My People Go’: Postcolonial Trauma in Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

161

Edit Zsadányi Voicing the Subaltern by Narrating the Communist Past through the Focalization of a Child in Gábor Németh’s ‘Are You a Jew?’ and Endre Kukorelly’s ‘The Fairy Valley’ 175

Part III: Place and Displacement in (Post-)Communist Narratives and Cityscapes Irene Sywenky Geopoetics of the Female Body in Postcolonial Ukrainian and Polish Fiction

197

Tamás Scheibner Building Empire through Self-Colonization: Literary Canons and Budapest as Sovietized Metropolis

215

Xénia Gaál The City of K. (Königsberg/Kaliningrad) as a Cultural Phenomenon: Cultural Memory, the Myth and Identity of the City

243

Dorota Kołodziejczyk The Organic (Re)Turn ― Ecology of Place in Postcolonial and Central/Eastern European Novel of Post-Displacement

261

Part IV: Imagining the Orient in Central European Communist Travel Writing Róbert Gáfrik Representations of India in Slovak Travel Writing during the Communist Regime (1948–1989)

283

Martin Slobodník Socialist Anti-Orientalism: Perceptions of China in Czechoslovak Travelogues from the 1950s

299

7 Agnieszka Sadecka A Socialist Orientalism? Polish Travel Writing on India in the 1960s

315

Part V: Between the East and the West: The Colonial Present Mykola Riabchuk Ukrainian Culture after Communism: Between Post-Colonial Liberation and Neo-Colonial Subjugation

337

Dariusz Skórczewski Trapped by the Western Gaze: Contemporary European Imagology and Its Implications for East and South-East European Agency ― a Case Study

357

Jagoda Wierzejska Central European Palimpsests: Postcolonial Discourse in Works by Andrzej Stasiuk and Yurii Andrukhovych

375

Contributors

399

Acknowledgments This book is the result of collaboration among nineteen scholars from eleven different countries, all of whom have actively shaped the content, form, and look of this book through group discussions and individual effort, and we would like to thank all of them for their resilience and intellectual rigour as well as their commitment to the discipline. Special thanks go to the anonymous peer reviewers for their critical insight and useful suggestions, as well as to Melinda Reidinger of Anglo-American University, Prague, for her invaluable input and meticulous copyediting. We sincerely appreciate the financial and institutional support provided to us by the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and the International Visegrad Fund, without which this book could not have been published. We are also very grateful to the artists who provided images of their work free of charge, and especially Yerbossyn Meldibekov whose sculptures grace the cover of this book. Finally, we wish to thank Norbert Bachleitner for welcoming the book in the IFAVL series and Paul Ferstl for excellent communication and helpful assistance with preprint preparation.

Introduction: Which Postcolonial Europe? The year 2014, during which this collective monograph took shape, marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain that once separated Europe. At the November celebrations in Berlin commemorating the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev warned that ‘the world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some say that it has already begun’.1 In February, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which escalated into a full-scale war in the Donbass region. The conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 5,000 people since the start of an uprising by proRussian separatists in mid-April. These events are part of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to reverse the consequences of the break-up of the Soviet Union and return Russia to the position of a world superpower, and have been on his agenda since his accession to power in 1999. Already in 1994 in St. Petersburg, Putin lamented that the USSR had to give up ‘extensive territories’ in post-Soviet countries, including those that ‘historically always belonged to Russia’ and asserted that it cannot remain indifferent to the destinies of ‘25 million Russians living beyond Russia’s borders’.2 In 2005, Putin told the Russian nation that the collapse of the Soviet empire was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’ and a tragedy for Russians.3 In his 2014 New Year’s Eve speech, Putin congratulated the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol for ‘deciding to return to their native home.’ 4 According to the French commentator Françoise Thom, Putin’s politics of re-integration of the former Soviet territory, in which the war in Ukraine is the first step, is ideologically accompanied by the rehabilitation of Sovietism, or even Stalinism, and economically by a ‘Schröderization’ of European elites by making Europe dependent on its gas and oil.5 What is perhaps even more worrying, however, is the belief of many Western pro-Russian commentators that Russia has an inalienable right to claim Ukraine, and

1

2 3 4

5

Bettina Borgfeld, ‘Gorbachev Says World is on Brink of New Cold War’, Reuters, 8 November 2014, available at Accessed 5 Dec. 2015. Françoise Thom, ‘Poutine. L’heure de vérité’, Commentaire, 147 (Autumn 2014), pp. 503510 (p. 503). ‘Putin: Soviet Collapse a “Genuine Tragedy”’, MSNBC, 25 April 2005, available at Accessed 7 October 2010. ‘Putin Calls Crimea Annexation Milestone of History’, 31 December 2014, available atAccessed 31 December 2014. Thom, p. 503.

12 Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik their tendency to portray Ukraine in Orientalist terms as a country incapable of action on its own initiative, always manipulated by the West.6 This collective monograph analyses how the postcolonial and the postSoviet/post-communist converge; given Russia’s renewal of imperialist activities, the discussion of the consequences of Russian colonial history becomes even more complex and urgent. Post-communist discourse, which has evolved mainly in humanities departments at universities across Central and Eastern Europe since the mid-1990s, shows that the experiences of the countries formerly belonging to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, and those previously colonized by West European powers, share a number of characteristics. These are, for example, structures of exclusion/inclusion (the centre/periphery model and theorizations of the liminal and ‘in-between’); formations of nationalism, structures of othering and representations of difference; forms and historical realizations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the rewriting of history); resistance as a complex of cultural practices; concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, selfcolonization, cultural geography, dislocation, minority and subaltern cultures, neocolonialism, orientalization, transnationalism.7

These intersections have led to the recognition of the applicability of the tools of postcolonial theory to the analysis of Central and Eastern European space post-1989, which has successfully been demonstrated in a number of scholarly publications. 8 What this shows is that postcolonial

6

7

8

See Fabio Belfatti, ‘Orientalism Reanimated: Colonial Thinking in Western Analysts’ Comments on Ukraine’, Euromaidan Press, 27 October 2014, available at Accessed 18 December 2014. Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Sandru, ‘Introduction: On Colonialism, Communism and East-Central Europe —Some Reflections’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (2012), 113-116 (p. 113). See, e.g., Ewa Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. by Violeta Kelertas (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006); From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. by Janusz Korek (Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola, 2007); Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008); Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Intersections and Overlaps, ed. by Monica Bottez, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru and Bogdan Ştefănescu (Bucharest: Bucharest UP, 2011). See also the journal Postcolonial Europe, Accessed 20 December 2014.

Introduction 13

theory, rather than being an ‘exhausted paradigm’,9 as some scholars have argued, is a globally flexible discourse that can be used to analyse a variety of regions. This does not mean that postcolonialism can be applied indiscriminately to the post-communist experience; instead, postcommunism recognizes the specificity and complexity of the latter as it revises and sharpens, not merely confirms, received postcolonial theory. In the words of Jagoda Wierzejska, ‘The studies on East-Central Europe inspired by Western postcolonialism [...] are a creative transposition of inspirations flowing from that postcolonialism, and not a mechanical translocation of its language and subject matter’ (p. 396). This work has already produced new theoretical vocabulary, such as ‘filtered colonialism’, 10 ‘intimate colonialism’, 11 ‘mutated colonialism’, 12 ‘mutant coloniality’, 13 ‘self-colonization’, 14 ‘post-dependence’,15 ‘post-communist Gothic’,16 and many others.17 As is by now clear, this book uses the term ‘postcolonial Europe’ in a new way; rather than designating the former West European colonial powers, as it has been used by the postcolonial discourse,18 it indicates here 9

10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17

18

See Patricia Yaeger, ‘Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diuf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel’, PMLA, 122.3 (2007), 633–51. Comparative Central European Culture, ed. by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2002), pp. 9; 24; 151. Ovidiu Tichindelean, ‘Postcommunism’s Modernity’, in Genealogii ale postcomunismului, ed. by Adrian T. Sirbu and Alexandru Polgar (Cluj: Ideea Design& Print, 2009), pp. 119-139. Cristina Sandru, Worlds Apart? A Postcolonial Reading of Post-1945 East-Central European Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p. 24. Madina Tlostanova, ‘Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (2012), 130-142 (p. 132). Alexander Kiossev, ‘Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures’, in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. by Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), pp. 114-117. See the Polish inter-university network Post-Dependence Studies Centre, available at Accessed 2 December 2014. Raluca Oproiu, ‘The Ghost of Communism Past: The Birth of “Post-Communist Gothic” Fiction?’, Studies in Gothic Fiction, 1.2 (2011), 12-22. See Monica Bottez, Alina Bottez, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Bogdan Ştefănescu, Ruxandra Vişan, Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Dictionary of Key Cultural Terms (Bucharest: Bucharest UP, 2011). See e.g., ‘Postcolonial Europe’, the issue 11.2 (2011) of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing; the research network ‘Postcolonial Europe’ set up by universities of Leeds, Munich and Utrecht, available at Acessed 22 Dec 2014; and the ‘Postcolonial Europe’ project forming part of the Advanced Thematic Network in Activities in Women’s Studies in Europe (ATHENA), available at Accessed 22 December 2014.

14 Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik the Central and East European countries formerly under Soviet domination, pointing to the fact that all of Europe is postcolonial, but in different ways, and arguing that this region should play a major role in the current debates in postcolonial studies on European identity. One of the first scholars outside of East-Central Europe to consider this geographic area in postcolonial terms was David Chioni Moore in his 2001 article ‘Is the Postin Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’. Despite the affirmative answer that the essay implicitly gives to the question posed in its title, postcolonial scholars have, by-and-large, not yet recognized Central and Eastern Europe as a postcolonial space. Nor are post-communist studies yet considered as part of the same discourse that seeks to re-evaluate the consequences of decolonization and rethink the cultural and mental implications of both colonial and anti-colonial discourses.19 One reason for this, as the contributions in the opening section note, is the typically Marxist orientation of postcolonial critics based in the West, which has made them resist seeing the Soviet Union as an imperialist power. According to Neil Lazarus, for example, ‘colonialism as an historical process involved the forced integration of hitherto uncapitalized societies, or societies in which the capitalist mode of production was not hegemonic, into a capitalist world-system.’20 This neat definition excludes the possibility of a socialist state such as the USSR engaging in imperialist activities. Similarly, the definition of colonialism as a domination of the ‘Third World’ by the ‘West’ (or the ‘global South’ by the ‘global North’), espoused by postcolonialists such as Robert Young, 21 is equally unhelpful in analysing Soviet expansion into Europe and Central Asia as imperialism. This book argues for the necessity of a broader-based, global postcolonial discourse based on geo-historical comparativism that would move beyond the above-mentioned political and geographic limitations. As the Moscow-based philosopher Madina Tlostanova observes, referring to Enrique Dussell, ‘An intersectional optic looking in between the postcolonial and post-socialist is a necessary step to see the darker side of Soviet and Socialist modernity within the global coloniality. Both postcolonial and postsocialist discourses are products of modernity/coloniality […] sharing the basic rhetoric of modernity acting as 19

20 21

An important exception to this is Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the Millennium, ed. by Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2010). Neil Lazarus, ‘Spectres Haunting: Postcommunism and Postcolonialism’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (2012), 117-129 (p. 120). See Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 6.

Introduction 15

a tool in justifying the continuing colonization of time and space, of lives and futures’ (p. 30). The studies in this volume show that examining the similarities and differences between postcolonial and post-communist experiences can be highly productive in this project, highlighting the various ways in which power masks itself. The borrowing of postcolonial theory for the theorization of the post-communist is not simply a convenient short-cut towards new knowledge; on the contrary, we propose that the intersections and overlaps between postcolonialism and post-communism illuminate the shared origin of both discourses and can enable a mutual productive dialogue and the continuous re-thinking of both paradigms. Some of the more discomforting questions that Tlostanova has asked in her work are also raised in this volume: How does the recognition of Soviet expansion as part of European imperialism alter the understanding of Western modernity? How do we theorize a post-Marxist alternative to capitalism and imperialism? What effect did the Cold War have on EastCentral Europe’s relationship to the West and to the Far East? How has the East-Central European space been reconfigured post-1989 and how has this affected individual and collective identities? How can the post-communist subject be reconstituted out of the void that became its main identity marker under Soviet cultural domination and Western Orientalism? What types of postmodernism developed in Central and Eastern European cultures as a result of Soviet domination? How does Russian colonialism continue into the present and what does it mean for the current world order? The opening section, Post-Communist, Post-Socialist, Post-Soviet, PostDependence: Preliminary Considerations on East-Central European Un-Homing, addresses these questions on the basis of a discursive analysis of contemporary examples of cultural production resulting from, on the one hand, mass migrations from East-Central Europe to the Western metropolis, and, on the other, the internal exile of non-Russian populations in postSoviet Russia and the Baltics. The studies diagnose the current postcommunist moment as ‘post-communist un-homing’, a term that reflects the trauma of involuntary physical displacement, desire for Western modernity and consequent cultural alienation in exile, or emotional alienation after return from exile. It leads to the tension between the search for genuine identity and the impossibility of retrieving it, since the imagined wholeness of a nation, due to its traumatic historical experiences, can no longer be restored. It is replaced by in-between identities, identity-splitting, and a changeable, contradictory and multi-layered spatial history, grounded in the rejection of history, responsibility, and rootedness—experiences which, as Cristina Sandru argues, migrants from postcolonial and post-communist

16 Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik spaces into the Western metropolis share. This is often expressed in literature and art through highly unrealistic, experimental, postmodern approaches grounded in the distortion or overcoming of realistic tempolocalities. These meta-narratives of post-communist postmodernity, as Madina Tlostanova writes, ‘do not go back to some ancient roots in quest of ethnic renaissances, as was still happening several decades ago. […] Space becomes a palimpsest of overlapping traces left by a succession of inscriptions, and the function of inscribing the names on the symbolic cultural map […] turns into an experimental field with constant crossings of borders, spaces and times, where the signs of history exist in the signification lacunas, semantic slippages and re-namings’ (p. 33). In other words, the un-homed condition does not require immediate re-rooting, because the post-communist subject needs to form new, fluid identities that can be created only in transit. In this context, the Baltic countries represent a particular example, which Benedikts Kalnačs calls ‘the suppressed side of modernity’ (p. 64). The medieval Northern Crusades in the Baltics and the forced conversion to Christianity provided Baltic societies with a European identity when, later in history, they became prey to Russian (and Soviet) colonial expansion. The longing to re-establish themselves as a part of the West (especially in opposition to the post-communist neocolonial threat), argues Kalnačs, forms a substantial layer within the identity of the Baltic peoples, who at the same time also seek to recover their own cultural specificity. In the last study in this section, Emilia Kledzik traces the development of post-dependence studies in Poland. This has undoubtedly become one of the most important contemporary theoretical projects in Poland and in post-communist Europe which, according to Kledzik, could transform into a chief methodological platform for regional studies. However, the author warns that Central Europe’s self-perception as postcolonial in relation to Russia and subaltern in relation to the West has often overlooked the situation of the ethnic and national minorities in the region, a lacuna that reveals nationalist and even nativist tendencies in the post-dependency discourse. The second section, entitled The Ghosts of the Past: Post-Communist Rewriting of National Histories focuses on literary and philosophical texts that revisit and re-interpret communist histories of the nation. These communist and post-communist trauma narratives endeavour to repair the symbolic and physical damage done by Soviet and internal colonization. Several of the studies utilize notions from cultural trauma theory to analyse the postcommunist healing process. These historical revisions do not only trace the historical scars on national and individual identities, but also rehabilitate and reinterpret past events, giving them new, vital meanings to replace the

Introduction 17

eternal mourning and guilt. By means of various experimental narrative techniques, aesthetic modes and tropes such as the gothic, the void, the uncanny, haunting, the absurd, the grotesque and the fantastic, history is filled with unexpected meanings of renaming and recreation of the world anew. Bogdan Ştefănescu uses the trope of the void as a crucial theoretical concern in the study of post-communist cultures, which, he argues, have turned the loss of self-esteem and estrangement into a collective representation of the nation. While for Ştefănescu the void as a symbolism of vacuity is a constitutive topos and trope of Romanian post-communist trauma, for Adriana Raducanu, who discusses the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, the Gothic mode enables to decode, name and exorcize specific ghosts of the traumatic Albanian past. Dobrota Pucherová’s study on the Slovak post-communist novel shows that in the constantly shifting Central European space, cultural identities have always been hybrid and multilayered, and it is impossible to divide the historical actors into victims and perpetrators. The absurd mode and metafictional approaches allow for the possibility of liberation from the violent logic of history. Sometimes, however, the recovery of loss is not possible, as Edit Zsadányi’s study of post-communist Hungarian novels reveals, because if it were possible to form a coherent life story out of a destroyed life, it would prevent the victim and receiver from viewing these experiences as a loss and effectively deny the trauma. Similarly, in Natalie Paoli’s discussion of contemporary Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko, trauma becomes transhistorical—that is, an ‘intergenerational trauma’, gesturing ‘toward a trauma that takes place and is repeated in multiple epochs and, in this sense, exceeds historicity’ (p. 159). As a result, as all studies in the section show, all that is possible are creative re-tellings of history which refuse the single ‘truth’ of ‘known history’ and question the prevalent paradigms and narrative cultural traditions. The third section, Place and Displacement in (Post-)Communist Narratives and Cityscapes, reflects the post-communist concern with space, spatiotemporality, movement, and geopolitics which is present in almost all contributions in this book, but it is in these four studies where this concern is made most explicit. As Irene Sywenky explains, ‘Historical, socio-political and cultural paradigms of postcoloniality are inherently connected to the ongoing production of geopolitically and ideologically shaped spaces, where the subject’s grounding in the workings of spatiotemporality becomes a locus of re-reading history and nation’ (p. 197). This is because postcolonial spaces are located between the past and the future; as a result, time and space become tangled and multi-layered. Using several post-communist women writers as her points of reference, Sywenky analyses how embodied postcolonial subjects are ‘presenced’ through their corporeality and through their situatedness in space. Her study thus brings together the ideological

18 Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik inscriptions of the female body and those of the geopolitical and geophysical post-communist spaces that also define these subjects. Tamás Scheibner’s and Xénia Gaál’s contributions are studies of two post-communist cities—Budapest and Kaliningrad/Königsberg, respectively—relating the semiotics of changing cityscapes with discursive analyses of texts rooted in those traumatized urban spaces. Scheibner discusses the postwar Sovietization of Budapest as a tool for ensuring regional cultural supremacy of the city, which was imagined to be a ‘little Moscow’ (p. 218)—a place from where the know-how of producing Soviet-type literature was transmitted to other Central and Eastern European cultures. Such refashioning of the city, he argues, affected the ongoing re-canonization of the Hungarian literary canon. Gaál examines the ambivalent history of Kaliningrad/Königsberg, a palimpsestic city transformed through communist destruction and subsequent re-building. Emphasizing the traumatic effects of the erased medieval past upon which a Soviet city was built, she analyses the vacuity produced by the Soviet regime as a special kind of identity in the postSoviet, post-Socialist world, which she calls the ‘City of K’. The last contribution to this section, by Dorota Kołodziejczyk, compares postcolonial and post-communist literature via ecocritical thought. Echoing ideas proposed by Gaál’s study, her term ‘fiction of post-displacement’ suggests that place experienced after displacement cannot be unproblematically linked to identity, since ‘post-displacement novels’ by Central and Eastern European authors view the eviction of populations and languages as something beyond rectification. Ecocritical thought, which projects the place as ‘a habitat where species human and non-human […] comprise an organic, albeit always precarious, whole’ (p. 261) enables her to overcome postcolonial displacement towards a model of locality that is not overdetermined by collective identity politics. The fourth section, Imagining the Orient in Central European Communist Travel Writing, opens a hitherto unexplored topic in postcolonial studies. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) set the ground for postcolonial discourse analysis by revealing the essentialization of the ‘Orient’ in Western imagination as a dialectical opposite of the West and its role in hegemonic claims of Western imperial powers in the East. Said focused on Great Britain, France, and Germany and in his later writings on the United States. Other critics have discussed Orientalism in relation to Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Norway.22 However, with 22

See e.g., Prem Poddar, Rajeev Patke, and Lars Jensen, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures—Continental Europe and its Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008); Jurrien van Goor and Foskelien van Goor, Prelude to Colonialism: the Dutch in Asia (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004); Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism:

Introduction 19

the exception of the Habsburg Empire, 23 the cultural area comprising Central and Eastern Europe has hardly ever been considered in the discussions of Orientalism. If at all, it has been seen as the object of Western European Orientalist discourses. 24 Taking their inspiration from Said’s imaginative geographies, the three studies in this section explore the perception of India and China as reflected in Slovak and Polish travel writing of the communist period. Even though these countries did not have imperial interests in the East, the studies show that Orientalism provided an epistemological perspective with which to exercise superiority over the Asian Other and define own identity as Western. Róbert Gáfrik studies Slovak travel writing on India in the years 1948–1989 and shows how it mixes socialist propaganda with a traditional romantic view of India. Agniezska Sadecka’s study focuses on Polish imaginings of India in the 1960s. She concludes that Polish travellers were torn between two impulses: they had to fulfil communist ideological demands while at the same time they were liable to producing Orientalist exhibitions of European superiority and civilizational advancement over the ‘backward’ East. The study by Martin Slobodník explores the image of China in Slovakia in the 1960s and argues that the authors writing on China tried to eliminate the traditional Orientalist stereotypes of China and determinedly promulgated the shared communist ideology of both countries. The last section of the book, titled Between the East and the West: The Colonial Present, describes the ways in which forms of colonialism continue to exist in Central and Eastern Europe. This is most manifest particularly in the contemporary Ukrainian cultural space, discussed by Mykola Riabchuk. As Riabchuk argues, Ukraine’s experience of three types of colonization since the 18th century has resulted in a peculiar situation in which ‘Ukrainian culture by its social status has not become yet a culture of a sovereign nation, despite years of national independence’ (p. 339) but ‘remains, to a certain degree, a sort of diaspora culture of rural emigrants within the dominant culture of the urban Russophone world’ (p. 340). This is most palpably demonstrated in the status of the Ukrainian language, which continues to be seen as obsolete, exotic and provincial—a dialect rather than a language. Dariusz Skórczewski’s contribution is a case study of a

23 24

Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800-1900 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005). See Robert Lemon, Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011). See e.g., Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).

20 Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik contemporary instance of Western European Orientalizing gaze towards Eastern Europe. This case of epistemic violence is all the more significant, argues Skórczewski, since it is effected in the spirit of multi-cultural championing of ethnic diversity and postcolonial de-marginalization of minorities and the subaltern: this ‘peculiar gaze that, registering with a seeming empathy and meticulousness, in fact produces its object through participating in the structures of Western European expansion’ (p. 369). Finally, Jagoda Wierzejska’s provocative contribution analyses the present position of Central and Eastern European societies as being in a relation of epistemological dependence towards both Russia and Western Europe. Her study focuses on the discursive consequences of that situation in the literary representations of the East-Central European socio-cultural space created by the Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk and the Ukrainian Yurii Andrukhovych, both of whom are explicitly trying to create a vision of ‘their Europe’ that goes beyond the old narratives of subordination and domination. The questions addressed by Stasiuk and Andrukhovych are at the centre of post-communist studies: What is the meaning of ‘Europe’ nowadays? What unifying tradition, if any, does it stand on? Who belongs to it and who does not? In his 2012 article ‘Spectres Haunting: Postcommunism and Postcolonialism’, Neil Lazarus reminds us of the constructedness of the idea of ‘Western civilization’ upon which ‘Europe’ as a political and cultural entity is based. 25 Built on false dichotomies, it has served to reinforce Europe’s domination over ‘non-European’ cultures represented as inferior. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the idea of Europe as the ‘West’ broke apart into Eastern and Western Europe, each of which considered itself to represent the ‘true’ European civilization. The question Lazarus asks is whether it is possible or meaningful today, in the postcolonial, postCold-War era, to rehabilitate the idea of ‘Europe’ as a region of shared history and culture. What motivations drive post-communist societies to rush to claim their place in Europe, constructed as synonymous with the ‘West’? For Lazarus, this homogenization of ‘Europe’ into one, coherent, ‘Western’ civilization, is both ahistorical and politically erroneous. The eagerness of Eastern and Central Europeans to become part of ‘the West’ is for him an expression of Eurocentrism that comes back to haunt postcommunist studies. Lazarus’s claim that ‘Western civilization’ is a construction is a truism that can hardly be disputed. All identities are constructions and can be based even on ideas that are historically misconceived or outright false. ‘Western 25

Lazarus, pp. 122-124.

Introduction 21

civilization’ thus includes not only the Greco-Roman tradition, but also the Judeo-Christian (that undeniably originated in the Middle East). As Hegel observed, Europe was ‘the centre and end’ of History, but History had begun in Asia: ‘characteristically the Orient quarter of the globe—the region of origination.’ 26 Furthermore, ‘Western civilization’ includes not only the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but also, as Lazarus points out, quoting Enrique Dussel, the ‘violent, coercive, genocidal reason’ of West European colonialism.27 While it is true that Europe broke apart politically with the rise of Bolshevism and eventually the Cold War, this was not, ideologically, such a sharp break as it might appear. Lenin and his circle saw themselves as heirs of the French Revolution; they saw their immediate roots in the German socialist movement; and their strategy was to join up with revolutions in the more advanced capitalist countries of the West. It is certainly possible to identify many other ideas that have dominated European thinking and politics as a whole for centuries. These include, for example, the Greek ideas of eudaimonia, or what constitutes a ‘good life’, and the polis as a society of self-governing citizens; Roman ideas of law and order; Christian ideas of piety. 28 The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have fully partaken in the major European philosophical tendencies and political movements, and have always been politically part of Europe, its kingdoms, empires, wars, and territorial alliances, as demonstrated, for instance, by Norman Davies’s monumental study Europe: A History. 29 Therefore, it is ahistorical to contend, as Lazarus does, that post-communist studies seek the admission of East-Central Europe into European modernity; on the contrary, it has always been part of it. Lazarus’s vision of what constitutes Europe is indeed very Western; therefore, it ignores that some of Europe’s oldest universities are located in East-Central Europe (Prague, 1348; Cracow, 1364) and that Bolshevism and its outgrowth, Stalinism, were also the product of European modernity. ‘Europe’ is all of these and the cultures of East-Central Europe have played as legitimate a part in the making of the European identity as any other Western nation. Realizing this might help postcolonial studies address some of its own blind spots and unresolved problems, for example with regard to its coming to terms with the postcolonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. 26 27 28

29

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), pp. 99–101. Lazarus, p. 123. For a fuller discussion of this, see e.g., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP and Woodrow Wilson Centre, 2002). Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996).

22 Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik At the same time, this shared European history does not cancel out entities such as ‘Central’ and ‘Eastern’ Europe, which make sense as regional cultural and political communities, as shown, for example, by the fourvolume study History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer.30 East-Central Europe, with its lack of colonial history, is a reminder that, precisely, ‘Europe’ cannot be conflated with the ‘West’ and the ‘West’ is not the same as ‘Europe’. Despite Europe’s troubled history, we hold that ‘Europe’ can be a useful idea to which Europeans from post-communist countries can actively contribute. As Frank Schulze-Engler writes in his lucid recent article, the current postcolonial trends of ‘deconstructing’ or ‘unthinking’ Europe are not helpful in analysing the predicaments of Europeanization: ‘The real challenge for postcolonial studies does not lie in unthinking Europe [...] but in rethinking and transforming it.’31 The studies in this book seek to shift the discourse away from both Eurocentrism and Euroscepticism to argue for the necessity of recognizing ‘Europe’ as a multivalent, cumulatively created, hybrid postcolonial entity that nevertheless shares a common heritage and values. This does not mean that the authors of this book view the idea of ‘Europe’ uncritically; rather, they intensely problematize it. While EastCentral Europe has after 1989 politically returned to ‘Europe’, the studies in this book show that the region has also become the site of collusion of various kinds of neo-colonialism. Post-communist economic migrancy to the West creates a new form of colonial relations which reinforce the international division of labour and appropriation benefitting First World countries at the expense of Third World, and, now, former Second World post-communist societies. Furthermore, the West European economic presence in the post-communist region (with the willing participation of the hosts) could also be considered a form of neo-colonialism in which the human and natural resources of the region are exploited to benefit the investor’s country. Thirdly, the internal colonization of ethnic minorities in East-Central European societies (with the possible exception of the Jews) continues despite new multi-cultural and postcolonial sensibilities resulting from free border crossings and the consequent cultural hybridization of these societies. Fourthly, Ukraine remains a special case in which Russian cultural colonization effectively continues, despite national independence. 30

31

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 4 vols. (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004-2010). Frank Schulze-Engler, ‘Irritating Europe’, in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), pp. 669-691 (p. 684).

Introduction 23

Lastly, as Bogdan Ştefănescu notes, there is a tacit ‘conceptual colonization’, by which he means a ‘form of voiding Eastern European cultures of any relevant status within the framework of the imperial/colonial relation, [...] apparent today in the critical disregard for the question of Soviet colonization’ (p. 108). All of this shows that discussion of what Europe is and should be is urgently needed and should not be thwarted by accusations of Eurocentrism. The question of whether Europe exists or not has been debated at least since 1876, when Bismarck dismissed it as a ‘geographical notion.’32 In 1946, Jean Monnet, the ‘Father of Europe’, said that ‘Europe has never existed, one has genuinely to create Europe.’33 Echoing these ideas in 2007, Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande write: [...] Europe as such does not exist, only Europeanization in the sense of an institutionalized process of permanent change. What ‘Europe’ includes and excludes, the location and direction of its territorial boundaries, its institutional form and what institutional architecture it should have in the future—none of this is clear. Europe is not a fixed condition. Europe is another word for variable geometry, variable national interests, variable involvement, variable internalexternal relations, variable statehood and variable identity.34

For Beck and Grande, the decisive question for this Europeanization process is not what Europe ‘is’, but ‘In which Europe do we want to live?’35 We hope this book will contribute to the continuation of the discussion of what ‘Europe’ should be; above all, a society that guarantees human rights and the freedom of self-determination to all who live in it, including immigrants and old and new minorities; and that recognizes European modernity as only one of plural modernities that have historically developed across the world. Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik Bratislava, January 2015

32 33 34 35

Davies, p. 10. Ibid. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 6. Ibid., p. 224.

24 Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik A note on spelling: The variety of spellings of ‘post-communist’ and ‘postsocialist’ in this book reflects each author’s view. Similarly to the ‘dash’ debate that once engaged postcolonial critics, it reflects the view that the ‘post-’ in ‘post-communism’ (‘post-socialism’) is not (only) a chronological marker, but primarily denotes a critical paradigm.

Part I: Post-Communist, Post-Socialist, Post-Soviet, Post-Dependence: Preliminary Considerations on East-Central European Un-Homing

Madina Tlostanova Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing Abstract: Postcolonial theory has recently begun to be applied to the analysis of postsocialist verbal and visual arts. There are factors supporting arguments for and against the postcolonial interpretation of the postsocialist material that are addressed in the article. The decolonial option is regarded as an alternative interpretative mode that makes it possible to see the intersections of the postcolonial and the postsocialist dimensions along with the recent term ‘post-dependence studies’ that originated in the Polish context, but has the potential of evolving into a much wider and more diverse critical discourse. Using many examples from the verbal and visual arts, this chapter considers the tempo-locality of the postsocialist and post-colonial transversals, decolonizing and complicating Bakhtin’s chronotope and Foucault’s heterotopia, and dwells on the coloniality of memory, trauma, and repentance in post-dependence artistic contexts. The author identifies the four main nerves of postsoviet verbal art intersecting with the main trends of postcolonial writing through the trope of post-dependence: place, metamorphosing character, language, and transmediation, and comes to an open ending allowing postsocialist writing the option of formulating its own distinctive aesthesis and audible voice.

Prologue: Postcolonial Theory and Postsocialist Reality The collapse of the socialist world almost a quarter of a century ago has led to a strange symptom detectable in Francis Fukuyama’s infamous ‘end of history’ discourse 1 and in the typically Western but also postcolonial 2 understanding of the postsocialist as time (after socialism) not as space (where the remaining postsocialist subjects still dwell). At the peak of the postcolonial fashion and in the absence of any meaningful overall theoretical paradigms to discuss the postsocialist condition which the old Sovietology failed to explain in its Cold-War area studies discourses of dissent,3 it was easiest to simply apply postcolonial theory to the analysis of the postsocialist reality. The first examples were quick to emerge: David Chioni Moore’s article in the influential PMLA 4 was a step forward in comparison with Fukuyama’s erasing discourse, as at least it did not refuse to see living people in postsocialist subjects even if tended to pack our lives into convenient foreign theoretical models. Still, it was not persuasive when lumping together the Eastern, Central, and South-Eastern European 1 2 3 4

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak., A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (New Heaven: Harvard UP, 1999). Jennifer Suchland, ‘Is Postsocialism Transnational?’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36.4 (2011), 837-862. David Chioni Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA, 116.1 (2001), 111-28.

28 Madina Tlostanova countries and the inherently diverse USSR, much less homogenizing them with the classical postcolonial cases, without taking into account the complex interplay of colonial and imperial differences and intersecting experiences of several non-Western and not quite Western empires and their internal and external Others, marked by specific understandings of ethnicity, race, nation, religion, multiculturality, gender, and resistance. In the next decade a number of theorists from the ex-socialist countries and the most Westernized former Soviet republics (Western Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries) produced several works applying the postcolonial approach to the interpretation of the ex-Soviet satellites or colonial subalterns.5 Yet, despite this, no separate postsocialist discourse has emerged either in the West or in the non-West. In their introduction to the 2012 special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing devoted to colonialism, communism and East-Central Europe, Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Sandru explain the missing intersections between the postcolonial and postsocialist realms, through political and disciplinary terms, claiming that anti-communist dissidence in Eastern Europe was seen in the West (by Western postcolonial theorists as well) as a right-wing movement—which was not necessarily the case—and that postcolonial theory was grounded in what they call poststructural culturalism, and rejected other approaches. 6 This is true of the relations between the Western-based, largely post-Marxist postcolonial theory and the postsocialist world in its (peripheral) European frames. However, it is not necessarily true in relation to less Western varieties of postcolonial discourse produced by third world intellectuals, and the postsocialist condition in its wider than Eastern European sense. There is something untranslatable in our postsocialist local histories and trajectories which postcolonial theory for all its poststructuralist sophistication and mostly Anglophone ‘commonwealth literature’ origin is unable to grasp. Hiding their locality behind universalist claims and merely descriptive modes, these postcolonial studies remain blind to the overall mechanisms, logic and directions of evolvement of modernity in regions

5

6

Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007); Igor Bobkov, Klakotsky Adam and his Shadows (Warsaw: Oficyna 21, 2008); From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. by Janusz Korek (Södertörn Academic Studies 32. Huddinge, Sweden: Södertörns högskola, 2007). Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Sandru, ‘Introduction: On Colonialism, Communism and East-Central Europe—Some Reflections’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (2012), 113-16.

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 29

and human histories intersecting the postsocialist and the postcolonial dimensions. The Socialist world was a stray outgrowth of Western modernity that retained such features as progressivism, developmentalism, the rhetoric of salvation, the fixity on newness, Orientalism, Eurocentrism, and various forms of enforced modernization. Yet the USSR remained in the minds of many postcolonial and leftist Western scholars a Tsardom of proletarian internationalism. They could not equate colonialism and socialism, the Second and Third Worlds. A highly generalized image of socialism or totalitarian communism (depending on one’s attitude) did not allow the perception of nuances. Scholars refused to realize that communism as such may have little to do with colonialism, but its real practices in relation to racialized Others clearly fall into the category of imperial domination and suppression. The lighter side of the Soviet modernity was grounded in ideological and social differences whereas its darker side reiterated racist clichés and human taxonomies from the 19th century and mixed them with hastily adapted historical materialist dogmas. Moreover, there was an important difference between racial divisions (in case of the Third World) and class (in the case of Eastern Europe) which prevented any unproblematic merging of the postcolonial and the postsocialist discourses. Paradoxically, the postsocialist people have acquired the problematic human status they occupy today not through race but through a poorly representable semi-alterity. They have become the off-White Blacks of the new global world—looking and behaving too similar to the Same, yet remaining essentially Others; hyper-visible invisibles who, according to Jennifer Suchland, like Spivak’s subalterns, have never even started to speak.7 The post-colonial subaltern indeed shares with the postsocialist Other such features as multiple dependences and the ‘paradigms of subjection, subalternity and peripheralization’, 8 mental if not economic and social subordination, invisibility to the wider world, ongoing forms of silencing by the dominant discourses, a growing dispensability of lives, intricate colonization of their spheres of being, thinking, and perception by a Western modernity that continues after political decolonization and flourishes after formal de-Sovietization. Yet the enormous notional, structural, and disciplinarian differences in the local histories and concrete manifestations of postcolonial and postsocialist constraints prevent any easy translation of the ideology of the lighter side of modernity into that of the darker side; that is, of socialism into colonialism. 7 8

Jennifer Suchland, ‘Is there a Postsocialist Critique?’, Lichnost, Kultura, Obschestvo XIII.3 (2011), 97-109; XIII.4 (2011), 103-114. Kołodziejczyk and Sandru, p. 116.

30 Madina Tlostanova What can still allow us to regard the postcolonial and the postsocialist together is not a historical concept of colonialism but rather the decolonial concept of global coloniality—an integral underside of modernity 9 that emerged as a conceptual and ideological matrix of the Atlantic world. Crucial here is the distinction between imperialism/colonialism and the rhetoric of modernity/the logic of coloniality. Since 1500 it has expanded all over the globe as a specific kind of imperial/colonial relations and brought imperialism and capitalism together. Global coloniality is manifested in particular local forms and conditions, remaining a recognizable connecting thread for the understanding of otherwise often meaningless and dissociated manifestations of modernity. In Russia and the Ottoman sultanate—the sphere of imperial difference with the first class Western empires— capitalism (as well as race) was not a necessary ingredient, as global coloniality has worked more profoundly in the spheres of thinking, knowledge, and perception. The dead-end-ness of external imperial difference has been for centuries a specific Russian problem, much before the capitalism/socialism divide. An intersectional optic able to peer between the postcolonial and postsocialist is a necessary step to see the darker side of Soviet and Socialist modernity within the context of global coloniality. Both postcolonial and postsocialist discourses are products of modernity/coloniality, emphasizing different elements and notions, yet sharing the basic rhetoric of modernity acting as a tool in justifying the continuing colonization of time and space, of lives and futures. One does not have to be colonized in a classical economic and political sense to be a slave of modernity in its Socialist or Capitalist version. At the base of global coloniality stands the idea of classifying humankind in relation to the colonial matrix of power and the ontological marginalization of non-Western and non-modern people that we find in both colonialist and socialist discourses. In all cases, modernity justifies violence against those who are branded sub-human politically, ideologically, racially, culturally, religiously, sexually, etc. One of the direct consequences is an uncritical acceptance of the existing hierarchy of the world where everyone is assigned a strict place. Those who are unhappy with their place (which is the case of many postsocialist Eastern European countries reduced to service states) are frightened to think of losing this precarious position or being associated with those who are still lower in the hierarchy of humanity. The flip side of this syndrome is the disappointment of the Third World with Socialist modernity, which did not cope with its mission of saving humankind from both Fordism and colonialism, and an 9

Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation (Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1996).

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 31

unproductive negative rivalry for a monopoly on victimization and suffering, which prevents any possible intersections with other Others, including the postsocialist world. Alexei Penzin stresses a trans-coding of the postcolonial discourse in postsoviet space, 10 but I prefer to see this situation as a post-subalternimperial syndrome. Coding the secondary status of the ex-imperial Sameness in terms of postcoloniality is not fair because then we stop seeing the power difference between the Same and the Other, and turn the Same into a false subaltern, erasing altogether the (real postcolonial) Other, conveniently rubbing out the guilt and the responsibility of the Same. Alexander Etkind’s recent revamping of the internal colonization theory as a model of the Russian empire where the state colonized its own people11 is also neglecting the Russian/Soviet postcolonial situations per se, remaining blind towards the experience of the colonial Others, marked by racial, religious, cultural and not merely social differences, and thus distorting the dynamic intersecting imperial and colonial processes in the region. What is needed today, and is still missing, is an analysis of the underlying colonial matrix of power revealing the logic of coloniality as the darker side of modernity. It would describe how postsocialist areas are linked with Western hegemony, with a focus on revealing what was hidden before and putting forward the ways of thinking, being, and perception disavowed by the rhetorics of modernity, both liberal and socialist. This positioning leads to an unstable sensibility of postsocialist intellectuals, writers, and artists. Many of them are working with social movements, grassroots initiatives, local communities, probing the spaces (museums, universities) and media (academic and non-academic scholarly works, art, fiction) that would facilitate delinking from modernity/coloniality. Such activism-cum-art practices are becoming more effective in the conditions of impasse and stagnation of most social protest movements, which have proven unable to affect economic and political decisions. The influence of art seems less immediate than open social protest, yet it slowly works for the implementation of the future radical changes by altering our thinking and setting our consciousness free from global neoliberal and local jingoistic brainwashing. Art in its visual and verbal forms remains the crucial intersection of being and knowledge and it is in the sphere of aesthesis understood as our ability to perceive through the senses untouched by aesthetic distortions, that the most promis10

11

Alexey Penzin, ‘Post-Soviet Singularity and Codes of Cultural Translation’, The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2008. 4 August 2011, available at Accessed 26 May 2014. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

32 Madina Tlostanova ing liberating models emerge today within the frame of re-existence as defined by the Colombian visual thinker Adolfo Alban-Achinte.12

Tempo-localities of Post-Dependence It may seem far from the postsocialist or post-dependence art and literature—to use the definition coined at the Post-Dependence Studies Centre at the Faculty of Polish Language and Literature at Warsaw University.13 Yet many recent examples of fictional texts, art projects, films, and theatre performances demonstrate a clear intersection and echoing between decolonial and postsocialist as well as post-apartheid and postdictatorship sensibilities, artistic devices, leitmotivs, and subjectivities that could be defined through the decolonial aesthesis outlined above. A good sphere to demonstrate this parallelism is the spatial-temporal dimension— the tempo-localities of post-dependence at the intersection of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries. Transcultural tempo-local models in art, fiction, cinema, and theatre, questioning the Western ideas of time and space and linked with postdependence discourses and multi-spatial hermeneutics, testify to the growing complexity of characters’ relations with time and space. Rediscovering and re-inhabiting a certain space and the return of spatiality is an important tendency of contemporary cultures—both postmodernist and those considered traditional. The frozen time of globalization with its single remaining horizon of consumption forces people to turn to forgotten spaces—both local and global, to spatial histories and glocal identities, as well as to the possible ways of re-rooting in new spaces—real or imagined and constructed. As a reaction against the five hundred years of time colonizing space, topos is finally taking revenge and often displaces time. Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope 14 and Michel Foucault’s heterotopia 15 12

13

14

15

Adolfo Alban-Achinte, ‘Conocimiento y lugar: más allá de la razón hay un mundo de colores’ [Knowledge and Place: Beyond Reason there is a World of Colours], in Texiendo textos y saberes. Cinco hijos para pensar los estudios culturales, la colonialidad y la interculturalidad [Weaving Texts and Knowledges. Five Sons Thinking over Cultural Studies, Coloniality and Interculturality] (Popayán, Editorial Universidad del Cauca, Colección Estiodios (Inter)culturales, 2006). Post-Dependence Studies Center. Wydział Polonistyki Uniwersytet Warszawski, available at Accessed 27 May 2014. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Formy Vremeni i Khronotopa v Romane. Ocherki po Istoricheskoy Poetike’ [Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Sketches on Historical Poetics], in M. M. Bakhtin, Voprosy Literaturi i Estetiki [Questions of Literature and Aesthetics] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1975), pp. 234-407. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16.1 (1986), 22-77.

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 33

accentuated respectively time and space but agreed on interpreting these spatial-temporal relations as a key to understanding of subjectivity. Nevertheless, both concepts need to be decolonized from the position of the (post)colonial and/or (post)socialist Other—a heteroclite character inhabiting an artificial space—be it a colony, a totalitarian state, a dictatorship or other constrained society. Bakhtin stressed that time shrinks, condenses, and becomes invisible, whereas space is enforced and woven into the course of time, plot and history.16 But what if the chronotope becomes disunited, fractured, or multiple, and stops imbuing the fictional text with what Bakhtin calls genre unity? And what if time colonizing space by means of the idea of progress is problematized, negated, exiled to the outskirts of the plot more and more devoid of previous utopian teleology? Then the chronotope is replaced with a shifting, contradictory, and multiple spatial history; a rehabilitated topos (not necessarily real) taking its revenge over time. The idyllic chronotope gives place to a mutopian (changeable, mutable and mutating), in Csicsery-Ronay’s words,17 if not mutant models grounded in the rejection of history, responsibility and rootedness, whereas space often replaces the almost missing temporal plot. This tempo-locality then becomes phantasmal and stops contributing to expressivity and descriptiveness. Instead, it works for the creation of often highly unrealistic imagery grounded in distortion or overcoming of tempo-local characteristics of physical reality in excessive, expressionist, often grotesque forms, or in the creation of seemingly material, heavy and lush topoi with no real equivalents. In post-dependence tempo-localities multiple spaces are permeated by and broached with multiple histories, sometimes parallel or intersecting with each other and with exhausted meta-narratives of modernity. These spatial histories do not go back to some ancient roots in a quest for ethnic renaissances, as was still happening several decades ago. They are dynamic, changing, and marked by the principle of non-exclusive duality. The spatial history is often materialized through changing and flexible language. Space becomes a palimpsest of overlapping traces left by a succession of inscriptions, and the function of inscribing names on the symbolic cultural map comes forward. It turns into an experimental field with constant crossings of borders, spaces, and times, where the signs of history exist in the signification lacunae, semantic slippages, and re-namings. 16 17

Bakhtin, p. 234. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, ‘Notes on Mutopia’, Postmodern Culture, 8.1 (1997), available at Accessed 25 May 2014.

34 Madina Tlostanova Memory is materialized in most unexpected places—from language to real physical spaces, so that it becomes necessary to purify language, contaminated by the rhetoric of dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, and colonialist states to use it very carefully afterwards. Space also requires purification and exorcism. The postsocialist world is full of such contaminated places that remember. Exorcism as a symbolic and public purification might not be enough. What is needed is a painstaking effort of gazing into the face of the past. And art and fiction are the best instruments for such questioning and purification. Tempo-localities of post-dependence do not only trace the historical scars but also rehabilitate places, giving them new vital impulses instead of mere survival or a painful pleasure from the eternally unhealed wounds inflicted by history. As a result, spatial history is filled with unexpected meanings of renaming and recreation of the world anew instead of eternal repentance and guilt. Often this is possible only in one’s imagination, in fantasy, or in some parallel reality. In Joanne Richardson’s documentary Letter from Moldova (2009) the necessity of disinfecting the space of the post-totalitarian post-dependence society is brought forward. A diasporic Moldovan who spent all her life in the West, Richardson sees Kishinev as an abandoned and devastated battle field. The author conveys the tempo-local interactions of postsocialist Moldova using specific verbal and visual metaphors, such as a refrigerator for nostalgia to freeze the overdue time interval when things seemed more stable and solid than in today’s liquid époque. Richardson is a paradigmatic unhomed person against her will, attracted to borders—temporal and spatial. Moldova then becomes a border tempo-locality, an intersection of disorder and transformations, behind which looms instability and a promise of another becoming whose momentum is completely lost, a reminiscence of the future which never happened. In her time model, progressive linearity is destabilized, and the future freakishly merges with the embellished and imagined past. Often the tempo-localities of post-dependence are recreated through the rituals of remembering and reconstruction, through the efforts to extract and carefully recreate the spatial memory, through merging with space, through a physical and bodily amalgamating in the palimpsest of many contradictory cultural layers, historical events, and natural landscapes. The artists and writers then reveal their ability to see time in space. In sinister, ruthless and often phantasmagoria imperial cities the colonial subject is defenceless, rejected, and invisible. Often he/she was previously shaken out of an idyllic pastoral or quite real social and cultural native space to find himself/herself in this new unhomed condition and subject to the ethics of war. Depicting the colonial city as a crisscrossing of various imperial and

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 35

colonial cultures, they practice a love-hate relationship with this space, invariably marking their urban colonial portraits with paradoxical nostalgia for the lost and imperfect paradise. Hence comes the idealizing of Baku of the era of his childhood by the Azeri-Jewish writer Afanassy Mamedov, who lives in Moscow and writes in Russian in the novelette Khazar Wind (2000);18 the pre-war idyllic Grozny in a Chechen woman (Lula Kuni) writer’s book, Outlines (2010);19 Khurramabad (Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan) in the Russian novelist Andrey Volos’s novel of the same name (2000); and the Bombay and Hong Kong nostalgia of Salman Rushdie and Paul Theroux. Any deciphering of the relics of the past is highly problematic. The debris is hard to put together to create any holistic picture. It is no longer possible to tell one layer from another and say which is today’s reality and which is an imprint of the same place on an old photograph or celluloid. All of them are equal and all of them merge in the face of eternity. A fascinating example of such an intersection of space, memory, alternative histories and topographies is Avarian (Northern Caucasus) artist Taus Makhacheva’s Gamsutl (2012). She questions various ways of human appropriation of space, and communicating with the natural, the manmade,

Fig. 1. Taus Makhacheva, Gamsutl. HD video. 16.01 min., colour, sound. Dagestan, 2012. © Taus Makhacheva 18 19

Afanassy Mamedov, Khazarsky Veter [Khazar Wind] (Moscow: Text, 2000). Lula Kuni, Abrisi [Outlines], Druzhba Narodov, no. 10 (2010), available at Accessed 18 September 2014.

36 Madina Tlostanova the animal, the machine, the social, and the historical. Her project is centred around acquiring one’s masculinity and humanity anew through rediscovering and reliving space and going back to spatiality through gendered forms of identification. Today Gamsutl’s picturesque ruins grow into the wild landscape harmoniously blending with the environment, as if it is time for nature to claim its eternal rocks back from the people. The protagonist is a young man taking part in a ritual of re-membering and reenactment and striving to carefully recreate the spatial memory of the forgotten past. Through a bodily ‘merging’ with this space—a palimpsest of many cultural strata and dramatic historical events the ‘dancer’ is trying to corporeally relive Gamsutl in his mimicry of natural and architectural objects. Similar overtones are to be found in a nostalgic and poetic documentary The End of an Era: Tashkent (1996) created by Mark Weil—an ethnically Jewish theatre director who spent all his life in Uzbekistan and called himself a patriot of Tashkent and a human of the planet Earth. This film is a requiem for the lost multicultural and tolerant capital of the Soviet Uzbekistan ending with a visual metaphor resonating with Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘lieu de memoire’20—the eleven monuments that replaced one another in the same spot in Tashkent in the course of the long 20th century—from the monument of the first general-governor von Kauffman to Stalin, Marx, and finally Amir Temur today—a symbol of postcolonial Uzbek national identity. Weil assembles them all in one ghostly space slowly covered with sands of time and oblivion, about to bury all traces of the former city. The same sensibility is to be found in the tempo-local representation of Baku in Oleg Safaraliyev's jazzlike film Farewell, Southern City (2006);21 and a fairy-tale Tbilisi seen through the eyes of the matured boy who turned into another unhomed character in Georgy Paradzhanov’s lyrical and penetrating movie Everybody is Gone (2012).22 For the characters cinematically narrating these postsoviet cities, entering the idyllic state is problematized: without entirely idealizing this world, seeing it a bit ironically, they still obviously prefer the detached ‘idyll’ of their childhood to today’s cut-down cherry orchard: the new Baku, Tashkent, and Tbilisi, with their caricature signs of globalization and commercialization.

20 21 22

Pierre Nora et al., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UP, 1996-1998). Oleg Safaraliyev, Proschai, Yuzhny Gorod [Farewell, Southern City] (Azerbaijan-film, Ibrus-studio, 2006). Georgy Paradzhanov, Vse Ushli [Everybody is Gone] (Atlantic Film Company, Russian Federation Ministry of Culture, 2012).

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 37

Tempo-Local Dimensions of War and … World In those cases when the urban space together with its inhabitants was violently destroyed as a result of war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or purification and decolonization rituals, forgetting and remembering acquire a different meaning and form, often connected with de-urbanization and a complete return to nature. Such is the Palestinian architectural and art-project Return to Nature23—a spatial decolonization of architecture and landscape. It recycles, circulates, replays, ridicules and re-masters the existing military infrastructures. Recycling of the former architectural symbols of power, violence and dominance deactivates them by accentuating different aims—utilitarian, ironic, provocative, etc., tracing parallels between human rootlessness and the transit of migrating birds whose routes on the way from Siberia to Eastern Europe and South Africa have always crossed over the hills of Palestine. Decolonizing architecture and going back to nature are recreated in Kuni’s Outlines. The title in Russian—Abrisi—alliteratively chimes with abrikosy—apricots—an Edenic image of natural revival and fruiting in the midst of the war. Through the optics of this unjust war, through its distorted ethics, seen by a young mother of two little girls who are later killed by the Federal forces, we detect the dreadful topos of destroyed and deurbanized Grozny in its post-human return to an advancing nature. An interesting parallel to this verbal tempo-locality of war is to be found in the works of a young Chechen artist Aslan Gaysumov. Symbolically born in 1991—the year of the Soviet Union’s collapse, having spent the first several years of his life in a refugee camp in Ingushetia, living in a tent and never attending an elementary or high school, Gaisumov acquired a stereoscopic vision typical for the postsoviet midnight children, to paraphrase Salman Rushdie. One of Gaisumov’s ongoing works revolves around books—the reservoirs of human knowledge, memory and creativity. But his are books used in unusual and often unnatural functions because of the war, the books that witness the war and also become its victims or become its accomplices. These are books with missing pages burnt in innumerable fires to warm up children, and books containing clockwork bombs. The apotheosis of war is presented not in military scenes, not through death and blood, but indirectly, through the perception of its victims—women, elderly people, children, the destroyed nature of the Caucasus, or the violated books. In the end the book is used as an intellectual object acting in an (anti)aesthetic and shocking function. It is a conceptual move, yet far from any cold postmodernist ludic position 23

Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency. Project: return to nature. Available at Accessed 25 May 2014.

38 Madina Tlostanova because of the author’s specific body-politics of perception and of being which is hard to fake.

Fig. 2. Aslan Gaisumov, In Memory of A.P. 2009. From the series Untitled (War). Mixed Media: book, nail, 22x16x3cm. Courtesy: Gallery Zink, Berlin. ©Aslan Gaisumov.

The Postsoviet Imaginary: Home, Transit and Paradigmatic UnHomeliness When societies go through sharp axiological fractures in a short period of time as happened in the postsocialist world, a specific multispatial and multitemporal hermeneutics grounded in intertextual and hypertextual principles, becomes a necessity. Many postsocialist works presuppose the interaction of several semantic layers—from the national and ethnic to the global, Western and non-Western, (post)socialist, (post)soviet and postcolonial which fewer and fewer readers or viewers can handle. We can hardly speak today of any postsoviet community of aesthesis apart from the shrinking linguistic sphere and not a very productive negative identity connected with the feeling of the looming end of an époque, and of one’s exclusion from the world history and modernity. The Soviet has already taken its place on the museum shelf and its interpretation by the younger generation is no more painful than that of other time periods. It is

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 39

no longer dominating as it used to. The postsoviet space more and more often gravitates towards the unhomed condition24 which does not require an immediate re-rooting. Therefore, space itself turns out to be highly virtual, liquid, arbitrary, as if it has lost its physical stability together with never attained stability of social, economic, and political life. The weak rootedness of the postsoviet individual in the world and the extreme precariousness of his or her life are important leitmotifs of all postsoviet art and fiction.

Fig. 3. Aslan Gaisumov, No Need for Theories. 2011. From the series Untitled (War). Mixed Media: book, soil, 7.5x12x26cm. Courtesy: Gallery Zink, Berlin. © Aslan Gaisumov.

Typical heteroclite topoi of transcultural films, books, and art works include the metro, the market square, and the yard of a large apartment complex (a communal yard acting as a substitute for Bakhtin’s parlour or salon chronotope). A crucial topos remains that of home in all its contradictory manifestations. However a modern trickster is an eternal wanderer who feels at home only in transit. Hence, so many transport metaphors and topoi— ship, airplane, funicular, railway-station, and other tools of modernity reconsidered in the tempo-localities of post-dependence art and fiction. One of the characteristic topoi of post-dependence fiction is the cemetery. At first sight our last refuge seems to be the only space relatively immune to 24

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

40 Madina Tlostanova transgressive tendencies and transcultural journeys. Crossing the boundary between life and death we hope to return to our ancestors and finally reterritorialize. The lost or displaced grave leitmotif and the border between life and death as an utmost line which finally defines human belonging or exclusion keeps coming back in postsoviet and post-dictatorship works.25

Rethinking the Idyll Time in post-dependence tempo-localities changes its usual characteristics, such as linearity, mono-dimensionality, and irreversibility, becoming multidimensional, multi-cyclical, and moving with different speeds and in different directions. This complexity of temporality is connected with the rethinking of the idyllic chronotope. The idyll is often destroyed right at the start by the forces of modernity in different guises, from the civilizing mission to war. Such is the metaphor of the railroad as a sign of modernity’s destruction of all other life styles in the exiled Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov’s novel of the same name (2006).26 Such are also the loggers destroying the jungle together with the life and future of an African village in Georgian expatriate director Otar Iosseliani’s And Then There Was Light (1989).27 Such is the logic of Soviet modernity with its forcefully imposed gender model destroying the quiet idyll in Uzbek director Yusuf Razykov’s film The Orator (1999).28 These are the stories of painful modernization, disjointing the previous local traditions, bringing forward specific meta-narratives and unresolved dilemmas of subjectivity. In the first part of Lula Kuni’s Outlines we encounter a paraphrase of Bakhtin’s family and agricultural idyll. In place of family there is just a doomed woman with two daughters. For her, the restoration of the organic links with nature and simple agricultural labour are not a part of a Rousseauian game but a necessity for an ex-urban dweller turned into a surviving farmer. Instead of the product created by the agricultural worker we find the story of an apricot tree—wounded by a shell, cured by the main character, and unexpectedly revived to provide abundant fruits between the two Chechen wars. The apricot Eden in the midst of a hell, the skeleton 25

26 27

28

Georgy Paradzhanov, Ya Umer v Detstve [I Died in Childhood] (Paradzhanof film, 2004); Ariel Dorfman, Feeding on Dreams. Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (Houghton Miflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2011). Hamid Ismailov, The Railway, trans. by Robert Chandler (London: Vintage Books, 2007). Otar Iosseliani, Et la lumière fut (La Rai-Radiotelevisione Italiana-Raiuno, Centre National de la Cinematographie, Ministere de la Culture et de la Communication, 1989). Yusuf Roziqov, Voiz (Uzkbekfilm, 1999).

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 41

geometry of meagre lives, and the tumult of invincible nature in the small garden present a distorted Bakhtin idyll, built on the contrasts of life and death, war and peace. This is at once an effort to humanize nature and to bring humans back to their natural terms. The all-penetrating violence triggers in war survivors a specific optics that animates everything that is alive and creates solidarity not only among humans but also with trees, animals, and the city itself. Kuni’s characters are making apricot jam in their destroyed city, which is not just a recreation of the forever lost idyll but an act of re-existence. The apricot harvest is a temporal idyllic border, which helps divide the time of idyll from the time of hell. This is a postapocalyptic tempo-locality presented in seemingly documentary forms, even though we realize that the narrator is dead from the start. In postdependence verbal and visual art works there are cases of deliberate use of fantastic, eschatological motives to imagine an other existence transcending this imperfect world.

The Coloniality of Memory: From South America to South Africa via Russia One of the deeper intersections uniting postcolonial and postsocialist fiction is the leitmotif of trauma, violence, repentance, and revenge in all the richness of its semantic overtones and poetic representations. In decolonial terms this corresponds to coloniality (and decolonization) of memory and the complexity and contradictoriness of violence as a destructive yet also cathartic Fanonian force. The Fanonian interpretation of violence was aimed at liberating the human being and the creation of a new individual free from the duality of colonialism.29 Violence, then, was an act of restoring downtrodden human dignity. A post-dependence society of any kind—from postsocialist to postdictatorship, from post-apartheid to postsoviet extreme impasse often continues to stagnate in its sick and violent complexes after the former emancipation is over. Too often trauma and memory remain repressed and underanalysed by the majority, and hence repentance or responsibility never even comes in sight. In all post-dependence societies today the emancipation from colonialism, apartheid, totalitarianism, or dictatorship has been into the system of Western neo-liberalism or its local semblances. While these may correct some superfluous ideological imbalances, they still retain all the major injustices and inequities of modernity. In post-Pinochet Chile and postapartheid South Africa alike after the initial liberation drives, the more conservative and often counter-revolutionary impulses take over, marginalizing 29

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963).

42 Madina Tlostanova and ousting former revolutionaries and underground fighters and retaining social inequity and poverty with a clearly racialized face. In both cases, as well as in the Eastern European postsocialist case (to a lesser degree), the so-called ‘truth and reconciliation commissions’ which were aimed not only at discovering and sentencing the criminals, but more importantly at forgiving rather than not forgetting, did their jobs half-heartedly and with many compromises that were not morally justified in the eyes of victims longing for repentance. It is similar with Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze’s rather early film of the same name (1984)30 with its central paralyzing event of the grandson repeatedly throwing his monster grandfather out of his grave. This issue has become fruitful material for fictional and cinematic reflections on the chronic maladies of post-dependence societies. Contemporary Russia reinstates the rhetoric and practice of Soviet state violence hand in hand with the most unjust capitalist and neocolonialist methods targeted at the entire population regardless of race or class. This system does not require remembering or repentance and replaces them with a slightly updated (with Orthodox Christianity and overt chauvinism) but still recognizably expansionist providential mythology. Fiction and cinema have addressed this problematic in a most persuasive way, though these works have not been made available for wider audiences, and have been accused of unpatriotic stances. All of them are marked by syndromes Franz Fanon detected in The Wretched of the Earth: the violence of the victim who has been violated before, and the apathy and inertia of the raped slave (pp. 249-310). According to the Russian film director Alexei German, ‘we are a raped, a prison-bitched country and we forgave and forgot our humiliation and did not repent, did not ask for any retribution’.31 Sexual violence has been used as a tool of national humiliation, particularly to humiliate male enemies. This erases women’s humanity, regarding them merely as receptacles of the alien semen. We find a paradigmatic case marked by the racial overtones in Bitter Fruit (2001) by Achmat Dangor, a South African writer of Indian Muslim origin. Chilean-American Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden (1990) adapted for the famous movie by Roman Polansky (1994), is a different story: Paulina is not openly dehumanized for racial or gender reasons, but her violent rape equates the punishment for political resistance (a way of stripping the resister to the merely 30 31

Monanieba [Repentance], dir. Tengiz Abuladze (Gruzia-film, 1984). Alexey German, Germanologia [Germanology]. Alexei German on himself and his work. An interview to Drugoe kino [Another Cinema]. 2008. Available at Accessed 10 January 2014.

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 43

biological state of a raped body, not a citizen) with presumable female viciousness as a sick justification of the torturer. In Alexei German’s disturbing and revealing Khrustalyov, My Car (1998), the bio-political violence of the Soviet system does not recognize gender or social status, and rapes and destroys everyone, including yesterday’s torturers. German bares the essence of the Soviet and postsoviet predicament in his story of General Klensky, an eminent military neurosurgeon who was arrested and accused of taking part in the infamous Doctors’ plot. He is gang-raped with the consent and on behalf of the NKVD by a group of criminals in the proverbial van adorned by a cheerful advert for Soviet Champagne. He is later miraculously pardoned and hastily brought—with his insides torn but general’s overcoat returned intact—to the dying Stalin, just to witness the inevitable and unsightly death of this monster and gasp with awe. What kind of repentance can we speak of in this case if the selflegitimating system is still with us, dehumanizing and subordinating everyone to its total power in violent and inhuman bio-political forms? Forgive and forget is the recipe of Paulina’s and Lydia’s husbands Gerardo and Silas working in truth and reconciliation commissions in Chile and South Africa respectively; two optimists working on ‘reconciling the irreconcilable’.32 But this forgetting and forgiving and later rehabilitation of executioners to justify their cruelty is not only a compromise necessary for the society to move forward, but also a betrayal of both women protagonists who refuse to forget and forgive, for whom rape is not an abstract infringement of honour and property but a living hell of pain and humiliation. In the last analysis it is a dilemma of the inadequacy of official justice and the lawlessness of personal vengeance. Anna Akhmatova predicted this in her 1956 words about the two Russias which would soon look into each other’s eyes: the Russia that imprisoned and Russia which was put into prison.33 In Dorfman’s play we see what can come out of such an encounter. But in the end he does not destroy the fabric of reconciliation necessary to move forward and his Paulina does not kill her torturer only to see him later at a chamber concert. In Bitter Fruit it is literally the bitter fruit of interracial rape—Lydia’s son Michael—who becomes the instrument of murderous revenge, which hints at the impossibility of any reconciliation and testifying to the ‘mortgaged future’34 of South Africa as a nation violated by history.

32 33

34

Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit (New York: Black Cat, 2001), p. 29. Lydia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhatovoi v 3 tomakhs [Notes on Anna Akmatova in 3 Volumes]. Volume 2, 1952–1962 (Moscow: Soglasie, 2007), available at Accessed 25 May 2014. Fanon, p. 253.

44 Madina Tlostanova In Russia the totalitarian system requires and receives the absolute fidelity and paradoxical solidarity of victims and torturers. Those raped by the system easily collaborate with it for a rare breath of fresh air and the rare illusion of power over those who are even weaker. The psychology of colonial complexes acquires additional overtones in the socialist case when the colonized and the Soviet politically repressed react identically by projecting their humiliation onto those who are still weaker and more dependent. The flip side is a fear that makes people erase their identities and invent new ones to survive the Soviet/colonial system. This sick power often acquires sexually violent forms and resonates with the (post)colonial psychic deviations analysed by Fanon. There is no way out of this system except into a non-systematic exteriority abundantly represented in Soviet and postsoviet fiction and cinema in many lumpenized characters: the generation of cleaners, homeless persons, drunks, stockers, and train conductors. Such was the case of German’s general who refuses to come back to his ‘successful’ life and opts for eternal transit, in-between-ness, rootlessness in his huge and enigmatic country resembling an endless empty field where everyone is alien to each other. German’s last work Hard to be a God (2013) claims that there is no way out of dependence, even for gods. The film becomes an almost Fanonian reflection on the tragic universe and a tragic humankind refusing to grow up and take responsibility, and therefore doomed to perish.35

An Open Ending And yet there is still a clearly detectable commonality of postsocialist categories, concepts, sensibilities which are impossible to interpret through the end of history model or post-Fordist and post-colonial paradigms alone. The main nerves of postsoviet verbal art intersect with the main trends of postcolonial writing through the trope of post-dependence, which is interpreted from different perspectives but essentially generates common reactions and poetic devices. The most important of these nerves is the sense of place and the accentuation of the rehabilitated spatial history as a dynamic way of linking time and space. The second nerve is the metamorphosing character, a turn-coat, a trickster, often an accidental nomad, juggling his or her selves, in many cases a doppelganger of a transcultural postcolonial or postsoviet city. The third nerve is the language—a painful question for multicultural postsoviet writers using Russian in the capacity of the post-colonial and post-imperial tongue. They are avoiding the negativism of postcolonial anger and concentrating on the 35

Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Fanon’s Tragic Revolutionary Violence’, in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. by Lewis Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Renee T. White (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 297-308 (p. 307).

Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing 45

originative moment of re-existence while at the same time attempting to enrich the language, to open up its unexpected overtones and unused resources beyond the riches of any monolingual native speaker or reader but available for those who have access to other cognitive and linguistic universes. The fourth nerve is transmediation as a specific form of synaesthesia which creates strong textual presence for visual, olfactory and other non-verbal traces which often compensate for the helplessness of contaminated or emasculated words. This also connected with the global decline of verbal arts: today the translation of the postsoviet into a language understandable by the rest of the world shifts towards the visual arts which are easier to recode, and towards the synthetic arts such as cinema and theatre, often moving in the direction of pure visuality, pantomime, animation, dance, clownery, etc.—genres easier to translate and sell to the wider world. This chapter necessarily has an open ending as the postsoviet, postcolonial and post-dependence condition is still with us. It continues in new forms of global coloniality, unable to erase the old problems of lack of freedom, guilt, repentance, revenge, and forgiving and forgetting, with historical memory stubbornly breaking through the shell of the new reality. We cannot know for sure that the postsocialist aesthesis or imaginary shall continue as a separate discourse. At the moment there is a fragile and imagined postsocialist community holding us together, there are still common poetic and aesthetic elements of postsocialist writing outlined above, certain imageries and leitmotivs, and specific ways of treating the language, in many ways intersecting with postcolonial fiction. However, the vanishing ex-second world will most probably gravitate to other centres, places, and histories, which are already competing in the artistic texture of the postsocialist verbal and visual arts. The socialist ex-grand narrative will turn into more of a dead-end in the historical labyrinth. And yet, as long as we refuse to critically reflect on this past, continue to vegetate amongst our complexes and suppressed desires, nostalgia and hatred, there will be no path to any future. The literature, cinema, theatre and visual arts of the exsocialist world remain the most effective means for collective cathartic therapy, which hopefully will help us better understand ourselves and our place in a new world where many worlds would coexist, and never slide back into the vicious circle of a forever dependent existence.

Benedikts Kalnačs Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options: The Baltic Experience1 Abstract: This chapter discusses the Baltic (Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian) societies in the context of postcolonial criticism. It provides insight into the historical experience of the Baltic countries that created the preconditions of their colonial difference, discusses representations of past and present experiences in literature and culture, analyses scholarly contexts for Baltic and East-Central European postcolonialism, and stresses the importance of the decolonial option as a critical tool for the self-understanding of the Baltic peoples.

Postcolonial criticism provides suitable tools for the discussion of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian literary processes, even if this theoretical approach has not as yet played a major role in the discussion of these literatures and cultures. If we take into account the countries’ complex history, it becomes clear that colonial contexts go far deeper than the most recent experience of Soviet-style communist dominance. Both history and historical contexts are vital for the understanding of contemporary processes. East-Central European parallels play a substantial role in the present discussion, while it is also necessary to apply global contextualization in order to escape excessively narrowing the scale of investigation. The discussion consists of several parts. First, an overview of postcolonial criticism with special emphasis on the East-Central European and Baltic geographical areas is provided. This section is followed by a discussion of the historical circumstances that have determined the development of Baltic societies. From there we move forward to discuss major patterns in Baltic cultures from the perspective of postcolonial criticism. In its final section, the chapter returns to postcolonial theoretical contexts, and discusses the concepts of colonial difference and the decolonial option.

Baltic Postcolonialism in East-Central European Contexts The gradual rise of interest in postcolonial theories in the Baltic countries indicates that the understanding of global processes has become substantially more comprehensive when compared to the decades of the communist period. The Soviet experience was, among other things, extremely restrictive of what models were allowed for interpreting the 1

This research was supported by the European Social Fund within the project entitled ‘Cultures within a Culture: Politics and Poetics of Border Narratives’ (Nr. 1DP/1.1.1.2.0/13/APIA/VIAA/042).

48 Benedikts Kalnačs world. Various histories written during the Soviet period might differ in their details, but they necessarily came to the same conclusions, which were made in accordance with the official narrative of the triumphant march of communist rule. The so-called Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, which deeply affected the history of the Russian Empire, always provided the turning point in historiographies of the Soviet period. This event did not have an immediate influence on the Baltic countries, which only for a brief period in 1919 came under Soviet rule. However, after occupying forces returned to the Baltic area in 1940 and then again, in the aftermath of the Second World War, their history was reinterpreted through the Soviet lens. The earlier historical experience of the nations living in these territories became a subject to be not only forgotten but also intentionally erased from memory, and in this process the Soviet authorities attempted to force oblivion upon the cultural diversity which had been characteristic for these parts of the world. The painful process of remembering which began after the demise of communism across all of East-Central Europe, as well as in the Baltic States, is far from completion. At present, new approaches to describing historical experience have replaced earlier schematic histories, and they link the development of art and literature to more traditional narratives. The applicability of postcolonial theories to the Baltic countries is still discussed; indeed, it only began to appear in the field of Baltic studies relatively recently. Not long ago, the Estonian researcher Epp Annus wrote an article identifying the main obstacles to the application of this approach in Baltic contexts.2 First, there is Western scholars’ traditional unwillingness to include the colonies created by the Soviet Union in their discussion. This has been mainly attributable to two causes. The first is that early practitioners of the postcolonial approach either had completely different backgrounds or, even more symptomatically, they came from leftist circles. In this case, they were much more interested in applying critical approaches to the policies of the West than discussing problems relating to the Soviet imperial aspirations that in many ways reproduced the traditions of tsarist Russia.3 To some extent this is still true today. On the one hand, some scholars are influenced by conventional ideas of what were the presumably more idealistic goals of the socialist power in 2 3

Epp Annus, ‘The Problem of Soviet Colonialism in the Baltics’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 43.1 (March 2012), 21-45. This link is well established, for example, in scholarly contributions by Ewa Thompson. See, for example, her article ‘Postcolonial Russia’, in A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires, ed. by Prem Poddar, Rajeev Shridhar Patke, and Lars Jensen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008), pp. 412-417.

Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options 49

comparison to its capitalist counterparts (an illusion sometimes upheld even in the face of tremendous evidence of Soviet crimes against individuals and nations). Or on the other, they raise the impossible objection that there are particular circumstances which bestow the exclusive status of colonizing Empire only to some of the most powerful Western countries. Postcolonial criticism, however, is at its most valuable when it does not discriminate against oppressed societies, but identifies their specific features; in a word, their difference. The application of postcolonial criticism to the Baltic countries is motivated by individual pathos and a quest for historical truth, and it represents an opportunity to look at matters differently, and makes an attempt at learning to unlearn.4 The second obstacle to the application of postcolonial criticism to the Baltic countries is, according to Epp Annus, the obvious unwillingness of Russia to tackle its own past in an imperial and colonial perspective. The third is the reluctance of the population of the Baltic countries to be, in the words of the Lithuanian scholar Violeta Kelertas, ‘lumped together with the rest of colonized humanity’ as they prefer ‘to be with the civilized part of the world’.5 This explanation is most relevant when considered in the context of the 1990s, the first decade after the re-establishment of independence in the Baltic countries. There appear to be two main tendencies which dominated the public discourse at that time. Interpretation of history was led by the post-Soviet approach which concentrated on the social pressures created by communist rule, attempts at resistance, and individual testimonies. This predominantly took the form of collecting life stories that had been suppressed during the previous decades. In regard to artistic trends, the brand new concept of postmodernism seemed to make an overwhelming impact, and only gradually more discussions concerning the different nature of the Baltic experience as compared to Western contexts started to crop up in the critical consciousness. To a certain extent the utilization of postcolonial criticism in recent years can be viewed as a kind of synthesis between the two previously-mentioned approaches: post-Soviet studies and postmodernism. This critical approach facilitates analysis of both social and aesthetic fields, but before it could reach the point where it would bear fruit a certain amount of time and new experience seem to have been required.

4

5

This theoretical concept is developed by Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova in their book Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2012). Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. by Violeta Kelertas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 4.

50 Benedikts Kalnačs Focusing somewhat more specifically on the changes in scholarly methodologies, there were two different trends dominating the field in the 1990s. On the one hand, there were attempts to follow and adapt certain theories that originated in the West; most notably feminist criticism (refocused currently in gender studies). On the other hand, critical theory in the early 1990s was also characterized by an emphasis upon suppressed local cultural features. This strand was dealing with texts and artefacts that had been pushed outside the imperial house of knowledge during the Soviet period due to the ideological constraints of socialist realism and attempts to regulate not only the present, but also the past of the colonized territories. During the 1990s, there was a remarkable return to the style and values most appreciated during the period of independence of the 1920s and 1930s, and the rhetoric of many publications of the 1990s did not differ much from the first half of the 20th century. Regional contacts were marginalized, and they largely fell into a cleft opened by contesting forces leading either to the adoration of the West or toward the local heritage.6 Only gradually did a new sense of shared perspectives develop among the scholars of the three Baltic countries, and at present it is being extended toward historical and cultural experience shared among East-Central European nations. 7 A testimony of more rich and fruitful perspectives can be also seen in the recent rise of Baltic postcolonial studies. New perspectives were offered for Baltic scholars as well as East-Central European scholars by David Chioni Moore in his groundbreaking article, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’. Importantly, Moore identified the omission of the Soviet sphere as one of the principal deficiencies of postcolonial thought. Without making an attempt to unify the social conditions of the historically quite different societies located within this vast area, Moore stressed the general conditions of Soviet colonialism that held sway throughout these territories. He was quite right to point out the illogical nature of the illmotivated omission of the Soviet sphere from the field of postcolonial studies, and argued that the Soviet experience cannot be isolated as

6

7

The concept of self-colonization has been raised in the context of Baltic societies and cultures by the Estonian scholar Tiit Hennoste. See, for instance, ‘Noor-Eesti kui lõpetamata enesekoloniseerimisprojekt’ [The Young Estonia Movement as an unfinished self-colonization project], in Noor-Eesti 100: Kriitilisi ja võrdlevaid tagasivaateid, ed. by Elo Lindsalu (Tallinn: TLÜ Kirjastus, 2006), pp. 9-38. One typical example of this trend was provided by the exhibition entitled ‘1914’ that was held at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga in spring 2014. It commemorated the beginning of the First World War, and displayed the art of new states that had been re-established and/or acquired independence after the war.

Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options 51

something ideologically neutral (which it definitely wasn’t) or unique on the world scale.8 Moore’s contribution inspired, among other responses, the most elaborated and ambitious undertaking by Baltic scholars to-date: Baltic Postcolonialism, a collection of twenty articles edited by Violeta Kelertas and published in 2006. In her introduction, Professor Kelertas clearly stated the reasons for reprinting the article by David Chioni Moore in the collection as a contribution of international importance and an effort which put the Baltic countries, alongside with the post-Soviet sphere in general, into the context of contemporary debates.9 During the last six or seven years the situation has changed considerably, and the necessity of engaging with postcolonial theory in the context of the historical experience of the Baltic countries can be seen as motivated by several factors. First, the tendency to identify with experiences of other oppressed (and colonized) nations was present in the political rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s and in the efforts of the Baltic exile community when they were trying to attract international attention and address the issues of Soviet colonial conditions even before the heyday of postcolonial studies.10 Second, the discussion of the specific conditions of Soviet colonialism has been further developed by Baltic scholars themselves. The political and ideological undertones of the colonial situation in the Baltic countries have been thoroughly dealt with by Epp Annus, who also reflects upon the impact of the Soviet occupation which gradually transformed into colonial practices. Annus concludes that Soviet colonialism in the Baltic area created a new layer of historical experience for the Baltic peoples and provides a valuable comment concerning the importance of the application of postcolonial theory to the Soviet period: Its central thesis claims that the Soviet regime was, in non-Russian areas of the Soviet Union, imposed from the outside; it was oppression by a foreign invader and needs to be analysed as such. This analyses would not only focus on the macro level of demands, laws, rules and regulations, but also on the micro level of the practices of domination in the everyday life of an ordinary colonial subject.11

8

9 10 11

David Chioni Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, in Baltic Postcolonialism, pp. 11-44. First published in PMLA, 116.1 (2001), 111-128. Violeta Kelertas, ‘Introduction: Baltic Postcolonialism and Its Critics’, in Baltic Postcolonialism, pp. 1-10. Annus, pp. 22-23. Ibid., p. 37.

52 Benedikts Kalnačs The third motivation for the application of postcolonial studies to the Baltic contexts is provided by the growing importance of regional studies. In the 21st century these disciplines tend to discuss East-Central European experience not only in terms of postcommunist but also postcolonial criticism, which provides opportunities to see one’s own experience in a comparative context. Another important impulse has been provided by an awareness that the experience of the Baltic countries is less analogous to those situations dealt with during the initial period of postcolonial studies, where the voices of the Empire made themselves heard in opposition to earlier English or French dominance, and more related to the rise in selfesteem of the countries of the former so-called Soviet bloc. The shared fate of this part of the world, which was blocked away from the rest of the world by communist authorities for the second half of the 20th century, has increasingly come to the forefront in ways ranging from sharing individual destinies to joint political, economic, and scholarly efforts to build a new and better integrated regional community. New geopolitical contexts within East-Central Europe have also been developed by literary scholars, and this feeling of having a shared fate has also had a substantial impact on scholarly ideas.12 It is possible to argue that the sources and perspectives of Baltic postcolonialism were initially those established by the key thinkers of the discipline, and centred around the notions of colonial discourse (Edward Said), anti-colonialism (Frantz Fanon), hybridity (Homi Bhabha), etc. Recently, two additional trends have been activated and critically elaborated by Baltic scholars: first, certain ideas advanced by East-Central European researchers; second, the growing impact of Latin American critical thought. Fruitful collaboration between the two trends has also been initiated. In recent investigations by East-Central European scholars, two different lines of thought seem to dominate. One of these principally evinces dissatisfaction with the Western neocolonial presence, while the other sees the discussion of the consequences of 20th century Soviet colonial policies as the key issue in understanding the current postcolonial sensibility of EastCentral European peoples. As an example, the confrontation of contemporary East-Central Europe with the Western world is the focus of Nataša Kovačević’s Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (2008). Perhaps the most challenging argument of this line of thought is to be 12

See, for instance, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vols. I-IV (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004–2010).

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found in the internal critique addressed toward East-Central Europeans themselves, especially as ‘reflected in the attempts of various Eastern European peoples to market themselves as civilized, developed, tolerant, or multicultural enough to be geo-graphed as European’. 13 Critiques of the West are more often found in the investigations of scholars from the Balkan countries, a finding which seems to point toward the reappearance of an earlier North/South divide within Europe.14 On the other hand, it is also apparent that many of the East-Central European countries, especially those that had previously been part of the Soviet empire, intensely engage themselves in discussions of the consequences of the Soviet period. Critical interpretation of the communist colonial legacy is an important task for the scholarly community, but behind this undertaking there is also a definite need to recover and explain the hidden layers of European thought which also belongs to the region’s (multi)cultural memory. In light of these contexts, Cristina Şandru has proposed to call EastCentral European literatures the ‘silenced voices of Europe’. 15 It is quite true that Western cultural interests in the region are only peripheral, and smaller cultures in the region have always experienced difficulty in substantially participating in major European literary trends.16 This situation may be changing; still, the Western reception of, for example, contemporary Baltic literature, often pertains only to particular texts: the terms of dominance in intra-European cultural relations are not being challenged. Therefore, serious engagement with postcolonial theory provides one of the options for attracting more attention to semi-peripheral or relatively minor European communities and their literary and cultural legacies. Important tools for this approach are currently provided by a group of scholars with Latin American backgrounds. Persuasive arguments are to be found in the works of Walter D. Mignolo and his colleagues on border thinking and the specificity of loci of enunciation. Instead of relying on Western dominance, they propose reliance on an individual locus of enunciation, the idea ‘that you constitute yourself (‘I am’) in the place you 13 14

15 16

Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 3. Among the reasons for this kind of approach we could also look for a comparatively milder presence of Soviet ideology in former Yugoslavia, as well as the aggressive policies of the Western countries in the region during the early 1990s. Cristina Şandru, Worlds Apart? A Postcolonial Reading of Post-1945 East-Central European Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p. 8. See, for instance, Andrei Terian, ‘Is There an East-Central European Postcolonialism? Towards a Unified Theory of (Inter)Literary Dependency’, World Literature Studies, 4.3 (2012), 21-36, p. 23.

54 Benedikts Kalnačs think.’17 This approach takes into account the specificity of each particular historical experience, thus providing possibilities for more diverse interpretations of the contemporary world. Baltic societies and literary cultures also provide interesting case studies, as on the one hand, they might be looked upon as examples of discursive creation of early Orientalism or European internal colonialism and treated within the contexts of hybridity and cultural transfer. However, on the other hand, they could also be seen as providing samples of self-colonization in their attempts to catch up with the West. Their situation is, however, further complicated by the historical presence of tsarist Russia (later followed by the Soviet Union) in the area. This makes the possibility of delinking them from hegemonic constraints even more challenging. It is this complexity that I focus upon in the following section.

The Historical Contexts of the Baltic Countries The arguments advanced by Mignolo and other scholars with a Latin American background (Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres, Arturo Escobar, and Enrique Dussel, among others) assert the importance of geographical discoveries and political power plays as a starting point for the construction of European identity under the banner of the Christian mission from the early 16th century onward. 18 The personal dimension has provided a persuasive motivation to engage in such work, as the experience of Latin American peoples has to a considerable extent been shaped by the so-called discovery of the New World. As for the Baltic historical experience, we have to look back to the crucial impact of the 12th and 13th century Northern Crusades that were ideologically motivated by the need to conquer the last pagans of Europe, but economic interests were also in the game. These events also subdivided the Baltic lands due to the successful resistance of the Lithuanian tribes against the crusaders. This made possible the subsequent territorial strengthening of Lithuania and, in alliance with Poland, established the country as a major Central European power. Only in the 18th century were the Lithuanian lands subjugated by tsarist Russia as the result of partitions of Poland. In the meantime, Estonian and Latvian territories became prey to German colonists who maintained their hold on political power until the end of the 17th century, and their economical and ideological dominance until the end of the 19th. The models of exploitation were changing, but

17 18

Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2011), p. xvi. Ibid., p. 7.

Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options 55

discursively they were openly compared to the colonial relations established between the core European states and the rest of the world.19 This process was initiated in the 16th century and the stratification of society was more or less completed by the end of the 18th century. The colonization of Estonians and Latvians, who were referred to as ‘nonGermans’, had both a temporal and spatial dimension. In terms of time, they were considered less developed and savage-like, and spatially they were predominantly localized in rural areas and occupied lower social ranks, without possession of land. After the Russian tsar Peter I annexed Estonian and Latvian territories in the early 18th century, he kept the special status of these provinces intact and for the next two centuries the political power of the centralized tsarist administration existed alongside that of the Baltic Germans. Both sides closely co-operated in suppressing the local populations, even despite considerable disputes as the Russian administration increased the level of demands and initiated policies of Russification in the second half of the 19th century. The second wave of suppression in the area took place in the middle of the 20th century in the context of World War II, when the occupation of the independent Baltic countries in 1940 was followed after the war’s end by various colonial-type measures. These included mass deportations of the local populations and the centralization of economic mechanisms within the so-called planned economy. The latter created the preconditions for a form of settler colonialism that had not been typical during the previous centuries. If we add to these forced policies the repatriation of the German Baltic population who had centuries-long historical ties with the territory but had been expelled as a consequence of the Soviet-German pact of 1939, it becomes clear that the previous multicultural milieu was replaced with one which had at its core a binary opposition (first-class Russians vs. secondclass locals). It is this constellation that is still roused by present-day Russian neocolonial aspirations and explosively lurks behind the rhetoric of the defence of the interests of their own people.20

19

20

See, for example, Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham & London: Duke UP, 1997); Heide W. Whelan, Adapting to Modernity: Family, Caste and Capitalism among the Baltic German Nobility (Köln & Weimar & Wien: Böhlau, 1999). A referendum on second state language status for the Russian language in Latvia, called by the so-called Russian-speaking part of the population including prominent political figures in 2012, might be looked upon as a training ground for the recent orchestration of events in Crimea.

56 Benedikts Kalnačs Of course, over the centuries there were substantial attempts at resistance and anti-colonialism, which we might divide into two mutually linked wings: the historical and the discursive. From the historical point of view, there are again two trends to be distinguished. The first one was linked to the rise of the previously non-dominant ethnic groups, according to the taxonomies developed by the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch (these groups were later to become the titular nations of the independent Baltic countries).21 These developments occurred in the second half of the 19th century, analogous to if slightly later than the processes that had taken place in most other East-Central European countries by that time, and they were to a great extent inspired by the rise of the social upstarts and intellectuals who were able to adapt the experience of the upper classes. In their aspirations to confront the Baltic Germans’ dominance, the first Latvian and Estonian intellectuals even sought the support of influential Russian political and economic circles, but these trends were short-lived as Russification and bloody suppression of social protests in the early 20th century clearly revealed that the tsarist regime was in no way more liberal toward the local population. Russia, moreover, pursued its own interests in the same manner as the Baltic Germans who had previously enjoyed cultural authority in the area. Nevertheless, the second part of the 19th century shattered the unilateral dominance of the Baltic Germans, and toward the end of the century the intellectual horizons of the young Baltic intellectuals became much wider. Apart from German and subsequently also Russian cultural influences, the reception of French and English literatures and cultures started to play a greater role. Even more importantly, regional— Baltic, Scandinavian, and East-Central European—connections increased considerably, and on many occasions there was a feeling of having a shared fate that fed mutual sentiments. The second anti-colonial wave was gradually rising during the second half of the 20th century and included such manifestations of opposition to the Soviet rule as guerrilla skirmishes after World War II, political pressures exerted upon the Western powers by Baltic communities in exile, the use of legal options in social and cultural sphere in the so-called Soviet Baltic republics, and the rapid growth of political organizations during the second half of the 1980s. One of the most public demonstrations of shared goals of the Baltic population was provided by the unforgettable experience of the so-called Baltic Way, a chain of people which in August of 1989 symbolically connected the Baltic lands and paved the road toward the 21

Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (New York: Columbia UP, 2000).

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freedom of all three countries. It is therefore a combination of the colonial experience, anti-colonial narratives, and decolonial options which provide both a methodological and a personal approach to the present discussion of Baltic postcolonialism. During both the Soviet period and its aftermath, the Baltic cultures have been looking back toward the experience acquired during the period of European dominance, even if these structures have been and to a considerable extent still are linked to the colonial matrix of power. A critical reaction to this matrix was necessarily postponed because there was an immediate threat of Soviet colonization. However, the situation has reshaped after the re-establishment of the independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the 1990s. In the overall context of decoloniality, these countries are now taking part in global processes, but they are also trying to ground their identities in a perspective originating in the discourse of (superior) European modernity. This is a situation that helps to explain the often contradictory self-positioning of the population of the Baltic area in recent times. The decolonial option for the region might be seen in critical evaluation of the role European (colonial) dominance has played in the area, especially in the period between the 16th and early 20th centuries, and greater awareness of the complexity of processes of decolonization and decoloniality in the context of the experience of the so-called Third World countries where these issues have been current for at least the last half century. The same soundly critical approach must be maintained toward the degenerative effect of the Soviet colonial undertakings that followed the mid-20th century occupation of the Baltic States. Here the discursive aspects of the representation of subaltern experience and the question of agency come to the fore, so let us now examine them.

The Aspects of Representation One of the arguments provided by Mignolo and other Latin American scholars is linked to the obvious fact of the underrepresentation of different social groups and languages in scholarly as well as social discourses. The new dimension added by the Latin American contributors has substantially enlarged the understanding of the global character of colonial/anticolonial/decolonial moves. ‘[T]he solution is not to eliminate the difference but to decolonize the logic of coloniality that translated differences into values.’22

22

Mignolo, p. xxii.

58 Benedikts Kalnačs Concerning the representation of the Baltic area in East-Central European contexts, it is important to stress that while being relatively separated from each other by language differences, the societies and cultures of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania also have a number of important links to one another as well as—at least to a certain extent—a shared political and intellectual history. One of the aims of this study is to pay tribute to those forces in all three societies which have been able to promote the existing links, often with the purpose of strengthening the vitality of each particular nation. If we attempt an overview of characteristic manifestations of anticolonial thought in the Baltic countries, they might be subdivided into six main patterns (a) the national, (b) the philosophical, (c) the historical, (d) the contemporary, (e) the absurd, and (f) the post-colonial. In the next section, I shall demonstrate that there are two chains of development characteristic for the historical and cultural self-positioning of the Baltic peoples: (1) the national—philosophical—historical— contemporary, a series characteristic for the period from the mid-19th century until the Soviet occupation of the 1940; (2) the contemporary— historical—absurd—(post-colonial) national, typical for the period of Soviet colonial rule in the second half of the 20th century and its aftermath. There are obvious reasons for highlighting the importance of the national dimension during the Baltic peoples’ initial period of selfpositioning; a process which gradually acquired strength, especially during the 19th century. National self-consciousness was among the most important motivating forces during the 19th century, and it was expressed by the willingness of the Baltic peoples to make their voices heard. They endeavoured to become respected among other nations, overcoming historical realities such as the education of the native population deliberately having been kept at a lower level, and all manner of restrictions that had been imposed upon them. The attempts of the new generation of the mid19th century Baltic intellectuals were determined by the wish to introduce and establish an intellectual level relevant to European standards. This was considered to be a patriotic task; later, individual motifs were only gradually brought to the fore alongside the national ones, and a more reflective approach turned out to be an integral part of cultural undertakings. Another angle of intellectual development was somewhat later provided by philosophical considerations, especially in Estonia and Latvia, where ideas borrowed from their German cultural heritage were dominant. The German aesthetic influence was present in 19th and early 20th century literary texts, but in addition, the German language was important as a mediator of other cultures. Gradually, modernist innovations began to loom ahead, and

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the clash between idealist and modernist art was one of the markers of the experience of entering the contemporary world. Alongside these philosophical and cosmopolitan aspirations, the relevance of the historical past has also been consistently present in Baltic cultures in different forms: previous centuries became a past to be discovered, and this was a past to be lived up to by the aspiring intellectual newcomers. However, the 1920s and 1930s also marked a return to the representation of the national in the form of contemporary, as the populations of the newly-independent states began to seek their own everyday realities. The national was again made into a contemporary issue, as the ordinary life of a community began to be considered important material for documentation. The second strain of anticolonial resistance, which included the necessity of adapting to living under Soviet colonial conditions as well as formulating a critical response to them, was initiated by the second half of the 1950s, as it gradually became possible to challenge the imposed restrictions of socialist realism. After the Stalinist stalemate, two early attempts at recovering the feeling of reality and self-confidence were represented by the return to the representation of the contemporary and of the historical. The reality principle became especially important during the Soviet years: from the 1950s onward the representation of the everyday was looked upon as a return to truth and normality after the excesses of the canonical phase of socialist realism. The representation of the life of the local community and the use of national languages were seen as principal means of resistance and of keeping traditional values intact. Similarly, the episodes of political crisis in East-Central Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s were again situated against a historical backdrop. Critical response toward Soviet realities in the late 1960s also took on the form of the absurd, even if these attempts did not gain wider public acceptance. This was also the first trend more or less directly inspired by aesthetic developments in East-Central European cultures which for about two postwar decades were beyond the horizon of knowledge of the Soviet people or remained strictly censored. The specific conditions of the Soviet colonial period, however, also made it clear that attempts at challenge on aesthetic grounds were not only difficult to undertake but also not necessarily accepted by a wider public accustomed to true-to-life forms of representation. The most aesthetically challenging efforts of the 1960s and 1970s reveal how difficult the path of innovation could become. The impact of the theatre of the absurd was, however, especially important as a rebellion from both without and within the imperial house of power: the

60 Benedikts Kalnačs critical trends of Western art were applied to the exposition of the colonial matrix of power imposed by the Soviet authorities. Finally, the late 20th and early 21st century poetic experience mixes together the historical and the contemporary, and aesthetic innovations come to the fore in all possible combinations. Its appeal is also linked to the specific (post-colonial) national dimension appreciated by the public. It is therefore interesting to observe how all these circumstances determine the present-day Baltic literature and culture, which is searching for opportunities to share its cultural specificity. In the following section, I offer a brief insight into the creative work of internationally recognized theatre director Alvis Hermanis (b. 1965), the artistic director of the New Riga Theatre, whose activities provide some of the most eloquent examples of contemporary artistic productions within Latvia as well as on an international scale. Here I will also tackle one of Hermanis’s many productions staged abroad, in this particular case at the Burgtheater in Vienna. At the root of Hermanis’s unique form of theatre are two different paths of experience, the foreign and the local, which have guided his search for national identity. One of the essential techniques he applies is so-called verbatim or documentary theatre, which plays with the portrayal of genuine reality, whose investigation is often carried out from the vantage point of marginality or subalternity. In this process the unrecognized, suppressed stories become equally significant in reflecting the personal and collective identity of the people. This historically oriented and localized understanding of reality is the context in which we should consider the often quoted pronouncement by Hermanis: Any person’s own life story is much more potently dramatic than all of Shakespeare’s plays put together. And each individual’s life drama is worthy of being considered for the purpose of performance, to a much greater degree than any fictional fantasy.23

Alvis Hermanis’s inspired production, Latviešu stāsti [Latvian Stories] (2004), is shaped by narratives created by the actors themselves, on the basis of which there are personal revelations provided by specific individuals. In these stories everyday experiences are revealed alongside current political events; the creators of the performance leave the assessment of the ideas entirely to the audience. The directness of the reality in some of the monologues is accentuated to the point where these stories can become 23

Quoted in Hermanis. Naumanis. Latviešu stāsti, ed. by Normunds Naumanis (Rīga: Dienas Grāmata, 2006), p. 260.

Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options 61

questionable as theatrical facts; however, the minimalism of the stylistic means and the marginality of the messages is part of a deliberate artistic strategy. This marginality reaches its climax in the production of Garā dzīve [Long Life] (2003), an hour-and-a-half-long mute documentation of one typical evening in the lives of five old people. The evening is spent in their separate apartments, but they are brought together by the despair of their existence. The approach of the director enables us to take a look behind the façade of the political window-dressings of the independent state. On the other hand, the vitality of the seemingly marginal experiences testifies to the richness of the life of a nation which is no longer the subject of colonial oppression. As emphasized by Homi Bhabha, the national narrative is assuming form by countering and unifying the pedagogically supportive and the performative aspects: The scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a coherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance interpolates a growing circle of national subjects. In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuous, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation.24

Characteristic of those performances, in which the trend initiated by ‘Long Life’ and ‘Latvian Stories’ is continued, is the more complicated structure of the text. In terms of the text’s organizational sense and content, the topic of national identity reaches a level that is difficult to surpass in the monodrama written and enacted by the actor Vilis Daudziņš, Vectēvs [Grandfather] (2009), which also reveals the tension between the search for genuine identity and the impossibility of retrieving it. The production opens up to a personalized experience as well as showing alienation, following the established principles of the epic theatre; at the same time the shape of the production becomes deliberately many-sided, although artistically unified, and its fundamental message consists of the revelation of present and past identities. The play’s structure is seemingly simple—the plot line is provided by the central character’s (the performer’s) wish to find his grandfather, lost without trace in the war, about whom there has been no news for the last 65 years. In the course of this search, the performer meets three different 24

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 145-146.

62 Benedikts Kalnačs individuals who have his grandfather’s last name and, personified by their monologues, these encounters become the intriguing play’s binding element. In each of these stories a radically different point of view is illustrated on events before, during and after the war. These stories are revealed to us as real and at the same time fictitious: as bits of a once existent, but now irreversibly lost and shattered history of a nation. In the production of ‘Grandfather’, the epic theatre’s fundamental principles come to life where the actor, Vilis Daudziņš, becomes an interpreter of a variety of human character qualities, as well as an intellectually-oriented artist. In the search to define his character’s image, he attempts to unify the imagined wholeness of a nation that, due to its traumatic historical experiences, can no longer be restored in reality. Simultaneously, in his self-conscious delinking from his own earlier experiences, this performer, very much like in the so-called street scene described by Brecht, uses the attempt at restoring past events in place of dramatic action. The character’s story in this play, over the course of the narrative, outgrows the boundaries of a theatre performance. One person’s message, told through the perspectives of different characters, becomes a description of an entire people’s destiny. By maintaining intellectual control over the presentation of the material, which was created by the actor himself, he shares a personal and intimate experience, which becomes an integral precondition for generating mutual trust between artist and audience. The solo performance by Vilis Daudziņš is an excellent example of how the text’s epic structure attests to the lost, searchable, and retrievable (or perhaps irretrievable) relationships among different generations within the context of colonization and war. The visualization of the story is shaped by the image spectrum from the first to the last available photo of the actor’s grandfather: I will show you a picture [...] See, this is my grandfather’s last photo. It is Chelabinsk, I believe—the summer of 1942. That is where my grandfather worked for a time as a chauffeur. Then he was drafted into the Red Army, and there he disappeared without a trace. That is all that I know about him. To put it more precisely [...] that is all that we know for sure—as the rest are unclear, conflicting versions and rumours.25

Another, complementary, aspect of Hermanis’s theatre is represented by his many productions staged abroad. Here we shall focus upon just one example, the stage version of Väter [Fathers] (2009) produced at the 25

Vilis Daudziņš, Vectēvs (Rīga: Jaunais Rīgas teātris, 2011), p. 2.

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Burgtheater in Vienna. Again, there is some deep nostalgia that is of a more reflective than restorative nature. 26 Three actors, Oliver Stokowski, Juris Baratinskis, and Gundars Āboliņš, tell stories from their lives, particularly focusing upon relationships with their fathers. The production, where all the visual images are labelled on cardboard signs that are from time to time moved around at the back of the stage, opens with a scene where two different dressing rooms are portrayed side by side. One is from the Schauspielhaus Zürich, the company where Stokowski works, and the other is from the New Riga Theatre, Gundars Āboliņš’s workplace and the headquarters of the company led by Alvis Hermanis. In the latter building, not much has changed since the times when Āboliņš’s father worked here as an actor; everything has just become shabbier, and the console has been broken so that the actors have to take care not to miss their entrances. The difference between the two dressing rooms immediately tells a lot about the differences between the cultural spaces dealt treated in the production. While the basic intimate, if sometimes troubled, relationship between the sons and fathers remains intact in all the stories, there is a considerable difference between the life and problems of a German middle-class family (even if Polish connections are important in Stokowski’s family story, and add a certain particularity to it), and the stories of those whose formative years were been spent within the Soviet Union, either in Riga, as in Āboliņš’s case, or in both Riga and Moscow, as in the case of Juris Baratinskis, whose Russian father was also among those deported to Siberia by the Soviet authorities. Their stories are simultaneously survival stories and stories where the identity quest is closely linked to historical issues, very much in the same way as in the production of ‘Grandfather’. Instead of war, issues of cultural difference are highlighted, through the reminiscences of Baratinski’s father having difficulties adapting to everyday routines after his return from Siberia, and the experiences of Āboliņš’s father, who was featured as Albert Einstein in a GDR film production. In connection with this project, he was even allowed briefly to travel to Switzerland, where he suddenly discovered the pleasures of Western world. These Eastern European stories are interwoven with deep similarities, and probably it is not too naïve to consider that it is our shared East-Central European history that provides them with a considerable amount of depth. We may just wonder at the deeper causes of the success of Alvis Hermanis’s poetic, nostalgia-fuelled productions in the West.

26

The concept of nostalgia has been elaborated in these terms by Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

64 Benedikts Kalnačs

Colonial Difference and the Decolonial Option A brief summary of the main points provided in this chapter will be linked to theoretical concepts elaborated in the works of Walter Mignolo. The Baltic societies, as discussed in this paper, represent the suppressed side of modernity and rank among those cultures which have not had substantial possibilities for self-representation. In this process they have also become victims of racialization. 27 It is therefore essential not to isolate the experience of the Baltic countries within post-Soviet or even East-Central European contexts, but to categorize these societies alongside other victims of the global coloniality of power. If we appreciate that the great narrative of modernity was shaped by European economic developments as well as colonial advances, which from the 16th century onward provided the preconditions of Occidentalism as a dominating world perception, the Northern Crusades in the Baltic lands from the 12th century onward formed a training ground for later European conquests on a global scale. On the other hand, the historical ties and forced conversion to Christianity by necessity provided Baltic societies’ link to European space, a process which was remembered positively when, at a later historical stage, the respective territories became prey to Russian (and still later, to Soviet) colonial expansion. Thus, the longing to be reunited with the space of European civilization forms a substantial layer within the identity of the Baltic peoples. Still, they cannot be considered full members of the European narrative of modernity but rather belong to its darker or colonial side. This also means that the possibilities for the development of the indigenous populations of these territories have always been restricted by the colonial powers, and these conditions therefore have to be looked upon within a context of colonial difference. The history of suppression, unfolding from the 12th century onward, also determines the importance of the decolonial option for the Baltic countries as they try to re-establish themselves as a part of the West (especially in opposition to postcommunist neocolonial threat) while at the same time also having a shared experience with the rest. Therefore in their self-positioning the Baltic societies should become even more open to a decolonial epistemic shift, which means understanding the conditions of modernity from the perspective of coloniality.28 27

28

‘Racialization does not simply say, “you are black or Indian, therefore you are inferior”. Rather, it says, “you are not like me, therefore you are inferior”.’ Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 17. This is further supported by the discussion of the conditions of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome which differed substantially from the interpretation of slavery following the global advance of the Europeans beginning in the 16th century (Ibid., pp. 41-42). Ibid., p. 34.

Cristina Sandru Joined at the Hip? About Post-Communism in a (Revised) Postcolonial Mode Abstract: The article offers a few theoretical reflections on how the postcolonial and the post-communist might meet, suggesting that present-day neo-colonial phenomena are a fruitful terrain for such a rapprochement. The first section outlines generic and structural similarities among different types of post-imperial cultures; argues that the various postcommunist syndromes (nostalgia, anxiety, rejection, displacement) are similar in tone and dynamic to those experienced in other post-colonial locations; and suggests that some of the methodological instruments of postcolonial criticism can be fruitfully applied to the study of post-communist cultures and, conversely, that the experience of communist imposition in East-Central Europe should function as an ideological moderator in largely left-wing postcolonial discourses. The second section considers contemporary transnational movements from East-Central to Western Europe and their reflections in literary and cinematic culture; it places particular emphasis on Romanian writer Ioana Baetica Morpurgo’s 2011 novel Imigranţii [The Immigrants], which it reads as an instance of ‘postcolonial post-communist’ fiction emerging out of the experiences of displacement, minoritization, economic deprivation and identity crisis which migrants from postcolonial and post-communist spaces into the Western metropolis share.

Part One: Relocating the Postcolonial The historical experience of Soviet-controlled territories or satellite states is more often than not absent from theorizations of the postcolonial. Despite making ‘in-betweenness’ one of its key critical concepts, postcolonial studies continues to ignore the former ‘Second World’, which is probably the geographical area that best illustrates the concept, lying squarely—not only geographically, but also culturally, and in terms of identity-formation— between West and East. Insofar as East-Central Europe has been seen through a postcolonial lens, the main approaches have been variations on the Orientalist model (in key studies by Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova, and Vesna Goldsworthy), which highlight the specific character imperial domination has taken in the region, of which the tendency towards ‘selfcolonization’ in relation to the West is central and goes a long way in explaining the current ideological climate in East-Central Europe. Yet this analytical framework, while of undisputed scholarly significance, does not in itself explain the persistence of certain modes of thinking in the West in relation to the ‘new members’ of the European family. (By ‘European family’, I specifically mean countries that belong to the EU; the East European ex-Soviet and ex-Yugoslav republics that have not yet joined this political organization pose an even more challenging problem.) Nor is it particularly helpful in situating the volatile mix of geography, ideology, and economic and political subservience that characterized East-Central

66 Cristina Sandru Europe’s communist half-century on a postcolonial axis. The most salient difficulty concerns the multiple levels of disjuncture that one must consider concurrently when attempting a comparative analysis of the two major ‘posts-’ of the twentieth century: differential inflections in terms of historical and geographical coordinates; divergent types of imperial occupation; asynchronous advents of modernity; different practices of othering; and, finally, Cold War ideological emphases. There are many ways in which the post-communist period harks back to the post-decolonization decades following the end of World War II, during which traditional colonial polarizations were at least partly replaced by a resurgence of ethnic, nationalist and religious fundamentalisms; these at times burst into full-blown conflict followed by partitions (at the borders of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Kashmir, in the former Yugoslav space, in the Caucasus). 1 Many such conflicts were caused, on the one hand, by inadequate and ill thought-out colonial borders, as well as ethnic resentments and historical traumas suppressed or distorted for decades under communism (involving in particular the trauma of fascist occupation/collaboration/resistance). On the other hand, the pressures of globalization have produced ever more parochial ideologies in response. Indeed, the suppression or incitement of ethnic and national sentiment are, as various commentators have remarked, an important point of intersection between postcolonial and post-communist scholarship. The end result is a deeply disjunctive post-communist culture, in which resurrected nationalism(s) coexist rather unhappily with accumulated historical frustrations over ‘European integration’, and where savage market capitalism is superposed upon a frequent distrust of mass consumerism. These are all phenomena that postcolonial polities and cultures recognize well, having been a staple of their public discourses for a long time. Similarly, the neo-colonial attitude exhibited by the former imperial powers towards the newly decolonized states is mirrored in the post-Cold War relations between the countries of East-Central Europe and their Western European counterparts. The critical space occupied by dissident voices in communist times has by and large been filled in the post1

These inter-ethnic/religious clashes resulting in partitions are not solely the result of colonialism, of course, and in many cases they continued to thrive after the nominal end of Empire. However, imperial occupation and exploitation tended to play on older conflicts and exacerbate them to its purposes. In other cases, such as in much of Africa, colonial borders that ultimately became those of nation states after 1945 were more or less arbitrarily drawn, disregarding existent ethnic or tribal contours in favour of various European spheres of influence, resulting in dire internecine wars that have devastated many countries ever since.

Joined at the Hip? 67

communist decades by unrestrained capitalism, conspicuous consumption, and ever-widening gaps of wealth and opportunity between various categories of citizens. As Katharine Verderey and Sharad Chari remark in their article on the conjunctures and disjunctures between postcolonialism and post-socialism,2 the process of transition in post-Cold War East-Central Europe has brought with it a cocktail of accelerated marketization, commodification, and integration in the global circuit of capital; this, coupled with a large supply of cheap labour and the very postcolonial phenomenon of economic migration to the affluent metropolis (from braindrain to the siphoning off of skilled labour), has turned the region into the capitalist West’s proximate ‘Third World’. From the perspective of a comparatist scholar, therefore, it seems to me that the relevant question to pose is not whether postcolonial modes of analysis are applicable in the wider post-communist context, but, rather, how they might be applied. The main problem in a combined analysis of these two forms of cultural critique—an issue which Bogdan Ştefănescu 3 and other commentators have also addressed—rests in their very different treatment of Marxism and its ideological legacies. It is, indeed, quite difficult to find common ground between intellectual perspectives that are so differentially charged across historical and ideological contexts: a left-wing Western academic, a postcolonial Neo-Marxist critic, and a civic-liberal Eastern European intellectual are unlikely to share many commonalities when attempting a dispassionate examination of Marxism and its historical consequences. Yet, I maintain, an honest appraisal of the legacies of communism in Europe as well as throughout the rest of the world must start by acknowledging the failure of leftist ideologies of Marxist extraction to produce egalitarian, compassionate, and affluent societies anywhere in the world where they have been applied. This is an intellectual position that does not have many supporters among the educated elite in the West, whether homegrown or of postcolonial extraction, a state of affairs that has not changed substantially (despite the lip-service occasionally paid to condemnations of communism’s excesses) after the fall of the Berlin wall. Alexander Etkind calls this, with direct reference to Edward Said’s work,

2

3

Katherine Verderey and Sharad Chari, ‘Thinking Between the Posts: Postcolonialiam, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War’, Comparative Studies in Societies and History, 51.1 (2009), 6-34. Among the few book-length studies which approach this problem systematically and consistently is Bogdan Ştefănescu’s 2012 Post-Communism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity (Bucharest UP), whose insights are very close to my own.

68 Cristina Sandru ‘partial worldliness’, which ‘omits the Second World as a nuisance’,4 and it is still a regrettably widespread phenomenon. The victimization of communist politics as ‘today’s cultural racism’ 5 by a sizeable number of left-leaning intellectuals (a few names immediately come to mind, such as Slavoj Žižek, Aijaz Ahmad, and Alain Badiou) both East and West is, in actual fact, a gesture of containment and critical oblivion, which denies the very possibility of a non-Marxist critique of the dominant world-capitalist system. In some important respects, what such commentators object to is the uncontested reign of free-market capitalism, which is now ‘the only game in town’ in East-Central Europe. And to the extent to which this objection has been borne out by recent trends in a speculative capitalism that has spiralled out of control and left states and individuals alike struggling in the grip of enormous debts while the chief players of the system continue to command the money-making game as dexterously as before, their critique is not only accurate, but necessary. In this sense, studies such as Nataša Kovačević’s account of post-communist East-Central Europe as a neo-colonial space (see note 4), and various analyses of the post-1989 ‘transitions’ to liberal capitalism in the region—calling attention to their negative consequences in terms of the impoverishment of the most vulnerable (the old, the peasantry, the unskilled) and the withdrawal of basic state amenities, the growing gap between the ultra-rich and the middle-earning masses, a culture of conspicuous (and often indiscriminate) consumption, a political culture marred by corruption, media frenzies and populist discourses, the resurgence of various brands of nationalism, ethnicism and xenophobic prejudice, etc.—offers a corrective vision to the celebratory stances embraced too easily and too uncritically by many of the opinion-makers who control the public sphere. Kovačević’s account is shared by many jaded, anti-American, anticapitalist intellectuals of Eastern-European origin, who, having studied in Western institutions and been exposed to the pressures and iniquities of postmodernity, can no longer share what they see as the rather naive liberal humanism that continues to dominate the public sphere ‘back home’. Thus, in Romanian writer Ioana Baetica Morpurgo’s novel Imigranţii [The Immigrants], Răzvan, the spokesperson for this particular new intelligentsia, remarks cynically on ‘the governing mechanisms of trust and manipulation, 4 5

Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (London: Polity Press, 2011), p. 41. Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 16.

Joined at the Hip? 69

which are evidently not aimed at his native country alone’;6 ‘public opinion functions according to well-oiled stereotypes: all Gypsies are thieves, all Jews are conniving, all Blacks are drug-dealers and all Muslims carry bombs in their backpacks. And—of course—all Americans are archangels of democracy’. 7 The very object of his PhD thesis is significant, and highly postcolonial in nature: he seeks to apply on the post-communist (specifically Romanian) stage what many postcolonial scholars have successfully demonstrated, namely that: Nationalism and its expansive formula—imperialism—have their roots in racism. In fact, nationalism is no more than the sophisticated formulation of cultural purism. Romania is in this stage: it elaborates its sophistication strategies. In my thesis I will attempt to demonstrate the connection between the marginalisation of the Roma community in Romania and the indiscriminate cooperation of this state with US anti-Muslim policies. (p. 76)

Clearly, a very postcolonial approach to a specifically post-communist issue. Nonetheless, the unwillingness to engage with what postcolonialism must see as an ideological embarrassment is still very much there. The postcolonial sensibility, informed as it is by Marxist anti-capitalist critiques, sits uneasily with communist experience—most often it chooses to conveniently bypass it; even when it is mentioned, it is always en passant—it is never conceptually and theoretically engaged. But it is important, I believe, to think comparatively and interconnectedly about different types of imperialism: while fully aware of their specific historical contexts and diverse incarnations in various locations, the Soviet communist imposition in EastCentral Europe must be seen as a particular historical embodiment of a persistent and widespread imperial drive which has characterized the behaviour of stronger states towards territories perceived as providing opportunities for their economic, political, or ideological expansion. I am in full agreement with Ştefănescu’s proposition that the best way to approach the two related but quite distinct cultural and ideological phenomena is by examining the generic mechanisms of what the critic terms ‘coloniality’, which he defines as a ‘paradigm of collective subordination which covers

6

7

Cristina Chevereşan, ‘Stories of Re-/Dis-Location in Ioana Baetica Morpurgo’s “Imigranţii”’, in Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium, Contributions to Transnational Feminism vol. 4, ed. by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith (LIT Verlag, 2013), pp. 197-210 (p. 200). Ioana Baetica Morpurgo, Imigranţii (Iaşi: Polirom, 2011), p. 43. This and all subsequent translations are mine.

70 Cristina Sandru the broadest spectrum of subtypes and historical variations’. 8 Thus, the ‘(post)colony’ can best be seen as a signifier of cultural and ideological violence—a ‘colonization of the mind’, as much as a project of geographical expansion and economic exploitation. This is a much subtler and more efficient form of hegemony, effected through what Althusser defined as ‘ideological state apparatuses’, 9 which use a very potent cocktail of indoctrination, missionarism, bureaucracy, and repression in order to achieve the compliance of the subaltern (however defined) with the demands and laws of the ruling elite. Such an approach would excavate the epistemological and cultural similarities that underlie the more visible political and economic differences; in other words, the kind of structural relationships which would enable us to treat colonialism and communism as ‘varieties of traumatic coloniality’.10 First, it is important to note that all the different strands of postcolonial studies confront the Western Enlightenment project of modernity, with its attendant teleology of universal progress and rationality. This project is as relevant for the formerly communized countries of East-Central Europe as it is for the West’s former overseas colonies. It makes its presence felt in the emancipatory project of national self-determination and modernization that the newly created states of the region undertake after the post-war dissolution of the large continental empires of Europe (Habsburg and Ottoman), a project seminal to the development of the postcolonial nations emerging after the Second World War as well. Significantly, it is also at the root of the Leninist version of Marxist philosophy, which is, as many political theorists have demonstrated, a teleology derived from Western modernity narratives. Secondly, the resulting ‘imperialisms’ that these Western-derived ideologies have engendered, while different in their specific political, economic, and cultural forms, instituted a set of relations which share a conspicuous similarity even when deployed in otherwise dissimilar locations. They cluster around binary oppositions of the type West/East, Occident/Orient, metropolis/margin (periphery), in which the former term is not only hierarchically, but also ontologically superior. The systematicity of these constructions and their remarkable degree of cohesiveness, as well as their underlying conceptual apparatus and the mechanisms of their perpetuation are shared across the spectrum of coloniality, irrespective of 8 9

10

Ştefănescu, p. 11. See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, available at

Accessed 6 June 2014. Ştefănescu, p. 80.

Joined at the Hip? 71

ideological colouring—whether liberal capitalist or Marxist—or, indeed, fascist. Interestingly, the discourse of ideological othering at the foundation of both fascist and communist totalitarianisms is underwritten by a series of assumptions similar to those on which colonial racism operated, particularly in the most extreme forms it took, such as slavery on Caribbean plantations and the US South, apartheid, or calculated genocide in various regions of Africa. Indeed, the treatment of ‘the other’ by regimes informed by scientifically sanctioned state racism (or white supremacism), has much in common with the policies and practices of communist regimes toward their class enemies. State sanctioned racism can function not only with regard to considerations of colour, blood, and ethnicity, but also of class, creed, and political conviction: it ‘rel[ies] … on institutional and biopolitical mechanisms, which differentiate populations into sub-groups having varied access to means of life and death’.11 And while the exercise of epistemic, social, and punitive power (what Foucault calls ‘biopolitics’) over internal enemies and variously othered populations was a chief characteristic of communist totalitarianism, it has been used with various degrees of systematicity by colonial administrations as well. Having said that, it is equally important to note that these relations were acted out differently and produced different series of results in various parts of the world—hence the need for a discriminative approach that would attend to local and historical specificities even while making connections at a larger systemic level. Clearly, various imperial experiences are not coeval, and linear chronology is not the best way to approach them. What is needed is a contextual and prismatic approach, and the assessment of ideology and its consequences should be done in full knowledge of particular historical and geo-political determinants. Thirdly, one other thing that postcolonial and post-communist cultures share is the experience of trauma and the predominance of the retrospective look, an almost obsessive calling to account of the past, in all its forms. Clearly, where ‘post-’ historical periods are concerned, issues of identity and remembrance, memorializing and using the past, questions of what and why we choose to forge, or what stories we choose to tell, are not only culturally relevant, but formative on the level of the national narrative as expressed in commemorative public practices and educational policies. Such hypertrophy of history has always been a chief characteristic of borderlands, hybrid identities, and post-imperial spaces, as Dennis Walder’s admirable comparative study Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Memory and Representation

11

Verderey and Chari, p. 7.

72 Cristina Sandru (2010) shows.12 A contrapuntal reading of literary works from East-Central Europe and a variety of postcolonial fictions reveals that they are often haunted by a prior history which cannot be adequately verbalized—not only the major accounts of empire, oppression, and occupation, but also a history of personal responsibility and betrayal. The present as revealed by their writing is forever inhabited—indeed, one could almost say possessed— by the shapes, textures and narratives of the past. This may be one reason why the adjective ‘post-communist’ does not usually describe a literary mode—there simply haven’t been enough decades of sifting through the debris of the past, and giving it a distinctive literary voice; perhaps we need to wait at least another decade for a properly ‘post-communist’ literature to emerge and make its mark, in the same way that it took more than three decades for postcolonial studies to crystallize as a discipline after the period of historical decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, and perhaps most importantly within our contemporary globalized neo-colonial context, the subjects of postcolonial studies are usually marginal, alienated, or underprivileged cultural groups. This is where the symbolic figure of the migrant to the Western metropolis can provide a fruitful terrain of rapprochement, and it is this particular point of view that I will be taking in the rest of the article

Part Two: ‘Why Are You Here’? ‘And all these people, where are they coming from?’ ‘All over. Brazil, Afghanistan, Poland, Ukraine, Iraq. They were promised work and told lies to. Third World here in London.’13 Despite the fact that immigration from East-Central Europe to the Western metropolis (I will mainly refer to Britain here, but it is equally true about France, Germany, and, to an extent, particularly for Romanians, Spain and Italy) is one of the most publicized socio-economic phenomena of the past decade, there have been few literary engagements with it. There are several reasons why this should be so—unlike the previous, politically motivated border crossings, which are probably best characterized as exilic in nature, and mainly involved the intellectual elite (who then produced a substantial body of work that can be usefully explored as ‘resistance’ literature); and also unlike the larger diasporic congregations which have accumulated in the 12 13

Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Memory and Representation (London: Routledge, 2010). It’s a Free World! dir. Ken Loach (Filmcoopi Zürich, BIM Distribuzione, EMC Produktion, 2007) 0.30'.20''.

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Western metropolis during the course of the post-decolonization decades, which have settled into micro-communities whose culture, religion, mores, and customs have seeped through and influenced the dominant culture, the East-Central European migrants are still dispersed, unsettled, provisional, reluctant to integrate—or, on the contrary, individually integrated to the point of assimilation (as, for instance, in the case of high-achieving professionals). As various commentators have remarked, diasporic groups from former communist countries have not yet cohered into distinct cultural communities—unlike other instances of minoritization (racial, sexual, gender-related). They lack a political function in the Western public consciousness, unless it is one of vilification and scapegoating;14 most of them are not even citizens of the countries where they currently reside, nor do they seek to involve themselves much in public life. As the multiple voices of Morpurgo’s novel ‘The Immigrants’ make clear, one cannot speak of a ‘cultural unity’ of the same kind or the same magnitude as that which binds together Caribbean, West African, Indian, and Pakistani communities in the UK. Yes, there are Polish shops everywhere, and online ‘communities’ in every major UK city, but little sense of a cultural unity that manifests in major events of the kind, for instance, that led to the first Notting Hill carnival in 1964. No Sam Selvon has emerged from the midst of any of the East-Central European national communities transplanted in the West, and one often gets the sense of the tenuousness of national connections—again, as will be evident in the novel, class and education play a much more important role than national or ethnic affiliation with many migrants from Central and Eastern Europe. For the middle class, highly educated East-Central European immigrant has joined the ranks of the second and third generations of successful Indian and Pakistani doctors and computer engineers; they neatly fill the space of what Balibar terms the ‘otherness-within-the-limits-of-citizenship’15—that which is tameable, assimilable, regimentable. Hence the sense of non-solidarity within the stratum of highly educated professionals with their compatriots who labour in the hotels, strawberry fields and construction sites of the UK. These latter have no ‘spokespeople’—no one emerging from their midst to 14

15

There are obvious parallels to note between the way contemporary far-right political discourses in Western countries on immigration (Britain, France, Germany) treat their poorer ‘European cousins’, and the anti-immigration discourses of the post1950s period, when the citizens of the former colonies began streaming into their respective metropolises. The results of the most recent elections to the European Parliament are also telling: in countries where far-right parties have little purchase on the national political scene they did remarkably well on the pan-European ballot by playing the key card of anti-immigrant sentiment. Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 159.

74 Cristina Sandru give them a voice, other than, perhaps, the well-intentioned but rather patronizing figures of the dominant culture who have found an inspiration for their next book or film on the stereotypical figure of the Eastern European migrant.16 Even less frequently do the old migrants rub shoulders with the new ones, whether in real-life encounters or in fiction, and, when they do, there is often a perceived sense of hostility: one the one hand, the old, already ‘settled’ diasporic communities see the newcomers in economic terms very similar to those shared by the white dispossessed underclass; in addition, the newcomers are often perceived as racist and politically incorrect. To reciprocate, many East Europeans regard various ethnic minorities in stereotypical terms, with suspicion and distrust; there is an ambivalence that reflects very well the attitude, quite widespread among the peoples of EastCentral Europe, that perpetuates a discourse of superiority towards nonEuropean peoples and races, and which to an extent also explains the rejection of the postcolonial paradigm outside relatively small pockets of (generally literary) scholarship. It also shows, particularly when coupled with barely masked dismay at being ‘lumped in’ with Africans, Indians, and other non-European, non-white races, how ‘a history of suffering is not incompatible with the perpetuation of racial stereotypes and discrimination against other subordinate peoples’.17 The play Let There Be Love18 by Britishborn (of Caribbean and Ghanaian descent) Kwame Kwei-Armah, one of the few fictional illustrations of this new metropolitan encounter, features (among other things) West Indian and Polish characters who dramatize precisely this fraught relationship between old and new immigrants. One of the protagonists, Alf Garnett, has been described in various reviews of the play as a modern West Indian version of King Lear—he is embittered and prejudiced against pretty much everyone: he can’t stand his younger daughter because she is a lesbian; his older daughter married a white man, and he calls their child (his granddaughter) a half-breed; he can’t stand the idea of Indian doctors; and, when his daughters hire a young Polish woman, Maria, to help in the home, he nearly fells her with a stick.19 He only calls 16 17

18 19

See, for instance, Rose Tremain’s novel The Road Home (New York: Hachette, 2007), or director Ken Loach’s film It’s a Free World (2007). Monica Popescu, ‘Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating Eastern European experiences for an African Audience’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (May 2012), 176-187, p. 184. Kwame Kwei-Armah, Plays: I (London: Methuen, 2009). See Charles Spencer’s review in The Telegraph (22 January 2008), ‘Let There Be Love: Poignant redemption of a modern-day Lear’, available at Accessed 6 June 2014.

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Maria ‘Polish’ or ‘Ms Polish’ at first, and treats her in a way that echoes the treatment West Indian migrants were themselves subjected to in the postwar decades. On the other hand, the new Eastern European immigrants’ positioning in metropolitan geography, which forces them to share their proximate ‘living space’ with the older immigrant communities who, in their turn, had displaced the white working classes, provokes the Lithuanian Vitas’s disgusted remark about Hackney Wick in Rose Tremain’s The Road Home, that it is full of ‘immigrant scum’20—presumably he does not mean other Lithuanians or East-Europeans. The major focus of the new fictions of immigration rests squarely on the figure of the economic migrant—your average Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Moldovan, Czech, etc. strawberry picker, construction worker, home carer, or their counterparts, the scheming ‘mobilfon men’, as they are generically called in British-Ukrainian Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans—an all-encompassing descriptive term for the new ‘sharks’ of post-communist savage capitalism. These latter deal in people, their hopes, dreams and aspirations, taking full advantage of their naivety and credulity to procure for them rotten, ill-paid jobs on the black market, misrepresented as huge opportunities. The narrative voice in Lewycka’s Two Caravans comments ironically on the economic dynamism of one such ‘mobilfon man’, the Ukrainian Vitaly, who justifies his lack of scruples and exploitative behaviour using half-packaged pseudo-Marxist rhetoric plastered over with the new vocabulary of ‘Protestant capitalism’, of the hard-working selfmade man, both layered within the sandwich of the foreign underprivileged upstart who has made it in an unfriendly world solely by the power of his wits. The resulting discourse is humorous, but only from the comfortable distance of the cultural observer: For as that brainy beardy Karl Marx said, no person can ever build up a fortune just by his own labour, but in order to become VIP elite rich you must appropriate the labour of others. In pursuit of this dream, many ingenious human solutions have been applied throughout the millennia, from slavery, forced labour, transportation, indentured labour, debt bondage and penal colonies, right through to casualisation, zero-hours contract, flexible working, no-strike clause, compulsory overtime, compulsory self-employment, agency working, subcontracting, illegal immigration, outsourcing and many other such maximum flexibility organisational advances. And spearheading this permanent revolutionisation of the work process has been the historic role of the dynamic edge cutting employment solution recruitment consultant. Not enough people appreciate this.21 20 21

Rose Tremain, The Road Home (New York: Hachette, 2007). eBook Edition 2008, loc. 2688. Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans (London: Penguin, 2008). eBook, loc. 3383-3389.

76 Cristina Sandru

[...] they don’t understand how dynamic you have to be, and sometimes how ruthless, and how lonely it is not being able to trust anyone, no one at all, because every other chancer will take their opportunity to knock you down and steal your business, and your closest business partners are also your deadliest rivals. For in the transition from the old world to the new, as that cunning old bushy-beard wrote, all fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and a man has to face up to his real choices in life and his relations with others. For in this new world there are only rivals and losers. (Loc. 3443-3451)

It is very easy to read these fictions from within a Marxist grid—if one watches Ken Loach’s film It’s a Free World, one immediately realises that the only freedom apparently gained by the new migrants to the metropolis is the freedom to be more efficiently exploited; as Tomasz in Two Caravans, one of the prey of ‘mobilfon’ men like Vitaly, muses bitterly: Is he freer here in the West today than he was in Poland in the years of communism, when all he dreamt of was freedom, without even knowing what it was? Is he really any freer than those chickens in the barn, packed here in this small stinking room with five strangers, submitting meekly to a daily horror that has already become routine? Tormentor and tormented, they are all just damned creatures in hell. (Loc. 2061-2064)

These dispossessed workers perceive the newly acquired ‘freedom’ as it is: a more subtle form of imperialism which simply reinforces the international division of labour and appropriation benefiting First World countries at the expense of Third World, and, now, former Second World post-communist societies. It erects a new set of boundaries, one which turns Ukraine and the more underprivileged parts of East Central Europe (those that did not even make it into the EU club) into the West’s ‘new Africa’, in Andriy’s perceptive assessment in the same novel (location 2418). Even Angie’s father in Ken Loach’s film, worried though he is about his grandson’s future prospects when competing against these ‘Kosovans and Romanians’, is appalled at his daughter’s lack of scruples in dealing with desperate people: ‘Giving them a chance? What about their own countries? Schoolteachers, nurses, doctors. Coming over here, working as waiters on starvation money. What good’s that?’ Yet there is a blatancy in these kinds of cultural texts, the uneasy posturing of the militant left-wing Western intellectual speaking for and on behalf of the dispossessed. They have little relevance, however, in the context of the lives of the many Răzvans, Marias, and Traians now residing in the metropolis, the highly-educated middle class professionals with an East-Central European background. They are three of the five narrative

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voices of protagonists in Baetica Morpurgo’s 2011 novel ‘The Immigrants’, which presents the parallel stories of five distinct types of new immigrants (all of Romanian origin): a gay, left-wing PhD student in international politics; a second-rate painter married to a typical middle-class artistic type yuppie; a stockbroker in the City; a caregiver looking after a dying old man; and a Gypsy-Romanian playing his violin on the streets and in the establishments of London. The book is generically complex, mixing fictional memoir, essayistic musings and documentary tones, and taking in its stride controversial contemporary issues such as the war in Iraq, the presumed detention centres for terrorists in East Central Europe, the discrimination against various minorities, particularly, in the Romanian context, that of the Roma community. In one way or another, all of the characters that inhabit its fictional universe are at a remove from the ‘common average’—not only are they dislocated from their familiar national and cultural surroundings, but some of them are doubly marginal in multiple senses. Thus Răzvan is, within his own culture, twice undesirable—not only is he gay, he is also leftleaning and anti-American in a country which is, on the whole, conservative and Christian. In the novel, his relationship with Ravi (who is from India) could almost be taken to encapsulate the similarities between the postcolonial and the post-communist subject, joined at the hip in their various experiences of minoritization; within the context of migration to the metropolis, they are among those who are already cosmopolitan in their approach, well-educated, hence ready to be integrated; yet the shadow of their difference persists—within the strictly normative societies of Romania and India, they continue to be marginal on account of their sexuality or political views. Then there is Gruia, of course, the final participant in the five-voiced concerto, ‘the undocumented inhabitant of city parks and back alleys, who watches people eating out and prays for them to forget to throw away the leftovers, so that he can enjoy the illusion of a meal’. 22 Gruia is the quintessential non-assimilable migrant and alien, the figure who provides a magnifying glass to both his country’s record of discrimination and the illusory plenty of the big Western city. It is through his eyes that we see the pithiest descriptions of London, reminiscent in many ways of Selvon and Rushdie: London has many hearts. And many garments. Old Miss London wears equally Elizabethan lace, grey, yellowish, and black, at once reticent and opulent, and modern clothing, abstract, conceptual, oneiric, multicoloured, as you wish to 22

Baetica Morpurgo, p. 208.

78 Cristina Sandru describe it. Both styles suit her. Fiery garments which have clothed more than half of her body back then, around 1666, garments steeped in the dirt and pus of the mid-14th century; early millennium garments with starchy collars and cuffs hidden under Norman mantles, black monk and white nun robes rustling in the terror of the Reformation 400 years ago and then burning in heaps on the pavements; red army uniforms with golden buttons and glittery epaulets, which have seen all of the world, from India to New England; poor frozen and lifeless rags which set sail on hundreds of ships to cross the Atlantic to the West, to a new continent of freedom, or to the South, to a new penal continent. The jagged clattering armours of the Vikings, the ones made of hemp and tanned hide of the Saxons, the large patriotic linen shirts worn under sheepskin vests by the Irish, the pleated skirts and furry hats worn by the Welsh, the checked kilts and long stockings of the north, on the other side of Hadrian’s wall—yes, the Romans’ brass helmets and shields, their sexy sandals on strong conqueror’s shanks, all these garments, plus Marcella’s skimpy polyester ones. They all become London very well. (p. 350)

His story is possibly the most touching, and perhaps also the most authentic of all—doubly marginalized by his ethnicity (he is a Romanian Gypsy), a figure of hatred and fear both were he comes from and on the streets of London. He has the candour and the charm of a big child, one who has been deprived of love and opportunity by the inauspicious circumstances of his birth. It is significant, I believe, that his narration is prefaced by verses from the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish—like the country-less Palestinians, being a Roma means living in a permanent state of dislocation: ‘I am a sightless vagrant on the road with not one letter in civilization’s alphabet. Meanwhile in my own time I plant my trees I sing of my love.’

More so than all the other types of immigrants, he is a shadowy figure who inspires fear because he embodies a type of alterity that feels threatening to the law-abiding citizen of the Western world. His conversation with a fictional interviewer in the novel expresses in compressed form the conclusions reached by many anthropological and sociological studies of human interaction with that which is perceived as different, threatening, alien: U: Why do you think Romanians hate the gypsies? G: Because they’re afraid. U: Afraid of what exactly? G: Do you want to know what they’re afraid of ? I’ll tell you. They fear the future. U: How come? G. Just so. They’re looking at us and they know that’s how they’re all gonna end up. The ones here [he points to the waiters], the ones in France, everywhere else

Joined at the Hip? 79 around the world. You’re looking at us and you shit yourselves with fear. Mark my words: we, the gypsies, we’re the mirror to humanity’s future. (pp. 347-348)

Far more relevant from the point of view of the difficulties posed by a hyphenated existence are the cases of Maria and Traian. Maria typifies the middle-class immigrant whose quite comfortable status in her adoptive country does not prevent her from being sensitive to social prejudice. Having married the wealthy art critic and aesthete Dorian (and in the process giving up her previous relationship back in Romania), she has achieved her dream—or so she thought. But, just as in Lewycka’s Two Caravans young Ukrainian Irina’s edulcorated vision of a Britain of poetry and Shakespeare and well-spoken gentlemen starts unravelling the moment she touches British soil and is taken over by one of the many ‘mobilfonmen’ who do the dirty work for employers who need low-wage workers, Maria’s passiveaggressive attitude towards her English artist husband perfectly captures her feelings towards her adoptive country and the kind of second-hand citizenship it offers foreigners. It is telling that a great deal of Maria’s narrative is dedicated to excerpts from her childhood and teenage diaries, a time of enchantment and idealistic dreams, which are shown to have disintegrated under the pressure of misguided expectations. Both present and past discourses function as typical postcolonial records of insecurity and disappointment—her diary is nostalgic, while at the same time revealing the underlying reasons of her secret desire to get out: her marriage is not to Dorian, but to the mirage of a West that has held generations of East Europeans in thrall; a paradise of colours and goods, of ‘stuff’ they longed to have but which was inaccessible: I married a dream, which wasn’t even mine. I married the oranges that never made it to us, in Tulcea, unless they were in a colouring book. I married because that’s what was demanded by the empty solemn shelves of the general store [...] The unshakeable dream of those hard years, that’s what I married, the dream of a rescue boat that would take you to happier shores […] I married the unlived youth of my parents, the forbidden territory populated with good fairies who wear leather shoes and carry bagsful of salami. I didn’t marry Dorian—I married a symbol; a projection, a fiction [...]. (p. 183)

And, having married this dream and acquired the coveted citizenship, all she can feel is a sense of emptiness—that feeling echoed by countless generations of migrants, of all races, creeds, and ages: ‘What am I doing in this country, among people who will forever be strangers to me, and for whom I will always be a foreigner, no matter how much I try to model my beliefs, hopes, wants and deeds on theirs?’ (p. 179).

80 Cristina Sandru Indeed, I could almost title her and Traian’s sections in the novel ‘The loneliness of the (not so) long-distance immigrant’. Traian’s story is the epitome of professional accomplishment and personal alienation, in the same way as his character is an uncanny and slightly jarring juxtaposition of private romanticism and public mathematical calculation. It is narrated in the third person, but from his perspective, or, rather, the perspective of somebody who knows Traian very well, maybe better than he knows himself—in that deadpan, seemingly objective manner of his job, revealing the vast emptiness at the centre of his rich, lonely, work-driven immigrant life. Most of the time he is presented as anesthetized, alone, introverted—‘a numb prisoner of his own accomplishments’.23 His apartment does not feel like a home, but rather like a temporary rental, and he craves the kind of communion he no longer shares with the people around him. Sibiu, his city of birth in Transylvania, does not exactly welcome him back; its European emancipation confuses the émigré, who finds the city of his memory barely recognizable (p. 231). As in the case of Maria’s youthful diary, the Romania of his mind is one frozen in an inadequate past that bears little connection with the dynamic present; this disconnect between his evident—albeit superficial—capacity for absorbing new things and spaces, and his inability to reconnect to the country he has left behind is one that many migrants share—the longer they have left, the more the disconnect is felt, and their home-reunions—often rushed—move on the surface or quickly degenerate into irritation, misunderstanding, or downright indifference. His alienation in London translates into an even more painful alienation ‘back home’, where his native city and former friends no longer see him as part of their community. Like Maria, he has a love-hate relationship with the world he has left behind,24 and his identity split is emphasized by one of his dreams, in which Traian 1 has escaped to London and Traian 2 is left behind, suffering for his fate while being strangely aware that the two Traians are, in fact, facets of the same self.25 It is exactly the same split which causes him to accept his nickname, ‘The Vampire’, given to him by his work mates, with a certain degree of indifference. On the one hand, the nickname encapsulates the kind of ignorance clad in a few stereotypical popular notions that the metropolitan majority entertains about those far-off places which, at best, are seen as cheaper venues to have an extended weekend bash, or which are otherwise ‘exotic’. On the other hand, and more significantly perhaps, it reflects a much larger alienation characteristic of the late-capitalist sensibility—what Jameson has termed the waning of affect, the replacement 23 24 25

Chevereşan, p. 206. See Chevereşan, p. 205. Baetica Morpurgo, p. 237.

Joined at the Hip? 81

of depth with depthlessness, the takeover of the semantic field by the signifiers of a superficial hedonism that sits uneasily with the utterly modern seriousness of a man like Traian—and, by extension, of all immigrants, irrespective of their level of education. Unlike Răzvan, he has an underdeveloped critical consciousness—he is good at numbers, but not necessarily at what they can do; the effect they have on his own personal life. Hence his identity split. He is the typical inhabitant of ‘The City’, described in the following section by the rather elusive narrative voice as having a ‘cold concrete heart and reflective glass, aseptic heart, exact, durable and light’ (p. 350). Another interesting case is Sabina, the ‘carer’ lady whose modest background in a poor non-descript village in the north of Romania is representative for many of those immigrants against which UKIP 26 politicians rail: she has no particular skills to speak of, beyond being able to maintain impeccable cleanliness in the house she works in and cook tasty food; she does not ‘integrate’ in the same way as Răzvan, Traian, or Maria, and can be seen to ‘fit in’—her universe in London is limited, and circumscribed to the local area. 27 Yet, paradoxically, she seems the least lonely of all the characters; she takes care of a terminally ill gentleman who is, of all things, a sympathizer of the UKIP and ostensibly dislikes immigrants, but leaves all his possessions to her after he dies; she also becomes fond of her ex-convict son. Her expectations have little to do with income, professional accomplishment, or even consumer satisfaction; she appreciates her British existence on various other levels: the cleanliness of the streets, the politeness of the people, the good healthcare system. She takes things for granted and just ‘gets on’. On a larger level, Sabina’s existence throws light on that very postcolonial tension at the heart of the metropolis—that between the desire for the chief attributes of modernity, for the amenities and benefits of ‘civilized’ life, those aspects which make the UK bearable for the likes of Sabina; and the realization that, together with the virtual machinations of financial capitalism, the Western world has moved to an altogether different stage of personal and cultural experience— one of gratification and lifestyle, guided by the pleasure principle, which has supplanted the classic capitalist-Protestant ethic of hard work, restraint, and 26

27

UK Independence Party, a far-right populist political organization in Britain which has been steadily gaining ground in the past few years, using the threat of immigration as one of its chief campaign points. It is interesting that this is also the case with many born-and-bred Londoners, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds, who very rarely leave the confines of their own borough and know less about the city at large than your average informed tourist.

82 Cristina Sandru lawful gain. Sitting on a terrace on the Thames embankment, Traian contemplates this fake consumerist paradise: Watching this human multitude coming and going you could almost be fooled into believing that, on this fine June afternoon there was no Iraq war, no global warming, nor global economic crisis. Nothing but self-gratification. Nothing but interesting-ness, as Martin Boswell-Harper would say. Nothing beyond fashion, or hairstyles, or fat-free foods. Nothing but life style. (p. 239)

Traian’s vision echoes Maria’s own contempt for the ‘hip’ middle classes of Britain and their fake traumas of too much prosperity; their lives could be characterized by what Žižek has called, in a different context, ‘aestheticized hedonism’, which goes hand in hand with a presumed ‘post-ideological’ universe of pragmatic administration, consensus and dialogue working under the guise of a ‘plurality of ways of life’, 28 but which conceals a foreclosed political passion that makes its triumphant comeback under the guise of xenophobia and terrorism.29 It is in this, above all, that the contrast between these superficially integrated immigrants and the ‘locals’ emerges most sharply—in the case of the former, their past experiences in the crumbling world of ‘real-life socialism’ have endowed them with a perception of value that fits uneasily in a world where objects—as well as people—are ‘recycled’/replaced according to the pressures of fast-changing fashions and trends. Like the previous generations of postcolonial immigrants, they have remained, at bottom, ‘untranslated’ people, to use a famous Rushdian formula, ‘creature[s] of selected discontinuities’.30 The views of home and diaspora, here and there, now and then, as they emerge from these post-2000 fictions of migration, correspond rather well to what Edward Said describes in Reflections on Exile as the distinguishing 28 29

30

Slavoj Žižek , ‘Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’, New Left Review, Sept.-Oct. 1997, 28-51, p. 37. Indeed, in his interview with Homi Bhabha in Relocating Postcolonialism, John Comaroff traces a number of metaphorical connections between the two: while the immigrant is ‘the living metonym of the global age […] [the] cipher of new signs and practices, of novel imaginings, of possibility, of danger and pollution, illness and contagion’, trespasser of boundaries, inhabiting an interstitial space of ambiguity and contradiction, it also becomes a figure of symbolic transgression that is uncannily paralleled by the image of the ‘terrorist’, an equally shadowy figure, invisible and anonymous, who slips easily across borders, impersonating the ‘civilized citizen’: ‘like the immigrant, the terrorist erases boundaries and opens up new ruptures in which the uncontrollable, the unmentionable, might take place’. See Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 26; 28. This is how Rushdie characterizes Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 427.

Joined at the Hip? 83

features of a displaced person. In contrast to the ‘legitimate’ inhabitant and rooted citizen, the immigrant is ‘neither here nor there, but rather inbetween things’. 31 A chain of memories pulls her back to her now impossible place of origin, while the new environment offers itself as a place of opportunity—usually economic, but also educational—but denies her emotional access. In this, as in many other respects, the experience of these ‘new’ immigrants can be seen as legitimately postcolonial as that of the previous waves of immigration from the colonial periphery to the metropolis. It may be possible to build on these shared experiences in order to form the kind of coalitions that Diran Adebayo has recently intimated, between a Pole, a black Briton, and a Romany, suggesting that ‘us black Britons, with our newer, particular take on citizenship, should have much to offer here that’s useful to new others, or old ones remaking themselves’.32 While tensions may persist, and new alliances may remain precarious,33 the recognition of one’s common ‘otherness within the limits of citizenship’34 could forge a sense of shared postcoloniality and open up spaces of dialogue where the postcolonial and the post-communist can meet.

31 32

33

34

Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000), p. 99. Diran Adebayo, ‘Some thoughts on Barack, the African in him, and “Post-black”’, 3 January 2010. Available at Accessed 2 July 2014. Particularly in the context of continuing racial tensions and the rise of neo-Nazism in many parts of both Western and East-Central Europe, as intimated by Vedrana Velickovic’s article ‘Belated Alliances?: Tracing the Intersections Between Postcolonialism and Post-Communism’, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (May 2012), 164-175. See note 14.

Emilia Kledzik Inventing Postcolonial Poland: Strategies of Domestication1 Abstract: This chapter presents various ways of implementing postcolonial studies into local theory. When postcolonial studies were introduced in Poland in 2003, on the impulse of American Slavicists, it at first aroused contradictory reactions. However, later, due to the ‘anthropological turn’ in the Humanities, not only did it become a popular way of (re)interpreting texts, but also of diagnosing political and cultural dependency and postdependency in the region. Although this approach still often overlooks the situation of the ethnic and national minorities in the region, it has undoubtedly become one of the most important contemporary theoretical projects in Poland.

Polish theory undertook the challenge of domesticating postcolonial studies during the 1990s and was the first among academic centres in Central and Eastern Europe to have broadened the scope of this methodological approach in the Humanities. Even today, ‘Polish postcolonialism’ occupies a visible place on the Central European map of theory, which Claire Cavanagh compared some time ago to the Conradian ‘blank space’.2 The Czechs have not manifested a similar interest in tackling the conflicts, regional and otherwise, that take place between nations, ethnicities, minorities, political entities, and places of memory,3 and in Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania this trend is discussed mainly within the walls of English Departments. Germans have begun working on their colonial history, analysing the Orientalist discourse in Eastern Prussian literature and other peripheral regions east of Berlin; 4 however, use of the term ‘postcolonial’ in relation to post-GDR German literature (including that relating to Sorbian culture) is used mainly by English and Polish academics.5 Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries 1

2 3

4 5

This research was financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the title ‘National Program of Development of the Humanities 2002-2014’, project number NPRH 12H 11 00180. Claire Cavanagh, ‘Postkolonialna Polska. Biała plama na mapie współczesnej teorii’, Teksty Drugie, 80/81.2/3 (2003), 60-71. See Josef Šveda, ‘Okcidentalismus a orientalismus v praxi. Reprezentace Západu a Východu v prózách Jana Nováka’ [Occidentalim and Orientalism in Practice: TheRepresentation of West and East in the Fiction of Ján Novák], Slavia Occidentalis, 67.1 (2013), in print. See Jürgen Joachimsthaler, Text-Ränder. Die kulturelle Vielfalt Ostmitteleuropas als Darstellungsproblem deutscher Literatur (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011). See Emilia Kledzik, Prowincjonalizowanie. Twórczość Jurija Brězana, Wolfganga Hilbiga i Andrzeja Stasiuka w perspektywie postkolonialnej [Provincializing. The Work of Jurij Brězan, Wolfgang Hilbig and Andrzej Stasiuk from a Postcolonial Perspective]

86 Emilia Kledzik are areas where, for various reasons, the phrase ‘postcolonial condition’ has become a key term in relation to literary and cultural phenomena that took place after the political transformations following the fall of communism.6 The case of Ukraine is particularly complex and could provide material for a few separate studies, 7 especially in political science and sociology. Polish postcolonialism, however, whose reception and evolutionary directions will be the main focus of this study, in contrast to the majority of bordering countries, has adopted the techniques of postcolonial studies as one of the most important languages with which to discuss literature and culture after the fall of communism. It has, in effect, become a kind of seismograph registering social clashes and expectations, as well as a language with which to account for our oftentimes unaccepted history. It is necessary at the beginning to emphasize that attempts to present Central Europe in terms of its struggles with various forms of colonization can be found in literature and journalism dating back from before the 1990s, which is when Edward Said’s Orientalism was first translated into Polish. These attempts can be seen re-emerging along with martyrological metaphors showing Poland as a victim of history that have been found in Polish literature since Romanticism. For Milan Kundera the struggle for freedom from the ‘colonial yoke’ of Germany and Russia was one of the defining features of this region.8 It is worthwhile tracing out how expansive

6

7

8

(Poznań: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2013); Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany since Unification. From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academics, 2005). See Audrius Beinorius, ‘Orientalizm i dyskurs postkolonialny. Kilka problemów metodologicznych’ [Orientalism and Postcolonial Discourse: Several Methodological Questions], trans. by Agata Jaroszyk, Porównania, 13.1 (2013), 11-23; Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. by. Violeta Kelertas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). See Mykoła Riabczuk, ‘Colonialism Another Way. On the Applicability of Postcolonial Methodology for the Study of Postcommunist Europe’, Porównania, 13.1 (2013), 47-59. According to Kundera, these nations, cornered, on the one hand, by the Germans and, on the other hand, by the Russians, exhausted too much energy in the struggle for survival and for their own language. M. Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, The New York Review of Books; 26 April 1984, pp. 33-38. The first mention of the possibilities of comparing countries from the Eastern bloc to African and Asian colonies appeared in the Polish exile press as early as the 1960s, when many of these countries won their independence. A journalist from Kultura wrote: ‘Racial and ideological apartheid are at odds with the most basic rules of democracy. Democracy assumes building society from numerous races and beliefs.’ See Londyńczyk [J. Mieroszewski], Kronika angielska; Kultura 12 (1960), p. 62, qtd. in Janusz Korek, ‘Central and Eastern Europe from a Postcolonial Perspective’, in From Sovietology to Postcoloniality. Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. by Janusz Korek (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2007), p. 8.

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this metaphor was and what connects it to Said’s Orientalism; however, it is difficult to agree with the claim that in this part of Europe ‘postcolonialism can and should be a weapon’.9 Such a radical formulation of the problem risks raising ressentiments, which is precisely what Polish literary scholars warned against, stating in a hyperbolic fashion that this is the kind of postcolonialism that we see ‘performed in its purest version by Islamic extremists’,10 a statement which in itself betrays its Eurocentric anxieties. We should remember that reaching for theoretical tools from the postcolonial repertoire brings about the risk of committing anachronisms. Postcolonial theory made its debut in Poland under the aegis of the social sciences, specifically pedagogy. In his edited volume Różnica, tożsamość, edukacja. Szkice z pogranicza,11 Tomasz Szkudlarek, a theorist of intercultural pedagogy, wrote about the crisis of national communities, a crisis that entails the necessity of remodelling educational assumptions in both the global as well as the local context (as understood by Anderson’s ‘tribal village’ community), excluding the national level of ‘imagined communities’. Paraphrasing Chinua Achebe, he wrote: ‘Most likely the absence of an institutionalized new religion, new ethics, and pedagogy leads to the conviction that the world is falling apart’.12 It has to be said clearly that this thesis, formulated twenty years ago about the problematic character of nation states in postmodernity not only did not gain acceptance in Polish educational practice, but also did not anticipate the educational ‘backlash’ from the first decade of the 21st century. It was then that propositions were advanced calling for a revised canonical reading list, which, incidentally, has not drastically changed after 1989. It could be said that from this moderately nationalistic canon (with its tendencies towards martyrological myths and anti-Semitic resentment) a central-nationalistic canon developed. Its axis remaining fixed on a patriotic upbringing and debates about the nation, though it was broadened by materials interrogating national and religious formulas including works by the modernist novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, the absurd drama writer Sławomir Mrożek, and the contemporary writer and film director Tadeusz Konwicki. After a relative 9

10 11

12

Michalina Golinczak, ‘Postkolonializm: przed użyciem wstrząsnąć!’ [Postcolonialism: Shake before use!] Recykling Idei, 10 (2008). Accessed 20 March 2014. Aleksander Fiut, ‘Polonizacja? Kolonizacja?’ [Polonization? Colonization?] Teksty Drugie, 84.6 (2003), 150-156 (p. 152). Różnica, tożsamość, edukacja. Szkice z pogranicza [Difference, Identity, Education: Drafts from the Borderland], ed. by Tomasz Szkudlarek (Cracow: Oficyna Wydawnicza ‘Impuls’, 1995). Ibid., p. 13.

88 Emilia Kledzik thawing period, another ‘ice age’ came in 2007, when an ultranationalist Minister of Education arbitrarily eliminated the masterpieces of modern literature from school reading lists, including those by Kafka and Witkacy; however, what caused the biggest controversy was eliminating Witold Gombrowicz due to his supposed promotion of anti-patriotism and homosexuality. Their place was to be occupied by Karol Wojtyła’s essays and stories about the priests murdered in the Dachau concentration camp. Those events foreshadowed the current discussions concerning first-grade textbooks, gender workshops in pre-schools, gender quotas, and feminine forms of professional titles such as ‘minister’, ‘professor’, etc. The postcolonial bomb exploded in Poland almost ten years later. In 2003, the American Slavicist Claire Cavanagh wrote in Teksty Drugie [Second Texts], the most prestigious journal of theory in Poland, that the entire Second World, as a further mutation of the Russian Empire along with its satellite partners, is a Conradian ‘blank space’ awaiting inscription into the postcolonial paradigm. Applying postcolonial tools to this region could suggest—incorrectly in Cavanagh’s view—the incompatibility of practices of cultural, economic, and political subservience that took place in this region in relation to imperial practices elsewhere. The Polish scholarly world was divided into those who rejected this idea, believing it to be ‘a Western fad’ (Włodzimierz Bolecki), and those who viewed it with approval, though at that time still remaining rather reticent about the possibility of ‘implementing’ postcolonial theory (Dariusz Skórczewski, Aleksander Fiut). What seemed at the time more crucial than interpretive practices was the question, developing gradually in an atmosphere of global conspiracy, concerning the causes of postcolonial silence. Dariusz Skórczewski suggested that the reason for this silence lies in the archaic structure of Slavic Studies in America, which are Russocentric and thus favour the Old Empire. 13 Janusz Korek identified the reason why postcolonial revisionist impulses have been stifled in the distribution of knowledge in the local universities, judging that this knowledge is practiced by ‘Slavicists and Sovietologists’ only. 14 Ewa Thompson, the author of Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, linked this silence about Central European colonies with the Russian strategy, according to which ‘colonized nations (including medium and small European nations) are blamed for historical

13 14

Dariusz Skórczewski, ‘Postkolonialna Polska – projekt (nie)możliwy’ [Postcolonial Poland – Project (Im)possible], Teksty Drugie, 97/98.1/2 (2006), 100-112, p. 103. Janusz Korek, ‘Postkolonializm a Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia’ [Postcolonialism and East-Central Europe], Porównania, 5.5 (2008), 75-90 (p. 87).

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processes in which they are merely playthings’. 15 David Chioni Moore proposed a thesis about ‘postcolonial trauma’ suffered by local scholars, and ‘postcolonial amnesia’, which he connected with the need to repress colonial memories.16 Several years have passed and the Polish academic world has risen to the challenge. Intellectual movements that I would like to see adopt the postcolonial thought are the ‘identity trend’ 17 as well as the revisionist, reinterpretational and regional approaches. In conclusion, I will present a subjective list of benefits which I believe postcolonialism has already brought to Polish theory. Ewa Thompson, an American Slavicist whose Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism was published in Polish in 2000, can be considered the patron of local postcolonial focus on identity. In her work, Thompson strongly demands a revision of textual practices in Russian literature, which have legitimated even more brutal colonialist practices than the ‘canonical’ colonial practices found in British or French literature. Thompson defined the term ‘white colonization’ and ‘inner colonization’ and argued that remaining silent about these discursive, yet very real practices, is a result of the West’s captivation with Russia/the USSR, in opposition to what many nations in Asia, and in Central and Eastern Europe, would consider the anticivilizational character of its colonization. This book did not initially gain recognition—one could even find it in the discount books section of bookstores—but it was rediscovered thanks to the ‘postcolonial boom’ following the publication of Cavanagh’s texts. Thompson’s later ideas oscillated around diagnosing the postcolonial condition of Polish society suffering from the so-called ‘post-Soviet pessimism’ and indulging in ressentimental ‘dreams of grandeur’ that Thompson, invoking Homi Bhabha, calls ‘necessary fictions’.18 As a remedy for postcolonial trauma and in order 15 16 17

18

Ewa Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood 2000), p. 8. David Chioni Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA 116.1 (2001), 111-128. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, ‘Gdzie jest miejsce dla Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej w przestrzeni postkolonialnej? Możliwe trajektorie podróży’ [Where is the Place for Central and Eastern Europe in the Postcolonial? Possible Trajectories], Porównania, 13.1 (2013), 9-27. Ewa Thompson, ‘Said a sprawa polska’ [Said and the Polish Case], Newsweek (Polish edition), 2 July 2005, available at Accessed 22 March 2014. Homi Bhabha describes ‘necessary fictions’ as ‘A possibility of a history of literature driven forward by the progressive discovery of essentially unmediated nature of reality in its works.’ See: Homi Bhabha, ‘Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of

90 Emilia Kledzik to ‘erase Poland from the great historical narrative,’19 she proposed a return to the Polish nobility’s ideology of Sarmatism, as a ‘series of structures and stances’ characterized by a powerful sense of community identification, rationed tolerance of ‘what is abnormal’, and, most of all, optimism and faith in one’s own strength. In daily newspapers, Thompson criticized the Polish intellectual elite for qualities and actions which—in her opinion—are symptomatic for local academics: their moroseness, lack of social solidarity, and glorification of the West. Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism became a weapon in election campaigns, serving to foster anti-Russian sentiment and criticize the current purported ‘servile politics’ in relation to Russia, and Sarmatism was to inaugurate a new Polish nationalism that would be Eurosceptical, ultra-Catholic, and revisionist in relation to the so-called ‘Eastern Borderlands’. Jan Sowa proposes another concept of identity that is equally radical, though contrary in its findings, in his book The Phantom King's Body: Peripheral Struggles with the Postmodern Form.20 I shall refrain from offering a critique of this book here, as one has already been written by Dorota Kołodziejczyk.21 I will only add that Sowa’s conception can be summarized in one sentence: ‘everything that Central Europe has created has a mimetic character’, which is a concept that has been criticized for its oversimplification as often as Thompson’s. It is difficult to disagree with Dorota Kołodziejczyk’s claim that postcolonial studies in Poland are often held hostage by nationalistic debates;22 one ought to recall in this context Homi Bhabha’s sober claim about the performative and pedagogical effect of the concept of nation.23 There is, however, research which manages to avoid the radicalism and pathos inherent in the abovementioned positions, even though it engages with the question of identity. This research tends to be based on the experience of the ‘otherness’ of the subject, one of the fundamental characteristics of the postmodern condition of subjectivity, which, as an

19

20

21 22 23

Mimeticism’, in The Theory of Reading, ed. by F. Gloversmith. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1989), pp. 93-121 (p. 94). Ewa Thompson, ‘Sarmatyzm i postkolonializm’ [Sarmatism and Postcolonialism], Dziennik Wiadomosci, 11 May 2007, available at Accessed 22 March 2014. Jan Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z ponowoczesną formą [The Phantom King’s Body: Peripheral Struggle with the Postmodern Form] (Cracow: Universitas, 2013). Kołodziejczyk, p. 17. Ibid., p. 16. Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: ‘Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in The Blackwell Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. by A. Elliot. (Oxford: Blackwell 1999), pp. 211-219 (p. 215).

Inventing Postcolonial Poland 91

external category, is construed in postcolonial discourse in opposition to the strategies of essentializing communities and is a touchstone for its relation towards variously understood minorities. Aleksander Fiut24 was the first to write a book on this topic, and in Polish anthropology Wojciech Kalaga’s findings remain unsurpassed. 25 Research relating to the representation of migration, carried out by Mieczysław Dąbrowski in the newest Polish literature, traces the need, so characteristic in postcolonial literature, to root oneself in locality. His findings do not lead to conclusions about the need to consolidate around a totalizing vision of a nation; instead, they propose refreshing reflections about the mood of Polish ‘migrants’ (not ‘emigrants’), and their ability to thematize their otherness and experiences in an intercultural dialogue.26 Polish postcolonial studies, steadily expanding in publications since the beginning of 2000, partly consist of historical and literary revisionism and reinterpretations. Some of the most important of these deal with Romantic literature; for example, Adam Mickiewicz’s Paris lectures, approached in terms of ressentiment towards the imperial neighbours, 27 and the literary portrayals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, presented from the perspective of those born outside the centre: Adam Mickiewicz and Czesław Miłosz.28 Finally, it reckons with the Slavic cultural inheritance, resurrected by Romantic literature and given the form of an origin myth, which, according to Maria Janion, one of the most eminent Polish scholars of Romanticism, has led not only to a denial, and consequently, a disdain of our own roots, but also to ‘Slavic trauma’, a result of identifying oneself with those who are weak, defeated, and humiliated, or, using a postcolonial

24 25 26

27

28

Aleksander Fiut, Spotkania z Innym [Meetings with the Other] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006). Tropy tożsamości: Inny, obcy, trzeci [Identity Clues: Other, Alien, Third], ed. by Wojciech Kalaga (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2003). Cf. Mieczysław Dąbrowski, Literatura i konteksty. Rzeczy teoretyczne [Literature and Contexts: Theoretical Matters?] (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2011), especially chapter 2: ‘Dyskurs i tożsamość’ [Discourse and Identity]. See Michał Kuziak, ‘Wartość kulturowego braku. Syndrom kolonialny w twórczości Mickiewicza’ [The Cultural Deficiency: Colonial Syndrome in the works of Mickiewicz], Porównania, 5.5 (2008), 43-54. See Vaiva Narušené, ‘Czesław Miłosz i Tomas Venclova o przeszłości: tradycja jako źródło wspólnoty i porozumienia między ludźmi i narodami’ [Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Vencolva on the Past: Tradition as a Source of Commonwealth and Understanding between People and Nations], Porównania, 10.1 (2012), 123-139; Krzysztof Zajas, Lithuania, My Fatherland! Colonial Perspectives in Polish Literature, in print.

92 Emilia Kledzik term—subalterns.29 Postcolonial revisionism also took aim at the literature of the Eastern Borderlands (today, territories in western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania that belonged to Poland before WWII) and the nostalgic ‘borderland’ discourse. Their deconstruction was meant to allay the fears of the above-mentioned martyrology potentially being revived. 30 Inspired by Daniel Beauvois’s dissertation entitled Trójkąt ukraiński. Szlachta, carat i lud na Wołyniu, Podolu i Kijowszczyźnie 1793-1918 [The Ukrainian Triangle: the Nobility, Tsarism and the Peasants in the Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev Regions 1793-1918],31 Bogusław Bakuła calls the Borderlands—against their idealizing multicultural character—‘a regressive utopia’ and ‘a symbol of exclusion’, showing that the situation of the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarussian and other non-Polish nations was (and still is—in contemporary historical and memorial ‘borderland’ discourse) similar to those of nations commonly recognized as colonised. Beauvois’s statements, cited by Bakuła,32 balance on chauvinism, and hark back to the 19th century, when ‘the Borderlands’, as a symbol of Polish national longing, private nostalgia and guarantor of identity had long ago lost their relevance. Their role and power are, however, still so important that they are elevated in Polish collective memory to the level of quintessential national virtues (essentialism and national ‘authenticity’), 33 while, at the same time, depriving other inhabitants occupying the same geographical space of the right to speak, and 29 30

31

32

33

Maria Janion, Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna. Fantazmaty literatury [Amazing Slavdom: Literary Phantasms] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006), p. 28. Fiut (2003), p. 152. See also Aleksander Fiut, ‘Wokół “Jądra ciemności”’ [Around ‘Heart of Darkness’], in Poszukiwanie wolności. Literatura—dokument—Kresy. Prace ofiarowane Tadeuszowi Bujnickiemu [Searching for Freedom: Literature—Document— Borderlands. Works devoted to Tadeusz Bujnicki], ed. by Stanisław Gawliński and Wojciech Ligęza (Cracow: Universitas, 2003), pp. 253-264. Daniel Beauvois, Le Noble, le serf, le révisor. La noblesse polonais entre le tsarisme et les masses ukrainiens (1831-1863) [The Noble, the Serf, the Revisor: Polish Nobility between Tsarism and the Ukrainian Masses, 1831-1863] (Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 1985). Władysław Panas’s text is particularly outrageous. In it he proposes that liberation from nationalistic tendencies is evidenced by the acceptance of the Polish language as a ‘borderland lingua franca’. Władysław Panas, ‘O pograniczu etnicznym w badaniach literackich’, in Wiedza o literaturze i edukacja. Księga referatów Zjazdu Polonistów [Literary Theory and Education: Presentations from the Polish Philologists’ Congress], ed. by T. Michałowska, Z. Goliński, and Z. Jarosiński (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN: Warsaw, 1996), pp. 605-613. See Bogusław Bakuła, ‘Kolonialne i postkolonialne aspekty polskiego dyskursu kresoznawczego (zarys problematyki)’ [Colonial and Postcolonial Aspects of Polish Borderland Discourse], Teksty Drugie, 102.6 (2006), 11-33 (p. 21). Comp. ‘Authenticity’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, second edition (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 17.

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it is in this perspective that the terms are considered elements of colonial studies. Postdependency studies have proven themselves successful as a strategy of taming postcolonial studies by developing local equivalents. Hanna Gosk, based at the Faculty of Polish Language and Literature of Warsaw University, is the originator of this endeavour, giving rise to the inter-university network Post-Dependence Studies Centre. 34 She argued that, although Polish geopolitical reality was never colonial in the strictest sense of the word (and thus not postcolonial either), it did undoubtedly succumb to the master/slave dialectic, and its literature can, therefore, be read through the discourse of hegemon and/or oppressed. But most of all, as indicated by Dariusz Skórczewski on the basis of the postcolonial problem pertaining to the abovementioned Borderlands, literature can also be read as a series of mutually conditional discourses, keeping in mind their ‘long duration’, surfacing in the memory and postmemory of dependency trauma, and, on the other hand, of imperial melancholy35. Based on what has been said thus far, it is possible to draw the conclusion that postcolonialism in Polish humanities has best flourished in literary studies, which—also as a result of the term ‘fiction’ being systematically annexed by other disciplines, most importantly history and culture studies, but also sociology—has become something of a metascience, clearly encroaching into the area of research previously established as the domain of structuralists and semioticians. I have already mentioned this in the context of ongoing tensions concerning the colonial aspirations of borderland discourse, and disputes over the resurrected ideology of the Polish nobility called Sarmatism. In each of these debates literary studies scholars encroached on the academic terrain of historians, borrowed from them, criticized them, and supported themselves with their arguments. A thesis claiming that postcolonial discourse has left this historical monolith untouched would be both spurious and malicious. Already in 2000, Ewa Domańska, in her book Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w międzyświatach [Microhistories: Meetings in the Between-Worlds], brought to our attention the necessity of appreciating what she called ‘alternative histories’, which decentralize historical discourses, discuss people’s ways ‘of being in the world’, and bring about a very important category of experience, to which 34

35

See Hanna Gosk, Opowieści skolonizowanego/kolonizatora: w kręgu studiów postzależnościowych nad literaturą polską XX i XXI wieku [Stories of the Colonised/Coloniser. Post-Dependency Studies on Polish Literature from the 20th and 21st Centuries] (Cracow: Universitas, 2010). Dariusz Skórczewski, ‘Melancholia dyskursu kresoznawczego’ [Melancholy of the Bordeland Discourse], Porównania, 11.2 (2012), 125-138.

94 Emilia Kledzik literary studies scholars have returned many years later. 36 These microhistories dealt with anthropological matters, but—as Domańska has written in her next book 37 —their profile was to be unconventional, thus lacking in any social consensus and escaping the category of ‘grand narrative’ with all its consequences: nonlinearity, nonchronology, intimacy, nonauthoritarianism, anecdotal cases, lack of metareflection, stylistic and genre heterogeneity, etc. These stories are, to a greater extent, the domain of subalterns: ethnic and national minorities, homosexuals, women, animals. Sometimes there is a subversive potential within them; however, they can also present a mirror image of the victor’s history. That is why, according to Domańska, when approaching them, categories which are usually not utilized in historiographic research are required: emotions, empathy, honesty—along with the awareness of epistemological manipulation at work in relegating someone to the status of a subaltern. 38 Unconventional histories were developed through research into oral histories, political history and its public staging, such as monuments and museums, and finally—though to the least extent—the history of the excluded, such as can be found in the work of the medievalist Jerzy Strzelczyk’s Pióro w wątłch dłoniach [A Pen in Fragile Hands], dedicated to women’s literature in antiquity and the early Middle Ages.39 The category of ‘insignificant art’, art that due to the social and cultural conditions never gained a large audience, proposed by Strzelczyk perfectly fits postcolonial thought and is proof of the interdisciplinary nature of this discourse. Sociology and regional studies are the most recent disciplines in Poland to have been inspired by postcolonialism. Tomasz Zarycki, a Warsaw-based sociologist, in his book, Peryferie [Peripheries], locates the Polish postcolonial debate in the context of tensions on a national level against the background of regional identities, not only in their ethnic perspective—Zarycki consciously omits regions with separatist or peripheral profiles, such as Silesia, Kashubia, and Podhale—but also in the context of discursive definitions of centre-periphery as well as in the cultural, economic and 36 37

38

39

Ewa Domańska, Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w międzyświatach [Meetings in BetweenWorlds], second edition (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2005), p. 62. Ewa Domańska, Historia egzystencjalna. Krytyczne studium narratywizmu i humanistyki zaangażowanej [Existential History: A Critical Study of Narrativism and Engaged Humanities] (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2012). Ewa Domańska, Historie niekonwencjonalne. Refleksja o przeszłości w nowej humanistyce [Unconventional Histories: Reflection on the Past in the New Humanities] (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2006), p. 65. Jerzy Strzelczyk, Pióro w wątłych dłoniach. O twórczości kobiet w dawnych wiekach. Początki (od Safony do Horswity) [A Pen in Fragile Hands: The Beginnings (from Safona to Horswita)] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2007).

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national domination of the capital. 40 He is interested in the relationship between regional identities and Warsaw’s national identity, which, due to its central, but slowly descending position, he calls ‘a weak, Orientalizing centre”’ in relation to Poznań, Kraków, and Wrocław. Of particular interest are his findings concerning ‘peripheral neuroses’, which could be extended to the whole of Central European region: in public discourse ‘periphery’ is seen as a source of weakness, geopolitical incapacitation, which nonetheless has no bearing on the self-esteem of the local elites, whose identity is built on regional myths: in the case of Kraków—the myth of the nation’s intellect, in the case of Poznań—the myth of entrepreneurship and civilizational superiority due to their close proximity to the West. Regionalism, wrongly identified with folklore, has been experiencing a renaissance lately, mainly due to the theory of the so-called spatial turn: geopoetics and geocriticism are being perceived as the ‘other side’ of globalization, migration, and nomadism.41 The list of advantages of transferring instruments of postcolonial discourse to Polish and Central European ground is lengthy and impressive enough to convince sceptics. In conjunction with comparative studies, which have been developing steadily in Central Europe, postcolonial studies, which work with such categories as liminality, hybridization, epistemic violence, mimicry, re-writing, migration, dependency, and postdependency, could transform into something of a methodological platform for regional studies, offering another, more modern cognitive perspective to the one currently found in philology and Slavic studies.42 Comparative studies is a marginal discipline in its programme; however, a postcolonial perspective demands, in the words of Dorota Kołodziejczyk, a comparatist impulse43 and transnationality, not only in the context of literature and Eastern and Western cultures, but also within the borders of a region that is experiencing or has experienced numerous inner colonizations. Comparative postcolonial discourses—a term 40

41

42 43

Tomasz Zarycki, Peryferie. Nowe ujęcia zależności centro-peryferyjnych [Peripheries: New Approaches to Centro-Peripheral Dependencies] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2009). See Nowy regionalizm w badaniach literackich. Badawczy rekonesans i zarys perspektyw [New Regionalism in Literary Studies: Scholary Reconnaissance and an Outline of Perspectives], ed. by Małgorzata Mikołajczak, Elżbieta Rybicka (Cracow: Universitas, 2012). See Bogusław Bakuła, ‘W stronę komparatystyki literackiej’ [Toward Literary Comparative Studies], Porównania, 1.1 (2005), 7-16 (pp. 13-14). Dorota Kołodziejczyk, ‘Literatura porówczawcza i studia postkolonialne’ [Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Studies], Porównania, 5.5 (2008), 55-73 (p. 55).

96 Emilia Kledzik coined by Bogusław Bakuła—is a broad project that examines the way in which we reckon with the symbolic and material inheritance of former conditions of dependency and imagological tools that are based on sources rarely utilized in philological studies, such as oral history, memory, cultural artefacts, and journalism. 44 Imagology understood this way has been criticized by many academics in the field: it has been accused of ‘sociologizing’ and a lack of scientific rigour. Postcolonial theory rejects these arguments at the source, emphasizing that its subject matter is comprised of the institutional conditions of consciousness. Literature is among the main areas of research, but does not constitute the only touchstone for social conditions. Comparative postcolonial discourses examine the degree and the manner in which historical trauma is processed, attitudes towards national myths, the instrumentalization of memory, forms of ‘reconstructing’ national genealogy, and, finally, the image of ‘Others’, in opposition to which a sense of community consolidates. The belief that Central Europe is a safe multicultural home for various nations and faiths, and is equally endowed with ‘postcolonial sensitivity’ by virtue of being a subaltern in relation to the West, either stems from naiveté in the best case, or, in the worst case, it is a strategy for Orientalizing employed by some Polish literary idiolects. 45 This is because, thanks to its flexible borders across the ages, Central Europe is full of subalterns (e.g., the Romany, Kashubs, Sorbians, and Moravians) and unresolved ethnic conflicts and fears (e.g., between the Slovaks and the Hungarians, the Poles and the Ukrainians, etc.). It follows that such a Central European map of flashpoints or truces as well as co-existing discourses—nostalgic, revindicationist, national, xenophobic, emancipatory, regional, pro-globalization, those based on equality, or identity—all fill in the ‘blank space on the theory map’ about which Claire Cavanagh wrote; however, this will happen not just by means of artificially transferring discourses from American academies, but by means of taking into consideration locally rooted phenomena. One positive influence—as that is how I view integrational processes— of postcolonial theory on the Polish humanities could be observed at the beginning of this century, when a fashion for anthropology and cultural 44

45

See Bogusław Bakuła, ‘Studia postkolonialne w Europie Środkowej oraz Wschodniej 1989-2009. Kwerenda wybranych problemów w ramach projektu badawczego’, [Postcolonial Studies in Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009: A Query into Selected Questions Within the Framework of a Research Project], in Kultura po przejściach, osoby z przeszłością, [Culture after Transitions, People with a Past], ed. by Ryszard Nycz (Cracow: Universitas, 2011), pp. 137-165. See my postcolonial analysis of the work of Andrzej Stasiuk, particularly Jadąc do Babadag [On the Road to Babadag] (2004) and Fado (2008) in Kledzik, Prowincjonalizowanie, pp. 189-246.

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studies dominated literature departments. In academic circles it was announced that literary studies would undergo an ‘anthropological turn’ and that a more cultural literary theory would arrive as an extension of deconstruction, which at that time was already in its death throes in America.46 Hanna Gosk sees the ready acceptance of the new movement in the poststructuralist epistemological revolution, or more precisely the redefinition of cognition as a cultural practice which is implicated in locality, subjectivity, ideology, etc.47 Among the elements responsible for this new way of theorizing are, according to Gosk, postcolonial studies. Anna Burzyńska argues that the foundation for this new theory of literature can be found in the interpretational turn, 48 which has also influenced local postcolonialists, whose focus has shifted mainly to interpretation practices, and more often, to reinterpreting Polish texts that have gained the canonical or controversial status. Now that theory is no longer considered a metascience, literary work is no longer seen as having a claim to objectivity, but is, instead, considered to be a discursive practice of cultural reality. The foundation has been created for a state of affairs which would have been impossible for structuralists to imagine: here we have a science of literature, alongside literature itself, that is merely one of many ways of ‘writing the world’, which is what ‘worlding’ of a literary work was supposed to be according to Edward Said.49 This postmimetic, postmodern way of reading literature (and theory of literature, as is the case with deconstruction), a way 46 47

48

49

See Teksty Drugie, 108.6 (2007), particularly Michał Paweł Markowski, ‘Antropologia i literatura’ [Antropology and Literature], 24-33. ‘I believe that anthropology is an effect of the reevaluation of cultural interests, developing cultural literary theory, which are the basis of narratological studies not only in relation to literature studies, but also psychology, sociology (Giddens, Taylor), metahistory (White, Carr), philosophy (Ricoeur), New Historicism (Greenblatt), feminism, postcolonial studies, to name only the most expansive. Poststructuralism (and its “offspring”) with their anti-Cartesian methods of historicizing and contextualizing cognition (which has become situational) has allowed cognition to be defined as a “cultural practice” with its linguistic aspect and ethical responsibility, ideological ties and loyalties of an individual existential experience, passed on as a type of fictionalized confession.’ Hanna Gosk, ‘Jak długo będziemy istnieć, tak długo będziemy o sobie opowiadać. Rozmowa z Hanną Gosk o antropologii literatury’ [As Long We Exist, We Will Tell Stories about Ourselves], Tekstualia, 13.2 (2008). Available at Accessed 21 March 2014. Anna Burzyńska, ‘Kulturowy zwrot w teorii’ [The Cultural Turn in Theory], in Kulturowa teoria literatury. Główne pojęcia i problemy [Cultural Literary Theory: Main Terms and Questions], ed. by Michał Paweł Markowski, Ryszard Nycz (Cracow: Universitas, 2006), pp. 41-91 (p. 43). See Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984).

98 Emilia Kledzik of reading that disenchants hermetic textuality and rhetoric, has once again connected literature to contexts—political, ideological and social—which have been rejected by supporters of methodological isolationisms, formalists and pragmatics alike. Michał Paweł Markowski, in defining the anthropology of literature, wrote that ‘A man is man because he uses literature as a tool to understand himself and his surrounding world’ and later: ‘literature is a place where the essence of humans is revealed’.50 Burzyńska provides key words, which can serve to summarize the literary output of older generations of literature scholars: text, discourse, rhetoric, significant/signifié, reading, and writing. The new orientation of theory is characterized by the following terms: history, society, politics, ideology, power, body, material culture. 51 When tracing the convergence of literary studies and anthropology that occurred through postcolonial studies (which are a part of the cultural theory of literature), we can locate the source of inspiration in Clifford Geertz, in particular in his doubts towards the transparent status of the language of a given discipline. These were concepts that paved the way to the conception of anthropological descriptions as fictions and toward ‘thick description’ of cultural facts, which a literary text may contain (or constitute). ‘It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical’ wrote Geertz in ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture’.52 Literature can take one of these forms, and, from the point of view of postcolonial studies, especially the kinds of literature that, by means of various interpretive practices, gives voice to those who are marginalized and excluded from the centralized model of culture and literary theory. Such a model is, by definition, also ethnocentric and holds the power to create canons, which postcolonialism later deconstructs and extends by including texts that verbalize other cultural practices, not only those which are accorded an educational value from the point of view of community consolidation and the dominant discourse. The anthropological turn also undermines the chronology of relations between the text and language/theory of its interpretation. In other words, it is difficult to indicate whether postcolonial theory precedes or succeeds masterpieces of postcolonial literature; such distinctions lose their significance since both forms of expression are treated as part of the same discourse. A similar situation exists in Poland, where discussions conducted in academies, the press, and within the domain of public life pertaining to the power of national myths, languages of exclusion, and emancipation or 50 51 52

Markowski, p. 27-28. Burzyńska, p. 66. Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3-30 (p. 6).

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multiculturalism not only inspire one another, but also find their manifestation in literary texts and other cultural artefacts.53 The anthropological turn was thought to instigate a revolution in interpretational practices, a revolution waged under the banner of the return of a strong subject hiding behind two categories: the category of ‘imagination’—found in both anthropology and literary studies—and the resurrected category of ‘experience’, and it is precisely this revolution that is one of the foundations of postcolonialism. The fictions wrought by a strong subject decide about a person’s way of being in the world, about his or her active or passive attitude towards reality. This conclusion brings to mind Ryszard Nycz’s claim about ‘the low level of professionalism’54 in culture studies: it is dangerous to speak, as language is already imbued with an ideological potency that undermines its informational function; on the other hand, speaking, understood as constructing fictions, is a characteristic feature of the human condition, underlining an active attitude towards the world.55 When discussing this issue, it is important to remember the strong subject’s mirror image—the weak victim, seen through the eyes of victimization ideology.56 In Central Europe this type of self-stereotyping is common, because we often see ourselves as excluded from Western civilization, and at the same time we consider ourselves exempt from reflecting about our own subalterns. It is true that postdependency research, dealing with the presence of minorities in the literature of the majority or their own ‘creative emancipations’, are often laden with obtrusive nativism.57 It is important to see them in the context of the imaginary, fantastic nature of national community. The construction of an identity takes place by means of indicating ‘others’, who acquire in a postcolonial perspective the status of subalterns. However, it must be observed how the identity of this subaltern 53 54

55

56 57

E.g., the literary and essayistic work by Marek Bieńczyk, Manuela Gretkowska, Brygida Helbig-Mischewski. Ryszard Nycz, ‘Kulturowa natura, słaby profesjonalizm. Kilka uwag o przedmiocie poznania literackiego i statusie dyskursu literaturoznawczego’ [Cultural Nature, Weak Professionalism: Some Remarks on the Object of Literary Cognition and the Status of Literary Discourse], in Kulturowa teoria literatury. Główne pojęcia i problem [Cultural Literary Theory: Main Terms and Questions], ed. by M. P. Markowski, R. Nycz (Cracow: Universitas, 2006), pp. 5-38 (p. 35). James Clifford expressed his doubts about creating a ‘nonorientalizing’ fiction about ‘Others’ in his review of Orientalism. See: James Clifford, ‘On Orientalism’ in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), pp. 255-276 (p. 281). Ibid. Kołodziejczyk, p. 20.

100 Emilia Kledzik is fluid: in Poland the focus oscillates between the Jews, Germans, Russians, and the Romany, and tracing these changes can lead to conclusions concerning current tendencies toward who is to be excluded. Polish contemporary emancipatory literature, trapped in a binary system of national narration (currently present in public debate, not in literature) and anticommunal narration that humorously deconstructs it, has until now been focused on re-establishing equality in discourse towards the Jews and Germans. There are, however, almost no literary works, which would in the same artistic spirit deconstruct an anti-Gypsy or—with the exception of Dorota Masłowska’s one book 58 —anti-Russian discourse. What perhaps exposes the weakness of postcolonial theory is the banal question of interpretation. If one were to glance at examples of canonized British postcolonial literature; e.g., White Teeth by Zadie Smith or The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, one would easily notice a rhetorical operation common in the genre, based on playing with national, ethnic, and racial stereotypes—and I am deliberately not writing exclusively about these stereotypes being reversed, but diluted, presented in a network of mutually constitutive conditions. Examples of postcolonial literature in which identity is shown to intertwine with the figure of mimicry are too numerous, so allow me to just mention The Mimic Men by V. S. Naipaul and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. This phenomenon can be referred to as postcolonial irony—a rhetorical operation that absorbs the somewhat embarrassing national narration with its mechanical inclusions and exclusions; it adds ironic signals (in view of the basic definition of incomparability of intention to form), and then casts them off towards the old hegemon, thereby deconstructing its discourse. This type of irony is present, for example, in fragments of Chinua Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. It is important to emphasize here that this procedure entails all the consequences of utilizing irony as an aesthetic category, which requires particular sensitivity on the part of the receiver. The abstract reader of such potentially ironic fragments has two options: to regard the author as either an ironist or as a supporter of the hegemonic narration. In the first case we are dealing with an advanced artistic operation which takes the peripheries under its protection; the second is somewhat more complex and requires the use of reception theory. The theories of Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser on readers’ epistemological horizons take into consideration tradition, reading, and epistemic experience in

58

See Dorota Masłowska, White and Red, trans. by B. Paloff (London: Atlantic Books, 2005).

Inventing Postcolonial Poland 101

relation to interpretative practices.59 The reconstruction of expectations of the first reading public of a given literary work allows us not only to reconstruct the question that the text was meant to answer but also to assess its quality. Few would now reject Jauss’s theory of the role of the reader in constructing the history of a literary work, of the existence of the text conditioned by the ‘I’ of the reader and his or her horizon of expectations (regardless of how poorly the term lends itself to interpretation) and, at the same time, of the creative potential of a text in transforming the reader. For example, when tracing the reception of Andrzej Stasiuk’s work in Germany, it becomes clear that he is read as a representative of a ‘wild, magical, uncivilized’ Europe, which would indicate that this book contains Orientalizing tendencies.60 In Poland opinions are divided; some see Stasiuk as a naïve ‘bard of the peripheries’, an opinion which inscribes itself well into the literary history of the provincial notion understood as Heimat [homeland], the tranquil village, the foundation of modernist discourse (whose return can be seen in the Polish literature of the 1990s); others see him as a self-conscious juggler and deconstructor of stereotypes. 61 Additionally, this phenomenon seems to be broader than the literature, for postcolonial irony is a double-edged sword, which can deconstruct but also strengthen the discourse of domination/subservience. It happens then that a slogan, which in the minds of its recipients did not contain ironic intentions, turns out to be mocking Polish xenophobia, and vice versa. 62 This 59 60

61

62

See Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to a Literary History’, trans. by E. Benzinger, New Literary History 2.1 (1970), 7-37. Evelyn Meer, Die Dezentralisierungstendenzen in der polnischen Prosa nach 1989 [The Decentralization Tendencies in Polish Fiction after 1989] (Regensburg: Universität Regensburg, 2006). See e.g. Dariusz Skórczewski, ‘Środkowoeuropejski kompleks’ [The CentralEuropean Complex], in Teoria – literatura – dyskurs. Pejzaż postkolonialny [Theory – Literature – Discourse: The Postcolonial Landscape] (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 2013), pp. 339-357; Piotr Millati, ‘Inna Europa. Nowa mitologia Europy Środkowej w prozie Andrzeja Stasiuka’ [Other Europe: A New Mythology of Central Europe in Andrzej Stasiuk’s Fiction], in (Nie)obecność. Pominięcia i przemilczenia w narracjach XX wieku [(Non)presence. Skips and Omissions in Narrations from the XX Century], ed. by Hanna Gosk, Bożena Karwowska (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2008), pp. 172-190. Such an example took place in 2013, when a popular music band, allegedly parodying the simple conventions of pop music, repeated its lyrics with anti-Romany stereotypes. When the academic community protested, the band members and their fans defended themselves by claiming to have used irony and accused the academics of having no sense of humour. They did not, however, refer to the anti-Roma cries, which were a regular fixture during their concerts. See and Accessed 9 June 2014. Joanna Bator, Ciemno, prawie noc [Darkness, Almost Night] (Warsaw: WAB 2013), p. 65. My own translation.

Inventing Postcolonial Poland 103

Such studies—especially linguistic, cultural, and sociological ones—are becoming indispensable in view of the discernible failure of the equality project in all of Central Europe. One can make the claim that postcolonial studies are progressing to a new stage, though the opponent remains the same: essentialism and re-emerging nationalist movements. Though it would seem that, unlike the moods in Europe from a few decades back, we are dealing this time with a new ‘pop’ version of nationalism, such pillars of identity as Eurocentrism, Islamophobia, and misogyny have never budged since the Enlightenment. The difference is that most of contemporary ‘postcolonial/postdependency’ Polish literature, like the above-mentioned example, instead of supporting, actively deconstructs them.

Part II: The Ghosts of the Past: Post-Communist Rewriting of National Histories

Bogdan Ştefănescu Filling in the Historical Blanks: A Tropology of the Void in Postcommunist and Postcolonial Reconstructions of Identity Abstract: The symbolic damage done by Soviet and Western colonial violence generated wounded national pride and a sense of impaired cultural identity in colonized subjects. Thus, the construction of shared self-images in traumatized communities acquires a special meaning—that of repairing countless dents and of supplementing fundamental loss. Postcommunist countries like Romania have a long record of dealing with their foundational deficits. While for philosophers like Bauman and Baudrillard the void is a typically postmodern experience, it is also arguably symptomatic of postdependent cultures of the second and third worlds which have woven the loss of self-esteem and estrangement into their collective representation of the nation. Relying on intuitions by Bhabha, Mbembe, Todorova, and Kiossev, this chapter proposes to sample the symbolism of the void as a recurrent discursive strategy in Romanian culture and to interpret it as a typical (post)colonial experience. A discursive genealogy is attempted in proposing the void as a crucial rhetorical category in the comparative study of the two historical forms of cultural trauma.

Brotherhood of the Void: The Poor Postcommunist Relative

This chapter attempts to say something about nothing. I choose to speak about vacuity and emptiness not out of a radical distemper with academic conventions, but to point out that to talk of postcommunism against the backdrop of postcolonial studies is, indeed, to talk about nothing. For what is the (post)communist second world to postcolonial studies if not a signifying absence, a gaping critical blank between first world colonizers and third world colonies?1 The postcolonialist critic’s gaze avoids the second world and the (post)communist historical interlude as if there were nothing there to look at. Ironically, this oversight replicates the blank gaze of the colonist which creates the colonized as an ontological and historical vacancy. Cameroonian critic Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001) describes the constitution of the colonized identity precisely in these terms: [C]olonialism defines the colonized as absolute void […]. The removal of the native from the historically existing occurs when the colonizer chooses—and has the means to—not to look at, see, or hear him/her—not, that is, to acknowledge any human attribute in him/her. From this instant, the native is only so far as 1

Cristina Sandru, ‘Reconfiguring Contemporary “Posts”: (Post)Colonialism as (Post)Communism?’ Euresis: Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires et culturelles, no. 1 (2005), 29-40 (pp. 32-3) and Bogdan Ştefănescu, Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity (Bucharest: Bucharest UP, 2013), pp. 17-21.

108 Bogdan Ştefănescu he/she is a thing denied, is only in as something deniable. In short, from the standpoint of a ‘self’ of one’s own, he/she is nothing.2

In an unsettling parallel, Bulgarian cultural historian Alexander Kiossev talks of a related phenomenon that is peculiar to Eastern Europe, which he calls ‘self-colonizing’ and which he predicates on the same founding voids. Kiossev finds that the obsessive recurrence of images of absence in national self-representations is symptomatic for marginal cultures. He claims that Bulgarian identity is historically grounded in a traumatic sense of lack that comes from the absence of its own, home-brewed civilizational model: Thus, in the genealogical knot of the Bulgarian national culture there exists the morbid consciousness of an absence—a total, structural, non-empirical absence. The Others—i.e., the neighbors, Europe, the civilized World, etc. possess all that we lack; they are all that we are not. The identity of this culture is initially marked, and even constituted by, the pain, the shame ― and to formulate it more generally ― by the trauma of this global absence. The origin of this culture arises as a painful presence of absences and its history could be narrated, in short, as centuries-old efforts to make up for and eliminate the traumatic lacks […]. [T]he birth of these nations is connected with a very specific symbolic economy. It seems that the self-colonizing cultures import alien values and civilizational models by themselves and that they lovingly colonize their own authenticity through these foreign models.3

East European cultures, then, construct their identity in a recognizable colonial fashion. In fact, I posit there is evidence that Eastern Europe has become the spectacularly unique site for a confluence of at least three types of colonization: the ‘wilful’ Western (self-)colonization, the forcible Soviet colonization, and a tacit conceptual colonization. The latter type is a form of voiding Eastern European cultures of any relevant status within the framework of the imperial/colonial relation—they are neither colonizer, nor colonized. The conceptual voiding of Eastern Europe, a protracted process in modern history, is apparent today in the critical disregard for the question of Soviet colonization. The indifference of postcolonial critics from the first and third world alike, which renders the postcommunist second world void of colonial meaning, is doubled by their awkward silence on the question of Soviet colonization. At best, Soviet colonial imperialism is relegated to a derivative, atypical, or marginal status in mainstream criticism.4 Such a view 2 3

4

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 187. Alexander Kiossev, ‘Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures’, in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. by Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), pp. 114-8 (114-5). Ştefănescu, Postcommunism/Postcolonialism, pp. 22-32.

Filling in the Historical Blanks 109

condemns cultural scholars of postcommunism to being merely tolerated or ignored when they play at postcolonialism. Caught in the cross-fire of epistemic violence (Spivak’s post-Foucauldian term) that comes from both the first world’s blank gaze and the third world’s denied acknowledgement, postcommunism scholars are left to aspire to little less than getting away with copying (pirating) the analytical methods and concepts of postcolonial cultural studies. This study sets out to demonstrate how Romanian cultural identity materializes in spite of and, indeed, out of, this very postcolonial void as a historical signifying absence. The Romanian case, no doubt like those of other former communist countries in the region, suggests a new content for the figural void in postcolonial metavocabulary and a way to saturate the absence of Eastern Europe in the critical literature of postcolonialism. I will show the void to be a constitutive topos and trope in the country’s repetitive reconstitution of its (post)colonized national self as or through the symbolism of vacuity. In that, Romania may prove an exemplary case of postcolonial trauma for the larger area of the (post)communist second world.

A Post-Genealogy of the Void

Indeed, for postmodern critics, the history of modern nations is no more than a figurative process of filling up the originary void. The tone may well have been set by the academic bestseller Imagined Communities (1983), in which Benedict Anderson applies the concept as he zooms in on the symbolic practice of modern nations dedicating generic monuments to anonymous heroes: No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of the Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times […]. Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.5

In his wake, Homi Bhabha has dignified the concept of the void to the status of a historical experience of foremost importance in the creation of marginalized minorities, not only in postcolonial, but in all modern and postmodern nations that have to deal with the conflict and trauma of minorities. In his article ‘DissemiNation’ from Nation and Narration (1990), Bhabha explains how the void functions as a founding trope:

5

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London & New York: Verso, 1991), p. 9.

110 Bogdan Ştefănescu More deliberately than any other general historian, Eric Hobsbawm writes the history of the modern Western nation from the perspective of the nation's margin and the migrants’ exile. The emergence of the later phase of the modern nation, from the mid-nineteenth century, is also one of the most sustained periods of mass migration within the West, and colonial expansion in the East. The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the 'middle passage', or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the imagined community of the nation-people.6

Mbembe, who was quoted earlier, picks up this figural generation of national identities to show how it operates in the genealogy of (former) colonies. He repeatedly employs the metaphor of the void in his celebrated On the Postcolony to represent a number of colonial issues such as the paradox of colonial right, sexual abuse, the magic of the autocrat, the ultimate silence of colonial language, the insurmountable gap between colonial design and resisting colonized cultures, and violence inflicted by the Other or on Oneself. Nor are Bhabha and Mbembe the only postcolonial critics to employ the symbolically charged image of nothingness. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin focus on the experiential ‘gap’ between the colonizing and the colonized cultures and on its linguistic and figurative formulations.7 Winay Dharwadker exemplifies one of the many facets of Indian consciousness with Muktibodh’s poem ‘The Void’, which is taken to signify ‘the late colonial self as a thing that is still alive but emptied out of all its human qualities, and reduced to a violent, retaliatory animal presence-that-is-an-absence’. 8 Anne McClintock discusses the nationalist metaphor of the family being the paradoxical site for the coexistence of an institution that has become both ‘void of history’ and ‘an organizing figure for national history’.9 Aparajita Nanda, Janet Wilson, and Emman Frank Idoko mention the void as a trope in colonial representations.10 Students of postcommunism with a postmodern sensibility also tapped into the seemingly endless reservoir of significance of the trope of vacuity, 6 7 8 9 10

Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 291. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1989]), p. 37 and passim. Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. by Roger T. Ames, Thomas S. Kasulis, and Wiman Dissanayake (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 243 and passim. Qtd. in Sandra Ponzanesi, Paradoxes of Post-Colonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), p. 89. Bodies and Voices: The Force-Field of Representation and Discourse in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Merete Falck Borch, Eva Rask Knudsen, Martin Leer, and Bruce Clunies Ross (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 120, 277, 398.

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multiplying the numbers of resonant critical reflections which have secured for the void a place at the heart of the post- condition. French postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard uses the metaphor of the void in The Illusion of an End (1992) to explain the postcommunist condition of our world. He invokes an ‘ascent of the vacuum towards the periphery’ and he proclaims: The attraction of the void is irresistible. The ‘victory’ of the West is not unlike a depressurizing of the West in the void of communism, in the void of history.11

Russian-born NYU academic Boris Groys meditates in similar figurative terms on the postcommunist condition as the recoil from a historical interruption: From this perspective, communism yet again appears as a specter: a Nothing materializing and, after its disappearance, dissolving into Nothing. […] why can communism be thought of as a mere interruption of history? […] The ‘postnational’ character of the communist phenomenon clarifies why, in the context of a national history, this phenomenon can be understood at best as a pause, a mere interruption.12

The danger of representing communism as a long historical recess, adds Groys, is that postcommunist nations, like their postcolonial counterparts, feel a compulsion to regress in time to a pre-communist past. Croatian postcommunist critic Boris Buden also invokes a lingering postcommunist emptiness after the dissipation of socialist industrial modernity with its (perverted) sense of the collective self: In Charity Scribner’s view, we are all nostalgic because, with the setting of industrial modernism, the experience of the collective and of collective solidarity, which is typical of socialist societies, has vanished and left behind an empty space which is experienced today as a loss.13

But this is a void that follows another one, for Buden claims Soviet colonialism operates from an empty centre:

11 12

13

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of an End, trans. by Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 49. Boris Groys, ‘Situaţia postcomunistă’ [The Postcommunist Condition], trans. by Maria Magdalena Anghelescu, Ideea 21 (2005), available at Accessed 8 June 2014. Boris Buden, ‘Ce este postcolonial în postcomunism?’ [What is postcolonial in postcommunism?], trans. by Cristian Cercel, Suplimentul de cultură, 144 (8-14 September 2007), p. 2.

112 Bogdan Ştefănescu The center of ‘Soviet colonialism’ is empty. Its alleged subject, the Russian people, itself felt Soviet communism as a colonial power. ‘Russia, Russia!’ chanted the mob in the streets of Moscow at the beginning of the nineties demanding that Russia extricate itself from the Soviet Union.14

The void seems to be the darling of another postcommunist thinker, PolishBritish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, for whom the overall experience of modernity itself—and not just the postcommunist interlude—is an obsession with the void that has contaminated postmodernity as well: The threats related to postmodernity are highly familiar: they are, one may say, thoroughly modern in nature. Now, as before, they stem from that horror vacui that modernity made into the principle of social organization and personality formation. Modernity was a continuous and uncompromising effort to fill or to cover up the void; the modern mentality held a stern belief that the job can be done—if not today then tomorrow. The sin of postmodernity is to abandon the effort and to deny the belief; this double act appears to be indeed a sin, once one remembers that abandoning effort and denying belief does not, by itself, neutralize the awesome propelling force of the fear of void; and postmodernity has done next to nothing to support its defiance of past pretence with a new practical antidote for old poison.15

However, in this triptych of reflections on vacuity, which binds together postcoloniality, postcommunism, and the postmodern, postcolonial critics fail to recognize the postcommunist connection, although one immediately notices how the figural use of the void in postcommunist construction of the self makes it structurally and symbolically congruent with postcolonial identities. The refusal of postcolonial discourse to acknowledge the (post)communist second world as a kindred colonial experience adds yet another instance of vacating Eastern Europe of its cultural relevance in an already long tradition of voiding this symbolic space.

The Topos of the Void in the Romanian Tradition

This section illustrates a rather lengthy Romanian tradition of invoking the void in founding narratives of the nation. In the new context of postcommunism the void is simply revived and resemanticized. I will take Groys’s suggestion that the traumatized postcommunist imagination compulsively regresses to a precommunist past so that it may dispense with the horrifying

14 15

Ibid. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. xvii-xviii.

Filling in the Historical Blanks 113

memory of the communist void, and below, I provide my examples in a reversed chronology. In the fateful December of 1989, in the inaugural moment of its postcommunism, Romania became identified with a new image: it spontaneously chose as its revolutionary emblem the old tricolour flag with a hole at its centre. The gap was the result of the exuberant removal of what used to be the communist coat of arms. A photograph in Le Nouvel Observateur showed in its empty stead the faces of two young boys, their hands fingering a V sign—a symbol of rejuvenation, the rebirth of Romania. Andrei Codrescu’s The Hole in the Flag (1991) is quite likely the best known Romanian narrative of their rediscovered and redefined postcommunist identity. Before the end of 1989—just a few days after Ceauşescu was ousted—the Romanian exile Codrescu, now an American academic, popular NPR personality, and surrealist poet, returned to his native country after twenty five years to report for the American media. On his crossing the border between Hungary and Romania, he notes: […] suddenly there, under the cold moon, there it was, the Romanian flag with the socialist emblem cut right out of the middle. It fluttered over a square brick building marking the frontier. It's through that hole, I thought, that I am returning to my birthplace.16

The Romanian-American writer does little more than echo an entire tradition that places emptiness and absence at the core of Romanian identity, a tradition that includes Codrescu’s favourite interwar writers, Lucian Blaga, Emil Cioran, and Mircea Eliade, as I have already discussed elsewhere.17 It is this same tradition of vacuity that Horia-Roman Patapievici, a prominent public intellectual voice that rose after 1989, scornfully reviews, only to vilify the moral and intellectual decay of his fellow Romanians. He claims, echoing ancestral voices, that this tradition was the result of their historical inertia. He blames the communist obliteration of all moral and political faculties for the failure of the masses to vote for a non-communist future in 1990 and concludes that the Romanian self had been annihilated and turned into an ‘identitate de neant’ (identity of nothingness):18

16 17

18

Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (New York: W. Morrow & Co., Inc., 1991), p. 67. Bogdan Ştefănescu, ‘Voices of the Void: Andrei Codrescu’s Tropical Rediscovery of Romanian Culture in The Hole in the Flag’, University of Bucharest Review, X. 2 (2008), 1121. Horia-Roman Patapievici, Cerul văzut prin lentilă [The Sky Seen through a Lens] (Bucharest: Nemira, 1995), p. 89.

114 Bogdan Ştefănescu Rephrased, this is the Romanian trauma: after the communist desert […] Dej and Ceauşescu left behind them two separate peoples. […] With more fortunate nations, scholars can afford to talk of a dissociation of sensibility: with us the identity of our most basic personality has been dissociated.19

Like Codrescu, Patapievici resorts to the favourite imagery of the interwar nationalist tradition to explain the postcommunist condition. And, like Codrescu, he displays mixed feelings for this tradition which he famously dubbed ‘the Vulgate of the good Romanian’. He cannot help but invoke the same nationalistic clichés regarding the ‘miraculous’ subsistence of a Romanian (Romanized) population below the historiographic radar, although his reaction is ambivalent: […] Romanians responded to the challenges of history both by retaliating and by annihilating themselves. They are characterized both by the absence of any reaction and by its presence, for, […] with the Romanians, it is precisely their lacks by which reality is measured. […] The void is evidence of a presence, as fullness itself is no more than an abscess of absence.20

Patapievici and Codrescu are both drawing from what constituted in the communist half-century the parallel canon of precommunist memory. During communism, the alternative to the brainwashing new Sovietized culture were the modern authors who had gained prominence between the two world wars. One such illustrious case was philosopher and modernist poet Lucian Blaga. In creating a nationalist metaphysics, Blaga had to confront the infamous ‘historiographic void’ in Romania’s past which turned the country into a ‘blank spot’ on the map of the region.21 He retaliated by creating the narrative of a peasant people which spontaneously ‘boycotts’ and withdraws from, history because it would rather choose a peaceful and anonymous spiritual communion with nature over an epic destiny and the ensuing fame: Indeed, for about a thousand years, the pre-Romanians and the Romanians displayed a kind of instinctive self-defense strategy which may be called a boycott against history. […] A population which for a while perhaps lived with the vague memory of a major kind of existence was instinctively boycotting, even without that memory eventually, any attempt to draw it away from an organic life and lure it into the rapids of history.22 19 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 86. Ibid, p. 118. Lucian Blaga, ‘Getica’ in Dreptul la memorie, Vol. IV, ed. by Iordan Chimet (ClujNapoca: Dacia, 1993), pp. 23-40 (pp. 32-33). Lucian Blaga, Spaţiul mioritic [The Mioritic Space] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994 [1936]), p. 177.

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Other young writers of the interwar period immediately picked up the theme of the historical void.23 Emil Cioran (1911-1995) is probably the exemplary young malcontent in this group. An impatient frondeur, he denounced the topos of the retreat from history as a resilient national flaw which he was angry to see was still alive in interwar modern Romania. In Schimbarea la faţă a României [Romania’s Transfiguration, 1939], a devastating criticism of Romania's tradition of ahistoricity, Cioran calls out in anguish, his sight temporarily overcast with mystical fascist fervour: There is a substantial flaw in the psychic structure of the Romanian, an original void generating a series of failures in our past. […] Whenever I look at a Romanian peasant, I choose to see in the lines on his face the painful voids in our past. […] How could there be patriots who turned our secular resignation into a virtue? […] Any resignation is but a mild yoke, an insult to the Promethean drive of the spirit. Renunciation comes from the chaos and demiurgy of the heart; resignation from its void. All Romanian historians have agreed—implicitly or explicitly—that resignation was the intimate keynote of our soul throughout our ahistory. (from Chapter III, ‘Romania's historical and psychological voids’)24

The celebrated historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) also repeatedly echoes Blaga in his meditations about the historical fate of his country. In his Los Rumanos. Breviaro historico [The Romanians: A Concise History, 1943], he reiterates the apologetic narrative of the ahistorical endurance of his people in order to explain the absence of historical records about life in ancient Romanian territories: As a matter of fact, there are more important—one may say even decisive— things than the documents regarding some individual or another, the details of a battle or the downfall of a dynasty: the proofs attesting to the spiritual and cultural life of an entire people. […] A symbol, a myth, a certain lifestyle reconstituted with the help of domestic pottery and tools are by far more significant […].25

In referring to the lack of memorable and documented deeds by the Romanized population in the Middle Ages, Eliade invokes the same thesis of a wise 23

24 25

The topos of Romanians’ mysterious lack of historicity was part of a historical argument meant to settle a political dispute. The rather scholarly debate between medievalists had become politically topical in the aftermath of recent international agreements (notably the peace treaty of Trianon in 1920) which had once again shifted state borderlines after the Great War. Emil Cioran, Schimbarea la faţă a României [Romania’s Transfiguration] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990), pp. 42, 44, 48. Mircea Eliade, The Romanians: A Concise History, trans. by Rodica Mihaela Scafeş (Bucharest: Roza vînturilor, 1992), p. 10.

116 Bogdan Ştefănescu withdrawal from history and a wondrous re-emergence after hundreds of years: The masters [i.e. the Slavs], in their turn, were brought into submission—through culture, language, marriages—and when the first Romanian principalities emerged during the 11th century, the miracle had already taken place: the Slavs had been assimilated, and the people living in the territory of Dacia was the Romanian people, who had preserved all the characteristic features of their forefathers, the Dacians, and were speaking a Latin language: the Romanian (p. 19).

In his article ‘The Fate of Romanian Culture’ (1953), he paraphrases Blaga by talking of a ‘terror of history’ (which he will rehearse in subsequent meditations on the fate of Romania, such as L’épreuve du labyrinthe [1978]): I was saying that History forced Romanians to deepen their own traditions. […] Terrified by historical events, the Romanian genius turned to those living realities that could not be touched by history: the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms.26

‘The Fate of Romanian Culture’ proposes a more explicit colonial counternarrative. Eliade brings together the Roman colonization, the settling of migratory hordes, submission by the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet occupation, and the modern West’s marginalization of minor and traditional cultures only to proclaim that Romania’s ahistorical and spiritualist attitude has always been the key for survival and that a new historical miracle will arise from this devious strategy. Blaga, Eliade, Cioran and a host of other public intellectuals of the precommunist times were in turn no more than recirculating a topos that was much older: the national myth of the absence from history and of the miraculous return from the abyss of anonymity. When, in 1939, historian G. I. Brătianu, a National Liberal Party personality with a PhD in medieval history from the Sorbonne, wrote Une énigme et un miracle historique: le people roumain [An Enigma and a Miracle of History: The Romanian People] to respond to the accusations from Bulgarian historian Petar Mutafciev who had denounced Romanians for being ‘the only European people which has no history of its own until the end of the Middle Ages’,27 the Romanian interwar historian was merely recycling an older theme in Romanian historiography, one which had been proposed by his mentor, A. D. Xenopol, in the 1885 study Une énigme historique: les Roumains au Moyen Age [A Historical Enigma: The Romanians in the Middle Ages]. 26 27

Mircea Eliade, The Fate of Romanian Culture, trans. by Bogdan Ştefănescu (Bucharest: Athena, 1995), pp. 30-31. Apud Gheorghe I. Brătianu, An Enigma and a Miracle of History: The Romanian People, trans. by Patricia H. Georgescu (Bucharest: Editura Encicolpedică, 1996), p. 25.

Filling in the Historical Blanks 117

Another young interwar intellectual offers the insight that this defensive strategy in Romanian historiography goes back even farther than the 1880s. In a 1943 lecture he delivered in Berlin, philosopher Constantin Noica (1909–1987), a friend of Eliade and Cioran and a devout admirer of Blaga, traced the crisis of the defective modern Romanian identity even further back to the scholar-prince Dimitrie Cantemir.28 Cantemir (1673–1723) was a spectacularly unsuccessful ruler whose encyclopaedic mind was validated by the Western intellectual circles: in 1714 he became a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin and he remained almost the sole source for Ottoman history until quite late in the nineteenth century. He received honours from some of the great monarchs of his day, such as when he was created Knyaz (Prince) of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great and Reichsfürst (Prince) of the Holy Roman Empire by Charles VI. For Noica, it was with Cantemir that Romanians started to exhibit the inferiority complex of a minor culture when comparing themselves with Western modernity. This traumatized sense of self came with feelings of shame at a marginal and uncertain identity and of dissatisfaction with their collective identity. In his Descriptio Moldaviae (1714–1716) Cantemir submits his Moldavian tribe to ruthless criticism in front of the European gaze. (The book had been commissioned by the Berlin Academy and he wrote in Latin for a select international readership.) He could find no redeeming qualities in his fellow Moldavians other than the Orthodox creed and an excessive hospitality. Noica surmises that this dearth of worthy attributes is the result of a ‘lack of harmony’ in Cantemir’s estranged soul from having internalized the standards of Western civilization (p. 33). In unveiling his cultural self in shame to the Western gaze, Cantemir resorts to the symbolic arsenal of the void first by presenting us with a blank list of moral and civilizational qualities for his people, and then by invoking a historical hiatus and emptiness as the starting point for his Moldavian tribe. In his unoriginal account, after the retreat of the Roman colonizing army in the third century, the Romanized local inhabitants had to find shelter from the invading hordes and live in the mountains for a few hundred years (actually, more like an entire millennium), deserting the fertile plains only to accidentally return to this forsaken territory (habitatoribus destitutas) and settle it once more in the fourteenth century. The old thesis (reportedly going back to Eutropius) that the colonized Roman province of Dacia was deserted after the Aurelian retreat in the third century was constantly revisited. Starting in the late eighteenth century, it became the central challenge for Romanian historians and political leaders in 28

Constantin Noica, Istoricitate şi modernitate [Historicity and Modernity] (Bucharest: Capricorn, 1990), p. 29 and passim.

118 Bogdan Ştefănescu their continuous war over a past which could offer legitimacy for their territorial claims in the present.29 Against this continuous effort, Cantemir’s original embarrassment at his people’s vacuity soon turned into one of the most traumatic and debated topoi in the construction of a Romanian identity: Romania's scandalous absence from history. According to this scurrilous theme, the Romanians were supposedly incapable of making their own history, either in terms of asserting themselves through a remarkable destiny or in recording their historical exploits. The situation is particularly troubling for two reasons. First, it makes it more difficult for Romanians to mimic the exceptionalism and missionarism of both Western and Soviet imperial ideology. Secondly, it thwarts Romanian claims at modernity, a status that is usually predicated upon a sense of history and historical progress—which was deliberately dispensed with in the case of Romania. From Xenopol to Blaga and Eliade, pro domo historical accounts reworked this theme to turn it to their benefit by suggesting a modest, anonymous type of heroism animated by the superior values of a spiritual existence in deep and discreet harmony with nature and the cosmos. Unsurprisingly, the same strategy of absenting themselves from history was chosen by Romanians to withstand a more ruthless and tenacious invader: communism. When armed partisan resistance in the mountains eventually failed,30 many Romanian cultural personalities switched to a more sophisticated defence: ‘resistance through culture’. They abandoned the supposedly marginal and superficial aspects of material civilization into the hands of the communist occupant and, vacating much of the territory of public discourse, withdrew into the ungraspable and immaterial centre of their spiritual being only to occasionally and surreptitiously infiltrate the territory they abandoned, whenever their deceptive style could outwit the communist censorship. ‘Resistance through culture’ was arguably the most popular and widespread anti-totalitarian strategy among Romanian public intellectuals during national-communism.

29

30

This was a struggle against Austro-Hungarian and Slavic imperial interests and its object was to legitimize several claims: to equal collective rights for the Romanian population in Transylvania (see, for instance, Supplex Libellus Valahorum, 1791-2), to the creation of a unified modern Romanian state through the two successive unions of 1859 and 1918 and the independence of 1877-8, and to the parts of Transylvania which had been lost after the Vienna Arbitration of 1940. For a good while (the last partisans were caught in 1959–1960), the anticommunist resistance fighters used mountainous and wooded retreats to launch occasional guerrilla attacks on the communist authorities, an echo of medieval accounts of survival despite overwhelming invaders.

Filling in the Historical Blanks 119

Philosopher Constantin Noica provided the most successful and popular example of cultural resistance to communism. He became a model for the younger generations and each of his texts was a secret insurrection of the Romanian mind. His books sold out immediately and circulated in clandestine photocopies at twenty times their market price. At a time when Romanians were famished by Ceauşescu’s economic policy and when butter (like practically all basic foods) was an almost unattainable rarity, Noica’s books were exchanged for an unthinkable four bars of butter. This indicates that at least some Romanians valued spiritual survival over biological subsistence as a form of ‘resistance through culture’. Noica’s strategy of resisting history and modernization was entirely cultural. He was accused of many things and some of his critics have claimed that his conspicuous silence and nationalist pathos indirectly endorsed the official doctrine of national-communist totalitarianism. On the other hand, even the most uncompromising opponents of communism such as Monica Lovinescu, a leading voice in the anti-communist Romanian programs of Radio Free Europe, acknowledged Noica as ‘the principle proof of a nucleus of a living conscience in the ocean of dead [Marxist-Leninist] thought’.31 Paraphrasing Noica (and recycling the topos inaugurated by Blaga and Eliade), Noica’s disciple Gabriel Liiceanu talks of a ‘will to culture’, a lateral, discreet, and unspectacular ‘liberation’ which: blameworthy, it may be, in its intellectual egotism, was and still is the form of survival for all that is in the Romanian spirituality of today. […] If by history we understand the sequence of events happening to us, but also without us and beyond us, then, for Noica, culture did indeed mean a withdrawal from history.32

Noica’s ideal of cultural resistance was a type of ‘subsistence without consistency’ that came from voiding the self of its material substance. It was his way, one of many in the Romanian tradition, to turn absence from history into a successful instrument of cultural survival and regeneration. In 1978, at a time when the officially enforced Marxist doctrine was ‘dialectical and historical materialism’, Noica wrote about the virtues of a Romanian life style he called ‘ahoretia’, which amounts to absenting oneself from the historical world of material civilization and withdrawing into the intangible, eternal realm of the spirit:

31 32

Monica Lovinescu, Est-etice, Unde scurte IV [East-Ethics, Shortwave IV] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994), p. 351. Gabriel Liiceanu, The Păltiniş Diary: A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture, trans. by James Christian Brown (Budapest and New York: Central European UP, 2000), p. 202.

120 Bogdan Ştefănescu […] a sudden illumination or lucidity of conscience which forces the subject to reject participation, to dominate his determinations, to perceive the positive in non-action and negativity, to accept defeat, to assimilate it, and to enter a state of indifference, placing life and history under the order of reason, which annihilates novelty and proclaims the fruitfulness of non-travel.33

Conclusions

Former communist countries like Romania display a wounded national pride and a sense of impaired cultural identity as a result of the symbolic damage done by Soviet and Western colonization. The cultural trauma ensuing from both physical and epistemic violence (the latter including postcolonial criticism’s persistent disregard of Eastern European cultures) forces such communities to fashion their self-image as a reparation of countless dents and supplementing of consistent loss. Postcommunist countries like Romania have a long record of dealing with their foundational deficits as cultureconstructing historical voids. While certain thinkers like Bauman and Baudrillard see horror vacui as a typically postmodern experience, it is also arguably symptomatic of postdependent cultures like the postcommunist and the postcolonial, which have turned the loss of self-esteem and estrangement into a collective representation of the nation. Achille Mbembe proclaiming that ‘the colonized [is] absolute void’ and Alexander Kiossev’s argument that a ‘morbid consciousness of an absence’ and ‘traumatic lacks’ are defining for the inaugural moments of the history of Eastern European cultures like Bulgaria testify to a common postdependency awareness of hollow national identity. Having sampled the symbolism of the void as a recurrent discursive topos in Romanian culture, I hope this study has demonstrated that an Eastern European culture is in fact constructed as a fundamentally (post-)colonial experience. By devoting consistent critical attention to the discursive economy of vacuity in the constitution of a Romanian self, I have aimed to show how the figural constellation of the void can be turned from an episodic and marginal critical issue to a crucial theoretical concern in the study of postcultures. This may also serve as a further argument for bringing (post)colonialism and (post)communism together under the unifying category of postdependency cultural trauma where the void could operate as a major rhetorical concept for their comparative study.

33

Constantin Noica, Şase maladii ale spiritului contemporan. Spiritul românesc în cumpătul vremii [Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit] (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1978), p. 103.

Adriana Raducanu Confessions from the Dead: Reading Ismail Kadare’s Spiritus as a ‘Post-Communist Gothic’ Novel Abstract: Ismail Kadare is arguably known as the most representative Albanian novelist whose works can be safely assessed as valuable fictional documents depicting the Red Terror of communism as it unfolded for decades in the least accessible country (to ideological friends and foes) behind the Iron Curtain. Frequently his works invite comparisons with the triumvirate of the most famous of Absurdist Writers (Kafka, Gogol and Orwell). Nevertheless, it is obvious to most critics that assessing him as a mere Albanian avatar of these literary titans may obscure the originality and the universality of his voice, which echoes far beyond the categorization inspired by the above authors. In this chapter, I read Kadare’s Spiritus (1996) as an example of a narrow but significant body of literature originating from the former communist countries, approachable through the theoretical lens of Raluca Oproiu’s ‘post-communist Gothic’, which, as I see it, describes the liminal spaces between post-colonialism, postcommunism, and the Gothic.

Postcolonial Gothic In recent years, Gothic scholars have argued for the extension of the genre beyond its claimed and familiar domains (psychoanalysis and feminism), towards the field of postcolonial studies. The term ‘postcolonial Gothic’ was first coined by Judie Newman, in her book The Ballistic Bard: The Postcolonial Fictions.1 Almost a decade later, the predominant tropes of this composite genre were discussed in a collection of essays called Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (2003); the most recent multi-authored collection of essays on postcolonial Gothic is Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (2009). 2 Commenting on the ‘uncanniness’ of what is clearly an unlikely theoretical collage, Smith and Hughes astutely notice that, at first glance, postcolonialism and Gothic seems to exclude one another due to the ‘different intellectual, cultural and historical traditions that facilitated them’, but they also share an ‘interest in challenging postEnlightenment notions of rationality’. 3 As I have argued elsewhere, the improbable concurrence of the Gothic with postcolonialism is justifiable in the light of the still-lingering problems of colonialism which, paradoxically, are best portrayed via a European narrative mode par excellence, reputed for 1 2

3

Judie Newman, The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (London: Arnold, 1995). Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, ed. by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic, ed. by Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2009). Hughes and Smith, p. 1.

122 Adriana Raducanu its ambiguities and its transgressions, but mostly concerned with the preservation of a strong sense of history. 4 For the authors opting for it, Smith and Hughes underline the liberating potential of postcolonial Gothic which aims to lift the veil from the terrors of the past in a hybrid style intended to free the discourse from the ideological burden of objective narrative.5 As a composite genre, postcolonial Gothic relentlessly subverts ‘the resolutions common in European literature’ since ‘its characters are so frequently incapable of salvation’, emphasizing the fact that ‘the impact of the colonizing past remains with us […]’.6 The list of novels so far ‘canonized’ as postcolonial Gothic includes Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, Michelle Cliff ’s No Telephone to Heaven, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and The Robber’s Bride, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury, and Shame, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s Heat and Dust, Naipaul’s Guerrillas. A perusal of the above narratives confirms that Gothic contributes to postcolonialism with ‘a particular added emphasis […] through its seeming celebration of the irrational, the outlawed and the socially and culturally dispossessed’.7

Post-Communist Gothic The term post-communist Gothic was recently coined by Raluca Oproiu in ‘The Ghost of Communist Past: The Birth of ‘Post-Communist Gothic’ Fiction?’ In the third part of her article, Oproiu offers a pertinent analysis of the Romanian novel Fantoma din Moara [The Ghost in the Mill], describing the authorial resort ‘to an arsenal of Gothic motifs to come to term with the haunting spectre of communism’. 8 While deeply indebted to Oproiu, I would nevertheless attempt a further stage in the conceptualization of postcommunist Gothic by drawing attention to its dialogical relationship with the already consecrated postcolonial Gothic, as well as by clarifying some of the possible theoretical conundrums. Firstly, I would propose that ‘post-communist Gothic’ refers to both literature and criticism and emphasize the manner in which they complement one another. Regarding the former, I suggest that it refers to various literary 4 5 6 7 8

Adriana Raducanu, Speaking the Language of the Night (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2014), p. 26. Hughes and Smith, p. 1. Sheri Ann Denison, Walking through the Shadows: Ruins, Reflections and Resistance in the Postcolonial Gothic Novel, PhD Thesis (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2009), p. 16. Hughes and Smith, p. 1. Raluca Oproiu, ‘The Ghost of Communism Past: The Birth of “Post-Communist Gothic” Fiction?’ Studies in Gothic Fiction, 1.2 (2011), 12-22.

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works (novels, short stories, etc.) published after the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe which employ Gothic imagery—a selfcensorship device—in order to denounce communism (both its practice and theory) as one of the worst recent historical nightmares. Conversely, postcommunist Gothic criticism, situated at the confluence between postcommunist, post-colonial and Gothic studies, focuses on how such works depict the horror-like atmosphere of totalitarianism and invite a retroactive assessment of its unresolved issues. In Russian literature and culture, scholars have already extensively argued for the theoretical perspective of ‘communist Gothic’. Eric Naiman eminently coined the ‘NEP Gothic’ phrase.9 In Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym, admittedly not terminologically ‘Gothic’ in her approach, focuses on nostalgia and the uncanny feelings of loss—arguably Gothic tropes—that former communist cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin preserve in the collective memory of post-communist societies. 10 Arguably the most comprehensive study up to this date is Muireann Maguire’s Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature, which focuses on works by early Soviet writers.11 Under the aegis of what she aptly defines as ‘Soviet Gothic’, the hybrid product of the improbable meeting between the Socialist Realist mode of writing and the Gothic-fantastic, Maguire discusses the writings of a rich plethora of Soviet writers, such as Nikolai Ognev, Maks Zhizhmor, Evghenii Zamiatin, Feodor Gladkov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Beliaev, Marietta Shaginian, Aleksandr Chaianov, etc. In the light of previous studies centred on ‘NEP Gothic’, or ‘Soviet Gothic’ (which I read as national versions of the larger category of ‘communist Gothic’), another clarification is necessary. I noticed that postcommunist Gothic may refer to: a) a corpus of writings accompanied by a theoretical perspective, naturally derived from the earlier ‘communist Gothic’, which focused on works produced during the totalitarian regime (in the case of East and Central-European literatures where the national communist Gothic was already argued for, like Russia); and/or b) a corpus of writings and a theoretical perspective which may be viewed as the posttotalitarian extension of a subversive mode of writing (albeit not necessarily labelled as ‘communist Gothic’), where subversiveness and self-censorship have lost their ‘privileged’ status, given the post-1989 socio-political climate (in the case of East and Central-European literatures where studies on the 9 10 11

Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997). Svetlana Boym, Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Muireann Maguire, Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), p. 16.

124 Adriana Raducanu national communist Gothic have not yet made the object of sustained scholarly enterprise). Circumscribing the limits of post-communist Gothic is possible only when the different meanings of the particle ‘post’ are commented upon. To further elucidate this, I draw inspiration from Peiker who, focusing on the significance of ‘post’ in postcolonialism, emphasizes the double function of the particle: ‘[…] first, the direct historical—chronological meaning—“after colonialism” (as in “post-war”; second, the more philosophical meaning, denoting a space or position beyond colonialism, yet inextricably linked to it (as in “postmodernism”, “post-feminism)’. 12 For my conceptualization of post-communist Gothic, I find Peiker’s categorization extremely relevant, as it paves the way to argue for the theoretical link between postcolonial and post-communist Gothic, with the first acting as a general comparative framework for the latter. As I see it, in both post-communist Gothic and postcolonial Gothic, ‘post’ covers both a chronological meaning and a more philosophical one. Hence, postcolonial Gothic and post-communist Gothic establish a synergy of ‘posts’, as they are both centred on the political, personal and aesthetic interrogation of the lingering wounds produced by colonialism and communism, respectively. Thirdly, the question of whether ‘post-communist’ or ‘Gothic’ is the locus of emphasis in the concept of post-communist Gothic should be addressed at this point. To clarify this, I suggest that the acknowledgement of post-communist Gothic fiction as the contemporary, post-totalitarian sum of writings whose corresponding theoretical perspective must be reinforced by the identification of its links to context and culture. Obviously, aspects of trauma, repression, the unconscious, dissolution of identity, paranoia and the use of doubles, the atmosphere of generalized terror and horror—typical Gothic tropes—are also the very coordinates that help establish the critical appraisal of the evils of the former communist era. Nevertheless, insofar as where the emphasis is placed—either on ‘postcommunist’ or ‘Gothic’, my argument coincides with Beville’s (notwithstanding the different contexts). According to her, the sheer, general observation ‘that the Gothic is a genre that has seeped into all literary movements […] filling a small but significant role in providing an outlet for social and imaginative energy’ falls short of giving Gothic its due, as ‘a genre that should be appreciated on its own terms’. 13 My short study, therefore, although mainly arguing for the inception of what may become ‘Post12

13

Piret Peiker, ‘Post-Communist Literatures: A Postcolonial Perspective’, Eurozine, 28 March 2006, available at , accessed 7 June 2014. Maria Beville, Gothic Postmodernism (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2009), p. 21.

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communist Gothic Studies’, also sets out to redress the generally marginal status of Gothic as a genre and endorses its specific conceptual apparatus as a valuable theoretical instrument in the evaluation of post-communism (along with postcolonialism).14

Ismail Kadare’s Spiritus as a ‘Post-Communist Gothic’ Novel Although acknowledged as generally critical of the communist fallacies in most of his novels, Ismail Kadare embraced an allegorical, profoundly imaginative style in his constant denunciation of the horrors of totalitarianism. Robert Elsie remarks on how ‘idiosyncratic is Kadare’s art in perceiving and coming to terms with Albania’s tragic history’ since with the ‘gnawing fears and surrealist horrors of the dictatorship’ safely behind him, ‘his readers might have expected a panoramic settlement of accounts with the Stalinist past, a cold and realistic description of the indescribable a la Solzhenitsyn’. 15 Kadare, nevertheless, thwarts critics’ expectations and opts for revelling in ‘a firm dichotomy of reality’, albeit with the obvious purpose 14

15

The attempt to further ‘rescue’ Gothic from the margins of academic discourse and argue for its survival, albeit under disguise lies at the core of my recently published monograph Speaking the Language of the Night: Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels (Peter Lang, 2014). The present study is part of a similar enterprise, since, apart from Ismail Kadare’s oeuvre, hereby represented only by Spiritus, there are quite a few East and Central European novels that, in my opinion, justify a ‘post-communist Gothic’ appraisal. Among them are: Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, trans. by Antonia Lloyd Jones (London: Granta, 2002); Pawel Huelle, Who Was David Weiser?, trans. by Antonia Lloyd Jones (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1991); Tadeusz Konwicki, A Minor Apocalypse, trans. by Richard Laurie (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999); Oksana Zabuzhko, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, trans. by Nina Shevchuk-Murray (Las Vegas: Amazon Crossing, 2012); Yuri Andrukhovych, The Moscoviad, trans. by Vitaly Chernetsky (Berkeley: Spuyten Duyvil, 2008); the following novels by Herta Müller: The Passport, trans. by Martin Chalmers (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009), The Land of Green Plums, trans. by Michael Hoffman (London: Granta Books, 1999), The Appointment, trans. by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2001) and Nadirs, trans. by Sieglinde Lug (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Doina Ruşti, Zogru (Bucharest: Polirom, 2013) and Fantoma din Moara [The Ghost in the Mill] (Iasi: Polirom, 2009); Bogdan Suceava, Coming from an Off-Key Time: A Novel, trans. by Alistair Ian Blyth (Evanston, Illinois: The Northwestern UP, 2011). For all her wonderful suggestions which added to mine and helped compile this tentative list, I am deeply grateful to Assistant Professor Dorota Kołodziejczyk whom I met at the ‘Postcolonialism and East-Central European Literature’ International Conference organized by the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, 10–12 April 2014. Robert Elsie, ‘Review of Spiritus: Roman avec chaos, revelation, vestiges by Ismail Kadare: Jusuf Vrioni’, World Literature Today, 71.4 (Autumn 1997), 841-842 (p. 842).

126 Adriana Raducanu of exposing the nightmare of reality in times of totalitarianism (p. 842). In presenting readers with an Albanian film director’s schizophrenic experiences of voyages between the realms of life and death (L’hombre), and a young man’s sudden ‘parallel existence in a mysterious underworld’ (L’aigle), Kadare actually allegorizes the deep, profound dichotomy between ‘communist Albania and the glamorous West’, and ‘sudden arrestment and internment in Albania’ (p. 842). Although the individual rapport with the mirroring worlds of life and death as constitutive coordinates of human existence is one of the main themes of Kadare’s works, nowhere is this more masterfully rendered than in his 1996 novel Spiritus.16 The generator of this extraordinary narrative is a fantastic situation centred on the morbid implacability with which the secret police pursued its victims in communist Albania, extending its demented techniques of surveillance and control beyond the realm of the living. Shpend Guraziu, an engineer apparently accidentally torn to pieces by a bulldozer is buried with a most sophisticated listening device sewn into his winter jacket. Three years later, in a climate of full-blown dictatorial paranoia, the decision is made at the highest level to exhume his remains. The expected result of this ghastly act is the hoped-for discover of any piece of recorded information that might prove the existence of a political plot to overthrow the dictator and destroy the young Albanian state. A long series of misfortunes befall all the willing/unwilling participants in this macabre game, starting with Arian Vogli, the head of the regional secret police, then his collaborators, the victim’s acquaintances and friends and finally the enigmatic figure of the Leader himself (a thinly disguised Enver Hoxha). Kadare does not provide readers with an elucidation of all the skulduggery that follows the disinterment; nonetheless, there are plenty of narrative arguments to sustain either the destructive effects of a curse unleashed to castigate the demonic secret police, or what seems like a natural, historical disintegration of the society based on the exercise of terror. The narrative structure of Spiritus consists of three parallel levels: ‘The Chaos’, ‘The Discovery’, and ‘De Profundis’, roughly corresponding to the Introduction, the Argument and the Conclusion. This is a most extraordinary tale, rich in supernatural tones, yet strangely symptomatic for the demented, pathological world of communist Albania. ‘The Chaos’ features a team of foreign (probably Western) researchers, in pursuit of an alternate truth regarding the historical substance of communist totalitarianism, which, as they see it, is not to be found in 16

As many other of Kadare’s works, Spiritus was published in French by Fayard Publishing House.

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‘reports, prison maps, prisoners’ letters, secret decisions and, of course, newspaper clippings’. 17 In their opinion, such memorabilia is ‘trivial and not worthy of attention’, since ‘the history of communism, regardless of the diversity of peoples and countries who experienced it, was the same’ (p. 16). The researchers’ facile dismissal of proofs of personal and collective trauma replaced with the obsessive search for ‘a wholly new manifestation, to be found nowhere else’, one that can ‘concentrate everything in it’ about ‘a historical cataclysm, extended over half a globe’ (p. 8) confesses to a typically colonial classification of the territories beyond the Iron Curtain, marked by the homogeneity of their experiences. At the same time, the desire to capture so as to comprehend and finally eliminate a peculiar ‘manifestation’ of evil, yet one that should embody the very essence of decades of totalitarianism, uncannily resemble the Van Helsing team efforts in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to exorcize through the deadly protagonist an entire threatening landscape, lying dangerously close to the cradle of Western civilization. The researchers’ efforts are not risk-free, for they are aware that the evil they are relentlessly pursuing ‘should remain on this part of the globe, so that it should not cause an imbalance or a hesitation in its rotation’ (p. 9). Implied in the above quotation is the concept of trauma, a central trope of the narrative and also a common feature of postcolonialism, postcommunism and the Gothic. 18 However, the uncovering of the ‘truth’ about the extraordinary exhumation (a stand-in for the absurdity and inhumanity of totalitarianism) defies the limits of credibility while painfully animating long-repressed memories in the collective psyche of the survivors. The Albanians in the novel reject the articulation of trauma and constantly escape the attempts of the researchers to establish the authenticity of the legend. In Kadare’s novel, trauma is assessed by establishing its destructive potential: here it is circumscribed to the linguistic level. Significantly, his juxtaposition of spheres and disciplines, of psychology and linguistics, bears the strong flavour of a colonial practice and its corresponding postcolonial 17

18

Ismail Kadare, Spiritus, trans. by Marius Dobrescu (Bucharest: Humanitas Fiction, 2012), p. 7. All excerpts from Spiritus are my translation into English from the Romanian translation. For a recent, pertinent analysis of trauma in the context of postcolonialism and postcommunism, see Ecaterina Patrascu, ‘Trauma Studies, Postcolonialism and PostCommunism: Conceptual Disjunctions and Conjunctions’, available at , accessed 8 June 2014. For its assessment in the context of Gothic studies, see Steven Bruhm, ‘Contemporary Gothic; Why We Need It’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. by Jerold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 259-277.

128 Adriana Raducanu assessment. In Spiritus, he constructs a sequence almost hilarious in its intellectual lack of sophistication. The chief investigator, rendered as a modern Macaulay (sadly infamous for his essentializing, rigid and ultimately diminishing views of the Hindu culture and traditions), supports his views of Albanians with supremely unfounded platitudes. Armed with an Albanian for Tourists booklet, the one-and-only fundament of his experience of Albanian language and culture, he informs his subordinates that ‘in a people’s language lies the key of its destiny’ (p. 12). As the other investigators notice, this is the stock phrase he wears out through repetition in St. Petersburg and in Budapest, notwithstanding his lack of knowledge of either Russian or Hungarian. Furthermore, he delights in waiting ‘for the locals, so as to terrorize them with odd questions’ after having discovered some untranslatable expressions, such as ‘the day of never’, ‘un-happenable happening’, and ‘particularly a verbal mode of desire” which only exists in Albanian and, perhaps, in ancient Greek’ and which, in his opinion, ‘is the instrument through which all the verbs of Albanian language may acquire either a positive or a negative aspect’ (Ibid.). Skilfully ‘elucidated’ by the Western chief investigator, it is this peculiarity of a verbal mode, painfully erased from the Albanians’ collective and cultural memory, which signals the endless re-enactment of historical trauma: You have been using this mode unaware that it is the machine which produces curses and blessings, which you can hear here as nowhere else. You widen your eyes like howls, because it never crossed your mind that, in your ancestors’ perception, the small deities, the godmothers, the fairies do nothing more than wander around to gather and bestow the curses and the blessings wherever necessary. Do you realize now that these deities mentioned are pieces of this machine? And that your old poets, who used to talk about Albanian as about the gods’ language, did so not because they believed such stories but because they knew that this time of ‘desire’, this treasure which makes it different from the other languages of the planet, is linked to the fairies? […] That is why your country looks the way it does. That is why your dictator, a priest or an imam, whatever he was, uglified you, crushed you, and deserted you, in the same way that the cuckoo abandons his eggs, with half a million bunkers. (p. 13)

I have quoted this passage at length, since the paradoxes it contains all centred on the connotations of the linguistic sign and its obvious links with trauma, facilitate the unfolding of the theoretical perspectives of my study. Firstly, as previously mentioned, this fiery monologue signifies the loftier Self’s appraisal of a people (seen as the Other), a language and a culture that he sets to dismember, qualify and interpret so as to self-righteously assert the superiority of his own rational, scientific mode of thinking and rationalizing foreign experiences. Secondly, the scientific evaluation and perspective on the peculiarity of a verbal mode is paradoxically accompanied by the

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same cold assessor’s mental (and nostalgic) excursion into the mythical past, the golden era of Albanian history, a time when the fairies roamed freely and the poets sang about it. The feelings of loss and nostalgia which he evokes while explicating the language away, are recognizable staples of the Gothicfantastic, linked as they are to a binary opposition of the dismal present reality, stripped of any heroic associations, and a mythical, heroic, glorified past. Thirdly, the trauma of having forgotten the language and its liberating powers acquires its sinister equivalent in the historical trauma of the recent communist past, embodied by the shadowy, menacing figure of the Albanian dictator who left his people a legacy of half a million incarceration spaces, thinly disguised as nuclear shelters. Finally, in concordance with the multiple readings of the excerpt above, I would agree with Patrascu who, in the context of postcolonial studies noticed that […] the narrated traumatic events are never ideologically neutral, but always liable to a process of selection by the one who will organize them coherently in a literary text: not the raw facts compose the image of reality, but the facts transformed imaginatively, passed through the ideological and cultural filter of the artist.19

In Spiritus, however briefly, the recorder of Albanian history, its reporting ‘artist’, is the foreign (and probably Western) chief investigator who, as the text suggests, may also be held ‘responsible’ for the re-created narrative of national trauma. In this context, ideological aspects notwithstanding, the refusal of trauma to be moulded into comprehensible language so that the past may be properly assessed and carefully exorcized betrays a Gothic ‘haunting’ of the text by ghosts of past and present linguistic terror.20 Nevertheless, in Kadare’s narrative, the mute terror that the unexplored language is capable of inflicting on its users also becomes a modality of resisting political terror. The transformative power of language is found in its ability to metamorphose in moments of great crisis into a ‘doublespeak’. This kind of language is most effective in its slipperiness; it is a hybrid, third linguistic product which confuses and frustrates the efforts of the Secret Police to gather information about the political plot.21 This horror/trauma-filled lan19 20

21

Patrascu, p. 384. The Gothic, according to Halberstam, is ‘the breakdown of a genre and the crisis occasioned by the inability to narrate and the inability to categorize’. See Judy Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke UP), p. 23, emphasis added. Significantly, the character who designates it as the third language is Vogli, the mouthpiece of the regime, and possibly the only intellectual in his circle of informers. We learn from him that there is an incommensurable gap between ‘high Albanian’, the language used ‘in everyday life, on the street and in the institutions’

130 Adriana Raducanu guage contains ‘the necessary obliqueness of any persecuted speech that cannot, at the risk of its survival, openly say what it means’.22 Arian Vogli, the chief of the Secret Police, the field agents, those who listen to the recordings, and the entire city is paralyzed by the monstrous new language which resembles the paralytics’ blabbering (p.159), a monstrous entity born of and made for fear. This is also, undoubtedly, an ‘in-between’ language, a ‘liminal’ one, as Bhabha would say, a post-colonial space of resistance, inscribed by Kadare into the memory of post-communist Albania, and perhaps, with a view to the future, intended to dissolve the totalitarianism of the binary logic and substitute it with an inclusive one. To return to the text, as previously mentioned, the Albanian survivors of the communist era and its climate of terror reject the articulation of trauma and impede the discovering of the truth about the ‘soul-capture’; the city dwellers take refuge in the repression of harrowing memories, and there are no surviving witnesses willing or able to confirm the veracity of the bloodcurdling event, to tell the story in order to exorcize the past. A file of a medium killed under torture, and various voice recordings, only serve to amplify the mystery; the more the investigators attempt to capture the story, the more futile their efforts, as the newly added elements only serve to exacerbate the general confusion: […] wandering atoms of information danced in our brains: a spiritualism séance, in the town of B., the opening night and then the prohibition of The Seagull, the search for a microphone, the torture of the medium, the disinterment of Shpend Guraziu, a raven which gets blacker when blinded…they all seemed to be connected, although we could not find the common knot […] Other events, apparently trivial, would gather around them: the cursing of Chekhov’s tragedy by an old woman who had never been to the theatre in her life, the moans of an unknown woman before orgasm, after the opening night, a man with his tongue cut off who wishes to say something … Figments of life, which similarly to the universal dust that celestial bodies are made of, had attracted each other and had formed, as it happens with heavy star matter, a final picture: either a spirit had been captured or the earth itself had spoken. (p. 44)

Spiritus is a narrative that loves to mystify its readers; it resists the act of deciphering exclusively by placement in the concrete historical context of

22

and ‘low Albanian’, the language that remains untainted by the communist ideology, ‘subterranean and hidden’ (Kadare, p. 160). For a short period, high Albanian seems to penetrate low Albanian and defeat it, to the point of amalgamation; but this is only a stage, for low Albanian finds a way to regenerate, to create a third language, which to Vogli seems ‘a virago who would torture him for a long time’ (p. 161). Paul De Man, Dialogue and Dialogism in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 107.

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post-communism as the East and Central European version of postcolonialism. In my opinion, the impossibility of de-coding this convoluted narrative is amplified through the author’s recourse to powerful Gothic imagery; for example, the text ‘reveals’ the gory events mentioned in a specific file that the investigators have been able to retrieve; however specific facts of traumatic communist past are actually bred by ‘the bloody uterus’ that, ‘as any other uterus will remain forever invisible’ (Ibid.). The second narrative level of Kadare’s novel, suggestively (although misleadingly) entitled ‘The Discovery’, marks a chronological leap. Events now unfold in the present/past of communist Albania and are orchestrated by two major characters: the first, Arian Vogli, is the head of the local branch of the feared Security Police responsible for installing the newest, state-of-the-art listening devices and collecting evidence of a political plot. The second is the menacing dictator himself who, although going gradually blind, attempts to remain in power by creating a general climate of paranoia and suspicion, meant to frighten his (non-existent) opponents and ensure the continuation of his oppressive rule. ‘The Discovery’, situated as it is, at the very centre of the narrative, is particularly rich in Gothic tropes and imagery; for the purpose of my study, I will focus on a discussion of the body—which I will read as the Gothic body—with its natural effects on body politics and its relevance to the overall work.23 Moreover, closely linked to the body, my discussion will focus on the analysis of the double, a well-known Gothic trope, charged here with poignant political undertones. In my reading of Kadare’s work as a political and biological canvas of the past age of communism, the body is one of the central foci of the narrative. It becomes a locus of self-celebration, abject subjugation, disintegration, constant humiliation, and ultimately degeneration. Arian Vogli’s character and the intricate process of constructing his stable and invincible identity, followed by its dissolution and annihilation, is that which provides the strongest arguments for the ‘post-communist Gothic’ character of the text. Spiritus vividly portrays an ordinary individual’s moral decline into villainy; moreover, villain (Vogli) and victim (Shpend Guraziu) are interlocked into a fictional cycle of cruelty and vulnerability, thus mimicking the reciprocally destructive connection between a double and his or her 23

For the most comprehensive up-to-date analysis of the body as a Gothic construct, see Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). Hurley discusses important Gothic texts, focusing on the replacement of a unified and stable human body/identity with a chaotic, ‘abhuman’ one, a process which she sees as strongly indebted to nineteenth century biology and social medicine, evolutionary theory, criminal anthropology, and degeneration theory.

132 Adriana Raducanu original. Vogli’s unexpected ‘incorporation’ into the odious surveillance machinery of the Albanian secret police comes as a consequence of the joint order by the Party and the Leader himself to regenerate the old organism of the Secret Police with a crucial ‘infusion with young blood’ (p. 70). The young philology graduate is the body-symbol of change, ‘the mostbeloved army of the Party’, superior to the old generation in terms of both age and education: At the Ministry of Internal Affairs, ‘the Illyrians’ were not given a warm welcome. They called them so because most of them had Illyrian names: Gent, Altin, Arian; names which had come back in fashion and had replaced those of the old foxes from the ministries: Sefedin, Kocio or Zylo. They were not set apart only because of the studies, the way they dressed, and the foreign languages: French, English (the old ones knew only some Russian and rarely, Serbo-Croatian and Greek, learnt while on different missions), but by the new impetus they brought to their work. (p. 71)

With his appointment as one of the Party’s youngest, most energetic, and polished bodies, Arian Vogli also gains power over the bodies of the others. Among them was the body of Edlira, a woman whose dazzling sexuality obsesses him, especially when she turned him down and married another. After the arrival of microphones sent from China, Vogli, in multiple acts of acoustic voyeurism, penetrates the privacy of Edlira’s bedroom and, while listening to the sounds made by the young married couple in the heat of their passion, indulges in erotic fantasies. Interestingly, while painfully aware of his unfulfilled longings, the young chief of the Secret Police also fantasizes about Faustian, unlimited power over the others, to be acquired when, ‘like a demon’, ‘he will descend into the Inferno, where everything is different’, where ‘the faces, the sounds and even the words are pronounced differently’ (Ibid.). The obvious Gothic characteristics of Vogli’s imaginary descent are hard to miss, as equally observable is the fact that they gain momentum when viewed from the perspective of the Foucauldian associations between power, sexuality and knowledge. Gothic also constructs vivid binaries in terms of what constitutes the healthy, powerful, young body, the very symbol of the New Man that all communist regimes sought to construct, and the decaying, grotesque, abject body of the veterans of the system. Significant in this respect is the confrontation between Vogli and the army of listeners: docile, former cogs in the diabolical political machinery who feel threatened by the arrival of the sophisticated listening devices. In a carnival of Gothic horrors reminiscent of the ball scene in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, bodies that were grotesquely self-mutilated in the service of the system proudly expose their wounds:

Confessions from the Dead 133 In the first row sat Sulo Gabrani, who had gone deaf listening to the pilots where they felt their safest, near the plane with the engine running. Next to him there sat Tod Zalheri, who had agreed to be buried alive with the victim who was still alive so as to hear, with his last breath, even the most insignificant secret […] A little bit late, as it befits a celebrity, Lef Ramabaja came and sat right at the front, the pride of the ‘listeners’ not only from the town of B. but from all of Albania, even from all the socialist world, famous because he agreed to be blinded so his hearing could become sharper. (p. 109)

The above fragment is extremely relevant for a characteristically Gothic blurring of boundaries of the body, when it is used as instrument for domination and control. 24 Thus, the decayed physical bodies which actively devoted their fanatic energies to the promotion and maintenance of the totalitarian regime can be read as replaceable body politic. The gradual, but implacable side-lining of the veterans from the centre of power signifies a typically Freudian (and Gothic) struggle between father and son for dominion over a reformed, transformed world. Interestingly, from a Gothic perspective, the similarities between what Kadare depicts almost as an epic conflict and the specifics of the Dracula plot are manifestly recognizable. Thus, the ‘new blood’ infusion dictated by the wise Leader (a communist version of the resourceful and cunning Van Helsing), and embodied by Arian Vogli (a composite of Jonathan Harker, Lord Holmwood, Quincey Morris, and Jack Seward) takes effect after obliterating the old, abject, albeit ‘noble’ (since they were forged in political battle) body/ies of the veterans (the Albanian versions of Count Dracula). In Kadare’s text, the pervasive politics of the Gothic body is not felicitously concluded with the apparent victory of the young over the old. As disclosed in the third level of the narrative entitled ‘De Profundis’, Arian Vogli’s very body, as the new, physically potent envoy of the system and the 24

As Maguire aptly notices, the obsessive fear of degeneration of bodies (always accompanied by political degeneration) informed Stalin’s decisions to organize his famous/infamous purges: ‘The Soviet nation had to constantly monitor itself and its descendants for signs of slippage, atavism, recalcitrance. Tellingly, a 1961 decree of the Supreme Soviet—a period when all biologically authentic class enemies should have aged into harmlessness—was aimed against ‘Persons Leading an Anti-Social, Parasitic Way of Life’. Fear of the Other had become fear of the Self; and once again the Gothic mode, and specifically the Gothic body, provided a literary frame for anxieties haunting Soviet self-image’ (Stalin’s Ghosts, p. 92). In Kadare’s novel, the once-famous bodies of the veterans of listening and surveillance are now depicted as aged, grotesquely malformed, and even parasitical in their reliance on former glory; in this context, their replacement with state-of the-art microphones orchestrated by the young and enthusiastic Arian Vogli symbolizes both the fear of the self (the veterans are, after all, parts of the system) and the practical necessity to dispose of what is no longer vital to the political life of totalitarianism.

134 Adriana Raducanu ‘magician’ in control of the listening devices, will also become the site of ruin and decay. After the attempt to confirm the existence of the conflict by un-burying the putrefied body of Shpend Guraziu in order to listen to possible testimonies coming from the other world, Arian Vogli’s destiny takes a spin for the worse and comes to mimic his victim’s plight. Thus, reduced to a monstrous entity, devoid of any human traits, he becomes the ‘living dead’ of the horrible communist past, a ghost, a revenant whose ascent to and descent from power signifies the archetypal story of all political structures turned into malefic totalitarianisms and doomed to eventually collapse. The account of Vogli’s decay, similar in its multiple and contradictory variants to the tales of political disintegration, becomes a Hydra-like narrative, with obvious Gothic undertones, whose grotesque heads reconstitute a complex intertextuality of political, and personal verdicts. One variation presents us with Vogli, the political prisoner met by the inmates of the Torovica labour camp, and by the veterans from Burrel, Spaç and Fushebar (p. 242). This Vogli, the ‘very young, middle height, young man, with grey, beast-like eyes’ is the victim of an inclusionary logic of justice and punishment (both state-dictated and divine). One year after his initial promotion and decoration with the Order of the Flag, the curse of an old woman from Lezha is apparently enacted upon him and turns him into a cripple and a political prisoner (p. 242). Another variation presents Vogli’s physical and mental deterioration as the direct consequence of implacable decisions, stemming from the concern of the body politic (with the Leader as a metonymic character) for covering the traces of past injustices. In this second scenario, Vogli is administered an injection in his tongue and hands, which forever obstruct any possible endeavour to reveal the truth about the harrowing events surrounding Shpend Guraziu’s death and subsequent exhumation. Significantly, in this second version, the villain (Arian Vogli) internalizes the condition of the victim (Shpend Guraziu) and the two come to share the plight of the undistinguished fatalities of a reign of terror: ‘[…] he had the feeling that everything was strikingly similar to what they had done to the dead man […], as soon as they had disinterred him. This was the first time that he truly believed in the curse’ (p. 250). Closely related to and derived from the second version of the story is the last scenario I offer here for the display of Arian Vogli’s Gothic body; this final version profoundly ruptures the boundaries of realism. The character is inscribed in the gallery of the personages of dark, demonic pedigree, a satanic hero/anti-hero whose cynical laughter at the sufferings of his victims marks his definitive separation from humanity. Vogli has at last become what

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he was always meant to be: the Demon,25 destroyer of and destroyed in his turn by the Spirit (Shpend Guraziu), on both the physical and linguistic level: The two main themes, closely bound even when they seemed separated, tended to melt into each other. They were bound not only by the same characters, the Demon and the Spirit, but by dozens of other threads. Only one would have been sufficient to get them close to the melting point: the obsession with the obstacle and the attempt to overcome it. And this was obvious everywhere: the obstacle to the attempt to send a signal to the world, the difficulty of the medium to contact the Spirit, of the latter to talk to the living ones, the difficulty of the helicopter to land, of the control tower to communicate with the pilot, the difficulty of the Demon to express himself, which will make him wander the world with his terrible stammer and, finally the difficulty of the land to speak and express Albania’s sorrow, but also the overcoming of this difficulty. (p. 256)

The epic confrontation between Demon and Spirit is concluded with the appearance of the Spirit’s son who, in the old tradition of ballads embarks on a Father’s quest. The ballad is further on transfigured into biblical knowledge related to ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ and also, according to an ‘even older formula’, to ‘the creation of man by God, as a mixture of earth and spirit’ (p. 258). As I have argued so far, the narrative canvas which constitutes the background against which the Gothic body can be conceived of employs a significant mixture of the political and the psychological. At first malefic, then cauterized by the reparatory recourse to recent history, alongside divine analogies, the Gothic body follows a predictable trajectory, established within the genre’s foundational texts.26 A typical Gothic trope, related to the Gothic body and extensively written on by a host of critics and scholars, is that of the double. 27 For a psychoanalyst like Freud, the double is one of the many aspects of the 25

26

27

Vogli’s subtle yet inexorable metamorphosis into a demon, the self-awareness of his superior condition to his subordinates and, ironically, to the remains of Shpend Guraziu, is prefigured by his old desire, cherished since he was fourteen, to enjoy ‘the solemn loneliness of Lermontov’s demon’ (Kadare, p. 181). In particular, see William Beckford’s Vathek (1787), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). These are only a few of the canonical Gothic novels tackling the ruination of the body in various political, psychological and religious contexts. For some of the early and most significant studies on the double and the uncanny see Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906), Angelaki, 2.1 (1995), 7– 16; Otto Rank, ‘The Double as Immortal Self ’ (1914), in Beyond Psychology (Camden: N.J. Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., 1941), pp. 62-101; Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), trans. by James Strachey, in Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 335-376.

136 Adriana Raducanu uncanny; as such, it signifies one of the deepest human fears: that of seeing oneself embodied in an Other. In ‘The Uncanny’, Freud analyses E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, a tale teeming with doubles and automata, vessels for characters’ obsessions and childhood fears carried into their adulthood. Relevant to the purposes of my study is what Freud considers to be the main motif of The Sandman, ‘the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes’. Similarly, in Ismail Kadare’s Spiritus, the uncanny atmosphere, ridden with political, physical and psychological violence dominates the narrative; its source is the inexorably advancing disease of the tyrant: The dictator was going blind. What had been only a suspicion for months had been confirmed a few hours before […] The possibility of the surgical operation on the cataract, after the disease was stabilized, as the French physicians were hoping, was more of an illusion, if not a diplomatic statement. (p. 51)

The fear of blindness triggers the search for a modality of substitution for the decaying eyesight—hence the monstrous (in human terms, but politically astute) appeal to the ‘Chinese brother’ and the request for microphones that can invade all spaces and report any dissent (imaginary or real). As Freud states, ‘in dreams, myths, neurotic fantasies the loss of the eyes represents fear of castration’28; in Spiritus, the physical fear is amplified by its political consequences, when a blind dictator, with neurotic fantasies of eternal power, knows that he will be a politically castrated dictator should he fail to eliminate his enemies. Therefore, a typical strategy for the maintenance of power is the hiring of a double, an ordinary man to replace the dictator at various official events and create the illusion of normality. According to Freud, the double is an ‘uncanny harbinger of death’29, the messenger of impending doom. There is a similar mechanism at work in Kadare’s novel, in that the dictator, apprehensive of his predicament, yet managing to repress his anxieties in front of his subordinates, both despises and fears his double. However, what I find more significant in Spiritus is that the double himself, the ordinary man asked to pose as the dictator, is the one who is most frightened and painfully aware of his ‘replicant’ condition: He hardly knew what position to adopt. Had he expressed his gratitude for the role that was granted to him, there was the danger that he might seem sad, had he done the opposite and looked proud, they could interpret it wrongly. They would say that he is putting on airs, that he thinks highly of himself, without any personal merit [...] once he heard someone whispering: ‘This clown really thinks of himself as a big boss’. Sometimes he was even more surprised. The assistant 28 29

Freud, p. 375. Ibid., p. 375.

Confessions from the Dead 137 to the guards’ commander was whispering to a colleague: I sometimes feel like jumping at his throat. And, as if all this were not enough, he went on: Honestly, should anything happen to the boss, the first one I am going ‘to take care of ’ is this one. I’ll rip him apart. (p. 198)

I read in this misplaced terror of death—the double’s and not the dictator’s— a departure from the concept of the double as it appears in canonical Gothic works, where ‘an apparently sensible, socially adjusted first self or host character [is] haunted by the inadmissible impulses of the double’.30 Rather, what occurs in Spiritus is more the substitution of the double motif with the more malefic one, that of the doppelgänger, which is closer to the concept of the Other. 31 It is the dictator’s look-alike who experiences the threat of physical annihilation at the hands of the ‘original’s sycophants. The ‘Self ’ here is represented by the anonymous replacement fearful of being invaded by the dictator as the ‘Other’ who had stolen his life from him: a case of ‘mimicry at once resemblance and menace’.32

Conclusion Taking Raluca Oproiu’s recently coined term ‘post-communist Gothic’ as a starting point, this study suggests an extended conceptualization of a new sub-genre. Situated as I see it, in the liminal space between postcolonial, Gothic and post-communist studies, ‘post-communist Gothic’ focuses on the socially and culturally dispossessed while allowing a critical and aesthetic perspective on a historical totalitarianism, which has perhaps been insufficiently denounced. As the analysis of Kadare’s novel from this particular perspective endeavours to demonstrate, ‘post-communist Gothic’ has the potential to constitute itself as an area of fruitful research into the traumas inflicted by the communist regimes in Eastern and Central European countries, as they were rendered in fiction by authors from behind the Iron Curtain.

30 31

32

Cynthia Sau-Ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 88. In Pizer’s view, ‘Double and Other are not [...] inevitably interchangeable terms. Otherness presupposes a sense of invasion by an alien entity which seeks to displace the ‘I’ from its locality, thus turning the ‘I’ into the ‘not-I’ which is not who I am. The double, on the other hand, is a relationship between two ‘I’s’ that is forged through close collegial relationships, familial ties, friendship, and/or similar personal histories.’ Quoted in Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial and Asian American Literature (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 104. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85-92 (p. 86).

Dobrota Pucherová Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-)Communist Literature Abstract: Based on a discursive analysis of poetry and fiction, this chapter analyses trends in Slovak communist and (post)-communist trauma narratives within the frame of postcolonial and trauma theory. Relying on intuitions by theorists such as Mbembe and Caruth, it suggests that assumptions of narrative psychology such as structured narratives and closure may not always be applicable to (post)-communist narratives in which issues of seduction, complicity, betrayal and irrational impulses complicate the meaning of collective traumas and the ways nations come to terms with them. Postmodern approaches that blur the line between history and fiction, including the outright rejection of the possibility of recovering history, and anti-realist modes such as the absurd and meta-fiction, seem to have a refreshing, anti-ideological effect upon postcommunist historiography, de-centring history to recognize the nation as essentially hybrid and ambivalent.

The Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia: Communism as Colonialism ‘It was an intervention followed by an occupation’.1 With these words, in May 1990, the last communist president of Czechoslovakia, Gustáv Husák, described the Warsaw Pact Army invasion of Czechoslovakia of August 1968, when five hundred thousand Soviet, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian soldiers, led by the USSR, invaded the country in response to reforms of the Czechoslovak communist regime known as the ‘Prague Spring’ that attempted to democratize the political system. The invasion was a deep shock for unsuspecting citizens and led to protests in which 108 civilians died and another 500 were seriously wounded; by the end of 1969, one hundred thousand people emigrated from the country. The invasion was officially presented as a friendly protection of the Czechoslovak citizens against ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Husák’s use of the word ‘occupation’ after Velvet Revolution of 1989 was the first official attempt at historical revisionism. To obscure his own responsibility for the events that followed, he added a few rhetorical questions: ‘Who will decode the colonial methods of the Soviets? Probably nobody. Who will truthfully evaluate all aspects of the occupation, in which we had to work? And it really was an occupation.’2

1 2

Rudolf Chmel, ‘Keď sa bratislavská jar nestretla s pražskou’ [When the Prague Spring Failed to Meet the Bratislava Spring], Pravda, 17 August 2013, pp. 30-31. Ibid.

140 Dobrota Pucherová According to Mircea Martin, ‘in some of its aspects, Soviet communism was even more colonialist than Western colonialism’.3 This is due to its ‘totalitarian character’,4 which used ideology to suppress individual self-consciousness, erase local collective memory and national histories and force local populations to unconditionally adopt the position of the metropolis, all the while masking its totalitarian character. In terms of Foucault’s powerknowledge nexus, writes Martin, ‘nowhere was the relation between knowledge and power stronger and more intimate than in the case of state communism’.5 Of course, Soviet imperialism took various forms: as Liviu Andrescu points out, it would be an oversimplification to lump together countries such as Hungary, Uzbekistan and Lithuania on the mere basis of their being under Soviet control. 6 However, some of the characteristic features of Soviet hegemony can in various degrees be identified also in the Czechoslovak experience. This includes what Martin calls an ‘exportation of the socialist revolution’ 7 in 1948 and ‘indirect rule’ 8 or, in Lefter’s words, ‘semi-colonization’9 in which the government officials in Prague listened to the directives from Kremlin and any ‘misbehaviour’ was liable to be punished. In addition, the USSR controlled Czechoslovak exports and imports and forced the country to contribute to its own postwar reconstruction. In terms of ‘mental colonization,’ 10 official adoration and imitation of the Soviet culture formed the core of state ideology, and pupils were indoctrinated in schools through compulsory classes in the Russian language, Soviet history and culture, and, at university, of Marxism-Leninism and the history of the proletarian movement. In art, socialist realism was the only officially endorsed style. Even though after the 1950s the doctrine that a work of art must serve the goals of socialism and communism) started to lose its grip in Czechoslovakia, it continued to serve as a blueprint for all 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10

Mircea Martin, ‘Communism as/and Colonialism’, in Postcolonialism/ Postcommunism, ed. by Monica Bottez, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, and Bogdan Ştefănescu (Bucharest: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2011), pp. 77-102 (p. 96). Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., 92. Liviu Andrescu, ‘Are We All Postcolonialists Now? Postcolonialism and Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe’, in Postcolonialism/ Postcommunism, pp. 57-74 (p. 66). Martin, p. 78. Ibid., p. 85. See Ion Bogdan Lefter, ‘Poate fi considerat postcommunismul un postcolonialism?’ [Can Postcommunism Be Considered Postcolonialism?], Caietele Echinox, 1 (2001), 117-119 and Radu Surdulescu, ‘Identity-Raping Practices: Semicolonialism, Communist Reeducation, and Peer Torture’, Euresis, 1 (2001), 54-65. I am using the term in the sense theorized by anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Albert Memmi.

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state-supported art, as well as for censorship. The military invasion of 1968 completed and intensified the political, economic and cultural domination of the USSR over the country. The most curious aspect of communist colonialism, observes Martin, was the fact that it posed as an egalitarian system. This was achieved through the rhetorics of proletarian internationalism, ‘exchange of experience’, and ‘mutual assistance’.11 On the other hand, it should be noted that Soviet domination over Czechoslovakia encountered resistance almost from the very beginning. Unlike a typical colony, Czechoslovakia had experience of modern democratic system established in 1918 upon the break-up of AustriaHungary, after centuries of struggles for national self-determination, which lasted until 1939. Thus, instead of succumbing to Soviet cultural assimilation, the Czechs and Slovaks maintained their own separate cultural and linguistic identities. The remnants of the capitalist system of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1939), were also still felt in the Czechoslovak postwar industry and economy. Indeed, as David Chioni-Moore notes, for the Soviets, cities such as Prague, Budapest and Berlin were ‘colonial prizes’ rather than remote outposts to civilize.12 The Russophilia that characterized the early postwar years in Czechoslovakia faded with the revelation of Stalin’s atrocities, dissatisfaction with living behind the Iron Curtain, poor results from the centralized economy, and eyewitness accounts of Soviet underdevelopment and poverty. By 1968, the Czechs and Slovaks were squarely on the path toward their own political model, carefully formulated as ‘socialism with a human face’. Thus, the official reproduction of the values and discourses of the colonizer was a performance that could be called, with reservation, ‘mimicry’, in Homi Bhabha’s term. 13 The people pretended to have internalized the values of the colonizer; however, their imperfect reproduction of these values subverted them. This becomes a source of comic effect in the Czech post-communist film Kolya, 14 whose Czech protagonist Louka pretends to speak Russian while in reality speaking Czech with a Russian accent. His unintended parody of Russian makes the language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sound like a dialect of Czech, reversing the power dynamic between the two languages.

11 12 13 14

Martin, p. 80. David Chioni-Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA, 116.1 (2001), 111-28 (p. 121). See Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicy and Men’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85-92. Kolja, dir. Jan Svĕrák. Jan Svĕrák Pictures, 1996.

142 Dobrota Pucherová

Colonial Trauma Narratives: The Poetry of August 1968 The film Kolya is part of post-communist narratives through which the Czechs and Slovaks have been trying to cope with their own experience of Soviet colonialism. The events of 1968 inspired a flurry of poetic reactions immediately ex-post, expressing anger, disappointment, and despair, published on the pages of the briefly-free local press and abroad where many Czechs and Slovaks emigrated after the invasion. The event became a taboo subject until the fall of the communist regime in 1989, when it became possible again to openly speak about it in terms of trauma, and it became the subject of countless novels, films and plays. Read as collective trauma narratives, these literary expressions speak about the identity of the Czechs and Slovaks and their view of their role in history. An analysis of the poetry of August 1968, which is a particular case of Eastern European Orientalism, will be followed by a reading of four contemporary Slovak novels engaging with the event from a post-socialist perspective. A discussion of Slovak poetry of August 1968 should begin by noting that Slovakia was the less industrialized part of Czechoslovakia, traditionally regarded by the Czechs with a certain degree of Orientalism as the less sophisticated and more emotional Eastern European nation within their federation. In this sense, Slovak poetry on August 1968 can be read as symptomatic of Slovak aspiration to West European cultural identity, which is constructed in opposition to the Soviets, represented as ‘Eastern barbarians’ who came to trample on their Western civilization. In this reversal of the Orientalist gaze of the West European colonizer, the Soviets are regarded as a ‘primitive’ nomadic culture of the Asian steppe, and their invasion is even compared to the 16th and 17th century raids in the Slovak territory by the Tartars and Turks, who in the collective Slovak imagination figure as the barbaric Other (being both nomads and Muslims). This is clear from expressions such as ‘steppe horses’, ‘bands’ and ‘holes under the Urals’: From under the hoofs of the steppe horses From under the trampling wheels Dust of suffering whirls in disks Covering my house in the heart of Europe Exploded the bands Rude bands From the holes under the Urals.15 15

Gorazd Zvonický, ‘Len črepy’ [Just Broken Shards], in Dvadsiatyprvý: August 1968 v tvorbe slovenských spisovateľov [August the 21st in the Work by Slovak Authors], ed. by Jozef M. Rydlo (Martin: Matica slovenská, 1993), pp. 9-17 (p. 9). All translations are mine.

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The poems further compare the Soviet army to ‘locusts’, ‘beetles’, ‘bed bugs’, ‘leeches’, and ‘tape worms’, associating it with destructive natural catastrophes and parasitism, and the soldiers are ‘jackals’, ‘hyenas’, ‘beasts’, and ‘wolves’, evoking irrational aggression as well as (some) non-European fauna. More expressive metaphors describe the Soviet culture as pre-modern and irrational through metaphors such as ‘prehistoric Siberian bear’, 16 ‘mastodons’,17 ‘pterodactyls’,18 and ‘the rule of the apes that returns to the middle of the twentieth century’,19 and even denies it participation in the Slavic identity: ‘He is not a Brother! Not a Slav!’ 20 However, the most symptomatic metaphors in the collection associate the Soviets with Asian nomadic societies, such as ‘Asiatic eyes and knives’,21 ‘Huns’,22 ‘Vandals’,23 and ‘Mameluks’ (i.e., Muslims), 24 whereas the Slovaks are represented as farmers and peasants whose wheat harvest has been trampled on by the invaders. 25 Slovakia is further imagined as a ‘lamb’, 26 ‘sacrificial sheep’, 27 ‘nation of doves’, 28 ‘white dove’, 29 ‘bird in a cage’, 30 ‘baby in a cradle’, 31 ‘paradise’,32 or ‘red rose’.33 Slovak identity is nostalgically constructed here as peasant, peace-loving and ‘dove-like’, the clichés originating in the Romantic imagination of the 19th century Slovak nationalist movement. This essential binarism between the ‘civilized’ European Czechoslovakia situated ‘in the heart of Europe’ (see above) and the ‘backward’ Asian USSR serves to emphasize the illegitimacy of the invasion and confirm the cultural superiority of Czechoslovakia. The only author who escapes this schematism is Jozef Svätopluk Sloboda (whose name is clearly a pseudonym – ‘sloboda’ is freedom and Svätopluk is the name of a 9th-century Great Moravian prince mythologized 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Anton Murin, ‘Invázia’ [Invasion], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 100. Alexander Karšay, ‘Kvietok na ulici’ [Flower in the street], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 146. Ibid. Murin, p. 101. Ján Stacho, ‘Nie’ [No], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p, 69. Zvonický, p. 17. Andrej Hora, ‘Slovensko 1970’ [Slovakia 1970], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 153. Zvonický, p.14. Ján Vetva, ‘Nádeje skvitli-nádeje zvädli’[Hopes rose and faded], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 45 Anton Murín, ‘Krvácajúca zem’ [Bleeding earth], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 92 Karol Strmeň, ‘Augustová elégia’ [August elegy], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 66. Vojtech Mihálik, ‘Rekviem’ [Requiem], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 109. Jozef Rampák, ‘Byť alebo nebyť’ [To be or not to be], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 79. Jozef Rampák, ‘Zlomené ilúzie’ [Broken illusions], in Dvadsiatyprvý o, p. 80. Sida Rákay, ‘Tak ako vták’ [Like a bird], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 83. Anton Murín, ‘Čierny verš’ [Black verse], in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 93. Ibid. Karšay, p. 146.

144 Dobrota Pucherová as the first Slovak king), who thematises Slovak collaboration with the Soviets. His poem speaks of ‘Slovak hyenas’ following the ‘pack of Marxist wolves’ who are ‘prowling around the Tatras’ and parodies the ideological rhetorics of the Communist Party: Love the Party! Do not think! The Party thinks for you. Do you want to be human? How silly! Parrots are sufficient. And wolves. And hyenas. The Party wants no more. Divine Lenin wants it so. Close yourself to the cage of ideology. One who thinks, betrays. Cut off your head and throw it into the Kremlin cesspit.34

This poem shows that an attempt to create Slovak identity in opposition to the ‘Otherness’ of the USSR eventually falls apart, since it is built on an unreal, binary essentialism: the Slovaks are complicit in the propagation of the totalitarian regime. The poem refers to the splitting within the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and the fact that the Soviet invasion was a reaction to the secret letter written to Leonid Brezhnev by five members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party who criticized the reforms of the Prague Spring. The so-called ‘invitation letter’ asked Brezhnev for ‘brotherly help’ in the face of the ‘threat of counter-revolution.’ The letter was regarded as high treason by the leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. According to Jeffrey Alexander, a collective trauma narrative tries to answer these questions: 1) what actually happened; 2) who were the victims; 3) what is the relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience; and 4) who is responsible.35 The answers to these questions, he emphasizes, will never be straightforward, because ‘in an actual social practice, speech acts never unfold in an unmediated way [but are] powerfully mediated by the nature of the institutional arenas and stratification hierarchies within which it occurs’. 36 Slovak poetry of August 1968 demonstrates a powerful antiSoviet sentiment filtered through the historical European fear of the Asian Other and an effort to constitute own identity as Western in opposition to it. As Achille Mbembe writes, postcolonial memory is composed of ‘psychic 34 35

36

Jozef Svätopluk Sloboda, ‘August 1970’, in Dvadsiatyprvý, p. 75. Jeffrey Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. by J. Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 1-30 (pp. 13-15). Ibid., p. 15.

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images [...] composed of absent objects, of formative, original experiences that occurred in the past. [...] Therefore, what is important in memory [...] is not so much “truth”, but rather gaps, “lies”, erasures, and blackouts [...] all of which can be summed up as the reluctance to confess.’37 In her essay ‘When they entered our dark streets’, Slovak writer Irena Brežná (who in 1968 emigrated with her parents to Switzerland) describes the Soviet invasion from the other point of view—that of a Soviet soldier. Muhammad Salich was 18 when sent to Czechoslovakia ‘to suppress a counter-revolution and liberate the local population’. 38 He came from Uzbekistan and it was his first trip beyond his native village. He was ‘fascinated by being in a European city with a real medieval castle […] The next day, he saw for the first time in his life young women in miniskirts who were giving him flyers and trying to tell him, without anger, patiently, that he was committing a crime’.39 This initial revelation is confirmed when Salich witnesses his superiors shooting a young girl during a protest gathering: In Bratislava, Muhammad Salich understood that he was not a Russian and that Uzbekistan with its cotton plantations is only a typical Soviet colony. [...] The last straw in his decision to definitively end his relationship with the USSR was the attack on the Slovak Radio station. His armed patrol entered abandoned corridors, ready to shoot. A lone employee immediately surrendered with hands up. He burst into laughter, realizing how ridiculous he was.40

The testimony by Salich collapses the binary classification of colonizer and colonized and illustrates Foucault’s claim that power is not concentrated and hegemonic, but employed and exercised though a net-like organization. ‘And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing or exercising power’.41 This dispersal of power makes it difficult to resist, and means that the experience of trauma is also dispersed. As Dominic LaCapra has frequently asserted, perpetrators can also be traumatized by their participation in extreme violence. 42 On the other hand, as Michael Rothberg argues, referring to traumatic memory in postcolonial terms may involve experiences of complicity under colonial oppression, and thus, ‘complicity can lead to 37 38 39 40 41 42

Mbembe, p. 28. Irena Brežná, ‘Keď vnikli do našich tmavých ulíc’ [When They Entered our Dark Streets], SME, 24 May 2008, p. 32. Ibid. Ibid. Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (Hertfordshire: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 98. Dominic LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998), p. 41.

146 Dobrota Pucherová a more supple understanding of the implications of racial and colonial forms of violence, which [...] inevitably attack subjects on the ethical and moral levels as well as the physical and psychological’.43

Postcolonial Trauma Narratives of August 1968 As the above analysis of Slovak poetry of August 1968 has illustrated, the complex workings of power as well as the processes of self-construction during decolonization, in which complicity, guilt and agency are central issues, complicate the relationship between the society and the trauma. Achille Mbembe, writing about the African postcolony, points out the complexity of the ‘entanglement of desire, seduction and subjugation; not only oppression, but its enigma of loss’ during decolonization, involving the realization that people ‘have allowed themselves to be duped, seduced and deceived’. 44 Similarly, Leela Gandhi writes that ‘power traverses the imponderable chasm between coercion and seduction’.45 All of these issues have implications for post-communist East-Central Europe, in which the coming to terms with past trauma is complicated by, on the one hand, a history of seduction by the Soviet ideology, anti-Semitism during the Second World War, and postwar complicity with the communist regime; and, on the other, by disappointment over the outcome of the post-communist transformation—which was virtually everywhere corrupted by private desires, unrealistic expectations, and irresponsible decisions. These led to seizing of resources by individuals close to the ruling elite, control over state politics by oligarchs and, in extreme cases, the elimination of those who promoted democracy and civil society. In this situation, which Madina Tlostanova calls ‘global coloniality’ in her contribution in this volume, it is often difficult to determine the historical victims and perpetrators and analyse ‘what actually happened’.46 This poses the question of how to write a trauma narrative of the past that would contribute to the nation’s coming to terms with communist trauma and at the same time not obscure the reality of the pre-communist era and the current post-communist moment. In other words, is it possible to write a trauma narrative that leads to

43 44

45 46

Michael Rothberg, ‘Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response’, Studies in the Novel, 40.1&2 (2008), 224-234 (p. 232). Achille Mbembe, ‘The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share’, in Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. by Elleke Boehmer and Steven Morton (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010), pp. 27-54 (p. 35). Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburg: Edinburgh UP, 1998), p. 14. Alexander, p. 13.

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national recovery and at the same time does not leave out issues of complicity and betrayal? In Slovak post-communist trauma narratives, there have been two distinct approaches to the communist trauma. One the one hand, there is the historicist approach which assumes historical referentiality and the possibility of mimetic description of reality, represented by novels such as Viliam Klimáček’s Horúce leto 68 [The Hot Summer of 1968] (2011), Anton Baláž’s Len jedna jar [Only one Spring] (2013) and Boris Filan’s Klimtov bozk [Klimt’s Kiss] (2009). On the other, there is the postmodernist approach, represented by authors such as Peter Krištúfek, Pavol Rankov, and Lajos Grendel, which assumes the impossibility of recovering lost histories and refuses a teleological narrative leading to a conclusion. These two approaches reflect the opposing tendencies in cultural trauma theory which emerged, on the one hand, from Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, and, on the other, from notions of narrative psychology developed in the United States by Jerome Bruner and Theodore Sarbin. Central to Freud’s ideas about trauma in Studies on Hysteria (1895) is that certain events become traumatic only retrospectively, when the adult is able to reconstitute and understand their nature. Trauma is thus defined as a painful remembering of an experience which need not have been painful when it happened. Following upon Freud’s work, Cathy Caruth formulated cultural trauma theory that posits two inherent paradoxes of trauma: the fact that trauma is not experienced as it occurs, but only belatedly, 47 and the unknowability and inexpressibility of trauma. 48 For Caruth, trauma is an experience that keeps returning, yet remains inaccessible to conscious knowing; at the same time, it leads to loss of language and therefore necessarily resists narrativization and interpretation. From a postcolonial perspective, Caruth’s theorization of trauma has been found problematic in its abstract and self-inflicted nature; as Irene Visser writes, it ‘centrally poses the internal, abstract and “unsayable” causation of trauma rather than a historically concrete, knowable, external causation. This lack of historical particularity sits uneasily with postcolonialism’s eponymous focus on historical, political and socio-economic factors in processes of colonization and decolonization.’49 A different tendency in trauma theory is represented by Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery (1994), which argues that narrative is a powerful 47 48 49

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), p. 7. Ibid., pp. 91-92. Irene Visser, ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47.3 (2011), 270-282 (p. 273).

148 Dobrota Pucherová and empowering therapeutic tool, enabling integration of the traumatic experience and aiding healing and recovery. Herman’s ideas arise from notions of narrative psychology that stories, rather than logical arguments, are the vehicle by which the meaning of human experience and identities are constructed. 50 This line of thought has been embraced by postcolonial studies, because it is open to narrativization and allows a historically and culturally specific approach to trauma narratives. Postcolonial writing engages with colonial trauma that had been negated, since the dominant narrative, written by the colonizer, insisted on the legitimacy of the colonizing act. Postcolonial trauma literature is concerned with the identification and articulation of traumatic events; it recovers ignored histories, and brings forth marginalized historical actors. The work of the Yale sociologist Jeffrey Alexander seems to reconcile the Freudian and narrative-psychological streams in trauma studies. One of his key ideas is that collective traumas are not natural responses of a society to traumatic events, because collective identities are not natural, but culturally constructed.51 Past events that are currently thought of as deeply traumatic for a society are not inherently devastating, but rather are constructed as such through cultural processes. In other words, harmful events are often not perceived by a society as harmful until constructed as such through narratives, which enable members of a society to share the suffering of others and to develop collective consciousness. This theoretical framework is useful for thinking about the events of August 1968, which before 1989 could not be discussed in terms of trauma. While they were certainly traumatic for those who directly experienced them, they did not produce the effect of collective or national trauma. This became clear in the 1990s and 2000s, when the negative effects of the neo-liberal transformation on individual lives made a significant portion of the population believe that ‘life was better during socialism’ and repeatedly vote for populist, ostensively social-democratic parties. The events of 1968 became consolidated as a ‘national trauma’ only after 1989, when they became the most reproduced collective trauma narrative of the communist era, represented as a drastic interruption of Czechoslovakia’s WestEuropean and democratic identity. Alexander’s idea can also be applied to the memory of the Jewish Holocaust in Slovakia, which was entirely suppressed by the anti-Semitic communist regime and started to be recognized as a collective national trauma only after 1994, when the Slovak Museum of Jewish Culture was established. 50 51

See Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990). Alexander, pp. 1-30.

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Post-Socialist Realism: Viliam Klimáček, ‘The Hot Summer of 68’ Viliam Klimáček’s novel ‘The Hot Summer of 68’ 52 from 2011 is an example of a post-communist trauma narrative that takes a distinctly historicist approach. Based on the author’s interviews, conducted in 2007, with Slovaks who emigrated to Canada in 1968, its aim is to record the stories of Slovaks whose lives were drastically interrupted by the Soviet invasion. The novel’s documentary character is emphasized by the fact that the narrator is the author himself, who personally witnessed many of the events and enters the narrative through authorial commentary: ‘I am writing a documentary novel’ (150). This is used to legitimize the narrative as ‘objective historical truth’. The novel clearly works with the concept from narrative psychology that it is possible and necessary to excavate traumatic history and narrativize what happened in order to achieve understanding and recovery. Paradoxically, however, the novel’s tendency to historicize comes into conflict with its interpretive approach and the desire to draw clear lessons from history. Addressed to younger readers for whom the events of 1968 have become distant, ‘The Hot Summer of 68’ is interspersed with explanatory commentary and appeals to the emotions. Furthermore, the novel’s binary perception of the characters mars its aspiration to historical objectivity. Dissidents are always good people with good family relations; a convinced communist is not only a secret police spy, but also an unfaithful husband and a devious schemer full of hatred. These meanings are served to the reader explicitly, allowing no doubt: ‘Lajoš was a thick-skinned swine’ (p. 71). Such a schematic narrative, which portrays the years 1968-1969 as a struggle of good against evil, recalls socialist realism with its simplified view of history. In this ‘post-socialist realism’, characters are either good or bad depending on their relationship to the Communist Party. Through the character of Lajoš, who collaborates with the regime, the novel attempts to portray the complex entanglements of totalitarian power and victimization. However, since Lajoš is represented as the personification of evil, his character remains exceptional, which obscures the fact that thousands of Slovaks collaborated with the regime, as revealed by the secret police files made public after 2000 by the Institute of National Memory.53 A sentence such as ‘we are a nation condemned to gentleness. It is easy to occupy such a nation’ (p. 65) uses the Romantic ‘dove nation’ cliché of 19th century Slovak nationalism to misleadingly elide this fact, as well as other dark

52 53

Viliam Klimáček, Horúce leto 68 [The Hot Summer of 68] (Bratislava: Marenčin PT, 2011). All translations are mine. See Accessed 15 June 2014.

150 Dobrota Pucherová corners of Slovak history (such as Slovak participation in the Jewish Holocaust during World War II). The novel’s interpretation of events allows no ambiguity of meaning: the Soviet invasion is portrayed as a national tragedy that victimizes peaceloving, democratically-oriented people. According to Astrid Erll this is an ‘antagonistic way’ of writing history, typical for war novels: the memory of a certain group is legitimized, while other versions are deconstructed as false. 54 In Klimáček’s imagination, there is no room for a committed communist whose story might be legitimized as part of collective memory. The Slovaks (with rare exceptions) are depicted as innocent victims of colonialism, whose suffering morally cleanses them, whereas the USSR is a monolithic enemy synecdochically represented by the ‘wide faces, Asian features, slit eyes’ (p. 61) of the Soviet soldiers; i.e., faces represented in the Orientalist tradition as visibly non-European and inscrutable. Neil Smelser observes that, by contrast with individual trauma, a society comes to terms with a collective trauma by continuously remembering it.55 It is an experience that a society needs to overcome, but at the same time must not forget, to ensure that the event that caused it will not be repeated. The paradox of collective trauma is that if its meaning is stabilized and closed (which is the precondition for recovery in the case of individual trauma), the society will stop talking about it and there is danger that the event that caused it will be forgotten. The moment when a narrative’s meaning is closed is the moment when the narrative becomes ideological; i.e., legitimizing one dominant vision at the expense of others. Therefore, the meaning of collective trauma must be constantly problematized, questioned, and re-interpreted. ‘The Hot Summer of 68’, in its pursuit of straightforward meanings and narrative closure, only confirms conventional ideas and does not create space for analysis. It is written in a mimetic realist mode that assumes historical referentiality, ignoring the issues of the process of remembering and the problems of recording personal memory, such as memory loss, repression, conflation of memories, etc.56

54

55 56

Astrid Erll, ‘Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 389-398 (p. 391). Neil Smelser, ‘Psychological and Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, pp. 31-59. On this, see Dominic LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), p. 128.

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Historiographic Metafiction: Peter Krištúfek, ‘The House of the Deaf ’ A different approach to traumatic history is taken by Peter Krištúfek in his monumental novel ‘The House of the Deaf ’ (2012) 57 set in Slovakia between the 1930s –1990s, which blends fiction and history in a highly selfreflective manner. As the novel’s opening sentence—‘Every clock in this house shows a different time’ (p. 19)—indicates, the novel is concerned with multiple interpretations of the past. It tells the story of Alfonz Trnovský, a medical doctor from the fictitious small Slovak town of Brežany, narrated by his son. Unlike Klimáček, Krištúfek is not concerned with historical veracity. When the novel adopts its episodes from historical sources, it purposefully manipulates them; at the same time, it is intertwined with documents posing as historical, demanding the reader’s participation in decoding history. Clearly, the author is working with postmodern understanding of historiography and fiction as equally valid discourses that record and interpret history. It arises from the awareness that events from the past are forever lost: what remains are only narrative records that are already interpretations. 58 Scepticism about the possibility of finding objective historical truth leads to the foregrounding of narrative as the central meaning-making vehicle of historical consciousness.59 Krištúfek emphasizes this textual, derivative character of history and memory by, on the one hand, adopting his narratives from other sources and, on the other, emphasizing the unreliability of memory and the resulting ‘fluidity’ of history. He describes how memory works: actual memories commingle with memories of reproduced images, but we can no longer distinguish them. ‘Familiar historical images like to make their way into memories’ (pp. 101-102). In this sense, as Birgit Neumann observes, it is no longer possible to write an authentic story, since we perceive all our experiences (real and imagined) through adopted narrative models and internalized mental images. 60 Therefore, Krištúfek’s ambition is not to write a mimetically ‘convincing’

57 58 59

60

Peter Krištúfek, Dom hluchého [The House of the Deaf] (Bratislava: Marenčin PT, 2012). All translations are mine. See Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 46; Dominic LaCapra (1985), p. 128. See, e.g., Hayden White, Tropics of Dicourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978); Roland Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 1986), pp. 127-140; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representation of Memory’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, pp. 334-343.

152 Dobrota Pucherová narrative; on the contrary, he is always undermining the authority of the narrator. Krištúfek’s project could be described with Linda Hutcheon’s helpful term ‘historiographic metafiction’. It is a genre that ‘plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record’ in such a way that ‘certain known historical details are deliberately falsified in order to foreground the possible mnemonic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error’, in contrast to historic fiction that ‘incorporates and assimilates these data in order to lend a feeling of verifiability’.61 This way of writing suggests that recording history is always a process of fictionalization. ‘The House of the Deaf ’ even suggests that a creative interpretation of historical experience could seem more authentic than the actual experience. In a world saturated with reproductions of reality, the simulacrum becomes more authentic than the reality:62 Susan and I saw three screenings in a row. [...] I now know Bielik’s ‘Wolves’ Lairs’ 63 intimately. If you did not have the opportunity to properly enjoy the Uprising64 in the original, or if it was too short for you, now you had a great opportunity. (p. 302)

Another useful term for describing remembering in ‘The House of the Deaf ’ is Toni Morrison’s term ‘re-memory’: a memory arising from the images, narratives and rituals through which a society remembers an event after those with living memory of the event have passed away. Since Krištúfek, who was born in 1973, did not experience August 1968, his description of the event is necessarily based on his memory of the narratives of the event and its mediation through art. For example, the scene below from ‘The House of the Deaf ’ recalls the scene in the American film The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988),65 where the image of a shaking glass of water announces the arrival of Soviet tanks to Prague. While it is not suggested that the author took the scene directly from the film, it is possible that his memory of the image subconsciously influenced his writerly imagination: 61 62 63 64 65

Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 114. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Vlčie diery [Wolves’ Lairs], a Slovak film (1948) about the Slovak National Uprising, dir. By Paľo Bielik. Slovak National Uprising—people’s guerilla war against the fascist Slovak State in 1944–1945. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, dir. Philip Kaufmann. Saul Zaentz Company, 1988.

Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-) Communist Literature 153 In the middle of the night, half asleep, I went to get a drink of water into the kitchen. It seemed like the continuation of my dream—everything started to shake, even the mug of water that I had placed on the counter. It travelled to the edge of the counter and finally fell on the floor. Earthquake—I thought. (p. 384)

A collective trauma thus becomes a collective re-memory of trauma. This narrative approach reflects Caruth’s proposition that trauma is not experienced as it occurs, but only belatedly, and that it cannot be expressed in our own words, but only with the help of images and narratives borrowed from others. However, Krištúfek does not adopt these narratives and images straightforwardly, but often subverts them with irony: Since we are a dove nation—with soft plumes and fine beaks, tiny claws, cooing sweetly—we started to fight in our own way. Not really, only like doves do, through symbols. An act of resistance was everything, even when you went to the toilet in the morning. No matter that no one saw you. Then you grew a beard in protest, at least you saved on razors. [...] You protested by brushing your teeth and putting on your shoes, smoking or stopping smoking, you protested sexually (especially in bolder positions), and while cooking pea porridge. The worst of it was that I also protested in this way. (p. 387)

By pointing out the absence of resistance to the Soviets in Slovakia, the novel undermines the official post-communist trauma narrative and shows the society as not invested enough in the idea of freedom. Similarly, the novel de-mythologizes the status of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 as a victory over totalitarianism. It shows former high-profile communists as entering politics under different guises, while innocent people are wrongly accused of having been secret police agents under the communist regime. The USSR as the civilizational model is replaced by the USA while the ideological rhetorics remains the same—only some details have changed: ‘After the fall of the communist regime we turn our eyes with hope to our great model—the founder and guarantor of modern democracy in the world—the United States of America’ (p. 485). The upsurge of Slovak nationalism, which leads to the 1993 break-up of Czechoslovakia, is seen as a revival of communism: ‘In his nationally-aware articles [...] [Peter] reflected on who is and who is not a true Slovak—he could at first sight recognize the sell-outs and the cosmopolitans, just as before he had been able to expose the Trockists, opportunists and reactionaries’ (p. 498). Therefore, ‘The House of the Deaf ’ cannot offer a clearly structured trauma narrative, in which the roles of aggressors and victims would be clear, since it shows former victims as complicit in present violence. The people, according to the novel, are guilty of forgetting the past:

154 Dobrota Pucherová We started anew already in 1918, then in 1938, then in 1945, then in 1948, then in 1968, then 1969, then completely anew in 1989, again in 1993[...]. Our national illness is serious amnesia. That is why the same people keep emerging and pretending that their head has been changed. (p. 498)

According to Mbembe, the postcolony is a debased mirror of the colony, saturated with terror and destruction, in which colonial terror effects are repeated as the arbitrary rule of the leader, who had once been the victim of terror. The way out of this, according to Mbembe, lies in the resurrection of the dead through proper memorialization, and in the realization that some lost things can never be restored, because if they could, then past events could not be recognized as trauma. ‘The House of the Deaf ’ seeks to resurrect the dead through the so-called ‘small histories’ of human lives that do not fit directly into the national trauma narrative, and shows that lost things cannot be restored by forgetting history and pretending to start anew.

The Absurdity of History: Pavol Rankov, ‘It Happened on the First of September’ A similar approach to collective memory is taken by Pavol Rankov in his novel ‘It Happened on the First of September (or at another time)’ (2008).66 Set in the period 1938–1968 in a small town in southern Slovakia, the story focuses on the lives of three friends whose destinies are affected by their ethnic identities (Hungarian, Czech, and Jewish). Rankov thus decentres Slovak national history through its historically marginalized minorities in order to highlight Slovak racism and ethnic violence before and during World War II and to de-mythologize the ‘dove-nation’ cliché. In this way, the novel rewrites the communist history that portrayed Slovaks as the victims of German fascism and obscured or completely elided Slovak anti-Semitism and active participation in the deportations of the Jewish population to concentration camps, as well as the Slovak anti-Czech, anti-Hungarian and anti-German sentiments that led to expulsions of these minorities from Slovakia after the war (and sometimes to extra-judicial executions of entire communities). 67 In a postcolonial gesture, Rankov seeks to bring these minorities back into the national history and emphasize the multi-layered nature of colonial violence whose agents are multiple and often colonized themselves. 66

67

Pavol Rankov, Stalo sa prvého septembra (alebo inokedy) [It Happened on the First of September (or at another time)] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2008). All translations are mine. On this, see the documentary film Feldvidék – Horná zem/Feldvidék – Caught in Between, dir. Vladislava Plančíková (2014)

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Accordingly, the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia is only one episode in the novel—the last one. Rather than presenting it as a unique traumatic event that forcibly interrupted Slovakia’s West-European-oriented identity, as Slovak post-communist historiography has tended to do, Rankov reconstructs it as yet another episode in the series of historical acts of violence that includes the 1938 Munich Agreement, the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany, Slovak fascism and anti-Semitism during the war, the 1948 seizure of power by the communists and forced expropriations, the communist show trials of the 1950s, the persecution of the suspected ‘enemies of the state’, etc. The novel’s cyclical structure, in which key events always happen on or around the first of September, complicates the definitions of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ and (like ‘The House of the Deaf ’) illustrates how history repeats itself. At the same time, ‘It Happened on the First of September’ is clearly not a realist historical novel in which fictional narrative illustrates familiar history. Rather, it is a postmodern play in which the ‘grand narrative’ of history is repeatedly subverted by absurd episodes characterized by hyperbole, parody, the grotesque, and the fantastic. By placing real historical characters into absurd situations, the novel abolishes the borderline between ‘fiction’ and ‘history’ and portrays history as a series of random incidents. In one of these episodes, Rankov fictionalizes the 1952 show trial in which fourteen prominent members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party were tried on trumped up charges as part of purges instigated by the Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald against those who resisted the Stalinization of Czechoslovak politics. Eventually, only eleven of the accused were sentenced to death, while three received life imprisonment. The reasons for this decision were never revealed. In Rankov’s novel, the event is given a particular absurd logic through the author’s imagination. He portrays Klement Gottwald (who was originally a carpenter) lovingly preparing coffins for his fourteen comrades. Since he only manages to make eleven coffins before he runs out of time, he finally decides that the last three will receive life imprisonment instead of a death sentence: He worked from dawn to dusk. He measured, sawed, joined, carved, drilled, hammered, glued, painted, polished. [...] He would not stop to rest. In his mind, he saw the men for whom he was preparing the last place of rest. He could do no more for them. Each coffin was personal. This one is stocky, he remembered and made his coffin a bit wider. When he measured the second one, he imagined the next one, who was tall, and made the coffin longer. The one with large feet needed a higher cover. He was bound to each of them by memories. It was more than friendship. They had been comrades in the struggle. Their relationship was born from the same hopes and desires, strengthened by persecution and oppression by enemies. They became like brothers. [...] One day the door of his

156 Dobrota Pucherová workshop opened. They were calling him. He quickly scanned the room and looked at the coffins he’d made. [...] He put his heads in his hands. His heavy manly tears loudly dropped on the floor. He had run out of time. Eleven instead of fourteen. –I’m late, I didn’t make it, –he sobbed. (pp. 175-176)

In the above episode, Rankov suggests that history cannot be explained by known narratives, because phenomena such as racism, fear or the desire to murder one’s friends cannot be explained rationally. Clearly, Rankov’s view of history emphasizes its absurdity, as he relates in an interview: I think what is typical for my short stories is their tendency towards the absurd and the irrational. Our life—both personal and social—is, however, also full of absurd, senseless situations. From today’s point of view, the same can be said about history, especially the history of the 20th century.68

A similar position has been expressed by Claude Lanzmann when he describes his documentary film project Shoah that recorded testimonies from concentration camps: It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms—Why have the Jews been killed?—for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah. I had clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical, and at the same time the only possible operative, attitude.69

According to Caruth, the act of refusal, here, is therefore not a denial of a knowledge of the past, but rather a way of gaining access to a knowledge that has not yet attained the form of ‘narrative memory’. In its active resistance to the platitudes of knowledge, this refusal opens up the space for a testimony that can speak beyond what is already understood.70

In Caruth’s poststructuralist view, verbalization of traumatic memory is not only impossible, but also undesirable, because attempts to comprehend violence through language lead towards banal understanding—that violence 68

69 70

Tina Čorná, ‘Chcem byť ticho a zároveň veľa povedať ’ [I want to be quiet and at the same time say a lot], Anasoft Litera, 8 September 2009, available at Accessed 13 May 2014. Cit. in Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), pp. 154-155. Ibid.

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arises from the irrational hatred of people who seem different from us. Like Lanzmann, Rankov refuses to rationally explain violent history according to known narratives. Instead, he uses the absurd to show that violence is not logical, but irrational. The novel suggests that liberation from the violent logic of history must sometimes involve the rejection of accepted interpretations of history and the realization of the irrational motivation of human action, because an attempt to understand violence might mean accepting it. At the same time, however, the novel calls into question the adequacy of narrative alone to enable healing and the restoration of agency. The novel ends with the three friends escaping the country upon the Soviet invasion, with the plan to return when the situation gets back to ‘normal’. However, they leave behind Mária, the woman they love, who in the novel personifies the motherland. The last sentences of the novel belong to her: ‘My three boys. My three unfulfilled lives’ (p. 327). This ending implies that a postcolonial recovery of language must be joined by material compensation and a fundamental refiguring of socio-spatial relationships. In this sense, the novel reflects the concerns of postcolonial studies, which seek to emphasize that colonial violence involves not only psychological trauma, but also bodily injury, material loss and displacement, and the restorative process must therefore be not only symbolic, but also material.

Historical Ironies: Lajos Grendel, ‘In Our New Hont’ The novel ‘In Our New Hont’ 71 by the Hunagrian-minority writer Lajos Grendel, who lives in Slovakia but writes exclusively in Hungarian, is yet again set in a typical small Slovak town between the years 1944 and 1998 and relates minor histories. The fictitious town of ‘New Hont’ is situated in southern Slovakia, where the borders repeatedly shifted during the 20th century: the town is first located in Austria-Hungary, then in Czechoslovakia, between 1938-1945 it is in Hungary, then again in Czechoslovakia, and after 1993 in Slovakia. The narrator is a writer commissioned by the New Honters to write a novel about their town and thus recover the ‘idea’ or ‘essence’ (p. 16) of New Hont that had once existed but was later forgotten, since in New Hont ‘nothing significant ever happened’ (p. 14). In collecting oral history, the writer realizes that it is impossible to reconstruct a collective identity for New Hont, since the town is essentially a hybrid Slovak-Hungarian town (moreover, as its name suggests, affected by globalization) whose ethnic groups have lived together 71

Lajos Grendel, Nálunk, New Hontban [In Our New Hont] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001). All translations are mine.

158 Dobrota Pucherová in peace, but cannot agree on a common interpretation of history. The only identity of New Hont seems to in be the provincial inconsequentiality that prevented it from entering national history. To rewrite Slovak 20th-century history from the point of view of such a historically, culturally and geographically marginal area is, in a sense, a ‘revisionist’ gesture. The small history of a marginal town offers the narrator innumerable opportunities for irony and parody, as it is full of contradictions and paradoxes that undermine not only the communist, but also the postcommunist historiography of the period of 1944–1989. One example is an episode from the year 1944, in which New Hont’s inhabitants are impatiently awaiting liberation by the ‘Russians’, even though their town had never been occupied by the Germans, since for them it had ‘zero importance from a strategic point of view’ (p. 19). The Red Army that finally arrives is composed of Ukrainians instead of Russians. Their commandant speaks fluent Hungarian and is clearly someone who after the break-up of Austria-Hungary in 1918 found himself on the ‘wrong side’ of the border, that is, in Ukraine. This ‘Russian’ army officer is angered by the image of the Hungarian fascist president, General Horty, forgotten on the wall of a classroom, which provokes him to violence. This type of historical irony points to the instability of identities in Central Europe, where a number of nations and ethnicities commingle in a relatively small space and political systems change all the time. In the episode from August 1968, New Hont is invaded by the Warsaw Pact Army. However, these are not Soviet but Hungarian soldiers, and their commandant is Pišta Szabó, a native of New Hont, whose family left the town for Hungary in December 1944 before liberation by the Red Army, because as ethnic Hungarians they did not want to live in Czechoslovakia again. Learning that the invading army is led by ‘one of them’ makes the New Hont inhabitants feel calmer and hopeful. As it ironically turns out, Pišta is a cynical and opportunistic henchman of the Soviets: -Tell me, son, why the hell have you come here? [...] -We have come, Uncle Kálmán, to overthrow the counter-revolution. -But there is no counter-revolution here! -I know, said lieutenant Pišti. -You see, sighed Uncle Kálmán with relief. So why have you come? -To overthrow the counter-revolution! [...] We will be strict and overthrow the counter-revolution even before it starts. That is, preventively. [...] It is clear, right? (pp. 80-90)

In this way, the novel complicates the post-communist interpretation of the 1968 invasion as a violent act of the USSR against freedom-oriented Czechoslovakia. At the same time, it shows that mistrust towards foreigners

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and ‘Others’, typical for small communities, is based on an irrational fear that masks its own moral flaws: the novel exposes Slovak and Hungarian nationalism and collaboration with both fascism and communism. By retelling history from the point of view of a small border town, the novel affirms that the division of historical actors into victims and perpetrators is never simple. According to Hutcheon, this type of postmodern parody not only fights against the forgetting of ‘small’ or alternative histories that are not part of the national history, while at the same time ‘put[s] into question the authority of any act of writing by locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single origin or simple causality.’72

Conclusion Slovak post-communist historical novel has tended to highlight the difficulty of defining the nation and national history in the multi-ethnic, constantly shifting Central European space where cultural identities have always been hybrid and multi-layered. In addition, the assumptions of narrative psychology, which argues for the necessity of structured narratives and clear definition of victims, perpetrators and causes of traumatic events as a path towards healing and recovery from trauma, may not always be suitable for dealing with collective traumas of communism and/or colonialism, which are complicated by issues of seduction, complicity, betrayal, as well as irrational drives and impulses. Instead, postmodern tendencies such as historiographic metafiction, irony, parody and the absurd, have the capacity to reveal the complex dispersal of power and victimization and the impossibility of recovering the past, which is lost forever. All that is possible are creative reconstructions of history, which refuse the single ‘truth’ of ‘known history’. The Central European post-communist novel thus joins the trend of postcolonial historiographic metafiction such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, and Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that fictionalize history in order to show how it is constructed. In this way, historiographic metafiction expresses seriousness through playfulness and has a refreshing effect on ideological (re)writings of history.

72

Hutcheon, p. 129.

Natalie Paoli ‘Let My People Go’: Postcolonial Trauma in Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Abstract: In The Museum of Abandoned Secrets the connection between memory and history is fundamental. This is because, for Ukrainian authors such as Oksana Zabuzhko, one’s relationship with the past is at the heart of one’s self-identification as ‘Ukrainian’. However, with the past comes the issue of collective trauma—the collective trauma the Ukrainian nation experienced as a result of Russian and Soviet oppression. While this trauma is collective in that it affected an entire nation, it is at the same time also individual. In her novel, Zabuzhko’s protagonist must negotiate both types of trauma, particularly in relation to identity formation in postcommunist Ukraine. She does this by going on a quest to reveal the truth of one aspect of her people’s history, and in doing so, works through her own trauma, giving it voice.

Published in English in 2012 (it was first released in Ukrainian in 2009), The Museum of Abandoned Secrets may well be considered Oksana Zabuzhko’s magnum opus. During an interview with the Kyiv Post, Zabuzhko referred to the novel as ‘something of a textbook on Ukraine and Ukrainian history’.1 It is an historical novel in the sense that it spans sixty years of Ukraine’s contemporary history and is characterized by its episodic prose style, giving the reader a sense of how memory functions. The novel presents the reader with a number of issues, from explorations around the gendered body to questions about the role of history in the present. This chapter seeks to examine those concerns specifically dealing with questions of trauma, on both a collective, national, level, as well as the trauma of being an individual and especially a woman. The issue of identity and identity formation, and questions around nationalism in what may now be termed ‘postcolonial’ Ukraine are also explored. During another interview, Zabuzhko stated that Ukraine ‘is a country which doesn’t yet know how to speak for herself ’.2 Following from this statement, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets becomes a mouthpiece for Ukraine and its people, and it is Zabuzhko’s primary protagonist, Daryna Goshchynska, through whom the reader gains insight into the traumatized psyche of a postcolonial, or even decolonial, individual. Postcolonial, or postcolonialism, is a contentious term which needs to be qualified, and, in the Ukrainian context, it has come to mean something very 1

2

Oksana Faryna, ‘Oksana Zabuzhko: “Hard to Be a Woman”’, Kyiv Post, 1 December 2011, Lifestyle section, available at Accessed 25 March 2013. Alexandra Hrycak and Maria G. Rewakowicz, ‘Feminism, intellectuals and the formation of micro-publics in postcommunist Ukraine’, Studies in East European Thought, 61.4 (2009), 309-333 (p. 325).

162 Natalie Paoli specific. Literary critic Vitaly Chernetsky explains that of ‘all the subjects of the former Russian empire, Ukraine has had one of the most complicated and difficult relationships with the metropoly’.3 It is a nation which endured, at the hands of the Russians, a ‘consistent and lengthy policy aimed at suppression and eradication of national identity, language, and culture.’ 4 Additionally, George Grabowicz elucidates that Ukraine’s past is a matter of Ukraine being ‘ever the object, not the subject of history’.5 This problem, as Grabowicz remarks, is ‘generic and constitutes a paradigmatic post-colonial issue’. 6 Grabowicz also explains that just as ‘the territory of what was Ukraine expanded many times, so also the content of what is ‘Ukrainian’ evolved in the cultural, political and even in the ethnic sense’.7 Significantly, he highlights that Ukraine’s independence ‘is particularly evocative of postcolonial transition,’ adding that, similarly to what Frantz Fanon observed with regards to postcolonial Africa, in Ukraine there now exist ‘economic and political crises, rampant corruption and, above all, a ruthless exploitation of national resources for the aggrandisement of the ruling elite’.8 The historical cultural and political relationship between the Russian or Soviet Empire and Ukraine is evocative of what Edward Said refers to as the ‘unequal relationship between unequal interlocutors’.9 In The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, these concerns are highlighted and grappled with: in particular, Ukraine’s position as a former colonial subject of the Soviet Union is emphasized throughout the novel. The question of national identity is an important one in The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, although it is brought across to the reader in subtle ways. This is because in most cases, as Maria Rewakowicz writes, Ukrainian female authors do not ‘champion national concerns, but a preoccupation with identities—national, gender, and class—is certainly there’. 10 Chernetsky explains that authors such as Zabuzhko (along with Salomea Pavlychko), are ‘responsible for an unparalleled revitalization of feminist consciousness in Ukraine, a recognition of the close ties between the personal and the 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Vitaly Chernetsky, ‘Postcolonialism, Russia and Ukraine’, Ulbandus: The Slavic Review of Columbia University, no. 7 (2003), 32-62 (36). Vitaly Chernetsky, ‘Ukrainian Literature at the End of the Millennium: The Ten Best Works of the 1990s’, World Literature Today, 76.2 (2002), 98-101 (p. 98). George G. Grabowicz, ‘Ukrainian Studies: Framing the Contexts’, Slavic Review, 54.3 (1995), 674-690 (p. 675). Ibid., p. 675. Ibid., p. 676. Grabowicz, p. 682. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 191. Maria G. Rewakowicz, ‘Women’s Literary Discourse and National Identity in PostSoviet Ukraine’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 27.1 (2004-2005), 195-216 (203).

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political in the traumas and struggles of Ukrainians, both men and women, and in drawing literary and critical discourse in the country to broad public attention while simultaneously endeavouring to bring it in contact with current international debates’. 11 According to Uilleam Blacker, in Zabuzhko’s prose works in general, the ‘bodies of her characters become microcosms of the national-colonial space’. 12 In The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, Zabuzhko uses her characters to move back and forth from the past (World War II Soviet Ukraine) to the present (post-independence, post Orange Revolution Ukraine) in order to paint a picture of the Soviets’ oppressive legacy there. In the novel, Daryna is a Ukrainian television journalist who became famous because of the programme she produces and hosts, rather aptly named Diogenes’ Lantern. She is a character who is thoroughly traumatized precisely because she has experienced personal trauma as well as partaking of the collective trauma of her people. She displays this trauma through the ways in which she expresses herself in the novel, primarily through an inner monologue which the reader is privy to. Her remarks are rendered in either an ironic, sarcastic, or tragic tone, illustrating perhaps her inability to properly express this trauma, rather simply providing passing comments. This relates to what trauma theorist Judith Lewis Herman states about the ‘unspeakableness’ of the trauma itself; it being unspeakable because it ‘overwhelm[s] the ordinary adaptations to life’. 13 However, as Herman highlights, atrocities ‘refuse to be buried’, because ‘[r]emembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites for both the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims’.14 By making the reader privy to her inner thoughts about the trauma she is experiencing, Daryna is exorcising ghosts, a metaphor for the overarching narrative of the novel. Ghosts from the Second World War infringe on Daryna and her partner’s lives in the attempt to make their stories heard, one aspect of the notion of collective trauma raised by Zabuzhko in the novel. It can be argued that The Museum of Abandoned Secrets presents the reader with a text that can be described as transhistorical in approach. For this term, I take the definition from Nancy Van Styvendale in her examination of literature by Native American writers, where the transhistorical, or transhistoricity, describes ‘intergenerational trauma,’ gesturing ‘toward a trauma that takes place and is repeated in multiple epochs and, in this sense, 11 12 13 14

Chernetsky, ‘Ukrainian Literature at the End of the Millennium’, p. 100. Uilleam Blacker, ‘Nation, Body, Home: Gender and National Identity in the Work of Oksana Zabuzhko’, The Modern Language Review, 105.2 (2010), 487-501 (p. 489). Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), pp. 8; 33. Herman, p. 1.

164 Natalie Paoli exceeds historicity’.15 Knowledge of the past, as is illustrated in the novel, is constantly in the back of Ukrainians’ minds. This issue is made evident at the beginning of the novel when Daryna reflects on her and her partner’s dead family members. It is implied that she is examining old photographs. She recalls some of their names: ‘[…] Apollinaria, Stefania, Ambroziy, Volodymyra—names that sound as if they belonged to a completely different nation, and maybe it was a different nation after all, the one wiped out in 1933 between Kyiv and Poltava […]’ (p. 3). Here Zabuzhko is making a reference to the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1933 that took the lives of millions of Ukrainians. This is one of many episodes in the novel where the notion of collective memory is demonstrated. Despite Daryna’s inability to fully express her trauma, she is intent on breaking the silence and exposing the truth. The trigger for this decision is her discovery of what became her father’s final raison d’être: […] I ran into a note in the margin of a yellowed coarse page […] written next to the apparently innocuous, idiotic critique, ‘Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness’. […] He underlined this critique with an impulsive, nearly straight line, and scrawled an equally triumphing this!!! with three exclamation marks in the margin. It struck me like a divinely inspired epiphany. […] I became firmly convinced that my father’s long ‘struggle against the system’ (as we Ukrainians have been calling it since 1991)—his desperate knocking on all those imposing oak doors; his countless letters, complaints, reports, and petitions to the Kyiv City Council, the Solicitor General’s Office, the Ukrainian Central Communist Party Committee, and the General Committee in Moscow (three or four bulging folders, held by strings tied into dead, eternal knots and stored in Mom’s attic); his trips to Moscow, each of which was supposed to resolve things once and for all, only every time they sent his query back to Kyiv and he had to start the cycle all over again—the whole gory mess that replaced his life and that finally sent him to the loony bin with the then-typical political diagnosis of ‘acute paranoid psychopathy,’ stemmed from nothing other than my father’s secret knowledge that he, too, shared, like a shameful disease, Hamlet’s damned hesitation to act decisively in the sight of triumphing evilness. And when the evil imperial machine rolled by, almost but not quite brushing him, it was this knowledge that prevented him from stepping back, that compelled him to throw himself in its path, and made him do so, again and again, each time recapturing the right to self-respect. (pp. 20-23)

Daryna reveals here to the reader not only her moment of epiphany upon discovering her father’s ‘this!!!’, but she also exposes what she refers to as the system of ‘Soviet criminal psychiatry’ (p. 24). This practice was used by the Soviets when it came to dealing with political criminals. Although this is an 15

Nancy Van Styvendale as quoted in Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, ‘Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels’, Studies in the Novel, 40.1 (2008), 1-12 (p. 9).

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instance of personal trauma for Daryna, it should also be considered an occurrence of collective trauma precisely because it happened to so many people during the Soviet rule. Traumatic events which occurred individually were in fact very much part of a collective experience. Another example of this is Daryna’s own experience of being interrogated by the secret police. It is in no way unique, and yet was uniquely traumatizing to her. She explains how the interrogator convinced her to be a spy for the KGB at her university: All of it wore her down so much that when the captain finally concluded his soliloquy (because he’d talked almost non-stop the entire time) and suggested she write some monthly reports for him, she, instead of telling him to eff off right there and then, agreed to ‘think about it’—compelled either by the student habit of not turning things in until the last possible moment (to win time to prepare, time to dress her refusal into an impeccably worded formula, although that was something they most certainly did not give a damn about!) or by the instinctive impulse to step away from the scene of an accident first, like when you break a heel walking, and only then catch your breath and assess the situation. (pp. 223224)

Daryna continues to explain that later on in her life she realized that this was in fact a collective experience, that she could recognize this ‘infestation of mind in dissidents’ memoirs’, and that people ‘lived like that for years, wired, as if into an electric grid, trying to untangle something that by definition could not be untangled’ (p. 224). However, the collective nature of these experiences did not, in fact, bring people together. As Daryna states: Millions of people went through the same trials, and yet no collective experience emerged from it, and every rookie had to start from scratch as though he (or she) were the only one in the world—a metaphysical state, almost, like in love or in death when no other’s experience is of any use to you, and no book has words for what is happening to you, the One and Only, with the sole difference that this whole thing was sealed under the massive lid of solid, shamed silence—this was not an experience people liked to share. (p. 224)

This is what Herman is referring to when she explains that to ‘speak publicly about one’s knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attached to victims.’16 In addition, she elucidates that the ‘knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level’.17 Daryna is well aware of the fact that many Ukrainians are 16 17

Herman, p. 2. Ibid.

166 Natalie Paoli living in denial, and she emphasises this at several points in the novel. Their denial of the oppression suffered simultaneously further traumatises her and spurs her on. She displays great loathing for the past and yet still has a strong relationship with it. For her, the past is constantly present, which relates to the concept of transhistoricity referred to earlier. Daryna struggles to negotiate with her personal past as well as her nation’s past more generally, and this is illustrated, once again, through her inner monologue in the novel. At several points, Daryna makes glib remarks either about the collective past of the nation, her own personal past experiences, or the current postcolonial situation in Ukraine. She consistently talks about what Ukrainians do or say, or how they act. Maria Rewakowicz explains that this is because the author is grappling with the connection between literary production and identity construction. 18 According to Rewakowicz, the reason for this is women’s literature in post-Soviet Ukraine serves an instructive purpose: ‘first, it is remarkably vibrant […] and no longer marginal, as was the case under the Soviet regime; and second, it provides a particularly interesting case for studying the complexity of national identity-formation in the postindependence period’. 19 The novel raises some questions around the complexities and contradictions associated with nationalist identity formation. It is a rather problematic issue, and Daryna wrestles with it as she works through the notion of identifying as ‘authentically’ Ukrainian. It is something which governs her life, to the extent that she will only choose an authentic Ukrainian man as her partner. Upon first meeting her partner, Adrian, she voices her concern about whether or not he would be a real Ukrainian: Something at first made me classify him as one of the Russian-speaking, bracing myself for the forced, just-learned Ukrainian, tight as a new shoe, with foreign phonemes rubbed raw like blisters […] and the cringe-inducing hobbling through phrases as they translate them, word for word. […] [L]inguistic neophytes eagerly borrowed the Galicians’ colourful words—folksy phrases and even the trademark lilting intonations—only to deploy them in most unnatural ways, believing all the while that this is exactly what one ought to sound like when one speaks pure and authentic Ukrainian, which, to be fair, they may never have heard spoken by anyone other than a Galician. And it’s not like Galicians can’t speak Russian either. As soon as they land in Kyiv, they switch and chirp merrily along, as if they were keeping Ukrainian for their own secret use, behind layers of mysterious rites and seals of conspiracy. (p. 16)

18 19

Rewakowicz, p. 195. Ibid.

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It is at this point that one might want to consider the issue of ethnolinguistic hierarchies apparent in The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, as well as in Zabuzhko’s first novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex. This is highly significant in the Ukrainian context, as language policies had a long history in Soviet Ukraine. As Vitaly Chernetsky writes, ‘[p]ersons ranging from ministers in tsarist governments to the “father” of socialist realism, Maksim Gorky, denied the very existence of a distinct Ukrainian language […]’.20 Similarly to The Museum of Abandoned Secret’s Daryna, the protagonist in Zabuzhko’s first novel is intent on having a partner who can speak the language ‘the way it is meant to be spoken’. Zabuzhko’s characters view those who still speak the ‘original’ language as the last champions of the Ukrainian people, the ones who have to rebuild Ukrainian identity in the post-Soviet era. One of the main reasons for this emphasis on purism, specifically purism of language, comes as a result of the history of acculturation under the Soviet regime. This phenomenon of Russification involved the suppression of the Ukrainian language in favour of Russian. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, several Ukrainian scholars, including Zabuzhko, have been placing great emphasis on raising the status of the Ukrainian language. There exists among this group of scholars a strong feeling of Ukrainophilia, the desire to restore Ukrainian culture and language practices, and a strong sense of historical consciousness. This, however, is quite problematic because it involves the marginalization of those who do not speak ‘pure’ Ukrainian, but who, in fact, refer to Russian as their mother-tongue despite the fact that they identify as ‘ethnic Ukrainians’. In addition, the new Ukrainian language policies also exclude those Ukrainians who speak surzhyk, non-official mixed sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian used in several parts of Ukraine. Moreover, there also exists the problem of the conflation of nationality and ethnicity, which is central to the arguments of the above-mentioned scholars. Therefore, there are several questions which would require further explanation. In the novel, Daryna is seething about the fact that despite their independence, her nation has not achieved the freedom they longed for. For her, this is precisely because the Ukrainians are lacking in ‘ethnic consciousness’ and the desire to improve Ukrainian speech. They have also not achieved this freedom, according to Daryna, because people have not yet broken all ties to the previous Soviet regime. At one point in the novel, when referring to her intentions of approaching the Security Bureau to gather information on the Insurgent Army member Olena Dovgan whom she is investigating, she states: 20

Chernetsky, ‘Ukrainian Literature at the End of the Millennium’, p. 98.

168 Natalie Paoli Nothing’s easy in this ghetto country of ours. But at least it’s not 1954, and our own Ukrainian Security Bureau does give up their archives bit by bit at the rate of their honourable retirees’ relocation to the Lukyaniv Cemetery, or wherever it is that they bury them these days […] Yep, to avoid traumatising anyone […] You can scoff all you want; I think they must be really vulnerable right now. If you’re gonna break women’s fingers in the doors or, you know, crush testicles with your boots, you’ve got to be, among other things, a hundred percent sure that you would never ever be held responsible for it, and by the time you’re old, after you’ve lived all your life with that certainty—heck, the idea alone’d give you a heart attack. (p. 199)

She is emphasizing the fact that the Security Bureau of independent Ukraine is complicit in not punishing those Ukrainians who were, through their roles in the KGB, responsible for the suffering of their own people. For Daryna, the history of her people’s oppression by the Soviets is close at hand. References to the post-independence Ukrainian government’s corruption and ties to the Russians are gestured at. Closely related to the past, and of great significance here, is the concept of secrets, as the novel’s title—The Museum of Abandoned Secrets—illustrates. The image of the museum functions as a metaphor for Ukraine’s Soviet past as a whole. Once again referring to the Soviet archives on Ukrainians, this passage from the novel, given from Daryna’s perspective, captures the idea of the museum as a metaphor for the past: The files of the Supreme Command—those got shipped to Moscow, they took loads of Ukrainian archives, in 1991 most recently, after August 24, right after the independence—cleaned the stacks out like in ’41 before the German army, people say, burned papers right there in the yard for several weeks—covered their tracks, you know. Of course there are things we’ll never learn—but it doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. It’s not like they went anywhere; we’re still living with them. Only it’s like walking in the middle of the night through someone else’s place—you keep bumping into furniture. (p. 200)

Historical consciousness, as already mentioned, is something of significance for the particular group of Ukrainian scholars who emphasize the advancement of the Ukrainian language as well as the creation of a ‘true’ Ukrainian identity. The above passage illustrates how historical consciousness is constantly at the back of the minds of the category of intellectuals Daryna belongs to. She is stressing the issue of the attempt on behalf of the post-Soviet government to remove the evidence of the Soviets’ crimes and how, regardless of the physical evidence having disappeared, the memories still remain. It is these memories that add to Daryna’s collective trauma and which disillusions her.

‘Let My People Go’ 169

One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the fact that it is highly allegorical. Following what Fredric Jameson states about texts which are produced out of the colonized world necessarily being allegorical, I take this statement to also apply to Zabuzhko’s postcommunist texts. Jameson argues that these texts are allegorical in a very specific way; that they make use of what he terms ‘national allegories’.21 These types of allegories, according to Jameson, are ‘conscious and overt,’ and they ‘imply a radically different and objective relationship of politics to libidinal dynamics’. 22 In addition, as explained by Grabowicz, in the ‘nineteenth and even the twentieth century, literature became more a carrier of national consciousness and a surrogate of political action than a form of art’.23 The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, it can be argued, attempts to be such a carrier of ‘national consciousness’, being, in Zabuzhko’s words as already stated, a ‘textbook on Ukrainian and Ukrainian history’. As has already been stated, the novel plays around with the metaphor of secrets. This is raised early on in the novel when Daryna interviews her friend, the newly-famous Ukrainian painter Vladyslava Matusevych. In the section entitled ‘Room 2. From the Cycle Secrets: Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident’ (pp. 46-98), Zabuzhko examines this metaphor. The chapter forms the foundation for a discussion around secrets and the role of women. Here secrets function not only as a metaphor, but is also the name of a traditional game that used to be played by girls in Ukraine. Daryna attempts to make the case that perhaps the game of secrets is a motif from the past, related to older Ukrainian myths, but Vlada disagrees with her, stating: “‘And you know why not? Precisely because secrets was a girls-only game. It was women who buried the icons—it was their job: […] because they were safer from authorities—if they got caught it was no big deal, like what else would you expect from a stupid broad’” (p. 56). This leads Vlada to a discussion about the role of women during Soviet times. She states: ‘It’s like when women riot, it’s not for real. [A] home’s icons have always been a kind of Di Penates, deities of the hearth, and of course, all things domestic constituted the woman’s sphere of influence—the man’s began outside the door. So when our grannies went digging to bury their icons, they weren’t intent on preserving our artistic heritage, but simply protecting the spirit of the home, as good wives and mothers have always done […]. It was women’s work, Daryna, and

21 22 23

Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, no. 15 (1986), 65-88 (p. 69). Ibid., p. 80. Grabowicz, p. 679.

170 Natalie Paoli that’s why two generations later it turned into a girls-only game. That’s the only explanation.’ (p. 56)

In this extract Vlada is highlighting the traditional gender roles of women in Ukraine, specifically Soviet Ukraine, raising the point that Soviet rule was not as feminist and progressive when it came to women as it appeared to be. Here, the female characters are subverting these typical roles. Daryna, in particular, defies gender roles by insisting on revealing the truth. In this way, she becomes an active agent of history, inverting the standard view that it is men who make history and women are merely the keepers of its secrets and memories. This is precisely because it is Daryna, instead of her partner, Adrian, who is on a quest to reveal the truth about the life and death of Adrian’s great-aunt, the Insurgent Army member who was killed in 1947. At this point it is important to note that Zabuzhko is defined as belonging to what is known as a nationalist feminist school of thought. According to Ukrainian feminist scholar Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Ukrainian national feminists use discourses to ‘participate in the process of inventing a Ukrainian nation and negotiating its borders, in constructing collective memory and a national identity’.24 In The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, the question of the destiny of the Ukrainian nation is one aspect which is discussed. Nationalist feminism, however, is a somewhat problematic field because, as Zhurzhenko argues, a ‘number of important questions about postcommunist feminists remain unaddressed, such as ‘how do they define their position in the current situation of unfinished nation building and blurred identity, [and what] role do they seek in the process of national revival?’.25 Furthermore, the issue of national identity or consciousness is a controversial one. Nonetheless, as Lois West highlights, it can be argued that nationalist feminists are now reconstructing ‘the meanings of both nationalism and feminism from a women-centred viewpoint’.26 This is not to deny that women are still ‘being victimized by individual men, states, nationalist conflicts, and wars,’ or that ‘women’s interests continue to be actively marginalized in the development of political economies and states’. 27 However, these women are attempting to redefine and conceptualize their ‘relationships to states, nations, and social movements’.28 24 25 26

27 28

Tatiana Zhurzhenko as quoted in Hrycak and Rewakowicz, ‘Feminism, intellectuals and the formation of micro-publics in postcommunist Ukraine’, p. 311. Ibid., pp. 311-312 Lois A. West, ‘Introduction: Feminism Constructs Nationalism’, in Feminist Nationalism, ed. by Lois A. West (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. xixxxvi (xiii). Ibid., p. xiii. Ibid.

‘Let My People Go’ 171

Alexandra Hrycak and Maria Rewakowicz point out that through her literature, Zabuzhko ‘raises the issue of woman’s identity and questions the utility of traditionally assigned gender roles’, 29 particularly with regard to postcommunist and nationalist concerns. Her feminist concerns have, however, been questioned by some critics as not sincerely belonging to a feminist tradition. As Uilleam Blacker explains, there exists a certain tension between Zabuzhko’s ‘feminist inclinations and her overpowering sense of national-cultural identity’.30 However, as Rewakowicz explains, Zabuzhko’s feminism ‘projects itself more as a vehicle to engender a discursive space in which both national and feminist issues are taken up than as any attempt on her part to produce a typical feminist novel’.31 One of several feminist issues which are raised in the novel is the trafficking of women into and out of Ukraine. When the television station Daryna is working for is taken over by new investors, her employer explains to her that her show is to be replaced by another, namely Miss New TV. Daryna has the opportunity to host this show and to receive a more substantial salary. However, as she discovers, the show is in fact a front for luring young women into a world of human trafficking. When she confronts her employer about it, he exclaims with a response indicative of the general attitude towards women in Ukraine: ‘“What, you think those girls are all unspoiled goods? Half of them are turning the same tricks for free in their shithole towns and can only dream of being paid for it. They’re the ones signing up in droves in response to those ads for dancers in Europe. You think they don’t know what kind of dancing they’ll be doing? Those floozies’ll be thrilled to get out of their pig farms…”’ (p. 256). His response to Daryna also reflects an attitude which is a legacy of the Soviet regime. As Daryna thinks to herself, ‘one always needs to justify one’s own actions, and blaming the victims is always the murderer’s simplest excuse’ (pp. 256-257). In response to what is happening at the television station, Daryna approaches Vlada’s partner, Vadym, because he is a powerful man in politics and she wants his assistance in stopping the takeover. After Vadym has explained to her that nothing can be done and she should leave well enough alone, they begin a debate centred on the communist regime and various kinds of ideologies. Referring to the fact that Vadym had obtained a degree in history, Daryna starts musing about it: ‘A useful department it was, history: full of country boys straight from army service who paraded around in double-breasted navy suits with Komsomol pins in their lapels and signed up to rat for the KGB for the love of the game. Now the boys are all well 29 30 31

Hrycak and Rewakowicz, p. 328. Blacker, p. 491. Rewakowicz, p. 204.

172 Natalie Paoli past forty and have a new and improved uniform—an Armani suit and a Rolex on the wrist, a real one. And chauffeur Vasya in the SUV—a distant relative from the native village. Who are all these people, and how did they come to manipulate the lives of millions of others—including mine?’ (p. 487). This passage describes Daryna’s view of the present state of Ukraine and the men who are now in charge, a specific reference to the type of capitalist culture which was borne out of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Significantly, at this point in the conversation Vadym explains to her that the Ukrainian government is like a corporation, to which Daryna responds in anger, stating: ‘So then, this corporation of yours was made up of zombies who’d zombied themselves so thoroughly they knew nothing about the country they ruled! […] The FSB still can’t bring itself to believe that Ukraine is independent—they keep waiting for their made-up picture to come back on. Governors, my ass! Like blind butchers in a slaughterhouse.’ (p. 487)

At this point Daryna is underlining the fact that Ukraine is still very much tied to Russia and has not yet broken free. It is during this conversation with Vadym that one of the most striking images of the futility and despair of the state of Ukraine is raised: This is who they are, these serious people—all those who, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, rushed to rake in never-before-seen capital, first as cash knitted into their undershorts, and later as transfers to offshore accounts—this is who they are: the descendants of a pogrom. The kind of pogrom modern history couldn’t fathom, and which, for that very reason, it failed to see or acknowledge when it happened in its own time, simply pressed the delete button. And now it is too late, they have arrived—the ones who, as Vadym said, make up the best pogrom squads. They have arrived and will take revenge on the new century for the mounds of deleted corpses from the past, spawning similarly deleted mounds of new corpses, and never suspecting that they themselves constitute a mutation—a tool of revenge. Flagellum Dei, the scourge of God […]. They have magnificent teeth, brand new titanium implants, and are insatiable like the iron locusts of the Apocalypse: they have come to eat, and they will eat until they burst—until their titanium teeth grind everything in their path into dust. (p. 503)

Here the reader is given an almost dystopic vision of Ukraine’s present or future by those Daryna refers to as ‘the pogrom squads’. She is bringing to the fore the fact that the perpetrators of the oppression of the Ukrainians are still in power and no one is speaking up against it. This forms part of the denial of Ukraine’s past which Daryna criticises throughout. As Judith Lewis Herman explains, ‘[s]ecrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defence,’ and the ‘more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his

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prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail’.32 In the novel, Daryna illustrates that secrecy and silence are still very much a part of Ukraine today, just as they were under Soviet rule. Speaking metaphorically about the people simply pressing the delete button when it came to the history of their annihilation, she highlights the will-to-forget or the amnesia of the victims with regards to a horrific experience of colonization or oppression. Daryna illustrates a certain kind of disillusionment with her own people, which is very much a part of her traumatized status as well as the postcolonial, postcommunist condition which she inhabits. Here one might think of what Madina Tlostanova calls ‘double-consciousness’, and the ‘phenomenon of passing for a Russian’ which occurred during the Soviet regime’s rule. 33 In the novel, the problematics of people concealing their ethnicity in an attempt to mimic and come across as more Russian are raised, and this can be seen as an example of the kind of mimicry which is found in former colonies. What is being gestured at in The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is the fact that Ukraine is yet to be de-Sovieticised, as the people have not regained their nationalism or sense of cultural identity. Zabuzhko could be defined as an anti-colonial author precisely because in the novel she strives for a ‘critical evaluation of the colonial past’, and illustrates that the ‘traces of this past […] still form a prominent part of the psyche of the contemporary postcolonial subject,’34 as can be seen in the character of Daryna Goshchynska. And in this sense, Zabuzhko conforms to what Vitaly Chernetsky refers to as an instance of ‘engagé, resistant’ postmodernist literature found in Ukrainian literature.35 As has been described in this chapter, the constant snide references to both Ukraine’s past and present is very much part of the fact that Daryna is a traumatised, colonized figure. In addition, the bitter aspects of Zabuzhko’s novel may be seen as an indication of the author’s desire for social change and regeneration which have yet to take place in Ukraine. In the afterword to the novel, Zabuzhko states the following: ‘Only the characters in this book are purely fictitious. Everything that happens to them has actually happened to various people at different points in time. And could still happen. This, actually, is what we call reality’ (p. 709). Daryna’s reality is improved when she finally uncovers the story behind Olena Dovgan’s death. She concludes that it is a story of betrayal. When her partner points out that 32 33 34 35

Herman, p. 8. Madina Tlostanova, ‘Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (2012), 130-142 (p. 137). Chernetsky, ‘Postcolonialism, Russia and Ukraine’, p. 43. Ibid.

174 Natalie Paoli they still do not know who exactly led the raid on the bunker which resulted in Olena’s death, Daryna responds that it is still a story of betrayal: ‘“Of one’s country. Of love. Of oneself. Betrayal as a road that leads to death […] someone has to pay for every betrayal, one way or another, to restore the cosmic forces that it violated”’ (p. 703). Trauma, whether collective or individual, can only be dealt with through a process or re-telling. In bringing Olena Dovgan’s story to the surface, the character of Daryna is able to process her own trauma. She is also able to expose an aspect of her nation’s trauma, colonial trauma, brought about at the hands of the Soviets. This, for Daryna, is essential for postcommunist, Ukrainian identity formation.

Edit Zsadányi Voicing the Subaltern by Narrating the Communist Past through the Focalization of a Child in Gábor Németh’s ‘Are You a Jew?’ and Endre Kukorelly’s ‘The Fairy Valley’ Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how the notion of the postcolonial subaltern created by Gayatri Spivak can be redeployed into the study of (post)communist Hungarian culture. Spivak convincingly claims that the subaltern cannot speak the language of the dominant discourse; therefore, mainstream representation cannot guarantee that the voices of subordinate groups will be recognized. In my analysis of two post-communist Hungarian novels, Endre Kukorelly’s ‘The Fairy Valley, or About the Mysteries of the Heart’ and Gábor Németh’s ‘Are You a Jew?’, I take the figure of the child living in a fictional totalitarian period as a special case of the subaltern. I claim that these novels express the complexity of the problem in a similar way as it was formulated by Spivak, and that they offer a narrative-rhetorical solution for giving voice to the subaltern.

Contemporary Hungarian literature plays an important role in helping the country work through its communist past. An interesting recent literary trend in Hungarian prose fiction utilizes a child’s point of view to narrate the communist period. Some examples of this include: György Dragomán’s Fehér király [The White King] (2005), Ferenc Barnás’s Kilencedik [The Ninth] (2006), Zsusza Rakovszky’s Hullócsillag éve [The Year of the Falling Star] (2005), Gábor Németh’s Zsidó vagy? [Are You a Jew?] (2004), Attila Bartis’s Nyugalom [Tranquility] (2001), Endre Kukorelly’s Tündérvölgy, avagy az emberi szív rejtelmeiről [The Fairy Valley, or About the Mysteries of the Heart] (2003), László Garaczi’s Pompásan buszozunk [The Splendid Bus Ride] (1998), and Szilárd Borbély’s Nincstelenek [The Dispossessed] (2013). In this study I claim that the combination of the fictional dictatorship and the focalization through a child’s eyes makes possible a postcolonial reading that helps us face our communist past. However, it is important to mention that when employing postcolonial theories to better understand post-communist regions, we cannot avoid facing the problem that Eastern Europe culturally shares in the Western and European heritage, ‘European thought’, and historicism that recent postcolonial thinkers, particularly Dipesh Chakrabarty, have manifestly challenged.1 Accepting his reasoning, I support 1

Dipesh Chakrabarty roundly criticizes the history writing tradition in which nonEuropean history is marginalized and the central position of Europe is taken for granted. He uses the term ‘Europe’ as a certain value system which originated in the Enlightenment and understood history as a developmental process. According to this Eurocentric view, non-European societies were undeveloped and inferior in comparison with the West, and remained stuck in an era that preceded that which

176 Edit Zsadányi the use of the concept of translation, which involves the reinterpretation and extension of certain categories, rather than ‘application’ of a postcolonial approach to reading Eastern-European literature. I believe Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s argument on the representation of the subaltern can be interpreted in a more general way than was originally explored by Spivak, who discussed the custom known as sati, or the selfimmolation of Hindu widows. According to Spivak’s provocative and inspiring argument, the Hindu widow, the female subaltern who faced death by fire, could not articulate her own views, and thus remained silent. In her research on sati, Spivak could not find the signs of the voice of these women in the legal documents made by the English colonizers who intended to change the custom of sati in order to save Indian women. 2 Spivak vigorously argues that compassionate Western intellectuals and politicians can ironically objectify, assimilate, and appropriate, thus silencing the disempowered by speaking on their behalf. Neither recognition by assimilation, nor political representation with its often simplifying categorizations can ensure that subordinate groups will be acknowledged or that their voices will be heard.3 After two decades of discussion in various fields in the humanities, the question of representing the subaltern remains open and there is still a huge distance between the theoretical discourses on the subaltern and practical programs of solidarity to help them.4

2

3 4

Europe had advanced to. Chakrabarty does not differentiate between Eastern and Western Europe in this respect. Since his convincing argumentation challenges concepts and values associated with the Enlightenment, which is also an important part of Eastern Europe’s cultural heritage, we should face the problem that postcolonial theory cannot be applied in its entirety to understandings of the postcommunist situation in East-Central Europe. This is why I suggest the term translation instead of application of postcolonial theory in post-communist studies. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), pp. 9-15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985), in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313. Ibid, p. 308. See, for instance, Eva Cherniavsky, ‘The Canny Subaltern’, in Theory after Theory, ed. by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 149-162; Rebecca Romanow, ‘But... Can the Subaltern Sing?’ CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.2 (2005), available at Accessed 2 July 2014; Jill Didur and Teresa Heffernan, ‘Revisiting the Subaltern in the New Empire’, Cultural Studies, 17.1 (2003), 1-15, available at Accessed 2 July 2014; Shetty Sandhya and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, ‘Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever’, Diacritics, 30.1 (2000), 25-48.

Voicing the Subaltern by Narrating the Communist Past 177

I wish to take the arguments developed by others further by illustrating that the subaltern does not have to remain silent and can speak in a special rhetorical narrative language by taking narratives of fictional children living in the totalitarian period of communism as special cases of giving voice to the subaltern. The novels I examine do not objectify and simplify the situation of the subaltern (juvenile) figures, a method which was rightly criticized by Spivak, nor do they speak on behalf of the unrecognized groups of children, a position which would imply power over the children, but they do represent their views and interests. Using the examples of two post-communist Hungarian novels, Endre Kukorelly’s Tündérvölgy, avagy az emberi szív rejtelmeiről [The Fairy Valley or About the Mysteries of the Heart]5 and Gábor Németh’s Zsidó vagy? [Are You a Jew?],6 I demonstrate that it is possible to translate the problem of giving voice to the subaltern into the complex narrative trope of reflecting upon the non-reflected perspective of the child. Instead of giving simplified answers to questions of political suppression, the novels initiate an interactive relationship with the reader: they make us participate in the fictional circumstances of the novel and experience the subordinated position of the child narrator. What the following texts all have in common is the child’s lack of reflexivity and understanding; as they interpret the threats and absurdities of their social milieu in childlike terms they accept their milieu to be natural and given. I discuss how these novels express an unselfconscious point of view, thereby lending a voice to subaltern characters who had not yet reached the stage of having their own voices or even of recognizing their own interests.

Encyclopaedia of Everyday Life: Endre Kukorelly, ‘The Fairy Valley, or About the Mysteries of the Heart’ Endre Kukorelly’s novel ‘The Fairy Valley, or About the Mysteries of the Heart’ (2003) tells the story of a child and his family living in the 1950s and 1960s in Hungary. The events of the family’s life, such as school time, vacations, and love stories are surrounded and shadowed by the events of the communist regime. The entire novel is constructed through fragments of short stories narrated in paragraph-long segments of text. There is no linear plot line; rather we read the novel as an encyclopaedia of events, impressions, feelings, and feel the atmosphere of the country during the communist period from the perspective of a child. The young boy feels the 5 6

Endre Kukorelly, Tündérvölgy, avagy az emberi szív rejtelmeiről [The Fairy Valley, or About the Mysteries of the Heart] (Budapest: Magvető, 2003). Gábor Németh, Zsidó vagy? [Are You a Jew?] (Budapest: Magvető, 2004).

178 Edit Zsadányi constant sadness and melancholy of his environment. It slowly becomes clear through narrative developments that the depressing life of his father and of the entire family is the result of the lack of perspective and hopelessness engendered by the communist system. We learn through fragments of stories that the father had been an officer in the Hungarian Army during the Second World War and then could not find other jobs for years under the communist rule. Finally, he accepted the position of a bank clerk and spent the rest of his life doing a job he was never interested in. The novel’s encyclopaedia of everyday life under communism serves as a memento for those adults and children who had no chance for selfrealization, who had no other choice but to live inauthentic and insignificant lives. ‘The Fairy Valley’ thus makes an important contribution to the trend of encyclopaedic postmodernist novels such as D. F. Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Péter Esterházy’s Harmonia caelestis with its political and ethical engagement with Eastern Europe. The Hungarian critics Györgyi Horváth and István Margócsi discuss how besides historical references, the novel is strongly embedded intertextually into the history of Hungarian and European prose fiction, including references to the Hungarian romantic writer and poet Mihály Vörösmarty, as well as Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, and others.7 This excerpt illustrates the narrative representation of the child subaltern: Grandpa and I are looking out of the window, and we watch how standing in line, the Russians are throwing the loaves of bread into the tank at the bakery in Rózsa Street. They put together two loaves, and they throw them like rugby balls. When they notice us, they wave at us, we should get out of the window. I remember this probably, a soldier beckoned up to us with his tommy-gun so that I should get out of the window. Whether I remember this or not, in any case, I see those gestures, they pack the breads into the tanks through the upper slot and one is waving with his gun. I see this, it’s me who takes it, high camera angle, this is how I am seeing it, from the window of our middle room, a boy with his grandfather sees how the Russians are passing the bread among themselves in front of the bakery. (p. 30)8

7

8

Györgyi Horváth, ‘A hiányzó B: Kukorelly Endre: Tündérvölgy, avagy az emberi szív rejtelmeiről’[The Missing B: Endre Kukorelly’s ‘The Fairy Valley, or About the Mysteries of the Heart’], Kortárs, 48 (2004), 106-109 (p. 108); István Margócsy, ‘Kukorelly Endre: Tündérvölgy, avagy az emberi szív rejtelmeiről’, [Endre Kukorelly’s The Fairy Valley, or About the Mysteries of the Heart], Kétezer, 15.10 (2003), available at Accessed 27 June 2014 (para. 7 of 8). Translation by Edit Zsadányi.

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There is no easily identifiable sign of the authentic voice of a child who experienced direct suppression. The intricacy of various voices here supports Spivak’s contention that voicing the subaltern is a very complex task. It is not clear who speaks and what the time of narration is. In the first paragraph the present tense refers to the time of the events: the 1956 Soviet invasion of Budapest, as becomes clear from the wider context. The present tense of the third paragraph takes place in the time of reminiscence of these events; the speaker could be an adult narrator. The remembering adult figure and the acting child figure are indistinguishably intermingled here. It is no longer apparent whether these events are constructed or remembered; therefore, the historical referent of what exactly happened is not accessible. From the sentences ‘Whether I remember this or not’ we can learn that it is not relevant to determine exactly what happened. Instead, what is important is the effect of these events on the personality. The child sees the gestures, and this becomes a traumatic experience for the rest of his life, whether he experienced it, imagined it, or this story was told to him. Reading this excerpt from Spivak’s point of view, we can take her argumentation one step farther. Though the child subaltern cannot speak in his own words, he does not remain silent either. In a complex narrative structure his voice and his personality carrying the inscriptions of the past trauma are being articulated and conveyed to the reader. When discussing narratives written through the focalization of a child, the narrator’s lack of knowledge, a sort of unreliability, is usually mentioned. According to Wayne C. Booth’s classical, oft-quoted definition, the narrator is reliable ‘when he speaks for or acts in accord with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not’.9 Gerald Prince refers to the figure of the unreliable narrator as a ‘limited point of view or focalization that is subject to conceptual or perceptual constraints as opposed to omniscient point of view’. 10 William Riggan examines four distinct types of unreliable narrators: the pícaro, the clown, the madman, and the naïf. 11 The last seems to most closely fit the narratives written from a child’s point of view that I explore here. Analysing the narration of two adolescent figures, Huck in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Riggan comes to the conclusion that these works present social critique 9 10 11

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 158. Gerald Prince, Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 48. William Riggan, Pícaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns. The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), pp. 169-170.

180 Edit Zsadányi through the eyes of one who has not yet entered the social world and who is largely unfamiliar with it on any direct, experiential level. I have found his argument especially relevant for my work because it emphasizes the outsider status of the narrator in relation to his social environment. My emphasis is on the fact that because he or she does not yet fully comprehend the symbolic order around him or her, the child narrator has not been fully absorbed by the system. Instead, the narrator remains a lonely outsider, an observer who accepts the circumstances of his life as part of a given and unchangeable order. An adult reader can see how the child narrator does not recognize his situation as the consequence of the political system, and not of a fatal givenness. The child cannot compare his own society with other political systems, and hence takes it as ‘normal’. The constant discrepancy between the point of view of the reader and the child narrator affords a special interpretative potential, suggesting that the child-like, naive point of view is one of the mechanisms used by the communist system for deception of the populace. Ansgar Nünning argues for a synthesis of cognitive and rhetorical approaches in understanding the concept of unreliable narration. He convincingly claims that the problem of unreliable narration cannot be resolved on the basis of textual data. It is a pragmatic phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped without taking into account the conceptual premises that readers and critics bring to texts.12 The above example illustrates the paradoxical situation that occurs when a child subaltern narrator giving account of an important event that took place during the communist period. The child knows both less and more about the narrated circumstances than the adult reader. As was suggested by Nünning and Riggan, the child knows less than the reader and we need to activate our conceptual premises, our historical knowledge, to supplement the information given by the narrator; namely, to situate the event in the historical context of 1956. On the other hand, the child knows more: his limited horizon confronts readers with the fact that their lack of knowledge about the circumstances creates a doubly dependent position for them vis-àvis the narrator. Moreover, we learn and experience through the reading 12

Nünning mentions two referential frameworks: the first refers to the reader’s empirical experience such as the general world-knowledge, the historical world-model or cultural codes, explicit theories of personality or implicit models of psychological coherence and human behavior of the reader or the critic. The second framework involves a number of specifically literary frames of references. Ansgar Nünning, ‘Reconceptualizing the Theory, History and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration: Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches’, in Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, ed. by Elke D’hoker and Gunther Martens (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 29–76 (pp. 45-48).

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process that the lack of information, or, in other words, putting people into the position of a child, is a totalitarian tactic. It is telling how the act of seeing is so strongly emphasized in the text example. The grandfather and his grandson are looking out the window and they see how the Soviet troops occupy the streets of Budapest. The remembering adult figure also sees how he as a child saw the event, and we the readers also see the double act of seeing. The camera angle and the window provide the frame through which the act of seeing is occurring. In these multiple stresses upon seeing, the reader is invited to recognize the importance of the frame itself. We see the frame, the window, and the camera, and see how the limited horizon of understanding of circumstances outside along with our absolute dependence on them, in other words, the perspective of a child, is deeply rooted in the totalitarian mechanisms of the communist system.

Communist Anti-Semitisim in Gábor Németh’s ‘Are You a Jew?’ Gábor Németh’s novel ‘Are You a Jew?’ (2004) is a series of interwoven stories and episodes describing everyday life during the Kádár era through a child’s eyes. The child struggles to understand the problem of Jewish identity, which was never openly discussed and considered a taboo question in the system. One evening at a summer camp organized for young pioneers, the child watches a documentary on the mass graves of the concentration camps. Without any information to prepare him beforehand, all he understands from the film is that the Jews must have committed some terrible crime to have met such a horrible end, and automatically identifies with the only sin attributed to them: that of being Jews. He is traumatized for life, accepting the imaginary sins as his own and assuming that his own Jewishness had been kept a secret from him, leaving him to wonder anxiously when he and his family might be next. He soon loses his faith in his family, unable to comprehend why they hadn’t told him he was a Jew, and following the flow of the text and the child’s thinking, the reader does not even realize the logical fallacy in his train of thought—namely, that watching a documentary on death camps does not mean that the child himself is Jewish. It remains undecided in the novel whether he really is Jewish or just supposes so. After watching the documentary on concentration camps, the child asks himself two questions: ‘Why didn’t my parents tell me we were Jews?’ and ‘When are we going to be next?’(p. 47), and later begins his search within the circles of his friends and family to find out what ‘Jews’ might be like. In this narrative we see an intertwining of two voices, that of the reminiscing, critically reflective adult and the voice of the child who accepted the political

182 Edit Zsadányi system’s oppression and taboos as natural. However, we can only uncover the child’s voice by closely attending to the shifts in person and tense, which means that to the reader the child’s identity does not emerge as an easily discernible linear history, but as fragments developing alongside other voices. The character’s life story follows an associative, metonymical logic as it unfolds in front of us, standing in sharp contrast to the question posed by the title: ‘Are you a Jew?’ There are several instances of the child’s voice surfacing in the adult’s recollections, opening up ‘windows to the child’s mind’ that appear like sudden flashbacks, usually accompanied by strong visual effects. In these sections of the novel, I analyse how certain statements are reflected upon or remain unreflected, searching for an answer to the question raised by Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the (child) subaltern speak?’ I have chosen a few typical examples to examine how adult wisdom and childlike naiveté, reflection and lack of self-reflexivity mutually inform one another through a rapidly shifting interplay that not only sheds light on the child’s lack of knowledge from the perspective of enlightened and embittered adult wisdom, but also shows how the piercing logic of the child illuminates the absurdities of adulthood brought on by habit or resignation, thereby highlighting the blind spots of each.13 It is important to note that the novel is not a development narrative and the fluctuation of viewpoints cannot be interpreted within a schema that starts from a more naive view at the beginning of the novel and leads to a more experienced, self-reflexive perspective by the end. Unreflective childlike utterances seem very common in the first part of the text, then lessen to some extent in the second part, but in the last chapter we once again see many instances of direct childlike utterances. Alternations between an adult and a childlike perspective are accompanied by shifts of narrative person, viewpoint, and tense, and rhetorically and semantically childlike, presenttense utterances are sometimes wedged into the first-person simple-past narrative told from the adult’s perspective. As the following example will illustrate, these parts not only evoke but also voice the child’s viewpoint;

13

One of the reviewers of the novel, György Kálmán C., notes that rather than rendering the ruptures between utterances from the child’s and the adult’s viewpoints invisible, the text aims to bring them to the forefront precisely because it wants to show ‘how the younger self had been squirming or floating freely in a web of misunderstandings, incomprehension or even deep insights, and how the adult now looks back upon this struggle.’ György C. Kálmán, ‘Zsidó-e vagy? Németh Gábor: Zsidó vagy?’ [You are a Jew? Gábor Németh’s ‘Are You a Jew?’], Kritika, 47 (2004), 1178-1181 (p. 1178). (Translation by Éva Misits).

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therefore, in regard to the issue raised by Spivak, it is in such ‘windows to the child’s mind’ that the subaltern is able to speak. In the excerpt below, the subject of relatives living in Holland leads to a description of the Dutch lifestyle and Dutch apartments without curtains where anyone may look inside, but the narrator’s attention soon drifts from the transparent windows to glass marbles. It is interesting to note that the reminiscing self is rather hard to distinguish from the evoked (subaltern) self. When the first person singular past tense narration switches to present tense, this shift in tense also causes a shift in person and the voice of the reminiscing adult transforms into the voice of the child. And there are no curtains on the windows. You walk down the street and you can look inside anywhere, of course nobody really does that, but they still live like if you were to look at any time, you wouldn’t see anything terrible. Transparently. The Dutch once brought glass marbles, a whole bag of them. A small sack, something like what you can buy garlic in nowadays. Woven from tight little nylon rhombuses. Something like thirty marbles, but I had never seen anything so cool in my life, they were a little bit, you know, as if they were glass eyes, but they are still wicked cool. I roll them on the floor. The marble rolls, the sun plays with it too, not just me. It spins and some blue flame lights up within. Holland must be a pretty country. (p. 67)14

The text slips almost seamlessly from the reminiscing adult voice into the child narrator’s present tense: ‘Something like thirty marbles but I had never seen anything so cool in my life, they were a little bit, you know, as if they were glass eyes, but they are still wicked cool.’ The first half of the sentence is in the past tense, and the second half is in present tense: ‘you know’ denotes an adult narrative position, while ‘wicked cool’ conforms to the little boy’s way of speaking. In the utterances that follow, the child’s perspective and discourse dominate, but we also cannot dismiss the discourse of the adult identifying with his former self. In other words, while the present tense is the tense of present-tense childlike narration, we cannot rule out the possibility that it may simply be a case of past tense narration (the adult’s narrative) momentarily switching to present tense. As Monika Fludernik puts it: ‘Most present-tense narratives, however illogical, are easily recuperable as a story of events or as the representation of a mind reliving past experience as present.’15

14 15

Translation by Éva Misits. Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 256.

184 Edit Zsadányi Since we cannot determine who is speaking in the excerpt, adult and child are voiced simultaneously as the utterance describing the ‘cool’ glass marbles intermingles with a voice that longs for the independence and transparency of an honest and free world. Holland becomes the land of the free both in the eyes of the child and the adult, when his playing with the marbles evokes the possibility of another world. There is no explicit political undertone in the excerpt, which allows it to be interpreted as a moment of grace that could happen to anyone, a miracle that can serve as a source of rejuvenating energy. If we consider other parts of the novel pertaining to Holland besides the one discussed above, we can feel the narrator’s sadness that the miracles offered by the glass marbles, a happy and transparent system without oppressive secrets, can only be expected from another world, and not from the character’s own environment. The child also seems to realize the differences between the quality of life in these two worlds thanks to these marbles: ‘Holland must be a pretty country.’ This final utterance could be voiced by the reminiscing adult as well as the child, but since there is no rhetorical or grammatical cue to help distinguish between the two, both voices are able to speak simultaneously. As we have seen above, the child’s voice can be traced and voiced in first person utterances shifting to the present tense, and even though the child has no basis for comparison or knowledge of different political systems and thus cannot see how much his personal anxieties might be tied to the communist system, he recognizes the possibility of an honest, transparent life, a freer and happier world, through his play with the glass marbles. If we examine the previous excerpt from the perspective of Spivak’s question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ we can see that although the child does not speak on his own (in his own voice and in direct speech), we can still hear his voice: his perspective is present in a complex rhetorical discourse, the duality of persons and tenses. He is voiced by speaking together and simultaneously with other, adult narrative voices, and while we cannot completely distinguish the childlike voices or dismiss the indecisive rhetoric, the child’s voice is obviously present and clearly perceivable by the reader. In the following, I examine excerpts from the novel ‘Are You a Jew?’ that pertain to Jewish identity, drawing parallels between the evaluation given by the novel and Spivak’s views on the ability of the subaltern to speak. My aim is to prove that the text supports the issues highlighted by Spivak by resisting simple, well-definable questions: in other words, we will not find an answer but the realization that we have asked the wrong question, that the very question is completely absurd. In my discussion, I argue that it is not the answer to the question asked in the title that is really relevant, but rather

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the issues of when and who might ask such a question, how such a category emerges in society, and to what extent it offers acceptable potential roles to people. I aim to show that the question posed by the title is wrong, since subaltern identity is a more complex and intricate system than the simplicity of the question would suggest. Based on the novel’s title, we would expect an identity narrative that tells the life of a character constantly facing the issue of his Jewishness, but instead we get a textual web that spreads in multiple directions and its entire structure contradicts the clear answer expected to this question since its complex textuality is in sharp contrast to the simple modality of the question. What the real question should be and what the novel may suggest is how we had reached the point where such a question can be voiced and addressed to someone. In her reading, Viktória Radics places the novel in the historical perspective of Eastern Europe where she draws parallels between anti-Semitism in socialist Hungary and anti-Hungarianism in Yugoslavia: The question ‘Are you a Jew?’ must have been a secret game in socialist Hungary, the ‘lowly’, illegal counterpart beneath the surface of legal identity politics, just as ‘Hungarianism’ had been in my homeland, Vojvodina. I too remember the shame Gábor Németh writes about. It was often pronounced ‘Hunjarian’ with a certain pathetic, petty, provincial undertone. […] I remember the burning ears of childhood guilt, the lowered head, the dizzying confusion of ‘I don’t know where I belong’ and the forced self-definitions. Whenever they warned you about who you were, it was shameful, an inferior ‘thing’ to be Hungarian.16

Continuing the argument outlined above, I examine what happens when the question ‘Are you a Jew?’ is voiced in the novel—or, more specifically—what speech acts it entails. The novel connects the issue of Jewish identity to the many suppressed conflicts of the communist system. The Kádár regime was not officially anti-Semitic, but it forced the Jewish community to assimilate after 1956.17 The issue of Jewishness was one of the several taboo issues of 16 17

Viktória Radics, ‘A gyilkos hangsúly’ [The Brutal Accent], Holmi, 18 (2005), 623-628, (pp. 627-628). (Translation by Éva Misits). There were various pogroms launched against Hungary’s Jews during the 1956 revolution, and thousands of Jewish people left Hungary at that time. After 1956, according to different estimations, 100-120 thousand Jews lived in the country. The Kádár regime could accept the issue of Jewish identity only as a religious question, but otherwise assimilation was forced upon the Jewish people. This time assimilation was understood mainly as identifying with the communist political system, rather than with the Hungarian national identity. See Róbert Győri Szabó, ‘Zsidóság és

186 Edit Zsadányi the Kádár era, a category that also included the question of the free elections, the 1956 revolution, the Hungarian population abroad. The novel examines how growing up in the depressing atmosphere of a dictatorship becomes even more difficult when a child struggles with identity issues related to suppressed tensions within the society.18 We cannot dismiss the readers’ present context in 2014, with anti-Semitism that is again growing, just as the novel describes in the past: it is found on the subway and on the streets, and also increasingly appears in intellectual life and in both high and popular culture. Even within political circles, politicians have engaged time and time again in explicitly or implicitly anti-Semitic discourse.19 The 2004 novel and the title incorporating the threatening, intimidating speech act can thus be considered a premonition of these general intellectual, political, and cultural trends. Therefore, it is all the more advisable in our current social atmosphere to pay heed to the warning signs presented in the novel. According to György Kálmán C.’s review of the novel, there are two concrete instances where the question ‘Are you a Jew?’ arises in the narrative.20 I now examine the excerpts he refers to more closely, since both cases make the protagonist realize the absurdity of the question. I never looked for Jews, the company of Jews; I would have looked in vain anyway since I had no idea how to look for them. Do they look a certain way? Or is there a sign? Two Jews are traveling by train, it sounds like a joke so far but I don’t want it to continue like one. Like, maybe they are slapping each other playfully with their paws like Fatty and the little Cubby and it turns out—do they

18

19

20

kommunizmus a Kádár-korszakban I. rész’ [Jewish People and Communism in the Kádár Period, Part 1.], available at Accessed 7 October 2014. Kádár’s policy of concentrating on the well-being of the people, depoliticizing the private sphere and following the confusing principles of ‘TTT’ (prohibit, tolerate, support; in Hungarian ‘tilt, tűr, támogat’) in public life suppressed tensions in society. However, under the surface there were serious conflicts between Jewish-urban and nationalist-populist social groups and intellectual circles. After 1989, anti-Semitism immediately resurfaced and again appeared in public spaces. The incident mentioned in the novel is a typical post-communist phenomenon. See Szabó. According to recent research by András Kovács, political anti-Semitism is a relatively new development in Hungary and is mostly though not exclusively related to the political party Jobbik. See András Kovács, ‘Anti-Semitic Prejudice and Political AntiSemitism in Present-Day Hungary’, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, 4 (2012), 443469 (pp. 456-458), available at Accessed 7 October 2014. See also Paul Lendvai, ‘Az antiszemita magyarok hamis önképe’ [The Fake Self-Image of Hungarian Anti-Semitic people], available at Accessed 13 December 2013. Kálmán, p. 1178.

Voicing the Subaltern by Narrating the Communist Past 187 hold a finger in a certain way? Do they smell differently? Or is there some secret code? […] I had never seen such a thing. And I only heard of such a thing later on. Say a boy would be traveling by subway, and some people would be going on and on about Jews and he would suggest they stop, to which they would ask, why, asshole, are you a Jew? The boy wouldn’t be too strong but he would still reply, yes, to you. It’s a strong reply, stronger than the boy, the only possible reply, so poignant he immediately gets stabbed for it. In the thigh, that is, so that this paragraph doesn’t dissolve into melodrama. Something deflected it. (p. 74)21

The excerpt above begins from the reminiscing adult’s perspective. The narration starts in the past simple tense, but after a few clauses the text shifts to the present tense and lapses into childlike thinking and language use (‘Like, maybe they are slapping each other playfully with their paws like Fatty and the little Cubby and it turns out—do they hold a finger a certain way? Do they smell differently? Or is there some secret code?’). The next part takes place later, but the use of a conditional tense makes it impossible to determine when it actually occurs; however, it is here that the aggression latent in the title of the novel becomes explicit and manifests itself in the question, ‘why, asshole, are you a Jew?’ The title of the novel could thus be considered the shortened version of this utterance, which gives the question ‘Are you a Jew?’ a clearly aggressive undertone even when the rest of the utterance is missing. The situation takes place in the specified space of the subway, a site of everyday aggression, but also in a dreamlike rhetorical space since the conditional tense blurs the scene. The event’s fictional quality comes through more strongly than the illusion of an actual occurrence, but is then contrasted by the fact that what takes place is a very concrete event. The boy’s answer is simple and tangible, with great emphasis on the play on the concrete and abstract meanings of the word ‘strong’ as well as the concrete and abstract meanings of the verb ‘deflect’, to give the impression that these things can happen to us, rendering fiction and reality highly permeable. In other words, fiction shows how, in reality, we experience such events as fiction and even in the most real of situations we may feel as though we were caught in a fictional world, looking at ourselves from an outside perspective. However, not even the highlighted textuality of the conditional tense and the rich word play of the text or the impossibility of distinguishing reality and fiction can protect us from the brutality and violence so evident in the excerpt. Paradoxically, it is the rhetorical play on 21

Translation by Éva Misits.

188 Edit Zsadányi words that alerts the reader to the primary, concrete meanings, to the everyday world and the existing, easily occurring aggression within it, to the potential everyday threats looming over us, divorcing us from the illusion that this is only a figment of our imagination. The next excerpt could be considered a ‘positive example’, but just like the previous excerpt, we find out that it does not allow for a better understanding of identity. The excerpt presents the possibility of a receptive Jewish community, but the narrator, now a young man, cannot identify with this concept. He almost immediately falls for a young beautiful woman, but still cannot accept the Jewish identity she offers to him. […] wants me, singled me out, reaches me, sits down by the bar counter, smiles, says something forgettable and then her hand shifts, reaches inside her turtleneck from above, pulls out a golden chain with a medallion, two triangles in overlay. ‘Swings about, spins and charms.’ Do you know what this is? This is what she’s asking, gives you the simplest task there is. The simplest task. […] You get married, man, and life is solved. All you’d have to do is say what the thing she wears on her neck is, on that light golden chain, that would be your simple task. It wouldn’t even be a lie, since she didn’t literally ask me, didn’t ask me literally what she was really interested in, she didn’t ask whether I was really, in the Nurembergian or whatever sense of the word, if I was who she pegged me to be. She didn’t ask if I was a Jew. She just spun the Star of David with her finger. ‘You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride. You have ravished my heart with one of your eyes, with one chain of your neck.’ […] Boiling defiance surges within me, arises, presses forward and becomes an arrogant sentence. No, I don’t know, I have no idea. The only possible answer to the unspoken question of am I a Jew or not. Not to you. She stands up without a word, disappears, takes our night, our hot and mysterious Jewish life with her back to the shadows of the Bon-Bon Café or whatever its name. (pp. 110-112)22

The text repeats three times how the protagonist’s task is so simple and yet the character-narrator is unable to do it. This repetition in itself might arouse suspicion in the reader as though it took the protagonist several tries to even narrate the simple task, let alone do it. As the excerpt clearly shows, the issue simply cannot be tied to simple answers—attraction and charm failed because the character simply could not take a path that led through a

22

Translation by Éva Misits; emphasis by E.Zs.

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simple category. There is no reply and the reader is left to guess why the simple reply could not be uttered. As the excerpt shows, neither love nor identity can be expressed in simple utterances or categories. Jewish identity did not lead to love and vice versa: the promise of love did not make the acceptance of a Jewish identity any less difficult. There are simply no right answers to simple questions—we can only expect wrong, arrogant utterances in reply. The complexity of the rhetorical relations in the featured excerpt also offers an argument against the simplicity of the situation. The inner monologue and past tense narration describing the emotional states of the narrator are interrupted by quotations from different sources as textual memories keep emerging in the narrative consciousness, various sayings, such as the often heard commonplace, ‘You get married, man, and life is solved’, in an otherwise coherent narrative. For instance, the parts from the Song of Solomon quoted from the Old Testament praise the woman’s beauty, while ‘You get married, man, and life is solved’ is an entirely different register that sounds like the generic life wisdom a young man might often hear from an older, more experienced man, followed by the arrogant rejection: ‘Not to you.’ Such fragments of internalized textual culture keep coming up inside the narrator’s head, emerging as free-floating associations trying to fit the present situation; however, they do not fit perfectly. They are appropriate and inappropriate in this situation, an excellent portrayal of the narrator’s confusion and internal struggle against these contradictions. This miscommunication illustrates how the Kádár regime’s policy of suppressing important issues such as anti-Semitism and the assimilation of the Jews created uncertainty and suspicion among the citizens. Tension among social groups was treated as taboo and was not discussed openly. After reading the above example, we can have an idea of how fear, confusion, and arrogance were generated among different social groups and produced and reproduced their dependency on the state. The ‘Not to you’ could be considered the negative counterpart of the ‘Yes, to you’ in the first excerpt. In both cases, the narrator rejects the protection of the cultural community and the safety offered by the categories of ‘Jewish’ or ‘non-Jewish’, choosing solidarity with the excluded ones—those who fall outside the category. In the face of threatening antiSemitic violence, the character earns the narrator’s respect by not accepting the category of ‘not Jewish’ that would offer him protection, even going so far as to add the personal pronoun ‘to you’. In this instance, the utterance ‘Yes, to you’ switches the power relations of the speaker and questions the superior position of the other; after that switch, he is no longer able to

190 Edit Zsadányi assume a superior position against ‘Jews’ and ends up in a ridiculous situation, to which he promptly replies with helpless anger and aggression. When we translate the problem of voicing the subaltern stated by Spivak into the post-communist context, we need to face the question of the taboo as it was illustrated by Gábor Németh’s novel. There is no available and honestly acceptable solution for problems if they are not discussed openly. There is no correct choice between the ‘Not to you’ and the Yes, to you’, for the only solution is to create a non-categorical discursive place. By the act of artistic refusal of the existing, post-communist cultural norms of declaring if somebody is Jewish or not, the novel creates a discursive non-categorical space. The reader is invited to work hard to understand the complexity of the textual plays: by refusing the yes or no answer for identity formation, they create an open, and not simplified but rather exciting and complex discourse on the issues, the open discourse which was painfully missing in the taboo-ridden time of communism, and which we, as successors of that time, are still missing today. The reader is invited to participate in this hard work of tolerance involving contradictions and paradoxes and to reflect upon this activity as a possible way to work through, process, and overcome inherited anxieties and suspicions. Frantz Fanon’s argumentation on the inferiority feelings of Black people in a White environment in his Black Skin, White Masks (1952) may provide further interpretive potential for understanding the post-communist aspect of Gábor Németh’s novel. Fanon identifies projecting and scapegoating mechanisms in White society that forces the Black subject to interiorize the position of the sinner. The feelings of inferiority and guilt in Black people among Whites are the result of a traumatic encounter with White society. He argues that generally, during a person’s development from childhood to adulthood, the values represented by the family stand in line with the values of the society. A young adult can extend the norms of his or family into his or her social life without any difficulties. However, a Black person who climbs up into society has to reject his family at a certain point. The first encounter with White culture is a traumatic experience; a Black person has to face a ‘solidly established myth’ about his blackness which is strongly associated in European culture with the Evil One and the sinner. Fanon gives several parallel examples of how cultural stereotypes and prejudices about Jews and Blacks are constructed in White society and how they generate neurosis in the black or Jewish individual.23 From this postcolonial perspective we can identify the starting conflict of the novel as the key traumatic experience. The Hungarian boy living in 23

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), pp. 147-157.

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the 1960s suddenly faces the fact that in the eyes of the society he might be a Jew, and that therefore he or his family must have committed a dreadful sin. The values of society and those of his family are immediately becoming contradictory, and as a result, the young boy stands alone and absolutely confused. He has no trust in his family, neither in his parents nor his grandparents, and does not understand society either. Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial and psychoanalytical study has revealed a hidden pattern of post-communism: the lack of open discussions created anxiety, feelings of inferiority, and many forms of neurosis in individuals. We also learn from the novel that the psychological damage the system caused in the people must have done more serious damage in the more dependent groups of society, such as children and Jews. If we look back to the question posed by the title of the novel from our current standpoint, we can see that the novel does not answer the question—it does not provide a development narrative where the boy might gradually realize his own Jewish cultural heritage and resume his adult life either accepting or rejecting it. Instead, the novel sheds light on the absurdity of the question and the aggressive narrow-mindedness of the textual environment where it can emerge. One of the most striking narrative characteristics of the novel is that it consists of tiny mosaic pieces that do create a picture of this thoroughly ostracized generation growing up under socialism, but still resist attempts at a unifying development narrative. We are offered the painful insight that, just as the pieces of the life story cannot be rearranged into a coherent narrative, the traumas of childhood and experiences of humiliation and marginalization cannot be simply worked through. The fact that the only comforting space is outside the category suggests that there is no life story that could make the category acceptable. There is only one honest answer, and it confirms Spivak’s statement on the missing voice of the Hindu widow facing death: that the generation that lived through such a childhood during communism had experienced a permanent and irrevocable loss. The mosaic pieces of the life story cannot be assembled, or else they could simply be written into a prevalent paradigm such as the cultural narrative of the ‘adult coping with childhood trauma’. Instead, the textual construct follows an associative logic that rejects even the possibility of constructing a story that can be easily processed, consumed, and digested with almost every sentence. From an ethical standpoint, the only acceptable path is an irreconcilable mosaic because there is no other possibility than facing what has been irrevocably lost. It is at this point that the various painful experiences play into one another and childhood traumas, years of living in oppression under socialism, and experiences of the humiliation of an inauthentic life become

192 Edit Zsadányi linked by the fact that all of them cause irreparable damage in people’s lives. Postmodern methods of narrative organization, the decentred nature of the speaking subject, and rejection of the possibility of forming a coherent narrative all foreground the interpretation of a past that cannot be amended. We cannot form a coherent life story out of a life that had fallen irreversibly to pieces; if we could, it would prevent the receiver from viewing these experiences as a loss. There is no other path for the ostracized and the oppressed of this historical situation except questioning the prevalent paradigms and narrative cultural traditions; however, this means that if the novel questions the principle of processability, it will also inevitably reject forgiveness as a form of behaviour that has deep roots in Western culture. Cathy Caruth’s views on refusing the narrativization of traumatic events in the past may support this argument. She claims that we as listeners are addressed by a trauma in the past, by ‘the voice of a wound’ to tell us of the truth of what happened. But this truth in its delayed appearance and its belated address cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and language. She argues that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the stories and in the language of the stories related to the trauma. 24 Considering how a lack of information is involved in the child’s narration and in the fragmentary manner of storytelling in the novels discussed here, we face the fact that knowing and not knowing are both part of our understanding of our traumatic EasternEuropean history. We might also face that what is at stake in our present situation is not only to know what happened, but to be able to continue listening to voice of the wound.

Conclusion The poetic thoughts and interpretation possibilities outlined above resonate deeply with certain statements by contemporary postcolonial theorists. For instance, in his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that in a postcolonial and globalized world, we must question the omnipotent paradigm of Euro-centeredness,25 which means that the omnipotence of its important principles can also be questioned, such as the axiomatic nature of forgiveness as perpetuated by the Christian culture. Accordingly, the two novels discussed do not suggest forgiveness, coping with traumas, and the construction of a coherent narrative when they face the communist past and the subaltern position of 24 25

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), pp. 17-19. Chakrabarty, pp. 9-11.

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the child: instead they reject such given narrative strategies in favour of the construction of a space outside them for the representation of subaltern experiences. We may well ask ourselves where the right path lies, if the subaltern can really speak, and if so, what is it telling us? Is there even a space for solidarity when all we get are different forms of rejection? As Spivak argues, excluded positions and practices cannot simply be reinserted into dominant social and political discourses; 26 therefore, we must look for appropriate representations in the mental space outside the category, in discursive constructs that reject closed categories and bring contradictions, struggles, and doubts to the surface. In the end, as the above analyses have shown, the subaltern was able to speak to readers and engage them in dialogue, even if it could only speak partly and in fragments within the novels’ complex narrative structures. The authors of these works created rhetorical non-categorical space for those who could not express their views within the existing mainstream categories. The child subaltern did not remain silent in either of the novels analysed here; he gained articulation by speaking simultaneously with other, adult voices. In these instances of double speech, the child’s voice giving account of his feelings and cognition was evidently present and was recognizable by the reader.

26

Spivak, p. 279.

Part III: Place and Displacement in (Post-)Communist Narratives and Cityscapes

Irene Sywenky Geopoetics of the Female Body in Postcolonial Ukrainian and Polish Fiction Abstract: Historical, socio-political and cultural paradigms of postcoloniality are inherently connected to the ongoing production of geopolitically and ideologically shaped spaces, where the subject’s grounding in the workings of spatiotemporality becomes a locus of re-reading history and nation. The chapter argues that the tradition of post-1989 women’s writing in Central and Eastern Europe has been defined by a spatially constructed female subject. It examines three differently situated subjectivities in the writings of Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukraine), Manuela Gretkowska, and Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), ideologically positioned as a deterritorialized body within the postcolonial space; a cosmopolitan body that remains outside/out of place; and a body that reads and inscribes herself within the hermeneutics of a local place.

The past few decades have been defined by an unprecedented rise of interdisciplinary interest in theories of spatiality and the study of spatial practices as socially and ideologically conditioned activities. In an influential recent collection, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, the volume’s editors examine space as an important ‘social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena’ and emphasize that the study of space has experienced a ‘profound conceptual and methodological renaissance’.1 In his seminal work on spatiality in the 1960s Michel Foucault speculated that ‘[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space’,2 and while the pioneering work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau laid the foundations of contemporary approaches to the conception of space, today’s studies in spatiality can be located at the intersection of a wide range of disciplinary and methodological inquiries such as historical, geographic, sociological, gender oriented, postcolonial, urban/cultural studies, and ecocritical, to name a few. Studies of spatiality and spatial practices are of both conceptual and methodological relevance for the context of postcolonial societies and serve as a productive tool for the examination of the dynamic relations among place, space, articulations of home, territory, location, borders, belonging, and mobility. Historical, socio-political and cultural paradigms of 1 2

The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Barney Warf and Santa Arias (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 1. Michel Foucault, ‘Des Espaces Autres’, 1967; ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. by J. Miskowiec, 1998, available at

Accessed 12 September 2014.

198 Irene Sywenky postcoloniality are inherently connected to the ongoing production of specific geopolitically and ideologically shaped spaces. In the area of cultural production, signifying practices and representations are important discursive tools that ‘inscribe’ places and spaces, and infuse them with ideological meanings. These practices became the focus of a recent academic inquiry that came to identify itself as geocriticism, which ‘probes the human spaces that the mimetic arts arrange through, and in, texts, the image, and cultural interactions related to them’, 3 thus emphasizing close affinities between spatiality of the text and the legibility of places as texts. In his recent theorization of the postmodern poetics of place at the intersection of the literary and the geographic, Eric Prieto, one of the proponents of geocriticism, devotes special attention to the conception of place in the context of the historical development (or perhaps in the aftermath) of postcolonial studies. 4 In its conceptualization of place the geocritical approach draws on Deleuzian geophilosophical premises that emphasize the fundamental fluidity of the idea (and condition) of territoriality: ‘the earth constantly carries out a movement of deterritorialization on the spot, by which it goes beyond any territory: it is deterritorializing and deterritorialized. It merges with the movement of those who leave their territory en masse’.5 These movements and transmutations—both physical and symbolic—are particularly intrinsic to postcolonial spaces, which are located between the past and the future, and in transformative interstices of collapsing master narratives and changing socio-political structures. According to Deleuze’s geophilosophical imagination, geography as a discourse is not limited to ‘providing historical form with a substance and variable places. It is not merely physical and human but mental, like the landscape’6 and thus is a powerful tool in informing the deeper structures of social spatial relations. Notwithstanding these important developments, spatial studies and studies in cultural geography have long ignored the relations between the human body, sexuality, and geography as embedded within larger ideological structures. The crisis of representation has equally affected discourses of literary and cultural studies, human and cultural geography, and interdisciplinary inquiries into the theories of the body. The points of 3 4 5 6

Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. by Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave, 2011), p. 6. Eric Prieto, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (New York: Palgrave, 2013), see p. 139 and passim. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), p. 85. Ibid., p. 96.

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affinity and contention concern the concepts of the geophysical place and the body as texts, and the hermeneutics of space and body. The tropological nature of discourse generally and the centrality of rhetoric to any discipline constitute the main nexus of alignment between various discourses (historical, political, cultural) about the geophysical space and the body.7 The human body is intrinsically spatialized, and bodies and the spaces which they inhabit mutually inform and shape one another: Bodies interacting with other bodies to form selves are situated in space, and form their selfhoods by means of more-or-less locally emplaced experiences. Within this analytical framework, space underpins the collective, dialogical, ongoing negotiation of the construction of self- and group-identities. This applies not only to the invention of the individual self, but for the production of aggregate lifescripts that we know as ethnicity and nationality.8

Embodied subjects are ‘presenced’ through their corporeality9 and through their situatedness in space and place which become the sites of selfconstruction, while geophysical and geopolitical spaces are also informed and affected by these corporeal constructions. Judith Butler’s work on performativity and the body as a site of inscription can be extended conceptually to include bodily performativity within specific spatial discourses and structures in order to further decentre and destabilize the gendered body. Bell and Valentine insist on corporeal ‘specificity’ in which the body cannot ‘escape its social and cultural setting. There is no body outside of its context’; 10 the body is thus determined by spatiotemporal parameters and is inextricably connected to the ideological discourses of space and place. The postcolonial body is doubly bound to the narratives of place, as it is the geopolitical and territorial postcolonial sensibilities that are usually central to the processes of identity and selfhood construction, whether individual or collective. In the framework of post-totalitarian, postcolonial Central and Eastern Europe, geographical imaginations and explorations of geophysical spatiality in the context of socio-political and historical shifts came to be one of the defining aspects of post-1989 literary production. In the absence of an 7

8

9 10

Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, ed. by Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4. Michael Dear and Steven Flusty, ‘Emplaced Bodies, Embodied Spaces’, in Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography, ed. by Michael Dear and Steven Flusty (Oxford, UK and Malden MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 303-306 (p. 305). Ibid., p. 303. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, ed. by David Bell and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 30.

200 Irene Sywenky explicit focus on specific places/spaces, it is the subject’s grounding in the workings of spatiotemporality that becomes the nexus of conflicting and often self-revelatory readings of history, politics, and nation. The emergence of a spatially conditioned female subject became part of the tradition of women’s writing that has been a powerful cultural force since the late 1980s. With specific reference to Ukraine and Poland, the literary scene has been ablaze with brilliant writers such as Oksana Zabuzhko, Irena Karpa, Natalka Sniadanko, Iren Rozdobud’ko, Halyna Pahutiak (Ukraine), Natasza Goerke, Olga Tokarczuk, Manuela Gretkowska, Magdalena Tulli, Krystyna Kofta, Isabela Filipiak, and Dorota Masłowska (Poland), to name just a few. These authors’ corporeal travels and experiences become venues for exploration of larger issues, both intra- and extra-corporeal: ‘The body is both mobile and channelled, both fluid and fixed, into places. It is not only the “geopolitics of the body” but also the politics of connection and disconnection, of rights over the body, of the body as a site of struggle’.11 In this study I will argue that contemporary women’s writing in postcolonial Central and Eastern Europe is deeply entrenched in the problematics of space—from readings in geopolitics to un-layering palimpsests of history—while bringing together the ideological inscriptions of the female body and those of the geopolitical and geophysical spaces that also define these narrators as subjects. This study examines three differently situated subjectivities from the writings of Zabuzhko, Gretkowska and Tokarczuk: conceptually positioned as displaced and deterritorialized body within the unstable and ambivalent postcolonial space; a cosmopolitan body that remains outside/out of place; and a body that reads and inscribes herself within the hermeneutics of a local space.

Peripheral Bodies and Bodies in Interstices Ukrainian women’s literature of the 1990s cannot be discussed adequately without reference to Oksana Zabuzhko, whose novel Poliovi doslidzhennia z ukrains’koho seksu (Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, 1996) became not only a quintessential feminist text of the decade, but also a catalyst for much of the feminist debate at the time. An academic with a graduate degree in philosophy, Fulbright Fellow, and lecturer at several major American universities, Zabuzhko at the same time became known as a poet, an essayist, and a prose writer. At the time of its original publication, Fieldwork provoked much domestic controversy and outrage as it touched on many sensitive issues and taboos, as it merged the plane of the deeply personal 11

Places through the Body, ed. by Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 3.

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and individual fears and anxieties with the plane of the collective political and social concerns. The first-person narrator’s female consciousness transcends the limitations of a traditional gendered perspective, acquiring distinct socio-cultural subtexts. The economics and politics of sex and sexuality have been one of the focal points of critical gender theory through the first and second waves of feminist theory; as reflected through the prism of poststructuralism, sexuality as a social and cultural structure and an ideologically shaped discursive/narrative space was given a new conceptualization in the seminal works of Foucault by theorizing bodily boundaries and transgressive spaces through the categories of state discipline and punishment. Betraying a self-reflexive awareness of the theoretical problematics of the Western discourse on gender and sex and inevitably engaging in an academic dialogue, Zabuzhko’s articulation of sexual agency is located at the intersection of a complex set of ideological, psychoanalytic, narrative, and historical perspectives, while also being positioned in the context of Ukrainian postcolonial space between the imperial shadows of Russia and the looming presence of the West. The narrator, who has been invited to deliver a series of lectures in the US, is fundamentally displaced and uprooted, feeling alienated in the West but also not finding a home in her own country. Her body becomes ‘a surface to be mapped, a surface for inscription, as a boundary between the individual subject and that which is Other to it, as the container of individual identity, but also as a permeable boundary which leaks and bleeds and is penetrable’.12 In one of the interviews, the author herself acknowledged that ‘[s]exual life belongs almost entirely to that “invisible part” of our existence... So, what particularly tantalized me while working on the book was to examine precisely how that massive, dark, and powerful mainstream of history affects, quite surreptitiously, people’s most unconscious behaviour’. 13 Zabuzhko explores the process of formation of the sexual subject as belonging inherently in the socio-historical context. Thus, the author’s narration of one woman’s journey through an abusive relationship is a lot more than a novel-length series of erotic adventures, as the title seems to claim. (Ironically, although the book had acquired a lot of scandalous notoriety even before it was published, there is very little in it that can be categorized as pornographic or even remotely erotic.) According to the author, 12 13

Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings, ed. by Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (London and New York: Arnold, 1997), p. 3. Oksana Zabuzhko, ‘Interview with Halyna Hryn (Boston University)’, 2001, available at Accessed 5 September 2004.

202 Irene Sywenky [o]ne reviewer observed that these ‘studies in sex’ are nothing but a ‘pathogenesis of our solitude,’ meaning solitude not just in personal terms, but also in historical, cultural, and even linguistic terms. [...] Ukrainian history: a lost, ‘forgotten’ country, with a historical memory that’s been deliberately erased, subjected for so long to all kinds of humiliation—and every social humiliation affects men much more strongly than it does women. [...] As a result, in the end it is always women upon whom men take revenge for their defeats ‘out in the world.’14

In the novel, collective patterns of sexual behaviour serve as one of the indicators of social health—or, respectively, pathology. The narrator is a fundamentally deterritorialized, nomadic body whose geographies and spaces are defined by two opposing spatial structures: those of the private sphere (bedroom/sex) and public sphere (writing and academic activities). In the private sphere ‘[a woman] has no authority to speak independently. There she is not to speak her mind, but to be eloquent only with her body, for his pleasure. This everyday geography of kitchens and bedrooms—and streets and workplaces and neighbourhoods—is the geography of many women’s spatiality’.15 While Zabuzhko’s narrator draws heavily on the spatial bodily vocabulary and the conventions of écriture féminine, which is posited as a space of flight, her body itself becomes a map, a site of inscription, in a rather literal sense: ‘your calves are decorated like a map of an archipelago of multicolored, reddish and brownish, peeled and peeling spots—scars, cuts, burns, a visual manifestation of your nine-month […] “mad love”, from which you emerged as madness itself ’.16 The bodily map is a recurring trope as her lover turns his gaze to reading her body, ‘tattooing’ his words on her, appropriating her through symbolic signification. Zabuzhko’s study in ‘pathogenesis’ is as much a study of the psychological deviations in a woman’s selfhood as it is also a closer look at the distortions of masculinity and male space. Her theorizing of the male pathological drive to sexual control links it—as a compensatory mechanism—to the collective as well as individual male ‘impotence’ in the socio-economic and political sphere of totalitarianism throughout the long history of the denial of the nation’s identity, dignity, self-determination and autonomy: That the book uncovered behind this ‘invincible’ make-up a deeply hidden insecurity and social helplessness was, of course, taken as a feminist ‘cultural 14 15 16

Ibid. Gillian Rose, ‘Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge’, in Spaces of Postmodernity, pp. 314-24 (p. 315). Oksana Zabuzhko, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, trans. by Halyna Hryn (Las Vegas, NV: Amazon Crossing, 2011), p. 8.

Geopoetics of the Female Body 203 answer.’ [...] What I attacked was, basically, a system of social lies extending to the point of mental rape, and affecting both men and women. That is why I don’t divide my readers along male/female lines.17

In very Foucauldian terms of reference, this system was ‘oriented toward absolute control over the bodies of its subjects, which was established through the political technologies of victimization, [and] successfully inculcated a deeply rooted and wide-spread attitude of submissiveness toward authority and a tendency toward self-defeating and self-destructive behaviour’.18 The narrator’s fragmented reminiscences about her childhood and her parents can be read as a story of the whole nation and its convoluted, tortured history. The feeling of helplessness and of a deeply internalized fear, both individual and collective, is the same pathological fear that eventually grows into the need to dominate and abuse (as a response to domination and abuse) and runs in generations of men—or in the protagonist’s narrative, from her father to a number of men she will encounter later in her life. Critical readings of the novel emphasize its ‘preoccupation with place and displacement, with the vestiges of the empire and the fragments of the national past’.19 Thinking about her unhomely country, which for ages has been ‘at the bottom of history’ (p. 23), the narrator reflects on her nomadic journeyings: ‘all these years of homeless wandering […] of passing, anonymous and unrecognized, through all the dusky airport terminals […] the early-morning hotels with coffee in the lobby —“Where are you from?”—“Ukraine.” —“Where’s that?” —you had grown tired of not being in this world’ (p. 33, emphasis in the original). The peripherality and secondariness of Ukraine on the global map, its nonexistence (‘a country hopelessly unconnected to the nervous system that criss-crosses the planet’ (p. 45), translates into the narrating subject’s searching for other meaningful spaces of belonging. Thus, the narrator’s writing in her mother tongue is a self-reflexive project which, for all its fragmented, disjointed and chaotic nature, is conceptualized as both a space of homecoming and a point of destination: ‘your home is your language, a language only about a few hundred other people in the whole world can still speak properly—it would always be with you, like a snail’s shell, and there would not be another, non-portable home’ (p. 11, emphasis in the original). 17 18 19

Zabuzhko, 2004. Maryna Romanets, ‘Erotic Assemblages: Field Research, Palimpsests, and What Lies Beneath’, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 27.1-2 (2002), 273-85, p. 275. Vitaly Chernetsky, ‘The Trope of Displacement and Identity Construction in PostColonial Ukrainian Fiction’, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 27.1-2 (2002), 215-32, p. 229.

204 Irene Sywenky One of the important thematic threads in the novel is the two dichotomies representing global hierarchies of powers: Ukraine versus Russia, and Ukraine versus the West. In the context of the former, Frantz Fanon’s early theorizing of colonial subjectivity and the inevitable separation of the self and the ‘other’ in the contexts of colonial and postcolonial conditions comes to mind. Zabuzhko’s argument about the (post)colonial subject’s inability to restore the centrality of the self bears primarily on the psychosexual aspect of subjectivity. Although the narrator’s focus is mainly on the examination of the dynamics of the heterosexual relationship and male psychology, her ‘research’—whether she is conscious of it or not—is just as relevant for the representative problems of female sexuality. Thus, for example, apart from her internalized essentialist assumptions about femininity—which deserves a separate study—the radical separation of the protagonist’s body from her self is highly significant in the context of the economic and political separation of the national self from the material ‘body’ (manifested in the ‘ownership’ of the language, culture, land, etc.). Incorporation of the Western geopolitical space in the novel (e.g., the narrator’s life in the US and her speaking in part from within the Western academic structure) further enhances the relativistic perspective and establishes a broader frame of reference (e.g., one of the narrator’s American friends comments on ‘East European’ men vs. ‘Western’ men). A similar function is fulfilled by the linguistic spaces of Russian and English, which emphasize the narrator’s suspension and indeterminate positioning in the interstices between the two worlds, each one of them ‘owning’ the protagonist’s Ukrainian-ness in a different way. This is one reason why Zabuzhko’s book escapes any possibility of a nuanced translation: the ideology of language is all-pervasive and forms an inherent part of the novel’s narrative fabric. It is noteworthy how much distorted, vulgarized and Russified Ukrainian comes from her lover, whose sexual agency needs to be reinforced and legitimized by a linguistic one with distinctly imperial undertones. The presence of English establishes a different point of reference, which at the same time creates a different standard—cultural and other—to which somehow the narrator’s world does not measure up. The English linguistic medium serves the paradoxical effect of structuring and appropriating the protagonist’s world and its Orientalist ‘enigma’ (or ‘Slavic mysticism’, p. 120, English in the original) through scholarly discourse, while at the same time failing to do so and thus emphasizing the impossibility of its containment within a rationalizing academic structure. In her address to an academic audience, the narrator’s defiant and deliberately conversational style of lecturing resists subordination to the expectations of contemporary Western discourse: ‘Please one moment of your attention, [...] I even have a

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quote ready here [...]—my apologies, it’s not from Derrida, Foucault or Lacan’ (p. 120). Zabuzhko repositions and deterritorializes problems of national selfhood, politics and history by taking them out of the public sphere and interrogating them on the terrain of the private sites of body and sex. Postcoloniality is given ‘aesthetic expression’ in Zabuzhko’s writing, and ‘[t]he bodies of her characters become microcosms of the national-colonial space, in which the dramas of cultural identity collide with those of sexual and gender identity’. 20 The writer’s examination of the intensely private bodily spaces translates into a clinical dissection of the mechanisms of postcolonial psychological dependence and the crippling effects it has had on generations of people.

Cosmopolitan Mobilities: Bodies ‘Out of Place’ Manuela Gretkowska’s creative work exemplifies today’s rethinking of European space from its historical margins with a voice that embodies a kind of rhizomatic multi-rootedness. Gretkowska’s narration of her everyday lived experiences as an immigrant woman and a traveller explores the experience of being a Polish woman in the cosmopolitan context of Europe through a prism of gendered consciousness. The author’s distinctly woman’s perspective and feminist sensibilities were partially conditioned by the developments in her own country, in which she later became an active participant. The last years of the 1980s in Poland were marked by the establishment of several prominent centres for women’s studies and the advancement of women’s rights, for example, Centrum Praw Kobiet [The Centre for Women’s Rights] in Warsaw, and the Women’s Foundation ‘eFKa’, one of the more important feminist groups which was based in Cracow, and published the journal Pełnym głosem [In a Loud Voice]. Gretkowska, an essayist, columnist, fiction writer, and film and TV screenplay writer, belongs to the generation of new Central and East Europeans who, with the gradual opening of the post-communist borders, took the opportunity to engage in a more mobile lifestyle. She left Poland for Paris in 1988, and for a number of years resided in France, Sweden, and, on occasion, in other European locations, while also regularly returning to Poland. In 2007 she founded the Polish Women's Party, which, under her leadership, acquired some public prominence. In her first novel My zdies’ emigranty [We Are Immigrants Here] (1991), which was favourably noticed by Czesław Miłosz, she focuses on the experiences of a generation of young 20

Uilleam Blacker, ‘Nation, Body, Home: Gender and National Identity in the Work of Oksana Zabuzhko’, Modern Language Review, 105.2 (2010), 487-501, p. 489.

206 Irene Sywenky people leaving their home country to seek opportunity elsewhere. Gretkowska’s following novels explore the bohemian lifestyle of the young expatriates living in France: Tarot paryski [The Parisian Tarot] (1993), Kabaret metafizyczny [Metaphysical Cabaret] (1995), and Podręcznik do ludzi [A Textbook on People] (1996). In Światowidz [Worldview] (1998), she narrates her travels to South Asia, while her later books become more intimate, slower paced, and focus on her life journey as a woman negotiating Polish and European spaces, such as Polka [Polish Woman] (2001) and Europejka [European Woman] (2004). Gretkowska belongs to the generation of the post-totalitarian mobile intelligentsia who, with the opening of the borders, adopted a nomadic lifestyle of fundamental unhomeliness, as Homi Bhabha’s phrase describes the state of permanently displaced identity, and continuous longing for elsewhere. Gretkowska’s writing explores multiple permutations of the conditions of otherness and foreignness, of un-rooting oneself only to (re)trace her roots elsewhere. The narrator’s awareness of her non-belonging—or rather her multiple belongings along various geopolitical axes—allows her to explore her own experiences as a woman (yet another margin) and to rediscover her own Polishness through the perspective of otherness. Border-crossings and explorations of otherness in Gretkowska’s work take place on multiple levels. The actual ‘geographicity’ of her writing, which is as much about the places she experiences as it is about the people, constitutes one of the definitive aspects of her prose. The author’s cosmopolitan experiences in Western Europe paradoxically (and inevitably) resound with Polish subtexts, as she ponders, even if implicitly, both the future of her own country as it is transitioning between its past and the new evolving European geopolitical order, and the future of the mobile subjects like herself, suspended between multiple existences, identities, worlds. Her early books are particularly focused on the experience of traveling abroad and being both at home in this experience and profoundly unhomely, using Bhabha’s apt coinage. Gretkowska’s self-reflexive narratives participate in the rewriting of the traditional masculine space of Baudelairean flâneurie from a woman’s perspective; her intervention is posited by her gaze from a critical distance, by observing and experiencing the life of the street crowd, the hustle and bustle of big European cities, feeling the mood of the urban scene, while also redefining and affirming her own space. It is this simultaneous being an insider and an outsider: observing herself as a participant of a different ontological order—doubling and multiplying of the ‘I’—that is characteristic of Gretkowska’s displaced identity, particularly foregrounded in ‘We Are Immigrants Here’ and ‘A Textbook on People’.

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Gretkowska’s emphasis on textuality creates a sense of textured physicality of her discursive spaces. For instance, the entire narrative of ‘Metaphysical Cabaret’ is structured as a series of footnotes, where each brief, disjointed section of writing serves as a footnote to the previous one, that is, it forms a subordinate level, expanding into a Chinese box structure. The tongue-in-cheek catch, however, is that the chain-like development of a series of footnotes lacks the traditional (and commonly expected) dependence of a regular footnote on the main narrative; here the relation between the footnote and the footnoted text is built mostly on the associative link to an arbitrary word in the text (the word also happens to be in the opening sentence of the next footnote). The very idea of footnotes, of course, is implicit of the ‘main’ narrative in the background; the absence of this narrative ‘centre’ forms an explicit gap, inviting the reader to fill it at as he/she likes, and, at the same time, emphasizing the arbitrariness of such finalizations. The lack of a narrative core parallels the similar lack in the ‘deferred’ identity of the narrator, and this ‘footnote’ narrative style (although without the usual footnote graphic markers) is characteristic of the other Gretkowska novels. Fragmentation and arbitrary connections among narrative episodes, insertion of pieces of random information with a minimal grounding in the background narrative, mixtures of different styles (primarily fiction with non-fiction), and journalistic commentaries on wideranging issues constitute some of the defining features of Gretkowska’s style. If in ‘The Parisian Tarot’ the main plot line is inserted into the two lovers’ interrupted telephone conversation and forms but a glimpse into the lives of the immigrant and cosmopolitan circles of the French capital, ‘A Textbook on People’ develops a more elaborate narrative frame featuring autobiographical details, the coherence of which, however, is continuously disrupted by intervening micro-narratives. Gretkowska’s body writing is textualized and self-conscious; as a corporeal, embodied subject on the move, she creates discursive spaces as ‘networks of social signification’, becoming a meaningful and functional subject ‘within assemblages composed with other subjects’.21 The narrator makes connections with trans-historical feminine and feminist spaces, seeking out other women, displaced, transgressive, unsubordinated: the ‘first wife’ Lilith; seventeen-year-old Mary Shelley, as she was finding and asserting her voice in the male literary space; the notorious Charlotte de Corday, the young assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, one of the leaders of the French Revolution who was most closely associated with the Reign of Terror. Gretkowska intervenes in these historical narratives of women’s 21

Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Inscriptions and Body Maps: Representations and the Corporeal’, in Space, Gender, Knowledge, pp. 236-46 (p. 237).

208 Irene Sywenky lives, plays with them, tries them on. She is fascinated by the historical constructions of de Corday as a threatening, powerful, and autonomous space of otherness. The scenario of Marat’s assassination acquires deeper connotations in the context of Gretkowska’s examination of Charlotte Corday’s motifs. Corday’s accomplishment of the murder with the knowledge (and anticipation) of the following death sentence is interpreted as an utter act of theatricality, as a self-sufficient and self-reflexive dramatic script, re-enacted in life. The careful and calculated ‘staging’ of both Marat’s death and her own (she was sent to the guillotine) was nothing more than acting out of the particular ‘literary’ models of murder and death (specifically, Gretkowska refers to Corneille and Racine): ‘The murder of Marat on 13 July 1793 was a symbolic gesture, but also a real one, just like the gestures of actors on stage are both symbolic and real at the same time’.22 This was de Corday’s articulation of her own public space and her way of writing herself into history. Historical transfigurations of the distant and forgotten by Charlotte de Corday fascinate Gretkowska because in this real woman’s various literary incarnations she also traces multiple recognitions and misrecognitions of herself, the various faces of her own insecurities and anxieties as a woman caught at a crossroads of history. Gretkowska’s nomadisms—geophysical, textual, and historiographic— are also defined by the ephemeral and mobile nature of the postmodern world. Through multiple crossing of borders, real or imaginary, elliptical pauses, textual spaces of suspended footnotes, she seeks to define and articulate her own space, while being ‘out of place’. The writer claims all the countries she lived in as the spaces of her simultaneous belonging and unbelonging. Geopolitical ambivalence and fluidity of territorial and sociohistorical points of reference render the narrator’s movement—both between and within borders—a liminal experience of in-betweenness, of an ongoing transition, transfer, and translation.

Domestic and Regional Spaces: Aporiae of Localism While the authors I discussed above emphasize the postcolonial aftermath of geospatial relations in a broader domestic or international context, another body of fiction represents a different trend: a tendency toward exploration of the domestic space and smaller, geographically less significant places (as opposed to both domestic and foreign metropolitan areas). The impetus toward provincial and regional writing has manifested in many writers (such as Andrzej Stasiuk in Poland, Iurko and Taras Prokhas’kos, and 22

Manuela Gretkowska, Podręcznik do ludzi [A Textbook on People] (Warsaw: Beba Mazeppo & Company, 1996), p. 75.

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Iurii Andrukhovych in Ukraine). Among female voices Halyna Pahutiak and Olga Tokarczuk are particularly significant in this context. Their work examines provincial geographies—human, cultural, historico-political— through the intimately subjective space of a female narrator’s perspective. Tokarczuk’s novel Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of Day, House of Night, 2002) situates its protagonist in the southwest Polish region of Silesia, whose complex political narrative of the twentieth century spans from its German history to its transfer to the new Polish government following the redrawing of Europe at the Yalta conference of 1945. The unnamed female narrator, who moves to a small village in the area of the towns of Wambierzowice and Nowa Ruda, finds herself in a geopolitically ambivalent territory, adjacent to the German and Czech borders, which is a palimpsest of historically layered cultural meanings and memories, stories and interpretations. The narrator’s gradual immersion in the slow, measured life of the village, and in the stories and memories of its people, becomes a sort of a hermeneutic quest for understanding the complex identity of this community as well as for rediscovering her own roots, which are entangled in the contested German-Polish territories (toward the end of the novel, the narrator recalls her German-speaking nanny). The prominent thematic thread of the novel is that of the body and bodily space, which is metaphorically translated at a number of other conceptual levels: the body as a house; the body as a territorial and a geophysical space; the body as a space of belonging/non-belonging. The novel’s epigraph, an excerpt from the Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran, sets the tone for the entire narrative: ‘Your house is your larger body./It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night;/and it is not dreamless./Does not your house dream?’ Various planes of spatiality negotiated by the narrator are inextricably tied to the concept of home space, which, in the geopolitically ambivalent and historically complex territory of Silesia, acquires multiple layers of connotations that are explored in the novel. These include historical de-/re-territorializations, belonging/non-belonging in the context of the shifting borders and historical transfers, generational differences in the perception of the region as the home for different historical communities, and the problem of memory and postmemory (to draw on the term of Marianne Hirsch). 23 Gibran’s concept of ‘dreaming,’ which he refers to in his poem, echoes in the dreamscape of Tokarczuk’s narrative (‘Only dreams are real’),24 where 23 24

See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1997). Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Evanston, Il: Northwestern UP, 2002), p. 36.

210 Irene Sywenky dreaming constitutes both a bodily and a cognitive, epistemological space. Dreams, which are referenced extensively in the novel, are an essential extension of the body’s functions, a conjoining of its physical, biological materiality and the (un)conscious; on the other hand, dreaming is posited as a source of intuitive, irrational knowledge, a collective repository of stories and memories shared between the narrator and other characters, especially her elderly neighbour Marta, who becomes the narrator’s connection to the other Silesia, which is unknown to her. The building of shared memories, both individual and collective, is something that brings the narrator closer to understanding the people with whom she came to share the space of a small village. She says we all dwell in two homes: one ‘with a fixed location in time and space’ and the other that is infinite, and we ‘live in both of them simultaneously’ (p. 204). The infinity of the other home implies the fundamental openness of the space of memory and the palimpsestic transhistorical space of the region that resists closure and is an ongoing dialogue of interpretation and negotiation of meaning. In the opening segment of the novel (‘The Dream’), the narrator experiences the sensation of separation of her body and mind in what can be conceptualized as a moment of geo-spatial awareness/consciousness: ‘I dreamed I was pure sight, without a body or a name. I was suspended high above the valley at some undefined point from which I could see everything. […] I didn’t […] belong to myself ’ (p. 1). In her dream, the narrator is trying to discern a meaningful landscape, to make sense of the complex sociohistorical physiology of the place, and, through her dream-enhanced sight, to take in the entire space with its nature, people and manmade landmarks. Seeing and sight, a traditional metaphor for understanding or knowing, has been a particularly dynamic trope in the historical construction and validation of the male space of production of knowledge. Tokarczuk’s construction of a specifically female epistemology is aligned with the space of female subjectivity, which is constituted at the nexus of body and mind. Although in this dream narrative the narrator’s mind is separated from her body, her mind is in fact her whole self, which in totality with her consciousness refers to the totality of her body; she also appears to conceive of herself as being one with—or merging with—the totality of the space and place, embracing all its aspects, including its multiple permutations through time. Her ‘seeing’ the village and the valley through time sustains the plane of spatiotemporality as part of the ‘organic’ existence and functioning of the place. The non-linearity and disturbances of temporality (‘Something had gone wrong with time’, p. 109) is part of the world constructed by the narrator as she weaves the network of stories, memories and other people’s dreams into a narrative that starts to elucidate meanings

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and fill in gaps and lacunae in her hermeneutic search. The suspension of time in Tokarczuk is reminiscent of a magical realist device that constructs a specific place as separate from its spatiotemporal environment and renders it paradoxical: the place becomes a holistic organism that is constituted by its geophysical parameters but also by its past, its memories, and its inhabitants, while also being ridden with irresolvable tensions between the past and the present. The narrator’s epistemological self-positioning is defined by her experiencing the place and ‘writing’ her body into the totality of space (quite literally, as the novel is a self-reflexive exercise). The narrative emphasizes bodily, sensory ways of knowing and understanding—taste, smell, hearing— and various segments of the novel are devoted specifically to the experience of these senses. The landscape of the sensory knowledge of the place also becomes part of its cultural landscape, as many chapters explore various local recipes (which are also reproduced in the novel), plants, smells and the sound environments that are part of what constitutes the phenomenology of the local experience. In this sensorium, in a continuous state of heightened awareness of her environment, the narrator’s body consciousness becomes diffuse, blurring the boundaries between her body, the natural space. and the world of objects: ‘If I weren’t a person, I’d be a mushroom’ (p. 48). Pondering the stillness and quiet introspective state and self-sufficiency of ‘being a mushroom’, the narrator engages in imaginative reflection on the potential of her ‘new’ body: its growing on the vegetation that died, always being exposed to the natural elements and ‘given away’ to insects. Like in the dream discussed above, she needs to see below the surface, uncover the layers, get to the core of the truth, if there is one to be found: ‘I would penetrate the deadness right through to the pure earth— there my mushroomy fingers would come to a stop’ (p. 48). This bodily symbiosis mimics the close interrelation between various species and the life cycle of plants and animals with each one being an integral part of their habitat and natural surroundings. Through these imaginative transfigurations, the narrator ‘grows’ into and becomes part of the quiet and unassuming self-sufficiency of the village and its human habitat. The realm of nature, however, is as ambivalent as the constructs of the human world, and ‘in the world of mushrooms nothing is certain’ (p. 222). While the bodily discourse in the novel serves to create tropological affinity and continuity between the narrator and the space she inhabits, it also serves to deepen the connections between the narrator and other people in the local community. Marta, the narrator’s neighbour, is a slightly enigmatic figure who is posited as a liminal presence between life and death, nature and civilization, human rationality and animal-like intuitive knowing.

212 Irene Sywenky The narrator is often caught scrutinizing Marta’s aged body, thinking about its smells, its frailty, its visceral quality, the scenarios of possible deaths it can meet in its final reunion with nature. Marta’s philosophy of the body is closely linked to the surrounding environment: according to her typology, different types of soils and other natural conditions produce different types of human physiologies. The female space of Marta’s body and bodily consciousness is the narrator’s window into the mysterious, primordial, earthy maternal space. Marta is a hybrid creature who occupies the liminal space between the human and animal realms; when she disappears into winter seclusion, the narrator thinks of her as retreating into seasonal hibernation (p. 280). To Marta, every extension of the human body is an inherent part of the self; thus, for instance, hair serves as a repository of a person’s thoughts (p. 68). When the narrator gives herself and Marta a haircut, their cut hair blends together on the floor; Marta wraps it up and buries it in the garden. This ritual reflects on the significance of intergenerational memory, forgetting and remembrance of the many sociohistorical changes that shaped the region. As Marta’s and the narrator’s hair is mixed together, the connection between their bodily spaces also comes to signify their implicit bonding and the narrator’s sharing in Marta’s—and the collective—memory of the village and its community. Marta’s stories about the people she knows and the memories of the events that shaped the local community (the war, the expulsion of Germans from Silesia, the Polish resettlement) become the narrator’s bridge to the past. In another symbiotic relationship—between words, language and the world of objects they represent—Marta’s memories and stories of other people’s experiences gradually become part of the narrator’s selfhood. While these narratives themselves are unreliable constructs, they nonetheless connect with the narrator on a visceral level: ‘I’ve never been able to reconstruct the story itself, but always remember exactly when and where it was first rooted within me, as if these stories are unreal somehow, nothing but fantasies that exist only within our two heads’ (p. 5). The stories Marta tells are extensions of her bodily, conscious and unconscious, space that invades the narrator’s own space and grows roots there: ‘I am never sure if there is a borderline between what Marta says and what I hear. I am unable to separate it from her, from me, from what we both know, and what we don’t’ (p. 26). Immersing herself in the discursive network of local memories, that are unreliable, subjective and vulnerable to destruction, she becomes an open-boundary receptacle, a repository of privileged knowledge, while also herself changing into a diffuse and ambivalent body: ‘Collecting the different stories of people inhabiting this equivocal territory, the narrator is a “dispersed” figure, a cultural negotiator maintaining her

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integrity by developing a metamorphic tolerance for contradictions’.25 What buffers these contradictions is the fluidity of her bodily space that morphs to accommodate and accept other intervening spaces—discourses, memories, conjectures and truths, from which some form of understanding and knowing may emerge. As Tokarczuk contends, people ‘cannot live without being attached to a place, because only then do they become real’ (p. 177); places, however, are more than geophysical materiality—they are also spaces that harbour palimpsestic layers of stories and imaginations, continuums of historical traumas and memories, and as such they speak to our bodies and appeal to our senses. If Tokarczuk’s narrator conceptualizes her body through the trope of a house or mansion with intricate architecture that has the potential to connect to other bodies and discursive spaces in order to create broader networks of meanings, Zabuzhko and Gretkowska pursue other strategies of bodily reinscription to engage with and challenge their respective environments. Women’s rewritings of spatial interpretations implicitly contribute to ‘critiquing the [traditional] masculinism of the geographical imagination’26, a project that is much overdue in geographic imaginaries of Central and Eastern Europe. In a broader context of the postcolonial framework, speaking through the spatially situated and geopolitically engaged bodies imparts agency to these narrative voices, while elucidating the complex mechanisms of redefinitions of identity and rewriting the spaces of nation and history.

25

26

Justyna Sempruch, ‘Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk’s Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 10.3 (2008), p. 4, available at Accessed 15 September 2014. Mapping Desire, p. 11.

Tamás Scheibner Building Empire through Self-Colonization: Literary Canons and Budapest as Sovietized Metropolis Abstract: The Hungarian national project integrated the civilizing mission of mediating Western culture for the peripheries. This idea was developed in competition with Habsburg colonialist models attributing the same role to Vienna. Due to the spectacular fin-de-siècle economic boom, Budapest replaced the Austrian capital as a major cultural centre in the imagination of a large part of the Hungarian elite. Somewhat unexpectedly, these aspirations for a regional cultural hegemony were revived after World War II in some leftist circles, where Sovietization was sometimes understood in terms of competition with neighbouring states, and as a tool for ensuring regional cultural supremacy. In the literary field, this meant that Hungary and, respectively, Budapest should emerge as a place from where the know-how of producing Soviet-type literature was transmitted to other cultures. Meanwhile, Budapest itself started to be redesigned after Moscow. I claim that plans for refashioning the city affected the ongoing reworking of the Hungarian literary canon, marginalizing authors, such as the much admired Gyula Krúdy, who were associated with peripheral or undesirable spaces in a future Soviet-type metropolis.

In January 1946, the internationally recognized communist playwright Julius Háy, who served as chief-secretary of the Hungarian-Soviet Cultural Society (HSCS) at the time, delivered a speech to the presidential body of the same organization. 1 He reported that the Society had, among other things, established a publishing house and made several Soviet books available in Hungarian translation during the first six months of its existence. Additionally, the Society mediated Soviet plays to theatres, and these according to Háy, aroused great interest. Two of these plays were staged in the National Theatre that was directed at that time by Tamás Major, another prominent member of the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP). As Háy claimed, The Stormy Evening of Life by Leonid Rachmanov, as well as Russian People by Konstantin Simonov, ‘was welcomed favourably, and, today, these are played all over the country in many theatres, therefore these are going to be part of Hungary’s general cultural treasure.’2 Háy, who was bilingual and wrote some of his works in German, alluded here to the concept of allgemeines Kulturgut to suggest that these Soviet plays could smoothly integrate into the culture of the Hungarian people (as opposed to any elite culture). Like most communists who returned from their Moscow exile, Háy 1

2

Contribution by Gyula Háy, Minutes of the Presidential Board of the Hungarian– Soviet Cultural Society (HSCP), 10 January, 1946, National Archives of Hungary (NAH), P 2148/1/54. Ibid.

216 Tamás Scheibner was convinced that the Hungarian people should be refashioned following Soviet models, and culture could be a major tool in the process. It was conceptualized not as the importation of foreign cultural models, but an organic development in the sense that Soviet literature would assist Hungarians in reconnecting with their ‘true’ character that they had betrayed in the previous hundred years.3 This explains Háy’s somewhat paradoxical suggestion that the allgemeines Kulturgut does not necessarily develop from ‘below’, but could be developed from ‘above’ via the capital city, the cultural centre that mediates Soviet literary products and values. For Háy, the significance of the plays by Rachmanov and Simonov, however, was more than just that they were a successful example of how Soviet culture becomes Hungarian. He emphasized that ‘not only the fame, but even the manuscripts of these plays reached the surrounding countries through Hungary.’ 4 Budapest could aspire then not only to the role of Hungary’s cultural centre, but in the entire region’s as well. As Háy pointed out: ‘They come to us from Romania for books and to be enlightened, they come to us from Bulgaria, Austria, and so on. As such, the charge of organizing culture on an international level was laid on Hungary, so to speak. If we work well, we could strengthen this position that will be an important factor in setting the base of the international authority of Hungarian culture.’5 Here, the Sovietization of Hungarian culture is framed by one of the dominant traditional interpretations of the Hungarian historical mission. This mission was that of the ‘civilizer’, a task that had been closely associated with Vienna until then. The idea that Hungary should mediate high-standard Western culture for the ‘semi-barbarous’ Eastern peripheries was developed in parallel with the struggles for national emancipation. Within this conception, Vienna was challenged as a regional cultural capital: as a consequence of the late 19th-century economic boom in Hungary that resulted in the truly spectacular development of Budapest, many thought that the latter could replace the Austrian city in its traditional role. This idea was nurtured during the interwar period as well, and at its most extreme, conjoined with irredentist dreams about the (re)establishment of a Hungarian empire. Motivated largely by political tactics aimed at pleasing part of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the communists revived this project after the Second World War, at least at a symbolic level. However, this time 3

4 5

György Lukács, ‘The Hungarian Communist Party and Hungarian Culture’ [1948], in The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945-1948, ed. and trans. by Tyrus Miller (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 241-64. Háy, ibid. Ibid.

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the standard of civilization was not Paris as it was before, but the Soviet Union and its capital city. As Katerina Clark has recently demonstrated, high Stalinism in the 1930s aspired to represent Moscow as the metropolitan capital of a multicultural empire.6 It was argued that the Soviet Union became the true inheritor of European culture that the decadent West failed to preserve and nourish in an appropriate way. Moscow was to take over the role of Paris as the European cultural capital. The socialist realism that was invented at the same time was claimed to be a synthetic aesthetics that integrated all artistic techniques inasmuch as these could be surrendered to a narrative defined by Stalinist philosophy of history. In Stalin’s Gesamtkunstwerk redrawing the cityscape and reinventing European literature as socialist realism were parts of the very same project. 7 The main ideologues of the Hungarian Communist Party had the high Stalinism of the 1930s in mind when it came to the reconfiguration of post-war Hungarian culture. 8 As Gyula Háy’s report demonstrated, the imitation of an imperial enterprise was expected to result in the restoration of imperial ambitions, even though only on a limited, symbolic level. According to this logic, the more devoted a country is to cultural self-colonization,9 the more likely it is to gain advantage over its rivals and dominate on a local scale.

Budapest as Small-Scale Moscow? Competing Visions of Urban Design It is telling that just as the chief-secretary of the Communist Party, Mátyás Rákosi liked to be called Stalin’s best student,10 Budapest was often imagined

6 7 8

9

10

Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2011). Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin: Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion, trans. by Gabriele Leupold (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1988). For a more detailed discussion see Tamás Scheibner, A magyar irodalomtudomány szovjetizálása: A szocialista realista kritika és intézményei, 1945–1953 [The Sovietization of Hungarian Literary Studies: Socialist Realist Criticism and Its Institutions, 1945– 1953] (Budapest: Ráció, 2014). The admittedly problematic metaphor ‘self-colonization’ is employed here as an heuristic term referring to a self-emancipatory effort that, in effect, creates and reaffirms the very center/periphery dichotomy it intends to supersede. For a discussion of the metaphor with regard to ‘Westernization’ (and with a focus on the Balkans), see Alexander Kiossev, ‘Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures’, in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. by Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), pp. 114-17. Cf. Balázs Apor, ‘The Leader Cult in Communist Hungary, 1945-56: Propaganda, Institutional Background and Mass Media’ in War of Words: Culture and the Mass Media

218 Tamás Scheibner to be a little Moscow. However, it was far from clear what a Sovietized metropolis should look like, and there were considerable differences between the various views even among the top ranks of the HCP. Even as late as 1948, when the communist architect Gábor Preisich presented an urban development plan to the Central Committee of the Party, Rákosi and the chief ideologue, József Révai, who were both charmed by the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow, criticized the outlined project for not foreseeing the establishment of a representative central square in Budapest, that would have been a ‘Forum’ following models from antiquity.11 This would have required the demolition of a significant part of the city’s historical centre: such costly undertakings were regularly disapproved by Ernő Gerő, a third Muscovite and the second man after Rákosi in the party hierarchy, who oversaw economic matters. In contrast, Gerő proposed to build high-rise buildings at significant crossroads that would meet the requirements of Stalinist urban planning in an alternative and more affordable way.12 This was vetoed, however, by Rákosi. At the end, neither of the propositions was realized. Earlier, between 1945 and 1948, the project of an alternative modernization of the city was even less defined: several visions competed for dominance, which were sometimes self-contradictory, vague, or sketchy. After Budapest was scathed in a siege that could be compared to those of Stalingrad, Leningrad, Warsaw, and Berlin in its scale of material destruction and civilian losses,13 several plans were made to rebuild the city. While the reconstruction of residential houses started as private initiatives,14 not only preservationists, but also some leading modernist architects cautioned against an extreme reshaping of historical parts of the city.15 The first plans contrived by the Board of Public Works of the Capital City (Fővárosi Közmunkák Tanácsa), a relatively autonomous institution overseeing the

11

12 13

14 15

in the Making of the Cold War in Europe, ed. by Judith Devlin and Christoph Hendrik Müller (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013), pp. 18-29. Minutes of the Meeting of the Political Committee of the HCP, 1 November 1951, NAH, M-KS 276/53/86. See also: András Sipos, A jövő Budapestje, 1930-1960 [Budapest of the Future, 1930-1960] (Budapest: Napvilág, 2011), p. 144. Minutes of the Meeting of the HCP Committee on State Economy, 14 September 1951, NAH, M-KS 276/112/89. John Lukács, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), pp. 219–221; Krisztián Ungváry, The Siege of Budapest (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2006), p. 257. János Bonta, A magyar építészet egy kortárs szemével, 1945–1960 [Hungarian Architecture From a Contemporary Perspective, 1945-1960] (Budapest: Terc, 2008), pp. 48-49. Cf. Iván Kotsis, Életrajzom [My Life], ed. by Endre Prakfalvi (Budapest: HAP Galéria—Magyar Építészeti Múzeum, 2010), pp. 241-42.

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rebuilding of Budapest, were much more radical than the current cityscape might suggest. The Board was led by the modernist architect József Fischer, a key member of the Hungarian faction of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in the late 1920s and 1930s—a network that was re-established after the war with Fischer leading the small Hungarian group. Like several other former representatives of CIAM, he also tended to see extensive material destruction, the new post-war political environment, and the changing status of properties as an opportunity to bring about a large-scale reshaping of the urban environment. Although Fischer was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, just like many of his fellows at the Social Democratic Party he saw no contradiction between his modernist propensities and co-presiding the Department of Architecture of the Hungarian–Soviet Cultural Society.16 After 1945 he sought to implement a version of the ‘functional city’; however, he relied extensively on interwar plans of urban development thereby maintaining considerable continuity with the previous epoch.17 This continuity is significant, because the idea of a metropolitan Budapest remained central from the 1920s to the Second World War,18 and Fischer revitalized such aspirations. While Fischer was instrumental in coining the slogan ‘not renovation, but rebuilding’ 19 that gave priority to more experimental planning, he and the architects he favoured were far from the most radical when it came to urban planning. While the winners of

16

17 18 19

Cf. NAH, P 2148, 1/57/2; 1/52/6; 1/50/22. In his groundbreaking comparative work, Anders Åman, while taking a bird’s-eye perspective, seems to overemphasize the polarity between the homogenized modernist and socialist realist sides. See his Architecture and Ideology in the Stalin Era (New York and Cambridge, MA: The Architectural History Foundation – MIT Press, 1993). It should be added that Fischer had long nurtured illusions about Soviet urbanism: he did not entirely believe the report by his Hungarian colleague Albert Forbát, who was another CIAM member, in the mid-1930s claiming that that Soviet architecture took a traditionalist turn. See ‘Fischer József emlékezései 1972-74-ből’ [Recollections of József Fischer from 1972–1974], published with an introduction by Anna Kaiser, in Lapis Angularis I. Források a Magyar Építészeti Múzeum gyűjteményéből [Lapis Angularis I: Sources from the Collection of the Museum of Hungarian Architecture] (Budapest: Országos Műemlékvédelmi Hivatal Magyar Építészeti Múzeum, 1995), p. 342. On the plans of the Board of Public Works see Sipos, ibid., pp. 77-101. Ibid., 19-75. See e.g., Endre Prakfalvi, ‘Elmélet és gyakorlat építészetünkben, 1945–1956/1959’ [Theory and Praxis in Our Architecture, 1945–1956/59] in Építészet és tervezés Magyarországon, 1945–1959 [Architecture and Urban Planning in Hungary, 19451959], ed. by Endre Prakfalvi and Virág Hajdú (Budapest: Országos Műemlékvédelmi Hivatal—Magyar Építészeti Múzeum, 1996), 8; Sipos, ibid., 77.

220 Tamás Scheibner

Fig. 1. Final visual plan for the regulation of Kálvin Square, City Centre, Budapest. Illustration to Kálmán Rados, ‘Budapest városrendezése és a hároméves terv’ [Urban Planning of Budapest and the Three Years Plan], Általános Mérnök [The General Engineer], 2.5 (July 1948), p. 126.

the design competition for rebuilding Budapest outlined plans that extensively reshaped the whole city,20 and the plan that was prepared under the supervision of Fischer himself was not different in this regard, these cannot be compared to those ideas that a younger cohort of communists brought forward. At times their views disturbed even Fischer, who maintained excellent relations with a good number of high-ranking communists, including Rákosi,21 and who became a patron of the previously 20 21

Endre Morvay, ‘A jövő Budapestje. Ötletpályázat a korszerű városrendezésre I-II.’ [The Future of Budapest], Budapest, 2.1 (1946), 23-27; 2.2 (1946), 68-72. During World War II Fischer was hiding many communists who became key political figures after 1945 (Tamás Major, Sándor Haraszti, Ferenc Donáth, and the future secret-police chief Gábor Péter), and his flat was used for secret meetings of the underground communist party: thereby he got to know László Rajk, Géza Losonczy, Gyula Kállai, Márton Horváth, and others. Cf. ‘Fischer József visszaemlékezéséből’ [From the Recollections of József Fischer], published with an introduction by János M. Rainer in Budapest Főváros Levéltára Közleményei ’84 [Proceedings of the Archive of Budapest, 1984] (Budapest Főváros Levéltára, 1985), p. 406.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 221

mentioned group of young members of the HCP. 22 According to the architect and writer Pál Granasztói, who was Fischer’s closest colleague at the time, these young communists, such as László Málnai, showed absolutely no respect for the existing architectural heritage, and their way of thinking was very similar to Hungarian fascist architects under the reign of Mátyás Szálasi. Their imagination was awed by dysfunctional imperial design without any sense of social or environmental realities.23 As one of the main promoters of Stalinist architecture, Málnai was the one who started the campaign against ‘formalism’ somewhat later, in the spring of 1949.24 Initially the Board of Public Works was dominated by that particular fraction of the social democrats who tended to prioritize Soviet cultural relations over an Anglo-Saxon orientation, though not on an exclusivist basis as the communists did.25 However, in the course of time, the latter gradually acquired ever greater influence in the field. 26 In 1946, they launched a new journal, Új Építészet [New Architecture], that was envisioned to become a rival to Fischer’s modernist Tér és Forma [Space and Form], and became the primary medium for spreading socialist realist ideals. Two of the editors, Máté Major and Imre Perényi, played a decisive role in the forthcoming years in developing a new Hungarian urban design. They both arrived from the Soviet Union, however under very different circumstances. Major was a former prisoner of war who, nevertheless, was assigned the task 22 23 24

25

26

Pál Granasztói, Ifjúkor a Belvárosban / Múló világom / Itthon éltem [Youth in Belváros / My Passing World / I Lived Here, at Home] (Budapest: Magvető, 1984), p. 621; 565. Ibid., pp. 563-65; p. 595. Mariann Simon, ‘“Fordulatnak kell bekövetkeznie építészetünkben—jelentős fordulatnak.” Elmélet és gyakorlat 1949-1951’ [‘A Change is Needed in Our Architecture—a Significant Change’: Theory and Practice, 1949-1951], Architectura Hungariae, 1.4 (1999), available at Accessed 1 October 2014. It is maintained that the principal difference between Fischer’s and the communist architects’ attitude was that the former tended to think in a democratic way while the latter were more inclined to dictatorial measures and strived for a total centralization of urban planning. Cf. Péter Ujlaki, ‘Fischer József a Fővárosi Közmunkák Tanácsának élén’ [József Fischer as Head of the Board of Public Works of the Capital City], in Az ostromtól a forradalomig – adalékok Budapest múltjához, 1945–1956 [From the Siege to the Revolution: Contributions on the Past of Budapest, 1945– 1956], ed. by Zsuzsanna Bencsik, Gábor Kresalek (Budapest Főváros Levéltára, n. d.), pp. 40-41. Fischer was always proud of his intellectual independence, and he was looking for inspiration both to the West and the East. He was against the fusion of the SDP and the HCP in 1948, and after he was marginalized in the same year, he became associated with the Anglo-Saxon oriented social democrats led by Anna Kéthly, and briefly joined the third government of Imre Nagy on the eve of the Soviet invasion in 1956. On the institutional aspects of the takeover see e.g. Ujlaki, ibid.

222 Tamás Scheibner there of designing new barracks and POW camps, and was introduced into the ‘Soviet style’ as it was manifested at the 1939 All-Union Agricultural Exhibition.27 Perényi, by contrast, had been living in the Soviet Union since his childhood and remained there until his repatriation in August 1945, and his Hungarian language skills were limited.28 While Major was a member of CIAM in the 1930s, Perényi, after his graduation from the University of Architecture in Moscow, worked as an architectural engineer on Soviet flagship projects—a difference that partly explains their later conflicts. Although Major and Perényi were initially working very closely together, that does not suggest that there was a general accordance on the meaning of socialist realism. Although Major disapproved of both the ‘old, mostly bad buildings’ of Budapest and the ‘modernist architectural monsters’ by which he implicitly referred to the agenda of Le Corbusier and the CIAM of the 1930s, he nevertheless categorically refused even the slightest architectural reference to the baroque, and claimed that secession should not be unequivocally excluded from the progressive tradition because it was a response to the historical eclecticism of 19th-century nationalism.29 He was arguing on a (somewhat misinterpreted and vulgarized) Lukácsian basis when he asserted that an artist can, on the one hand, create historically ‘positive’ works despite his/her conservative political views, but, on the other hand, one should not expect Hungarian architects to design at the same level as their Soviet colleagues, because of the differences between the economic bases of the two countries.30 In practice, even though he did not subscribe to the idea of those huge blocks of flats popular in the 1930s, he did seek a compromise between the functionalism of the CIAM and socialist realism. 31 Major’s closest friend at the time, Perényi, was more explicit somewhat earlier in a monograph titled Urbanism in the USSR (1947): Modern architecture had and has outstanding representatives in the USSR, but at the beginning of the thirties they were infected by formalistic tendencies, quite foreign to Soviet society. From that time onwards, till this very day, Soviet 27

28 29

30 31

Máté Major, Tizenkét nehéz esztendő (1945–1956). Lapis Angularis III. Források a Magyar Építészeti Múzeum gyűjteményéből [Twelve Hard Years (1945–1956). Lapis Angularis III: Sources from the Collection of the Museum of Hungarian Architecture], ed. by Zoltán Fehérvári and Endre Prakfalvi (Budapest: Magyar Építészeti Múzeum, 2001), p. 98. Ibid., p. 153, 178. Máté Major, Az új építészet elméleti kérdései (Szocialista realizmus az építészetben) [Theoretical Questions of the New Architecture: Socialist Realism in Architecture] (Budapest: Új Építészet Köre, 1948), p. 9, 13, 18. Ibid., pp. 22, 14-15. Endre Prakfalvi – György Szücs, A szocreál Magyarországon [The Socrealism in Hungary] (Budapest: Corvina, 2010), pp. 53-54.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 223 architecture has steadily been seeking satisfactory solutions for the needs of the socialist country, even at the risk of sometimes going to the extremes.32

What is striking here is not only that Perényi urged a selective appropriation of Soviet standards that were themselves still in the process of changes, but also the reference to the local context: it was left undecided how closely the Soviet model(s) should be followed. What is inappropriate in the Soviet Union may fit the traditions of another country. This was not in contradiction with Stalin’s rather elastic cultural policy at that time,33 which prescribed ‘socialist content in nationalist form’. One still might note, though, that the book was published a few months before the Comintern was founded, which hardly came as a surprise for the communist elite,34 and had the result of limiting local divergences in cultural agendas within the Soviet sphere of influence. Given that Perényi in his study outlined the main characteristics of socialist realism, but followed the rule of the HCP of avoiding the term itself or limiting its usage in all spheres of culture,35 it seems plausible to argue that the publication of the manuscript served the double aims of presenting Soviet urbanism with a rich collection of images, while not deterring an audience that feared the communists would culturally isolate the country from Western trends if the HCP gained the majority in the elections that were scheduled for August 1947.36 Since the establishment of the Comintern, in the course of an ever accelerating process of Stalinization the accent on everyday ‘beauty’37 that

32 33

34

35 36

37

Imre Perényi, Városépítés a Szovjetunióban [Urbanism in the USSR] (Budapest: Új Magyar Könyvkiadó, 1947), p. 6. For a summary of the contradictory nature of the Stalinist cultural policy of the time see Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 39-41. See e.g., Csaba Békés, ‘Soviet Plans to Establish the COMINFORM in Early 1946: New Evidence from the Hungarian Archives’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, 10 (March 1998), 135–136; László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, 1945-1956. Between the United States and the Soviet Union (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2004). On communist tactics and discourse see Scheibner, ibid. This fear was fuelled by the case of the Hungarian Community, a show trial in which the communists accused several prominent members of the Smallholders of being Western spies and charged them with treason, and forced the governing party to exclude a good number of its members from its ranks. See Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), pp. 217-38. On the significance of ‘beauty’ in Stalinist urbanism see Clark, ibid., pp. 119-22; Jan C. Behrends, ‘Modern Moscow: Russia’s Metropolis and the State from Tsarism to Stalinism’, in Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940,

224 Tamás Scheibner was already present in Perényi’s book was highlighted and detached from ‘function’: an ideological shift that culminated in the 1949 campaign against architectural ‘formalism.’ Lajos Szíjártó had lived and worked in the USSR since 1922 and resettled in Budapest in the summer of 1948. He was soon thereafter appointed state secretary of construction, was a primary actor in the process. In the Soviet Union he not only led the Directorate of Planning and Construction at the Ministry of Electronic Industry at the highest point of his career, but also served as director of a factory that produced socialist realist decorative items. For him, the thesis that beauty is something exterior to the structure of a building wanted no extensive theoretical grounding: he unconditionally subscribed to the most vulgar version of socialist realism. He proposed the demolition of the entire Castle Hill and its replacement with residential blocks for the working class. 38 Szíjártó was not alone in conceiving such grandiose plans. According to Major’s memoir, this was ‘a time when certain leaders of the party wanted to create a tabula rasa’ by tearing down a series of historical monuments, including the emblematic St. Stephen’s Basilica. 39 Szíjártó repatriated right after the HCP and SDP merged, and a de facto one-party system was created. Sometime earlier Fischer’s Board of Public Works had been dissolved, and the supervision of urban planning was taken over by Perényi and his State Centre of Architecture (later, the Institute for Architecture and Planning). It is clear that those urbanists amenable to historical protectionism continued to live through rather stressful years even after the destructive war was over. Large factions of both the modernists and adherents of socialist realism advocated extensively reshaping the city. Although protectionists warned against such ambitious planning and urged for the preservation of the remnants of the city’s rich architectural heritage, many of them shared the motivation to re-establish Budapest as a metropolis. The first mayor of the city who gained his position as a consequence of free elections, József Kővágó, a member of the Independent Smallholder’s Party, was one of them. Even though the Smallholders, the primary rivals of the HCP, won both the Budapest and the countrywide elections with a large majority, Kővágó as Mayor had a rather limited influence on the rebuilding of the city: this task was sourced out to Fischer’s Board of Public Work. Still, parallels between the ministerial and municipal bodies—with their rival agendas—did exist.

38 39

ed. by Jan C. Behrends and Martin Kohlrausch (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2014), pp. 120-21. Major, Tizenkét nehéz esztendő, pp. 205-206; Granasztói, ibid.,p. 667. See also: Preisich, ibid., p. 83. Major, Tizenkét nehéz esztendő, p. 206.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 225

Reading the Metropolis Mayor Kővágó, who was soon to be removed from his position on trumped up charges (and imprisoned in 1950), also had the ambition to turn Budapest into a metropolis of global significance, but he emphasized continuity at least as much as change. In this project he ascribed considerable importance to literature, which he recognized as a primary tool for forging self-conscious citizens attached to their local environment, and thereby creating a real community of inhabitants with various (often rural) backgrounds. In a representative volume entitled Budapesti antológia [Budapest Anthology] (1946 and 1947) that compiled poems about the historical ‘Pest, Buda, and Budapest’, and was published primarily for educational purposes for the schools of the capital with the aim of awakening local patriotic sentiments,40 Kővágó, who authored its foreword, suggested that the ‘value’ of a city depends on the significance of its literature on a global scale. Therefore he contended that the emergence of Budapest as a metropolis is closely connected to its potential for contributing to ‘world literature.’41 The interdependence of urban space and literature was further emphasized by the volume’s editors, the literary historian Mózes Rubinyi and the pedagogue-jurist Ferenc Szoboszlay. Their introduction presented literature as a medium that renders the urban environment ‘readable’—an aspiration that was not entirely alien to the Leninist monumental propaganda either, despite its utopian project of creating architecture parlante. 42 The two agendas, however, were very different. One strived to inscribe the imagined glorious future into the contemporary by elevating monumental buildings of great potential significance, and in parallel aspired to create their context in the literature of socialist realism. By contrast, the other championed the insignificant, and restated the city’s global status through this celebration of the peripheral. Rubinyi and Szoboszlay asserted that the anthology (re)introduces the reader to a wide variety of districts, squares, streets, and buildings, and ‘unfolds the intimate family and social life of the beloved city; data are on display here that seem insignificant but without that it is impossible to write up the spiritual life of this city, and its

40

41 42

Budapesti antológia. Költemények Budáról, Pestről, Budapestről [Budapest Anthology: Poems on Buda, Pest, and Budapest], ed. by Mózes Rubinyi and Ferenc Szoboszlay, foreword by József Kővágó (Budapest: Székesfővárosi Irodalmi és Művészeti Intézet, 1946; second ed. 1947). József Kővágó, ‘Előszó’ [Foreword], in Budapesti antológia, p. 5. Wojciech Tomasik, Inżynieria dusz: Literatura realizmu socjalistycznego w planie ‘propagandy monumentalnej’ [Soul-Engineering: The Literature of Socialist Realism in the Plan of ‘Monumental Propaganda’] (Wrocław: FNP, 1999), pp. 46-48, 65-66.

226 Tamás Scheibner development. Through the poets we get a view of the soul of Budapest.’ 43 This quotation in itself the mimetic drive of the anthology: without the ‘data’ it mentions, that is, the visual objects of Budapest, there is no hope of getting access to its transcendent spiritual essence. For the editors, poetry was not sufficient in itself to ensure such a communion: what was assumed instead is a dialogue of the existing urban environment and its representations, with the practical purpose of building a Budapest identity. From this perspective, the demolition of historical parts of the city appeared not as a prerequisite, but as a threat to this very metropolitan project. In such circumstances Budapest and its literature that, for Kővágó, ‘tops that of the great world famous metropolises in its variety and richness’, would be unable to regain and keep its position: it would lose its soul. Accordingly, the editors implied a certain attitude to heritage when they described the volume as a ‘concert of old and new, classical and modern bards’ where these do not rule each other out. 44 Such a disposition was confirmed not only by prominent historical protectionists like László Gerő (a namesake of the aforementioned Ernő Gerő), but also by many poets and writers, among whom the most active were young leftist intellectuals such as László Bóka and István Sőtér. They all saw change as necessary, but wished for an urban development that would balance the old and the new. Linking urban space and literary canon was common in post-war Hungarian discourses. A set of authors were presented by literary critics as writers of Budapest, or of certain districts, as for example, in the book Writers of the Metropolis by Endre Sós. 45 Here and elsewhere, the flagship Budapest writer was Gyula Krúdy, whose short stories and novels were among the most desired products on the literary market.46 This comes as no surprise, since his nostalgic stories usually revived an imaginary land of late 19th-century and fin-de-siécle bourgeois culture, and often evoked the old Budapest with its traditional restaurants, cafés, hotels, and private interiors, of which many were lost or damaged in the war. The art historian István Genthon, who was the director of the Museum of Fine Arts and one of the protagonists of historical protectionism, welcomed the republication of Krúdy’s novel Boldogult úrfikoromban [My Glory Days as a Young Gent] 43 44 45

46

Mózes Rubinyi and Ferenc Szoboszlay, ‘Bevezető’ [Introduction], in Budapesti antológia, p. 8. Ibid. Endre Sós, ‘A megelevenedett Szindbád’ [Sindbad Animated], in A nagyváros írói [Writers of the Metropolis] (Budapest: Székesfőváros Irodalmi és Művészeti Intézet, 1947), pp. 79–95. László Sziklay, ’Budapest olvasóközönsége 1945-ben’ [The Reading Public of Budapest in 1945], Magyar Könyvszemle, 70 (1946), 75-78, 82-84; István Örkény, ’Krúdy Gyula az élen’ [Krúdy is on the Lead], A Reggel, 12 April 1948, p. 8.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 227

(1930) with great enthusiasm: ‘It is not only the top of the “Pest novels” in a never expected high quality, but—shall I utter it, I myself being charmed by other kinds of beauties?—the crown of Hungarian novel writing.’47

Fig. 2. Gyula Krúdy with his son, 1906. © Petőfi Museum of Literature, Budapest.

Although Genthon was degraded by the communists in 1948, it is important to note that most of the laudations of Krúdy were authored by those who shortly became significant movers within communist cultural politics. For instance, the director of the University Library (associated with Eötvös Loránd University), discussed Krúdy, Dezső Kosztolányi and Frigyes Karinthy as three writers that represented three different faces of Budapest,48 and saw cities and literature as intimately tied: The relationship of cities and writers is woven from threads not easy to unravel. It is not dependent on one’s origin, but for its development into an intimate relationship it is equally not sufficient for the writer to borrow its themes and 47 48

István Genthon, ‘A békebeli Pest regényéről (Boldogult úrfikoromban)’ [On the Novel of Pest in the Times of Peace], Budapest, 2.5 (1946), p. 185. See also László Bóka, ‘Pesti utcák éneke’ [The Song of Budapest Streets], Budapest, 2.2 (February 1946), p. 65.

228 Tamás Scheibner characters from the reservoir of the city. A serious, deep relationship between a city and a writer that ‘lasts to the grave’ will grow only if the style of the two become identical, as in the case of great lovers.49

This symbiosis is so close that, according to another article by Mátrai, it is impossible to write about Budapest without being affected by Krúdy’s vision, because his literary works are inscribed into the materiality of the urban environment.50 Krúdy was able to grasp that particular tension created by the immense and rapid growth of Budapest at the turn of the century, Mátrai claimed, a primary feature of which was the close coexistence of the provincial and the urban/cosmopolitan. This tension was virtually imprinted in the streets of the capital, therefore ‘failing to see’ the Krúdyness of the urban space ‘is the equivalent of misreading the history of the city’.51 Similar views were expressed by István Sőtér as well, who deconstructed the traditional image of conservative bourgeois Buda52 by replacing it with the imaginary land of Krúdy, an alternative reality that left a mark on the urban space, and which is more important than the ‘reactionary’ Buda, a label that does not express the real spirit of this part of the city.53 Krúdy was so closely associated with Budapest that sometimes he was literally identified with it. Here is how István Hargitay, one of Krúdy’s onetime friends, poetically depicted the writer’s last day: He got up early in the morning, in a good mood on that sunny day in May, and left his home early. In the morning he walked through and crossed the Tabán district, he was in the Castle district around noon, in the Sándor Palace, and from here, from a balcony [...] he looked down to Pest. He heaved a sigh. In his mind, he swept over the tempestuous city where he spent so many nights and days, sometimes here, sometimes there, in happiness and torment, waiting with sweet hope and a crippling pain in the heart, at the most various places. For a long, for

49 50

51 52

53

László Mátrai, ‘Az író és a város’ [The Writer and the City] (Karinthy), Budapest, 1.3 (December 1945), p. 124. László Mátrai, ‘Egy pesti regény. Kárpáti Aurél: A nyolcadik pohár’(Régi kövek, régi emberek) [A Novel of Pest: Aurél Kárpáti’s The Eighth Glass (Old Stones and Men of Old Times], Budapest, 1.2 (November 1945). Ibid. On the social differences between Buda and Pest see Gábor Gyáni, Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-siécle Budapest, trans. by Thomas J. DeKornfeld (Boulder, CO – Wayne, NJ: Social Science Monographs—Centre for Hungarian Studies and Publications, 2004), pp. 16–22. István Sőtér, ‘Városrészek siratása’ [Mourning of Districts], Budapest, 1.3 (December 1945), p. 127.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 229 a very long time, he was watching the city of Pest that he knew so well [...] When he withdrew and lost the view of Pest, his heart was smothered.54

As the text suggests, this was the start of Krúdy’s agony: he went home, wrote the last short story, and passed away. This excerpt shows the spiritual unity of Krúdy and the city. They are one and the same, Budapest is pervaded by Krúdy’s soul. Their connection is so close that the moment they lose contact, the writer dies. It is significant that after his last spiritual reunion with the city, Krúdy writes a last piece of literature suggesting that he somehow inscribed this metaphysical unity into his texts. The oeuvre of Krúdy becomes a place where one could re-join the old Budapest, but in a way that allows the reader to engage with the tension between nostalgia and renewal, tradition and modernity.

Fig. 3. Dugovics Square/Tanuló Street, Óbuda, 1972. The house to the left once belonged to Krúdy. © FORTEPAN/Museum of Óbuda.

54

István Hargitay, ‘Emlékezés az álmok hősére: Beszélgetés Krúdy Gyuláról, halálának évfordulóján’ [Remebering the Hero of Dreams: Conversation on Gyula Krúdy on the Anniversary of His Death], Kis Ujság, 11 May 1947, p. 7.

230 Tamás Scheibner

Reshaping the Literary Canon The recreation of Budapest’s identity and the growing cult of Krúdy were parallel and connected processes. But the cultic status of Krúdy was not an entirely new phenomenon: while he did not enjoy dazzling fame in the 1920s, after his death in 1933 a good number of writers and critics started to recognize him as one of the most significant authors of his time.55 This explains why those communists who returned from their Moscow exile were quite unfamiliar with his works, while Krúdy was praised by several writers and critics on the political left who spent the interwar period in Hungary. An unpublished study by the influential communist cultural politician Márton Horváth, one of those who did not emigrate, claimed that Krúdy, along with such classic authors as Mór Jókai and Kálmán Mikszáth, belongs to the ‘main line’ of Hungarian literature—a heritage that he could not identify with, but one that was definitely presented as a favourable alternative to the likes of such popular conservative writers as Ferenc Herczeg.56 This study from April 1946 was a rather significant piece that was composed following consultations within the party57 with the intention of outlining the policy of the HCP regarding intellectuals. A few years later, however, Krúdy was not only excluded from the ‘main line’, but his works were not allowed to be published any longer, and from 1952 one could hardly even find his name mentioned in the press and professional organs. The canonization and decanonization of Krúdy requires closer inspection. In the piece by Horváth mentioned above, the writer was described as part of a colonial literature in the sense that it largely served the literary needs of the gentry, that turned to be ‘an almost colonial caste of officers’ after the Ausgleich of 1867. In Horváth’s view, the gentry was either directly serving an empire that in fact existed (the Monarchy), or was exhibiting an attitude ‘foreign’ to the Hungarian people, a ‘behaviour’ that prioritized feudalistic latifundia to any kind of democratic land reform. The gentry was presented not simply as a class-enemy, but also as an ethnically ‘alien’ class that resided in cities and administratively backed up great land owners. Horváth believed that part of the gentry did not even need to adopt such attitudes, since they were often non-Hungarians by their ethnic origin that in itself explained the difference. As such, both Mikszáth and Krúdy were tools of a kind of internal colonization that was primarily class-based, 55 56 57

Gábor Bezeczky, ‘Kultusz és szakirodalom. Krúdy fogadtatása’ [Cult and Literature: The Reception of Krúdy], Jelenkor, 55 (2012), pp. 1207-16. Márton Horváth, ‘Értelmiség’ [Intelligentsia], April 1946, The Archives of Political History and Trade Unions (APH), Márton Horváth Papers, 991/15. Memorandum of the Meeting of the HCP Committee on Intellectual Issues, 18 April 1946, APH, Márton Horváth Papers, 991/15.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 231

but underpinned by racial categories. When it came to the literary canon, key ideologues of the HCP preferred another tradition that was not associated with urban environments but with the village: the populist writers’ movement, whose leftist members expressed similar views on Hungarian history. Their style came closer to the kind of realism Révai and Lukács promoted, and the communists considered them the best ‘raw material’ to be turned into socialist realist authors. In contrast, Krúdy’s works are full of anecdotes, he often dissolves the boundary between dream and ‘reality’, and has a very elaborate, highly artistic style, not compatible with socialist realism in any way. Further, Krúdy, just like Mikszáth, was ambivalent about modernity.58 He clearly had a nostalgia for the Monarchic imperial setting, which was identified with peace, and a critical view on the technological developments that played a crucial role in the First World War. Nevertheless, he did not entirely lose his faith in the progress and modernization that he, admittedly, associated with Westernization. But all these characteristics, while obviously played an important role in his neglect, do not fully explain his total exclusion from the canon. Indeed, after the war, the communist press started to canonize the works of Krúdy, arguing that he, perhaps unintentionally, unveiled the gentry by representing his lifestyle as it was, in an authentic way. 59 The very same claims, derived from Lukács’s theory of realism, were used when Krúdy’s literary ‘master’, Mikszáth—who remained one of the most significant prose writers in the canon of the Rákosi era—was discussed. Krúdy could have also been saved for the same reasons as Mikszáth. Furthermore, a whole set of data was lined up in favour of Krúdy: his support of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919; his friendship with Endre Ady, a key poet of the literary tradition regarded to be ‘progressive’; his being the first Hungarian writer who recognized the talent of Maxim Gorky, and so on. He could have been kept in the canon as a ‘controversial’ writer, as many others were. His drastic expulsion from the canon is even more striking if one considers his overall popularity signalled by the serial republication of his works (in 1948 alone not less than eight different volumes by Krúdy were published) and the growing number of commentaries around them. The press even interviewed politicians, like the minister of culture Gyula Ortutay (a secret member of the HCP), and the above mentioned László Bóka, who became

58 59

Cf. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, ‘Conservativism, Modernity, and Pluralism in Hungarian Culture’, 9.1-2 (1994), p. 27; ibid., p. 217. See e.g., Miklós Molnár, ‘Krúdy és a magyar dzsentri’ [Krúdy and the Hungarian Gentry], Szabad Szó, 3 April 1945, p. 4.

232 Tamás Scheibner Ortutay’s state-secretary, to foster Krúdy’s case. 60 Bóka himself, already bearing his high office, published a review of one of Krúdy’s works,61 and promised to set a memorial to the writer that lives up to the extraordinary standards of his oeuvre. In early 1948, shortly before the introduction of the one party system in the summer of the same year, it seemed that leftist intellectuals would manage to fix his position as an important literary figure. However, starting in 1949 and after the nationalization of publishing houses just the opposite happened. One crucial aspect was a new policy Rákosi initiated in the autumn of 1948: he called for a revision of members of the party that was partially motivated by an alleged lag on the ‘cultural front’. From that point onward the communist leadership aspired to replace cadres of bourgeois origin with those of worker and peasant background. These latter were often uneducated and subscribed to the ideals of Soviet socialist realism presented in the short courses at the Party School. For the majority of these new cadres Krúdy was either unknown or suspicious. The massive influx of newcomers into the offices turned those who were more cultivated insecure and overly cautious. It was not wise to confront this new cohort of cadres, especially in the context of the show trial of László Rajk. Further, the work of Krúdy had been reassessed by Georg Lukács not long before. In the spring of 1948, in a speech delivered at the Political Academy of the HCP and published shortly after as the opening piece of his widely distributed volume Új magyar kultúráért [For a New Hungarian Culture] (1948), he depicted Krúdy as a representative of the Hungarian national character that should be a subject of change. According to Lukács, Hungarians are prone to pointless daydreaming that prevents them from acting, and Krúdy re-enforced this character as being at ‘the essence of Hungarian national fate’. 62 Lukács’s claims were radicalized by one of his followers, István Király, who in his 1952 monograph on Mikszáth overstressed the social critical aspects of the work of this fin-de-siècle classic, and set him in opposition to Krúdy, who, in turn, was devalued as a setback in literary ‘development.’ 63 However, Krúdy’s elimination from the canon

60

61 62 63

Dezső Kiss, ‘Álomvilág’ [Dreamworld], A Reggel, 19 January 1948, p. 4; and ‘A Tegnap Ködlovagja után’ [After Yesterday’s Chevalier of the Fog], Világ, 17 June 1948, p. 2. László Bóka, ‘Próza (Ady Endre éjszakái)’ [Prose (The Nights of Endre Ady)], Új Magyarország, 24 January 1948, p. 7. György Lukács, ibid., pp. 14-15. István Király, Mikszáth Kálmán (Budapest: Művelt Nép, 1952). For a deconstruction of Király’s view on Mikszáth see Levente T. Szabó, Mikszáth, a kételkedő modern. Történelmi és társadalmi reprezentációk Mikszáth Kálmán prózapoétikájában [Mikszáth: A

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 233

started well before Király’s work, and therefore still does not fully explain the phenomenon. My proposal here is to consider the history of literature and urban design as entangled processes.

Krúdy, Óbuda, and Memory Politics The visions of modernist and socialist realist architects who aspired to reshape Budapest entirely in order to fit more to an imaginary Weltstadt did not come true, largely for economic reasons. This is not to claim that the communists, who gradually took complete political control, ceased to envision the new Budapest in Moscow’s image, even though Stalin’s death meant a setback in this respect. Indeed, it was only the 1955 Urban Development Plan that made it explicit that the size of the planned buildings would not be of ‘Moscow-scale.’64 Still, they managed to undertake (or, at least, start) two prioritized projects: a second subway line and a new bridge over the Danube. Both were extremely important for the construction of a Sovietized metropolis, because the acceleration of public transport was claimed to eliminate the social characteristics of the various districts. In this new urban space, the working class permeated by Soviet values would meet more often with the petit-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, and this would make the latter confront the ideals and practices of the new Soviet man. As was argued, this new man would embody such an irresistible model that the bourgeoisie would also want to emulate it, and, as a final consequence, a homogenous society would be created that universally shared Soviet values. Building a bridge between the district Óbuda, with its Svabian, religious, and petit-bourgeois citizens, and the Angyalföld and Újpest districts, with their working class profile, was essential for this project of building a Sovietized metropolis, even though its construction was started before the war. Appropriately enough, the new bridge, inaugurated in November 1950, was named after Stalin. The construction of the bridge, naturally, did not leave Óbuda untouched,65 and the district was, in general, a primary scene for almost all plans of urban development. Even some of the historical protectionists proposed large Óbuda as a scene of experimental urban planning, in order

64 65

Modernist with Doubts: Historical and Social Representations in the Prose of Kálmán Mikszáth] (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2007). Prakfalvi, ‘Elmélet és gyakorlat’, p. 23. A number of streets were demolished when the construction of the bridgehead and the exit lines were built in 1948/49, and these divided Óbuda in the middle. See Miklós Létay, ’A szabadságharc bukásától 1950-ig’ [From the Fall of the Freedom Fight to 1950], in Óbuda évszázadai [Centuries of Óbuda], ed. by Csongor Kiss and Ferenc Mocsy (Budapest: Kortárs, 1995), p. 253.

234 Tamás Scheibner

Fig. 4. Construction of the Stalin Bridge, 1950. © FORTEPAN/Imre.

to shift the gaze of the more radical architects from the city centre to the semi-periphery. 66 It could be justified by social reasons as well, since the living conditions in some houses and streets in the neighbourhood left much to be required. Further, it is important to remind ourselves once again not to ‘envisage the war and then the Cold War as imposing a total rupture. Planning for post-war reconstruction proved the main channel for the continuity of concepts and inspirations from the 1930s to the 1950s.’ 67 66 67

László Gerő, ‘Újjáépítés és esztétika’ [Rebuilding and Aesthetics], Budapest, 3.6 (June 1947), p. 195. Charles S. Maier, ‘City, Empire, and Imperial Aftermath: Contending Contexts for the Urban Vision’, in Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe, 18901937, ed. by Eve Blau and Monika Platzer (Munich: Prestel, 1999), p. 38.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 235

Indeed, it involved not only the bridge that was started to be built before the war, but also the destruction of some streets of Óbuda’s historical centre that continued under communist supervision—a moderate endeavour in no way comparable to the radical reshaping of the district in the 1960s and 1970s that rebuilt Óbuda in such a way that it was almost entirely deprived of its charm. But what is really significant from the perspective of the literary canon is not urban history as such, but rather how the gradually monopolized press mediated the construction of the bridge and how it depicted old Óbuda—the ‘word city’, to borrow Peter Fritzsche’s term,68 but one that became increasingly dominated by a single politically motivated reading, and, finally, lost its heteroglossic character (in Bakhtin’s terms). The new regime made it clear that the Stalin bridge is exclusively its own achievement, while Óbuda should be seen as worthless territory and, consequently, a possible scene of constructing a new, readily understandable urban landscape following the new Muscovite imperial model. At the same time, Óbuda was also known as a neighbourhood where Gyula Krúdy lived and worked in his final years. This was where he retired to write his last piece of literature right before his death in the previously quoted story by Hargitay. When Krúdy gained popularity in the post-war years, he was very often represented not simply as a writer of Budapest, but was linked to a particular district. Several articles appeared in the press that explored the places he once visited and the people he had contact with. The latter provided first-hand memories of the writer. One could recognize a rivalry between the various neighbourhoods of the city for Krúdy: some claimed that the ‘natural environment’ for him was the Belváros, the centre; others associated Krúdy with the Tabán and its narrow, crooked streets, a district on the Buda side demolished by the order of Miklós Horthy in the mid-1930s in order to modernize the cityscape.69 One of the most serious candidates was, certainly, Óbuda, the district that most closely resembled the once existed Tabán. Established or aspiring writers and intellectuals often visited Óbuda to rejoin with the spirit of their beloved Krúdy. 68 69

Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1996), pp. 12-51. See, for instance: Károly Acsády, ‘Szindbád utolsó estéje: Óbudai riport Kéhlinél és a kis Bródynál Krúdy’ Gyula nyomában’ [The Last Evening of Sindbad: Óbuda Report at Kéhli and the little Bródy in Search for Gyula Krúdy], Színház, 11 December 1946, p. 15; Jenő Kálmán, ‘Nekrológ a New-Yorkról’ [Obituary of the Café House New York], Színház, 6 May 1946, p. 8; Károly Acsády, ‘Tabáni litánia. Krúdy Gyulát idézi leghűbb barátja, Várkonyi Titusz’ [Litany for the Tabán: Gyula Krúdy is Evoked by His Truest Friend, Titusz Várkonyi], Színház, 12 May 1947, p. 5; Pál Relle, ‘Akikkel találkoztam—Krúdy Gyula’ [Whom I Met: Gyula Krúdy], Világ, 14 September 1947, p. 4; Péter Ruffy, ‘Krúdy’, Hírlap, 20 October 1948, p. 5.

236 Tamás Scheibner

Fig. 5. Tavasz Street, Óbuda. Postcard from the turn of the 19th and 20th century.

In May 1947, the historian Ludwig von Gogolák, who had appreciated the art of Krúdy, made a strong claim for Óbuda being the ‘real’ home of the writer. As many others did, he represented the modest, impecunious Óbuda as the only place where ‘Krúdy’s spirit shuttles with comfort’, in contrast to the Belváros, the busy city centre, where ‘the dust of forgetting rapidly covers everything’.70 Óbuda for Gogolák was a place of remembering, of nurturing a valuable literary tradition. Just one year later, after the communists extended their political control, and, significantly, published the plans for constructing the bridge between Óbuda and the workers’ districts, the same Gogolák expressed the opposite view in a politically biased report. He ceased to attribute any values to preserving the local urban heritage. Making rather clear reference to articles I cited above, he asserted: ‘it will do no harm to demolish the little old houses that writers from Pest come to visit, and who cry for these, because they treat them as memories of the good old world.’71 He described Óbuda as a backward and faint land, full of ‘reactionaries’ who drink in Harry Truman’s words, or believe in Ferenc Nagy, the former prime minister of the Smallholders who was criminalized, 70 71

Lajos Gogolák, ‘VIII. kerület Krúdy Gyula utca’ [8th District, Gyula Krúdy Street], Új Magyarország, 24 May 1947, p. 2. Lajos Gogolák, ‘Tömbgyűlés Óbudán’ [Block Meeting in Óbuda], Politika, 8 May 1948, p. 6.

Building Empire through Self-Colonization 237

Fig. 6. Görög Street/Fehérsas Street and Mélypince, one of Krúdy’s favourite taverns, Tabán, 1928. © FORTEPAN/Noémi Saly

removed, and forced into emigration right after Gogolák’s previous article on Krúdy and the district was published. The revaluation of this part of the city had serious consequences for Gogolák with respect to the literary canon. People living here are represented by him as literary figures ‘who monitor the regime with a critical stance, and when speaking confidentially they augur no great future for the nationalization of properties’, and, as a logical consequence, to the reshaping of Óbuda. In these poor streets ‘the gentry fictions of the old times keep blossoming, though in a gloomy manner under a climate turned unfavourable to them.’ One can hardly miss the reference to Krúdy in these

238 Tamás Scheibner lines, in whose evaluation Gogolák managed to do a complete about-face. Indeed, he explicitly referred to the writer when described Óbuda as an environment where ‘literary stereotypes inherited from Krúdy’ live on. In judging Óbuda and Krúdy the fault line did not lie, however, between the Smallholders and the labour parties. Gogolák, who tried to please the communists, marked the citizens of the district as predominantly social democrats, despite their admiration of Ferenc Nagy. This reference had an ethnic subtext for the Bratislava-born Gogolák, who had strong Slavophilic and anti-German sentiments. It is not an accident that his degrading article on Óbuda is stuffed with German names, and mentions a certain ‘CelticSvabian barbarism’ that resisted the new modernity. His references reveal that memory politics of the district was massively ethnicized at the time. This ethnic subtext was quite obvious in several other articles as well that discussed the relationship of Krúdy and Óbuda. As the magazine Színház [Theatre] reported: ‘we may turn to anywhere and to anybody in little Óbuda, the people of the Braunhaxlers [the local German minority] enshrine the memory of that tall gentleman with sad eyes who liked to tilt his head on one side, and who merged with them so many times and with such a pleasure.’72 Certainly, the same issue was not always presented in such idyllic terms. ‘I search reconciliation in the footsteps of Krúdy with this ferocious district [of Óbuda], that was the seed-plot of Svabians and members of the Volksbund’, reads the confession of the Jewish Károly Kristóf.73 His article suggests that Krúdy could be turned into an instrument of reconciliation between various minorities, just as he was invoked in order to consolidate Jewish–Hungarian relations.74 As one advances in reading the piece by Kristóf, Óbuda gradually turns from a hostile environment to Krúdy’s neighbourhood packed with predominantly positive characters. The district reveals itself as a crucial medium of memory politics, but it is Krúdy again who facilitates the reconciliatory project of making the ‘real’ face of this part of the city readable. The success of the project symbolically solicited by arriving to the one-time flat of ‘the poet of Budapest’ at the end of the walk, where the wanderer is welcomed ‘with friendship and hospitality by an old Svabian Krúdy-like grandam.’ 75 In the closing lines 72 73 74

75

Acsády, ‘Szindbád utolsó estéje’, p. 15. Károly Kristóf, ‘Templom-utcai szép délután’ [Sweet Afternoon on Templom Street], Világ, 15 June 1947, p. 9. Poldi Krausz, a well-known Jewish tavern-keeper of the Tabán district, for example, recalled that Krúdy once defended the Krausz family with a sword when they were threatened by raging mob. See Ágnes Zsolt, ‘A Mély-pince Poldi bácsija emlékezik’ [Uncle Poldi of the Tavern Mély-pince Remembers], Szivárvány, 3 (1948), p. 3. Kristóf, ibid.

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Kristóf himself turns out to be a hero of Krúdy, just like the Svabian woman did: ‘they cook stew somewhere, and its noble smell attracts me with magnetic power to one of the romantic little tavern-restaurants [kiskocsmák]…’ The majority of these pubs were about to be demolished in a few years or decades. Such a reconciliatory memory politics was far from the official communist agenda that rather opted for the principle of collective guilt in the case of Svabians. Accordingly, Gogolák’s above cited article presented a rather different image of the locals: a uniformly retrograde mob. At the residential meeting he reported, a young communist representative of the town hall ‘informed the audience about the purging of the state bureaucracy, an announcement that does not raise comfort here […] then about the Árpád bridge [to be renamed after Stalin by the time it was finished] that provokes angst among these good old Óbuda people because they fear that they will get perniciously close to Újpest.’76 Gogolák touched upon a central theme of socialist realist urban planning here: the acceleration of movement between districts with contrasting social characters. In the urbanist discourse of the time great emphasis was placed on the elimination of the ‘reservations of the middle class’ by animating exchange between various social strata with the objective of homogenizing the city. As I pointed out earlier, it was maintained that contact between the bourgeoisie and the working class would enhance the creation of a new type of mankind.77 In a rather remarkable manner, the communist press in 1950 attempted to recruit the figure of Krúdy into service for such views. A journalist at the daily Független Magyarország [Independent Hungary], for instance, bewildered by his imagination (and identifying Krúdy with one of his recurrent mythic characters, Sindbad), wrote in the extremely enthusiastic style of the time: Sinbad [sic!] would be truly amazed now seeing the pulsating work that evolves around the construction of the new bridge that will elevate his beloved Óbuda from its backwardness. If he could see the sumptuous new blocks of houses, the squares planted with flowers and trees, and the azure coach that could fly him to Flórián Square [a central square in Óbuda] in ten minutes in contrast to a jolting fiacre […] He would stare with eyes wide open, and his heart would fill with delight.

The writer had called for the modernization of Óbuda several times in his lifetime, but certainly had less drastic changes in mind. And few readers of Krúdy would agree with the assumption that the gentleman Sindbad, a disillusioned follower of outmoded chivalrous manners, a modern Don 76 77

Gogolák, ‘Tömbgyűlés Óbudán’, p. 6. Prakfalvi, ‘Elmélet és gyakorlat’, p. 27; Clark, ibid.

240 Tamás Scheibner Quijote, who serves as a figure of nostalgic displacement in Krúdy’s oeuvre, would have been delighted by living an accelerated metropolitan life-style.

Conclusions In 1971, a film by the director Zoltán Huszárik was released with the title Sindbad. The movie based on short stories by Krúdy presented a series of scenes that were chained by associations, and shortly achieved a cultic status. Its pessimistic atmosphere and the representation of life as a stand-still fitted perfectly to the era of stagnation: the post-1968 period when all illusions about socialism seemed to fade away. The popularity of the movie was, in a large part, due to the fact that it was received as an act of resistance to existing socialism, with its nostalgia for the Monarchy, its rich Biedermeier interior design, and its celebration of traditional Hungarian quality cuisine. It comes as no surprise that Krúdy and his works never surpassed the category of ‘tolerated’ literature until 1989.78 His oeuvre was not only incompatible with any kind of realist aesthetics, but provided examples of multicultural coexistence, and preferred to depict the intimate lives of friends, families, and lovers to the representation of heroes acting for the sake of the public. His predilection for portraying petty-bourgeois urban environments also confronted communist cultural-political aspirations. As we can see, such obstacles could have been overcome in literary historical narratives: Mikszáth with his anecdotal style was recast as a predecessor of Béla Illés, a new ‘classic’ writer of socialist realism. Krúdy could have also been integrated into the canon on the coattails, for instance, of Aurél Kárpáti, who presided over the Writer’s Union until 1951, and whose style was compared to that of Krúdy.79 The opposite happened. The Rákosi regime’s drastic efforts in the early 1950s to remove such a significant writer from the canon, who was widely acknowledged in the post-war years by almost the entire political left, are virtually unparalleled in Hungarian literary history. In order to fully understand his neglect, one needs to consider that he challenged official memory politics, and relatedly, frustrated the rebuilding of Budapest as a Sovietized metropolis. To a significant extent, Krúdy was cast out of the canon to such a degree that by 1952 even his name was not written down in official literary histories because his stories would have filled readers with a sense of loss for, among other things, the reshaping and demolition of the old Óbuda. The regime built the first large residential blocks in the district only at the end of the 1950s, and the almost complete demolition of the historical part of Óbuda 78 79

György Aczél, who decisively shaped the cultural policy of the Kádár-era, famously introduced a threefold system of prohibited, tolerated, and supported culture. Mátrai, ‘Egy pesti regény’, ibid.

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was finished in the early 1970s, in times when imitation of Moscow was no longer prioritized. But in several respects this was just an end of a longer story. Already in 1948, the same year when books by Krúdy flooded the literary market, that plan for urban development, which on the one hand relied on ideas outlined in the 1930s that had the ambition of building a world metropolis, but on the other hand revised it according to the standards of socialist realism, became authoritative. This put an end to conjectures on the future of Óbuda, and the plans were further reinforced in 1951 by a renewed interest on the side of the political elite in urban planning with a representational drive, and by the so-called architectural debate that lopped the ‘wilderings’ of socialist realism. 80 As attested by contemporary articles that linked the reshaping of Krúdy’s Óbuda with the construction of a new bridge crucial for an imagined, but never materialized new imperial/colonial metropolis, the destructive works motivated by the building of the Stalin bridge prevented Krúdy from being integrated even into the margins of the canon of the Rákosi era. One of the most popular local writers was suppressed in an act of self-colonization that, in this case, also meant the realization of an imperial project that ultimately failed.

80

Sipos, ibid., p. 141.

Xénia Gaál The City of K. (Königsberg/Kaliningrad) as a Cultural Phenomenon: Cultural Memory, the Myth and Identity of the City Abstract: Kaliningrad—previously known as Königsberg—was the centre of East Prussia for centuries. After World War II the city was annexed by the USSR and has since become a Russian exclave. Renamed Kaliningrad, its German population was deported, and the empty district was repopulated with Soviet citizens. The new residents, lacking any connection to their new environs, lived in a Soviet settlement built on the ruins of the historic city, whose memorials were destroyed and replaced with ideologically-designed Soviet architecture. This breaking of historic continuity resulted in Kaliningrad’s conflict between official and unofficial collective memory and an atmosphere of isolation. Today’s Kaliningrad is an ‘isolated continent’, a unique historical and cultural entity on the boundary of the former Soviet ideological sphere and (post)modern Europe. Contemporary texts by Yury Buida, Zinovy Zinik and others reflect the city’s palimpsestic cultural memory and rootlessness. The city created by these narratives, which I call the ‘City of K.’, has an undefined present and a past that has not been dealt with.

Kaliningrad is a creation of the Soviet regime. Almost the entire city that was known as Königsberg was erased in order to build a new, prototypical socialist city. Thanks to applied Soviet ideology, Königsberg started to disappear after the Second World War, although after the collapse of the USSR, especially in the last decade, representation of its traumas and reactions to the socialist process of erasing or rewriting history has become the main theme in the reconstruction of Kaliningrad’s identity.1 This study illustrates how motifs of silence, dependence, void and vacuity,2 as well as the rootlessness and marginalization that have become the essential features of this territory, also appear in contemporary literary tendencies. My argument is that the case of the City of K. is unique; for this reason it has turned into a particular cultural phenomenon, but it also has a symptomatic cultural character common among post-Soviet territories’ reconstructed identities. In this article I will demonstrate that this analytical approach is not arbitrary, using two examples of what I call the ‘Narrative of the City of K.’: the cycle of short stories titled The Prussian Bride by Yury Buida, and the personal essay My Father’s Leg by Zinovy Zinik.

1 2

Olga Sezneva, ‘Izobretenie prinadlezhnosti’ [Inventing Relations], in Kabinet. Kartiny mira II, ed. by Viktor Mazin (Saint Petersburg: Skifiya, 2001), pp. 65-83. For the concept of the void in postcommunist and postcolonial discourse see the chapter by Bogdan Ştefănescu in this volume.

244 Xénia Gaál In the first part of this chapter I discuss out how the former Prussian city of Königsberg was transformed into Kaliningrad by Soviet ideology following the Second World War and describe the traumatic consequences of the violent identity-forming processes. Next, I briefly review the history of the city and its environs, and sketch in the results of the Soviet ideological transformation of the city. The second part of the article is devoted to the literary texts mentioned above, as imprints of the Soviet era. These works of art interpret past traumas, which can be read through the concepts of cultural memory (or amnesia), representations of the past, and the imitation or simulation of reality, all concepts which have been prevalent in cultural studies in the last few decades of the 20th and the first years of the 21st century, especially where theories of the ‘post-’ (postmodern, postcommunist and postcolonial discourse) intersect.

Historical Background: the ‘European City’ of Königsberg Königsberg was founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Knights on territory near the Baltic Sea, and over the centuries it served as the cultural centre of its region. In the 14th century the city joined the Hanseatic League, after which it developed into an important port on the Baltic Sea. Königsberg became a crucible of cultural, economic, and scientific influences and movements.3 It was the birthplace of the world-famous writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776) as well as the birthplace and home of, Immanuel Kant (1726). Especially after the foundation of the Albertina University (1544), the city developed into an important German cultural, intellectual, and educational centre. In addition, it had a unique scientific milieu, thanks to the mathematical puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, which was solved by the Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler and led to the mathematical branches of topology and graph theory. Due to its economic and cultural status, Königsberg took significant part in European trade and partook in the circulation of culture and philosophy.4 In other words, Königsberg was an essential part of the so-called ‘motherland’ of Europe. However, this situation changed three times during the 20th century: first, when as a part of Germany, Königsberg and East Prussia were separated from the rest of the Weimar Republic by the Polish 3

4

Ocherki istorii Vostochnoi Prussii [Outline of the History of East Prussia], Section 3, ed. by G. B. Kretinin, V. N. Bryushinkin and V. I. Galtsov (Kaliningrad: Yantarnyy skaz, 2002), pp. 85-106. Beate Shyortkul, ‘Kulturnaia zhizn’ goroda Kenigsberga v XVI veku’ [Cultural Life of the City of Königsberg in the 16th century], in Vostochnaia Prussiia. Istoriia. Kul’tura. Iskusstvo. 1st edn, ed. by G. V. Zavolotskaya (Kaliningrad: Izdatel’stvo Kaliningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2003), pp. 134-146.

The City of K. 245

Corridor after the First World War; second, when the former Prussian—and then German—Königsberg and the western part of East Prussia became a Soviet territory called Kaliningrad Oblast’ after the Second World War; and third, when the whole Oblast’ became a Russian exclave after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In 1946, after this territory (Königsberg, several other cities, and some of the rest of what had been East Prussia) became part of the Soviet Union and its westernmost territory, the central city was renamed Kaliningrad after the death of Mikhail Kalinin, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Almost the entire German population had been deported after the war’s end, and at the same time, the new Soviet cities were repopulated with people from various territories of the Soviet Union. 5 The old Königsberg started disappearing after the war: the ideological acts of renaming the city and replacing its population were steps in the process of erasing the memory of the historical Prussian and German city. The urban landscape completely changed as it became a Soviet city: most of the central buildings of the city had been ruined by bombings during the war, and many of those that managed to survive were destroyed by the Soviet ideological iconoclasm that began to take hold directly after the war. For example, Königsberg Castle sustained some damage from the war, but was finally demolished by the Soviets in the 1960s.6 The ‘newly-born’ Kaliningrad was characterized by the atmosphere of a socialist tabula rasa. Its new residents, lacking any connection to their environs, lived in a Soviet settlement built on the ruins of a historical city, the memorials of which had been destroyed and replaced by ideological examples of Soviet architecture. These events caused a dramatic breaking point in historical continuity, turning Kaliningrad into a layered city due to its ambivalent national narrative, the conflict of collective memory and amnesia, and the atmosphere of isolation in space and time. The ‘Narrative of the City of K.’ is built on ruins and turned into a palimpsest of cultures and memory sites.

5

6

Vostochnaya Prussiya glazami sovetskikh pereselentsev. Pervye gody Kaliningradskoi oblasti v vospominaniyakh i dokumentakh [East Prussia Seen by the First Emigrants. The First Years of the Kaliningrad Oblast’ in Memoires and Documents], ed. by Yu. V. Kostyashov (Kaliningrad: Izdatel’stvo KGU, 2003). V. I. Kulakov, Istoriia zamka Kenigsberg [The History of the Königsberg Castle] (Kaliningrad: Zhivem, 2008).

246 Xénia Gaál

Fig. 1. Different layers of architecture: buildings of the Fishing Village, imitation of the historical German-Prussian style and the concrete blocks of flats of the Soviet times. © Xénia Gaál

Fig. 2. The former Prussian Königsberg disappeared in the Soviet Kaliningrad after World War II. Kaliningrad of the 21st century is still the remains of the Soviet era. © Xénia Gaál

The City of K. 247

Concepts of Memory, Identity and Reality One of the key terms of the discourse about Kaliningrad today should be collective memory, coined by Maurice Halbwachs.7 Halbwachs claims that the past recurs in every society as a result of the reconstruction of the past in the present. Collective memory is not a result of the process of recollection of individual memories—that would be an oversimplified explanation that does not encompass its collective framework. These frameworks are ‘precisely the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society.’8 Halbwachs introduced the concept of collective memory in 1925, after which this idea opened new fields of research in cultural studies. The term lieux de memoire by Pierre Nora,9 cultural memory by Jan Assmann,10 arts of memory by Aleida Assmann,11 vehicles of cultural memory and representations of history by Alexander Etkind, 12 and the arguments of Susan Sontag,13 among others, have led researchers and writers in a variety of cultural disciplines to emphasize the importance of various acts of memory in narratives of cultural communities, nationalities, etc. As I discussed above, after the Second World War, Königsberg started to disappear while, at the same time, the ideologically-motivated building process of the new Soviet Kaliningrad had already begun: it then continued for decades. Sontag argues that the term of collective memory is just another name for ideology, and the case of Kaliningrad seems to be an extreme manifestation of this idea. According to Aleida Assmann, large social groups such as nations or churches do not have memory. Assmann emphasizes the significance of rites as the main element in the creation of a collective identity (‘it creates an identity of a “we”’).14 Social groups ‘create’ memory for themselves ‘with the aid of memorial signs such as symbols, texts, 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Ibid., p. 40. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. by Pierre Nora et al., trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UP, 1996-1998). Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011). Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011). Alexander Etkind, ‘PostSoviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror’, Constellations, 16.1 (2009), 182-200. Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, The New York Times, 23 May 2004, available at Accessed 15 August 2014. Aleida Assmann, ‘Transformation between History and Memory’, Social Research, 75.1 (2008), 49-72, p. 52.

248 Xénia Gaál images, rites, ceremonies, places, and monuments’, and this memory is an essential element in the construction of identity. Thereby ‘collective memory is necessarily a mediated memory’15: it is not a critical term because it is much too vague to serve as one, continues Assmann, who recommends more circumscribed formulations such as family memory, social, political, national, and cultural memory.

Fig. 3. Gothic Königsberg Cathedral and the incomplete House of Soviets. © Xénia Gaál

In the case of post-war Königsberg/Kaliningrad, all these types of memory seem to be problematic. First of all, this could be due to the new residents, who lacked any connection to their new environs, starting their new life in a Soviet settlement built on the ruins of a historic German/Prussian city, surrounded by Soviet propaganda and ideology. However, at the same time, 15

Ibid.

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the pressure of official ideology to forget also generated an ‘unofficial tendency of remembering’. The demolition of the ruins of the former Royal Königsberg Castle started in the mid-1960s and lasted until the beginning of the 1970s, and then the House of Soviets was built almost in the same place. At the same time, the myths of Königsberg (including the lost Amber Room, the problem of the seven bridges of Königsberg, and the figures of Immanuel Kant and E. T. A. Hoffmann) spread as urban legends and became thematized in literary texts.16 These contrary tendencies transformed into the metaphors of this territory and became the most significant elements in contemporary art after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The enormous concrete House of Soviets would be the most significant representation of the mind-set generated by socialist realism. Mikhail Epstein claims that one of the most important features of socialist realism was simulation, which has developed into the defining feature of postmodernism.17 According to Epstein, socialist realism created a special kind of reality, a so-called hyper-reality as a result of simulation and simulacra, ‘which appear more real than does reality itself.’18 The House of Soviets in Kaliningrad, as a representation of the special reality of the socialist-realist aesthetic, underlined the empty self-representation of the former Soviet era. This special kind of emptiness as the representation of disruption of the linear historical narrative became the ‘the new massive void’ of postcolonial and postsocialist discourses, as Madina Tlostanova argues: Both postcolonial and postcommunist discourses are products of modernity/coloniality, emphasizing different elements, yet having a common source […] and a shared birthmark in the rhetoric of modernity […], acting as a tool to justify the continuing colonization of time and space [...].19 16

17

18 19

For the metaphorized motifs of Hoffmann’s stories in the context of Königsberg/Kaliningrad see Valentin Zorin, ‘Sny o Kenigsberge’ [Dreams about Königsberg], in Antologiia kaliningradskogo rasskaza [Anthology of Kaliningrad Short Fiction], ed. by O. Glushkin (Kaliningrad: IP I. V., 2006), pp. 169-181. The unique figure of Immanuel Kant and the mystical atmosphere of the so-called Kant Island in the centre of the city appears as a central motif in works of contemporary art: for a summary of these tendencies see Art-gid. Kenigsberg/Kaliningrad segodnia [Art Guide. Königsberg/Kaliningrad today], ed. by E. B. Tsvetaeva (Kaliningrad: Yantarnyy Skaz, 2005). For a poetic summary of the myths of the city see Aleksandr Popadin, Mestnoe vremia [Local Time] (Kaliningrad: Skorost’ Zvuka, 2010). Mikhail Epstein, ‘The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism’, in Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) pp. 188-210. Ibid., p. 190. Madina Tlostanova, ‘Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2 (2012), 130-142, p. 132.

250 Xénia Gaál Unveiling the void and silence and, furthermore, using them as artistic concepts, is a stage of the process of facing the traumas in literary texts with the central themes of constructed identity and fragmented narratives.

From Königsberg Text to the ‘Narrative of the City of K.’: Fragmented Narrative and the Unattainable Female Body The blending of the Prussian Königsberg and the Soviet Kaliningrad into a third city called the ‘City of K.’ first appeared as a theme in three poems by the Nobel Laureate Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. The so-called Königsberg Cycle (consisting of ‘Fragment’, 1964; ‘Einem alten Architekten in Rom’, 1964; and ‘Postcard from the City of K.’, 1967) by Brodsky is the central topic of the article about the Königsberg Text by the Lithuanian poet, writer, scholar, translator and friend of Brodsky, Tomas Venclova.20 He was the first theoretician to consider Brodsky’s poems as texts about the constructed socialist narrative of Kaliningrad, although the connection between literary texts and a city in Russian culture was analysed for the first time by Vladimir Toporov when he introduced the idea of the ‘Petersburg text’21 into Russian philology. The theoretical basis for Venclova’s concept of Brodsky and Kaliningrad was Toporov’s theory about a meta-text (or collective text) linked to Petersburg in a mythical, thematic and metaphoric way through literary texts. Venclova’s method is similar, since he put together a unified corpus of motifs and themes, creating a Königsberg text focusing on Brodsky’s Königsberg Cycle, but also mentioning texts by Nikolai Karamzin and Andrei Bolotov. As Venclova argues, Brodsky’s poems focus on the fragmented narrative of the city in historical space and time, emphasizing the traumatic effects of the destroyed urban artefacts, the radically changed landscape and structure of the city, and the juxtaposition of the erased medieval past and the newlyminted socialist present. Applying the theoretical methods and further developing Venclova’s concept for my research, my contribution is to analyse and synthesize these characterizations of this city. The main difference between Brodsky’s poems and contemporary literature on Kaliningrad is that in Brodsky’s Königsberg Cycle the ruined (Prussian) past paradoxically serves as a point of reference for the present, whereas the short literary texts on the City of K. from the last two decades do not claim 20

21

Tomas Venclova, ‘“Kenigsbergskii tekst” russkoi literatury i kenigsbergskie stikhi Iosifa Brodskogo’ [The Königsberg Text of Russian Literature and Poems of Königsberg by Joseph Brodsky], in Tomas Venclova, Stat’i o Brodskom (Moscow: Baltrus – Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2005), pp. 96-120. V. N. Toporov, Peterburskii tekst russkoi literatury [The Petersburg Text of Russian Literature] (Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo – SPB, 2003).

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any point of reference, and the rootlessness that is a ‘product’ of the Soviet regime is itself a special kind of identity in the post-Soviet, post-socialist world.22 As a consequence of this void of reference and continuity, the term Königsberg text cannot be used for the literary tendencies of the last few decades. Königsberg appears as the motif of the unattainable past, while Kaliningrad serves as the metaphor for the emptiness of the ideological regime. The unique blending creates this special narrative, for which I suggest the term ‘Narrative of the City of K’. The first author of these contemporary tendencies is Yury Buida, born in Kaliningrad Oblast’ in 1954 in the former Prussian town of Welau, later known as Znamensk. His short story collection Prusskaya nevesta [The Prussian Bride]23 published in 1998 focuses on the former Prussian region that fell victim to the devastation of Soviet ideology. One of the main themes of his stories is void, which carries a collective amnesia definable as the opposite of collective memory, and which was established after the breaking point was reached in the historical past of the territory. The cycle revolves around the problem of the inaccessibility of the buried past; the first short story, titled ‘The Prussian Bride (Instead of a Preface)’, signals this problem of a past locked by violence when the author introduces the metaphorical figure of the unattainable bride (pp. 11-18). Condensing the city, the country and people into a single female figure is a well-known metaphor in (not only) Russian culture, and Buida does this in order to express the problematic identity of Kaliningrad. The habit of portraying cities as female entities with extreme characteristics goes at least as far back as the Bible, and eventually this became an important element in Russian cultural thought. According to Ellen Rutten’s work Unattainable Bride Russia,24 Russia is portrayed in its cultural discourse as the female member of a unique love triangle with two male rivals: the prevailing power regime and the intelligentsia. This triangle takes different forms, but a permanent feature is the metaphorization of the problematic relationship between political power, the intelligentsia, and the imagined Russian people. In her 22

23 24

Rootlessness and vacuity as key concepts appears in many literary texts in Kaliningrad, see for example: Konstantin Davydov-Tishchenko, ‘Khronika proshlogo leta’ [The Chronicle of Last Summer], in Antologiia kaliningradskogo rasskaza, ed. by O. Glushkin, pp. 108-133; Igor Belov, ‘Drednouty’ [Dreadnoughts], in Sol’nechnyi udar. Sovremennaia kaliningradskaia literatura, ed. by I. Belov and S. Mikhaylov (Kaliningrad: Muzei Yantaria, 2011), pp. 14; and Evgeny Grishkovets, ‘Gorod’ [The City], in Evgeny Grishkovets, Gorod (Moscow: Prospekt–N, 2001), pp. 178-220. Yuri Buida, Prusskaya nevesta [The Prussian Bride] (Moscow: NLO, 1998). English translation: The Prussian Bride, trans by. Oliver Ready (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2002). Ellen Rutten, Unattainable Bride Russia: Gendering Nation, State, and Intelligentsia in Russian Intellectual Culture (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2010).

252 Xénia Gaál work, Rutten relies on a significant corpus of texts (Alexander Blok, Nikolai Berdiaev, Andrei Platonov, Boris Pasternak, Daniil Andreev, Vasily Grossman, Venedikt Erofeev, Viktor Erofeev, Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin, Mikhail Berg, and Timur Kibirov). She projects the feminization of the home and the motherland back to the cult of the pagan Mother Earth goddess, which is eventually transformed in the Russian cultural discourse into the father figure of the Czar and the mother figure of the Russian homeland. In the 18th century, this image was further modulated by the dichotomy of Moscow and St. Petersburg, which at once represents the opposition of male and female, and of Russians and foreigners. According to Rutten, the male figure beside the woman symbolizing Russia is the embodiment of something foreign that obstructs, violates, and destroys the woman—in whose figure the region, the city and the country is essentialized. Although Buida does not appear among the authors examined by Rutten, I see an organic relationship between Buida’s bride figure and Rutten’s view of the metaphorization of the Russian people as torn between the intelligentsia and political power. In the case of Buida, an entire cultural sphere becomes the victim of the Soviet regime’s practice of rewriting history. In Russian literature, from the poems of Alexander Blok to the novels of Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, this metaphor serves to embody a traumatized social layer—a crisis that, according to certain researchers, already began during the reign of Peter the Great. 25 Buida, however uses it in order to embody the buried past and the consequences of aggressive Soviet ideological acts. At the centre of Buida’s work stand dumb, sleeping, or mentally or physically disabled female figures, or else those who have been captured by the vacuum of their own fates in some other way; all are brought together in the metaphor of the unattainable bride. The unity of characters and location holds together the forty-seven stories of Buida’s volume, which all take place in a single town. The unified urban narrative is outlined by the characters’ stories; however, the lack of linear narration and the fragmentation dominating the various layers of the text throughout the work is important. We cannot talk of a single main protagonist—most of the figures appear in almost all of the tales—which emphasises the enclosed, claustrophobic nature of the characters’ networks. The figures become protagonists only in the chapters the author devoted to each. These fragments seem to integrate into a coherent whole, but this 25

O. V. Turkina, ‘Rossiya v poiskakh novoi identichnosti. Iskusstvo identifitsiruet konflikt’ [Russia is in Search of a New Identity. Art is Identifying the Conflict], in Kabinet: Kartiny mira. II. Sbornik stat’ei, ed. by V. Mazin (Saint Petersburg: Skifiya, 2001), pp. 84-90.

The City of K. 253

coherence is merely illusory since the conglomeration of the individuals’ stories is overshadowed by the overall story of the town. Various versions of the first story’s prototypical bride figure appear throughout the book, such as the bedridden paralysed woman, the mysterious German wife hidden away from the town’s residents, and even the mentally and physically disabled figure of Galaha, who reminds us of Pygmalion’s Galatea. The woman stuck in her marginalized situation is the peripheral Kaliningrad Oblast’ itself. This simplified formula is unravelled through the two title heroines of the story ‘Milenkaya and Masenkaya’, which links the female figure with the town itself.26 The two siblings are discovered in this area devastated by the war, appearing in an emphatically empty space, and the orphans bring their own forgotten past to this empty space created as a result of destructive acts of war: ‘Who was their mother: German? Polish? Lithuanian?’ (p. 244) The girls seem to offer the promise and hope of new life, with the suckling scene nodding to the legend of the origin of Rome (whose two infants are nursed by a she-wolfe). A ceremony of rebirth and recreation is performed on the ruins of the destroyed town, and as a result of the cyclic nature of culture, the possibility of a new cultural space is created. The girls’ stagnant fate, however, illustrates the impossibility of organic development here. Just as the town has remained half-finished and half-dead, the fate of the girls develops in the same way, which is especially made manifest in how the girls stopped developing physically (they are depicted as dwarves). This vacated reality is counterbalanced by a mythicized hyper-reality, creating a duality characteristic of the postmodern—and this duality may be identified on several levels within Buida’s texts. Battle-Axe, the most frequently mentioned character in The Prussian Bride, is an old woman busybody mythicized as a structural, cementing force with the power to hold the community together, whose powers cease after her death. On examining the metaphorical level of the text it may be determined that Battle-Axe is the alter ego of the narrator, as she is the creator of the deriding nicknames that play such an important role in the stories’ narration. During the act of name-giving, a new reality is created, a construct which leads us to what Epstein terms ‘hyper-reality’. However, the figure of Battle-Axe is connected to the past, and with her death, the possibility of continuity vanishes forever. In the author’s poetics, the Prussian bride is a synonym for the Kaliningrad Oblast’. Bridehood is a unique status, on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, between maidenhood and marriage, signifying 26

Buida, pp. 244-247. (The English translation includes only 31 short stories in contrast to the 47 stories in the original edition. Hence we should rely on the Russian edition.)

254 Xénia Gaál passage from one life to another. The Prussian bride is a kind of ‘eternal bride’, as she has become stuck between her two lives, just like, according to the author, the Kaliningrad Oblast’ is wedged between the past and the future, East and West, Russia and Europe, but is not clearly linked to any of these. Buida mythicizes the hyper-reality characteristic of the Soviet era and the pseudo-town that the Soviets determined to re-create with violence, disrupting the organic continuity of the area. In this way, in the world of Buida’s tales, the possibility of revealing an urban narrative that has proven to be otherwise unachievable is suggested during a unique act of re-creation.

From the Metaphor to the Topos Scepticism about the accessibility of the past is the key problem of the personal essay by Zinovy Zinik entitled My Father’s Leg.27 Zinik—originally Gluzberg—is an interesting figure within the ‘Narrative of the City of K.’, as he never lived in Kaliningrad, but is connected to the place through his father’s life-story. Zinik’s father was ordered to the siege of Königsberg during the Second World War, where he lost his leg. His son emigrated first to Israel and then to London, returned to Moscow for his dying father’s last days, and two years later travelled to Kaliningrad to explore the points of connection between the stages of his father’s life from Königsberg back to Soviet Moscow. In his foreword to the work, the author connects the life-story of his father to the case of Kaliningrad, merging them into the context of a postcommunist narrative: My father died a year before this visit to Kaliningrad, where the remains of his leg had been left rotting sixty years ago. For two thirds of his life he walked with an artificial leg, and he was married four times. All his life my father, a holy simpleton, amazed me with his naive, innocent attitude to the horrors of Soviet history and his sense of duty reminiscent of the Kantian Categorical Imperative. This was how the idea arose of taking the BBC’s microphone and following my father’s route—following in the footsteps, so to speak, of my father’s lost leg: from the sarcophagus of Immanuel Kant to the gravestone in Moscow, from the tomb of the unknown soldier to the Mausoleum, from the hospital to the crematorium, behind the scenes of death. After all, a funeral is also a mirror of life, and my father’s funeral was a mirror of Soviet life—he never knew any other. (p. 2) 27

My Father’s Leg was originally broadcast by Zinovy Zinik in the Sunday Feature/Another Country of BBC’s Radio 3. It was first published in Russian as ‘Noga moego ottsа’ in Ural No. 7, 2005, available at Accessed 29 June 2014. The English translation by Andrew Bromfield, from which the quotes are taken, has not been published yet. The manuscript was made available to me by Mr. Zinik.

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The author marks out the semantic field of the work in order to build a dichotomous narration where void, loss, and trauma are juxtaposed with the figure of Kant, and the tension between Königsberg’s Prussian past contrasted with the present city Kaliningrad. The main dichotomies thematize the problems of centre and margin, and past and present through the opposition of Moscow as the eternal centre of the Soviet regime and Kaliningrad with its forgotten past. Lenin’s Mausoleum in the Red Square is the topos of the eternal remembering, while the tomb of the unknown soldier is the metaphor of the nameless, silenced past. The text consists of three long chapters, of which the second, entitled ‘Dead Zone’, talks of the ‘City of K.’ and the past. The leg lost in Königsberg is closely related to the lost past of Kaliningrad and the town’s fate also points toward Zinik’s most important question: what does emigration actually mean? An escape route, leading out of the closed Soviet reality, or precisely the contrary; punishment, as a result of which the subject ceases to belong anywhere, becoming rootless, without memory or a past? Emigration in Zinik’s works is more than just geographically leaving the motherland. It is also a specific literary device that points to unique and problematic elements of identity and memory, in addition to the typical post-Soviet dichotomies of Here and There, We and They, etc. According to Zinik in his work ‘Emigration as Literary Device’, one of the most basic features of the Soviet era and, within this, the reality of the émigré, is dichotomous thinking: the contrast between the Soviet Union and the Other, Western world, which affects every aspect of life. 28 Besides these dichotomies, we can add the contrasting poles of Reality and Fantasy, Ordinary Life and the Land of Dreams or the Promised Land, etc., which are expressive examples of Epstein’s hyper-reality and the artificial rhetoric of Socialist ideology. ‘Emigration as Literary Device’ and My Father’s Leg thematize the same concepts (alienation, the contrast between Soviet and post-Socialist reality, and the problem of remembering and forgetting) through different poetics, which are supplementary to one another: ‘Emigration as Literary Device’ gives the theoretical basis for the narration of My Father’s Leg. The themes of the former work, such as ‘losing the citizenship of a country that no longer exists on the political map of the world’ (p. 31) turns into the metaphor of the prosthesis in the latter. In My Father’s Leg, the whole of the USSR has become a prosthesis with its partly paralyzed leader, while the members of the Politburo are legless invalids: 28

Zinovy Zinik, Ėmigratsiia kak literaturnyi priem [Emigration as Literary Device] (Moscow: NLO, 2011), p. 7.

256 Xénia Gaál

Stalin, with his semi-religious education and virulent anti-clericalism, was, surprisingly, very fond of Greek mythology, studied it, and frequently quoted from it in his speeches. Perhaps he saw some parallels between his Politburo and Olympus. Himself, with his partly-paralysed hand, he must have felt some affinity with those Greek gods who limped like Hephaestus, the gods’ blacksmith and jailer, who manufactured shackles, chains and artificial limbs. When you visit the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts you can see hundreds of plaster reproductions of ancient Greek masterpieces, all of them with a limb or two missing. Since my childhood, I remember a damaged statue of Aphrodite with a rod instead of a leg. (pp. 36-37)

The ‘original’ part of the father’s body that vanished in the ‘forgotten land’ of the ‘City of K.’ was replaced with an ‘artificial’ limb. Imitation of the original is a key concept in this postcommunist narrative: the profanation of the Soviet leadership by the parallel with reproductions of ancient masterpieces is used to unfold the imitative nature of the USSR. The problems of originality, reproduction and imitation are articulated on different levels: the artificial limb is associated with the fake Greek statues in the Museum of Fine Arts, and through the image of the ‘gods of the Politburo’ the narration uses imitation and reproduction as central motifs to characterize the absurdity of this reality. This is especially apparent from the narrator’s simultaneous positions as insider and outsider: ‘I, the pseudoforeigner from the supposedly free world, was back in the old trap—in this world where duties were avoided and imperatives were false, where you couldn’t get anywhere at all without marring, twisting, and distorting the very essence and logic of life’ (p. 5). The text’s key concept is that the ‘pseudo-foreigner’ needs to see the ‘pseudo-city of K.’ in order to even start to gather the pieces of the puzzle of his father’s life-story. The artificial limb represents the disruption of the linear connection between the past and the present, and the prosthesis is developed into a metaphor of the people living in the artificial hyper-reality of the Soviet regime, especially the disabled, who are symbols of the postwar period. My next visit was to the factory in Moscow that bears the name of Karl Marx and still produces artificial limbs. It was here that my father had his first prosthesis made. The picture of the rows of plaster casts for artificial limbs—a multiplied version of my father’s lost leg—gave an almost science-fictional atmosphere to the place, so fitting for the vision of the failed utopia of the socially disabled. (pp. 33-34)

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Using the imagery of ‘the hierarchy of the disabled of Russia’ (p. 34), Zinik connects the life-story of his father, who serves as a metonym of the Russian people, to the unstable structure of Stalinism. The entire second chapter of My Father’s Leg is spent searching for a sort of orientation point in a historical, philosophical and political sense, but it is also a discourse experiment with a slice of a personal past: the story of a father who had outlived the Soviet era. An important organizing force in the text is the concept of the void, of which the extreme, bipolar ideology characteristic of the Soviet regime is an expressive example. Bipolarity is a fundamental element of Soviet ideology: the Soviet propaganda machine created effects such as fear of the enemy from ‘the outside’ in the midst of Stalin’s terror, pride in the national past during the process of its rewriting, etc., The effect of this artificial simulacrum was to replace reality itself, separating reality and the sense of reality.29 A radical example of the process of rewriting or being silent about the past is the case of Kaliningrad, which formed a sort of vacuum. The emptiness of the Soviet regime is represented in the figure of the onelegged father, within which Kaliningrad metaphorically becomes the prosthesis torn from the ‘organic body of the motherland’. The confusing state of mind of the character of the father illustrates the status of a whole generation. ‘The country that he had known all those years—the USSR— disappeared, slipped out from under his feet, and he became an émigré in his own motherland.30 The operation that removed the father’s cataract in the last year of his life serves as a metaphor for unveiling the imitative nature of the Soviet, and also the post-Soviet reality. He tries to finally open his eyes: ‘“Our generation was never interested in the material side of things,” my father objected. “We were a generation of idealists. Absolutely objective. We never thought about anything but the bright future”’ (p. 10). The father’s view of the world has moved from the future to the past, although he is still locked into the vacuity of socialist thinking, even after the collapse of the USSR. The ghosts of the past are still present in him as much as in the case of the City of K. Even though Buida and Zinik employ different artistic means in their works, ‘The Prussian Bride’ and My Father’s Leg still deal with the very same problem by setting up a central metaphor and/or metonym of the broken, wounded body. For Buida this unfolds along the semantic chain of the injured/broken/tortured female figure—imaginary Prussian bride—Königsberg—buried past, while in the case of Zinik this is built through the widening metaphor of the one-legged father—Kaliningrad—Soviet regime—post-Soviet reality. In the 29 30

Epstein, p. 189. Zinik 2005, p. 27.

258 Xénia Gaál analysed texts of the ‘Narrative of the City of K.’, the female characters (Buida) and the one-legged father (Zinik) bring this hope, although, paradoxically, their bodies are the obvious signs of the impossibility of its fulfilment. In both texts the characters’ broken bodies (represented literally by the father’s lost leg and the physically disabled female bodies of Milenkaya and Masenkaya, and figuratively as bodies stuck in their own microcosm) are used as metaphors of the lost identity and the fragmented national narrative. Buida uses the silenced and broken female body as a symbol of the Kaliningrad Oblast,’ demonstrating the rootlessness and the difficulties of reconstruction of identity. In Zinik’s texts the lost leg serves as a metaphor for the lost past of Königsberg, while the image of Kaliningrad is used as a topos for the post-Socialist void and vacuity. When we place the two very different texts works side by side to form a ‘Narrative of the city of K.’, the traumas that took place in the Soviet era in former Eastern Prussia—concretely in Königsberg/Kaliningrad—are revealed. The next generation of the ‘Narrative of the City of K.’ is represented by literary texts 31 and the artistic tendencies of the last few years in Kaliningrad that are trying to connect Kaliningrad more to Europe than to Russia. The most significant artistic tendencies in Kaliningrad today are the international projects of the National Centre for Contemporary Art, which are oriented toward the past of the former Prussian and Baltic territory. Kaliningrad today has a strong and productive artistic connection with Gdańsk (the former Danzig) and Klaipėda (the former Memel) through the international cultural project called Close Stranger. 32 Although these European connections are highly developed by the young generation of Kaliningradian artists and writers, the Kaliningrad Oblast’ is obviously a very important territory for Russia at the doorstep of Europe, primarily for political reasons. The results of these contrary ambitions can be easily seen in the landscape of the city today (such as governmental building projects for numerous Russian Orthodox churches, and satirical artistic performances in the main urban spaces of the city).

31

32

Especially the following two anthologies of contemporary short stories: Antologiia kaliningradskogo rasskaza [Anthology of Kaliningradian Short Fiction], ed. by O. Glushkin; Sol’nechnyi udar. Sovremennaia kaliningradskaia literatura [Sunstroke. Contemporary Kaliningradian Literature], ed. by I. Belov and S. Mikhailov (Kaliningrad: Muzei Iantaria, 2011). For details about the project see Accessed 20 September 2014.

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Conclusion This chapter focused on significant works by Buida and Zinik as fragmented narratives of Kaliningrad. The layering of the ‘colonized’ Königsberg and the socialist Kaliningrad can be seen as forming a ‘terra incognita’. Alexandr Sologubov, using Roland Barthes’s concept of logosphere, argues that ‘the logosphere of Kaliningrad’ can be defined as ‘culture in a strange place’.33 Here, culture, the substance of what is unreachable, is read upon a palimpsest of different layers of history from the post-Socialist position. Ştefănescu’s concept of ‘post-dependency cultural trauma’ 34 may be the central theoretical basis for cultural studies on Kaliningrad, insofar as this strange territory was used as a specific ‘ex-Soviet space’, 35 where postcommunist, postcolonial and postmodern discourses intersect. In Buida’s work the mythical figure of the unattainable Prussian bride is used as a metaphor for the broken historical narrative of the artificial city of Kaliningrad, whereas the ‘pseudo-city of K.’ in Zinik’s text paradoxically serves as a piece of the puzzle of the socialist past. One of the main metaphors of both works is the body as witness of traumatic memory, or oppositely, traumatic amnesia. Buida uses the traumatized female characters to express the erased and never completely recovered past of the Kaliningrad Oblast’. Zinik’s main image is the one-legged father as a metaphor for the tortured Russian nation during the Soviet era, while the case of Kaliningrad is developed into a topos of the cultural narrative of the ‘post-’. Although Kaliningrad is still a part of the Russian Federation, the process of reckoning with the ghosts of the past, which began in the 1970s despite the period anti-German propaganda and gained strength after the collapse of the USSR, developed into an ‘alternative memory’36 in the late 1990s. This tendency is reflected in the literary texts of the ‘Narrative of the City of K.’ by using the motifs of rootlessness, void and vacuity, dependence and trauma expressing the rupture of space and time.

33

34 35 36

Alexander Sologubov, ‘Kul’tura v chuzhom prostranstve’ [Culture in a Strange Place], in Art-gid. Kenigsberg/Kaliningrad segodnia, ed. by E. B. Tsvetaeva (Kaliningrad: Yantarnyy Skaz, 2005), p. 13. See Bogdan Ştefănescu’s article in this volume. Tlostanova, p. 141. Sezneva, pp. 70–71.

Dorota Kołodziejczyk The Organic (Re)Turn—Ecology of Place in Postcolonial and Central/Eastern European Novel of Post-Displacement1 Abstract: This chapter develops grounds of comparison between postcolonial and postcommunist/postdependence literature via ecocritical thought. It analyses instances of ecologically sensitive thinking and representation of place in Central and Eastern European fiction of post-displacement within the framework of the postcolonial/ ecocritical perspective. The local in this type of fiction is characteristically projected as a totality encompassing much more than the social tissue defining it. It is a habitat where species human and non-human, as well as objects and mental/imaginary constructs comprise an organic, albeit always precarious, whole that veers askance of discourses of identity. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all… (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature) And those flowers with those names: delphiniums, foxgloves, tulips, daffodils, floribunda, peonies; in bloom, a striking display, being cut and placed in large glass bowls, crystal, decorating rooms so large twenty families the size of mine could fit in comfortably but used only for passing through. (Jamaica Kincaid, ‘On Seeing England for the First Time’) What countries are these? Memories of the former ones, remnants of those gone past, projects of the new ones, some potentialities, vague promises […] this is the country of recycling and it will be recycled itself one day. (Andrzej Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag)

‘Fiction of displacement’ is a provisional term in which I want to include both postcolonial fiction that is almost always fiction of displacement and fiction from Eastern and Central European countries written after the fall of communism that usually refers to the communist epoch as a profoundly displacing experience. Critical debates have been running on for more than a decade on whether we can rework postcolonial theory to describe the situation of post-communist (post-socialist) countries and societies. However, the displacement described here is comprised of: real historical experience in the wake of World War II, including the process of decolonization; second-generation recollections mediated by family stories; circulating tales, and cultural and political discourses—all of which provide evidence for a great deal of overlap between postcolonial and postcommunist sensibilities. The line of similarity can be drawn not only 1

The article was supported by the grant no. DEC-2011/01/B/HS2/01120 from Narodowe Centrum Nauki.

262 Dorota Kołodziejczyk alongside the postwar geopolitical situation, which brought about migrations of whole populations across state borders on a regional and transcontinental scale, if one thinks of the consequences of the Yalta agreement and the Indian Partition. The ethnic basis of the large-scale migrations is the chief distinguishing feature of those displacements both in postcolonial and postcommunist contexts. In both, as a result of massive population shifts, such a foundational coordinate of identity as place-attachment turned out for many to be precarious and no longer accessible. Inga Iwasiów, a Polish writer and literary critic whose explorations of the phenomenon of postwar migrations are rooted in literature and auto/biography, postulates a comparative study for this phenomenon: ‘I would very much like to read a monograph on European post-1945 literature as a literature of mass displacement […] I see such a monograph as a utopian project’. 2 This utopian project, which is at the same time both necessary and impossible due to its geographic and thematic scope, would reveal the core identity narrative pattern of postwar and post-1989 literature. In my view, though, these narrative patterns in the post-1989 wave of fiction reflecting on displacement in a way that makes it necessary to term it ‘post-displacement fiction’ are uneasy about the notion of identity itself. They profoundly call into question the necessity of harnessing one’s place and dwelling to identity. Such a cautious approach to identity, which always seems to be exterior and to place too great a demand on the sense of dwelling, is articulated in this fiction most significantly through its special receptiveness towards the environment and nature, which function as active constituents of place. In post-displacement fiction from Eastern and Central Europe and in postcolonial novels reflecting on displacement, home-seeking and dwelling are most often grounded in ecocritical sensitivity. Granted that the pastoral tradition in American and British ecocritical thought has provoked postcolonial critics to a polemic, which I will discuss below, the self's dissolution into nature in Emerson’s epigraph above provides a powerful impetus for contemporary posthumanist reflection on human-nonhuman coexistence. It reverberates in post-displacement novels that project place and locality as a thwarted concept encompassing much more than the social tissue defining them. It is a habitat where human and non-human species, as well as objects and mental/imaginary constructs comprise an organic, albeit always contingent, whole. The re-creation of locality in fiction representing displacement as the core experience of postcoloniality and 2

Inga Iwasiów, ‘Hipoteza literatury neo-post-osiedleńczej’ [A Hypothesis of NeoPost-Settlement Literature], in Narracje migracyjne w literaturze polskiej XX i XXI wieku [Migration Narratives in Polish Literature of the 20th and 21st century], ed. by Hanna Gosk (Cracow: Universitas, 2012), pp. 209-224, p. 210.

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postdependence, 3 and, with it, modernity at large, is possible thanks to a unique ecocritical sensitivity underlying the process of making oneself at home in an alien space. It does not connote, by any means, the domestication of nature through horticulture, landscaping, etc. In postdisplacement reflections, impassioned and expert gardening is as much a luxury as it was for Jamaica Kincaid experiencing, in the epigraph above, a profusion of floral decorations in an English home. As an avid gardener herself, she cannot but feel estranged from this epitome of domesticity which, across the ocean, bore the name of a cotton plantation and based her experience of living in Antigua on the sense of lack and insufficiency. In a related way, in the epigraph from Andrzej Stasiuk’s travelogue On the Road to Babadag, the Eastern and Central European locations on his itinerary along the Carpathian ridge make up a coherent whole of transience and incompletion, recycling and second-hand possession, with the mountains on the horizon being the only permanent coordinator of that underdefined, in contrast to the solid Western Europe, peripheral space. As Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin observe, after Lawrence Buell and other ecocritical writers, the ecocritical perspective does not involve a retreat from the complexity of modern life into the pastoral mood. It is, rather, an aesthetic choice for a language and imagination striving to cross over the limitations of anthropocentric thinking.4 At the core of the efforts in postdisplacement fiction to restore the idea of place is the historical awareness of the loss of place as habitat and the sense of holism that it secured, the loss of nature as natural to one’s idea of place, and, finally, the postdisplacement generation’s effort to work through these gaps and reconstruct a model of locality that will not be overdetermined by an identity regime that mobilizes the self to national or other collective affiliations. Opening up the sense of dwelling to an interaction with the environment not limited to its function of passive landscape results in bringing the agency of the non-human component of locality into the foreground. This entails a simultaneous withdrawal from identity-accumulating narratives usually associated with the idea of place and its function as the basis for identity development. 3

4

‘Postdependence’ is a term used in relation to discourses emerging and circulating as a consequence of Central and Easter Europe’s complex history of subjugation to foreign rule from the end of the 18th century onwards. In Poland postdependence studies is a field of research developing dynamically for almost a decade now, negotiating between postcolonial studies and the region’s and Poland’s specific historical, political and cultural contexts. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism. Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 12.

264 Dorota Kołodziejczyk

Escapes from Identity 1: Ecocritical Postcolonialism Modernization is everywhere a major force disconnecting human communities from their embeddedness in nature and sense of emplacement. Ecocriticism and postcolonialism share the fundamental concern for recuperating or reproducing the environmentally accountable model of community made up of people, place, and the life-forms around them. Certainly, a high degree of caution has to be maintained in order not to fall into the temptation of romanticizing the past, nature, and indigenous societies as living in an especial harmony with their natural environment, in contrast with the industrialized areas of the world, affiliated with modern empires. Rather, the alliance of postcolonialism and ecocriticism encourages us to consider that imperialism always implicated a serious infringement on the environment in the name of human progress. Lawrence Buell traces, for example, the role of the production of space in the imperial project for deterritorializing locality5 and displacing communities. Ecocritical postcolonialism takes as its departure point the basic assumption that it is necessary to rethink the human place in a more relational, non-hierarchical way and to challenge the old and draw new cultural politics of representation where the human-environment relation becomes interactive and mutual. Huggan and Tiffin write: ‘a re-imagining and reconfiguration of the human place in nature necessitates an interrogation of the category of the human itself and of the ways in which the construction of ourselves against nature […] has been complicit in colonialist and racist exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to this day’. 6 The global environmental perspective underlying the historical knowledge of uneven development in combination with de-anthropocentric imagination in literature and culture remarkably broadens the scope of postcolonialism’s critical force. In turn, the postcolonial insight into the imperial grounds of many environmental problems on a global and local scale equips ecocriticism with the necessary awareness that knowledge is politically, ideologically and culturally conditioned and has little universal appeal and applicability. Therefore, imagining nature-bound societies that need to be taken into the custody of ecological guardians (from the West) can be as racist in effect as the global feminist sisterhood Gayatri Spivak commented on.7

5 6 7

Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 64. Huggan and Tiffin, p. 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 170-200.

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With these interconnections, ecocriticism and postcolonialism join forces to effectively challenge and eradicate the human-nonhuman dichotomy structuring much of our thinking. Of course, these are not by any means naïve returns to nature, or nostalgia for nature in its wake (although there will always be a degree of that in any ecocritical discourse). This critical conjunction works, rather, toward questioning the set hierarchy inscribed in the dichotomy and explores its ethical and pragmatic implications. As Tiffin and Huggan note, an ecocritical perspective ‘is not necessarily restricted to environmental realism or nature writing, but is especially attentive to those forms of fictional and non-fictional writing that highlight nature and natural elements […] as self-standing agents, rather than support structures for human action’.8 In ecocritically-inspired writing, nature has its own space of agency beyond anthropomorphic figurations—but quite paradoxically so, in that the world represented will obviously be an emanation of the human consciousness, but distanced from itself precisely as human consciousness and yielding to other putative forms of reflexive being. Anthony Vital notes in his essay ‘Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction’ that postcolonialism and ecocriticism may differ remarkably in their respective politics, pointing out that the main source of tension between the two arises from the history of environmentalism’s implication in the imperial project and postcolonialism’s distrust of ‘power, both economic and cultural, that flows from metropolitan centres’, but they do share a perspective on environmentalism as ‘a rallying point for local resistance to the encroaching forces of global capital’.9 Seeking possibilities for African ecocriticism as an accountable ameliorative discourse rooted in postcolonial critique, Vital advocates a materialist approach in his other article. This is intended to bridge postcolonialism’s alleged textualism as poststructuralism’s offspring and environmentalism’s belief in accessibility of nature as knowledge, 10 and investigate its production of concrete historical and social effects. Language becomes, again, an essential object for critical attention as the chief mediating force between nature/environment and the human, as it determines nature’s position in discourse and therefore also in economy and culture. Postcolonial studies has accumulated a rich archive of research on how colonial discourse represented the indigenous and the colonial subject as inarticulate, mute, and part of nature. Exposing language as a tool of power 8 9 10

Huggan and Tiffin, p. 13. Anthony Vital, ‘Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction’, Journal of South African Studies, 31.2 (June 2005), 297-313, both quotes p. 299. Anthony Vital, ‘Towards African Ecocriticism’, Research in African Literatures, 39.1 (Winter 2008), 87-106, p. 88.

266 Dorota Kołodziejczyk producing diverse forms of knowledge and discourse for supporting and legitimating imperial conquest has been a vital part of postcolonialism’s deconstructive and analytical impetus. Ecocriticism complements postcolonial studies with new methodologies for examining that which is outside of the borders of language, and thus of the human, the civilized, or the modern, and encourages further destabilization of ontological hierarchies where the human is posited against nature and depends for its self-identity on the non-human: ‘the uncivilized, the animal and animalistic’. 11 What is at stake in this new, ecocritically focused understanding of language are explorations into how language borders with the non-verbal and sensual and what rhetorical devices need to be recognized (as already working in discourse), and what need to be yet developed to allow space for transmediation of what is beyond language and seeks expression. This is not a return to some naïve belief in extra-discursive agents, but an intervention into the creative and critical power of language, that is to its very materiality, in order to make space for life forms that, although not self-reflexive themselves, can compensate for contaminated words in the process that Madina Tlostanova identifies as the significant work of decolonial knowledges.12 As such, the ecocritical perspective joins in a larger framework of posthumanist critique of anthropocentrism. 13 The primary space-clearing gesture of ecocritical thought grants the non-human environment autonomy and self-standing agency beyond anthropocentrism and human speciesism. The ecocritical sensitivity in literature has had a major effect on the working of imagination—its chief role now is to act as part of an intersubjective, transmedial, multidirectional exchange system known as ‘environment’, with localities understood as habitat at the centre of attention. Memory, the chief factor in social bonding and the condition of place-attachment, likewise becomes a force that creates a relational, horizontal ontology14 of exchange and transmission that is not limited and not subordinate to the human self. In the fiction of displacement in postcolonial and postdependence/ postcommunist contexts, the ecocritical imagination espouses a nonidentitarian agency at work in developing place-attachment, locality and self. 11 12

13

14

Huggan and Tiffin, p. 5. Madina Tlostanova, The Sublime of Globalization? Sketches on Transcultural Subjectivity and Aesthetics (Moscow: URSS, 2005), and Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Ewa Domańska, ‘Humanistyka ekologiczna’ [The Ecological Humanities], in Od pamięci biodziedzicznej do postpamięci [From Biomemory to Postmemory], ed. by Teresa Szostek and Ryszard Nycz (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich, 2013), pp. 15-39. Ibid., p. 23.

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Escapes from Identity 2: Detours and Eco-Locations Criticism in both postcolonial studies and what has developed in the postcommunist context as postdependence studies tends to foreground the identity-making impetus of literary representations of the experience of uprooting and displacement. In some cases, like in the Polish literature on the Eastern Borderlands, 15 the perspective evolves from the direct expression of loss as affecting the very tissue of national identity to texts written in a decidedly revisionary mode, critical of the often possessive nationalist nostalgia pervading that discourse.16 In some postcolonial texts, national identity is subjected to critical scrutiny as a volatile tool in state politics rather than an innocent form of supra-local bonding. 17 Again, attempts to rectify the coercive aspects of collective identity, especially national identity, in seeking possibilities for more grassroots forms of identification is what links both postcolonial and postcommunist/ postdependence literatures. Yet another crucial feature shared between those two literary areas is that both are, albeit each on different scales, specifically transnational. This is what makes the claimed affinity between the postcolonial and postcommunist evident: the additional voice, or rhetoric, of critical memory culture growing on narratives of displacement accumulating from direct and indirect testimonies and memories, occupying the whole spectrum of literary genres. Novels featuring displacement and home-seeking are strongly mediated by the voice of memory, or, more often than not, post-memory. The narrative develops through negotiations with stories and discourses, and pertinently interrogates its own claim to truth (e.g., historical truth) or authenticity. I would suggest looking at this rhetoric as part of a larger critical memory culture in postcolonial and postcommunist fiction that pertains most saliently to the concept of place and the sense of emplacement, 18 while working simultaneously as a familiarizing and estranging agent. In the fiction of displacement, memory turns out to be a 15

16

17 18

Eastern Borderlands is the name given to the eastern territories of prewar Poland, characterized by its multiethnic and multilingual composition. I propose to read this term through, as Tlostanova proposes in reference to post-Soviet cultural borderlands, Yurii Lotman’s idea of ‘semiosphere’: ‘ambivalent multilingual borders are the hottest points of semiotization’. See Tlostanova, The Sublime of Globalization?, p. 130 Dariusz Skórczewski, ‘Melancholia of the “Borderland” discourse. Why Poles need postcolonial therapy (and why Polish literary critics need postcolonial theory)’ (unpublished conference paper). The most relevant authors here are, among others, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai. Buell, p. 62.

268 Dorota Kołodziejczyk powerful intersubjective force transferring experience, especially the sense of place and locality, across temporal and historical divides, working independently of a delimited singular consciousness. It restores the vernacular through translation and grafting in an act of ‘ethical spectrology’ across rupture, displacement and forgetting. 19 Place as a social entity in postcolonial fiction by Amitav Ghosh, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, Salman Rushdie, and many others, and in post-displacement fiction by Olga Tokarczuk, Juri Andrukhovych, Andrzej Stasiuk, Herta Müller, Oksana Zabuzhko and Serhiy Zhadan is practically always made up of spectral Others—vestiges of the displaced or perished inhabitants.20 The fiction of displacement itself can be divided into a range of subcategories: fiction of historical migration (e.g., indentured labour), of postcolonial migration, of post-migration, of the post-Yalta border shifts and the ensuing mass migrations in Europe, or, alternatively, of postresettlement (Iwasiów), which can be compared to the post-migration trend in the postcolonial novel. It is most particularly the affinity between the post-displacement novel in the postdependence/postcommunist context and post-migration novel in postcolonial context that is of interest here. Both share a special interest in recreating and recuperating the lost place and the local, but with the already debunked myth of a peaceful, Arcadian locality in the background. Also in both, the anti-colonial energies of early postcolonial literature tend to give way to one of the typical legacies of postmodernism: an ironic distance marked especially in relation to major political constructs such as the state, nation, national identity and any other ideological affiliation resulting in an identity regime. This does not mean that this fiction is in any particular way intended to programmatically negate the nation, national identity or any such constructs; nor does it expose them as constructs; rather, it takes the constructedness of such identity forms for granted. In much of this fiction a painstaking effort at the reconstruction of selves shattered by the crushing assaults of history is taking place. However, this effort takes place on the expansive margins of identity narratives, mostly tangentially to them (Ghosh, The Shadow Lines), but also sometimes at a far remove (Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times, House of Day, House of Night). In the works by Ghosh and Tokarczuk the character-narrators do not 19 20

Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in Contemporary India (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004), p. 153. I have written about memory and locality in the context of Central and Eastern Europe in ‘The Uncanny Space of “Lesser” Europe: Trans-Border Corpses and Transnational Ghosts in Post-1989 Eastern European Fiction’, Postcolonial Text, 6.2 (2011), available at http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1282/1154 Accessed 20 November 2014.

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really care to have identities of their own—they act more as intermediaries between various forms of consciousness. Their places are always revisited— the local can only be re-created and re-membered, and, likewise, placeattachment in post-displacement novels cannot be a direct affect. It is recreated and reimagined through layers of mediations, always already reflexive and negotiated, rather than spontaneous and natural. The transplant metaphor is probably one of the most notorious ways of encoding displacement in postcolonial criticism. Uprooting and re-rooting are among the most frequent, alongside hybridity and chimeras. On the one hand, such organicist metaphorization provides evidence for Cheryll Glotfelty’s observation that literacy subordinates nature in human consciousness to language, with ensuing anthropocentric approaches to nature in writing: ‘nature has shifted from an animistic to symbolic presence and from a voluble subject to a mute object, such that in our culture only humans have status as speaking subjects’.21 Transplant metaphors prove the subordinate status of nature in the symbolic order of language—nature serves here to illustrate the human condition of homelessness. On the other hand, such metaphors are also evidence that in the symbolic order of language the self cannot be expressed, or uttered, outside of the organic imagery of its natural environment. What subordinates nature—at the same time—returns the human to nature itself. In the post-displacement novels I want to survey here an interesting shift is taking place—the organic imagery becomes more active, one would say, articulate, when identity paradigms are either loosened up or made obsolete. In the postcommunist context, especially in Poland, literary criticism has usually treated this aspect (circumventing identity and its coercive political/ideological contexts) of what it called fiction of the local or mythographic fiction of the local as some kind of escape from a more complex critical revision of the communist past. A related critique highlighted the intertextual, or even epigonic, nature of that specific return to the local in fiction, labelling it ‘mythic homelands’, and pointing out the inevitable reliance of that fiction on the tradition of writing on the Eastern Borderlands. This tradition, dominated by the narratives of the Eastern Borderlands and the stature of the authors (Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Vincenz, Tadeusz Konwicki, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, etc.), was premised on the Arcadian image of the perished unity in plurality: ‘Practically every person I met was different, not because of his own special self, but as a representative of some group, nation or class’, writes Czesław Miłosz on the 21

The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: The University of Georgia Press), p. xix.

270 Dorota Kołodziejczyk Wilno of his youth, 22 being careful, though, to note the ‘mutual impenetrability of each milieu’23 that everybody took for granted, and the onset of nationalism that ruffled and disturbed the settled uncircumspect coexistence of religions and ethnicities. The new ‘homeland’, or, rather, the new concept of the local developing within a negotiable sense of place-attachment in post-displacement fiction, is distinguished by domesticated unfamiliarity. It features the uncanny and powerful presence of an alien past communicated, as if through objects of everyday use (clothes, letters, inscriptions and books), also present in the traces of agricultural and craft styles, and, ultimately, in the landscape itself. But this alien past is at the same time disarticulated because it has been severed from its historical unity. The place in this fiction does not become homeland as part of the narrative of belonging. Quite the opposite, its alien status is deepened by the motif of return and its magical-realist undertones.24 The experiential reality of place and its characteristic, morethan-textual semiosis is what makes it an especially interesting object of an organic repossession. What is at stake in these novels, then, is not so much the recuperation of place through mythographic representation of a new belonging, but an underlying ethics of restoring the place to its organic unity, across a broad spectrum of divides. In this sense it is always a revisionist and critical intervention into what Raymond Williams would call ‘structures of feeling’, 25 and what I would like to see as a critical consideration of the material working of the language. In fiction of displacement, re-creation of place requires a combined effort of the work of imagination, of archival search and of translation. It is a story of realization that the self is always dependent, relational and environed. Locating oneself will always, in a way, be about finding or embracing one’s environment. Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005), a novel located in the Sundarbans delta, features the painstaking mutuality of the precarious environment and human settlement. What at first seems to be an intrusion of two alien newcomers—the urban businessman and the foreign-raised biologist, turns out to be an experience of being restored to 22 23 24 25

Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm, trans. by Catherine S. Leach (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), p. 68. Ibid., p. 92. Brenda Cooper notes the prevailing magical-realist poetics of return in her study Magical Realism in West African Fiction (London: Routledge, 1998). ‘Williams first used this concept to characterize the lived experience of the quality of life at a particular time and place. It suggests a common set of perceptions and values shared by a particular generation, and is most clearly articulated in particular and artistic forms and conventions.’ Blackwell Reference Online, Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, DOI10.1111/b.9780631207535.1997.x

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one’s place in several senses: as a geographical location, as personal history, and as the living now of its present community. The Sundarbans is a borderland in all possible meanings of the word—where divisions between sea and land, fresh and salt water, wilderness and civilization, animal and human worlds, and, finally, the state and its underbelly (the Sundarbans’ enduring, dispossessed inhabitants)—are blurred but nevertheless powerfully determine human fates. The radical ethics of Kipling’s The Jungle Book reverberate in Ghosh’s novel—this is where nature rules with a powerful indifference to the tenacious efforts by the human world to secure a stable footing in this land of flood and flow, and where human habitation shares perilous space with that of a man-eating tiger—which here, as in Kipling’s novel, is the phenomenological core of the wild. This is a humbling experience to both newcomers-turned-returnees, teaching them an important lesson that our independence and self-reliance as subjects is an anthropocentric delusion of not much use in time of trial. To belong to that place means confronting one’s autonomy with the environment and yielding it in acknowledgment of nature’s simple and implacable ethics of survival. The experience of living in the Sundarbans restores the two protagonists to their roots, or, rather, replants them back into their native soil: the national space of India, the precarious space of the subaltern, the survival space entered by the encounter with nature, and the narrative space delineating the whole as a unique socio-political locale. Postcolonial and postdependence narratives of displacement (replacements notwithstanding) foreground a complex relation among the ideas of place, cultivation, and the environment. In his ‘Environmentalism and Postcolonialism’, Rob Nixon analyses the troubled relationship between ecocriticism, especially that which is rooted in the American pastoral tradition, and postcolonialism—whose dedication to the study of displacement, migrations, and various forms of transnationalism make it difficult to unproblematically interact with the environmentalist pursuit of place as locality pure in its isolated connection with nature. The core difference Nixon identifies is postcolonialism’s investment in redefining history and ecocriticism’s attempt to bypass history in its definition of nature and the environment: ‘[t]here is a durable tradition within American natural history writing of erasing the history of colonized peoples through the myth of empty lands’. 26 Nixon proposes to link the two discourses across what he sees as ‘schism’ to work productively toward ‘a transnational ethics of place’ which would complement ecocritical studies with the 26

Rob Nixon, ‘Environmentalism and Postcolonialism’, in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005), pp. 233-251, p. 235.

272 Dorota Kołodziejczyk postcolonial investment in recuperating ‘imaginatively and politically, experiences of hybridity, displacement, and transnational memory for any viable spatial ethic’. 27 At the heart of Nixon’s project lies the need to develop a critical method of reading that would, ‘refract an idealized nature through memories of environmental and cultural degradation in the colonies’. 28 Relatedly, postcolonial and postcommunist (postdependence) literatures testify to the necessity of revising representations of nature as pristine and uncorrupted space in what we could term the national pastoral tradition as by definition suspect, already a product of an ideology repressing prior histories.

Greening Traces of the Departed Other The rediscovery of locality in the fiction of the 1990s in Poland should be read in connection with its rapport with nature. By focusing on the local, mostly through revisiting mythic homelands through an unobtrusive subversion of the implacable working of history and memory in the foreground, this fiction both returns to the theme repressed under the communist regime for many reasons, and fosters a new way of thinking about place as conditional for developing a sense of identity and agency. Under communist rule nature in connection with place was a thwarted subject, resonant with the relatively recent history of mass displacements of long-settled populations according to the nationality declaration. The natural environment ceased to function as rooting for a cohesive local community and was appropriated to serve the needs of the new political regime. It wanted to build a new, national-communist, symbolic apparatus: for example, birch trees were considered conventional for Slavic landscapes, and contrasted with oak, which was suddenly problematic, especially in the socalled ‘regained territories’, because it was commonly read as a symbol of Germanic tribalism and the spirit of German nationalism in general. 29 Fiction in the 1990s foregrounds the unsettled status of locality, representing its complex and contentious national, ideological and even aesthetic affiliations that would engage even such a seemingly politically neutral factor as the natural environment. The local in post-displacement fiction is negotiated through historical gaps, untranslatable traces of other 27 28 29

Ibid., p. 239. Ibid. On the importance of oak as national symbol for German culture see Linda Siegel, Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism (Branden Book, 1978), p. 75; on how the oak symbolism tended to be overemphasized see Jeffrey K. Wilson, The German Forest, Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 201.

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languages and lives, and memory that materializes itself in spectral objects and traces of the other, rendering one’s intimate space of home and the immediate neighbourhood alien and uncannily shared. The immediacy of the natural environment reinforces the sense of haunting and transgressing the border of another’s life-world. In Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1998, 2002), the inhabitants of a village in the mountains in southern Lower Silesia endure visits by elderly Germans, mostly former inhabitants of that area, with a sense of uneasiness: Every year the Germans come pouring out of coaches that park timidly on the hard shoulder, as if trying to be inconspicuous. They walk about in small groups or pairs […] They take photos of empty spaces, which many people find puzzling. Why don’t they take pictures of a new bus stop or the new church roof, instead of empty spaces overgrown with grass?30

The Germans cannot return to the same location—they come back to experience their memories at work, in physical contact with the space, but possibly, not the place, or not quite the place, they left behind decades ago. The ever-renewing vegetation represents both forgetting and the resilience of the repressed presence of those departed Germans. For Poles and Germans respectively the grass hides a different thing—the void left after the erased past or the image of the past coming to life. Relatedly, in a short story ‘Miejsce’ [Place] from Andrzej Stasiuk’s Opowieści galicyjskie (1995), the narrator, witnessing the removal of a Ukrainian church to a museum in Western Galicia, from where the Ukrainians were forcefully resettled by the Polish state, resorts to an organismic metaphor to mark the absence of that practically indigenous population: ‘in a woody and deserted landscape this bareness looked like a flake of torn-out skin. Next year, after two hundred years, grass will grow here. More likely, the nettles—they are the first to grow in places abandoned by people.’31 The spot remaining is the wound to the local environment that will be healed by grass and nettles. In both texts the returns to emptied places help reveal a strongly chthonian character of memory—the soil will preserve the traces and cover the remains of (another) human settlement with natural outgrowth.

30 31

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, trans. by Anthonia Lloyd-Jones (London: Granta Publications, 2002), p. 91 (emphasis mine). Andrzej Stasiuk, ‘Miejsce’ [Place], in Stasiuk, Opowieści galicyjskie [Galician stories] (Wołowiec: Czarne,1995), p. 29 (trans. mine).

274 Dorota Kołodziejczyk

Fig. 1. Typical 19th c. farm building of the Sudeten mountains on the border of Lower Silesia—the borderland landscape of Tokarczuk’s novels. © Teresa Bruś & Charlie Hahs

The memory of displacement manifesting itself in a natural, thus seemingly neutral, landscape ensuing after the departure of the evicted population is crucial in developing a unique awareness of locality as a sequence of histories, and, alongside them, environments, that do not allow an unproblematic division into human and non-human ones. The place and wilderness are not separate but mutually constitutive. Lawrence Buell, drawing on Heidegger’s notion of building and dwelling, points out that primordiality is more often than not an environment shaped at least to an extent by human settlement, itself a responsive adaptation to the environment.32 The human settlement becomes wilderness only to become a human place again. In post-displacement fiction the settlers arriving to take the place abandoned by the previous population are inclined, by virtue of their own experience of forced displacement, and because they usually arrive to places that are already deserted, to think of their new locale as wilderness. The state propaganda mixes the vocabulary of colonization— ‘pioneers’ and ‘repatriates’—returnees to their place, but in the process of setting up their dwellings the new settlers become aware of co-habitation of sorts—they share the place or are allowed their share of the place on a par, as if, with the richly populated past.

32

Buell, p. 66.

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Recycling In House of Day, House of Night, this kind of dwelling in another’s place forces the inhabitants to acknowledge that their use of everyday tools and objects left by the departed Germans is not so much an appropriation—a sense of property linked to the economy of colonization, of turning something into one’s property, but recycling that is a way of continuing the preceding life-form: Sometimes they found simple wooden toys that they gave to their children—after years of war this was real treasure. […] The Germans had left spices, salt-cellars, oil at the bottom of bottles, containers full of buckwheat, sugar and ersatz coffee in the sideboards. They had left curtains in the windows, irons on hotplates, and pictures on the walls. Bills, rental and sale contracts, christening photos and letters lay about in drawers. Some houses still had books, but they had lost their powers of persuasion—the world around them had moved on to another language. […] An alien smell still lingered in the kitchens and bedrooms. […] The women had a special talent for discovering closets no one had noticed, drawers that had been overlooked, and well-hidden shoe-boxes, from which children’s milk teeth or locks of hair spilled forth. (p. 243)

Recycling is not strictly appropriation—it sustains the spectral presence of those who used the objects before. In this way it links the idea of place as dwelling with the idea of place as adaptation to the environment, the cyclic temporality of vegetation, and the terminal location of lives and things in the soil/dirt. The dug-out ‘treasures’ intimate the Heimlichkeit of the Germans, the ultimate other in the postwar context and, as a result, help question the national division as determining and unbridgeable. In Tokarczuk’s novel one character is especially aware of the superficial, even artificial, nature of such categories when dwelling is at stake. Marta the wigweaver, who descends underground each year for winter, explains to the narrator, her neighbour, the ontology of dwelling as freedom from the constrains of identity: ‘So when you’re travelling all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you’re at home you simply are […] you can put yourself to one side—and that’s when you see the most’ (p. 43). The place is an endless repetition of intersubjective life-forms rather than a historical sequence of communities and cultures. To the narrator’s anxious question of why the German ex-owners should be interested in her house (though they assert that they are not), Marta provides an answer that is as commonsensical as it is cryptic: ‘Because they built it’ (p. 92). This is more than just an assertion of the right of belonging—Marta subsequently asserts that ‘the most important human duty is to save things that are falling into decay, rather than create new ones’ (p. 92). The novel’s ethos could be

276 Dorota Kołodziejczyk read as the key ecocritical idea of the post-displacement novel. The place can yield the sense of belonging, especially a place of such contentious and multiple histories as prevail in Central and Eastern Europe in both urban and rural spaces, only when identity understood as delimitation opens up and yields to the place’s many voices, echoes, and ghosts. In this sense, although place is often portrayed in literature as the origin of identity, it is equally well the undoing of it, the point where it does not matter, because this is where the subject can tune in to pure sensation and cognition. Being and dwelling in place ultimately makes identity obsolete: ‘[I]t wasn’t my house, or my valley, because nothing belonged to me. I didn’t even belong to myself. There was no such thing as “I”’ (p. 1).

Fig. 2. Typical 19th c. farm building of the Sudeten mountains on the border of Lower Silesia—the borderland landscape of Tokarczuk’s novels. © Teresa Bruś & Charlie Hahs

Rooting Words in Place The source of identity is usually located in culture and socialization, but its ultimate condition is the language. Post-displacement literature differs from literature of mythic homelands in that it cannot ground the characters’ identity in a myth of origin rooting the self in place. Displacement severs

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the narrative continuity of inter-generational biographies; the identitynarratives of the newly inhabited places can only be fragmented and built on missing bits. Especially the language, which, before the war, was the chief index of identity in multicultural territories, but often opened up to the bordering languages (people who functioned in two or three languages without formal education were not uncommon), has to, in the postwar period of state-delimited national homogeneity, re-root itself. The language, even if it seems to create the place, and with it, the new world, from scratch, acquires a haunted aspect because it cannot ignore languages that were here before. In Tokarczuk’s novel the translational character of renaming goes hand in hand with the fiat of creation: ‘Who was the guy who spent his nights changing German place names into Polish ones? Sometimes he had a flash of poetic genius and at other times an awful word-inventing hangover. He did the naming from the start; he created this rugged, mountainous world’ (pp. 176-177). Language is a part of the local environment in the same way as people, their histories and settlements, the animals and plants are. It does not delineate the border between the human and non-human world; quite the opposite, it mediates between the self and nature: ‘Words grow on things, and only then are they ripe in meaning, ready to be spoken aloud. [...] People are like words in this way, too—they cannot live without being attached to a place, because only then do they become real’ (p. 176). Post-displacement fiction abounds in characters who carry their language with them to a new place. The German of Herta Müller’s stories of communist Romania, the Ukrainian in the USSR (especially in the Soviet Ukrainian Republic) in Yurii Andrukhovych’s novels, the problematic Jewish (Yiddish) of the Holocaust survivors in Israel founding itself on Hebrew, the German of Stefan Chwin’s Gdańsk novels (Hanemann,1995, Krótka historia pewnego żartu. Sceny z Europy Środkowowschodniej [A Short History of a Joke: Scenes from East-Central-European History], 1991), the German and Ukrainian in Brygida Helbig-Mischewski’s Niebko [The Sky], from 2014, and, last but not least, the Kashubian of Grandma Koliaczkowa in Günther Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959)—these are but a few examples of a vast body of literary accounts of the loss of place and, concomitantly, language. While in Salman Rushdie’s novels the idea of hyphenation, being translated and carried-across, founds, although not without contention, postcolonial migration on the economy of gain (getting hybrid is always more affluent than just being singularly mono-cultural or -lingual), post-displacement novels by Eastern and Central European authors encourage remembering the eviction of populations and languages as something beyond rectification. Not so much texts of nostalgia or mourning, these novels do focus on the catastrophic consequences of such large-scale, modern state-

278 Dorota Kołodziejczyk designed, destructions of local cultures in the name of a totalistic (and totalitarian) vision of the future. The destruction is visible first and foremost in the local landscape, as in Yurii Andrukhovych’s Dvanadtsats’ obruchiv [Twelve Rings, 2003], where he describes the mythical (abounding also in literary myths) Hutsul region of the Carpathians: The local landscape, with virgin forest and the grassy meadows where the sheep should by all probability graze, but they do not, because the Hutsul shepherds do not come down here anymore [. . .] so, this virgin forest hides traces of the notorious army grounds, and rumours of the underground extensive network of bunkers, plus a fragment of railway that comes from nowhere and stops, leading nowhere.33

In Andrukhovych’s novel nothing can be ‘natural’ after the cataclysmic era of the Soviet empire. The virgin forests and picturesque Hutsuls are only linguistic relics lingering in cultural discourses. What was once symbolic of an Eastern European indigenous cultural mosaic turns out to be a thoroughly petrified, Soviet militarism notwithstanding, landscape of trash and dilapidation. Indeed, all the efforts by Artur Pepa, the protagonist seeking the right genre to grasp this place, turn out to be futile, because no form can order this historical, cultural, linguistic, and natural postapocalyptic landscape. Another protagonist, the fated Austrian Zumbrunnen who inherited from his grandfather an unrequited love for Eastern Galicia, can find in the trash accumulated through the decades of neglect and destruction the vague intimations of his own memories translated impossibly into a disarray of languages in that forsaken place at the end of the world. Passing through the corridors he reads the most impossible, yet uncannily familiar, door nameplates: Fucking room, Red Army of the Universe, Do not Masturb’ Please, Exquisite Corpse, Eternal Damnation, Hellfire, Kiss of Death, Torturers Never Stop (inadvertently, he remembered some blood-coloured and black dust jackets from those years when he was in high school and could die for heavy metal) […] The Doors (nobody knew why in the plural), Achtung-Scheiße, Lokalbahn nach Baden […] and the impossibly alogical Damen-Pissoir.34

This absurd compilation represents yet another dimension of the postSoviet landscape: the language is unleashed from any rooting in place and culture; floating free it confuses and prevents Zumbrunnen from recognizing the signs of his imminent death. Interestingly, these are the local 33 34

Yurii Andrukhovych, Dvanadtsat’ obruchiv [Twelve Rings] (Kiev: Kritika, 2003), p. 77. (trans. and emphasis mine). Ibid., p. 74.

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Gypsies, a community of multi-lingual survivors across millennia of such catastrophes, who are able to put together the scattered pieces of Zumbrunnen’s narrative—but they appropriate his story to explain and fulfil their own mythic prophecy. In this way, the place seems to reclaim all the narratives that may have belonged to human lives, to reconstruct itself as a continuous story surviving over the human histories.

Digging into the Underworld Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009, 2012) similarly links the motive of language (meaning) with that of place and, specifically, place brought down to its solid foundation in the ground. Secrets, a girlsonly game of making pictures of flowers, candy wrappers, anything bright and colourful, covered by a shard of glass and buried so that nobody can see them but those admitted into the secret act, set the leitmotif for the whole novel, whose major theme is that of the loss of meaning once known to all. The loss is the consequence of the decades of totalitarianism that wrought such destruction upon Ukraine—that is, upon its population, language, and culture. The novel’s protagonists, the journalist Daryna and the painter Vlada, whose collection is inspired by this childhood play, locate the source of ‘secrets’ in the practice of icon-burying by women in Ukraine in the terror of the 1930s: […] the mystifying kinship between children’s secrets and icons […] our mothers must have spied our grandmothers secreting icons into the ground, and imitated them when they played, as all children do. With time, our generation inherited only the seemingly pointless manipulations with found shards of glass, a fading echo, a sound without a message.35

The ‘secrets’ iterate the chthonian motif of digging, burying, and hiding underground, abounding in post-displacement fiction, as essential to the idea of place. Surviving is made possible only through reconnection with the underworld—going underground or depositing there what is vital for one’s individual or communal surviving. The recuperation of the severed links between place, self, and language can be attempted only through the work of imagination that itself figures digging—an unearthing of that which was hidden from view or collapsed to create the narratives of memory and fiction, which could, possibly, restore the sound to its message, the word to the thing, and, subsequently, the self to the place. Likewise, the reformulation of dwelling as being planted, gains a new resonance in post35

Oksana Zabuzhko, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, trans. by Nina Shevchuk-Murray (Las Vegas: Amazon Crossing, 2009), p. 55.

280 Dorota Kołodziejczyk displacement fiction, because it grows out of narratives of uprooting and loss of contact with one’s (native) ground. It is both recuperative and already resigned to the impossibility of fully inhabiting the place as one’s own and familiar: ‘We’re alien here’, the narrator of House of Day, House of Night (p. 120) observes. The organic conceptualization of language in post-displacement fiction, where the local toponymy triggers the development of environmental imagination, testifies, in my conviction, to what Buell calls ‘cultural ecology’—a sensitivity to local knowledge, however hidden or occluded it may be, through the continuing interaction of ecological and cultural discourses. 36 Post-displacement fiction resorts to organic metaphors to foreground the substantial materiality of place which, on the one hand, is made up of discourses, but, on the other hand, where they are incomplete or need translating, these are the objects and the physical environment that last over the missing human element and secure the continuity of place as self-sustaining life form. In fact, it is chiefly through the greening imagination that the new poetics of place manages to transcend anthropocentric limitations of identity discourses.

36

Buell, p. 34.

Part IV: Imagining the Orient in Central European Communist Travel Writing

Róbert Gáfrik Representations of India in Slovak Travel Writing during the Communist Regime (1948–1989) Abstract: Postcolonial studies are directly related to the critique of colonialism and Orientalism. Thinking about the applicability of post-colonialism to the situation in (post-)communist cultures must therefore also take into consideration attitudes to nonEuropean cultures in Central and East European countries. On the basis of a survey of the history of Oriental studies in Slovakia and the geopolitical situation during the Cold War characterized in terms of the three-world model, this chapter explores the perception of the Orient in Slovak travel writing during the communist regime (1948–1989) and tries to answer the question of how these travel accounts partake in the (post-)colonial discourse.

In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said argued that the discourse of Orientalists presented itself as a kind of knowledge that is superior to the knowledge which the Orientals possess of themselves. The Orientalists also appropriated for themselves the right to represent the Orientals, and to explain and to interpret their thoughts to Westerners as well as to Easterners themselves. In the past this Orientalist knowledge helped the Western European powers to conquer and rule over the subjugated regions. Said also argued that even now, in postcolonial times, specialists in different area studies as well as in government and business are heirs to this knowledge and use it in their interactions with the so-called Third World. Whereas Said’s concern was primarily with the Arab world, and he treated India, which played a special role in Western imagination as the most valuable possession of the British Empire, only marginally, the Indologist Ronald Inden in Imagining India (1990) critically surveyed the field of Indology and argued that most scholarship consistently failed to treat Indians as rational subjects and knowing actors who made their own world. Instead, the Indological research and writing treated them as accidents of substantialized agents such as ‘caste’, ‘Indian spirit’, a ‘Hindu mind’ characterized by dreamlike imagination and passions, or by the metaphor of the jungle. Considerations of the applicability of postcolonial studies to the situation in (post)-communist cultures should also take attitudes to nonEuropean cultures in Central and East European countries into account. These countries have never had any power interests elsewhere in the world; on the contrary, they were often dominated by others. One can therefore legitimately ask the question of whether, and if so, how they partake in the Orientalist project, and if not, how they imagine countries associated with the Orient.

284 Róbert Gáfrik Herein I endeavour to reconstruct the perception of India by Slovaks who were able to travel to the subcontinent and captured their experiences in writing. The first travel accounts to India were published only after World War Two. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 naturally represented a major change which also affected travelling possibilities and the freedom to report about one’s travels. The present study will concentrate only on the period from 1948 to 1989; i.e., on the years when Czechoslovakia was ruled by the Communist Party. These years also represent a unique period in the history of India. The country gained independence from Britain in 1947, and Jawaharlal Nehru, who was elected the first prime minister, was a committed supporter of socialism. In India, socialism was established in the aftermath of the October Revolution in Russia as a part of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule. In the 1950s, the Indian government rejected Gandhian economics focused on villages and rural people. Influenced by socialist ideas it enacted land reforms and nationalized major industries as well as the banking sector. Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv Gandhi continued in his policy. In the 1960s, the Communist Party of India took over the government in the states of Kerala and later also West Bengal. After the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi the influence of socialism decreased in India and Narasimha Rao with the support of finance minister Manmohan Singh introduced economic liberalization in 1991. The adoption of socialism by both countries during this period opens several questions: How did the Slovaks see India in the context of this parallel development? How did the common ideology of socialism affect the representation of India in Slovakia? Inden notes that ‘[t]he opposition of East and West, traditional and modern, civilized and primitive, has been transformed and reappeared as the idea of “the three worlds”.’1 According to the three world model, which originated during the Cold War, the former Czechoslovakia belonged to the Second World, led by the Soviet Union, the arch-enemy of the US, and India to the Third World. The First World and the Second World were constantly at odds with one another. Among the Third World countries India played a particularly important role in the NonAligned Movement, an organization founded in Belgrade in 1961, grouping states which were not formally aligned with or against either the Western or the Eastern bloc. The Third World was the part of the world which both the First and the Second World tried to bring under their influence. It was described as backward, underdeveloped, or developing and became the new frontier for the First and Second Worlds’ missions to win and modernize the 1

Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), p. 76.

Representations of India in Slovak Travel Writing 285

economies and people there. ‘The Third World, emerging out of colonialism,’ argues Ozay Mehmet, ‘was suddenly discovered as lacking autonomous capacity for development.’ 2 However, the Soviet Union regarded the policy of non-alignment as an integral component of the competitive struggle between East and West and assumed that it was linked to the socio-economic formation of countries that pursued it. Neutralism and non-alignment were conceived as transitional and developmental drawing their character from changes in the domestic and international environments. Soviet spokesmen believed that the ‘global correlation of forces’ would shift in favour of the ‘socialist system of states’. They characterised the policy of non-alignment, therefore, as a process which over the passage of time should orient the states led by its principles towards ever closer political and military association with the Soviet led group of states.3

Do Slovak descriptions of India from the time from 1948 to 1989 show traces of this ideology? Do they show any form of latent colonialism? Do Orientalist stereotypes of India play any role in these descriptions? Since the 1980s academic interest in travel writing has increased dramatically. The genre has become relevant in many branches of the humanities and social sciences and especially in postcolonial studies. The genre of travel writing as such allows the traveller to examine and explore the country, its people, culture, and institutions from different perspectives and connect the observations with his or her own world, thus defining and redefining his or her own identity. As is well known, the genre played an important role in European imperial expansion and reveals much about the attitudes and ideologies that drove it. From this perspective, in the absence of developed academic Indian studies in Slovakia, the relatively rich Slovak travel writing on India can serve as a good point of departure for the study of Slovak perception of India during the socialist period.4

Indology in Central Europe and in Slovakia Sir William Jones, Max Müller, and Eugene Burnouf epitomize the 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist scholarship in the West. However, Oriental studies 2 3 4

Ozay Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories. 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge), p. 60. Roy Allison, The Soviet Union and the Strategy of Non-Alignment in the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), p. 3. Due to their mutually intelligible languages and shared history, Slovaks and Czechs had been culturally close for centuries and Czech literature has always been widely read in Slovakia. Additionally, they also shared a common state between 1918-1939 and 1945-1992. Therefore, it should be kept in mind that Slovak perception during the communist regime was influenced by Czech sources as well.

286 Róbert Gáfrik also developed in Central Europe and many well-known representatives of the discipline were associated with the region. Hungarians especially feel a strong bond to the Orient because their origins are tied to Asia and, moreover, in the middle of the 16th century Ottoman Turks invaded Hungary and occupied parts of its territory for more than 150 years. The centuries following the Turkish invasion attest to an increasing interest in the Orient. Oriental studies gained in importance at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, when the modern nations constituting Hungary started forming. Besides having significantly contributed to various disciplines within Oriental studies, the world-renowned Hungarian Orientalist Csoma Korösi Sándor (1784–1842) also became the founder of Tibetan studies. Hungary also gave the world other famous Orientalists such as Edward Rehatsek (1819–1891), Aurel Stein (1862–1943), and Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921). Oriental studies also have also a long and rich tradition in Poland. Ludwik Sternbach (1909–1981), for example, is well-known for his contribution to Indian studies. The Czech lands can boast of their strong tradition of Middle-Eastern and Indian studies. Moriz Winternitz (1863– 1937) was an eminent Sanskrit scholar teaching at the German University in Prague. In the latter part of the 20th century Dušan Zbavitel (1925–2012) and Kamil Zvelebil (1927–2009) rose to world fame as distinguished scholars of Indian literatures and languages. During the boom era in various Orientalist disciplines, Slovakia, which did not exist independently until 1993 (with the exception of the first Slovak Republic in the years 1939–1945), was part of Austria-Hungary or Czechoslovakia. However, Slovak Orientalists worked at universities in Budapest, Vienna, Paris or other European centres of education. Conditions for the development of Oriental studies in Slovakia improved only after the Second World War. Herman Klačko (1913–1996), who served as a Czechoslovak consul in what was then called Bombay in 1945–1948, was the author of the first original Slovak book on India, which offered a descriptive account of India’s culture (language, religion, science, press, radio, etc.) and art (literature, dance, theatre, etc.). He praised Czech accomplishments in the field of Oriental studies and expressed the wish for Slovak participation in these efforts. 5 Finally, in 1960, the first Orientalist institution called The Cabinet of Oriental Studies at the Slovak Academy of Sciences was founded in Bratislava. In 1971, the linguist Anna Rácová (1946) joined the cabinet

5

Herman Klačko, Svetlá a tiene Indie [Lights and Shadows of India] (Bratislava: Štátne nakladadeľstvo v Bratislave, 1947), p. 148.

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and became the first and—till the end of the century—practically the only Slovak Indologist.6 However, despite the absence of developed Indology in Slovakia, India captured the imagination of many influential Slovak personalities of the 19th and the early 20th century. The discovery of the similarities between the languages of India and Europe stimulated comparative research of languages, literatures, and cultures. On the basis of this knowledge, leaders of the Slovak national revival such as Ján Hollý (1785–1849) and Ján Kollár (1793–1852) surrendered to a romantic image of India as the homeland of the Slavs. In his long poem Slávy dcera [The Daughter of Sláva] (1824–1852) Kollár glorifies the Goddess Sláva, whom he presents as a symbol of Slavonic race. This goddess never existed as a worshipped deity and is probably only a product of Kollár’s imagination. He claimed that Sláva was actually the old Indian Goddess Svāhā.7 In his heroic epic poem Svatopluk (1833), Hollý describes India as ‘najprvná je našého prenárodu matka’ [the first mother of our nation] and compares it to a paradise.8 The famous 19thcentury Slavic philologist Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861) also subscribed to this thesis in his famous Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten [The History of Slavic Language and Literature According to all Dialects] (1826). ‘Slavs come from India,’ he says, ‘as Germans, their eternal neighbours, from Persia.’9 Later he distanced himself from this assertion and saw it as only an alternative to autochthonous origin for Slavs and other European nations. 10 Even Ľudovít Štúr (1812–1856), the leader of the Slovak national revival in the 19th century, saw India as the homeland of European nations. However, he was critical of Indian religion and of the caste system in the typical Orientalist fashion.11 It is also possible to find reflections on India and its culture in the works of Slovak Romantic and Realist authors such as Jonáš Záborský, Janko Kráľ, and S. H. Vajanský, and 6

7 8 9 10 11

Anna Rácová, ‘Indológia’, in 50 rokov Ústavu orientalistiky Slovenskej akadémie vied [50 Years of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences], ed. by Dušan Magdolen (Bratislava: Ústav orientalistiky SAV, 2010), pp. 57-60. Jan Kollár, Sláwa Bohyně a původ gména Slawůw čili Slawjanůw [The Goddess Sláva and the Origin of the Name of Slavs or Slavyans] (Pest: J. M. Trattner-Károly, 1839). Ján Hollý, ‘Svatopluk’, in Básne Jána Hollého (Turčiansky Sv. Martin: Kníhkupeckonakladateľský spolok, 1908), pp. 138-335 (p. 218). Paul Joseph Šafařik, Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten. 2nd edition. (Prague: Verlag Friedrich Tempsky, 1869), p. 2. Pawel Josef Šafařik, Slovanské starožitnosti [Slavic Antiquities] (Prague: Jan Spurný, 1837), p. 22. Ľudovít Štúr, ‘Z prednášok o histórii Slovanov’ [From the Lectures on the History of the Slavs], in Dielo v piatich zväzkoch. Vol. II. (Bratislava: Slovenské vydavateľstvo krásnej literatúry, 1956), pp. 34-44.

288 Róbert Gáfrik Indian themes and motives in the works of Andrej Sládkovič, and in the first part of the 20th century in the works of P. O. Hviezdoslav, Ivan Krasko and Vladimír Roy. The work of the priest Ján Maliarik (1869–1946) represents a unique reception of Indian thought.12

Building Socialist Friendship Miloš Ruppeldt (1922–1967), who served as a Czechoslovak chargé d’affaires to India in 1949–1951, wrote the first Slovak book recording personal experiences in India, titled India, krajina dávnych múdrostí [India, the Land of Ancient Wisdom].13 Ruppeldt hailed from an influential Slovak intellectual family and he himself played an important role in Slovak cultural life. His father Miloš Ruppeldt (1881–1943) was a Slovak composer, coordinator of musical activities in Slovakia, translator, and conductor. Ruppeldt emigrated to London in 1943; after his return in 1946 he became the personal secretary of a prominent member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Vladimír Clementis (1902–1952). In 1948 he started his diplomatic career in Paris, then moved to Stockholm and finally to India. After his return he was falsely convicted and Clementis was hanged in the infamous Slánský show trial in which elements deemed disloyal to Stalin were purged from the Communist Party. Afterwards, he was forced to work as a lathe operator. Only following Stalin’s death in 1953 did the harshness of the persecutions slowly decrease, and Ruppeldt began to be again active in Slovak cultural life. He translated works of Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others. He also translated from Indian literatures, for example, Bhabhani Bhattacharya’s novel He Who Rides a Tiger, and, through English, short-stories by Munshi Premchand, Manik Bandopadhyay, and others. 14 Apart from that, in 1954, he translated The Crisis of Britain and the British Empire (1953) by Rajani Palme Dutt, the leading journalist and theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain, who was called ‘Stalin’s British mouthpiece’ by his detractors and who later disagreed with the criticisms of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Dutt’s book India Today (1940), which was banned by the British imperialist rulers in India at that time, served Ruppeldt as a guide to Indian 12

13 14

Róbert Gáfrik, ‘Vplyv indickej filozofie na beletristické dielo Jána Maliarika’ [The Influence of Indian Philosophy on the Belletristic Work of Ján Maliarik], in Tvorivosť literárnej recepcie/Az irodalmi recepció kreativitása, ed. by Judit Görözdi and Gabriela Magová (Bratislava: Veda a Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, 2008), pp. 33-41. Miloš Ruppeldt, India krajina dávnych múdrostí (Bratislava: Slovenské vydavateľstvo politickej literatúry, 1956). Indické novely [Indian Novellas], ed. and trans. by Miloš Ruppeldt (Bratislava: Slovenský spisovateľ, 1953).

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politics during his stay in India 15 Ruppeldt himself wrote two short monographs on the Indian path to independence and the struggle of the Communist Party of India and the Indian National Congress to implement socialist reforms.16 The Marxists in the former Eastern Bloc developed their own critique of the colonial rule, viewing colonialism as a form of capitalism. As is well known, Marx and Engels had been harsh critics of the British rule in India. Similarly, Lenin regarded colonialism as the root cause of imperialism and advocated the principle of self-determination of peoples. Ruppeldt introduced his Indian travel account with the following quote from Marx: At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country, whose gentle natives are, to use the expression of Prince Soltykov, even in the most inferior classes, ‘plus fins et plus adroits que les Italiens’ [more subtle and adroit than the Italians], whose submission even is counterbalanced by a certain calm nobility, who, notwithstanding their natural languor, have astonished the British officers by their bravery, whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat, and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin.17

Marx’s critique of the British colonial rule coupled with his romantic image of Indians themselves foreshadows the spirit of the book, which carries the subtitle Krajina dávnych múdrostí [The Land of Ancient Wisdom]. Ruppeldt stayed in New Delhi and visited Haridwar, Kashmir, Agra, Jaipur and Mumbai. He constantly criticizes the British rule, which he holds responsible for many ills of the Indian society, such as, for example the culture of servanthood. The British left behind a devastated economy (p. 10) and inferior, unpalatable buildings (p. 17-19). The Soviet and Czechoslovak culture is praised on every possible occasion. He relates that whereas the British did not allow any ‘foreign’ books and India was cut off from the rest of the world, people were eager to read communist literature, including that of the Czech communist journalist Julius Fučík, Reportáž psaná na oprátce 15 16

17

Miloš Ruppeldt, Za siedmymi závorami [Behind Seven Toll Bars] (Bratislava: Slovenský spisovateľ, 1968), p. 32. See Ruppeldt’s books Niektoré otázky národnooslobodzovacieho boja indického ľudu [Some Issues of the National Liberation Struggle of the Indian People] (Martin: Osveta, 1955) and India na prelome. Vnútorná situácia a zahraničná politika Indie [India on the Verge: India’s Domestic and Foreign Policy] (Bratislava: Slovenské vydavateľstvo politickej literatúry, 1956). Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), pp. 83-90 (p. 88).

290 Róbert Gáfrik (Notes from the Gallows, 1947), and did not pay attention to American cartoons that are sold ‘here and there’ (p. 20). Ruppeldt feels close to the Indian people. It is easy to make friends with them, ‘because they are open and warm-hearted, one could say that they are close to us in nature’ (p. 30); ‘in all strata of the Indian people we have sincere friends, who have a great regard for Czechoslovakia and yearn to know it more closely’ (p. 32). Ruppeldt mentions that he had to prepare before his trip to India. He read about the Indian economy, history, politics, literature, philosophy, and religion. His interpretation of what Inden calls the ‘pillars of Indological constructs’; i.e. caste, religion, India’s rural political economy, and Oriental despotism is vulgar Marxist. He criticizes the backwardness of religion and praises efforts at shaking off religious prejudice. Drawing on the weak scholarly work of a founding member of the Communist Party of India, S. A. Dange (1899–1991), India: From Primitive Communism to Slavery (1949) (which was severely criticized by the famous Indian Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi), which discovers ideals of communism in ancient India, Ruppeldt concludes: ‘It would be a mistake to consider Indian thinking manifested in the Indian religion […] abstract or “mystical”. On the contrary, Indian thinking is in its essence immensely bound up with life, with the reality of the world and expresses the amazing vitality of Indian people’ (p. 66). ‘The creativity of Indian thinking and art,’ he continues, ‘was hindered […]. This situation culminated under the imperialist dominance in the last two centuries, when all the development in India was unnaturally hindered’ (p. 67-68). But India has made good progress out of the morass created by the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British, as it started adopting socialist thinking and the Indian ‘working class, that increasingly becomes a decisive power in the people’s struggle for the bloom and the glory of India’, grows (p. 140-141). In addition to that, Ruppeldt wages the Cold War on the pages of his book. If the British are the evil of the past, the United States is the villain of the present. Americans come to India and try ‘to use the situation in order to exert political and economic pressure’ (p. 12), even though ‘India’s interest is not close to their heart’ (p. 79), and for them India is just an ‘agricultural pendant of imperialist countries’ (p. 80). As with Ruppeldt, the British colonial rule is responsible for the backwardness with which the independent India had to wrestle also for the journalist Dušan Kerný (b. 1941), who spent less than one month in India and published his account India nie je ďaleko [India Isn’t Far Away] in 1974.18 He visited seven of the nineteen Indian states then extant and paid special attention to West Bengal and Kerala, the two states with communist 18

Dušan Kerný, India nie je ďaleko [India Isn’t Far Away] (Bratislava: Pravda, 1974).

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governments. Similarly to Ruppeldt, he tried to show cultural and economic ties between India and Czechoslovakia or, if necessary, the Soviet Union as well. Czechoslovakia is always depicted as a helping friend of India; Indian people are very fond of Czechoslovakia and eager to learn more about the country. Kerný never failed to mention the Czechoslovak credits in helping Indian industry and economics. Kerný’s disdain for the British rule in India went so far that he even did not care to visit the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, which was built between 1906 and 1921 and dedicated to the memory of Queen Victoria. ‘It is supposed to be an interesting museum,’ he says about the museum housing a large collection of colonial paintings, ‘I do not know. Anyway, I do not like buildings of this style […]’ (p. 65). By contrast, he was attracted by the red flag, wherever he saw it (pp. 55, 60). The Western Euro-American capitalist culture is criticized occasionally as well (including hippies (p. 99) and Coca-Cola (p. 104)). However, India has made good progress, and the country had made strides in its industrial development thanks to the help of socialist countries headed by the Soviet Union as well as to the socialist policy of Indira Gandhi, whom Kerný (as Ruppeldt had) met in person. For both Ruppeldt and Kerný, India was not the ‘other’ that West Europeans and Americans created during the periods of their world ascendancy. They perceive India through the prism of vulgar Marxism. Indian people are depicted as friends, as allies, as people who either joined or are on the way to joining the socialist camp, who participate in the struggle of the proletariat to overthrow the exploiting class and to achieve emancipation and socialism. The ‘other’ that was attributed various negative essences were the Western imperialists. First the British and then the Americans, whose only concern was to exploit the Indian people. The journalist Jaroslav Brabec is probably the best informed about Western imperialism in India. However, more interesting than his texts about his visit to India, which were published in the weekly Nové slovo in 1987 and depict the situation on Indian roads 19 as well as his visits to Chandigarh 20 and Varanasi,21 is his journalistic writing. In an article titled ‘Tajná vojna proti Indii’ [A Secret War against India] from 1984, he argues that the American CIA supported religious separatism in India with the aim ‘to weaken and seize its foreign policy and to disintegrate India […] to bring India into 19 20 21

Jaroslav Brabec, ‘Kolorit indických ciest: Indické zastavenia (1)’ [The Colour of Indian Roads: An Indian Sojourn (1)], Nové slovo, 29.32 (1987), p. 24. Jaroslav Brabec, ‘Mesto Corbusiera a Nek Čanda: Indické zastavenia (2)’[The City of Corbusier and Nek Chand: An Indian Sojourn (2)], Nové slovo, 29.33 (1987), p. 24. Jaroslav Brabec, ‘Váránasí, mesto posvätné: Indické zastavenia (3)’ [Varanasi, the Holy City: An Indian Sojourn (3)], Nové slovo, 29.34 (1987), p. 24.

292 Róbert Gáfrik isolation and conflicts with its neighbours’. 22 In 1989, Brabec authored a book on Sikh extremism and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, where he also elaborates on the role of CIA in the rise of Sikh separatism.23 In accordance with the geopolitical situation of the time, a latent colonialism is apparent in these above mentioned accounts. Their intention is not the physical colonization of the Indian subcontinent. As bearers of socialist ideology, they wish India to become fully socialist and, eventually, to join the communist camp. Their aim is an ideological colonization. An interesting and strangely comic example showing a kind of colonizer– colonized relationship is provided by an expedition of the Turist Union Bratislava in 1978, which set out on a trip to India in the four new Škoda 1203 vans that had been manufactured in Bratislava.24 Ľudovít Zárecký, a reporter from the daily Večerník, informed readers about their progress and adventures in various countries from Turkey to Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India. Their mission was ‘to follow in the footsteps of economic aid, which Czechoslovakia offered to the geographically distant but friendly-close India in the last thirty years, as well as to document the high quality of our products and the advance state of motoring in our country.’25 There is no explicit ideology in Zárecký’s writing, but, the glorification of Czechoslovak achievements in India, which is also present in places in Ruppeldt and Kerný’s writing, turns out to be the official objective of the trip. Socialist Czechoslovakia with its advanced technology represents a superior power in comparison to India, which is technologically backward and in need of help. While this situation may reflect the economic reality of the two countries at that time, the trip’s objective itself is reminiscent of a colonizer’s effort to check the progress of his influence in the colony. The colonial moment becomes obvious by the one-sidedness of Zárecký’s presentation of the relations between India and Czechoslovakia. India was Czechoslovakia’s biggest business partner among the countries of the so-called Third World. Zárecký traces the cooperation back to the time before the Second World War, when Czechoslovakia participated in building several sugar factories and power plants. After the war, 22

23 24

25

Jaroslav Brabec, ‘Tajná vojna proti Indii: Separatizmus—politický nástroj imperializmu’ [A Secret War against India: Separatism—a Political Tool of Imperialism], Nové slovo, 26.40 (1984), p. 11. Jaroslav Brabec, Sikhovia a paňdžábska drama [The Sikhs and the Punjab Drama]. Nakladateľtvo Pravda: Bratislava, 1989. Zárecký ’s reports were published in the 1978 issue of Večerník, no. 136, pp. 1,4; no. 139, pp. 3-4; no. 142, pp. 2,8; no. 144, pp. 3-4; 147, pp. 2, 8, 9; no. 149, pp. 3-4; no. 154, pp. 3-4; no. 162, p. 9; no. 164, pp. 3-4; 167, p. 8. Ľudovít Zárecký: ‘Cocacolový svet naruby’[The Coca-Cola World Upside Down], Večerník, 25 August 1978, 23.167 (1978), p. 8.

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Czechoslovakia built the first aluminium factory in India. A trade agreement signed in 1957 between the two countries meant a significant breakthrough in their cooperation. Czechoslovakia supplied technologies to cement, ceramic, and brick factories, diesel engines and other equipment. Škoda supplied technology for factories in Ajmer and Hyderabad, where steam turbines and turbo-generators were produced. Zárecký considers Hindustan Equipment Suppliers Ltd., which produced alarm clocks, to be the most successful venture with a private company, but he is especially proud of Yezdi, the motorcycle that has been produced under a license from Jawa since 1961 in Mysore,26 and of HMT, a tractor factory in Pinjore working under a license by Zetor. Zárecký concludes that Czechoslovak experts participated in building about 60 industrial businesses and factories, which provided employment for more than 150,000 workers.

Neo-Romantic Images of India The romantic view of India represents an alternative to the hegemonic view, which is associated with utilitarian secularism. Wilhelm Halbfass says about its origins: The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by a very distinct association between a general interest in non-European traditions and the motif of criticizing contemporary Christianity and Europe. One shape which the criticism of Christianity took was the attempt to trace it back to older, more original traditions, or the view that a more pristine, religious consciousness could be found in Asia, and specifically in India. Both this motivation towards selfcriticism and the theme of origins were assimilated into the Romantic awareness of India and the Orient.27

The views of the Romantics, which offered to some extent a more positive evaluation of Indian culture, were seemingly opposed to the adherents of the hegemonic view. However, they, too, agree, that India is Europe’s opposite. 26

27

Zárecký also narrates a comic story about the origin of the name Yezdi: During a presentation of the first motorcycle produced from the first to the last screw by Indians, a group of Czechoslovak experts was present. When the motorcycle was started up and moved, one of them jokingly commented, ‘Hele, vono im to jezdí’ [Look, it runs]. The Indian partners liked the last word of the Czech sentence so much that they decided to use it as their brand name. See Ľudovít Zárecký, ‘Z indického zápisníka mototuristickej Expedície India ’78: Rozkošatený strom spolupráce’ [From the Indian Notebook of a Motoring Expedition India ’78: The Patulous Tree of Cooperation], Večerník, 8 August 1978, 23.154 (1978), pp. 3-4 (p. 3). Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), p. 69.

294 Róbert Gáfrik Romantic ideas have survived in various forms even to the present day. Elena Androvičová’s (1924–1997) travelogues are the best example of a romanticized representation of India in Slovak travel writing. She worked as a technical translator in Ranchi in 1969–1970 and then in Jabalpur from 1975 to 1977. She published two books on her travels and experiences in the country, Od Himaláji po Cejlón [From the Himalayas to Ceylon] (1978) and India, čierno-biely kontrapunkt [India, a Black and White Counterpoint] (1984). Androvičová’s account of her stay in India is also in various places marked by references to communism, Marx, or the Soviet Union.28 At the end of the first volume of her travelogue she even writes that she realized the depth of the historic importance of Lenin’s effort only in India (p. 155). However, compared to the accounts of Ruppeldt and Kerný, these are mere decorative flourishes which were necessary for the book to pass the communist censorship. When Androvičová came to India for the first time, she was shocked by the exceptional poverty, the dirt, and the emaciated cripples and beggars (p. 9); she even wanted to return as soon as possible and could not understand what people like about India (p. 19). But later India became for her ‘the most fabulous country’ (p. 10); ‘the dreamland of my imagination’ (p. 11), ‘a country of philosophers and beautiful people’ (p. 38). As she grew fonder of India and developed a deep interest in the country and its people she even practised yoga, read widely about India, and started learning Hindi.29 During her stays she travelled a lot: on the first visit when she worked in Ranchi, she visited Nalanda, Benares, Kathmandu in Nepal, Kolkata, Delhi, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, Agra, Khajuraho, Konark, and Lucknow; i.e. some of the main tourist destinations in North India, and Madras, Kanchipuram, and Mahabalipuram in the South, where she also visited the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. Her second visit was as a technical translator at the Grey Iron Foundry in Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh; however, she also revisited some places from her previous visit such as Khajuraho, Delhi, Agra, Madras, Kanchipuram, Mahabalipuram and saw Kanha National Park, Goa, and other places in Kerala, Bombay, Ajanta, Ellora, Bangalore in the South and Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Jammu and Kashmir in the North. This time her husband also spent a part of the sojourn in India with her. Androvičová clearly subscribed to a romantic image of India: ‘Indians are nice, cordial and fighting for a higher standard. Europeans are too 28

29

Elena Androvičová, Od Himaláji po Cejlón. Za prírodou a pamiatkami Indie [From the Himalayas to Ceylon. In Search of Nature and Historical Monuments]. (Bratislava: Obzor, 1978), pp. 20, 31, 42, 50, 136 and elsewhere. Elena Androvičová, India čierno-biely kontrapunkt (Dva roky v Indii) [India, a Black and White Counterpoint (Two Years in India)] (Bratislava: Obzor, 1984), p. 11.

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‘disturbed’ and ‘demoralized’ (p. 24). Indians, these ‘people of the Orient’ (p. 58) are charming, because of their ‘loving approach to other living beings’ (Ibid.). They are also happier than people in Europe, especially because of their better family life (p. 42-43). They even experience love ‘more existentially and devoutly than white people’ (p. 89). To her, Indian life seemed stress-free: ‘In India one does not run after anything, one is not unnecessarily in a hurry. Neither quarrels nor nervousness are as common phenomena as in Europe. Especially so in marriage’ (p. 25). Her critique of Westerners is interesting. They are for her inferior to Indians. The reason lies in the not-so-recent European past: If I pity the Westerner for anything, it is his fondness for violence and absence of nobleness, which escalated in the period of unbound fascism. The moral values did not mean almost anything to him. Thoughtful people in the West are still severely troubled by it, but they still have not found medicine for it. So, if we do not want to fall into barbarism again, we need to get strength from the East, because many return from there with the basic impression: they lived among the best people. (p. 42)

Androvičová criticizes the West, but at the same time romantically extols the Indians. However, one can rightly ask which West she has in mind. She speaks of Europeans and Westerners, sometimes not distinguishing between them. Are Central or Eastern Europeans also included? Definitely, Indians are a kind of the ‘other’ for her, the ‘other’ loaded in a romantic fashion with positive qualities which the West lacks. One can find a less excited experience depicted in the articles of Jan Baltus, who participated in a project by the International Development Camp in Nangloi Colony in Delhi. He published his account under the common title ‘India sa mení’ [India is Changing] in the weekly Technické noviny in seven parts in 197830 with a kind of six-part sequel in 1979.31 He acknowledges that he learnt a lot during his stay and understood that ‘life in India is multifarious, different from our way of life.’32 He describes his stay in the colony and his visits to major tourist sites such as Agra, Jaipur, Amritsar, Varanasi, and Puri in the North and Madras and Mahabalipuram in the South. He also visited Kashmir and Nepal. His account is written in a 30 31 32

In no. 41, p. 16; no. 42, p. 24; no. 43, p. 24; no. 44, p. 24; no. 45, p. 16; no. 46, p. 24; no. 47, p. 16. Published in no. 43, p. 16; no. 44, p. 24; no. 45, no. p. 16; 46, no. p. 24; no. 47, no. p. 16; no. 48, p. 24. Jan Baltus, ‘India sa mení: Kolónie na okraji indickej metropoly’ [India is Changing: The Colonies at the Outskirts of an Indian Metropolis], Technické noviny, 26.41 (1978), p. 16.

296 Róbert Gáfrik matter-of-fact style. Nevertheless, here and there he makes digressions. As for example, when he tries to understand the situation in which the people in the colony live: ‘The life in the colony provokes many questions. […] Why do only a few welcome the vaccination of children? Most of the people suffer from cough, malaria. Children as well as adults are weakened by fever.’ He seeks answers in the ‘Hindu mind’: ‘Is it because of the mentality? The surrender to life in the Hindu conception of life, the belief in reincarnation?’ (Ibid.) He is shocked by the apathy of the people. Not only at the cremation ground in Varanasi,33 but also in the colony: ‘It would be easy to say that people living in these conditions are depressed, slow, and without interest. But religion, philosophy of life, and mainly lack of food for tens, nay, hundreds of generations before make the people apathetic. And this creates the nation’s mentality.’ 34 Nevertheless, Baltus concludes that Indians are praiseworthy for their ideal of non-violence: ‘It is really a nation deserving of admiration in its own right. The way of life, whose ideal form an ordinary Indian tries to attain, is a world without violence, aggressiveness, and useless haste.’35 Boris Ivančov, who published a book-length account of his stay in India in Ukrainian36 and in 1989 a series of articles based on his book in Nedeľná Pravda, 37 the Sunday supplement of the daily Pravda, adds, similarly to Androvičová, a critical twist directed at Westerners to his assessment of ‘Indian nature’. When describing the popular Diwali festival Ivančov comments: ‘It seems to me that we are simply not capable of something similar, that we would need a bit of inspiration in form of a liqueur-glass. We are too restraint and too civilized in order to directly enjoy such a simple matter […] they enjoy with their hearts and we with our reason. But what can be done, if we are different after all?’38 Longer narratives published either in a book form or as a series of articles, can hardly do without, using Inden’s terms, ‘commentatative’ or ‘explanatory’ accounts. However, one can observe a tendency toward a more 33 34

35 36 37 38

Jan Baltus, ‘Varánasí’, Technické noviny, 26.43 (1978), p. 24. Jan Baltus, ‘India sa mení: Vždy si spomeniem na svojich priateľov v Nangloi’ [India is Changing: I always Remember my Friends in Nangloi], Technické noviny, 26.42 (1978), p. 24. Jan Baltus, ‘Ružové mesto na okraji púšte’ [The Pink City at the End of the Desert], Technické noviny, 27.43 (1979), p. 16. Boris Ivančov, Mrija Po Imeni Tadz᾿-Machal [A Dream by the Name of Taj Mahal] (Bratislava: SPN , 1987). They appeared under the title ‘Z indického zápisníka’ [From the Indian Notebook] in eight parts in issues 43-50 always on p. 11. Boris Ivančov, ‘Čo deň, to sviatok: Z indického zápisníka (6.)’ [Every Day a Festival: From the Indian Notebook (6.)], Nedeľná Pravda, 22.48 (1989), p. 11.

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neutral style in the late 1980s. Thus Androvičová’s second book, published in 1984, contains fewer such passages. Even her romanticism is less pronounced. Indeed, many typical aspects of the romantic view of India are absent from the travel accounts analysed. Due to the prevalent MarxistLeninist critique of religion, the spiritual and religious character of Indian culture—which is so dominant in the romantic fascination with India—is hardly mentioned, and when it is, it is usually not commented upon. It sublimated into the idea of a moral or balanced life-style that deserves Westerners’ appreciation. This is even more evident when examining the important role appreciation of India’s spiritual culture plays in post-1989 travelogues.39

Conclusion The socialist and the neo-romantic view of India represent the two basic forms of perception of India in the years 1948–1989. Several more or less neutral short accounts by journalists, or, very often by scientists and scholars, which stick to a matter-of-fact reporting, were published in magazines and newspapers,40 and were, for obvious reasons, excluded from 39

40

See, for example, Ján Litvák, Gandžasan (prepísané z Indiára) [Ganjasan (Transcribed from the Indiary)] (Bratislava: Slovenský spisovateľ, 1999); Róbert Bielik, Gompa. Kláštorný denník [Gompa: The Monastery Diary] (Bratislava: Petrus, 2001); Alana Dev Priya, Posolstvo rieky. Joga jej v Indii ukázala nový zmysel života [The Message of the River: Yoga Showed Her a New Meaning of Life in India] (Bratislava: Noxi, 2013). See Engelbert Merkl, ‘India v kocke: Dillí—mesto obrovských vzdialeností i kontrastov’ [India in a Nutshell: Delhi—the City of Great Distances and Contrasts], Práca, 10 March 1979, p. 4; Boris Latta, ‘Nezabudnuteľný skvost histórie: z cesty po Indickej republike’ [An Unforgettable Jewel of History: From the Travels in the Indian Republic], Pravda, 23 January 1981, p. 6; V. Spišiak, ‘Kanaán ctiteľov vody’ [Canaan of Water Worshippers], Život, 32.14 (1982), 14-17; Ján Brindza, ‘V krajine Telugov’ [In the Country of Telugs], Život, 32.45 (1982), pp. 14-17; Ján Brindza, ‘Ako žije žena v sárí?’ [How Does a Woman in a Sari Live?], Život, 33.14 (1983), pp. 16-17; Drahoslav Machala, ‘Dotyk s Indiou’ [A Touch of India], Nedeľa, príloha Nového slova, 18 (1983), pp. 4-5; Dušan Slobodník, ‘Džaia Hind, Džaia Hind! Priehrštie dojmov, stretnutí, zážitkov a úvah inšpirovaných Indiou’ [Jai Hind! Jai Hind! A Handful of Impressions, Meetings, Experiences, and Reflections Inspired by India], Nedeľa, príloha Nového slova, 15, (1985), pp. 4-5; Pavol Komár, ‘Skropené farebným dažďom’ [Sprinkled with a Colourful Rain], Smena na nedeľu, 21.30 (1986), p. 5; Milan Labuda, ‘India očami lekára’ [India through the Eyes of a Doctor], Život, 38.3 (1988), pp. 3033; Erich Mistrík, ‘Život v znamení ahimsy’ [A Life Marked by Ahimsa], Život, 38.41 (1988), pp. 32-24; Vladimír Lehotský, ‘India ďaleká blízka (1.)’ [India, Distant and Close], Príroda a spoločnosť, 37.21 (1988), 32-35; Vladimír Lehotský, ‘India ďaleká i blízka (2)’, Príroda a spoločnosť, 37.22 (1988), pp. 32-37; Ladislav Tomášek, ‘Sárí nezmení ani Dior’ [Not even Dior will Change the Sari], Život, 39.17 (1989), pp. 1619; Ladislav Tomášek, ‘Ďaleko je do Tiručirapalli’ [It is Far to Tiruchirapalli], Život,

298 Róbert Gáfrik the present analysis. Both tendencies in the travel writing from this period offer an interesting perspective on the postcolonial condition after the Second World War. Marxist-Leninist ideology believed in the gradual victory of socialism all over the world. The social revolution this ideology envisioned was not an accidental but rather a natural phenomenon that resulted from the conflict between production forces and production relations; i.e. the conflict between the proletariat and bourgeois reaction. The Third World was bound to become socialist sooner or later. The Second World countries just offered some friendly help to them in this transitional period. This colonization was believed to be an inevitable outcome of social and historical processes. Therefore, it may not be too farfetched to argue that Miloš Ruppeldt, Dušan Kerný, Ľudovít Zárecký, and Jaroslav Brabec as adherents of the Second World ideology simply participated in this form of latent colonialism. Interestingly, even the romantic appreciation of India was per negationem filtered through the communist viewpoint. Postcolonial studies focus on the relation of the First World to the Third World. The relation of the Second World to the Third World is absent from their considerations for the simple reason that the Second World countries did not have colonies in Asia and Africa before the Cold War. However, the Second World’s colonialism of the Third World, which is illustrated in these socialist travel accounts by writers who belonged to a country which was only a peripheral player in the Cold War as well as in Oriental studies, definitely deserves more attention if we want to understand the postcolonial condition in which the world found itself after the disintegration of the European colonial empires.

39.19 (1989), pp. 16-19; Jozef Hvorecký, ‘Mesiac na indických univerzitách’ [A Month at Indian Universities], Universitas Comeniana 1.3 (1989), pp. 52-53.

Martin Slobodník Socialist Anti-Orientalism: Perceptions of China in Czechoslovak Travelogues from the 1950s* Abstract: This paper analyses the image of China in travelogues written by Slovak and Czech authors during the 1950s, the period of the closest cultural and political cooperation between these two socialist countries. Its focus is on the central themes of these travel accounts; namely, the sense of comradeship and brotherhood, and the construction of both temporal (past versus present) and spatial (here/China versus there/Taiwan) dichotomies. These narrative strategies were regularly employed by the authors who were pro-regime writers and journalists in order to familiarize their readers with the situation in China and mobilize solidarity with this distant country at home in Czechoslovakia. The image of China in these writings epitomizes a deliberate effort to eliminate traditional Orientalist clichés and it suppresses the exoticising perspective in favour of the propagation of proletarian internationalism and the shared ideological underpinnings of both regimes.

The 1950s was a crucial chapter for the construction of the image of China in Czechoslovakia, because during this relatively short period a number of travelogues were published and the Czechoslovak media (newspapers, journals) regularly provided information on developments in the People’s Republic of China. These travelogues resulted from a close cooperation between the two socialist countries which was at its greatest intensity during the years 1950–1959. Czechoslovakia had become a socialist country and a satellite of the Soviet regime after the seizure of power by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, and the representatives of the Communist Party of China proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The ideological proximity of these two socialist countries facilitated large-scale political, economic, and cultural cooperation. It is beyond the scope of this study to provide a detailed analysis of the initial period of Czechoslovak-Chinese relations,1 but the political context

* 1

This work was supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Taiwan. So far, very few scholarly works have treated the political and economic relations between China and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s: see Zdeněk Trhlík, Československočínské vztahy. I. část, období let 1949–1965 [Czechoslovak-Chinese Relations. Part 1, Years 1949–1965] (Prague: Ústav mezinárodních vztahů, 1985); Bohuslav Litera, ‘ČSSR a ČLR: soudruzi, ne přátelé’ [Czechoslovakia and the PRC: Comrades, Not Friends], Zahraničná politika 11.5 (2007), 16-17. The relations between the Czech Republic and China after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia have been

300 Martin Slobodník played a crucial role because cultural cooperation (which included the visits of Czech and Slovak writers and journalists) was conditioned by the close political partnership between the two regimes. To a certain extent, cultural exchanges were a spinoff of the contacts established within the highest echelon of government officials and party leaders. The first cultural agreement between Czechoslovakia and the PRC was signed in spring 1952, when the Czechoslovak governmental delegation led by Václav Kopecký, Minister of Information, visited China.2 This agreement launched a close and lively cooperation between these two socialist countries: Czechoslovakia was visited by Chinese writers, filmmakers, painters, actors, dance and music ensembles, a number of modern Chinese literary works (written by leftist and communist authors) was translated into Czech, and representatives of the Czechoslovak ‘cultural front’ made reciprocal visits to China.3 Knowledge of China in Czechoslovakia was scarce 4 and once the People’s Republic of China joined the socialist camp in October 1949 the need came about for bridging the gap between the citizens of

2

3

4

analyzed in a well-researched monograph: Rudolf Fürst, Česko-čínské vztahy po roce 1989 [Czech-Chinese Relations after the Year 1989] (Prague: Karolinum, 2010). Trhlík, p. 63. This visit resulted in the publication of two books. Václav Kopecký, Alois Neuman and other authors (who were also members of the delegation) wrote Ve veliké čínské zemi [In the Great Country of China] (Prague: Orbis, 1953). Alois Neuman, Minister of Telecommunications, also authored another book entitled Čína a její lid [China and its People] (Prague: Orbis, 1954). However, although the authors visited China, these cannot be considered travelogues: the authors provided basic information about the history of China, and its current developments, economy, and culture in a systematic manner, and refrained from any personal comments or descriptions of authentic experiences. Cultural exchanges between Czechoslovakia and China have so far been discussed only in a preliminary manner—see Lenka Dřímalová, ‘Česko-čínské vztahy po roce 1945 v oblasti kultury’ [Czech-Chinese Cultural Relations after the Year 1945], unpublished B.A. thesis (Olomouc: Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University, 2009). M. Pejčochová provides a good overview focused only on the fine arts— Michaela Pejčochová, ‘Původ a formování sbírky čínského malířství dvacátého století v Národní galerii v Praze’ [The Origin and the Formation of the Collection of Chinese 20th Century Painting in the National Gallery in Prague], in Mistři čínské tušové malby 20. století ze sbírek Národní galerie v Praze [Masters of 20th Century Chinese Ink Painting from the Collection of the National Gallery in Prague], ed. by Michaela Pejčochová (Prague: Národní galerie, 2008), pp. 24-36. ‘Until recently everything about this country was enwrapped by the mystery of the enormous distance which separated us’. Jaroslav Čech, Vojtěch Jasný, and Karel Kachyňa, Byli jsme v zemi květů [We Went to the Country of Flowers] (Praha: Naše vojsko, 1954), p. 16. For a good overview about the concepts of China in late 19th century Czech society see Filip Suchomel and Marcela Suchomelová, And the Chinese Cliffs Emerged out of the Mist...Perception and Image of China in Early Photographs (Prague: Arbor vitae, 2011), pp. 81-118.

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Czechoslovakia and this geographically and culturally distant country. This would build a sense of brotherhood between these two nations which were jointly—under the leadership of the Soviet Union—building socialism and defending peace against ‘imperialist aggressors’. Travelogues written by Slovak and Czech authors, which were published either in book form or in journals and newspapers, became an important propaganda tool as they bore witness to China’s progress, and thus contributed to overcoming the barrier of ignorance between the two ‘friendly nations’. Authentic reportage and literary travelogues provided the general public with insight into a country which, unless one was one of its prominent guests, was only open to be visited by a very limited few. These state-sponsored trips for Czech and Slovak pro-regime authors, who generally were not previously very knowledgeable about China, resulted in the publishing of travelogues commissioned by state and party authorities. These works represented part of the mandatory ‘publication output’ for the prominent writers, and were to serve for the education of the masses. Two visits were crucial with regard to the dissemination of information about China through travelogues. In the summer and autumn of 1952 the Vít Nejedlý Military Art Ensemble toured China. Czech members of this delegation published the first travelogues about China in book form after 1954.5 The largest Czechoslovak cultural delegation visited the PRC from 23 September until 11 December 1953, and it included such prominent writers as Adolf Hoffmeister, Vojtech Mihálik, Vladimír Mináč, Pavel Kohout, Marie Majerová, Marie Pujmanová, Jarmila Glazarová, the painter Mária Medvecká, the director of the National Gallery in Prague, Vladimír Novotný, the theatre director and actor Andrej Bagar, and the sinologist Danuška Šťovíčková. 6 Later in the 1950s several other Czech and Slovak journalists and writers visited China and published travel accounts. Their stays in China were also organized by the Chinese government and they were dispatched to China on official visits by Czechoslovak unions of journalists or writers. Bellow I will refer to the writings of the Slovak authors Rudo Moric (who visited China in 1956 on his way to Vietnam), Ladislav Mňačko (he went to China and Mongolia in 1956), and Vladimír Ferko (he paid a visit to China in 1957).7 5

6 7

Čech, Jasný and Kachyňa; František Skála, Čína ve skizzáři [China in the Sketch Book] (Praha: Mladá fronta, 1954). During this tour the documentary film Lidé jednoho srdce [People of One Heart] (1953, directors: Karel Kachyňa, Vojtěch Jasný) was made. Pejčochová, p. 31. The topic of Czech and Slovak travelogues about China was briefly tackled by Anton Lauček, Svedectvo reportáží z ‘krajín, kde vychádza slnko’ [Witness Records from ‘Lands where the Sun Rises’] (Ružomberok: M-servis, 2009). For a good overview of several

302 Martin Slobodník It is not my intention to describe in great detail the ways these visitors travelled around China, or their interactions with the country and its inhabitants, although of course the way such matters were arranged greatly circumscribed their capacity to comprehend the situation in China. The travel of these official visitors from ‘friendly countries’ was in the care of Chinese authorities, and they were accompanied by interpreters and Chinese officials who represented a natural hindrance to spontaneous interactions between these prominent visitors and the local population. The official published travelogues did not mention restrictions on movement and contact with Chinese people, but a rare and valuable glimpse behind the curtain of official visits in China in the 1950s is provided by the previously unpublished private diary of the Czech archaeologist and art historian Lumír Jisl, who visited China and Mongolia in 1957–58: What is the most annoying thing in China? It is the so-called gunman. He is someone whom they always forget to introduce to you, but surprisingly, he is following your every step. […] One can recognize them because they always walk some five meters behind you and you can see that something is swelling in their back pocket or under their coat.8

Besides the permanent armed escort, the planning of the trip required thorough preparation, which should have created an experience that would leave the visitor with only positive impressions: In the morning we should have visited the bridge […]. As the morning was quite foggy and it would be not possible to make photographs, I asked to change the schedule. After some haggling the interpreter told me that it is not so easy and probably will be not possible. Why? Because we were scheduled to visit the bridge in the morning. And it is not possible to give them a call that we will arrive at a different time? Yes, it is possible, but is it necessary to make some preparations. (…) It is not possible to walk across the bridge from one side to the other? When there should be a guided tour it is different, it is necessary to make some preparations. So we should not do the guided tour and we should visit the bridge like normal visitors. That is not possible, because you are a foreigner. And when a foreigner wants to see anything, it is necessary to make arrangements in advance.9

8

9

topics repeatedly mentioned in the travelogues see Tiziana D’Amico, ‘Some Remarks on Propaganda and Slovak Travel Literature (1955–1958)’, Studia Orientalia Slovaca 8 (2009), 111-135. Lumír Jisl, ‘Soukromý deník z první pracovní cesty do Mongolska, vykonané od 3. srpna 1957 do 19. února 1958’ [Private Diary from the First Field Trip to Mongolia, Accomplished from 3 August 1957 to 19 February 1958] (unpublished diary, private property), 7 October 1958, Dunhuang. Jisl, 6 January 1958, Wuhan.

Socialist Anti-Orientalism 303

In order to comprehend the historical circumstances of these visits we have to briefly mention the political situation in China in the 1950s. The Communist Party of China seized power in October 1949 and after the initial stabilization of the situation and the establishment of the new regime’s authority in all parts of China (with the exception of island of Taiwan), the Beijing government started to implement its socialist reforms in the economy (land reforms, confiscation of large industries, etc.) and citizens were exposed to vigorous Marxist propaganda, which accelerated the class struggle against the class of ‘exploiters’ (landowners, bourgeois owners of big businesses, high officials of the expelled Kuomintang regime). Later, the political struggle also reached for internal enemies, such as communist officials displaying too little loyalty and too much critical reasoning, and representatives of the labouring population of peasants and workers whose adherence to the new regime was questioned. Despite the fact that the Chinese economy—after the prolonged war against Japan in 1937–45 and the subsequent civil war in 1945–49—was to a certain degree consolidated, the Czechoslovak visitors in 1950s reported on a poor and backward country. Yet the Chinese authorities were able to swiftly establish a totalitarian state which was persecuting millions of its inhabitants.10 From a literary perspective the travelogues of China represent a wide range of styles: some authors preferred a style similar to documentary reportage (V. Mináč), while others strived for a more personal perspective with some poetic passages (L. Mňačko). One author transformed her Chinese experience into a series of poems (M. Pujmanová), and other texts were intended specifically for the young reader (e.g., V. Ferko). Despite these differences, the common features of these travelogues prevail—all the authors depict a very positive image of China, which is both idealistic and idealized. They highlighted their enthusiasm for the construction of a socialist regime while all the negative experiences during their stays in China were consciously (through self-censorship) excluded from their accounts, or were later eliminated by censors, as these books were published (often in quite numerous print runs in order to secure a large readership) in stateowned and state-controlled publishing houses. The authors of these travelogues were pro-regime intellectuals, and their loyalty towards the Czechoslovak communist regime was a condicio sine qua non for their dispatch on an official visit to China. The publishing of travelogues was an assignment from the state and party authorities which they had to deliver after the sightseeing tour to China. The texts are usually written in 10

For a detailed analysis of the tragic process of the establishment of communist power in China in the 1950s see Frank Dikkötter, The Tragedy of Liberation. A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

304 Martin Slobodník straightforward and simple language intended to reach the broad masses11 and the authors provide readers with a schematic portrayal of China. The itinerary of the authors’ trips was usually similar, and it included traditional political and administrative centres (Beijing, Shanghai, Canton), as well as new industrial complexes (Wuhan, Shenyang), or cities that represented traditional Chinese culture (Hangzhou, Xi’an). In the eyes of the foreign visitors these cities had a distinctive symbolic propagandistic value: a stay in Shenyang or Wuhan gave the authors an opportunity to praise the dynamic industrialization of China after 1949.12 However, when describing Shanghai, the writers tackled two antithetical topics: the city symbolized the establishment of Communist Party of China in July 1921 and thus the very birth of ‘New China’, but at the same time the recent past of Shanghai (late 19th and early 20th century) encapsulated for them the exploitation of China by Western imperialism. 13 Visitors were usually required to visit and participate in the Chinese National Day (1 October) celebrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The festivities usually included eulogies about the vigour of the Chinese nation and the bright future of ‘New China’, glorifications of the resolution of the Chinese masses to defend socialism against its enemies, and the large-scale parade illustrated the triumph of socialism. For many of the visitors this was the only opportunity to get a glimpse of Chairman Mao Zedong from their precisely assigned seats on one of the tribunes reserved for important foreign guests.14 While describing their stay in China the authors consistently applied the class principle; for example, during a visit to the former Beihai Imperial compound in the centre of Beijing, it was stressed that that this is the ‘recreational area of the Beijing workers’.15 11 12

13 14

15

Lauček, pp. 45-46. See Adolf Hoffmeister, Pohlednice z Číny [Postcard from China] (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1956), pp. 154; 160-163; Marie Pujmanová, Čínský úsměv [The Chinese Smile] (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1954), pp. 53-55; Vladimír Mináč, V krajine, kde vychodí slnko [In the Country where the Sun Rises] (Bratislava: Slovenský spisovateľ, 1955), pp. 59-60. Čech, Jasný and Kachyňa, pp. 50-56; Skála, pp. 76-79; Mináč, pp. 70-76; Hoffmeister, pp. 138-139. Čech, Jasný and Kachyňa, pp. 150-154; Skála, pp. 150-158; Mináč, pp. 11-14; Hoffmeister, pp. 57-61; Vladimír Ferko, Tajfún je dobrý vietor [The Typhoon is a Good Wind] (Bratislava: Mladé letá, 1959), pp. 99-102. For the political and symbolic role of these parades in Maoist China see Chang-tai Hung, ‘Mao’s Parades: State Spectacles in China in the 1950s’, The China Quarterly, 190 (2007), pp. 411-431. Čech, Jasný and Kachyňa, p. 16. Similarly, Rudo Moric stated during the visit of the Forbidden City in Beijing: ‘Nowadays entirely ordinary Chinese people walk through the palaces. Workers and peasants, students and soldiers.’ Rudo Moric, Pri zakliatej rieke [By the Enchanted River] (Bratislava: Mladé letá, 1958), p. 22.

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A favourite narrative strategy employed by authors who wanted to stress their travelogues’ authenticity is the inclusion of recurrent portrayals of individual destinies of carefully selected representatives of socialist China’s progressive classes (workers, peasants, members of the pro-regime intelligentsia). The kaleidoscope of these model heroes also included some members of the former exploiting class who had relinquished their assets and possessions, acknowledged their ‘mistakes’ in re-education programs, and contributed to the construction of the new socialist China.16 The life stories of these ‘ordinary citizens’ were supposed to illustrate the rising living standards of the Chinese nation after the establishment of the communist regime and their dedication to building a ‘New China’, and at the same time to familiarize readers in Czechoslovakia with current developments in China in a didactic manner.17

Fig. 1. Slovak writer Vladimír Mináč (on the left) during an interview with the Chinese worker Ying Yanhua in Shanghai, Autumn 1953 (Mináč, p. 81).

At the same time, the portrayals of life stories of particular Chinese people served a different aim: they were to bring home to the reader the obvious 16 17

Ladislav Mňačko, Ďaleko je do Whampoa [Whampoa is Far Away] (Bratislava: Slovenské vydavateľstvo politickej literatúry, 1958), pp. 190-194; Ferko, pp. 34-37. For a synoptic typology of these characters see D’Amico, pp. 121-127.

306 Martin Slobodník fact that the Chinese people are also human beings of the same ‘flesh and blood’ as themselves. People who in the past—similarly as in Czechoslovakia—suffered under the yoke of local and foreign exploiters from which they were liberated by the communist parties and now they, the Czechoslovak and Chinese people, jointly contributed to the construction of the socialist camp. One of the central motifs of the travelogues is the brotherhood and solidarity of the two culturally and geographically distant nations interconnected by ideological proximity and their shared enthusiasm for the building of socialism. The travelogues were intended to mobilize public support in Czechoslovakia for the People’s Republic of China and all the authors repeatedly stress the common struggle, shared destiny and comradeship in the struggle against the enemies of socialism: ‘The soldier stands at the fort / in a curly fur hat / in the rough north of China / bundled in fur, / he guards the bastion and the Chinese railway line – / you know what? He also guards Prague.’ 18 This motive of the international brotherhood of the proletariat which overstepped the borders of individual states also appeared in the International Workers’ Day parades in Czechoslovakia where this banner referred directly to China: ‘From [the city of] Aš up to Shanghai the red flag flies high’.19 The authors repeatedly stress that the Czechoslovak and Chinese people were part of the same historical process: China. Great Power. The country that shifted the global political scales in Southeast Asia towards socialism. The country that brought new truths to the treasure-house of Marxism. The country with colossal political, economic and cultural achievements which in London and Washington they used to call—with certain apprehension—Chinese miracles. China stands on our side.20

A similar motif can be found in the travelogue written by F. Skála: ‘We, people longing for peace and peaceful labour, are one big family and our boys keeping guard on the Šumava frontier [with West Germany] are defending the tranquil sleep of Chinese children in the same way as the Korean volunteer lying in the ditch suffers for the happiness of our kids.’21 18

19 20 21

Pujmanová, p. 55; see also Hoffmeister, p. 174. The theme of common struggle can also be illustrated with the following quotation: ‘If they would shoot you, Wang Li, we will shoot back together with you; and in case they would start with us, where, where would they end, if your whole great country will rise and in the same way as the storm drives the sand, you will drive them out and they will never, never recover themselves!’ – Čech, Jasný and Kachyňa, p. 14. Skála, p. 76. Ferko, p. 105. Skála, p. 207.

Socialist Anti-Orientalism 307

Fig. 2. Mass rally of Chinese workers at the Shanghai municipality hall, where in April 1952 Václav Kopecký, Czechoslovak minister of education, delivered a lecture about recent developments in socialist Czechoslovakia under the banner ‘Long live the friendship between the people of China and Czechoslovakia’ (author’s personal archive).

Large rallies of the labouring masses were organized by state authorities with the aims of strengthening the friendship between the two nations and disseminating information about the befriended country on each side. During the visit of the official Czechoslovak delegation in China, Minister Kopecký gave a speech on 9 May 1952 in Beijing where he introduced the Czechoslovak path towards socialism and by the end of April 1952 some 2000 workers gathered in Shanghai in the municipality hall and V. Kopecký lectured about socialist Czechoslovakia under the portraits of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and the Czechoslovak communist leader Klement Gottwald. After returning home, Minister V. Kopecký gave a lengthy speech entitled ‘On the Great Country of China and the Life of its People’ in Prague on 3 June 1952 which should have solicited support and solidarity with China.22

22

For the text of this lecture see Kopecký, pp. 11-60.

308 Martin Slobodník Regular mass rallies were held on the occasion of the Chinese National Holiday (October 1) in Prague and Bratislava.23 Another frequently employed narrative strategy is the construction of dichotomies, in both the temporal (past versus present) and spatial senses (here/China versus there/Taiwan). The establishment of the PRC on October 1st 1949 24 represents in their understanding the pivotal point in China’s development, but at the same time it is also invested with global significance, as illustrated by Minister Kopecký’s enthusiastic comment: ‘On the day of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China the globe finally inclined to the side of peace, democracy and socialism’. 25 The modern history of China is presented in a black-and-white manner: China before 1949 is only portrayed with negative associations, in contrast to the positive developments after the Communist Party of China’s seizure of power: Was the Chinese nation not sleeping as though enchanted for three thousand years? The Chinese people had beautiful palaces, but they had to bow in front of them, they lived in a rich country, but they were starving to death, they had a great, fine culture but they did not understand it. And did not they rouse as if awakened by a magic wand? The Chinese nation revolted and it started to move, to progress. Its talent and wisdom, its labour and force will raise the greatest country in the world up to the sun.26

The authors used straightforward language and the ‘political enemies’ are denoted by very negative labels: Before the liberation this area was ruled by landlords. Twenty two villains possessed almost fifty eight percent of the land. After the liberation the peasants organized themselves into a cooperative, confiscated the land, houses and working tools from the landowners and distributed them among the poor 23

24 25

26

For instance on 30 September 1951 a mass meeting of this kind was held in the Lucerna Palace in Prague on the occasion of the 2nd anniversary of the founding of the PRC. The main speaker was Viliam Široký, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs and chairman of the Communist Party of Slovakia. This meeting was also reported in the weekly Filmový týždenník [Weekly Newsreel] (No. 41/1951), and symptomatically entitled ‘People’s China Guarding the Peace’. The establishment of the PRC is described in Chinese as ‘liberation’ (jiefang), and the periodization of Modern Chinese history is divided into before and after liberation. Neuman, p. 7. Similarly, Deputy Prime Minister Široký at the rally held on the occasion of the foundation of China proclaimed: ‘The global historical importance of the victory of the great Chinese nations consists of the fact that the People’s Republic of China became a mighty bastion of the global camp of peace and socialism under the leadership of the Soviet Union’. Filmový týždenník, No. 41/1951. Mináč, p. 13.

Socialist Anti-Orientalism 309 peasants. [...] The living standard of the village is on the rise. There is a granary in the abandoned temple. They dug out ten wells.27

According to the authors, the living conditions of Chinese people before 1949 were circumscribed by the corruption and incompetence of the Kuomintang regime: ‘Nobody will have to again chew on roots and during the summer no one will have to pull the dead bodies of children from caves.’28 By contrast to these gloomy images, the developments in the PRC evoke the authors’ impassioned admiration: ‘Ages, you may envy us! We were at the cradle; we were present at the nascence of the happiness of the biggest country in the world...!’29 The dichotomy of past versus present is often stressed by the examples of individual people, for instance Vladimír Mináč described the life story of a certain Xuedin, who was not allowed to study before 1949. He suffered from starvation and physical abuse by his employer, but after the foundation of the PRC he became the chief technician in a weaving mill and he expressed his deep gratitude for his personal happiness and living standards to the new regime.30 The authors laid emphasis on the moral superiority of the new socialist regime in China (and eo ipso of the socialist camp as such) in comparison with the past and the capitalist world as well: With regret I have to announce to those who expected that I will be discussing such things in this book that there are no dens, no brothels, no thieves and murderers, no pirates and smugglers, no woman has to prostitute herself, there are no venereal diseases, one can hear nothing about gangs, criminal brotherhoods or horrible sects. Nowadays in China you can leave your suitcase all day on the street. It might be the case in Stockholm, but it is certain that in China no one would steal it.31

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28

29 30 31

Hoffmeister, pp. 117-18. Other authors also emphasized: ‘We will have to often recall the shameful and criminal rule of Kuomintang while describing our trip in China.’ Čech, Jasný and Kachyňa, p. 23. Mináč, p. 43. Paradoxically, only several years later (1959–61) the disastrous economic policy of the central Chinese government caused a large-scale famine during which some 30 million people died and cannibalism was quite widespread (children, especially, became victims of this manmade tragedy). Mináč, p. 117. Mináč, pp. 27-28; see also Ferko, pp. 38-41; Pujmanová, pp. 30-31. Mňačko, p. 180. The Slovak journalist and writer Miloš Krno described North Korea in similar words: ‘Here, the people are honest, no one would steal anything from you’. Miloš Krno, Z krajiny rannej sviežosti [From the Country of Morning Freshness] (Bratislava: Osveta, 1960), p. 25.

310 Martin Slobodník The negative example, against which the author juxtaposes the idealized image of the post-1949 China, is represented not only by the pre-1949 developments, but also by the current situation in Taiwan:32 Nanjing was until recently the capital of China. That China which was under the reign of the Kuomintang was a jailhouse for millions of people. The Chinese people had been suffering badly for a long time. But nothing lasts forever and this is true also for Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. The People’s Liberation Army chased out all the evil-doers and parasites, so they could only escape to Taiwan under the protection of their American masters in order to scold and spit blood from there.33

The Czech and Slovak authors perceived Taiwan as the rotten regime of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, while at the same time it symbolized American imperialism: ‘[...] and one has to think about the frontier of two worlds, about the American fleet in the Taiwan Strait, about Taiwan armed to the teeth, about the human malevolence and the voracious greediness of money. No, this eastern frontier of our world will be not conquered by anybody’. 34 Taiwan embodies for these authors (and we have to keep in mind that none of them ever visited the island) the state of moral decline: ‘General Zhan Shunu, in the same way as hundreds before him, provided a truthful testimony about Taiwan, where a piece of ancient China remained preserved. That corrupt China with hordes of prostitutes, policemen, and American advisors’.35 A similarly negative image of the criminal and violent nature of Taiwan is mentioned in another travelogue: ‘Around noon a large Kuomintang battlecruiser suddenly appeared in our bay. We could not figure out whether it was intentionally being piloted directly against us, or just

32

33 34 35

After the loss in the civil war, Chiang Kai-shek and hundreds of thousands of followers of the Kuomintang escaped to Taiwan where the government of the Republic of China (led by the Kuomintang) continued its existence with the military and political support of the United States of America. For details see Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York – London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), pp. 504-513. Skála, p. 71. Mináč, p. 12. Ferko, p. 46. Prostitutes and Americans also embodied moral decline and political subordination in the description of South Korea by Miloš Krno: ‘One can hear the footsteps of American military policemen and hookers surrounding them. [...] Namtemun Street is a street of brothels. Here the life of thousands of girls drains away very quickly. These girls did not have any other option: if they did not want to starve to death they could only sell their bodies and their youth to the occupiers.’ Krno, p. 88.

Socialist Anti-Orientalism 311

making another of their plundering inroads, during which the Kuomintang people robbed the inhabitants of the island and mistreated their women.’36 As illustrated by the above mentioned themes and quotations, the image of China (or in broader sense the Orient in general) is not constructed along cultural or civilizational lines, but the criteria adopted in the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy are strictly of an ideological nature; i.e. adherence to communist ideology and membership in socialist camp versus affiliation with the imperialist and aggressive West. In these travelogues we cannot trace the Orientalist concept of the civilizing mission, or the traditional Oriental clichés of the passive, backward, childlike, irrational or mystical East as analysed by Edward Said in French and British literature on the Middle East.37 In the representation of the Chinese ‘Other’ the authors deliberately suppress the exotic features of Chinese society and traditional culture in order to stress the shared values, common historical destiny of the exploited classes, and the sense of comradeship which transgresses any cultural or ethnic differences as was required by the communist concept of proletarian internationalism.38 The narratives stress the equality and common interests of the East European visitor and the Asian host, and the Orientalist discourse of dominance is not present. The authors did not position themselves as the ultimate authorities reporting on the Orient, but as comrades describing a befriended society that was also divided across familiar class principles. The opposite ‘Other’ is distinguished not by ‘Chineseness’ but by ideological background (Kuomintang regime, American imperialism) and class affiliation (landowners, members of the bourgeoisie). In my contribution I have focused primarily on two crucial motifs (the sense of brotherhood and the dichotomies of past versus present and China versus Taiwan), which the Czech and Slovak authors repeatedly employed while constructing the image of the People’s Republic of China. 39 The theme of the ideological proximity of the Czechoslovak people with the 36 37 38

39

Čech, Jasný, and Kachyňa, p. 23. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). The life stories of ordinary Chinese people represent an important narrative strategy in the de-exotization of China. In order to familiarize the Czechoslovak readership with their Chinese experience, the authors sometimes also make direct references to some well-known Czech and Slovak places. For instance, Vladimír Mináč likened the main shopping street in Xi’an to the famous Wenceslas Square in Prague (p. 26), and Adolf Hoffmeister gave the Chinese industrial city of Wuhan the nickname ‘Chinese Ostrava’ (p. 154). Another frequently recurrent theme of these travelogues is the state of religion in China after the communist takeover. Czechoslovak authors praise the elimination of religious traditions and the promotion of atheism. I will deal with this subject in a separate article.

312 Martin Slobodník people of another socialist country, as well as the dichotomy of the negative representation of the past and the positive image of the society after the communist seizure of power are not specific only for the representation of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Similar narrative strategies were employed, for instance, by Miloš Krno in his travelogue on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which he visited in 1959. 40 From the comparative perspective (which is beyond the scope of this contribution), an analysis of the image of China in the travelogues written by official guests from other socialist countries (e.g., the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic), who visited this country in 1950s would help us to understand whether one can discern a distinctive Czechoslovak perception of China in this period.41 The Czech translation of the travelogue about China written by the Soviet journalist and writer Boris N. Polevoy 42 (which was originally published in Russian) illustrates how the texts of these prominent pro-regime writers from the socialist camp followed a similar propagandistic format. B. Polevoy employed analogous narrative strategies and clichés to those described above in the works of the Czech and Slovak writers, and he provided an equally positive and idealized image of China. An interesting comparison to these works is provided by the texts written by Western leftist and communist intellectuals, who also travelled in China as official guests of the Beijing government. Like the Czech and Slovak travelogues, they also treat the Western readership to a similarly naïve and simplistic positive image of China. 43 However, what sets these writings apart is that the Western authors had to address the very negative images of the People’s Republic of China rife in the media of their native countries. In the face of propaganda that reflected their countries’ Cold War logic, their goals were to correct misconceptions about China, counterbalance the negative perceptions, and provide an alternative image of socialist China. At the same time, it is necessary to mention that, unlike their Czech and Slovak counterparts, the Western authors could publish their travelogues in journals and publishing houses 40 41

42

43

Krno, Z krajiny rannej sviežosti [From the Country of Morning Freshness]. Adolf Hoffmeister explicitly mentions that the Czechoslovak cultural delegation spent a part of their trip through China in the autumn of 1953 on a ‘friendship train’ with delegations from other socialist countries. See Hoffmeister, p. 121. Boris N. Polevoy, 30 000 li po Číně [30 000 Li through China] (Praha: Svět sovětů, 1960). This book was originally published in Moscow in 1958, but the Czech translation was published in Czechoslovakia only in 1960 when the relations between the Soviet Union (and all the other socialist countries with the exception of Albania) and the People’s Republic of China dramatically deteriorated. See Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 278-346.

Socialist Anti-Orientalism 313

which were undoubtedly not subjected to such harsh censorship as it was the case in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1950s. The observant visitor of China could not overlook certain negative aspects of the situation there despite the fact that the freedom of movement of these official guests was restricted and they were treated to a kind of reality show reminiscent of a Potemkin village. A remarkable critical reflection of these propagandistic officially disseminated positive images of China in 1950s is provided by the unpublished diary of Lumír Jisl, who shortly before his departure from Beijing confronted his experience with the perception of China in the Czech travelogues of the period: In the afternoon I took a walk in the living quarters of the poor people. In my whole life I have never seen such poverty as I encountered here—not only in Beijing, but anywhere [in China] where I went—during the last five months. These people are just struggling to survive. And one has to say their living standards are higher than before the Liberation. […] But who will be the first to write about this? The official guests, such as Hoffmeister, Majerová, etc. just frequent one bacchanal banquet after another. What do they know about the real, genuine China with its hundreds of millions of people?44

In my opinion, these propagandistic travelogues served two interlinked goals. On the one hand, they disseminated information about the newlyestablished People’s Republic of China in order to familiarize this distant country to the Central European reader and thus solicit support for its destiny. But at the same time they also deliver to the readership in Czechoslovakia another message—the developments in China only represented another example of the great social, political, and economic achievements of the socialist camp. These travelogues were to affirm for the reader that the road to construction of socialism in Czechoslovakia runs straight and true, and the Chinese experience is just another example to prove it to the domestic public.45 The Czechoslovak propaganda for China from the 1950s—and these travelogues constituted only one of its 44 45

Jisl, 8 February 1958, Beijing. The previously-mentioned propagandistic positive image of China was undoubtedly predominant in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, but I do not want to suggest that there existed a homogenous perception of China. One can also trace down, for instance, some residues of the Orientalist image of China, particularly in the collections of paraphrases of classical Chinese poetry published (and repeatedly reprinted) by the Czech translator and literary scholar Bohumil Mathesius which perpetuated the clichés of lyrical, exotic China preserving its eternal wisdom. On Mathesius’ translations see Anna Zádrapová, ‘Bohumil Mathesius, Jaroslav Průšek a Zpěvy staré Číny’ [Bohumil Mathesius, Jaroslav Průšek and the Songs from Ancient China], Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11.2 (2012), 239-272.

314 Martin Slobodník contrivances 46 —represents an interesting example for the analysis of the operation of communist propaganda on foreign policy in Czechoslovakia47 because, after the Sino-Soviet ideological and political split in the late 1950s and early 1960s,48 the official image of China in Czechoslovakia (following the Soviet example and precise instructions from Moscow) underwent a dramatic U-turn: the former close ally and comrade in arms jointly building socialism suddenly became a heretical Maoist and ideological enemy. The period of close friendship between China and Czechoslovakia abruptly ended in 1960 and even several seemingly innocent lines written by the pro-regime Slovak poet Ján Kostra (‘what do we know about the pains in which the people’s China was born / how was tempered the steel / of the Party truth, which raised / a quarter of humanity / for the defence of the peace’), which reflected one of the typical themes of the propaganda in the 1950s, were no longer in accord with the official Party line. Therefore, the Press Surveillance Office, which was in charge of censorship, demanded their erasure from an anthology of the poet’s work that was to be published in 1962.49

46

47

48

49

Other effective tools included articles about China published in journals and newspapers, documentary films about China made in 1950s by Czech and Slovak directors, and the regular summaries of domestic and foreign developments shown in cinemas (Týždeň vo filme [The Week in a Newsreel] and Československý filmový týdeník [Czechoslovak Weekly Newsreel]) which often dealt with the social and political developments in China. For a detailed analysis of the official communist propaganda on foreign policy and on foreign countries in Slovakia see Marína Zavacká, Kto žije za ostnatým drôtom? Oficiálna zahraničnopolitická propaganda na Slovensku, 1956–1962: Teórie, politické smernice a spoločenská prax [Who Lives behind the Barbed Wire? The Official Propaganda on Foreign Policy in Slovakia 1956–1962: Theories, Political Instructions and Social Practices] (Bratislava: Veda, 2005); see also Marína Zavacká, ‘Picturing the World Abroad: Official Domestic Propaganda in Czechoslovakia 1956–1962’, in Osteuropa vom Weltkrieg zur Wende, ed. by Wolfgang Mueller and Michael Portmann (Vienna: Verlag der ÖAW, 2006), pp. 209-217. For more details about the conflict launched by Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech criticizing Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality that the Soviet leader delivered at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, see Spence, pp. 583-590. Zavacká, Kto žije za ostnatým drôtom?, p. 139.

Agnieszka Sadecka A Socialist Orientalism? Polish Travel Writing on India in the 1960s Abstract: This chapter focuses on Polish travel accounts of India from the 1960s, exploring the relationship between the two countries: one belonging to the Soviet Bloc, or ‘Second World’, and the other, among the newly decolonized countries of the ‘Third World’. The perception of India in the travelogues of Janusz Gołębiowski and Wiesław Górnicki is influenced by various discourses. On the one hand, the Poles often used Orientalist imagination unrecognizable from their Western European counterparts. However, on the other, the Russian School of Orientalism and, later, Soviet Oriental Studies had an important role in shaping Soviet approaches to foreign and cultural policy, which in turn were imposed on other countries in the communist bloc. As a result of these conflicting influences, Polish travellers found themselves in an ambiguous situation: they had to reconsider their own position and rethink their own identity. They had to reconcile the preconceptions on India with the need for a new, socialist way of thinking.

Ryszard Kapuściński, the icon of Polish reporting who started his career in the communist period, recalls how he dreamed of going abroad. The magazine he was working for called him one day, announcing that they are sending him on a foreign mission. Kapuściński expected he would be going to ‘Czechoslovakia’—this was as far as he could imagine travelling abroad. But, to his surprise, in 1956 he was sent to India. Following Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Poland, the authorities were eager to intensify relations with the Indian Republic. Kapuściński only briefly mentions his stay in India in his Travels with Herodotus, written in 2004, as he never published the account of his first foreign journey. When confronted with India, he is absolutely overwhelmed: In time I grew convinced of the depressing hopelessness of what I had undertaken, of the impossibility of knowing and understanding the country in which I found myself. India was so immense. How can one describe something that is—and so it seemed to me—without boundaries or end? […] India was my first encounter with otherness, the discovery of a new world. It was at the same time a great lesson in humility. Yes, the world teaches humility. I returned from this journey embarrassed by my own ignorance, at how poorly read I was. […] I tried to forget India, which signified to me my failure: its enormity and diversity, its poverty and riches, its mystery and incomprehensibility had crushed, stunned, and finally defeated me.1

Contrary to the Orientalists who studied the Orient and claimed having superior knowledge of the many cultures and religions that this label 1

Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, trans. by Klara Główczewska (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007) pp. 36-39.

316 Agnieszka Sadecka encompasses, Kapuściński refrains from writing about India. He knows that he would inevitably fall into a trap of clichés, mental shortcuts, and generalizations. However, several reporters visited India and attempted to describe the country and its culture, as well as their own experience of the subcontinent, in the form of a travel book. Some, like Jerzy Putrament2 and Włodzimierz Janiurek,3 were part of, or closely related to the structures of communist power. Others, such as Jan Józef Szczepański 4 and Jan Zakrzewski5, were critical of the regime, though the censorship would not allow them to express their views openly. Many were journalists or reporters of the mainstream, state-approved dailies, magazines, and news agencies: among them were Jerzy Ros, 6 Kazimierz Dziewanowski, 7 Wojciech Giełżyński, 8 Wojciech Żukrowski 9 as well as Janusz Gołębiowski 10 and Wiesław Górnicki.11 In this article, two travelogues written by authors who both travelled to India in the early 1960s are used as examples: Posted from Delhi, by Janusz Gołębiowski, and A Journey for a Handful of Rice, by Wiesław Górnicki. Their political position was in theory neutral, since their aim, as journalists, was to present an ‘objective’ picture, though it can be assumed that as employees of state-controlled media they could not travel without the consent of the communist authorities. Since it was only several years after Stalin’s death, the difficulties in obtaining a passport for travel abroad, especially outside the communist bloc, were still considerable. That is why early socialist travel accounts are mostly written by reporters on an official 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Jerzy Putrament, Na drogach Indii [On the Roads of India] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo MON, 1967). Włodzimierz Janiurek, Dzień dobry, Nusantaro. reportaż z podróży przewodniczącego Rady Państwa PRL Aleksandra Zawadzkiego do Indonezji i Indii [Hello, Nusantara: Reportage from the Visit of the President of the State Council of the Polish People Republic, Aleksander Zawadzki, to Indonesia and India] (Katowice: Wydawnictwo ‘Śląsk’, 1962). Jan Józef Szczepański, Trzy podróże [Three Journeys] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1981). Jan Zakrzewski, Wiza do Indii [A Visa to India] (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1989). Jerzy Ros, Indyjskie wędrówki [Indian Wanderings] (Warsaw: Iskry, 1957). Kazimierz Dziewanowski, Siedem miejsc osobliwych [Seven Special Places] (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1975). Wojciech Giełżyński, Kraj świętych krów i biednych ludzi [The Country of Holy Cows and Poor People], (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1977). Wojciech Żukrowski, Wędrówki z moim Guru [Journeys with my Guru] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1960). Janusz Gołębiowski, Nadane z Delhi [Posted from Delhi] (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1966). Wiesław Górnicki, Podróż po garść ryżu [A Journey for a Handful of Rice] (Warsaw: Iskry, 1964).

A Socialist Orientalism? 317

mission—both Gołębiowski and Górnicki were affiliated with the Polish Press Agency (PAP) and published in several newspapers and magazines of the time. These two authors’ books were also chosen because they were published relatively closely together. Indeed, over time, the tone of travel accounts changes in tandem with the political situation—for instance, Jerzy Ros’ Indian Wanderings, published in 1957, is more politically biased than Jerzy Chociłowski’s Indian Charade from 1977.12 It is significant that, by and large, travel writers were not simply tourists on a leisurely journey, like many of their Western counterparts. In her study on travel during the communist era, Anne E. Gorsuch remarks that: […] the typical Soviet travel account was a far cry from the exuberant, deeply reflective, sometimes exhibitionist contemporary travel writing we are used to. Soviet travel accounts reflected the fact that Soviet tourism was an official project. Possibilities for travel were determined by Central Committee resolutions. Meaning, too, was officially prescribed in the authoritative language of Soviet newspapers, Intourist [official state travel agency of the Soviet Union] propagandists, and of Khrushchev himself. 13

Even though the Polish regime was somewhat less restrictive than the Soviet one, it is obvious that the reporters would have little chance of venturing on a journey to India on their own—they needed an official permission to obtain a passport and foreign currency, to start with. That is why both authors analysed here were clearly limited by the expectations of their employers and sponsors, and thus unable to avoid using the official narrative coming from Moscow via the Polish Communist Party Central Committee. In this article, the goal is to explore the coexistence of the discourse of Soviet propaganda on the Third World with the discourse of Orientalism, in Edward Said’s understanding of the term. Since the Polish writers analysed here were (more or less willingly) representatives of the Soviet bloc, their views were shaped partly by the Soviet Union’s attitude and policy towards the Third World. Nevertheless, by describing a region that in the collective imagination of Europeans was considered the Orient, a label that encompasses a large number of meanings and representations, the Polish reporters place themselves at least to some extent within the Orientalist tradition analysed by Said. That tradition is not homogenous: one can assume that since Poles, geographically and culturally, are at the crossroads between Western and Eastern Europe, they have always been influenced by 12 13

Jerzy Chociłowski, Indyjska szarada [Indian Charade] (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1977). Anne E. Gorsuch, All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), p. 20.

318 Agnieszka Sadecka various intellectual currents—Western European Enlightenment and Romantic traditions, as well as trends from academic centres in the neighbouring countries—Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Certainly, it is difficult to precisely trace the influence of academic research or artistic styles on the works of reporters; nevertheless, following Said’s example, one can outline a general discourse that shaped the idea of the Orient—and in this particular case—of India.

Polish (Western?) Orientalism Just as Western Europe developed its Orientalist fascination in the 18th and 19th centuries, both in academia and art, similar trends were affecting the Polish society as well. In the 19th century Poles were living on territories of their country partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria. Some studied at the old universities of Krakow, Warsaw, Vilnius and Lviv, and some at the universities of the three empires that they belonged to, such as in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin. Others received their education in European metropolises where many Poles emigrated, in France, Great Britain, or Switzerland. In this way, they were participating in debates in various academic centres. A good example of such international influence on Polish scholars is the biography of one of the first Polish Indologists, Helena Willman-Grabowska. A graduate of secondary school in Russian-occupied Warsaw, she studied literature and Sanskrit in Switzerland and at the French Sorbonne in the first decade of 20th century, and then, after Poland regained independence in 1918, she taught at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She participated in various international associations of Orientalist scholars, such as Société Asiatique and Les Amis de l’Orient and attended Oriental studies conferences. After World War II, because of political pressure from the new communist powers, she was forced to retire in 1947 without receiving any pension. Thanks to many interventions by her peers the scholar was granted a pension in 1951, and allowed to return to academia in 1957, but it was too late—Willman-Grabowska died later that year.14 Simultaneous with the development of academic Orientalism, many Polish artists became as fascinated with the Orient as their Western and Eastern counterparts—or even more: As Izabela Kalinowska observes, Paradoxically, in the nineteenth century scholarly and literary Orientalism enjoyed great popularity in Eastern Europe in part because the Eastern Europeans 14

A biographical article on Helena Willman-Grabowska written by Renata Czekalska can be found in Złota Księga Wydziału Filologicznego UJ [The Honour Roll of the Philological Faculty of the Jagiellonian University], ed. by J. Michalik (Cracow: Kubon & Sagner, 2000), pp. 224-230.

A Socialist Orientalism? 319 desired to participate as equals in the intellectual life of Europe. For some Polish and Russian writers, travel to the East provided a way to assert their own Westernness and hence Europeanness.15

Even though there were some restrictions on the freedom of travel, the Grand Tour, or voyage orientale, was in vogue among Polish cultural and artistic elites. As in the case of Westerners, this was often a quest for selfdefinition, a juvenile adventure, but for many Poles, such travel could also be something more: a response to an even more complex identity crisis, caused by their own position as colonized subjects. The poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, both considered iconic figures of Polish Romanticism, travelled to the Orient (in its widest definition), and these journeys were reflected in their literary creations. Mickiewicz’s stay in Crimea, where he encounters an Oriental culture, results in a particular form of travelogue: the ‘Crimean Sonnets’ (1826). 16 There are several Orientalist elements in the sonnets, but Mickiewicz differs from his Western European contemporaries in certain regards. On the one hand, the figures of the Traveller and of the Tatar can be seen as yet another way of presenting the binary opposition between the East and the West described by Said. One the other hand, as Kalinowska points out, it is visible that Mickiewicz was sympathetic to Crimea and its inhabitants because they were dominated by the Russian empire, just as his homeland was. That is why, even though Mickiewicz followed West European Orientalist trends of his time, his writing was also in a sense anti-imperialist. 17 Another example is Juliusz Słowacki, who in 1836 set off on an Oriental adventure: a journey to Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Though he is on a conventional tour, Kalinowska underlines that he distances himself from this travel experience, portraying the Oriental travel in ‘The Journey’ in an ironic way: As a writer coming from the grey area of a cultural in-between, Słowacki was well positioned to produce an anti-illusionist oriental narrative, one that interrogates both the Western European discourse and his own dependence on this textual tradition. Rather than satisfying himself with mere imitation, in ‘The Journey’ Słowacki mocks European travellers and parodies the conventions of western travel narratives.18

15 16

17 18

Izabela Kalinowska, Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient (Rochester: Rochester UP, 2004), p. 3. Adam Mickiewicz, ‘Sonety Krymskie’ [Crimean Sonnets], in Poezje, tom 2, Wiersze z lat 1825-1855 [Poetry, vol. 2, Poems from years 1825-1855] (Cracow: Krakowska Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1928). Kalinowska, p. 74. Ibid., p. 66.

320 Agnieszka Sadecka In other instances, however, Słowacki uses the Orientalist clichés just like other Western European writers, for instance in his description of Alexandria that he compares to a coffin-like woman, or in a description of a sexual encounter with an Eastern woman in his poem ‘Beniowski’.19 These clichés inscribe themselves into the Orientalist discourse, even though—as Kalinowska concludes—the main point of reference for the poet is Poland, as he is an exile who longs for his homeland, and his journey is strongly marked by nostalgia and a feeling of loss.20 In their descriptions of Oriental travels, Polish Romantic poets would not always escape the stereotypes and trends of European Orientalism, but the motives behind their journeys were different from the Western ones. As Kalinowska writes, To survey the Orient in the same manner as the Western Europeans meant to emphasize Poland’s allegiance to Europe. Polish writers were therefore prone to replicate the models of cultural encounters present in Western European texts. Yet they did not participate in the West’s colonizing enterprise. Rather, on the level of discourse, they faced the risk of becoming voluntary victims of colonization.21

Mickiewicz considered his travels to be a liberating experience and an opportunity to encounter the otherness that he was curious about, while Słowacki could not shed the melancholic thoughts of how his country was enslaved and subdued. One can wonder whether the post-Second World War experience of dependence on the Soviet Union influenced travel writers in a similar way: could they also consider their visits to India liberating? In fact, according to Max Cegielski, there were two main groups of Poles drawn to South Asia, especially from the 1970s onwards: mountain climbers, reaching for the highest peaks of the Himalayas, and engineers, trying to make some extra money on missions to the Third World.22 The former were certainly enjoying the sense of freedom that frequent mountain expeditions gave them; in fact they even admit that being able to go to India or Pakistan and conquer the 8-thousand-meter peaks, gave them a ‘window to the world’

19 20 21 22

Juliusz Słowacki, ‘Beniowski’ in Dzieła Juliusza Słowackiego [Works by Juliusz Słowacki] (Lviv, 1901). Kalinowska, pp.74-76. Ibid., p. 66. Max Cegielski, ‘Polacy w Azji 1945-89. ‘Kominternowski europocentryzm’ czy wschodnie okno na świat?’[Poles in Asia 1945-89, The ‘Comintern Eurocentrism’ or an Eastern window to the world?], in Polska & Azja. Od Rzeczpospolitej Szlacheckiej do Nangar Khel [Poland & Asia. From the Republic of Nobles to Nangar Khel], ed. by Max Cegielski (Poznań: Fundacja Malta, 2013), p. 76.

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and was a symbolic act of freedom. 23 As for the contractors, engineers, industry representatives, and diplomats, going to India or the Middle East was a rather lucrative perspective, but it also offered them the possibility of living in a large, often former colonial house, of having maids and drivers, and sending their children to English-speaking boarding schools—privileges that were absolutely inaccessible for them in communist Poland. 24 These examples demonstrate that travelling in a time of foreign domination was often an escape, a way of reaching for more freedom. But it could also be an opportunity to heal a sense of inferiority by Orientalizing and objectifying others. The generation that explored the world in the early communist period, was in fact trapped in a similar paradox, for they understood well what it means to lose independence and be incorporated into a foreign empire. In Polish travelogues from the 1960s, authors often describe the colonial fate of India in a similar manner as if they were referring to their own country’s history of partitioning between three neighbouring empires. Still, they desperately want to feel European, and their Europeanness is often tantamount to inscribing themselves in the Western Orientalist tradition. This Oriental imagery, coexisting with, or even stimulating the colonial enterprise, was widely popular even after the end of World War II, when Poland became a satellite state of the USSR. While the political perception of the Third World had changed according to the new ideological guidelines, the cultural imagery by and large remained the same: youngsters grew up reading Kipling and other imperial writers, and popular culture perpetuated the image of ‘mysterious Orientals’. This is illustrated well by Monika Żółkoś in her article on a widely popular series of adventure books by Alfred Szklarski. 25 The main protagonist, Tomek Wilmowski, presents a rather Eurocentric view on the ‘exotic’ and ‘exciting’ cultures of the lands he discovers. This series, created in the communist period of the 1950s and 1960s, transported readers into a rather colonial world of exploration and discovery of unknown lands, and encounters with ‘primitive’ tribes.

23 24

25

See the documentary film Art of Freedom, dir. by Wojciech Słota and Marek Kłosowicz (Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2011). An interesting account of living in Delhi in the 1970s can be found in Halina Ogrodzieńska, Może spotkamy tygrysa… [Maybe We’ll Meet a Tiger] (Warsaw: Nasza Księgarnia, 1984). Monika Żółkoś, ‘Łowcy kultur. Cykl powieści o Tomku Wilmowskim w świetle myśli postkolonialnej’ [The Hunters of Cultures: A Series of Novels on Tomek Wilmowski in the Light of Postcolonial Thought] in Studia postkolonialne nad kulturą i cywilizacją polską [Postcolonial Studies on Polish Culture and Civilization], ed. by Krzysztof Stępnik and Dariusz Trześniowski (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2010).

322 Agnieszka Sadecka Being relatively isolated from the West by then, Poles were not fully aware of the debates that began in Western academia, and of the critique of colonial discourse. Starting in the 1960s, scholars of Middle-Eastern origin residing at Western universities raised their voices against the Orientalist bias of European and American institutions. Among them were A. L. Tibawi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, and Edward W. Said, whose Orientalism is still a central reference work for postcolonial scholars today. 26 During the Cold War divide, it was clear that critiquing the West could be tantamount to supporting the East—but of the three scholars, only the Egyptian AbdelMalek toys with the idea of the Soviet Union offering an interesting alternative to traditional Orientalism. In his article, he calls for a new, more just Orientalism, and expresses the hope that the Soviet Union will provide a new way of studying and thinking about the Orient. This was an understandable expectation from Abdel-Malek, given the fascination of many anti-colonial movements with Marxism and experiments with socialism among the newly independent ex-colonies. However, he must have been unaware of how the Soviet Union was persecuting its own Muslims, as well as those Orientalist scholars who did not support the state’s propaganda.27 Publishing his book in 1978, Said is more careful than AbdelMalek, and while remaining close to Marxism, he distances himself from the Soviet Union, and does not even mention it as an alternative model. In fact, in Culture and Imperialism, he admits that Russia was a colonizing empire, though it acquired its lands in a different way than the maritime empires of the West. 28 Eventually, Said’s thoughts inspired scholars today to analyse Russian Orientalism, and to consider the Soviet Union’s relations with the Third World, or the so-called Orient.

Orientalism Made in the USSR Russia developed its own school of Orientalism. At the time of the ‘Oriental Renaissance’ which reached its peak in Western Europe in the 19th century, when increased interest in the Orient went hand in hand with ever more powerful colonialism, Russia was eager to participate in this trend. 26

27

28

See A. L. Tibawi, ‘English-Speaking Orientalists’, Islamic Quarterly, no. 8 (1964), 1-4 (pp. 25-45); Anouar Abdel-Malek, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Diogenes, 44 (1963), 104-12; and Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). See Russia and Islam: State, Society and Radicalism, ed. by Roland Dannreuther and Luke March (London: Taylor and Francis, 2010); Shireen Hunter, Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharp, 2004); The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, ed. by Michael Kemper and Stephan Conermann (London: Routledge, 2011) and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2010). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, Knopf, 1993), p. 10.

A Socialist Orientalism? 323

According to David Chioni Moore, ‘the Russians were mimicking the French and the British, to whom, again, they had long felt culturally inferior. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, colonial expansion was the price of admission into Europe’s club, and this was Russia’s ticket’. 29 Ewa Thompson notices that the strategies of the Russian Empire for colonizing foreign territories were to a great extent comparable to those of the Western colonial empires. In her book, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, she stresses the importance of the Orientalist writers and scholars who created a discourse that legitimized tsarist rule and its expansionist politics. 30 Vera Tolz, focusing on academic Orientalism, describes the founding fathers of the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies, their influence on the public opinion and the authorities, and their fate after the Bolshevik Revolution.31 She points out that there was a certain continuity between early 20th century Orientalist scholarship and the Soviet Oriental Studies established after the revolution. Some scholars were persecuted or even killed in the Gulag, but others became the patrons of the new Soviet Orientology. After some initial attempts at reading Islam in connection with Marxism and finding common elements (for instance, the idea of social justice or giving alms), the communist state by and large rejected Islam as a ‘feudal’ religion that needed to be eradicated.32 That is why, starting in the 1930s Muslims were persecuted in the Soviet Union, and research on Islam—and more generally, on the Orient—became difficult as well.33 Many Soviet Orientalists promoted this anti-religious propaganda, for instance by forming the ‘Knowledge Society’ which distributed pamphlets and sent its representatives to Muslim-dominated regions of USSR with lectures on atheism. While some Orientalists tried to preserve some independence, others in one way or the other collaborated with the Party, for instance by joining the ‘League of the Militant Godless’, a statesponsored atheist organization which, as Vladimir Bobrovnikov explained, could be helpful in their academic career. 34 The political pressure on academics was great: according to Michael Kemper, by 1940 many scholars

29 30 31 32 33 34

David Chioni Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA, 116.1 (2001), 111-128 (p. 120). Ewa Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 2. Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), Kindle for PC. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Introduction, Section 1. Kemper and Conermann, Introduction, The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, pp. 4-5. Ibid. pp. 5-6. Vladimir Bobrovnikov, ‘The Contribution of Oriental scholarship to the Soviet AntiIslamic Discourse’, in The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, pp. 67-70

324 Agnieszka Sadecka of Islam and the Orient were imprisoned, exiled, or executed.35 However, unlike in the West, the Soviet academic environment incorporated many ‘Orientals’—locals from the predominantly Muslim regions—who knew the language and culture of their ancestors and sometimes had even studied in madrasas before they were closed down by the Soviet state. Still, numerous Orientalists had high political connections with the Communist Party and the field of Orientalism as such was considerably limited by ideology and the political goals of the USSR. Generally, Conermann and Kemper observe that Soviet Oriental studies formed a discourse which was, in Said’s words, a ‘style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’,36 and promulgated an image of the Orient that somewhat resembled the Western European one. They emphasize that ‘the task of Oriental studies in the USSR was to provide information on Islam and Muslim societies abroad, with regard to foreign policy, and at home, in the Muslim areas of the USSR, where scholarship was crucial for the formation of national histories and identities’.37 Kemper and Conermann ponder the connections between academic Orientalism and Soviet foreign policy. They demonstrate that while it should be recognized that some Soviet Orientalists preceded Said—as well as European and American academic Orientalism—in their critique of Western European imperialism, their work was far from objective or apolitical. It was strongly embedded in the system of communist scholarship, and closely linked with a discourse of political propaganda that governed external relations and the image of other regions of the world. While the Soviet Orientalists set the tone of the discourse on the regions of the world considered ‘Oriental’, Polish Oriental studies of the communist era shared certain similarities with its Soviet counterpart, but remained much closer to Western Europe. There were two reasons for this: first, the pre-war Orientalist studies were preserved in better shape in Poland than in the Soviet Union (persecutions of academics in Poland was less harsh than in the USSR). Second, since the discipline’s beginnings in the 19th century, Polish Orientalists were eager to follow the European model and to participate in Western European intellectual life. A similar phenomenon occurred in the postwar era: while Polish reporters were expected to represent the socialist bloc, they were happy to be regarded as Europeans, or even to be taken for Westerners by the people of Africa and Asia. A good example of this attitude can be found in the travelogue of Jerzy Ros: he often refers to himself as a Westerner, in contrast to the Indian population,

35 36 37

Kemper and Conermann, p. 8 Ibid., pp. 2-3. Ibid.

A Socialist Orientalism? 325

and even poses as an American to be let into Goa.38 Even those reporters who were critical of British, French, or American imperialism would feel to some extent flattered by the association with the rich, ‘civilized’, Western world. In fact, Poland continued to see itself as a frontrunner of civilization, first in the interwar period, then in times of communism. Andrzej Szczerski, in his article on the colonial ambitions of the Polish Second Republic (between the two world wars), points out how various magazines and periodicals showed the colonies of the West as underdeveloped and uncivilized, strengthening already existing stereotypes and attributing any signs of modernity to ‘help’ by Westerners. In this way, they promoted the idea of an unfinished process of colonization that Poland could join, suggesting that it does not only mean economic development for the home country, but also bringing progress to the primitive inhabitants of the Third World. (pp. 55-56)39

It is striking how the accounts by the socialist reporters echo the colonialist language before the Second World War that the communists considered ‘bourgeois’ and ‘imperialist’. In an interview with Max Cegielski, the sociologist Marek Moroń remarks how socialist Poland was building relations with the East using the same blueprints for the civilizing mission as the Western empires did before; the only difference was that the mission statement was peppered with the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Still, the goal was to demonstrate Poland’s power by promoting the idea of a centrally planned economy and the priority of heavy industry. Even if, ostensively, the authorities would present a rhetoric of equality and socialist brotherhood, this did not manifest much in reality, since the underlining goal of the whole project was the extension of the Soviet ideological influence. Moroń concludes that this was a form of ‘Comintern Eurocentrism’. 40 Perhaps this spirit of ‘Comintern Eurocentrism’, supported by the expertise of Soviet Orientalists, inspired the authorities in the post-Stalin era to new styles of engagement with the so-called Oriental world. The next generation of Soviet communists decided to abandon armed interventionism and the Comintern-inspired formation of communist parties as strategies in the Third World, focusing instead on cooperation with a larger pool of countries, not only the openly socialist ones, but also the ‘radical bourgeois’ regimes such as Nasser’s Egypt, Sukharno’s 38 39

40

Jerzy Ros, p. 96. Andrzej Szczerski, ‘Kolonializm i nowoczesność. Liga Morska i Kolonialna w II Rzeczpospolitej’ [Colonialism and Modernity: The Maritime and Colonial League in the Second Republic], in Cegielski, pp. 43-66 (p. 55-56). My own translation. Cegielski, p. 87.

326 Agnieszka Sadecka Indonesia, and Nehru’s India. 41 As a result, Khrushchev started traveling abroad to meet the heads of Asian and African states and called for a revision of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. Soviet policy-makers understood that the collapse of the colonial system provided the USSR with an opportunity to gain new allies by championing the anti-imperialist struggle. Khrushchev decided to support the newly independent states, especially economically and militarily, and he also ordered a reform of the Russian research institutions. For instance, the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg reorganized and moved its headquarters to Moscow, and a few new organizations were formed. The aforementioned institute actually had to present a self-critique, in which it claimed that its work was ‘greatly harmed by a failure to understand the nature and the depth of the contradictions existing between the forces of imperialism and internal reaction on the one hand, and those of national progress in the non-socialist Eastern countries on the other’.42 The Soviets believed that progress must lead the countries of the so-called Orient to socialism, and they struggled to get as many ideological and strategic supporters as possible to join their ranks in the Cold War conflict. Khrushchev understood that not only political, but also cultural relations had to be intensified. In his speech from March 1963 on the great role of Soviet literature, he encouraged travel to foreign countries since ‘it is necessary for Soviet writers to see with their own eyes how other people live’.43 However, that mobility had to be very tightly controlled, so that the confrontation with the outside world would not lead the travellers to question the world inside the USSR. The reporters going to India would be expected to represent the socialist point of view on current issues, to be critical of colonialism and of the West in general, and to observe the development of the countries’ socialist movements. Certainly, when this kind of mood had taken hold in the USSR, Polish communists were also encouraged to join in the effort of establishing ties with the decolonized states of Africa, Asia, and South America. Thanks to this opening, it was possible for journalists such as Ryszard Kapuściński, Wojciech Giełżyński, Janusz Gołębiowski, and Wiesław Górnicki to write about these parts of the world. Analysis of their texts thus reveals that just as they are personally torn between the East and the West, their take on the observed reality is also influenced by two perspectives: the Western European, Orientalist one, and a socialist one. Two travel accounts were 41 42 43

Odd Arne Westad, Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), p. 67. Westad, p. 68, citing from Soviet periodical Sovetskoe vostokvedenie, 1 (1956), pp. 6-9. Marina Balina, ‘A Prescribed Journey: Russian Travel Literature from the 1960s to the 1980s’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 38.2 (1994), 261-270 (p. 261).

A Socialist Orientalism? 327

selected for this article to illustrate this particular way of perceiving the Oriental Other, both of them written in the 1960s by reporters visiting India. These journalists are less famous than, for instance, Kapuściński, nevertheless their texts constitute particularly interesting material to demonstrate a discourse of what can be called ‘Socialist Orientalism’.

Defying the Indian ‘Exotic’? It is significant that both Gołębiowski and Górnicki remark in their texts on how they see their own role as writers. Janusz Gołębiowski states in the introduction to his book: I came back to Delhi with confusion in my head and a resolution to write about everything that happens in India: about the extreme poverty and brave attempts of getting out of it, about the work of the Indian ‘doctor Judyms’44 and about the selfishness of some local politicians, about the economic backwardness of the country, and about the newly created islands of modern industry. This first encounter with Indians reality convinced me that in many magazines and books about this country various aspects of this reality are exaggerated—in a positive or negative way. Drawing one’s attention only to the construction of steel mills in India creates an equally distorted view of the country, as does concentrating solely on the descriptions of the masterpieces of Indian art or the mysterious practices of yogis (p. 6).45

In this declaration, we can already see the duality of the traveller’s account. He is aware that he has to adhere to a socialist point of view, but also acknowledges the existence of other narratives, often typically Orientalist (for instance, the ‘mysterious practices of the yogis’). In fact, Gołębiowski confesses that his first series of articles on India which contained ‘stories out-of-this-world’, such as ‘remote healing, belief in reincarnation, snake charming, and holy cows’ (p. 16) provoked an angry reaction from Indians studying in Europe who wrote a letter to the newspaper’s editor accusing Gołębiowski of ‘falsifying the truth about their homeland’ (p. 16) by not mentioning that India had adopted socialism as a goal. The journalist justifies himself by saying that it was a misunderstanding, as ‘it is impossible to cover everything in one article—the economic plans and the castes, the building of industry and the particular cult of the horned cattle’ (p. 16). ‘Besides,’ concludes Gołębiowski, ‘the fact that one can’t refrain from winking when describing certain aspects of Indian reality which are difficult 44

45

The main protagonist of a positivist novel by Stanisław Żeromski, Ludzie bezdomni [Homeless People] from 1900; Tomasz Judym is a doctor who sacrifices himself to help the poor. My own translation.

328 Agnieszka Sadecka to reconcile with our way of thought, does not necessarily mean a lack of sympathy towards India and its nation’ (p. 16). Gołębiowski’s defence is rather weak, as having ‘sympathy’ towards Indians does not preclude Orientalist prejudice. Indeed, ‘out-of-this-world’ stories evoke classic Orientalist fantasies: the incredible, the irrational, and the magical world of the Orient. Similarly, Jerzy Ros, mentioned earlier in this chapter, often compared the people and scenes that he encountered on his way to and around India, to characters from The Tales of One Thousand and One Nights, such as Scheherazade and Ali-Baba. Similarly, Górnicki confesses that while being aware of the stereotypes, he cannot avoid the exotic, the strange, and the fascinating. In a selfreflexive moment, he says: What can I do? I was coming to this country with the conviction that I would encounter a widespread struggle with this wretched ‘exotic’ here; that I would be carried away by the momentum of the great change, the familiar clamour of debates, the fast course of fiascos and successes, a clear contour of the future in the shadows of the past, the tangle of emerging conflicts. Were we not discussing, full of impatient curiosity, the ‘Indian path to socialism’ in the version presented by the Indian Congress Party? […] I wanted to write about power plants and bridges, to praise spinning-mills and schools, and to relentlessly avoid all that reminds the readers in my country of the banal picture of India. I wanted to scream: there exist people who defy the Indian ‘exotic’! Let’s finish with the maharajas and the yogis!’(pp. 165-166).46

Górnicki’s confession finishes abruptly and another subchapter begins. It seems as if he does not want to, or simply cannot explain what exactly happened to him, what made his attempt impossible. Was it the author that could not remain fully in line with his ideological assumptions? Or was it India’s otherness that made him recur to the well-established Orientalist pattern? His rather dramatic appeal demonstrates determination in resisting the colonial-type exoticizing discourse, but, as a skilled writer he must have realized the unfeasibility of focusing merely on the topics prescribed for propaganda, such as industrialization. While he is able to consciously resist the Orientalist stereotypes, he does not refrain from lecturing readers and offering his views on what Indians should do. This fact, even more than any romantic fantasies on India, demonstrates his Orientalism: Górnicki believes he possesses superior knowledge about the country. He criticizes the government of independent India for giving too many privileges to the aristocracy, and he calls for confiscating the wealth of the maharajas. He even lists—in points—what steps should be undertaken towards fulfilling 46

My own translation.

A Socialist Orientalism? 329

that goal. Gołębiowski speaks in a similar tone: he is disappointed with the insufficient support that India’s leaders give to the communist movement in the country. He also finds Nehru too weak, allowing, as a result, for ‘reactionaries’ and “right-wing circles’ to sympathize with the Dalai Lama,47 whom he calls ‘the highest representative of the religious-feudal Tibetan hierarchy’ (p. 22). This way of describing the Dalai Lama is characteristic of the hostile approach of the Polish reporters to all religions. Whether it is Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism—the authors use an ironic tone, regarding spiritual beliefs as ‘traditionalist’, ‘backward’, or ‘superstitious’. When talking about Islam, Gołębiowski mentions ‘reactionary Muslim elements’ (p. 79), supposedly encouraged by ‘subversive instigators’ from Pakistan, and when writing about Sikhism he describes their ‘exotic appearance—a beard and an elaborately tied turban’ (p. 73). In case of Hinduism, the journalist’s attitude is somewhat conflicted: on the one hand, he is critical of the caste system, of the sadhus who ‘prey on human ignorance’ (p. 87), and of other Indian customs, but he does not hesitate to use them to his advantage: when invited for a meal that does not seem very appealing, he says: ‘my caste forbids me to eat this’ (p. 61). Moreover, reporters from communist Poland fall into an ideological trap: how to promote atheism, and at the same time respect India’s cultural tradition, strongly rooted in religion? As a result, their texts are often inconsistent and a common strategy that they adopt is irony. In one chapter, they mock Hindus for letting cows freely on the streets, but in another they lecture readers on how one cannot judge another culture by the same measure as one’s own. Both reporters maintain a rather friendly tone when talking about Indians, though they underline what changes should be introduced in Indian society to make it modern. David Spurr, the author of The Rhetoric of Empire, explains that domination by inclusion and domestication was typical for the imperial mind-set, since it made the civilizing mission seem more justified: Hence the impulse […] to see colonized peoples as ultimately sympathetic to the colonizing mission and to see that mission itself as a bringing together the peoples of the world in the name of a common humanity.48

Another characteristic trait of Polish travel texts from that period is to draw parallels with their homeland. This can be considered a form of 47 48

Gołębiowski intentionally refuses to use capital letters in the title of the Tibetan spiritual leader, calling him ‘dalailama’. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), p. 32.

330 Agnieszka Sadecka domestication, but it also served an ideological function. Górnicki describes the social hierarchy of Chandigarh’s districts, comparing it with Warsaw, to finally conclude that ‘even socialism does not do away with the notion of a ‘good [prestigious] address’, at least among the well-off sections of a society’ (p. 144). Many statements seem to have a purely political message directed at the Polish audience—to affirm the reporter’s ideological orientation or to appeal to the Polish readers. For instance, Górnicki’s reportage from Trivandrum and his visit to the local Catholic Church takes an interesting form: every paragraph starts with a phrase from the Pater Noster prayer (in Latin) and serves as an introduction to a critique of Catholicism. For instance, Górnicki says: ‘Pater noster qui es in coelis… Our father? But whose father, the father of the plantation owners?’ (p. 197). He explains that over 30% of the spice plantations belong to the Vatican, and the rest to European and Indian landowners (referred to as ‘kulaks’, p. 197). As a conclusion, he declares: ‘Here, one can put a sign of equality between Catholicism, plantation owners, and the European missionaries’ (p. 198). He goes on to explain the political situation in Kerala, and ends with the final line of prayer: …sed libera nos a malo… From the evil. From the missionaries, carrying the Bible in one hand, and a cost-benefits analysis in the other. From the church of the planters. From the alliance of black sotnia of the four different religions. From all the situations that enable the Catholic Church to have political activity. Amen.49

This literary trick is interesting, as Górnicki uses his ideological opponents’ weapon—the prayer—to prevail over them. He interprets the words of the prayer to convince the readers of how his worldview is superior to the Indians’, how the words they believe in are, as a matter of fact, a lie. While the situation of Christians in India might be an interesting topic for a reporter, it certainly is not the most prominent issue for most travel writers documenting their visit to the subcontinent. Thus, it seems that Górnicki is particularly intent on ridiculing the Catholic Church because by doing that, he targets his Polish readers. As it was underlined in his introduction, Górnicki is at times selfcritical—he realizes that European science is not always thought of very highly by his Indian interlocutors. In fact, he often quotes them; for instance, he cites a doctor of traditional medicine, who said to him: —You, Sir, as every European, […] suspect here some black magic and shamanic tricks. Oh, please, do not deny it, I can see it very well. All visitors from Europe

49

My own translation.

A Socialist Orientalism? 331 and America take us for charlatans, and our respected colleagues, medical doctors, even fear we poison our patients. However, do not be troubled by this, you people are rather talented and perhaps in some three hundred years you will stop being arrogant. In fact, your Hippocrates, my dear guest, could not tell a heart from a stomach, while already then we were able to cure complex cases of paralysis.50

Clearly, although he praises Polish development in a truly socialist spirit of optimism, Górnicki does not hesitate to include the perspective of the Other in his book. Although he does not fully let go of his ironic approach to non-Western medicine, he nevertheless tries to show his readers the logic behind Indian traditional knowledge. Also, he acknowledges that Indians are far from expressing only unconditional appreciation of European modernity. Europe is not always associated with progress and cultural or technical superiority—on the contrary, given the long history of Indian science and art, Górnicki’s interlocutors can rightly be proud of their culture and dismiss the Western, Eurocentric point of view. Górnicki’s ego is somewhat damaged by the Indian doctor’s disparaging remarks about how young and foolish the European nations are. The doctor says: ‘A long time ago, I became used to your [Western] impulsiveness and your comic arrogance. It is a rather common phenomenon among young nations’ (p. 211). Though rather upset by this remark, Górnicki still decides to relate this encounter in his travelogue. He concludes the chapter recalling the words of the doctor, who declares that contrary to Western science, he and his colleagues are not trying to convince anyone of their methods. In this way, the Indian expresses his belief in cultural autonomy and respect for the methods of others—he implies that just as Indian hakims do not try to spread their discipline globally, the European and American scientists should not try to impose their methods. Such a remark, at the end of the chapter, seems to be a sign from the author that in spite of believing in socialist modernity, he is also open to a different perspective, as he allows the possibility of Indian doctors being right in their attachment to tradition and justified in their lack of scientific arrogance. The line dividing the two stereotypical constructions, one of the ‘Enlightened, modern’ European (whether Eastern or Western), and the ‘superstitious, traditional’ Indian, is thus blurred.

A Socialist Orientalism? Edward Said claimed that Orientalist representations were so deeply ingrained in Europeans’ imagery that ‘every European, in what he could say 50

Górnicki, p. 209. My own translation.

332 Agnieszka Sadecka about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’.51 This was the case in colonial times. Did the situation change after the end of colonialism? There are three alternatives, according to Said: 1) to pretend nothing has changed and continue with ‘traditional’ Orientalism; 2) to adapt Orientalism to new reality; or 3) to give up on Orientalism altogether.52 Polish socialist reporters seem to combine all three approaches: on the surface of things, the reporters do away with Orientalism—after all, they represent the communist bloc, which wants to present itself as the antithesis of Western imperialists. Nevertheless, the reporters would sometimes continue to see India through the lens of The Jungle Book, referring to stereotypes that they know well from their pre-war, pre-socialist education. But they are also conscious of how inappropriate such an approach can be. So instead they try to develop a socialist perspective on India, which, unfortunately at times seems to be yet another form, or adaptation, of Orientalism. Even though they are aware of the need of a new language to describe the recently decolonized countries, they are still white Europeans arriving to India with an assumption of having superior knowledge. And this is largely what Orientalism—in Said’s understanding of the term—is about. In the preface to the new edition of his book, published in 2005, the scholar differentiates between two types of knowledge: one that serves the purpose of understanding the Other, and the knowledge that leads to domination. Whilst the Soviet Union obviously did not want to conquer India in the way the British or the Portuguese did, it still wanted to exert political, social, and cultural influence on the NonAligned states. Despite the fact that the Polish reporters condemn the colonizing powers and present themselves as friendly observers, their tone is often prescriptive and didactic: they assume they know better what should be done in India, what should change, which customs should be abandoned, and how the country ought to be governed. Said believes that ‘every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.’ 53 The Soviet Union was also trying to issue such a propaganda message, confirming its support for the newly independent nations and trying to align them on its side. While certain actions undertaken as part of this agenda, such as offering scholarships, assistance in development projects or scientific cooperation, could have been beneficial to India, the overall aim was to spread the socialist model—a sort of a new mission civilisatrice. 51 52 53

Said (1978), p. 204. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. xvi.

A Socialist Orientalism? 333

The travel reporters, since their journeys were not private ones, were to some extent, more or less consciously the agents of this mission. As Marina Balina points out, the Soviet travel writers ‘…were making a komandirovka, literally a “command performance”, both in their journey and in print’.54 In Polish socialist travelogues, this feeling is intensified by the instructions that the narrator gives to the readers, as if they were just about to embark on a similar journey: do not use stereotypes, try to understand India, accept the strange customs and the ‘backward’ social order. Thus, the reader is to a certain degree a participant in the journey, although there is no doubt that the real position of authority remains with the narrator—he is the one possessing the knowledge, only he is able to explain India’s reality and offer an interpretation of it. The seemingly neutral and objective account is invariably broken with instances where the author’s ego is displayed—the reporters boast about how they tried to convince the Indians of how inappropriate the caste system is (Górnicki), retell their exploits, and sometimes cannot hide their emotions and reflections, or even their biases. They are in an ambivalent position of having an ideological mission to fulfil, but at the same time they cannot resist following in the footsteps of their Western predecessors, demonstrating their superiority and civilizational advancement. That is why the representations of India in travelogues from the communist period can be considered as part of a particular Orientalizing discourse, a sort of ‘Socialist Orientalism’.

54

Balina, p. 263.

Part V: Between the East and the West: The Colonial Present

Mykola Riabchuk

Ukrainian Culture after Communism: Between Post-Colonial Liberation and Neo-Colonial Subjugation Abstract: Ukraine’s ambiguous postcommunist development has been largely determined by the country’s peculiar regional composition and the very different historical experiences of each region. Ukraine is probably the only postcommunist nation with all three types of colonial experience. Whereas the western part of the country had already acquired a strong national identity by the time of the Soviet occupation and therefore never internalized the feeling of cultural inferiority vis-à-vis the occupiers, southeast Ukraine as a no-man’s-land experienced settler colonization under imperial auspices. The centre, however, experienced a dynastic type of colonization with its own peculiarities starting in the 18th century. All of this has given rise to today’s complex interactions of different identities and nationalisms, primarily of the ‘aboriginal’ and ‘Creole’ types, which inhere in different models of cultural development: postcolonial, anti-colonial, and neo-colonial. The chapter examines the interactions of the respective discourses in the cultural and political fields as related specifically to identity issues and language policies.

In 1988, at the midpoint of Gorbachev’s perestroika, a leading Ukrainian intellectual Ivan Dziuba published the article ‘Do we Perceive Ukrainian Culture as Integrity?’ which became an important event in the cultural life of the time, and seems not to have lost its relevance even today. Despite all the inevitable censorial and self-censorial limitations, the author not only dared to mention an open secret—the lack of integrity in Ukrainian culture—but also to imply that structural incompleteness and dysfunctionality reflected its colonial status, and that they were the result of specific repressive policies pursued by both institutional and discursive means. Firstly, a whole range of its sections are weakened, and some are entirely missing. Secondly, the Ukrainian language does not fulfil all of its social and cultural functions, and national language is, after all, the backbone of a national culture. Even non-verbal art forms are linked to a language through imagination which is formulated via language and even through its sounds […] But insofar as the entire social and cultural strata, especially the technical and scientific intelligentsia, and citizens in general retreat from Ukrainian language, this not only narrows the sphere of usage of the Ukrainian word […] It also dramatically depletes Ukrainian speech, reduces its intellectual and spiritual potential, and ultimately emasculates Ukrainian national culture in general. The national culture consists not only of works of professional and folk art, which represent just its apex. Its basis is made up primarily of the daily life of words and thoughts, of numerous spiritual acts articulated in speech.1

1

Ivan Dziuba, ‘Chy usvidomliuyemo my ukrayinsku kulturu yak tsilisnist?’ [Do We Perceive Ukrainian Culture as Integrity?], Nauka i kultura. Ukraina, 22 (1988), 309325 (p. 313).

338 Mykola Riabchuk Ivan Dziuba further refers to the 19th-century Ukrainian linguist Alexander Potebnia, letting readers understand that his own interpretation of the language as ‘the core of the national culture’ is neither new, nor too revolutionary (nor, as it might have seemed at the time of the publication, seditious). The full-scale functioning of culture depends on full-scale functioning of the language—in all spheres of life and all subcultures, both formal and informal. Simple as it may seem, this obvious truth still has not been put into practice, which can be observed, for instance, in the widespread complaints about the absence or underdevelopment of Ukrainian cinematography. 2 All its achievements, indeed, belong to either silent cinema or genres with a peculiar, rather restrained, or highly conventional language use (documentaries, cartoons, and films on historical or rural topics), or very short, experimental forms. As the most mimetic genre, fully and directly connected to reality, including language, cinematography is not able to authentically voice all the layers of modern life. The point is not that the language resources are insufficient; in fact, since the intense Kulturwerk of the 1920s, Ukrainian is rich enough to translate a wide range of the most sophisticated texts—from Plato and Shakespeare to Hegel and Wittgenstein, or to wittily dub foreign films of all genres. But it is one matter to assume a priori that we are watching a foreign film and embracing the translating convention, and quite another to watch Ukrainian films, which usually have the artificial sound of bad translations. One may attribute the problem to the fact that most actors (as well as filmmakers) use Russian as their primary language for daily communication, and therefore their Ukrainian is just too dry, rigid, devoid of nuances and altogether less suitable for impromptu improvisations. Yet, as Ivan Dziuba implied, the problem is more complex. It relates to the lack of integrity in the national culture at the level of synergistic interactions among various genres and at the level of personal communication—interactions of artists and artistic environments. A great number of Ukrainian artists still function, both mentally and institutionally, within the framework of a provincial part of an imperial culture. From this framework they derive not only cultural codes and reference points but also self-colonizing inferiority and ignorance2

See, e.g., Igor Lesev, ‘Pochemu ukrainskogo kino net i ne budet?’ [Why is There No Ukrainian Cinema and Never Will Be?], Obozrevatel, 21 October 2014, available at Accessed 4 November 2014; Oleg Kohan, ‘Snimat kino v Ukraine segonia—srodni geroizmu’ [To Make Films in Ukraine Today is Tantamount to Heroism], Telekritika, 26 July 2014, available at Accessed 4 November 2014; ‘Ukrayinske kino: pohliad z Kanady’ [The Ukrainian Cinema: A View from Canada], Novyi shliakh, 24 September 2014, available at Accessed 4 November 2014.

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based and arrogance-driven attitudes towards the national heritage and their own colleagues’ works. They often lack the subtle cultural and linguistic instruments needed to actively collaborate with other Ukrainian artists or creatively improvise in the field of Ukrainian culture. Cinema as the most syncretic genre perfectly reveals the absence of synergistic interaction among its creators at the individual level and, more widely, an absence of interaction among them and the national culture—at the level of language-cultural codes and ability to improvise in the broadest allusive-associative, or intonation, ranges. Looking back today at the 25-year-old publication, we have to acknowledge that, judging by its social status, Ukrainian culture has not yet become the culture of a sovereign nation, despite years of national independence and its broad base; namely, that it functions across the entire national territory, more or less embraces the whole population, and bases itself on codes understandable for most citizens and is the language naturally used in everyday life. In a sense, the situation of Ukraine resembles that of Ireland, where neither national independence nor the official status of Gaelic language has ensured the full-fledged functioning of the language and Gaelic-based culture.3 At least, this is how the post- (or neo-) colonial situation is perceived by many Ukrainians. Most of them do agree on the symbolic value of Ukrainian language and firmly support its official status and the need to teach it at schools. They split, however, on the issue of its practical use: either Ukrainian should be promoted to the status of the main national language of daily communication, or relegated to a purely decorative, ceremonial role vis-à-vis the dominant Russian. In other words, while the Ukrainophones strive to bring Ukrainian de facto up to the status it holds de jure, the Russophones strive to secure de jure the de facto dominant status Russian already enjoys. Their primary tactic is attempting to grant it the status of the country’s “second” official language, which in practice would mean it would become the first and only language really employed (a case which is graphically confirmed not only by the Irish, but also in the historical Soviet Union, and today’s Belarus). The cultural and linguistic situation in both Ireland and Ukraine (and, for that matter, the one in Belarus) resulted from centuries of colonial subjugation, oppression, and forceful assimilation of the ‘lesser’, subaltern 3

‘The Irish language is unique in that its constitutional status goes far beyond mere recognition and confers upon it the privileged position of national and first official language of the State. But its de facto minority status has been largely ignored.’ Bill Bowring, ‘Law in a Linguistic Battlefield: The Language of the New State versus the “Language of the Oppressors” in Ukraine’, Language & Law, 1 (2012), available at Accessed 4 November 2014.

340 Mykola Riabchuk people by the dominant group. The large-scale Russification processes in Ukraine, as many historians argue, 4 coincided with the twin processes of modernization and urbanization. A huge gap between things Ukrainian and things modern opened up in the 19th century, and has largely persisted to the present day. Not only did the indigenous population (Ukrainophone Ukrainians) become a minority in their own country vis-à-vis the dominant Russophones, but the Ukrainophone world became firmly associated with village backwardness and bumpkinness.5 In fact, this world became a kind of ‘inner colony’, a local ‘Third World’ of kolkhoz slaves that provided the ‘First World’ of the higher (Russophone) civilization with cheap labour. Under these circumstances, the Ukrainian culture was not merely a minority culture within the Russian and, eventually, Soviet empires. It was— and still remains, to a certain degree—a sort of diaspora culture of rural emigrants within the dominant culture of the urban Russophone world (with the minor exception of Western Ukraine, where the urban milieu is predominantly Ukrainophone). The popular culture functions, in many regards, as a regional, provincial part of the imperial, ‘all-Russian’ culture.6 This is how it is perceived not only in the metropolis but, largely, in Ukraine itself as well. As to the ‘high’ Ukrainian culture, largely deprived of diversity of various mutually enriching connections with the mass culture, and locked thereby in an ethnic ghetto, it functions de facto as a minority culture in what otherwise seems to be its own sovereign country, marginalized by foreign discursive power and dominant post-imperial, creole-type institutions. Without radical political changes and systematically overcoming the colonial legacy (which also requires political will), the full-fledged functioning of Ukrainian culture in Ukraine seems to be problematic. The totality of bright cultural phenomena does not transform into functional integrity and does not create a flush cultural process. Popular culture is rather an index than a factor of this integrity (or in our case, of its absence), which Ivan Dziuba seems to have been one of the first Ukrainian intellectuals to clearly realize: The completeness of functioning of the national culture requires developed mass culture and entertaining genres and forms [...] of all youthful and urban subcultures. We tend to think that none of these are necessary. […] We seem to 4 5 6

Orest Subtelny, Ukraine. A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 260-278. C.f. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). Serhy Yekelchyk, ‘Shcho ukrayinskoho v ukrayinskiy pop-kulturi?’ [What is Ukrainian about Ukrainian Pop Culture?], Krytyka, 15.3-4 (2011), 24-28.

Ukrainian Culture after Communism 341 need only masterpieces of high art. But there will not and cannot be any without the substrate of the mass culture, without the possibility for the culture to fully function on all its levels and in all its sections, without interactions and counteractions, rejections and oppositions, clashes of different trends, tendencies, tastes, and qualities.7

One may note that the tendency to oppose ‘entertaining’ (popular) and ‘serious’ (high) culture is very old and observable not only in Ukraine. However, here this opposition has acquired specific features because of the colonial character of Tsarist Russia and the nearly complete absence of high—educated and wealthy—social strata as the main consumers and promoters of Ukrainian ‘high’ culture. During nearly all of the 19th century, the small Ukrainian intelligentsia in Dnieper Ukraine (the Russian-ruled part of the country) satisfied its needs for high culture from Russian sources and was very uncertain about the possibility of creating its own high culture, even though the first brilliant work in the Ukrainian vernacular, Ivan Kotliarevsky’s mock-heroic poem Aeneid, was published as early as 1798, the first grammar of modern Ukrainian appeared in 1818, and the first dictionary in 1855.8 Nevertheless, until the last quarter of the 19th century the Ukrainian intelligentsia viewed itself and its mission largely through the eyes of the ‘Other’—the dominating imperial culture that regarded Ukrainian culture as, at most, a harmless regionalism, or a kind of an

7 8

Dziuba, p. 321. The 18th century marked a dramatic watershed in the development of Ukrainian literature. For seven centuries, since the adoption of Christianity, all the literacy in Rus and eventually in Muscovy and Ruthenia was based on Old Church Slavonic, with the increasing absorption of vernacular forms from local dialects. The 17th century was the high point of Ukrainian Baroque literature, incomparably richer that the Russian literature of the time. Both were produced in a bookish; i.e., non-spoken, largely arificial (Church Slavonic-based) language unsuitable for modern times. It took the whole 18th century to gradually vernacularize that language in Russia—a process that had been firmly completed only in the 1820s by Alexander Pushkin. In Ukraine, after the autonomy of the Cossack state was abolished in 1764, the development of literature in old (bookish) Ukrainian was undermined by the removal of that language from the administration and ecclesiastic life, as well as by the advance of an increasingly modernized culture and literature from the imperial capital. So modern Ukrainian literature as well as literary language had to be constructed not from the top down—from the bookish ‘Slavonic’ to the vernacular, as happened in Russia, but from the bottom up—from the vernacular to a gradual appropriation of high lexicon and style, largely but still not sufficiently completed in the 1840s by Taras Shevchenko.

342 Mykola Riabchuk auxiliary capable of enriching the all-Russian culture with dialect forms and local colour.9 The essence of the approach is represented in articles by leading Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, particularly in his review of the Ukrainian almanac Lastivka and the ‘Little-Russian’ opera Svatannia (1841) by Hryhory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko: The Little-Russian language really existed in the times of Little-Russia’s 10 independence and still exists—in the monuments of folk poetry of the glorious times. But it does not mean that they had their own literature: folk poetry does not form literature yet […] Literature is usually written for the public, and by public we mean the class of the society for which reading is a recurrent pursuit, a necessity[…] A Russian novelist can show people of all social strata and make all of them speak their own language: an educated person speaks educated language, a merchant—the language of merchants, a soldier—the language of soldiers, a peasant—the language of peasants. The Little-Russian dialect is the same for all strata—the peasant one. Therefore, our Little-Russian writers and poets write short stories about everyday life. The contents of such short stories are always the same, and they are mainly interested in peasant naiveté and the naive charm of the peasant dialect [...] Fine literature it is! It breathes only the simplicity of the peasant language and rusticity of the peasant mind!11

Belinsky, however regrettable it may be for many Ukrainians, was right about almost everything, including the opposition of Russian ‘high’ and Ukrainian ‘low’ cultures, or the Russian language, which was increasingly elaborated and institutionalized language versus Ukrainian, which was an increasingly ostracized and, from 1861 onward, officially forbidden vernacular. He was wrong, however, in one crucial detail. The situation he aptly, albeit sarcastically described, did not emerge as a result of some metaphysical ‘laws of history’, a consequence of supposed historical determinism. It was a certain social construct, a product of a specific policy of the tsarist administration in the occupied territories. A somewhat different policy of the Austrian administration in Ukrainian Galicia created a profoundly different situation there (or, at least, did not hinder its development). 9

10 11

Hryhory Hrabovych, ‘Hohol i mif Ukrayiny’ [George Grabowicz, ‘Gogol and the Myth of Ukraine’], Suchasnist, 34.9 &10 (1994), 77-96 &137-151; also Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, ‘Modeling Culture in the Empire: Ukrainian Modernism and the Death of the All-Russian Idea’, in Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter 1600-1945, ed. by Andreas Kappeler et al. (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2003), pp. 298-324. The official name of Ukraine in the Russian Empire, perceived by modern Ukrainians as derogatory. Vissarion Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Works], 13 vols. (Moscow: Akademia nauk, 1954), vol. V, pp. 176-179.

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Moreover, the cultural situation in Lithuania, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia turned out to be entirely different since after 1918, the newly established national governments took care of it. Belinsky’s determinist claims that the Little-Russian nobility ‘accepted the Russian language and Russian-European traditions in their lifestyle due to historical necessity’ simply mystifies the specific needs and repressive policies of the empire as a quasi-Hegelian ‘historical necessity’. In actuality, until the first decades of the 18th century, Muscovy had no cultural superiority over Ukraine (called Rus/Ruthenia at the time) and the assimilation of Ukrainian elites (mostly clergy and Cossack gentry) into the Russian culture was by no means predetermined. On the contrary, it was the educated Ukrainians who played a key role in the modernization/Westernization of the Oriental Muscovy and its transformation into the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, as he reasonably hired the bulk of his cadres from the newly-acquired and culturally superior territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was, paradoxically, the Ukrainian, Western-educated intellectuals who had not only assisted Peter I in his modernizing efforts but also created the founding myth of the Russian Empire—the myth of the ‘thousand-year-old Russian state’, conceived as a mutual property of both the Muscovites (the ‘Great Russians’) and the Ukrainians (the ‘Little Russians’) under the common crown.12 The concept of ‘Little Russia’ and ‘Great Russia’ was an apparent product of a European humanism enthralled with ancient, primarily Roman and Greek, history. Within this framework, ‘Little Russia’ referred to the core lands of historical Rus while ‘Great Russia’ (like the ancient ‘Greater Greece’) referred to the lands of eventual colonization. The Ukrainian intellectuals who did the job pursued no nationalistic agenda in modern terms. Their interest was first and foremost corporatist—to assert their special role and therefore the status of their group within the new political milieu that emerged after part of Ukraine broke away from Poland (in 1654) and made alliance with Muscovy. The historical (and symbolical) analogue between Little Rus and Little Greece as Greece proper was to grant Ukrainians the central status within the newly-born empire and bestow upon their land a special symbolic role as the cradle of Russian/Rus civilization. (One may compare this logic to today’s Alexander Lukashenko’s claim that ‘Belarusians are actually Russians but with a mark of quality’ [‘so znakom kachestva’]). 12

Zenon Kohut, ‘The Question of Russo-Ukrainian Unity and Ukrainian Distinctiveness in Early Modern Ukrainian Thought and Culture’, in Culture, Nation, and Identity, pp. 57-86.

344 Mykola Riabchuk The Greek-style model, however, was soon reversed, and Realpolitik predictably gained the upper hand over historical symbolism. Great Rus naturally became the central part of the empire, while Little Rus was downgraded to the status of its provincial appendage. The ‘Kievan Russia’ myth as a founding myth of the Russian Empire was institutionalized and ultimately promoted to the level of an internationally recognized ‘scientific truth’. The main goal of the myth was to make Rus into Russia, to establish an imaginary continuity between the medieval multi-tribal entity centred in Kyiv and a modern nationalizing empire centred in St. Petersburg. To achieve this aim, a number of manipulations were required. First, a loose conglomerate of dynastically connected East Slavonic duchies was upgraded to the level of a medieval ‘empire’—allegedly a precursor and prefiguration of Peter the Great’s eventual project. Second, the minor and marginal Duchy of Muscovy that had gradually managed, under Mongol-Tatar auspices, to subjugate its neighbours was upgraded to the status of the direct successor of Kyiv—even though no idea of the historical continuity had ever existed in Muscovy until the end of the 17th century.13 And finally, the Latinized form of ‘Rus’ (‘Rus-sia’) was coined to replace the traditional name ‘Muscovy’ and prove the imagined connection with Rus phonetically as well. One may recollect here a long list of similar ‘invented traditions’, including the 18th-century invention of ‘Romania’ as an imaginary successor to ancient Rome, or the earlier invention of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. The invention of ‘Russia’, however, had much more serious political implications. First, it legitimized territorial claims to the arguably ‘Russian’ lands held by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, specifically, to the city of Kyiv which had never belonged to Muscovy but became an object of ‘legitimate’ claim by Muscovy-turned-‘Russia’. And second, the invented continuity delegitimized the very existence of Ukrainians and Belarusians since all of them were declared merely ‘Russians’—notwithstanding the fact that they had little in common with Muscovites by that time. Indeed, since the mid-13th century the East Slavonic duchies belonged to entirely different civilizations—the European (Polish-Lithuanian) in the west, where the Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities had eventually evolved, and the Oriental (Golden Horde) in the east, where Muscovites/Russians emerged from the local Slavonic and Finno-Ugric tribes. Even religion—the Orthodox Christianity that seemed to be common 13

Edward Keenan, ‘On Certain Mythical Beliefs and Russian Behaviors’, in The Legacy of History in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, ed. by S. Frederick Starr (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 19-40.

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for the both parts of Rus, played a fundamentally different role in Muscovy where it was etatized and frozen in obscurantism, and in Ruthenia (eventual Belarus and Ukraine) where it had to cope, like the Protestants elsewhere, with the pressure of the (Polish) Catholic state and to rely primarily on civil society and its own intellectual flexibility and polemical skills.14 Even today, after two centuries of Russification/Sovietization, the Ukrainians substantially differ from the Russians in their political culture and valuebased attitudes; Ukrainian language is still much closer to Belarusian and even, lexically, to Polish than to Russian (which was heavily Bulgarized via Old Church Slavonic, the primary base of Russian high culture and literacy). Moreover, Ukrainian Christianity, even after the forceful elimination of the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church in the early 19th century, still remains much more open to western influences and ecumenical trends. Russian imperial policy vis-à-vis the Ukrainian movement had noticeably varied under both tsars and commissars but its ultimate goal—assimilation and dissolution of Ukrainians within the Greater Russian (eventually ‘Soviet’) nation—remained the same. Soviet policy was more ambiguous and, in fact, more perfidious that the tsarist (which simply denied Ukrainians’ existence and tried to ban all things Ukrainian). The Soviets, after a brief concession to the national aspirations of various minorities in the 1920s, commenced heavy repressions, especially in the 1930s, that were especially harsh in Ukraine, and they continued with their double-track nationality policy through the 1980s. In short, the Soviet approach meant, on the one hand, a formal recognition of various nationalities and their cultural rights, including publishing and education in their native languages, yet, on the other, there was a programmatic attempt at fusing all the nationalities into one ‘Soviet nation’ with the predictably Russian cultural and linguistic core. The Ukrainians (and Belarusians) as the closest groups were the first targets of this fusion. In practice, this was like an example of typical Orwellian doublethink: officially, the Communist Party (de facto equivalent to the state) supported institutionalized Ukrainian culture (schools, theatres, publishing houses, and even the Academy of Sciences), but unofficially did everything possible to undermine, marginalize, and discredit it in recipients’ eyes. The schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction made little sense insofar as almost all higher education and eventual employment were in Russian; theatres were downgraded to the old-fashioned ethnographism and insipid communist propaganda; Ukrainian publishing was double-checked to prevent any ideological deviation, and even translations, including works by Marx and 14

Dennis Soltys, ‘Shifting Civilizational Borders in Orange Ukraine’, International Journal, 61.1 (2005), 161-178.

346 Mykola Riabchuk Engels, had to be done from Russian only; whereas the Academy of Sciences, after the bloody purges of the 1930s, became notorious for its servility and parochialism rather than famous for any achievements in the humanities. Starting in the 1930s, even the Ukrainian language was persistently doctored to bring it closer to Russian—lexically, grammatically, and even phonetically.15 Moreover, whoever tried to challenge this policy or even question any of its controversial aspects was immediately relegated to the camp of ‘bourgeois nationalists’’, i.e. the ‘enemies of the people’, since the term was in fact tantamount to a criminal accusation—exactly like the term ‘Zionist’ applied arbitrarily to anyone concerned with the preservation of an ethnic culture and identity. Even the public use of Ukrainian beyond some ritualistic purposes was suspicious; only uneducated peasants were allowed to freely use it in daily life, confirming thereby the popular view of Ukrainian as a crude dialect unsuitable for any serious conversation. As an American Sovietologist aptly observed back in 1987: Language use has a potent symbolic quality in a politicized linguistic environment: it immediately assigns the user to one of two sides of the ideological barricade [...] The use of Ukrainian, they [the dissidents] realized, is tantamount to opposition to the Soviet state [...] Although no laws forbid deviations from this behavioural norm (as one Soviet Ukrainian representative once told me, no one ‘is holding a gun to their heads’), non-Russians in general and Ukrainians in particular appear to understand that insistence on speaking one’s native language—especially among the Russians—will be perceived as a rejection of the ‘friendship of peoples’ and as hostility to the ‘Soviet people’. Few Ukrainians are audacious enough to risk such unpleasantness as public censure, loss of employment, or even jail for the sake of linguistic purity. As a result, they signal their loyalty to the state and sidestep chauvinist reactions by speaking Russian.16

In sum, in the Soviet Union all non-Russian cultures, and Ukrainian in particular, had to flourish officially in a propagandistic show-window, but in fact had to be as provincial, non-modern, purely ethnographic, and obsolete as possible. This is quite a familiar situation for students of colonialism who 15

16

Ukrayinska mova u XX storichchi: istoriya ligvocydu. Dokumenty i materialy [Ukrainian Language in the 20th Century: The History of a Linguocide. Documents and materials], ed. by Larysa Masenko (Kyiv: KM Academia, 2005); Larysa Masenko, Język i społeczeństwo: wymiar postkolonialny [Language and Society: The Postcolonial Dimension], trans. into Polish by A. Bracki (Gdańsk: Wyd-wo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2008). Alexander Motyl, Will the Non-Russians Rebel? State, Ethnicity and Stability in the USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987), pp. 100-101. One may notice also a similar ‘antiestablishment’ use of Belarusian in today’s Belarus.

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define ‘cultural phenomena (works of art, cultural institutions, processes in the cultural life of a society) as colonial if they contribute to the entrenchment or development of the imperial power—by diminishing the prestige, narrowing the field of operation, limiting the visibility of, or even destroying, that which is local, autochthonous, in a word, colonial, while underscoring the dignity, global significance, modernity, necessity and naturalness of that which is metropolitan or central.’17 The structural deformations inflicted by centuries of colonialism have both qualitative and quantitative dimensions. In purely demographic terms, the crucial preponderance of Russian-speakers over Ukrainian-speakers stems from the highly unequal level of their urbanization. Historically, the Russophone population had been concentrated primarily in big cities, which still provide urbanites much better access to education, cultural goods, higher earnings, professional careers, and other social advantages. According to the last census (2001), there were 8,068,992 Russians in Ukraine, of which 1,462,950, or 18%, had higher education. Among the ethnic Ukrainians, the proportion of people with higher education was significantly lower—only 11% (3,942,938 out of 35,475,295). 18 Since higher education (and urbanization in general) in Ukraine traditionally promoted the policy of Russification (which changed only partly after 1991 in Central Ukraine but not in the southeast), the percentage of educated people among the Ukrainian speakers is even lower (9%) than among ethnic Ukrainians, while among Russian speakers it is even higher (19%) than among ethnic Russians. The numerical as well as social/structural preponderance of the Russophones over Ukrainophones in the urban milieu in general and some crucial fields (slightly resembling the white/black imbalance in South Africa) has been further exacerbated by the feckless, incompetent and incoherent policy of Ukraine’s governments since 1991, which can be fairly described as laissez faire, even though some degree of Soviet-style protectionism in the cultural field remained. The laissez-faire policy clearly benefited the Russophones as stronger players and exasperated the Ukrainophones, who increasingly complained about the de facto ‘Creole’ character of the Ukrainian state, which was largely alien to the ‘aborigines’. As the prominent Ukrainian intellectual and long-term political prisoner Yevhen Sverstiuk put it, 17

18

Marko Pavlyshyn, ‘Shcho pere-tvoriuyetsya v Re-kreatsiyakh Yuriya Andrukhovycha?’ [What is Re-created in Yurii Andrukhovych’s Recreations?], Suchasnist, 33.12 (1993), 115-144 (p. 116). Volodymyr Yevtukh, Volodymyr Troshchynsky, Etnonatsionalna struktura ukrainskoho suspilstva [Ethnonational Structure of the Ukrainian Society] (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 2004), p. 332.

348 Mykola Riabchuk The state has been called Ukrainian but nothing has changed, besides phraseology [...] The state power, the state authorities are the same. The Ukrainian language and culture, and culture in general, have always been alien for the Soviet nomenklatura which still rules the country [...] Lack of national will at the top gives a carte blanche to a predominantly Ukrainophobic bureaucracy which still lives with old stereotypes of intolerance [...] The linguistic situation in Ukraine reflects the social situation. The Ukrainian people have always been wretched in Ukraine—and they are still are.19

Sverstiuk’s younger colleague—the philosopher and publicist Serhy Hrabovsky—expressed a similar view in 1999, with an even greater dose of resentment and pessimism: Again, like ten years ago [i.e., before independence in 1991], a child could be derided by another children in the yard just because he or she speaks Ukrainian. The print of Ukrainian publications is miserable. Ukrainian books are virtually absent in book stores. And more than one third of Ukrainian citizens come out against national independence. […] Neither a culturally nor politically independent Ukraine (in the real sense of the word) seems to be possible for a long time under even the most favourable circumstances. For a long time, if not eternally, the Ukrainophones will remain a social and cultural minority in the Ukrainian state. Ukrainian language and culture, of course, will persist—but only as assets of a minority group.20

The structural factors that determine the preponderance of the Russianspeaking elites and Russophone population in general contributed to the solid symbolic capital of the group largely based on the long tradition of cultural domination that the empire established and vigorously protected through a set of elaborated institutional and discursive means. The Russianspeaking minority in Ukraine still perceives itself as a representative of the ‘big’, ‘world-wide’, ‘universal’ culture which is a priori higher than the provincial and particular culture of Ukrainian-speaking (or any other) natives. Such a stance, apparently, takes hold only in cases where the natives consciously or unconsciously accept it and recognize as legitimate. Neither imperialness nor putative universality gives Russian-speakers any symbolical, status-based priority in Poland, Estonia, or even Ukrainian Galicia. Instead, in Kyiv and most other Ukrainian cities the symbolical dominance enables them to establish and preserve Russian-speaking as a 19

20

Yevhen Sverstiuk, ‘Problema zaminy osnov kultury’ [The Problem of the Substitution of Cultural Fundamentals], in Towards a New Ukraine II: Meeting the Next Century, ed. by Theofil Kis and Irena Makaryk (Ottawa; Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa, 1998), pp. 159-168 (p. 144). Serhy Hrabovsky, ‘Ukrayina nasha sovkova’ [Still a Soviet Ukraine], Krytyka, 3.9 (1999), 2-5 (p. 4).

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social norm and to sanction natives for breaking it. This norm is based on the persuasion of both groups—dominant and subordinate—that the Russian language and culture are ‘higher’, ‘more prestigious’ and ‘normal’, and for this reason all interactive public discourse should be in Russian. Due to this very reason even those few Ukrainian-speaking officials switch to the Russian language when they speak with their secretaries, drivers, and guards. Even in situations when, seemingly, it would be the client who should have language priority (in restaurants, hotels, shops, and so on), Russian-speaking servants, as a rule, do not switch to Ukrainian, which is inferior in their eyes. The unwritten rule is that a Ukrainian-speaker should switch to Russian—no matter whether she/he may be a client, a lady, or a senior who should be addressed in Ukrainian at least out of politeness. Today, sanctions for breaking the ‘norm’ do not amount to political persecution as was the case in Soviet times, when any dissent could have been criminalized under the rubric of ‘bourgeois nationalism’. Nor do they involve physical punishment nowadays—even though among teenagers, soldiers or, for example, convicts, such things still do happen. In general, this kind of violence has a symbolic character. It is employed by discursive means in which the general context is no less important than the ‘text.’ In some cases, the ‘text’ is articulated directly—with a derogatory face, pretended incomprehension or, as in the notorious episode with the traffic cop in Odessa, a remark about ‘the cow’s language’.21 Out of a colonial context, such ‘texts’ could be regarded as mere boorishness, quite a widespread and banal phenomenon of human life. However unpleasant, they do not evoke much symbolic connotation, and typically do not transcend the frame of a private conflict between two people. In a colonial situation, however, the context works as a resonator. The abusive ‘text’ is strengthened by both the actual socio-cultural domination of occupants (or colonists in Ukraine) and the collective memory of humiliation and ignominy of the colonized. In other words, when a white person calls a black one a ‘nigger’ or expresses his disrespect in some other way, the symbolic violence is much more powerful than in the hypothetically opposite situation—when a black person somehow expresses disrespect to the white. In Ukraine, the Russian-speaking norm is supported and reproduced not by mass downright boorishness by Russian-speakers towards Ukrainian-speakers, but rather by the very possibility—and absolute impunity—of such boorishness when it occurs. Symbolic violence exists here first of all as certain potency—not necessarily fulfilled, but always felt 21

‘Odesa Policeman Calls Ukrainian “Cow” Language’, RFE/RL Newsline, 26 January 2011, available at Accessed 5 November 2014.

350 Mykola Riabchuk by both sides. In most cases, the weaker side tries to avoid trouble, even only potential and hypothetical trouble, and proceeds in the easiest way—by avoiding speaking Ukrainian in public; that is, obeying the ‘norm’ of the dominant Russian-speaking. To be sure, symbolic violence is possible from both sides. However, its strength, and effect, and awareness of it are very different for the dominant group and the subaltern, in approximately the same way as in the abovementioned case of a hypothetical conflict between a white and a black person. In the Ukrainian case, the symbolic domination of one side is provided not only by a subjective feeling of cultural-civilizational superiority, but also by the quite real social advantages that Russian-speakers acquired through imperial modernization. This structural inequality makes the official status of the Ukrainian language a sheer formality, a decorative element that legitimizes the Creole-type statehood. The language can still be unknown and not used, and even, as quite a few officials openly demonstrate, despised with impunity at all levels of the state hierarchy. This dominant discourse is not only backed by an arguably ‘higher’ culture and language (for neither Slovaks, nor Estonians, nor even Western Ukrainians—who had never been part of the Russian Empire—would ever consider such an argument seriously). It draws on the real power of the state apparatus, including the army, police, and security service, as well as on the wealth of the post-Soviet, thoroughly Russian-speaking, oligarchy. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian counter-discourse can rely mainly upon ‘a handful of Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia’ (as a former Minister of Education mockingly put it) 22 and, to some extent, on the feckless national independence and the largely fictional Law on Languages (1989) that has never actually been respected, like most laws in Ukraine.23 Thus, twenty years after independence, many Ukrainophones still feel that the Russian-speaking ‘norm’ will persist in all Ukrainian cities outside the non-Russified West, and that speaking Ukrainian in public will still be perceived as a kind of deviation—like walking down the central street in an exotic folk dress. And the deep prejudice of the majority of Russian22

23

Dmitrii Tabachnik, ‘Nelzia vesti kulturnuyu politiku tolko v interesakh uzkogo sloya ukrainoyazychnoy itelligentsii’ [One Should Not Carry out the Whole Cultural Policy Exclusively for the Sake of the Narrow Circle of Ukrainian-Speaking Intelligentsia], Segodnia, 12 October 2006, p. 7. Vadim Kolesnichenko, a co-author of the scandalous 2012 language law, had explained earlier his vision of the official ‘bilingualism’ he adamantly promoted in Ukraine: ‘Why should I, having Russian as my native language, learn anything else?’ See Vadim Kolesnichenko, ‘Severodonetsk—The Last Call to the State that May Perish Tomorrow’, Forpost, 27 February 2008, available at Accessed 5 November 2014.

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speakers vis-à-vis Ukrainian culture that paradigmatically replicates the classical racist attitude of the colonizers towards the colonized, the whites towards the blacks, will not dissipate any time soon. In extreme forms, it happens to be expressed through frank contempt and even aggression (‘I am not going to read those blacks’, quite an intelligent interlocutor responded when I suggested that he read the outstanding Georgian writer Otar Chiladze). In milder, more intelligent forms, the bias is wrapped in the patronizing supremacy of an imperial Kulturträger praising occasionally talented savages (‘Thank God, they learned to write!’—is how a prominent Russian émigré poet explained the situation in Soviet non-Russian literatures to American colleagues).24 In both cases, the bias results in ignoring or undermining indigenous literatures/cultures as less (if at all) valuable. It is difficult to overcome such an attitude, since the objective value of a work of art does not matter much here. Of a far greater importance is the subjectively low value of the indigenous culture in the recipient’s eyes. He knows a priori that there cannot be anything outstanding, and therefore there is no need to waste time, money, and energy on a dubious, non-prestigious and, probably, valueless thing. I happened to observe a quintessential expression of this position in an Odessa bookstore some time ago. There was a woman looking through History of Odessa by the Harvard professor Patricia Herlihy in Ukrainian translation, who put the book back on the shelf and sighed sadly: ‘Such a book has been spoilt!’ The publication was of good academic quality and the translation was superb. But it did not matter. The publication was bad a priori—regardless of book’s quality, content, or price. It was in Ukrainian and therefore incorrigibly flawed. A graphic illustration of such a stance dangerously retranslated into the political realm, comes from one of the most outspoken representatives of the Party of Regions (which ruled Ukraine until recently) when a top official of the Donetsk city council and, inter alia, a close associate of the richest Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, 30-year-old Nikolai Levchenko: Sooner or later, Russian will become the second official language and all citizens will communicate in it. All Ukraine will speak Russian, anything else is artificial […] Ukrainian is the language of folklore. As soon as the Russian language acquires official status, any need to communicate in Ukrainian will just disappear. It is not a language of scholarship. It would not die. It would persist in songs,

24

For more detail, see my article ‘The Ukrainian “Friday” and the Russian “Robinson”: The Uneasy Advent of Postcoloniality’, Canadian American Slavic Studies, 44.1-2 (2010), 5-20.

352 Mykola Riabchuk anecdotes, in folklore. But Russian is the language of science, of civilization. It is not going to squeeze out Ukrainian. There is nothing to squeeze out.25

The problem is not with the view per se or even with the official status of the speaker but, primarily, with the fact that this kind of (self-)deprecating view has been internalized by too many Ukrainians subjected for centuries to colonial pressure. The very situation when the people of a subaltern nation are forced to compare their native culture with the dominant one and make their bet is a priori self-defeating and self-destructive. It presumes that such a comparison is reasonable and legitimate and reinforces the already existing inferiority complexes of the colonized people vis-à-vis the colonizers. The chess players are forced to play dominos, the lightweights are forced to compete with the heavyweights. The smaller nations may admire the cultures of greater nations or even envy them, but they feel pretty comfortable within their own language and culture, they normally do not perceive them as obsolete and do not strive to replace them with a ‘true’ one. Colonized people are forced to choose not by the sheer attractiveness of the dominant culture—as the colonizers are prone to claim—but by a whole set of coercive measures, which are often invisible—discursive, symbolical, structural, institutional. Levchenko’s statement is highly damaging not because of its odd, aggressive and overtly arrogant character (it would hardly evoke anything but laugh in, say, Slovakia or Slovenia). It is damaging in Ukraine because it resonates with the inferiority complexes of many Ukrainians, both Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking, who still live in the Russia-organized and manipulated cultural space and still feel obliged to answer odd questions such as, ‘where is your Dostoyevsky or Leo Tolstoy?’ The statement apparently reinforces such feelings and, worse, legitimizes a crypto-racist, supremacist, chauvinistic view as acceptable at the official level. And, paradoxically, this rather precludes than promotes the institutionalization of a civilized bilingualism in Ukraine, because it clearly shows what kind of ‘bilingualism’ its adherents envision. As a leading Ukrainian expert on language policy has aptly remarked, the pro-Russian activists are ‘not demanding a legalization of the obligation of Ukrainian-speaking citizens to

25

Nikolai Levchenko, ‘Sekretar miskrady Donetska: rosiyska stane yedynoyu derzhavnoyu movoyu’ [The Secretary of the Donetsk City Council: Russian Will be the Only State Language], Hazeta po-ukrayinsky, 25 February, 2007, available at Accessed 4 November 2014.

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know Russian (they know it), but the right of Russian speakers not to know Ukrainian’ and not to use it under any circumstances.’26 The law ‘On the Fundamentals of the National Language Policy’ (2012), hastily pushed through by the Ukrainian parliament with multiple procedural violations, largely embodies Nikolai Levchenko’s vision of ‘bilingualism’, which has little to do with liberal Western practices but a lot with the hypocritical practices of today’s Russia, or Belarus, or the late Soviet Union. The law was severely criticized by experts,27 including those of the reputable Venice Commission,28 opposed by activists, and ultimately revoked by the parliament in February 2014, shortly after the ousting of President Yanukovych. The timing for such a move was rather unfortunate, yet even more unfortunate was the international reaction to that move, which largely parroted the heavily biased Kremlin interpretation of the event. The Ukrainian government was accused of banning the Russian language (a move nearly as ridiculous as would be the banning of English in Ireland) or, in a milder version, revoking the right of its official use. Nobody bothered to take a look at the notorious law or at least at the conclusions of the Venice Commission—a legal arm of the Council of Europe. The simple truth was that the law had nothing to do with the right to use (or not to use) Russian. Such a right is enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution of 199629 and in the earlier (1989) law on languages in Ukraine

26

27

28

29

Volodymyr Kulyk, ‘The Search for Post-Soviet Identity in Ukraine and Russia and Its Influence on the Relations between the Two States’, Harriman Review, 9.1-2 (1996), 16-27 (p. 23). ‘Ekspertnyi vysnovok schodo novih proektiv zakonu pro movy Institutu politichnykh i etnonatsionalnykh doslidzhen’ [Experts’ conclusion on the new draft laws on languages by the Instittute of political and nationalities’ studies], Dzerkalo tyzhnia, 5 November 2010, available atAccessed 4 November 2014; Volodymyr Kulyk, ‘Chomu zakonoroekt Kolesnichenka ne vede do rozvyazannia movnoyi problemy’ [Why Kolesnichenko’s Draft Law Does Not Lead to a Solution of the Language Problem], Ukrayinska Pravda, 4 June 2012, available at Accessed 4 November 2014. European Commission for Democracy through Law, ‘Opinion on the Draft Law “On the Principles of the State Language Policy of Ukraine”’, Council of Europe, 19 December 2011, available at Accessed 4 November 2014. The article 10 guarantees in particular the ‘free development, use, and protection of Russian and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine’, available at Accessed 4 November 2014.

354 Mykola Riabchuk that still remains in force.30 The revoked law, in its essence, was first and foremost about the right not to use Ukrainian—under any circumstances. The law stipulated—in direct contradiction to the constitution—that Russian can be used officially not alongside but instead of Ukrainian, which in practice meant the complete eradication of Ukrainian from at least half of the country—hardly an acceptable solution for any state pretending to be bilingual.31 To tame the media scandal, the interim president vetoed the MPs’ decision to revoke the law but the problem of its unconstitutional and essentially subversive character still remains and should be addressed under more suitable circumstances. At this point, 32 the undeclared Russo-Ukrainian war and the need to defend the country which both the Ukrainophones and most of the Russophones consider their own, has relegated language and cultural issues to a less critical level. The Russophone group, which had actually never been homogeneous, split into two very unequal parts. The smaller part has radicalized its Ukrainophobic stance and taken up a militant pro-Russian position, joining symbolically or even actually with the Russian commandos and mercenaries in Donbas. However, the larger faction joined forces with the Ukrainophones to defend their common motherland. This does not mean that the problem of co-existence of two cultures and languages—the ‘aboriginal’ and the ‘Creole”—is going to disappear. In any bilingual country the trade-off between two major cultures and languages is never easy, and Ukraine with its weak institutions, fragile civil culture and small tradition of rule of law would be barely an exception. But the common fight of 30

31

32

The article 3 stipulates that ‘the state shall guarantee free development, use and protection of Russian and the other languages of national minorities in Ukraine. Languages of national minorities in Ukraine shall be used in cultural and educational areas as well as in some other areas specified in this law’, available at Accessed 4 November 2014. Even before the notorious law was passed, the head of the Crimean parliament Vladimir Konstantinov complained officially that ‘quite a few ministers [from the Ukrainan government] approach us in Ukrainian’. Remarkably, he substantiated his complaint by the fact that in the Crimean autonomy not only Ukrainian but also Russian and Crimean Tatar were official languages. This meant, in his view—and fully in line with the Soviet tradition of ‘bilingualism’—that the Crimean authorities had a right to choose the most suitable language for themselves but no duty to know and use any of two other ‘official’ languages, suitable for the citizens or partners or Kyiv superiors. See ‘Spikera Kryma razdrazhaet ukrainskiy yazyk’ [Ukrainian Language Irritates the Crimean Speaker], Obozrevatel, 7 February 2012, available at Accessed 5 November 2014. As of November 2014 when this article was written.

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Ukraine’s Russophones and Ukrainophones against the foreign invasion may draw them closer and facilitate their eventual compromise on the language and cultural issues. It may well happen if Ukraine opts for a liberal democratic way of development and if the both major groups come to understand something that had never been clarified in the Soviet version of ‘bilingualism’—that the cultural and linguistic rights of each group in a bilingual country can be realized only to the extent to which they are supplemented by the closely related duty of knowing and respecting the culture and language of the other group.

Dariusz Skórczewski Trapped by the Western Gaze: Contemporary European Imagology and Its Implications for East and South-East European Agency—a Case Study1 Abstract: In modern cultural discourses of the Western world, members of East and South-East European populations have not infrequently been assigned the role of ‘anthropological objects’ of examination, the ones discursively incapacitated and relegated to a weak position vis-à-vis the dominant systems of knowledge and representation. With postcolonial theory and Edward Said’s notion of Orientalization as conceptual frameworks, this chapter subjects to close scrutiny a collection of photographs by German photographer Frank Gaudlitz that has resonated across the continent, thus yet again transmitting the idea of Western hegemony and reinforcing the fundamental East–West divide, solidified by the discourse of the Enlightenment. The author concludes with a critique of the ongoing epistemological as well as ethical asymmetry between contemporary cultural approaches to the two parts of the continent, which is conducive to depriving the East and South-East Europeans of their own agency.

Introduction Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 it has become obvious that the encounter with ‘otherness’ has ambivalent effects on the ‘Other’ and is likely never void of ambiguity and violence. ‘Otherness’ is sometimes considered an innocent result of the mechanism of differentiation, and as we know, differentiation is the elementary operation performed by the human mind in encounter with another entity of some kind. However, as Said and those after him have proved, ‘otherness’ never leaves the subject of the ‘Other’ intact and sovereign (‘The act of representing others almost always involves violence to the subject of representation’).2 Rather, it inevitably tends to appropriate the subject,3 1

2 3

This is a modified version of the essay published in Polish as ‘Obrazy wschodniej tożsamości. Wystawa fotografii Franka Gaudlitza Casa Mare i jej implikacje w kontekście europejskiej imagologii’ [Images of Eastern Identity: The Exhibition of Frank Gaudlitz’s Photographs in the Context of European Imagology], in Historie, społeczeństwa, przestrzenie dialogu. Studia postzależnościowe w perspektywie porównawczej [Histories, Societies, Spaces of Dialogue: Postdependence Studies in a Comparative Perspective], ed. by Hanna Gosk and Dorota Kołodziejczyk (Cracow: Universitas, 2014), pp. 181–201. Edward Said, ‘In the Shadow of the West’, Wedge 7–8 (1985), p. 4. The relationship between the two subjects: that of the photographer and that of the photographed person, is powerfully ambiguous. As Roland Barthes argues, on the photograph, ‘I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object’. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, transl. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 14.

358 Dariusz Skórczewski placing it into a systematized field where meanings and values are established and distributed arbitrarily by another entity—the dominant subject, who is existentially disengaged and intellectually disconnected from the ‘Other’. Colonial history can be in part deemed a history of such epistemic violence varying in kind and intensity in diverse parts of the globe, Europe not excluded. This essay is a case study in how epistemic violence can subtly penetrate otherwise generous and poignant cultural undertakings, such as the exhibition of German photographer Frank Gaudlitz’s still photographs titled Casa Mare (which in Romanian means ‘the nice living-room’ or ‘the great space’). I was inspired to write about this event upon visiting the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest in 2012 where the exhibition was held from July through October. This study is an objectified report from the subjective unease aroused by that visit. The unease resulted from a strange dissonance between the artistic and ethical aspects of Gaudlitz’s undertaking. Before engaging in a closer reading of Gaudlitz’s photographs, let me begin with some basic details, as they are not unimportant for the analysis to follow. The exhibition was presented in a number of German cities, as well as Genoa and even Istanbul,4 and it was supplemented by a German-English photo album.5 The accompanying leaflet handed out to visitors contains a brief description of the idea behind the exhibition and its stated goals. The leaflet itself requires some analysis, because it provides the framework for interpreting Gaudlitz’s photographs. It defines and projects the anticipated direction of the viewers’ reception and response of the work by putting forth requirements they are expected to comply with in order to ‘properly’ understand and evaluate the art they are being exposed to. The interpretive

4

5

According to the information obtained from the Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the exhibition first opened in Cottbus (November 2009) during the Eastern European Film Festival. Following that, in April–June 2010 it was presented in Berlin at Guardini Stiftung, and in Potsdam (June–September at Waschhaus). Then it went to Brasov. In December 2010 it opened at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. In February 2011 it was presented in Pécs, Hungary. Between March and July 2011, it was exhibited in the Danube Swabian Museum in Ulm, Germany. In March 2012, the second part of the tour began. It was exhibited at the Istrian Ethnographic Museum in Pazin, Croatia, the Art Museum in Constanta, Romania, the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest, the Culture Centre in Istanbul–Kadiköy, and Castello d’Albertis and Gallery VisionQuesT in Genova. Frank Gaudlitz, Casa Mare, ed. by Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa Koordinierung Ostmittel-und Südosteuropa, text: Karl-Markus Gauß and Matthias Flügge. Published in cooperation with Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 2009. Contains 171 pp., incl. 76 colour stills.

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framework begins quite innocently, with a short narrative listing the places where the photographs were taken and the minority groups represented: Frank Gaudlitz visited various multi-ethnic regions of Eastern and South Eastern Europe, including Transylvania, Maramureş and Dobrudja in Romania, Southern Hungary, the Republic of Moldova, as well as Vojvodina in Serbia. He photographed the people belonging to the immensely diverse ethnic minorities of these regions—Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Roma and Muslim Roma, Turks, Tartars, Aromanians, Lipovans, Szeklers, Dutch, Croats, Serbs, Moldovans, Gagaouzes, Slovaks and Ruthenians. The exhibition presents a selection of these photographs.6

Having read the above introductory information, viewers are likely expected to be impressed with Gaudlitz’s meticulous, multicultural approach in not leaving any group out. It appears that all the groups have been democratically represented and will be treated equally by the artist. Photography, as reflected in the quoted passage, is considered to serve the purpose of ethnographic description. To render that ‘description’ adequate, the ‘democracy’ in selecting the subjects extends onto other aspects as well, such as age, education, social status, and religion: ‘People of different ages, education, social status and religion are portrayed in full-figure colour photographs.’ One can assume that the choice of colour photographs has been intended to invoke a ‘reality effect’, while full-figure takes are meant to visualize the author’s perception of the subject’s body as a complete representation of the subject’s persona. The implications of the techniques applied will be discussed in the latter part of the article. Another constitutive factor of the interpretative framework is the setting that contributes to realistic qualities of the series. As the brochure points out, most of the photographs were taken in the most prestigious room of people's homes. Figures in festive clothes stand in a heterogeneous and colourful environment with wall hangings, carpets, curtains, pillows, blankets, pictures and objects in the background, the material manifestations of different cultural identities. They also bear witness to their owners' everyday life, their ways of furnishing, memories and religiousness. Besides their ideal of beauty, the photographs also reflect the social status and identity of the subjects.

It seems that all has been spelled out in the quoted passage and not much can be added. Persons are captured in their natural setting in a discrete space 6

Casa Mare. Photographs by Frank Gaudlitz, published by Néprajzi Múzeum (Museum of Ethnography), Budapest, 2012. N. pag.

360 Dariusz Skórczewski of their homes, yet that setting has been deliberately preselected and embellished to highlight the slightly exotic ‘fragrance’ of the subject. Indeed, the construction of the setting is significant for unravelling the subjects’ status and identity. However, as I mentioned earlier, while contemplating Gaudlitz’s enchanting work I was somewhat vexed. I pondered whether it was merely my subjective sensation, or there was perhaps some concealed ambiguity involved that needed to be pinpointed and elucidated. This study is an attempt to resolve that original sensation of unease by unpacking the less direct meanings of the exhibition. It is based on the premise that the reading of any text, be it literary or cultural, is always contextual, and as such may lead to dissimilar or even contradictory interpretations, which in the case of photography brings in the question of ‘the process by which a visual image has its meanings renegotiated, or even rejected, by particular audiences watching in specific circumstances’.7

Implications of Reading Casa Mare ‘Against the Grain’ The above-reconstructed model of reception of and response to Casa Mare can be explicated in Stuart Hall’s terms as a ‘hegemonic reading’.8 Such a reading complies with the ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ code, one anticipated by the author. The model viewer is expected to decode the message along the line(s) in which it was originally encoded. The dominant code in the case of Gaudlitz’s collection belongs to the broad category of ethnographic discourse. Given the constituents of that discourse, such as a complex comprising ethnic difference, the low material status of its subjects, the subjects’ authority and the places from which they speak, alongside the circumstances and the principles of utterance, the position of the model reader,9 and the utterance itself, perhaps the most suitable subcategory for the Casa Mare exhibition would be the discourse of the clash of modernity and backwardness. The style of reception and response, anticipated by Gaudlitz, can, and perhaps should, be deconstructed. Referring again to Stuart Hall, I suggest the possibility of a different way of ‘decoding’; one that does not take the explicit message of the exhibition for granted. Such a deconstruction, or 7 8

9

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (London: Sage, 2001), p. 5. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, Stencilled Occasional Paper, Birmingham: University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973. I borrow the notion of ‘model reader’ from Umberto Eco. See: Interpretation and Overinterpretation, by Umberto Eco et al., ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), p. 66.

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decoding, can be considered a critical re-reading, or reading ‘against the grain’. In Hall’s terms, it can be labelled ‘counter-hegemonic reading’. Although the reading meant here was unintended, and certainly undesired by the author, one is justified in performing it as ‘discourse analysis’. The analysis suggested here is aimed at deciphering what the photographs are actually showing the audience in reference to the following factors: 1) Diversification of the audience (West and East Europeans, respectively), powerfully influencing their attitude to the exhibited representations (dissociation and distance from the vernacular context of the subjects vs. engagement and identification). 2) Different locales (in Western countries Casa Mare has predominantly been exhibited in galleries and museums, while in Eastern and South Eastern European countries it was customarily shown in ethnographic museums). 3) The tradition of the ‘Western gaze’ and the ‘imperial gaze’ whose historical facticity is concealed within and subtly conveyed through Gaudlitz’s collection, irrespective of the artist’s own intention. When pondering the status, or the ontological nature, of Casa Mare, the viewer is struck with its ambiguity. It conjoins the elements of a visual work of art on the one hand, and ethnographic, or anthropological, photography, on the other. This conclusion can be drawn from placing Gaudlitz’s exhibition within the context suggested by the following two theoretical remarks: 1) ‘No visual image or practice is essentially ethnographic by nature. Accordingly, the ethnographicness of photography is determined by its discourse and contents.’10 2) ‘An anthropological photograph is any photograph from which an anthropologist could gain useful, meaningful visual information.’11 Oscillating between visual art and the field of ethnographic discourse, Gaudlitz’s images create a tension whose results manifest themselves in the process of interpretation. On the one hand, they call for acknowledgment of their purely aesthetic dimension. On the other hand, however, given that, 10

11

Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media, and Representation in Research (London: Sage, 2007, 2nd ed.), p. 66–67. Pink adds that ‘the same photograph may serve a range of different personal and ethnographic uses; it may even be invested with seemingly contradictory meanings. […] The meanings of photographs are arbitrary and subjective; they depend on who is looking. The same photographic image may have a variety of (perhaps conflicting) meanings invested in it at different stages of ethnographic research and representation, as it is viewed by different eyes and audiences in diverse historical, spatial, and cultural contexts’ (p. 67–68). Anthropology and Photography, ed. by Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven—London: Yale UP, 1992), p. 13; qtd. in Sarah Pink, p. 67.

362 Dariusz Skórczewski according to Bourdieu, ‘photography is considered to be a perfectly realistic and objective recording of the visible world because (from its origin) it has been assigned social uses that are held to be “realistic” and “objective”’,12 they clearly gravitate towards a mimetic model of representation, one ascertaining and asserting ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’,13 and eligible for rating according to its adequacy. Aspiring to the former, Gaudlitz’s photographs do not cease to establish meanings typical of the latter. The synchrony of these two aspects of photographic image has been aptly captured by Susan Sontag, who argues that photographs ‘trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information’. 14 It is partly due to this tension that the aforementioned anxiety arises in an East European viewer of Casa Mare who, after all, was a subject of colonial domination. Placed here within the tradition of ethnographic discourse, Gaudlitz’s photographs, ‘innocent’ as they appear at first glance, begin to speak to us in the language whose principles have been all-too-well unravelled in Orientalism. What made the people, immobilized by the camera lens—‘social actors’ performing as ‘native informants’, providing knowledge concerning themselves and their kin—give their consent to photograph them? What made them agree to be turned into ethnographic objects to view in European museums, in a similar style as the images of American Indians and Australian Aborigines taken by Everard im Thurn, Edward S. Curtis, Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski and exhibited a century earlier in the United States and Europe? Before addressing these questions, let us briefly examine the basic technical aspects of Gaudlitz’s project, as these aspects point to the mode of representation employed in Casa Mare. According to Stuart Hall, such a mode is telling in that it always influences the character and type of meanings produced by any media, including photography: ‘Every choice— to show this rather than that, to show this in relation to that, to say this about that—is a choice about how to represent “other cultures”; and each choice has consequences both for what meanings are produced and for how meaning is produced.’15 The way Gaudlitz prepared his subjects sheds light on the exhibition’s agenda implicit in the visuals. There are two, seemingly 12 13 14 15

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Social Definition of Photography’, in Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1999), p. 162. Franklin R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 192. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005, electronic ed.), p. 54. Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Representation: Cultural Representations and the Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), p. 8.

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contradictory, major components of his technique that bring about particular implications for the reading of the images: 1) Artificial, posed, and distanced shots: ‘The photos were not taken by chance, people had known about the photographer’s arrival, prepared for it and put on their best clothes. […] Just as in the past, people had to stand motionless in front of the camera. Standing straight and waiting distanced the subjects from everyday life even on the level of gestures.’ 2) Natural, realistic settings: ‘All the photos were taken in natural light, the colours and lights of the homes are realistically captured in the photos.’ The pre-selection and pre-arrangement of the décor serves the purpose of neutralizing potential controversies between the subject and the photographer over the matter of how the subject wants to be represented. By taking frozen poses and relinquishing their right to discuss how they want to appear in the pictures and where the pictures should be taken, the subjects appear as if obedient to the power of discourse and reconciled with the order of the world. They are represented as void of confrontational attitude, as if disarmed of potential rage that might be caused by the visual situation directed and arranged by the photographer-outsider. Gaudlitz intrudes into the native space of East and South-East Europeans as a visitor from the rich part of the continent, coming with his instructions, setting up the people he intends to capture with his camera, and distributing roles in the particular interaction that yet again takes place—in the 21st century!— between the two halves of Europe: ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’. Gaudlitz’s command to take the pose ‘just as in the past’ is a clear reference not only to the principles of early photography but also—given the theme of the series—to the tradition of ethnographic appropriation. Taking all this into account, Casa Mare can be considered a peculiar restaging of Orientalizing discourse developed by the ‘West’ concerning the ‘East’. The ambiguity of the series as disclosed in the accompanying brochure is in tune with the visual representation submitted on the photographs. The ultimate effect of the blend of artificiality and naturalness has definite implications. It seems to underscore the distance between the two worlds implied in Gaudlitz’s series: that of the subject, part of which is represented, and that of the viewer that exists only outside the photographs. Consequently, the photographs appear to be invested with ethnographic meanings that are linked and point to another type of knowledge, one that originates from the long tradition of (West) European Orientalism and within which Gaudlitz’s collection creates yet another ethnographic archive. At closer scrutiny, the visual data in that archive proves to be laden with meanings reinforcing that tradition.

364 Dariusz Skórczewski

Rehearsing the Pattern of ‘Colonial Photography’ Speaking of ‘visual data’ provided by Casa Mare, one must evidently differentiate between (scholarly) ethnographic description par excellence and information extracted from the ‘archive’ consisting of visual materials, such as the collection in point. As Sarah Pink pointed out, ‘certainly, photographs cannot represent social structures, words spoken in interpersonal interactions or conventional theoretical and critical responses to existing academic discourses in the same way that written texts can. Nevertheless, photographs can be used in realist or expressive modes to represent, for example, the corporeal experience and facial expressions of people interacting with one another or their material environment, or people who stand for institutions and occupy particular places in power structures. They can be used to create direct comparisons, and thus evoke difference’.16 Thus, ethnographic images may provide substantial social evidence comparable to ethnographic descriptions produced by scholars and thus carry significant epistemological load. Given that Gaudlitz’s work should be placed within the contexts of both art and ethnographic discourse, we have the right to ask what implications for its interpretation are brought about by the interaction of the two semiotic systems engaged in meaning production. The collection Casa Mare fulfils the criteria of ethnographic photograph, and can be read accordingly as a piece of ethnographic description (toutes proportions gardée). On many subjects, audiences can trace the facial expression mentioned by Pink, the result of interaction between the subject and the outside observer, with the latter representing the epistemological and cultural authority of his place of origin and placing the photographed subject as his object of interest in the dominant order of discourse, the one linked to the original locus of his or her own. Furthermore, such representation also invokes the fundamental difference between the represented and the photographer (with whose perspective the spectators identify themselves) who exists outside the camera images. Hence, an opposition emerges between the subject and the (human) object of observation, and critical for the interpretive impact of this opposition, as we are going to see, is the position of the photographer, as defined by his cultural identity comprising his professional status and national as well as political affiliation. The most striking impression about Gaudlitz’s approach to representing humans is that in his works, instead of capturing a moment, he shot studied and masterminded scenes, having meticulously arranged them so as to show 16

See Pink, p. 177.

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the ‘subjects-objects’ in all their ‘beauty’. Consequently, these takes display the effects of his ‘arbitrary choice’17 of certain qualities and characteristics, one influenced by a set of a priori assumptions and not by his spontaneous response to the situation of an interpersonal, as well as intercultural, encounter.18 While every photograph stages an act of ‘imprisonment’ of its subject by immobilizing the subject,19 in this case we are dealing with an additional, or double, imprisonment; one designed and staged all the way through, as if inscribed into the frame and patterned according to a set of stereotyping rules that have powerfully influenced, at least since the Enlightenment, 20 the perception of Eastern Europe by West European cultural elites. Here a clear point must be made. The above is not to say that Frank Gaudlitz is approaching his human subjects with a feeling of colonial superiority or contempt. One does not sense any racism in the photographs, 17 18

19 20

Bourdieu, p. 162. Theorists suggest there exists a peculiar type of human behaviour in front of the lens, which takes the form of a ‘visual behaviour’. See, e.g., Julianne H. Newton, ‘Beyond Representation: Toward a Typology of Visual Behavior’, Visual Anthropology Review, 14 (1998), no. 1, p. 60. This type of behaviour is influenced by the particular relations between the photographer, the photographed person, and the camera. Considering the implications of this problem for the self-awareness of the photographed subject, Roland Barthes argued that: ‘Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing:” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. […] No doubt it is metaphorically that I can derive my existence from the photographer. But though this dependence is an imaginary one […], I experience it with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image—my image—will be generated […]. I decide to “let drift” over my lips and in my eyes a faint smile which I mean to be “indefinable,” in which I might suggest, along with the qualities of my nature, my amused consciousness of the whole photographic ritual: I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, apart from any effigy. What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self;” but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself ” never coincides with my image […] if only Photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing! Alas, I am doomed by (well-meaning) Photography always to have an expression’ (R. Barthes, pp. 10, 11–12). The tension along the line subject—photographer and subject—representation in the case of Gaudlitz’s series seems to be even more intense due to the discursive field of Orientalism in which Gaudlitz’s project is located. Cf. Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994).

366 Dariusz Skórczewski be it scientific or aesthetic. The people presented are not outcasts, monstrous, or ugly. Rather, they are pretty; some of them are even charming and intriguing. They are represented in a way void of any touch of disdain. Gaudlitz is applying a specific technique to present them as individuals possessing their own dignity and worth. As pointed out in the brochure, the ‘photos were taken from a very slightly lowered viewpoint and this approach of the photographer makes us, viewers look up to and respect the people in the pictures’. The problem is located elsewhere. By employing the above-mentioned techniques, Gaudlitz, perhaps unconsciously, is subscribing to a pattern of colonial photography. 21 His photographs possess a powerful collective formative aspect. The subject of a colonial photograph is being constituted as an ‘Other’ who in his or her existence is altogether dependent on the ethnographer. By focusing the camera lens on the subject, the ethnographer grants the subject a chance to come out of the shadows and exist publicly. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, these inhabitants of East and SouthEast European regions have been granted an opportunity to narrate themselves. What stories, or better stated, whose story, are these photographs telling us? Although in Casa Mare East Europeans have been given occasion to present themselves at their best, their ‘story’ does not originate from them. As viewers we do not know much about their other realities. We only see as much as had been carefully staged. In fact, Gaudlitz’s series is a visual record of a cross-cultural encounter which encourages and reinforces the Western gaze at Eastern Europe. The announcement posted by the German publisher discloses the original intention behind the collection: ‘In this series, Gaudlitz shows us different cultural traditions that are threatened due to the eastward expansion of the European Union.’22 The hegemonic reading of that information suggests Gaudlitz’s endeavour in preserving the ‘endemic’ East European ‘phenotypes’. The reflexion on the expansion of the European project is critical, although politically disengaged. The desire to preserve the cultural heritage of the recently accepted members of the European Union by providing the ‘native’ people ‘authentic representation’ before their societies are transformed into uniform westernized modern ones, seems an appropriate decision in light of ‘historical veracity’. 21

22

This pattern is described in Anne Maxwell’s book Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities (London: Leicester UP, 2000). Frank Gaudlitz profile information on Hatje Cantz Verlag website, obtainable via , accessed 6 June 2014.

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Although I would not go as far as to suggest a direct parallel between Gaudlitz’s ‘eye as Western photographer’ and Foucault’s ‘eye of surveillance’ in the panopticon prison,23 one cannot deny that it is the photographer and not the photographed subject who is in charge of setting the framework for producing meanings, which leaves the subject vulnerable to the attribution of those meanings to him or her by the viewer. Consequently, the viewer uncritically takes the photographer’s perspective while dismissing that of the subject. Thus, a counter-hegemonic interpretation of that comment is necessary to trace and deconstruct the major opposition in Gaudlitz’s collection: the opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The represented ‘them’ is assigned a role of ‘anthropological’ or ‘ethnographic’ object. The ‘us’ points primarily to the Western audiences, members of the ‘old’ EU who would rather see the newly accepted East European countries outside the EU for the sake of preservation of those countries’ rural traditions. 24 The fundamental divide between the represented ‘them’ and the observing (and unrepresented) ‘us’ is reflected in the fact that, rather than being exhibited in art galleries, Casa Mare has been customarily shown in ethnographic museums. This clearly emphasizes the classifying nature of the collection and makes Gaudlitz’s project appear ambiguous and even perverse to his audiences, especially in Eastern and South Eastern European countries. In this context Barthes’ question can be recalled and decontextualized: ‘To whom does the photograph belong? Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object.’25 This question in Camera Lucida was accompanied by a concern about interpretation, of which the represented subject-object loses control, risking losing his or her subjectivity as well: ‘for what society makes of my photograph, what it reads there, I do not know’. (p. 14) Given the above ambiguity, the exhibition Casa Mare alongside its contextual setting can be interpreted as a metaphor of the current condition of the discourse on Eastern and South Eastern Europe, with the response of East and South-East Europeans embedded into it. This metaphor entails a chain of intertwined meanings, such as: a patronizing attitude of the observer, invoking in the subject the feeling of pride intertwisted with selfcontempt and self-doubt, and relegating the subject to a position of passivity and powerlessness—the role of a Barthesian ‘museum object’. All 23

24 25

Cf. Christopher Pinney, ‘The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography’, in Anthropology and Photography, ed. by Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven–London: Yale UP, 1992), pp. 75–76. The exhibition has not been exclusively shown to West Europeans. It also travelled to East and South East European countries such as Romania, Croatia, and Hungary. Barthes, p. 13.

368 Dariusz Skórczewski this begins with the gaze implied in Gaudlitz’s work. This gaze establishes the principle of interaction between the author, the object, and the audiences. The author’s request that his East European informers dress in their best outfit and pose in the prettiest interior of their home (the sine qua non condition of the visual undertaking performed in Casa Mare) is anchored in the assumption that inhabitants of Eastern Europe have either stopped at, or only now reached, the modern stage in their development. In fact, that stage was achieved by bourgeois in the late 1800s and early 1900s in great many European countries, including those present in Gaudlitz’s project. At that time, ‘better’ homes indeed had parlours providing a space for socialization that was separate from the sounds, smell, and steam of the kitchen, the squalor or untidiness of sleeping chambers, and the reminders of unfinished work in utility areas. Such rooms would be decorated with the best that a family could afford and represented their social status or their aspirations to visitors. To revive now, at the outset of 21st century, the concept of a ‘best room’, applicable primarily to middle-class, may seem somewhat problematic if not extravagant, as this concept is condescending to use as a setup for the display of ‘exotic’ subjects, especially those living in old peasant’s cabins in the rural areas penetrated by Gaudlitz’s lens. Similarly, the concept of ‘best clothes’ now seems worlds away from the time when people had one set of clothing to wear day in and day out, and a second, special (or ‘festive’, as the brochure has it) set for ‘church’. Reaching uncritically for these notions as basis for his strategy of representation of (East) European societies, the author of Casa Mare seems, even if unintentionally, to ascribe developmental backwardness to ‘indigenous’ societies of Eastern and South Eastern Europe. Appealing thereby to the peculiar mode of Western ‘ethnological imagination’, the photographs inadvertently point to the impasse at which Western discourse finds itself nowadays when facing ‘cultural pluralism in a globalizing world’.26 Thus, apparently, Frank Gaudlitz’s work introduces and imposes on the subjects the framework that pretends to be advantageous for them, allowing them to articulate themselves, present themselves at the best angle possible. In actuality, however, it re-establishes the perennial principle of forming the subject through the orientalizing gaze, unveiling accordingly some palpable colonial aspects of Casa Mare. Such a gaze is by no means innocent. On the contrary, it participates in the construction and consolidation of the subaltern status of the subject vis-à-vis the superior ‘Western’ subject. By 26

Fuyuki Kurasawa, The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 1.

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bringing his exhibition to countries such as Hungary, the German photographer seemed to be saying: ‘This is how we, people of the West, are viewing you, people of the East.’ Such approach carries in fact a troubling yet well-concealed neo-colonial attitude through an implicit patronizing of East and South-East Europeans that is involved in their visual representation. The photographer is being equipped with epistemological authority, inaccessible to his human subjects. Thus, he solidifies his double position as: 1) the master of the discourse, distributing the roles and settling the meanings, and 2) the authoritative observation centre from which to view and interpret the people represented.

Within the Tradition of European Imagology: the ‘West’ Gazing at the ‘East’ One will not risk much saying that the visualization of Eastern and South Eastern Europe by Gaudlitz has been carried out according to the same principles that fixed the 19th-century Orientalizing Western look at the West’s Near East, the look having been articulated in a plethora of works of German, French, and English literature. 27 In those works, one can easily trace Western European imagology employed as an instrument of ‘ethnographic description’, so powerfully portraying nations and ethnicities of the same regions as those visited by Gaudlitz. Casa Mare bears a similar trait to those literary works: it fixes and preserves the peculiar gaze that, registering with a seeming empathy and meticulousness, in fact produces its object through participating in the structures of Western European expansion, carried out either by ‘hard’ (e.g. invasions, partitions, etc.) or ‘soft’ means (i.e., discursive practices). This gaze grants its objects—human figures—autonomous meanings, relieving them as signifiers from responsibility towards the actual represented people as the signified. These meanings belong to a broader discursive field that is altogether beyond the control of those placed within it as objects of artistic representation, whether in 19th-century poetry or 21st-century photography.

27

One eminent example is Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage where reader encounters a ‘dark-eyed maid and dusky Moor’, ‘high-capp'd Tartar’, ‘wild Albanian kirtled to his knee,|With shawl-girt head and ornamented gun,|And gold-embroider'd garments, fair to see:|The crimson-scarfed men of Macedon;|The Delhi with his cap of terror on,|And crooked glaive; the lively, supple Greek:|And swarthy Nubia's mutilated son;|The bearded Turk, that rarely deigns to speak,|Master of all around, too potent to be meek’ (George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in The Works of Lord Byron, ed. by Earnest H. Coleridge, Poetry, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1899), II. 192. 510. 514–522).

370 Dariusz Skórczewski The subjects’ passivity, demonstrated by the personas captured on Gaudlitz’s photographs, is not merely a result of silencing. In fact, these subjects are not quite that silent. Instead, their appearance filtered through the gaze of the photographer and that of the viewer speaks quite a lot. East and South-East Europeans seem deprived of their own agency. Realizing this, they are ‘hunting’ for opportunities to be represented in order to manifest their existence. They agree to terms imposed on them by the dominant Western discourse, the boundaries of which demarcate and lock up their self-perception as if in a panopticon-style prison of thought. Through agreeing to being looked at by an external observer, East and SouthEast European informers allow Western discourse to essentialize and systematize their difference vis-à-vis the Western subject. By so doing, they put themselves in the position of ‘collaborators’ with that discourse, reluctant to dispute the ‘definition’ of their own identity created within the framework of and submitted by that discourse. They are doomed and give consent to being represented by an ‘expert’ whom they consider qualified to collect such representations of them. It is the Western photographer that defines the boundaries of representation and chooses the way(s) in which to establish and encode the meanings. The presented subjects are eligible to neither say nor point to anything beyond those boundaries. The exhibition’s explicit message has been clearly spelled out in the brochure: ‘Gaudlitz’s photographs let us discover all the small contradictions, hairline cracks and asynchronies that make us think about the complex relationship between tradition and modernity as well as about the diversity of cultural identity and culture change in today’s Europe.’ In light of all that has been said so far, the quoted passage is simultaneously true and misleading. It is true in recognizing the contradictions transpiring in our continent. It is misleading, however, in essentializing these contradictions by juxtaposing the (represented) ‘East’ and the (unrepresented) ‘West’. We might say that Gaudlitz is magnanimous in offering space to the peoples of the ‘East’, but he is unfair in removing the Western region from the landscape. Consequently, his perception of the cultural encounter is biased. One party of that encounter is being assigned the role of a dominant vantage point, while the other party remains immobilized as an object to look at, even if one is encouraged to look up to it. As a result, we are facing a clear-cut division between the ‘East’ as the silent object and the ‘West’ as both the interpreting centre and the distorting mirror in which the ‘East’ looks at itself, with a tinge of shyness mixed with pride, through the Western gaze. It is not that the East European subjects have been misrepresented. In Casa Mare they are becoming the objects of a double fantasy: to themselves, as

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they are allowed to playfully perform in front of the camera, and to the viewers, as they are fulfilling the viewers’ fantasies of what the more or less exotic Oriental subject looks like. This ambivalence makes their existence vulnerable and uncertain, as frequently reflected in their facial expressions. To render him justice, one cannot say that Gaudlitz stripped his subjects of individuality, personality, and subjectivity. As portraits of individuals, these photographs indeed are splendid documents of inhabitants of their respective Eastern and South Eastern European countries and regions. It is not mistaken to say that due to his humanist approach, the author eschewed the perverse obsession with ‘otherness’ that occasionally marks other similar undertakings, leaving the audiences deeply troubled. Nonetheless, as a whole, Gaudlitz’s exhibition does raise anxiety and unease, and perhaps even embarrassment with the idea embedded into it. Although the collection cannot be considered a vehicle for imperial ideology, it is certainly part of a broader discourse. This makes it impossible to dismiss it as assuming no political import. In fact, the enterprise in which Casa Mare is involved bears features of a neocolonial anthropological venture for which the East Europeans have unconsciously become the raw material as ‘authentic’, ‘indigenous’ people, ‘species’ about to go ‘extinct’. What the viewer is most embarrassed with and confused by is not the manner of representation but the unintended contradictory message of the exhibition. While single photographs draw attention to individual lives and lifestyles, and the stories behind them, all of which are presented with ample sensibility, the exhibition as a whole sends an opposite impulse, calling for a different interpretation. Such interpretation cannot fail to recognize the concealed Oriental underpinnings, even if those underpinnings are not accompanied by contemptuous treatment. Thus, even if one refuses to interpret Gaudlitz’s photographs as singular examples of Orientalist representation, considering such an interpretation abusive, one cannot fail to see Casa Mare as part of a broader institutional enterprise rooted in that tradition. In fact, we are dealing here with the following situation: a German photographer, a contemporary traveller, and a member of a rich Western European country is given license to visually interrogate citizens of relatively poor regions of Eastern and South Eastern Europe. By projecting those people’s half-primitive and half-noble fantasies of looking beautiful, stylish, and wealthy onto a glossy paper, Gaudlitz is providing his predominantly Western public with a pleasurable diversion amid their everyday regular ‘Western’ life. This must cause displeasure in the audiences of East European countries where Casa Mare has also been exhibited. Fanon’s comment on black culture as a provisional form of ‘relaxation’ for white Westerners seems an excellent parallel in this context:

372 Dariusz Skórczewski I will be told, now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will turn to you as we do to our children—to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world. You are so real in your life—so funny, that is. Let us run away for a little while from our ritualized, polite civilization and let us relax, bend to those heads, those adorably expressive faces. In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves.28

The exhibition of Frank Gaudlitz’s otherwise excellent photographs reaffirms the fundamental European divide between the ‘civilized West’ and the ‘primitive East’, the latter needed by the former only to ‘reconcile’ the West with itself. Even the apparently picturesque setting seems to be implicated in powerful stereotyping, relegating Eastern Europeans to the position of superficial imitators of Western fashion and lifestyle. They do aspire to look and live like West Europeans, make efforts to achieve this goal and assume Western traits, yet are not affluent enough to afford it, as demonstrated by sparse interiors of their homes. As a result, their aspirations are failed and pathetic, and they themselves may at the very most call for sympathy and pitying looks. These aspirations and efforts are evident on some photographs, especially those showcasing the owners’ notion of his or her material status, as they perceive it. For example, in one of the portraits (see Fig. 1) Gaudlitz captured a seventy-year-old Romanian woman standing next to two obsolete black-and-white TV sets piled up on each other on a living room table. These material objects, once the top consumer goods in a communist household, now of low value, poor quality and outdated functionality, their height almost matching the human figure in the centre of the photograph, render her message ambiguous: ‘What I am showing you is the best of what I now have; these emblems of modernity, trashy as they are, I treasure the most, but were I given a chance, I would gladly exchange them for better stuff.’ The small globe placed on a coffee table in the background suggests that the woman may have spent her life dreaming of traveling overseas, living elsewhere—typical fantasies of millions of Eastern Europeans under communism. Now that possessing basic artefacts of Western lifestyle, these artefacts anticipated by the plethora of their poor post-communist substitutes, seems within arm’s reach, she feels no unease demonstrating her present possessions, a proof of her status, incomparably lower than that of vast majority of Western Europeans. Gaudlitz has thus submitted here, and in some other of his photographs, a powerful sociological insight.

28

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 132.

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Fig.1. Magda Szöcs, 70, Teaca, Romania, 2007. A photograph by Frank Gaudlitz from the series Casa Mare. © Frank Gaudlitz

Conclusion If we agree that ‘photography can be a good and approachable way of introducing a reflexive voice, articulating a critical position rather than presenting a didactic, illustrative, historical ethnography grounded in

374 Dariusz Skórczewski positivist, realist uses of photography’,29 then it is legitimate to ask whether Frank Gaudlitz’s ethnographic visual undertaking is a fortunate attempt at introducing a reflexive voice and thus inviting the voice of the ‘Other’. Instead of hearing the other independent voices, in Casa Mare we are yet again exposed to the dominant voice of the authoritative Western centre. This time, however, that voice comes in the disguise of sophisticated visual art rendering full compassion for the East European ‘Other’. If we accept Sontag’s remark that ‘the history of photography discloses a long tradition of ambivalence about its capacity for partisanship: the taking of sides is felt to undermine its perennial assumption that all subjects have validity and interest’, 30 then, paradoxically, the engagement of Gaudlitz and the institutions promoting his works in creating a sympathetic representation of Eastern Europe (as if it were unable to represent itself) turns against the very message assumed in Casa Mare. The way of visual telling, undertaken by Gaudlitz and his editors, raises questions about the representational validity and credibility of the contemporary Western European discourse on Eastern Europe. One way to overcome this defect would be to confront the Orientalizing stereotypes of Eastern Europe with those cultivated by East Europeans towards Europe’s West. Such a confrontation would make it possible to overcome the glaring asymmetry that exists in the production of knowledge, resulting from the fact that ‘Westerners had for centuries studied and spoken for the rest of the world; the reverse had not been the case’.31 However, a project like that is still difficult to envisage: one can only with difficulty imagine Gaudlitz visiting villages in Provence, Bavaria, and Flanders, and asking the native French, Germans, and Belgians to put on their ‘festive’ clothing and pose against the wall in the ‘most prestigious’ interior of their homes. Critiques of undertakings such as Casa Mare are necessary to realize the chasm between that which is permissible in the present cultural discourses on the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, respectively. They are also necessary for further reflection on the interpretations of alterity and of its representations. A departure point for such reflection might be the realization that easy demarcations between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, the ‘modern’ and the ‘backward’, should be reconsidered and, perhaps, abandoned, and the two parts, instead of being juxtaposed, should be treated as belonging to one human and humanistic reality. 29 30 31

Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photography in Ethnographic Museums: a Reflection’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 7 (1995), p. 132. Sontag, p. 60. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), p. 21.

Jagoda Wierzejska Central European Palimpsests: Postcolonial Discourse in Works by Andrzej Stasiuk and Yurii Andrukhovych Abstract: The societies of East-Central Europe remain in a relation of post-dependency to Russia, and they appear to have some things in common with the position of former overseas colonies vis-à-vis their Western metropolises. However, on the other hand, they are discursively incapacitated by the West and relegated to the ‘poor’ position in relation to the dominant systems of knowledge and representation. The chapter is an analysis of the discursive consequences of this situation in the literary representations of the EastCentral European sociocultural space created by Andrzej Stasiuk and Yurii Andrukhovych. Both authors are explicitly trying to create a vision of ‘their Europe’ that goes beyond the narratives of subordination and domination. However, in their works certain tropes reveal the post-dependent condition of the subject. These are related to the hidden presence of the discourses of foreign empires (particularly the Soviet Union, but also Germany and Austria-Hungary), as well as to the involuntary takeover of the Western Orientalizing point of view by the ‘East-Central European’ subject.

Since the beginning of the ‘postcolonial transfer to East-Central Europe,’1 scholars have considered the validity of using tools based on postcolonial studies for the interpretation of literary activity and socio-cultural phenomena in this part of the world.2 Opponents of applying postcolonial methodologies to the countries of East-Central Europe have often stressed that the latter do not meet two threshold criteria by which typical colonies have been characterized: (1) they are not faraway territories separated by sea from the imperial centre; (2) their inhabitants are not representative of any race other than white.3 Additional objections have been raised that touch upon the entanglement of postcolonialism with Marxism; a politically ambiguous connection during the Cold War. Let me add here that since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Marxism has been associated by East-Central Europeans first and foremost with the recently overthrown system of oppressive power. However, these misgivings—which are not the only ones, but probably the most crucial—did not put a stop to attempts to use 1 2

3

Dorota Kołodziejczyk, ‘Postkolonialny transfer na Europę Środkowo-Wschodnią’ [Postcolonial Transfer to East-Central Europe], Teksty Drugie, 125.5 (2010), 22-39. See Kołodziejczyk, 22-39; Grażyna Borkowska, ‘Perspektywa postkolonialna na gruncie polskim—pytania sceptyka’ [Postcolonial Perspective on the Polish Ground—Questions of a Sceptic], Teksty Drugie, 125.5 (2010), 40-52; Leszek Koczanowicz, ‘Post-postkomunizm a kulturowe wojny’ [Post-post-communism and the Cultural War], Teksty Drugie, 125.5 (2010), 9-21. See Janusz Korek, ‘Central and Eastern Europe from Postcolonial Perspective’, in From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. by Janusz Korek (Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola, 2007), pp. 5-22 (pp. 6-7)

376 Jagoda Wierzejska postcolonial tools for interpretation of cultural and social realities in the socalled Second World. Those scholars who were most attracted to the postcolonial approach noticed that the criteria mentioned above; i.e., overseas location and the race of inhabitants, were wrong for typing the colonial and postcolonial status of regions.4 Therefore, they have proposed various ways of overcoming the political limitations of postcolonial theories, such as extending their methodological basis by applying theories developed within the post-secular turn in the humanities.5 Consequently, many experts in the field have come to acknowledge the validity of using the postcolonial tools in studies on East-Central Europe, in accord with the following view metaphorically expressed by Aleksander Fiut: The omnipresent, although invisible, shadow of empires has undoubtedly left its destructive, pernicious traces not only on the antipodes, but also on Central and Eastern Europe. Insidiously, day after day, it was shaping reactions and attitudes, ways of thinking and perceiving reality, influencing not only all aspects of daily life, but also morality. The imprint of subjection has been stamped everywhere on the region and is hard to erase.6

Obviously, this does not mean that the arguments surrounding the problem have ended. It has been rightly stressed that perceiving the experience of East-Central Europeans from the postcolonial perspective, however inspiring, should be kept to appropriate proportions, as the diversity of socio-political, economic, and cultural structures in this part of the world does not allow the equation of present trends of domination and subordination with the colonial projects of the British and French empires. This is precluded first of all by the fact that national relations in EastCentral Europe have had such a multifarious character, crossing at such different angles that they render the establishment of a clear reference to colonizers vs. colonized impossible. In East-Central Europe this classic relationship pattern—even if we consider the ambiguity caused by the phenomenon of hybridity (with all its consequences) described by Homi Bhabha 7 —loses clarity, transforming into a complex cluster or even, as 4

5

6 7

David Chioni Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA, 116.1 (2001), 111-28 (p. 112); Korek, pp. 6-7; Ewa M. Thompson, ‘A jednak postkolonializm. Uwagi epistemologiczne’ [And yet Postcolonialism: Epistemological Notes], Teksty Drugie, 132.6 (2011), 289-302. Dariusz Skórczewski, Teoria—literature—dyskurs. Pejzaż postkolonialny [Theory— Literature—Discourse: The Postcolonial Landscape] (Lublin: KUL Publishing House, 2013), pp. 11-61, 107-49. Aleksander Fiut, ‘In the Shadow of Empires: Postcolonialism in Central and Eastern Europe—Why Not?’ in From Sovietology to Postcoloniality, pp. 33-40 (p. 33). Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 102-22.

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suggested by one Polish researcher, a knot8 of relationships, in which it is difficult to separate particular relations of dependency and power, as they permeate and overlap one another. Scholars have tried to describe this cluster in different ways. Maria Janion, taking her own country as an example, pointed out that Poland has many postcolonial features, but at the same time experiences superiority towards its former colonizer, Russia. However, it also, due to having attempted to subordinate kindred Slavic territory, itself has a colonial past. 9 The Romanian Bogdan Ştefănescu, referring to the complex relationship dynamics between the East-Central European periphery and various mother countries, raised, for a change, the argument that a ‘triangular identity formation’ process had taken place in this part of the world, meaning that a new pole—the USSR—was added to the traditional postcolonial opposition of West vs Orient. As a result, EastCentral Europe was placed among three mutually antagonistic reference points.10 Inspired by the findings of researchers favouring the postcolonial approach, I would like to suggest another means of describing this cluster, employing the familiar yet presumably fresh metaphor of the palimpsest. Namely, I propose to look at the cluster as a multi-layered system where, from underneath the most blatant relationships of dependency and power, other relations emerge, beginning to shine through one another or, in other words, to be subject to a certain interference. Thus, the post-Yalta Soviet domination would be one of the dimensions of hegemony in East-Central Europe that is exceptionally visible due to its long duration; however, it was not the only one. This approach aims at including the experiences of the largest possible number of hegemons (and would-be hegemons) as well as of their subordinates in the region, taking into account that sometimes one and the same national group (in relationships with various other groups) may have played both roles. When applying this approach and treating East-Central Europe as a palimpsest of supremacy-subordination relationships, it is necessary to consider the following problems and dimensions of supremacy in this part of the world. Firstly, most of the countries of the East-Central Europe were situated within the sphere of not one, but at least two imperialisms: the Russian one, which had its separate Soviet variant, and the German. They 8 9 10

Leszek Szaruga, Węzeł kresowy [Borderland Knot] (Częstochowa: WSP, 2001). Maria Janion, Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna. Fantazmaty literatury [Amazing Slavdom: Literary Phantasms] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006), p. 328. Bogdan Ştefănescu, ‘Reluctant Siblings: Methodological Musings on the Complicated Relationship between Postcolonialism and Postcommunism’, Word and Text, A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2.1 (2012), 13-26 (pp. 22-23).

378 Jagoda Wierzejska both left a deep mark on the local ethos. Aside from these two, however, we should also consider Austro-Hungarian imperialism (which has been insufficiently researched with regard to its colonial character). This latter hegemon influenced the identity-forming processes of the nations and territories that belonged to the Habsburg monarchy;11 and perhaps it would also be worthwhile to look into Turkish imperialism, whose former oppressive presence still draws attention in Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Secondly, the East-Central Europeans who before the fall of Iron Curtain had so often treated the West as an object of idealization or even idolatry (while having also experienced long-standing inferiority feelings towards it at the same time), found themselves after the political breakthrough in the zone of Western supremacy. This took various forms: real political and economic hegemony, but also, above all, a discursive hegemony, as well as the more veiled, vicarious hegemony recognized by Ewa Thompson.12 Thirdly and finally, some countries of East-Central Europe played the role of the colonist at one point in their history, and the role of the object of colonization at another. As a result, the elements of both imperial and victim discourse became established in their cultures. Still, it is worth remembering that the fluctuations of those roles remained extremely complex. For example, citing Daniel Beauvois, the Ukrainians in Ukraine were Russified by the Russians and Polonized by the Polish; still, the same Polish were simultaneously Russified by the Russians, and, once Russified— the Polish then re-Polonized them.13

11

12

13

See the collective monograph Habsburg Postcolonial. Machtstrukturen und kollektives Gedächtnis [Habsburg Postcolonial: Power Structures and Collective Memory], ed. by Johannes Feichtinger, Ursula Prutsch, and Csáky Moritz (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003). See also the thematic issue ‘Galicja postkolonialnie, możliwości i granice’, of Historyka. Studia metodologiczne, 42 (2012), guest ed. by Jan Surman and Klemens Kaps; and Robert Lemon, Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011). Ewa Thompson, ‘Postkolonialne refleksje na marginesie pracy zbiorowej From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective pod redakcją Janusza Korka’ [Postcolonial Reflections on the Margins of the Collective Work from Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. by Janusz Korek], Porównania, 5 (2008), 113-25 (p. 114). Daniel Beauvois, ‘Rosyjsko-polska wojna o oświatę na terenie Ukrainy (1836-1914)’ [The Russo-Polish War for Education in Ukraine (1836-1914)], in Europa nieprowincjonalna. Przemiany na ziemiach wschodnich dawnej Rzeczpospolitej (Białoruś, Litwa, Łotwa, Ukraina, wschodnie pogranicze III Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej) w latach 1772–1999 [NonProvincial Europe: Changes in the Former Eastern Territories of the Republic of Poland (Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Eastern Borderland the Third Republic

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All of these problems blur the opposition of colonizers vs. colonized in East-Central Europe, which leads, as mentioned above, to the creation of fairly complex, palimpsest-type interrelations of hegemony and subordination. I shall present these interrelations in more detail by referring to the works of two writers enmeshed in contemporary post-colonial discourse of their own respective countries: Yurii Andrukhovych, a Ukrainian, and Andrzej Stasiuk, a Pole. As a starting point, I have chosen the book My Europe: Two Essays on the So-Called Central Europe,14 written by them jointly. Contextually, I will also refer to other texts by these authors, in particular their essays.

On Russia/the USSR and Germany In My Europe, both Andrukhovych and Stasiuk approach the East-Central European theme from their individual perspectives, as suggested by the title of the publication, where ‘my’ indicates a private perspective, and ‘so-called’ implies distance towards the following adjective, ‘Central’. The objective of both writers can be assumed to be contestation of the cognitive frames imposed on the macro-region for the purpose of classifying knowledge about it according to commonplace categories.15 Examples of such frames could be the project of Friedrich Naumann16 (ideologically connected with Germany’s expansive Eastern policy) and the idea of Central Europe in the eyes of local populaces (Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 17 Czesław Miłosz, 18 Milan Kundera)19 that wanted to defend themselves intellectually against the imperialistic appetites of their powerful neighbours. Instead of invoking

14

15

16 17 18 19

of Poland) in the years 1772–1999], ed. by Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw/London: Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm/Polonia Aid Foundation Trust 1999), pp. 401-32. Yurii Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk, Moja Europa. Dwa eseje o Europie zwanej Środkową [My Europe: Two Essays on the So-Called Central Europe] (Wołowiec: Czarne Publishing House, 2001). Ukrainian version: Stasiuk, Andrukhovych, Moia Yevropa. Dva esei pro naidyvnishu chastynu svitu (Lviv: VNTL-Klasyka, 2005). Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine. See the collective volume Mitteleuropa: Between Europe and Germany, ed. by Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Berghahn Books, 1997), and the review of the volume by Lonnie Johnson, ‘Peter Katzenstein ed., Mitteleuropa: Between Europe and Germany’, in The Marshall Plan in Austria, ed. by Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2000), pp. 544-560 (p. 558). Friedrich Neumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: Verlag hierzu Th. Heuss, 1915). Tomáš G. Masaryk, The New Europe (the Slav Standpoint), ed. by W. Preston Warren and William B. Weist, introduction by Otakar Odlozilik (Cranbury: Bucknell UP, 1972). Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: a Search for Self-Definition, trans. by Catherine S. Leach (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, trans. by Edmund White, The New York Review of Books, 31.7 (1984), pp. 33-38.

380 Jagoda Wierzejska those frames, Andrukhovych and Stasiuk want to make East-Central Europe the centre of their own world and narration. However, this goal is achieved only partially. Although the writers speak with ‘free voices’—the book was first launched in Poland in 2001—so theoretically both are able to say what they want, in reality their voices prove only partially free because they are still stifled by the echoes of various relationships of hegemony and subordination existing till now in this part of the world. In Stasiuk’s and Andrukhovych’s narrations, the theme of imperial violence by Russia/the USSR and Germany is the first one to recur. The Ukrainian author sums up the introductory part of his essay, composed in the Bildungsroman style, with the following words: Staying between Russia and Germany is Central Europe’s historical destiny. The Central European fear is historically balancing between two fears; the Germans are coming, the Russians are coming. The Central European death is a prison death or a forced labour camp death, and additionally, a collective death, that is, Massenmord or zatschistka; the Central European journey is escape. (pp. 100-101)

Stasiuk begins his essay with the description of how, with the use of a compass, he draws a circle on a map, 300 kilometres in radius (the distance between Wołowiec where he lives and his birthplace of Warsaw): The line runs more or less through Brest, Rivne, Chernivtsi, Cluj-Napoca, Arad, Szeged, Budapest, Žilina, Katowice, Częstochowa, and ends where it started; that is in Warsaw. Inside, there is a scrap of Belarus, quite a stretch of Ukraine, decent parts of Romania and Hungary comparable to each other in size, almost all of Slovakia and a bit of Bohemia. Well, and about one third of Poland. No Germany and no Russia, a fact which I accept with some surprise, but also a discrete, atavistic relief (pp. 77-78).

The fragments cited above, are symptomatic of the prose of both Andrukhovych and Stasiuk. Both writers thematize the facts that the history of this region, especially in the 20th century, was overshadowed by two great powers: the Russian/Soviet, and the German, and that it was under the direct influence of their real and symbolic violence. That notwithstanding, the efforts of this thematization, calculated to intellectually describe the problem and consequently gain distance from it, do not eliminate discourse elements deriving from foreign empires from the statements of the Ukrainian and the Polish (descendants of) the victimized. On the contrary, those discourses show themselves to be present in the analysed texts tacitly or, as I proposed before, in a palimpsest-style manner. This is due to the long-term relations of dependency upon Russia/the USSR and Germany having led to a situation, where, even though the dependency ceased, the

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victimized assimilated some patterns of thinking and epistemological structures that had belonged to the prevailing discourses, regardless of the fact that they had previously regarded them as alien and intimidating. Testimony to the assimilation of such patterns and structures in narration of Andrukhovych and Stasiuk is provided by the ambiguous attitude that encompasses both contempt and admiration for the former Russian/Soviet and German hegemons, which leaves its mark in some of their essays. This ambiguous attitude, although not explicitly thematised, subtly permeates both of the essays that comprise My Europe. In other texts by these authors, however, it was expressed directly. Andrukhovych describes his attitude to Russia: In the manner of children, I divide the sheet of paper in two, trying to list the pluses on one side and on the other, minuses. I refer to Russia, that is, to what I think of it. […] all the pluses are co-related with what is individual, with the character of an individual, whereas all the minuses with what is social, with the system as such. In other words, there is no way but to agree with Marquis de Custine or was that somebody else, I don’t remember now, that ‘they [Russians] evoke admiration as particular people, and repulsion as a social organism joined into a national whole’. Well, that’s it, no more and no less: admiration and repulsion, either-or, Russian style extremities.20

And Stasiuk adds, uncompromisingly: ‘I am scared of Germans and Russians; I both scorn and admire them. That may be the destiny of Poles: obsession about their own position in Europe and the world’.21 This kind of ambivalence characterizes the attitudes of all peoples subdued by foreign supremacy. Leela Gandhi was trying to name the phenomenon when she pointed out that, aside from force, the other instrument of imperial power is ‘seduction’. 22 Similarly, Bogdan Ştefănescu, cited above, has shown that every imperial centre is for its subordinates both repulsive and full of hypnotic charm. This ambiguity of feelings towards former oppressors is not nullified by the fact that the East-Central Europeans often perceived one of their hegemons, namely Russia/the USSR, as representing a lower level of culture and civilization, which we may distinctly observe in Andrukhovych’s narration. 20 21

22

Yurii Andrukhovych, Diiavol khovaietsia v siri. Vybrani sprobky 1999-2005 rokiv [The Devil is in the Cheese: Selected Essays 1999-2005] (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2007), p. 84. Andrzej Stasiuk, ‘Wir brauchen alle eine Therapie’ [We All Need a Therapy], interview with Gerhard Gnauck‘, Die Welt, 14 March 2007, available at

Accessed 10 June 2014. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), p. 18.

382 Jagoda Wierzejska I have no right [...] to bring the definition of East Central Europe to 'the areas where Russia is not particularly loved', to an anti-Russian attitude [...] And if, at this dead end, one reversed everything one hundred and eighty degrees and thought about love? I mean, I'm sure it exists. My love for Russia is Central European. It contains the memory of wrongs, of all the gas attacks from the past. But it does not abandon hope. Central European love for Russia is in no case an illusion, it is a reality present everywhere where people still know how to (even if they do not always want to) speak Russian and read the Cyrillic alphabet. (p. 89)

Another sign of assimilation of certain elements of the past oppressors’ discourses in our writers’ narrations are the ideas derived from the oppressors’ dictionaries relating to different forms of violence used by them towards the oppressed. This phenomenon shows especially clearly in the works of Andrukhovych.23 In his essay from My Europe the writer uses such terms as ‘smert tabirna’ [forced labour camp death], ‘zachystka’ [purge], ‘Massenmord’ [mass murder], and at another place (not without ironic subtext) ‘peemzhe’ (the abbreviation of the words ‘postoiannoe mesto zhitelstva’ [permanent place of residence]) or ‘wyizd na peemzhe’ [departure to a permanent place of residence]. 24 He thus activates in the cultural consciousness of the receiver the memory of the most atrocious displays of Russia/the USSR’s and Germany’s supremacy in this part of the world, ones hard to express in a language other than that of the oppressor. With reference to the work of Homi Bhabha, it could be said that those terms, the elements of foreign power discourse in the narration of the Ukrainian, are nothing other than specific signifiers of its authority (pp. 145-74) shaped to East-Central European standards. This specificity results from the fact that in that part of the European mainland the imperial conqueror was often associated with inconceivable totalitarian violence. Furthermore, in the Russian version this took on the form of what David Chioni Moore calls ‘reverse cultural colonization’ (p. 121); i.e., colonization where the oppressor was perceived by the oppressed as a representative of lower culture, and the conquered territories were often seen by the oppressor ‘as prize rather than as burdens needing civilizing from their occupiers’ (Ibid). Even though Moore is referring to the Baltic countries and Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania—not Ukraine—with this term, 23 24

Andrukhovych is aware of the Ukrainian language as remaining primarily ‘in the deep shadow of the Russian language’. See Andrukhovych, 2007, pp. 57-58. See Andrukhovych, 2007, pp. 263-266. The category of a ‘permanent place of residence’ functioning in the language of the Soviet administration was related to the permanent control, especially of the mobility, of the residents of the USSR and the whole Eastern Bloc. ‘A departure to a permanent place of residence’ is a veiled way of describing emigration from the area of Soviet influence.

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Andrukhovych, recalling these exact signifiers of the Soviet authority in his essays, reveals a point of view similar to his.25 Namely, he suggests that in ‘his’ Europe, Soviet domination took on particularly violent forms— ‘particularly’ not only in the sense of quantity, describing the scope of violence, but also in the sense of quality, describing its wild, barbarous character.

On the West Besides consideration of the long-lasting effects of East-Central Europe’s dependence on Russia/the USSR and Germany, we can also observe the influence of the politico-economic and, above all, cultural supremacy of the West in the region in the writings of the Ukrainian and Polish authors. For example, Andrukhovych admits that he feels like a citizen of an ‘Insufficient-Europe’ (p. 210); that is to say, a space where ‘the reality is divided into Europe and Something Else’ (p. 259). Stasiuk, however, maintains that in the West he feels like ‘a barbarian from the unwashed, unfinished East’.26 Additionally, both authors see the past as a fundamental modus of time in East-Central Europe, a ‘dictate of pre-judice’ which ‘does not let the future make it possible’ (p. 93) (in Andrukhovych’s words) or (in Stasiuk’s words) ‘it provides us only with rational warnings of the type: you should have stayed at home’ (p. 136). In such moments the authors of My Europe diagnose the feelings of belatedness and economic underdevelopment, pessimism and passivity; in short, various aspects of the inferiority complex towards the West, which on the mental map drawn by many inhabitants of the Second World still remains an oasis of affluence as well as an object of jealousy, aspirations, and dreams. Both writers—Andrukhovych to a greater extent, and Stasiuk to a lesser— intellectually map out this complex. First of all, they point, each in 25

26

Moore-Gilbert mentions Budapest, Prague and Berlin as examples of the aforementioned ‘prizes’ in the perception of the Soviet Russians. In the context of his utterance, it is worth recalling Andrukhovych’s words on Lviv which ‘in the period of the USSR was considered [...] one of the four European cities.’ See Andrukhovych, Lexicon intymnykh mist. Dovilnii posobnik of geopoetiki ta kosmopolitki [The Lexicon of Intimate Cities: the Unrestricted Handbook of Geopoetics and Cosmopolitics] (Kamyanets-Podilsky: TOB Printing Ruta, 2012), p. 250. Lviv, for many inhabitants of the Soviet Union, especially western Ukrainians, who have not only an eastern but also a western identity, was a figure of Europeanism, both in the symbolic and literal, physical sphere. (Let us recall that in the Soviet era the streets of Lviv often were used as sets of films, the plot of which took place in western European cities, for example, Paris or Rome). Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe, trans. by Michael Kandel (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 83.

384 Jagoda Wierzejska his own manner, to the symbolic domination present in Western Orientalizing discourse on East-Central Europe. This discourse, as several scholars have observed, has been developing since the Enlightenment on the basis of tendentious, pro-imperial theses by Russian and German historians asserting that the local nations, small and devoid of long history, are supposedly incapable of independent functioning.27 Andrukhovych reflects on this issue directly, bitterly mocking the stereotypes that model how Western Europeans perceive Ukrainians: When German camera men visited us, they had in mind that ours was a poor country with a dying-out population, where old women a) lived on twenty five Deutschmarks a month; b) wore kerchiefs over the heads. That is why their cameras hypnotically traced the anticipated views.28

Stasiuk touches upon that same theme when he writes in Fado about Gypsies encamping in the middle of Champs-Élysées, Bulgarian bear-tamers in Berlin’s Ku’damm, half-savage Ukrainians at the gates of Milan, and drunken, prayerful Poles wreaking havoc in the vineyards by Rhine and Mosel.29 Thereby, through parody, he exposes stereotypes embedded in the ignorance and arrogance of the Westerners, who feel superior to their Eastern neighbours. Both writers also point to the phenomenon of mimicry. Mimicry is something East-Central Europeans give in to, influenced by the multi-sided hegemony of the West. To some extent it resembles the mimicry investigated by Bhabha—it is ‘the sign of the inappropriate’, the resemblance that ‘produce[s] its slippage, its excess, it difference’ (p. 86). In the perspective of the writers, however, this mimicry does not disturb the authority of dominant discourse—as Bhabha sees it (Ibid); rather, it is a hopeless attempt to gain authenticity through repetition, which is why they treat it critically. Andrukhovych, again, thematises the issue: ‘The Ukrainians emigrate and undergo mimicry—in the face of police control, dragnets and

27

28 29

Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), pp. 1-49. See also Mark von Hagen, ‘Does Ukraine Have a History?’, Slavic Review, 54.3 (1995), 658-73; Mykola Riabchuk, ‘The Nowhere Nation, abo czy maie Ukraina istoriiu?’ [The Nowhere Nation or Does Ukraine Have a History?], in Riabchuk, Vid Malorosii do Ukrainy. Paradoksy zapizniloho natsiietvoriennia [From Little Russia to Ukraine: Paradoxes of the Delayed Nation-Building] (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2000). Andrukhovych, 2007, p. 59. Andrzej Stasiuk, Fado, trans. by Bill Johnston (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), pp. 74-75.

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deportations’,30 he writes with a bit of sadness, while Stasiuk limits himself to introducing the inhabitants of Second world in his narrations. His presentation is not without mockery of those who re-create the realities of the First world as well as they can: wearing mirrored sunglasses, parading in gold chains, and making ‘gestures aped from MTV or the NBA’.31 Here is where the relatively limited similarities between the diagnoses proposed by these writers of the relationship between East-Central Europe and the West end. Even though Andrukhovych perceives symptoms of the culture of exhaustion in the West, which include annihilation of the hierarchy of values, transformation of traditional symbols into mass-culture trinkets, the pretence and superficiality of intellectual life, and the nihilistic effects of globalization, he turns out to be a descendant of such intellectuals as Miłosz, Kundera, and Danilo Kiš. And why is that? It is because he does not separate Ukraine from that West, nor does he accept the division of the continent along the borders of the former USSR. On the contrary, by reaching out for the idea of ‘his Europe’, he attempts to include the EastCentral region into Europe’s intellectual community. Stasiuk sees things differently. He turns awareness of the supremacy of the West over East-Central Europe into a gesture of rejection of the former—one motivated by deep resentment, and in a sense repeating the rejection of the East by West after 1945. Both writers cannot therefore free themselves from thinking in terms of the East-West opposition, which shows their postcolonial attitude, indicating that they require a binary worldimage for the purposes of politics, ideology, and mythology. The Ukrainian author however, attempts to heighten that opposition with dynamism, by thematizing it, revealing its tacit assumptions and showing possible ways to overcome it. What Stasiuk does instead—rightly called anti-Kundera32 and compared to Franz Fanon33 (although missing the revolutionary zeal of the Martinique-born intellectual)—is confirm the duality. He creates a vision of ‘his Europe’ that actually means a ‘different Europe’; its inhabitants are aliens in the Old World, having come ‘from outside, from lands about which Europe itself has only the vaguest notion and which it treats more like a threat than as a part of itself ’.34 By doing that, he is sentencing the East30

31 32 33 34

‘Ukraintsi migruiut i mimikruiut—pered zahrozoiu politsiinykh zatryman, oblav i deportatsii’. See Andrukhovych, 2007, p. 266. The sentence exploits the soundsimilarity between the words ‘emigrate’ and ‘undergo mimicry’ or ‘mimic’. Stasiuk, Dziennik pisany później [A Diary Written Later], photos Dariusz Pawelec (Wołowiec: Czarne Publishing House, 2010), p. 8. Terrence O’Keeffe, ‘Mitteleuropa Blues, Perilous Remedies: Andrzej Stasiuk’s Harsh World’, part 2, The Sarmatian Review, 32.1 (2012), 1640-50 (p. 1643). Skórczewski, 2013, pp. 345-346. Stasiuk, 2009, p. 73.

386 Jagoda Wierzejska Central European to the inevitably postcolonial place ‘between the East that never existed, and West that existed excessively’ (p. 136). The differing approach to Western supremacy in the region, presented by Andrukhovych and Stasiuk, shows that there is no single version of the postcolonial palimpsest in East-Central European cultures. Complex arrangements of hegemony and subordination that can be found in the literary heritage of this part of the world may assume different shapes, depending on how their subsequent layers are represented. As we will see, the problem discussed herein; namely, the relationship towards the West, also affects postcolonial meanings contained in other writings by the authors of My Europe.

The Habsburg Monarchy—the Glamour and the Shadow Both Andrukhovych and Stasiuk declare the centre of ‘their Europe’ to be located in places where they themselves live, situated not far from each other, although separated by the Polish-Ukrainian border. What is interesting is that they both like to use the historical name of the region, Galicia, rather than West Ukraine and Eastern Lesser Poland. In exploiting that historicalgeographic category, the writers bring to life the past era connected with the dominance of one more empire on the territory of East-Central Europe: the Habsburg Monarchy. Although that power had a much gentler face compared to the hegemony of Russia/the USSR and Germany on the territories conquered by the Habsburgs; i.e. in Galicia itself, it also bore colonial traits.35 What is curious, however, is that the term ‘Galicia’ does not seem to play a crucial role in the interpretation of Poland and Ukraine’s postcolonial situation in Andrukhovych and Stasiuk’s texts. ‘Seem’, as some of the applied rhetoric allows us to guess that from our writers’ perspective the presence of Austria-Hungary in this part of the world was not entirely without imperial dimensions. When Stasiuk writes, for example, that he ‘supports monarchy from one end of the world to the other’ because ‘the more land the emperor has, the better for an ordinary man’, and when he adds that there is nothing wrong with the fact that ‘once again we are just subjects’(p. 123), in his words, which refer explicitly to the historical EmpireKingdom, we can sense a touch of irony. As a result of that irony, in the

35

See Andriy Zayarnyuk, ‘Imperium, chłopi, ruchy narodowe—galicyjski trójkąt postkolonialny?’ [Empire, Peasants, National Movements—The Galician Postcolonial Triangle?], trans. by Iaroslava Kravchenko, Historyka, 42 (2012), 101-13; Ursula Prutsch, ‘Habsburg Postcolonial’, in Habsburg Postcolonial, pp. 33-43; Clemens Ruthner, ‘K. u. k. Kolonialismus als Befund, Befindlichkeit und Metapher: Versuch einer weiteren Klärung’, in Habsburg Postcolonial, pp. 111-28.

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idyllic Kakania,36 we notice traits characteristic to every great world power: the state of being ‘in motion, in progress, driven by the idea of expansion but also sclerotic, unable to remember its lands, its peoples, its capitals’.37 Generally speaking, however, both Andrukhovych and Stasiuk avoid presenting the rule of the Viennese centre over East-Central European provinces with excessive doom and gloom. In their perception, even if the Habsburg Monarchy can be at least partially said to cast an imperial shadow on the region, it also surrounds this territory with seductive glamour. This approach could be explained through reference to the Austria Felix myth;38 however, it would be a misleading track, as both the writers while referring to the Habsburg past, simultaneously implement the tactics of disillusionment. They disarm the stereotype of Austria-Hungary as an incarnation of indefiniteness, impermanence, self-parody, and weakness disguised as strength, etc. and from the virtual world of Kakania they return to the reality of regions that once constituted the Empire-Kingdom. Andrukhovych admits plainly, though on a bitter note: ‘not cinnamon cafes, nor Viennese postcards, nor old Galician anecdotes, nor Sacher, nor Masoch, nor Kafka, nor Musil, nor Schulz, nor Roth, nor all the others […] my East-Central Europe is the former socialist camp, Ostbloc’. 39 Stasiuk accompanies him in a jocular-ironic key: ‘I always supported kings and emperors, […] at this lean time I miss them especially because democracy does not satisfy the aesthetic or mythological desires, and man feels 36

37 38

39

The noun ‘Kakania’ comes from the abbreviation k. u. k., which stands for ‘kaiserlich und königlich’ [Imperial and Royal] in German. It referred to the Habsburgs state over the Danube in a broader historical sense; nevertheless, some modern authors restrict their use to the Dual Monarchy, i.e. Austria-Hungary between the AustrianHungarian compromise in 1867 and the end of World War I. The name ‘Kakania’ was intended to describe the Habsburg Monarchy as a particular political, social and cultural reality, as well as a special state of mind. A discussion of Kakania became a highlight of the first volume of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities. Stasiuk, 2011, p. 222. The myth of widespread happiness in the Habsburg Monarchy is deeply rooted not only in the Austrian culture, but also in the other cultures which used to form the Empire-Kingdom. See Claudio Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur [The Habsburg Myth in Austrian Literature], trans. by Madeleine von Pásztory (Salzburg: Müller, 1966); Alois Woldan, Der Oesterreich-Mythos in der polnischen Literatur [The Austrian Myth in Polish Literature] (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1996); Lidia Stefanowska, ‘Back to the Golden Age: The Discourse of Nostalgia in the 1990s’, in Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map Europe, ed. by Larissa Zaleska Onyshkevych and Maria Rewakowicz (London: M. E. Sharp, 2009), pp. 119-30. See also Luiza Bialasiewicz, ‘Back to Galicia Felix?’, in Galicia: A Multicultured Land, ed. by Christopher Hann and Paul R. Magocsi (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2005), pp. 160-84. Andrukhovych, 2007, pp. 87-88. Emphasis by the author.

388 Jagoda Wierzejska somewhat lonely having to watch his presidents chosen in public elections on TV’ (p. 126). Nevertheless, he also more seriously admits: ‘The boredom and decay of Kakania, the way the literary men describe it, were, to a large extent, a creation of their own minds. […] The reality here was soon to outgrow their expectations’ (Ibid). If Andrukhovych and Stasiuk deconstruct the Austria Felix myth rather than invoke it, why are they not willing to report on the imperial dimension of Habsburg rule in East-Central Europe? My feeling is that the reason stems from the story about the Habsburg past of the region being a narration with marks of ‘compensative’ postcolonial discourse for them. It is a discourse where, by creating a story of subordination to an empire considered less expansive, and more liberal and ‘civilized’, the effects of being subordinated to a second empire (and also third, fourth…etc.) which influences the subjects much more oppressively, are softened. That is, in principle, how Andrukhovych employs the Kakania discourse, even though he is aware of the oversimplifications marking cultural memory about Austria-Hungary, as well as of the power-subordination relationships in a monarchy where the Ukrainians were a multilaterally oppressed group. He does this because that discourse, being rooted in the pre-Soviet cultural landscape of Galicia, can constitute a counterpoint to the model of Soviet culture, which he treats as extremely alien and superimposed.40 ‘I cannot not mention the timetables from a century ago; certainly, I was late to all viable trains, still, the information that between Lviv and Venice there were two train lines, first passing through Vienna and Innsbruck, the other between Budapest and Belgrade, is vital to me today’ (p. 77) admits the Ukrainian, who prefers to think of ‘his Europe’ as territory connected via Vienna and Budapest with Venice, rather than via the Gulag archipelago with Moscow.41 In a similar way Stasiuk, although he knows Galicia to be an Austrian partition where Poles played an ambiguous role in national relationships, reevaluates that partition in relation to other partitions—first, the Russian and the Prussian, and second, to the subsequent totalitarian supremacy of the USSR and Germany in East-Central Europe. That is why he admits:

40

41

Olena Fedyuk, ‘Stanislav Phenomenon. More on Ukrainian National Identity’, Kakanien Revisited, 25 August 2006, pp. 1-18, available at Accessed 17 February 2014. Monarchy over the Danube ‘has revealed to us a new geographic perspectives, has taught us to look to the West and relish its delicate dusk. Just think that there were times when my town belonged to one state structure not with Tambov and Tashkent, but with Venice and Vienna’, Andrukhovych, ‘Erts-herts-perts’, in Andrukhovych, Dezorientatsiia na mistsevosti. Sproby [Disorientation on Location: A Book of Essays] (Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileia-NV, 1999), pp. 5-14 (p. 8).

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‘…always on the 18th of August42 I get nostalgically drunk. […] I get drunk to the glory of the last true Emperor, as it is only from this current perspective, that his greatness, his operetta-style, infantile, oafish heroism become apparent’ (p. 125); and that is why in Gönc he drinks with an incidentally encountered Hungarian, drinks to Franz Joseph, because to such a toast—in contrast to a toast to Stalin or Hitler—both a Pole and a Hungarian are able to agree (Ibid, pp. 125-6). What links Andrukhovych and Stasiuk is the use of imperial-royal motifs as a compensative postcolonial discourse; what sets them apart is the ultimate functionalization of those motifs connected, in turn, with their different attitudes towards the West. The Ukrainian author employs a discourse related to the Habsburg Monarchy in order to connect his heart space with the West and thus justify its presence in the European mainland: Ukraine admittedly did not exist as a country—he seems to point out – but instead the Ukrainians, at least the ones from Galicia, were citizens of the ‘wonderful’ Europe that preceded 1914. The Polish author, on the contrary, acknowledges that the Imperial-Royal heritage, destroyed by the subsequent waves of history, constitutes a distinctive feature of the region, not so much joining it with other parts of the continent as defining its character per se. Thus, it possible to claim that both writers, even though sketching similar palimpsests of postcolonial correspondences that enmeshed the EastCentral Europe with Russia/the USSR, the West, and the old Habsburg Monarchy, ultimately present quite different pictures of ‘their Europe’.

Andrukhovych’s Europe and Stasiuk’s Europe Through the lens of the Ukrainian writer, East-Central Europe is an entity of weak stature (in the meaning given to the concept by Gianni Vattimo),43 because of its complex postcolonial heritage. Such a Europe is characterized by several factors. One of them is ‘post-modernism’, or, as Andrukhovych explains, ‘unfinished post-totalitarianism’, with a ‘permanent neo-totalitarian threat’ lurking within; another, ‘post-multiculturalism’, multiculturalism already being an attribute of the past, with occasional residues remaining; and finally ‘provincialism; that is marginalization in the sense of which Central Europe never was and never wanted to be a centre’.44 According to 42 43

44

The anniversary of the birth of the Emperor Franz Joseph, celebrated annually, usually very solemnly and pompously in the whole of the former Habsburg Empire. Gianni Vattimo, ‘Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought’, trans. by Thomas Harrison, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 10.1 (1984), 151–64. See also Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. and intro. by Jon R. Synderm (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 19-30 (herein esp. pp. 25-26). Andrukhovych, 1999, pp. 115-22 (pp. 120-21).

390 Jagoda Wierzejska his approach (which postulates more than ascertains), despite its weak postcolonial condition (and maybe even because of it, for Andrukhovych perceives its specific advantages), this region should be a part of Europe’s intellectual commonwealth, because all its nerves, ranging from cultural and intellectual to geographic ones, interconnect it with the West. Under this declaration, the Ukrainian author groups various motifs from his writings. Among these, aside from the updated discourse on the Habsburgs, there are the questions of the Polish past in the territory of what had been Eastern Galicia in interwar Poland, 45 and the problem of contemporary PolishUkrainian relations (Poland, which, albeit slightly ironically represents ‘the land of dreams’ in his writings, is for Andrukhovych a vestibule of the West).46 There is also the lyrical motif of the Danube in whose drainage basin Ukraine is situated (which proves that ‘we too are in the Atlantic zone’).47 Finally, so close to the poetry of ruins, we encounter the motif of traces of Galician architecture: ‘a vague reference evoking some sort of faraway depth, as if infused with an Italian/French/German aura’ (p. 73). Ultimately, in order to place ‘his Europe’ within the European mainland, the author suggests resignation from a Europeanness that is too narrowly conceived. He claims that ‘Europe is the youngest of continents, one that so far has not known its borders’.48 That is why he proposes proving to Europe that ‘it is bigger than it thinks itself to be. It should get accustomed to a different way of thinking about itself ’. 49 ‘Europe’, the writer adds, ‘is everywhere the populace believes they belong to Europe’.50 With Stasiuk, things look entirely different. ‘His Europe’ is a territory stigmatized by rejection and marginalization, plagued with imperialist spectres of the East, that, as discussed above, ‘never existed, and the West that existed excessively’, but also with its back turned to both sides. The Polish author puts a lot of effort into proving the exceptional nature of East-Central Europe. For this purpose he creates ‘a myth of the South’, in which the South, geographically speaking, is identified (roughly) with the 45

46 47 48

49 50

Andrukhovych, ‘Tu i tylko tu’ [Here and Only Here], trans. by Ola Hnatiuk, in Andrukhovych, Ostatnie terytorium. Eseje o Ukrainie [The Last Territory: Essays on Ukraine], trans. by Ola Hnatiuk, Katarzyna Kotyńska, Lidia Stefanowska (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne 2002), pp. 13-20. Andrukhovych, 1999, p. 91. Andrukhovych, 2007, p. 208. Emphasis by the author. Andruchowycz, ‘To tylko widmo, ale wciąż jeszcze krąży’ [This is Only the Spectrum, But It Still Circulates], trans. by Ola Hnatiuk, Gazeta Wyborcza, 287 (2006), p. 24. Emphasis by the author. Andruchowycz, ‘U potiazi Bazel—Berlin, 23.10.2006’ [On the Train from Basel to Berlin, 23.10.2006], Dzerkalo tizhnyia, 42 (2006), p. 19. Ibid., p. 24.

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Balkans, although culturally and intellectually it represents the essence of the East-Central European region. This myth contains imperial-royal motifs, a tricky approach to the idea of Danubian civilization, a specifically transformed topos of the poetry of ruins (elements close to the ideas of Andrukhovych, though approached differently), and the raising of the Roma to the rank of cultural heroes.51 The author intends to create an opportunity for overcoming the East-West opposition that has defined the postcolonial condition of the inhabitants of East-Central Europe: ‘True geography is an escape route heading South, because the East and the West have been taken over by its bastard sisters [political and cultural geography] and my hungry soul finds nothing there’ (p. 120). In reality, however, this myth leads to the creation of a vision of the Second World as a region immersed in its own solipsism, which, by expanding the qualities of the South to cover the whole region, and through recurring remarks about the similarity of landscapes as well as human experiences in this part of the continent,52 instead of ‘the greatest variety within the smallest space’, 53 everywhere reveals the same attributes: ruin, chaos, sloppiness, and the degradation of civilization. Stasiuk’s creation of East-Central Europe as a specific terra incognita—let us review again—‘lands about which Europe itself has only the vaguest notion, lands for which Occidentalism is essentially threatening, 54 has a quality (present to a much lesser degree in the narration of Andrukhovych), appearing only in the postcolonial perspective. As a peculiar reincarnation of the Slavic myth, this creation confirms the presentation of the region as an antithesis rather than a complement of Europe, fitting well into the previously discussed Orientalizing tendencies shown by the West since the Enlightenment towards the East-Central Europeans colonized by neighbouring empires. Larry Wolff wrote about the impact of this Orientalizing perspective in his work about the discursive ‘inventing’, that is to say the appropriation of East-Central Europe by the Enlightenment 51

52

53 54

Jagoda Wierzejska, ‘Mit Południa jako kontrapunkt dla opozycji Wschód—Zachód i podstawa mitu Europy Środkowej’ [The Myth of the South as a Counterpoint to the East—West Opposition and the Basis for the Myth of Central Europe], Porównania, 11 (2012), 71-86. This rhetorical device is very typical in Stasiuk’s works: ‘Slovak names would imperceptibly become Hungarian, then Romanian, Serbian, Macedonian, finally Albanian—assuming that we keep more or less to country lanes that go along the twenty-first line of longitude.’ Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 191. Or ‘It is thirty kilometres to Wołomin […]. I turn to the roadside glimpsing the lowbrow peasant sons and grandsons who finally get enough steroids and meat. They resemble chappies from Bajram Curri, from Kragujevac, from Prishtina.’ Stasiuk, 2010, p. 152. Kundera, 1984, p. 33. Stasiuk, 2009, p. 73.

392 Jagoda Wierzejska philosophers and writers which became a basis for the still-present stereotypical division East-West. 55 Travellers crossing the lands between Russia and Germany (with small exceptions, like Austria) spanning from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans, described them as uncivilized periphery, something between the West and the Orient, a particular kind of non-Europe nested in the European bosom. The function of those descriptions, just as Said discovered in relation to the Western European accounts of the Orient,56 was to justify the necessity of undertaking an (imperially motivated) civilizing mission in these territories, as well as defining the West as advanced and civilized in opposition to the Eastern parts of the continent. Stasiuk, creating the picture of ‘his Europe’ as the ‘Other’ of the West, and offering a negative answer to the question ‘Is it possible to merge two streams of history [Western and East-Central European] that have flowed separately alongside one another for so long?’, 57 falls hostage to the discourses worked out by Western Orientalists, regardless of his having discovered some stereotypes in those discourses, as mentioned above. The Polish author praises East-Central European geography at the expense of its history, 58 gets fascinated by the primitivism of the region, allegedly uncontaminated by the influence of the West, 59 ignores East-Central European achievements in the areas of culture and civilization by e.g., deliberately overlooking local metropolises on his journeys.60 This is how he refers to loci communes of the narrations popular in the West since Enlightenment, such as the dehistorization of East-Central Europe, the highlighting of the complex underdevelopment of this part of the world, and its agrarian character, which makes it a space of dirty, impoverished villages, interconnected with roads of the worst kind. Thus his conclusion is 55 56 57 58 59

60

Wolff, pp. 1-49. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (New York: Vintage, 1978). Stasiuk, 2009, p. 78. ‘Time concerns only those who hope for something to change, that is die-hard fools.’ Stasiuk, in Andrukhovych and Stasiuk, 2001, p. 77. While describing inhabitants of East-Central European countryside, Stasiuk writes: ‘They work like animals—slowly, monotonously, performing the same movements and gestures performer one hundred, two hundred years ago.’ Stasiuk, 2010, p. 23. ‘Try navigating Budapest during rush hour. There’s no way to get around: it sits like a spider in the middle of its web of streets. Or try making it through Warsaw, through Bucharest. A city on a trip is a disaster. Especially in countries that are like large villages. Villagers don’t know how to build a city. They end up with totems of foreign gods. The downtown area takes a stab at copying something, while the suburbs invariably resemble an aborted farm. The hypertrophy of storefronts with a melancholy of lost illusions. Whenever I am driving along and suddenly an edifice looms in the centre of a small town, I am stunned, because nothing prepares for or explains it.’ Ibid., p. 198.

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ultimately analogous to the Orientalizing recognition of newcomers from the West who, when crossing the borders of Germany and Austria, felt as if they were leaving Europe. ‘Five hundred kilometres to Vienna, 800 to Munich, 1,800 to Brussels, all of it more or less, approximately, as the crow flies’, writes the author of On the Road to Babadag. ‘But the air cracks somewhere en route, parts like tectonic plates separating continents’ (p. 41). The varying visions of the region put forward by Andrukhovych and Stasiuk suggest that postcolonial palimpsests presented in East-Central European narratives may differ not only in regard to the interpretation of particular relationships of dependency and power by East-Central European subjects, but also with respect to a stronger (Andrukhovych) or weaker (Stasiuk) will to overcome the stereotypical, discrimination-based oppositions that constitute the basis for colonial relationships as such. When the will turns frail, what happens is, first, the seeping of Orientalizing gnoseological patterns, present in the texts of Western-European authors, into the East-Central European identity discourses,61 and, second, escalation of resentment in the postcolonial subject. This, in turn, not only complicates the postcolonial palimpsest, but also limits the chances of working through the trauma of old (and current) subordination.

On the Polish Borderlands Discourse In creating ‘their Europe’, both Andrukhovych and Stasiuk refer to lands called the Borderlands (Kresy) in the Polish mythology.62 Therefore, in the postcolonial palimpsests of both authors, one more dimension of the relationships of hegemony and subordination should be included; namely, the one connected with the Polish rule over the Eastern lands of the former Kingdom of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Polish scholars who look at the history, culture, and literature of the socalled Borderlands from the postcolonial perspective draw attention to the 61

62

Another example of such penetration, apart from Stasiuk’s essays, this time emerging on the Ukrainian ground, is the prose fiction by Serhiy Zhadan. For example, in his novel Voroshylovhrad (Kharkiv: Folio, 2010) the image of Ukraine and the image of the main character bear the imprint of the stereotypes characteristic for orientalizing Western discourse about the East. Despite the satirical tone of the work, these stereotypes had not undergone ironic deconstruction or been thematized at a metalevel. However, we can talk about deconstruction and thematization of this type in the case of certain Andrukhovych’s novels, especially Dvanadtsiat obruchiv. The Borderlands or Eastern Borderlands is a territory of eastern provinces of the former Kingdom of Poland and then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the country before the first partition in 1772). In the interwar period the Borderlands were roughly equated with the land beyond the Curzon Line, and thus it is understood today.

394 Jagoda Wierzejska fact that Polish discourse on the Borderlands displays an imperial character. By ‘Polish discourse’ they understand both the literary discourse thematically associated with the so-called Borderlands, and the scientific, critical, and popular-scholarly discourses (from literary studies, history, ethnography and sociology), describing phenomena associated with the so-called Borderlands in their own fields.63 The aforementioned discourse is linked to the colonial form of consciousness by such features as: (1) idealization of multiculturalism with Polish culture in the centre, serving as means of explaining the Borderlands world in toto; (2) exotization, idealization or demonization of the Other (Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, etc.); (3) Polonization of the Other as well as the imposition of a Polonizing discourse on the interpretation of Borderlands phenomena by the period authors; (4) paternalism with regard to the Other; (5) shunning real contact with the Other and its multiple forms of marginalization; (6) treating the phenomenon of Borderland character as valid ingredient of the Polish historical or civilizing mission. Polish discourse on the Borderlands to some extent displays the said characteristics to this day;64 its consistency, however, is overshadowed by the historical volatility of power-subordination relationships there. On the Eastern lands, which after World War I became part of the Second Republic of Poland (interwar Poland), the roles of the dominant (the Poles) and the dominated (national and religious minorities such as Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians) were subject to a new (as compared to the times of partitions) definition, as compared with the one from the times of partitions. It subsequently changed after 1939, 1941 (when after the aggression of Germany toward the USSR, some Ukrainians 63

64

See Bogusław Bakuła, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Aspects of Polish Discourse on the ‘Borderlands’, in From Sovietology to Postcoloniality, pp. 41-59; Hanna Gosk, Opowieści ‘skolonizowanego/kolonizatora’. W kręgu studiów postzależnościowych nad literaturą polską XX i XXI wieku [Tales of the Colonizer/Colonized. Postdependency Studies of Polish Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries] (Cracow: Universitas, 2010), pp. 51-92; Skórczewski, pp. 427-473. One of the main pieces of evidence of that fact is a monumental publication, consisting of eight volumes, Tamten Lwów [That Lviv] by Witold Szolginia (Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnicza Sudety, 1992–1997), reedited in 2011. It presents the history of the city from an exclusively Polish point of view, not taking into account other inhabitants of Leopolis/Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv, especially Ukrainians. For the list or analysis of more examples see Bakuła, pp. 51-52; Wierzejska, ‘“O tem [...] co i bez dokumentów żywe jest.” Wizje Lwowa w polskim piśmiennictwie międzywojennym (i późniejszym)’ [‘About That […] Which is Real Even Without Documents.’ Visions of Lvov in the Interwar (and later) Polish Writing], in (Nie)przezroczystość normalności w literaturze polskiej XX i XXI wieku [The (Non)-Transparency of Normality in Polish Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries], ed. by Hanna Gosk, Bożena Karwowska (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2014), pp. 24-44.

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and Lithuanians began to relate their hopes for establishing their own states with Germans), and finally in 1945. After World War II, the object of colonization; i.e., the Borderlands, were incorporated into the USSR as a part of the union republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, and finally stopped being accessible to Poles. This resulted in subjects bearing the traits of a Borderland Pole (that is, the prewar oppressor) often started to be set into the role of the oppressed. The Borderlands themselves, not despite, but precisely because they were lost, gained one of the central positions in the national mythopoetic discourse, which turned them into a symbol of both a rapturously harmonious community, and of suffering and sacrifice. The essays by Andrukhovych and Stasiuk forming the volume of My Europe are devised in such a way as to gain distance from the Polish discourse on the Borderlands in its imperial variant characterized above. That intention nonetheless, is pursued in a particular manner. The only expressive display on the textual level in the Polish version of the book is giving equal (and first) voice to Ukrainians. Otherwise, these inhabitants of the region would have probably remained without a chance to speak in the colonial discourse about the so-called Borderlands.65 Thus, a dialogue effect was achieved, which is not only illusory, but real, on the space that constitutes a correlate of the national self-identification narrative not only in regard to the Poles, but also to the Ukrainians. However, aside from that, neither author of My Europe referred to this discourse, either by problematizing it or by polemicizing with it. This reticence about the canonical Polish story of the so-called Borderlands shows here very clearly. As a result, it unintentionally updates the story, which is to say, it points to the potential presence of a contrary pole in the message, one drawn in the colours of Polish imperialism and strongly rooted in the Polish collective consciousness. The case of Stasiuk, who avoids references to the Polish discourse on the Borderlands not only in My Europe but practically in all his writings, confirms the validity of the remark by Bogusław Bakuła in reference to Polish literature: The literary tradition of scoffers, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century (Gombrowicz, Mrożek, Kisielewski and others) gives these issues [related to ‘Borderlands’] a wide berth. No-one wished to ‘scoff ’ at ‘Borderlands’ history and no one could. It would be simply too painful.66

65

66

It is worth mentioning that in the Ukrainian version of the book, the essay by Stasiuk comes first. That publishing decision can be interpreted as an attempt to gain distance from the Ukrainian nationalistic discourse. Bakuła, in From Sovietology to Postcoloniality, p. 50.

396 Jagoda Wierzejska Consequently, Stasiuk’s attempts to re-write the story of East-Central Europe, so he could silently free himself of the Polish discourse on the socalled Borderlands, prove to be ineffective inasmuch as they leave ‘the Borderlands’—a phenomenon grown to the stature of an element of the collective memory and national axiology—in a sphere inaccessible to critique that could expose deep structures of Polish collective consciousness hidden beneath. In this respect, Andrukhovych’s endeavours seem more effective, for it is he who, not in the discussed dialogue with the Polish but in some other of his texts, exaggerates stereotypes of Ukrainians and Poles use in relation to the space which played an important role in the identity-forming processes of both nations. He allows himself to ask rhetorical questions, which, through irony, deconstruct the Polish discourse on the Borderlands and expose the associated prejudice towards Ukraine: Could it be then that the Poles were mostly concerned with the fact that they will lose a part of their own cultural—well, yes, European!—heritage abroad if they agree to a Russian-influenced Ukraine? Could it be that until today Lviv, Drohobych and Kamyanets [Podilsky] with that entire post-Soviet garbage dump, despite everything, seemed worth that hopeless war, not even a Thirty Years one as it seems? The war bearing the name: ‘the European choice of Ukraine’?67

This is how Andrukhovych phrases the question, while trying to push the reader towards the processing the mental schemes located at the centre of both Polish and Ukrainian national discourses.

Conclusion Studies on East-Central Europe inspired by Western postcolonialism should be, and, as the research shows, essentially often are, a creative transposition of inspirations flowing from that tradition of postcolonialism, and not a mechanical translocation of its language and subject matter. The postcolonial palimpsests of East-Central Europe, with their literary representation in the writings of Andrukhovych and Stasiuk, tend to be multi-layered arrangements of hegemony and subordination, where the relationships of dependence and power are subject to various interferences. That is why the primary structure of postcolonial discourse oriented to the cultural fortunes of British or—less often—French colonies, does not fully reflect the level of their complexity. As I endeavoured to show through the 67

Andrukhovych, 1999, pp. 93-94. In the last sentence the author refers to the contemporary Polish foreign policy, which supports bringing Ukraine closer to the European Union.

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example of My Europe as well as other writings by two selected Ukrainian and Polish authors, postcolonial studies in the East-Central European context should include the following: (1) the long-term results of political, economic, and above all discursive subordination to the Russian/Soviet as well as German hegemons; (2) the conditioning resulting from the subordination to other hegemons; e.g. to the Austro-Hungarian Empire; (3) the results of the actual and the ‘vicarious’ hegemony of the West; and finally (4) the asymmetrical relations between East-Central European nations, where certain nations could exhibit the traits of an oppressor towards others, even if at the same time they were also subordinated to a foreign power. Layers of relationship to be discussed: the oppressor vs. the oppressed in the region tend to be additionally modified by (1) deformations of the symptoms of domination and discrimination resulting from the phenomenon of hybridity; (2) the perception of Russia/the USSR’s supremacy in East-Central Europe as ‘reverse cultural colonization’; (3) East-Central Europeans running a compensative postcolonial discourse, thanks to which the results of hegemon’s supremacy (Russia/the USSR, Germany) are diminished by the results of another’s (Austria-Hungary); finally (4) the tendency shown by both ‘statistical’ inhabitants and intellectuals of East-Central Europe to give in to beliefs about the region, created and then imposed by the Orientalizing discourse. As we have seen through the example of Andrukhovych and Stasiuk, the postcolonial palimpsests of East-Central Europe are represented in different ways in literature, depending on how and with the use of what modifications the East-Central European subject perceives particular relationships of dependence and power. It is also evident that even the differences limited only to the chosen aspects of these relationships are capable of producing diametrically opposite visions of our part of the continent. Postcolonial studies, which make it possible to capture the nuances of these visions, are without doubt an important methodological tool for the East-Central European humanities. They should be sensitive to the characteristics of East-Central European discourses that have so far gone unnoticed or have not yet been adequately brought to light, and ought to relate to the colonization period as well the colonial ambitions highlighted here. To fulfil this condition, they must take account of the specificity and complexity of hegemony and subordination systems in East-Central Europe, which I have tried to describe here.

Contributors Xénia Gaál is a PhD student in the Russian Literature and Culture between East and West programme at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE). In 2014 she was a Research Fellow at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, Russia. Her research interests are collective memory, trauma, and identity in Russian Literature, and especially the theorization of forgetting/remembering, and destroying/rebuilding/ rewriting the past and history in the case of Königsberg/Kaliningrad. She has published articles on unique metaphors in literary texts of Kaliningrad, on special features of (re)constructed identity of the city, and on connections between identity and urban space, mostly in Hungarian volumes. Róbert Gáfrik is senior researcher at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and associate professor in the Department of German Language and Literature at Trnava University. His research interests are in German literature of the 19th and 20th century, comparative literature, East–West cultural encounters, and emotion in literature. He has published monographs on Indian themes and motifs in German literature (Hra s cudzou kultúrou. Bratislava: Veda, 2009) and on comparative poetics (Od významu k emóciám. Trnava: Typi Universitatis Tyrnaviensis, 2012). With Libuša Vajdová, he co-edited New Imagined Communities: Identity Making in Eastern and SouthEastern Europe (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2010) and regularly edits or co-edits thematic issues of World Literature Studies, the journal of the Institute of World Literature. Benedikts Kalnačs is Deputy Director of the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art at the University of Latvia, Riga, and Professor at the University of Liepāja. He is co-editor of 300 Baltic Writers: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Vilnius, 2009), Back to Baltic Memory: Lost and Found in Literature 1940–1968 (Riga, 2008), We Have Something in Common: The Baltic Memory (Tallinn, 2007), Ibsen in Poland and the Baltic Nations (Oslo, 2006), and editor and author of several books in Latvian, most recent among them Baltijas postkoloniālā drāma (Riga, 2011). Emilia Kledzik is assistant professor at the Institute for Polish Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Poland. Her research interest is mainly in postcolonial and comparative studies in Central Europe, especially in relation to the Roma minority in this region. She is the author of Prowincjonalizowanie. Twórczość Jurija Brězana, Wolfganga Hilbiga i Andrzeja

400 Contributors Stasiuka w perspektywie postkolonialnej [Provincializing. The work of Jurij Brězan, Wolfgang Hilbig and Andrzej Stasiuk from postcolonial perspective] (Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje Poznań, 2013). She is the assistant editor of Porównania, the comparative studies journal of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. Dorota Kołodziejczyk – assistant professor at the School of British Literature and Comparative Studies and director of Postcolonial Studies Centre, Institute of English Studies, Wrocław University, Poland; in 2002-2004 assistant professor of Polish Studies at SUNY, University at Buffalo. Board Member of Postdependence Studies Center, an inter-university research network coordinated at the Institute of Polish Studies, Warsaw University, Poland. Author of works within postcolonial studies, comparative literature and translation studies. Editor with Hanna Gosk of Historie, społeczeństwa, przestrzenie dialogu: studia postzależnościowe w perspektywie porównawczej [Histories, Societies, Spaces of Dialogue: Postdependence Studies in a Comparative Perspective] (Cracow: Universitas, 2014); with Cristina Sandru of a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing: ‘Postcolonialism/ Postcommunism: Confluences, Intersections and Discontents’ (Routledge, 2012). Published also, among others, in Postcolonial Text, Porównania, Teksty Drugie, Literatura na Świecie. Translator and translation/academic editor of translated works within the fields of postcolonial studies and literary theory. Natalie Paoli is a PhD candidate at the Department of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, where she works as both a sessional lecturer and teaching assistant. Her Master’s dissertation was focused on the early novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and her PhD research is centred on an examination of feminist literature from postcommunist Eastern and Central Europe. More broadly, her research interests include feminism, postcolonialism, and the role of women in transition governments. Dobrota Pucherová is a researcher at the Institute of World Literature of Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and a lecturer in the Department of African Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Vienna. She received her PhD in English from University of Oxford in 2009. Her research interest is mainly in African and AfroEuropean Anglophone literature, especially in relation to theories of (post)nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and socio-political engagement. She is the author of The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011) and co-editor (with Julie Cairnie) of

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Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century (Berlin: LIT, 2012). Her articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Women: A Cultural Review, and other publications. She is on the editorial board of World Literature Studies, the journal of the Institute of World Literature. Adriana Raducanu is Assistant Professor in the English Language and Literature Department of Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey. She has published on contemporary (Global) Gothic novels, Jungian criticism, gender studies, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, and comparative literature. With Fiona Tomkinson she founded the Gothic Studies option of the MA programme in English Language and Literature at Yeditepe University. She is the author of the monograph Speaking the Language of the Night: Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels (Peter Lang, 2014). She is also a reviewer for the Romanian Journal of English Studies. Mykola Riabchuk is a research associate at the Institute of Political and Nationalities’ Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and a member of the editorial boards of Krytyka, Porównania, and Journal of South Eastern Europe. He graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic Institute and Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. His books on civil society, state/nation building, nationalism, national identity, and post-communist transition in post-Soviet countries, primarily in Ukraine, have been translated into a number of European languages. The major publications include De la petit Russie a l’Ukraine (L’Harmattan, 2003), Die reale und die Imaginierte Ukraine (Suhrkamp, 2006), Ogród Metternicha (KEW, 2010), Gleichschaltung. Authoritarian Consolidation in Ukraine, 2010–2012 (KIS, 2012), and Ukraina. Syndrom postkolonialny (KEW, 2014). Agnieszka Sadecka is a PhD candidate at the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate programme ‘Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones.’ She will receive her degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India and Eberhard Karls University in Tuebingen, Germany. She graduated from the Institute of European Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, where she was researching and teaching anthropologically-oriented issues linked with cultural identity, postcolonial and gender studies. She coauthored a research report on women’s and sexual minorities’ organizations in Poland entitled ‘Extending the Boundaries of Civic Membership: Polish NGOs as Change Agents’ edited by Beata Czajkowska (Oslo: ARENA, 2011) as part of the Reconstituting Democracy in Europe (RECON) project, and published her article on Polish travel reportage on India in the

402 Contributors collective monograph Historie, społeczeństwa, przestrzenie dialogu. Studia postzależnościowe w perspektywie porównawczej [Histories, Societies, Spaces of Dialogue: Post-dependency studies in a comparative perspective] edited by Hanna Gosk and Dorota Kołodziejczyk (Cracow: Universitas, 2014). Cristina Sandru currently works as managing editor for The Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com) and teaches at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She previously taught at the universities of Northampton and Wales, at UCL, Goldsmiths, and ‘Lucian Blaga’ University of Sibiu, Romania. She co-edited the special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on Postcommunism/Postcolonialism (May 2012) and the collection Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (Routledge 2009). She has published articles and reviews in Critique, Euresis, The Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and English. Her monograph Worlds Apart? A Postcolonial Reading of post-1945 East-Central European Culture was published in August 2012 by Cambridge Scholars. Another book chapter is forthcoming in 2015, in What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, eds. Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy and Stuart Murray (London: Routledge). Tamás Scheibner has been Assistant Professor in Comparative and Hungarian Literature and Cultural Studies at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE) since 2010. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, and MA degrees in Literary Studies from ELTE and in History from Central European University (CEU). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität) in Germany in 2012. In the academic year 2013/2014, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at BabeșBolyai University in Cluj, Romania. His principal research interests lie in the cultural and intellectual history of the Cold War, the history of the literatures of Eastern and Central Europe, and the history of literary criticism. His recent book focuses on socialist realism and the Stalinization of literary studies in Hungary in the 1940s and 1950s (A magyar irodalomtudomány szovjetizálása: A szocialista realista kritika és intézményei, 1945– 1953, Budapest: Ráció, 2014). Dariusz Skórczewski is a professor at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. His research interests are in history of Polish literary criticism of the 20th and 21st century, and postcolonial studies, especially in relation to Polish historical experience and identity. He is the author of Aby rozpoznać siebie. Rzecz o Andrzeju Kijowskim krytyku literackim i publicyście (Lublin: Societas Scientiarum Catholicae Universitatis Lublinensis Ioannis Pauli II, 1996), Spory o krytykę literacką w Dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym (Cracow: Universitas,

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2002), and Teoria – literatura –dyskurs. Pejzaż postkolonialny (Lublin: KUL, 2013); co-editor (with Andrzej Wierciński and Edward Fiała) of The Task of Interpretation: Hermeneutics, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Studies (Lublin: KUL, 2009), and of Melancholia: The Disease of the Soul (Lublin: KUL, 2014). He publishes in Teksty Drugie, Porównania, The Sarmatian Review, Pamiętnik Literacki, Ethos, Roczniki Humanistyczne, and Znak. He is on the editorial board of The Sarmatian Review and Postcolonial Europe. Martin Slobodník teaches Chinese history and the history of Sino-Tibetan relations at the Department of East Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. His research focus includes Sino-Tibetan relations, religious policy towards Tibetan Buddhism in China, and Czechoslovak-Chinese relations in 1950s and 1960s. He is the author of Mao a Buddha: náboženská politika voči tibetskému buddhizmu v Číne (Bratislava: Chronos, 2007) and Politické, náboženské a ekonomické aspekty čínsko-tibetských vzťahov v 14.–15. storočí (Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo Univerzity Komenského, 2011). He is co-editor of the journal Studia Orientalia Slovaca published by the Comenius University. He has published a number of research articles abroad in edited volumes and scholarly journals. Bogdan Ştefănescu, PhD in English and Comparative Literature, is Professor of English at the University of Bucharest where he teaches courses in critical theory, British literature, the rhetoric of nationalism, and the comparative study of postcolonialism and postcommunism. He is the author of Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity (University of Bucharest Press, 2013), co-author of a dictionary of and co-editor of a collective volume on, comparative postcommunism and postcolonialism. He has also published Patrii din cuvinte [Nations out of Words] (UBP, 2014) and two studies on European romanticism. His literary translations have appeared in fifteen books from Romanian and US publishers. Prof. Ştefănescu is a founding member of the Romanian Society for British and American Studies and was deputy director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (20052007). He is currently Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest and editor-in-chief of University of Bucharest Review (http://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/). Irene Sywenky is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East European studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has published on postcolonial and post-imperial cultural spaces in Central and Eastern Europe; border identities, border cultures and diasporic cultures; cultural translation; popular culture; and contemporary Canadian literature. She has

404 Contributors co-edited several books and special journal issues and her articles have appeared in edited volumes and international journals such as Translation Studies, Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, German Politics and Society and Australian Slavonic and East European Studies. She is interim Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and coordinator of the Program in Comparative Literature at Alberta. Her current monograph project focuses on imaginative geographies and production of geospatiality in postcolonial Central and Eastern Europe. Madina Tlostanova is a professor of philosophy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. Her research interests focus around the decolonial option and postcolonial literature with a specific emphasis on postsoviet cultural imaginary, fiction, and contemporary art. She has authored several books on U.S. multiculturalism, the sublime of globalization, postsoviet transcultural fiction, non-Western feminism, and other related topics. Her most recent titles include Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Learning to Unlearn. Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012, co-authored with Walter Mignolo). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, European Journal of Social Theory, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Interlitteraria, etc. She is the editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Personality. Culture. Society (Moscow). Jagoda Wierzejska is a researcher at the Institute of Polish Literature, University of Warsaw. Her research interest is mainly in Polish and Ukrainian contemporary literature, especially in relation to theories of self and social identity, postcolonial studies and spatial studies. She is the author of Retoryczna interpretacja autobiograficzna. Na przykładzie pisarstwa Andrzeja Bobkowskiego, Zygmunta Haupta i Leo Lipskiego [Rhetorical Interpretation of Autobiography Based on Examples of Writing by Andrzej Bobkowski, Zygmunt Haupt and Leo Lipski] (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2012) and co-editor (with Tomasz Wójcik and Andrzej Zieniewicz) of Fantazmaty i fetysze w literaturze polskiej XX (i XXI) wieku [Phantasms and Fetishes in Polish Literature of the 20th (and 21st) Century] (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2011) and (with Alina Molisak, Tomasz Wójcik and Andrzej Zieniewicz) Literatura i ‘faktury’ historii XX i XXI wieku [Literature and the ‘Textures’ of History of the 20th (and 21st) Century] (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2014). She is on the editorial board of Humanistic Review, a journal of the University of Warsaw.

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Edit Zsadányi is associate professor at the Cultural Studies Department of Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Hungarian literature, with a particular emphasis on literary and cultural theory, Hungarian women writers, and gender in modern narrative. She is the author of the book-length study of the novelist László Krasznahorkai, Krasznahorkai László (Bratislava: Kalligram, 1999, 2001); A csend retorikája: Kihagyásalakzatok vizsgálata huszadik századi regényekben [The Rhetorics of Silence: Figures of Omission in Modernist Prose Fiction] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001); and A másik nő: A női szubjektivitás narratív alakzatai [The Other Woman: Narrative Figures of Female Subjectivity] (Budapest: Ráció, 2006). She also co-edited Transfer and Translation: Intercultural Dialogues (Budapest, 2002), and Gender Perspectives on Hungarian and Finnish Culture (Maastricht, 2011). Her articles have appeared in literary journals such as Arcadia, AHEA: E-journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Hungarian Studies, and Interdisciplinary eJournal of Gender Studies.