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For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change?
This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansion of the mining industry and disasters such as the Chernobyl explosion, Anna Barcz opens up new understandings of local political traditions and examines how they might be harnessed in the cause of contemporary environmental activism. The book covers works by writers such as Christa Wolf, the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and film-makers such as Béla Tarr, Andrzej Wajda and Wladyslaw Pasikowski.
List of contents
Introduction
Part I Unknownland: Retelling the Environmental History of Soviet Eastern Europe through Literature and Cultural Memory
Chapter 1 Narrating History across Borders
Chapter 2 History and Literature
Chapter 3 Environmental History
Chapter 4 Cultural and Environmental Memory
Part II The Tired Village
Chapter 1 Historical Background
Chapter 2 Fatigue: Platonov’s Pit and the Stalinocene
Chapter 3 The Rural World is Gone: Peasants’ Voices
Chapter 4 Satantango: Interconnecting the Human and Ecological Worlds
Part III The Earth’s Memory
Chapter 1 Mining Narratives and Their Historical Background
Chapter 2 Unearthing the Story of Coal: Drach
Chapter 3 The Uranium Narrative: History of a Disappearance
Part IV The Persistence of Chernobyl in Cultural Memory
Chapter 1 Eastern European Risk Narrative: Chernobyl Memorial
Chapter 2 Contaminated Language: Wolf’s Accident
Chapter 3 The Bees Knew: Alexievich’s Chronicle
Part V Disturbed Landscapes
Chapter 1 Non-sites of Memory and the Violation of Nature
Chapter 2 Greening Sites of Memory
Chapter 3 Bialowieza Forest across Eastern Europe’s Borders
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Anna Barcz holds a PhD in literary studies from the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw where she currently works as an Assistant Professor; she was the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub (Trinity College Dublin) in 2018-2019, and Rachel Carson Centre Fellow (LMU, Munich) in 2019-2020. She is the author of books: Ecorealism: From Ecocriticism to Zoocriticism in Polish Literature (in Polish, 2016), and Animal Narratives and Culture: Vulnerable Realism (2017).
Summary
For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change?
This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansion of the mining industry and disasters such as the Chernobyl explosion, Anna Barcz opens up new understandings of local political traditions and examines how they might be harnessed in the cause of contemporary environmental activism. The book covers works by writers such as Christa Wolf, the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and film-makers such as Béla Tarr, Andrzej Wajda and Wladyslaw Pasikowski.
Foreword
Explores the legacy of Soviet rule on contemporary cultural responses to the environment in Eastern Europe, including literature and film.
Additional text
The close readings are generally insightful and often penetrating... The broad topics of each of the four overarching case studies are well chosen, as are the literary texts addressed in each.
