The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945

424 Pages·2008·1.199 MB·English

by  Harold B. Segel

The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945

The C O L U M B I A
L I T E R A R Y H I S T O R Y of
E A S T E R N E U R O P E
Since 1945
Harold B. Segel
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2008 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress C ataloging-i n- Publication Data
Segel, Harold B., 1930–
The Columbia literary history of Eastern Europe since 1945 / Harold B. Segel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-13306-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-231-50804-9 (e-book)
1. East European literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. East European
literature—21st century—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN849.E9S44 2008
809'.933584709045—dc22
2007040577
o
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid- free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
PREFACE vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv
1 World War II in the Literatures of Eastern Europe 1
2 Postwar Colonialism, Communist Style 39
3 In the Aftermath of the Great Dictator’s Death 66
4 Fleeing the System: Literature and Emigration 92
5 Internal Exile and the Literature of Escape 113
6 Writers Behind Bars:
Eastern European Prison Literature, 1945–1990 143
7 The Reform Imperative in Eastern Europe:
From Solidarity to Postmodernism 191
8 Eastern European Women Poets of the 1980s and 1990s 233
9 The House of Cards Collapses:
The Literary Fallout of the Yugoslav Crises of the 1990s 264
10 Glimpses of the Other World:
America Through Eastern European Eyes 290
11 The Postcolonial Literary Scene in Eastern Europe Since 1991 318
NOTES 371
FURTHER READING 379
INDEX 383

Preface
The literature of Eastern Europe is a mirror of the calamities, and extraordinary
changes, that have occurred throughout the region since it was plunged into
the costliest war in human history on 1 September 1939. By the time Poland
was invaded, the Czech lands had been appropriated by Nazi Germany under
the guise of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Slovakia was well
on its way to being shaped into a q uasi- independent state under the leader-
ship of a Nazi puppet. By the time World War II ended in May 1945, much of
Eastern Europe lay in ruins, millions of innocents as well as combatants were
dead, cultural treasures had been massively despoiled, and national borders
and populations were soon to be shifted like so many pawns on a chessboard.
Again, as after the fi rst “world war”—that grand illusion of a war to end all
wars—Eastern Europe was being remapped.
To enable us to better come to terms with the enormity of the transforma-
tion Eastern Europe underwent from 1945 to the collapse of communism, and
from that momentous event to the present, a periodic reexamination of the
forces shaping the region is necessary. We will be doing that in this book in
the context of a broad consideration of the literary culture of Eastern Europe
as a whole from the end of World War II to the early years of the twenty- fi rst
century. The legacy of the war itself is complicated by the realization that if in
the wider sense all of Eastern Europe was a victim between 1939 and 1945,
some of the presumed victims were also in fact victimizers. The capitulation
of the Czechs, followed by the swift invasion and devastation of Poland, and
the ruthless German and Italian campaigns in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece
were offset by the compliance in the German scheme of conquest by Bulgaria,
Hungary, Romania, and the puppet states of Croatia and Slovakia. When ulti-
mate German victory seemed probable, the compliant Eastern European states
made little determined effort to resist mounting pressure to enter the war on the
German side.
As has often been the case in history, the primary incentive to this coop-
eration was territorial aggrandizement. This was certainly true for Romania,
viii • Preface
anxious to hold on to the rich region of Transylvania ceded to it by Hungary
after World War I. For the Hungarians, reacquiring, with German backing, as
much of Slovakia as it could after the disintegration of the Habsburg empire
in 1918, and having the hope always of at least some return of Transylvanian
lands, there could be no question as to where their allegiance would go. And
for Bulgaria, certainly the least compliant of Nazi Germany’s Eastern European
allies, there were parts of Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece that beckoned. For
the Croatians, the opportunity to become independent of the prewar Kingdom of
Yugoslavia, with its Serb preponderance, was irresistible. Thus the Independent
State of Croatia was established in 1941 under German and Italian sponsor-
ship. It included, in addition to Croatia proper, Bosnia- Herzegovina and those
parts of Dalmatia that had not already been ceded to Italy. The head of the
new Croatian state was Ante Pavelic´ (1889–1959), who was backed up by the
Ustaša terror organization that he headed.
If less animosity characterized Czech-S lovak relations through the centuries,
the long- nurtured Slovak sense of inferior status in the Czechoslovak state—
politically, economically, and culturally—won considerable backing for the
Nazi- engineered independent Slovak Republic led by Monsignor Jozef Tiso
(1887–1947). The Slovaks had little choice in the matter. Fascist Hungary
had already begun gobbling up parts of Slovakia it had lost by the terms of
the Versailles Treaty, and further delay by the Slovaks threatened even greater
loss of territory. Collaboration with the Germans meant, in the case of the
Croatians, willing participation in the campaign against the Serbs and Tito’s
partisans, and, in the case of the Slovaks, a supply of cannon fodder in battles
against the Soviet Union.
In both instances, compliance also entailed deportation of Jews to concen-
tration camps in Germany and Poland or, in the case of the Croatians, to the
few that were established on Croatian soil, above all Jasenovac. The eagerness
of the Croatians to persecute Jews (as well as Serbs and Gypsies) was at least
mitigated among the Slovaks by a lesser degree of enthusiasm and on occasion
even some resistance. The situation among the Bulgarians and the Romanians
was more complex. Widely hailed for protecting their small indigenous Jewish
population of less that fi fty thousand, the Bulgarians nevertheless assisted in
deportations of Jews to German concentration camps in countries where they
were occupiers, such as Greece and Macedonia. The Romanian record is infi -
nitely worse. Although claiming to protect the Jewish population of the historic
Kingdom of Romania (the Regat), the Romanian authorities, especially under
the regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu, subjected Jews to every conceivable kind
of mistreatment. The Ias¸i pogrom of July 1942 remains one of the worst atroci-
ties of the entire war. What spared the lives of many Romanian Jews was the
inconsistency and haphazardness with which the anti-J ewish measures were ap-
plied. The brunt of the Romanian Holocaust was borne, however, by the large
Jewish populations of such regions as Bessarabia and Bukovina, which had been
occupied by the Soviet army and then subsequently recaptured by Romanian
troops. The most horrendous slaughter was carried out in Transnistria, which
Preface • ix
Antonescu’s forces seized from the USSR and temporarily incorporated into
greater Romania. By the war’s end, Romania’s prewar Jewish population of
eight hundred thousand had been reduced by more than half.
When the turning of the tide had become so obvious that denial was no
longer possible, Hitler’s Eastern European collaborators scrambled to realign
themselves. Romania switched to the allied side on 23 August 1944, after the
Soviets had begun their invasion of the country. The Bulgarian Otechestven
Front (Fatherland Front), a coalition of resistance groups, staged a successful
coup against the wartime regime on 9 September 1944 and threw its support
to the Soviet forces that had already entered the country. The Croatian Ustaša
state was defeated by Tito’s partisans and was disbanded. Ante Pavelic´ had
already fl ed the country; with the considerable assistance of the Vatican he was
provided safe haven in Argentina, until his whereabouts were discovered and he
was forced to fl ee again, this time to Spain. A failed attempt on his life in 1957
left him wounded, and he eventually died in Madrid on 28 December 1959.
As Soviet units began advancing into eastern Slovakia in the summer of
1944, a national resistance movement (known as the Slovak National Uprising)
erupted on 29 August 1944. Although invested with the status of myth in Slovak
culture, the weakly organized rebellion was handily crushed by the Germans.
The Soviets captured Slovakia, and Tiso was hung on 18 April 1947. Only
the Hungarians, led in the late stages of the war by the head of the fascist
Nyilaskereszt (Arrow Cross), Ferenc Szálasi (1897–1946)—the ruler of Hungary
since 15 October 1944—held out to the very end, continuing to round up Jews
and slaughtering them even as the Russians and their Johnny- come-l ately allies,
the Romanians, were banging on the doors of Budapest. Like Tiso, Szálasi was
captured and hanged in 1946.
The grim memories of the war throughout Eastern Europe, and the discord
and enmity sown by it, have dogged the peoples of the region down to the
present, as witnessed, for example, in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the
as- yet-u nresolved issue of Kosovo’s fi nal status. The imposition of communist
rule in the immediate postwar years, by sheer power or deception (and lasting
until 1989–1991), was a direct outcome of the war and the Soviet occupation of
most of the region. To the trauma of the war years was now added the trauma
of communist neocolonialism. The nearly half-c entury of communist rule in
Eastern Europe may be likened to a foreign body invading an organism that
then periodically erupts in a desperate effort to expel it. The Berlin workers’
strikes of June 1953 in the German Democratic Republic; the Poznan´ riots in
Poland three years later; the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution that same
year; the promise of hope embodied in the Prague Spring of 1968, only to be
dashed by the S oviet- led Warsaw Pact invasion; the rise, fall, and rebirth of the
Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s; the dismantling of the Berlin Wall
in 1989; the outbreak of revolution in Romania that same year and the sum-
mary execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaus¸escu; and fi nally the unimaginable
collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 ended the long struggle to expel from
Eastern Europe the foreign body that was communism.
x • Preface
But Eastern Europe was still not spared further tremors. The vicious and
costly Balkan wars of the 1990s—the wars, that is, of the Yugoslav secession—
were brought to an end defi nitively only in the late 1990s. By then, mass murder
had been uncovered; new war criminals were being sought for justice (a dragnet
some have still managed to elude); “ethnic cleansing” had entered the interna-
tional vocabulary; and American and British NATO bombers had unleashed a
seventy- eight day onslaught against a truculent Serbia led by Slobodan Miloševic´,
who was subsequently put on trial for war crimes in the Hague but who died
before a verdict was handed down. The Yugoslavia that had come together
again after World War II under the leadership of Tito lay in ruins, replaced
by the newly independent states of Slovenia, Croatia, B osnia-H erzegovina,
Serbia- Montenegro, and Macedonia, undoing the work of a generation of car-
tographers. National borders were further redefi ned following the peaceful
separation of Montenegro from Serbia while the Serbian province of Kosovo
and Metohija—which the Serbs have long regarded as the cradle of Serbian
nationhood—was well on its way to becoming in all probability an independent
nation under Albanian rule. Two new states in the heart of Europe came into
existence in 1993 when the never wholly satisfying relationship between Czechs
and Slovaks was acknowledged and the truncation of Czechoslovakia into the
Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia was declared.
The fervently sought and much-c elebrated collapse of communism through-
out Eastern Europe has been accompanied by free enterprise and slow but
steady economic progress. Most states in the region have fi nally been accorded
the highly prized membership in the European Union and, in a few instances,
in NATO. Yet political, economic, and social problems have persisted to the
present day. New stirrings of nationalism have emerged that have discom-
forted minorities in the region, especially Gypsies. A lbanian- Slav tensions have
spilled over into Macedonia from the confl ict in Kosovo. The expulsion of the
Germans of Romania, begun under the dictatorship of Ceaus¸escu, has by now
cleared Romania of this once thriving and distinct community. The position of
Hungarians in Romania as well as in Ukraine and Slovakia has also been at times
contentious in the postcommunist period. Problems with the Turkish citizens
of Bulgaria fl ared in the 1980s and resulted in the expulsion of a large number
of people, some of whom have eventually been allowed to resettle. Economic
mismanagement led to riots in Albania in 1996–1997 and in Hungary more
recently in 2006. Russian political meddling in the affairs of Belarus, Ukraine,
and Estonia has proven an unsavory reminder of earlier Soviet expansionism.
Although considerably smaller in size than in the period between the two world
wars, the Jewish population of Eastern Europe has, despite many obstacles,
shown signs of limited renewal. But reemergent nationalism in the region has
also brought with it new manifestations of anti- Semitism, although fewer and
less virulent than before, during, or immediately after World War II.
Although communism is no longer a political force in Eastern Europe, its
legacy continues to be actively debated and its capacity for disrupting people’s
lives is manifestly evident. As secret police and other government archives open