After the Fall:

Post-Soviet Literature

in Russia and Eastern Europe

The Cycle of Empire: DestructionThomas Cole, 1836

Historical Overview

Europe in 1914

The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917

Vladimir Lenin

Warsaw, 1945

The Soviet Bloc

Eastern Europe Today

Moscow

Warsaw

Prague

Budapest

Kiev

Sarajevo

Mostar, May 1994

Soviet Leaders, Resistanceand Repression

Joseph Stalin

Nikita Khrushchev

Budapest, 1956

Leonid Brezhnev

Prague, 1968

Lech Walesa

Mikhail Gorbachev

The Empire Collapses

East German Border Opened, 1989

Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989

The Velvet Revolution, 1989

Rally in Moscow, 1991

Boris Yeltsin

Vladimir Putin

The European Union Today

Post-Modernism

• Is there post-modernism in Eastern Europe?

• If so, how is it different from post-modernism in the West?

Purely Western Concepts

• Fredric Jameson: post-modernism as a product of late capitalism

• Jean Baudrillard: post-modernism as a product of a media-saturated, computerized, “hyper-real” society

Jean-François Lyotard

• Post-modernism as a response to the failure of “master narratives” or “meta-narratives”

• Reaction vs. ideology, faith in progress and reason, hegemony, hierarchy

• Reaction vs. modernist utopianism (in the USSR as early as the 1960s)

Michel Foucault

• Link between discourse and power: language is used to wield power

Jacques Derrida

• Fundamentals of knowledge are uncertain

• Deconstruction reveals internal contradictions in texts

• All knowledge is relative

Jean Baudrillard

• Everything is a “simulacrum,” a sign of another sign, and the ultimate meaning is unreachable

• What we call reality is unreal, or “hyper-real”

• Words are signs without meaning

Mikhail Bakhtin

• Dialogism: no omniscient narrative voice, but numerous conflicting voices, registers, discourses

• No word is free of its past uses; bears traces of all of its past meanings

Literary Post-Modernism

• Narrative may be disjunctive, contradictory, ambiguous, illogical

• May be absurd, parodic, ironic

• May digress without reason

• May play with language

• May reflect, lament, or embrace loss of meaning

Post-Modernist Literary Devices

• Fragmentation

• Self-consciousness

• Playfulness

• Multiplicity

• Blurring of genre distinctions

• Blurring of distinctions between high and low art

“That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition,

the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress,

epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.”

Aylesworth, Gary, "Postmodernism," http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries/postmodernism/