From Ostalgie To Ostodium. The Anti-Communist Novel in Post-1989 East-Central Europe¹

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to theorize the post-communist anti-communist novel as a distinct and productive genre in East-Central European literatures, which we describe – in polemic with the better-known ostalgie – as a narrative of ostodium. We argue that anti-communist fiction became a cohesive genre in post-communism owing to its rigid view of the past, which was kept alive and significant, while simultaneously being antagonized, even after communism had collapsed. To that end, we explain how the anti-communist mindset assumed by intellectuals from the region during communism (which had then been branded as ‘anti-politicsʼ) maintained monopoly over post-communist cultural production, and merged with ascending post-communist neoliberalism that promoted an anti-statist public mythology. We further outline the shifting shapes in which the ideological bias of the post-communist anti-communist novel was conveyed, and draw distinctions from proximate genres, such as the political novel, le roman á la thèse and historiographic metafiction. One crucial argument in this respect regards the postmodern entanglements of the post-communist anti-communist novel: in maintaining an univocal rejection of the communist metanarrative, they took on a stronger political thèse than in Western postmodernism, but also enhanced postmodernism’s anti-realist drive by failing to provide an understanding of the post-communist present.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-communism
• Post-communism
• East-Central European Cultures
• Democratization
• Political Fiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We use the concept of East-Central Europe, instead of the more restrictive, ideologically-biased notion of Eastern Europe, following Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauerʼs view from the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, I – IV (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004–2010). Although an extensive coverage of the literary cultures of the region falls outside the scope of this short thematic issue, our goal is to highlight a set of literary works, topics and formal patterns that are representative of an essentially overlooked genre of East-Central European literatures whose production and reception deserves attention and debate.

² This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101,001,710).

³ See, for example, John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009) and Hannes H. Gissurarson, Voices of the Victims: Notes Towards a Historiography of Anti-Communist Literature (Brussels: New Direction, 2017).

⁴ See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

⁵ George Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay (London: Quartet Books, 1984).

⁶ In Romania, the first two presidential elections (1990, 1992) were won by a former member of the communist Central Committee, Ion Iliescu. In Hungary, the Socialist Party won the parliamentary elections of 1994, 2002 and 2006. In Poland, Lech Wałęsa lost the 1995 presidential election to the former communist apparatchik Aleksander Kwaśniewski.

⁷ See Boris Buden, Zone des Ubergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009); Boris Buden, Transition to Nowhere. Art in History after 1989, ed. Paolo Caffoni, comp. Boris Buden and Naomi Hennig (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020); Andrew C. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds.), Post-communist Nostalgia (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010).

⁸ See, for a detailed overview, Cornel Ban, Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

⁹ Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism. The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).

¹⁰ Robert Boyers, Atrocity and Amnesia. The Political Novel since 1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Ștefan Firică, ‘Political Fiction or Fiction about Politics. How to Operationalize a Fluid Genre in the Interwar Romanian Literatureʼ, Dacoromania litteraria 7 (2020): 164–81.

¹¹ Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions. The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

¹² Amy Elias, ‘Historiographic Metafictionʼ, in Brian McHale and Len Platt (eds.), The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 293–307.

¹³ Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 1–11. For an extensive development of the idea, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

¹⁴ See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Dominic Boyer, ‘Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germanyʼ, Public Culture 18 (2006): 361–81; Todorova and Gille, Post-communist.

¹⁵ The boom of commercialized ostalgie in the post-communist cultural markets was especially obvious in Germany, see Joshua H. Whitcomb, ‘A Problematic ‘Modell’ for Success: East German Nostalgia and Identity in Modern Germany’s Attempt to Come-to-Terms with its DDR Pastʼ, Of Life and History 2 (2019), https://crossworks.holycross.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=oflifeandhistory. (accessed April 10, 2023). See also Claudia Sadowski-Smith, ‘Ostalgie: Revaluing the Past, Regressing into the Futureʼ, GDR Bulletin 1 (1998): 1–6; Daphne Berdahl, ‘“(N)Ostalgie” for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things’, Ethnos 2 (1999): 192–211.

¹⁶ As a result of this inability to acknowledge an alternative to capitalism, the post-communist anti-communist novel affirms Mark Fisherʼs arguments about the ideological enclosure of post-Cold War capitalism. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (New Alresford: O Books, 2009).

¹⁷ Gil Eyal, Iván Szelenyi, and Eleanor Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Postcommunist Central Europe (London: Verso, 1998).

¹⁸ Wachtel, Remaining, 14.

¹⁹ Mihai Iovănel, Istoria literaturii române contemporane:1990–2020 (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2000) (Iași: Polirom, 2021), 406. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are ours (Adriana Stan and Cosmin Borza).

²⁰ For instance, Romanian Dan Lungu’s Sunt o babă comunistă! (I’m an Old Commie!) (Iași: Polirom, 2007) portrays in a light-hearted manner a former worker in a socialist factory, now retired. The novel claims to cover, and thereby shrinks by means of caricature, the protagonist’s entire social history during communism. Slovak Peter Pist’anek’s Rivers of Babylon also depicts one typical social process of communism – rural-urban mobility – by means of satire and with little attempt to comprehend its complexity.

²¹ Ratka Denemarkova, Money from Hitler (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2009), Gabriela Adameșteanu, Provizorat (Provisional) (Iași: Polirom, 2009).

²² Jiří Holý, ‘Conventions of Radka Denemarková’s Novel Peníze od Hitlera (Money from Hitler) along with its Receptionʼ, Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne12 (2017): 371–79.

²³ See Florin Poenaru, Locuri comune. Clasă, anticomunism, stânga (Common Places: Class, Anticommunism, Left) (Cluj- Napoca: Tact, 2017), 139–157.

²⁴ Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literatureʼ, New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.

²⁵ Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism. Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008). See also Vedrana Velickovic, ‘Belated Alliances? Tracing the Intersections between Postcolonialism and Postcommunismʼ, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48 (2012): 164–75.

²⁶ Lavinia Stan, Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania: The Politics of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

²⁷ Peter Morgan, ‘The Afterlife of a Dictatorship: Ismail Kadare’s Post-Communist Reckoning with the Albanian Pastʼ, Journal of European Studies 50.3 (2020): 281–94.

²⁸ Mariano Siskind, ‘The Genres of World Literature. The Case of Magical Realismʼ, in Theo Dʼhaen, David Damrosch, Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), 345–55.

²⁹ See Michael Denning, ‘The Novelists Internationalʼ, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, vol. I: History, Geography and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 703–25. The article argues that there are striking similarities between magical realism and socialist realism in terms of their ideological input.

³⁰ The under-analysed status of the post-communist anti-communist novel is obvious: on the one hand, anti-communist fiction written during communism enjoyed widespread recognition in the West, and was allotted extensive commentary both before and after the fall of the regimes, with its leading figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera becoming literary superstars; on the other hand, the prolific field of post-communist studies has never spotlighted the specific focus of anti-communist fiction. See Kovačević, Narrating, 2008, and Rajendra A. Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 1988–1998 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004).

³¹ Marcel Cornis-Pope, Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and after (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Christian Moraru, ed., Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 2009).

³² Jameson, Postmodernism.

³³ See WReC: Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015), and Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005).

³⁴ Ruxandra Cesereanu, ‘The Romanian Gulag as Reflected in the Novels of the ‘Obsessive Decade’ʼ, Transylvanian Review 24 (2015): 29–43. See also Alex Goldiş, ‘Pentru o morfologie a romanului ‘obsedantului deceniu’ʼ, Caietele Sextil Pușcariu 3 (2017): 494.

³⁵ Mircea Martin, ʻD’un postmodernisme sans rivages et d’un postmodernism sans postmodernitéʼ, Euresis. Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires 1–2 (1995): 3–13.

³⁶ See Carmen Mușat, Strategiile subversiunii. Incursiuni în proza postmodernă (Strategies of Subversion. Forays into Postmodern Fiction) (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 2008), 23: ʻThe totalitarian communist society and the postindustrial society share […] the process whereby reality is suspended and replaced by a network of manufactured images, ideological ʻsimulacra’, which were only meant to embellish a decaying organism.

³⁷ Martin Mevius (ed.), The Communist Quest for National Legitimacy in Europe: 1918–1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

³⁸ See also Michael D. Kennedy, Cultural Formations of Postcommunism. Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 240: ‘The Wars of Yugoslav Succession, when nationalism – in opposition to liberalism – is in play, hold a critical function in transition culture: the unspoken, but deadly alternative to markets and pluralismʼ.

³⁹ See Laure Neumayer, The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2019).

⁴⁰ See Fisher, Capitalist Realism.

⁴¹ Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No 101001710].