Inside the Labyrinth. The Post-Communist Novel Between Anti-Communism and Nostalgia

ABSTRACT

The article tries to map the perspectives of the post-communist East on its own communist past, as envisioned by four writers and their relevant novels: the Michal Ajvaz (The Other City, 1993), Mircea Cărtărescu (Blinding, 1996), the David Albahari (Leeches, 2006), the Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 2009). I argue that these novels – which take the form of mysteries and/or draw on conspiracy theories – resort to specific genre tropes in their attempt to render in an allegorical code the deficits in the cognitive mapping of the post-communist period. This blank spot concerns the project of post-communism as an evasive totality which the East has been constantly trying to grasp, after being confined in the cognitive labyrinth of the neoliberal capitalism that has predominated since the demise of communism in central Europe in 1989. My study relies on Fredric Jameson’s view that conspiracy theories are indicative of deficiencies of cognitive mappings. Subsequently, I analyse the four novels in a World Literature frame. These terms help in interpreting the ways in which the literatures of the former Eastern Bloc relate to their own past, but also to the new planetary conscience pushed forward by neoliberal capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Michal Ajvaz
• Mircea Cărtărescu
• David Albahari
• Olga Tokarczuk
• conspiracy theories
• neoliberal capitalism

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ For the anti-communist novel, see Roland Végső, The Naked Communist. Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York – Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018). For ostalgie literature, see Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds), Post-Communist Nostalgia (New York – Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010).

² See Harold B. Segel, The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 191–232. See also Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism. The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 189–214.

³ See Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant, 214: See also Mihai Iovănel, ‘Mobile Frontiers. Instrumentations of Paraliterature in Modern Romanian Literature (1878–2018)’, Transylvanian Review, Supplement no. 1 (2019): 73–82.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ For a discussion of the cognitive impasse caused by the conspiracy theories embedded in a variety of mass artistic products, starting with cinematography, see Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

⁶ See Luc Boltanski, Mysteries and Conspiracies. Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies, trans. Catherine Porter (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014), 19.

⁷ See Cornel Ban, Ruling Ideas. How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

⁸ The transition process was not uniform throughout ex-Communist countries: neither its rhythm, nor its results were identical. Countries like Poland witnessed a faster transition and managed to achieve over one single decade a successful restructuring of the system, while in countries like Romania or Bulgaria, the transition was more difficult and less successful.

⁹ For a study on the huge impact of Solzhenitsyn’s novels within the French intellectual field of the 1970s, which had until then been rather pro-communist, see Christofferson, French Intellectuals.

¹⁰ See Roland Végső, The Naked Communist.

¹¹ This is far from being a specifically post-communist process. In ʻConjectures on World Literatureʼ Franco Moretti writes: ʻIn cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe), the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materialsʼ. See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 50.

¹² For Romania, see Mihai Iovănel, Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990–2020 (Iași: Polirom, 2021), 437–80; See also Ștefan Baghiu, ‘The Functions of Socialist Realism: Translation of Genre Fiction in Communist Romania’, Primerjalna književnost 1 (2019): 119–32.

¹³ Michal Ajvaz, The Other City (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), 154–5.

¹⁴ Ibid., 166.

¹⁵ Only the first volume of the trilogy has been translated to English – see Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding. The Left Wing, trans. Sean Cotter (New York: Archipelago Books, 2013).

¹⁶ For a reading of Cărtărescu’s novel in the context of world literature, see Christian Moraru, Reading for the Planet. Toward a Geomethodology (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 112–25.

¹⁷ Cărtărescu, Blinding. The Left Wing, 18.

¹⁸ Cărtărescu, Blinding. The Left Wing, 134.

¹⁹ However, the balance of these features is lost in the last volume of Blinding, which approaches the December 1989 Romanian Revolution in a slapstick register that lacks any analytical or literary subtlety. Not coincidentally, this volume was published after the 2006 official condemnation of communism made by President Traian Băsescu, whom Cărtărescu had supported from his position as a prominent public intellectual.

²⁰ Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2012 (Toronto: Anansi, 2012), 485–95. See also Stijn Vervaet, Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory. Testimony from Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature (Oxford – New York: Routledge, 2017); Jelena Đureinović, The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia. Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution (Oxford – New York: Routledge, 2020).

²¹ David Albahari, Leeches, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 66.

²² See Nebojša Blanuša, ʻDissolution of Yugoslavia as a Conspiracy and its Haunting Returns: Narratives of Internal and External Otheringʼ, in Astapova Anastasiya, Onoriu Colăcel, Corneliu Pintilescu, and Tamás Scheibner (eds), Conspiracy Theories in Eastern Europe. Tropes and Trends (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 147–66.

²³ Albahari, Leeches, 254, 258.

²⁴ Africa had been one of the main export markets for the communist countries.

²⁵ Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020), 5, 6, 24.

²⁶ Ibid., 57.

²⁷ Ibid., 9.

²⁸ Ibid., 49–50.

²⁹ Ibid., 232.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2021-1429, within PNCDI III.