Literature and Politics in Eastern Europe

Literature and politics have been closely related in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the centuries of occupation and fragmentation of its various states. Concentrating particularly on the twentieth century and the position of writers under totalitarian regimes, the essays in this volume offer insights into aspects of many of the literatures of the region: Bulgarian, Czech and Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian and Yugoslav. There are also references to some earlier topics: an eighteenth-century Polish literary response to the launching of the first balloon and a reflection of the Germanisation of Ukrainian culture, thus giving the book's main focus a sense of historical perspective. Several of the essays consider questions of dissent and exile from the several prevailing communist ideologies in the period 1945-89. This volume is itself an historical document as the essays of which it consists were originally presented at the first international conference of Slavists to be held since the collapse of communism in East and Central Europe.