Remembering Late Socialism in Autobiographical Novels and Autofictions from Central and Eastern Europe: Introduction

Abstract

Since the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990/91 literature has dealt with this epochal societal change, trying to come to terms with the past and assessing its influence on the present. In the last years the focus has turned towards the era of late socialism, that is the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers who attempt to present and reevaluate these decades and their ongoing influence on biographies and societies today grew up or came of age in this era. Our main contention is that different forms of life-writing, especially autofictions and autobiographical novels, have become the dominant narrative device for addressing and narrating the socialist past. Accordingly, the contributions to this cluster explore the era of late socialism, examining its different and often contested meanings not only from the perspective of the past but also from the perspective of today. Thus, we explore the role of autobiographical writing in commemorating the past as well as in demonstrating the demise of socialism, as represented in contemporary literatures in Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.

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“…The paradox that shores the fragments of memory work against the ruins of a monolithic notion of historical truth, making trauma memorialization necessary and, by the same token, difficult, does not seem to have an expiry date. The discarding of Fukuyama's "end of history" paradigm by Eastern European studies, highlighted, among others, by Agnieszka Mrozik and Anja Tippner in connection to the rise of late-socialism-themed autofiction 11 , also means that the cultural work performed by Life Writing cannot be framed only through the grid of a retrospective relevance. On the contrary, analyzing women's auto/biographical, autofictional, and diaristic writings from the early twentieth-century to the early twenty-first, and from various areas of transcultural confluence (from the former Habsburg Empire to the former Yugoslavia, as well as Lower Silesia, Transylvania, and other multiethnic areas), as this special issue does, contributes not just to the understanding of the past, but also to that of the present.…”