“Wiping clean the slate of the past”. Reflections on the fringes of selected literary texts from Slavic People´s Republics Cover Image

„Przeszłości ślad dłoń nasza zmiata”. Refleksje na marginesie wybranych tekstów literackich z obszaru słowiańskich krajów demokracji ludowych
“Wiping clean the slate of the past”. Reflections on the fringes of selected literary texts from Slavic People´s Republics

Author(s): Celina Juda
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Slovak Literature
Published by: Instytut Slawistyki Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Bulgarian literature; Slavonic literature; totalitarianism; communism; collective memory; ritual

Summary/Abstract: Formulas of “forgetting” in the totalitarian half-century as well as post-1989 have changed shape and intensity. Strategies of disavowal and rejection of the proximate and distant past differ depending on the intensity of the ideologising processes in the structure of the phenomenon. The systemic mechanism of ritual burial and announcement of the end of “bad past, bad times” includes a number of phases (from construction to reconstruction). This paper examines the strategies under the first of these phases (1944–1956), during which the process of incorporating an external matrix created in revolutionary conditions (Soviet culture) into local culture/literature was the strongest. The practice consists of an unconditional transfer from the model of a maximum number of factors which sanction acts of disavowing the proximate and distant past and legitimise subjection to the chosen / ideal system (denial/discreditation of the old world order, new genres, a new way to explain the past, clear vision of the future).

  • Issue Year: 2014
  • Issue No: 14
  • Page Range: 245-259
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Polish