An artistic infantilisation of war: “The Mythogenic Love of Casts” by S. Anufriev and P. Pepperstein and “Achtung, Zelig! The Second War” by K. Gawronkiewicz and K. Rosenberg

Abstract

The paper examines the novel “The Mythogenic Love of Casts” (1999– 2002) by Sergey Anufriev and Pavel Pepperstein, both from the younger generation of the Moscow Conceptualists, and the comic strip “Achtung, Zelig! The Second War” (2004) by the Polish authors Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz and Krystian Rosenberg from the perspective of a specific representation of the Second World War (a narrative on the border between the reality and fantasy, adulthood and childhood, historical facts and grotesque). Of particular interest is the psychological and aesthetic motivation of the Russian and the Polish authors. The texts are an attempt to capture the experience of children of the 1970s: Both the unimaginable nature of war (and the Holocaust in the case of Polish comic strips) and the oversaturation of consciousness with approximate and fragmented, yet ideologized and mythologized knowledge of the former. The mythologemes of war are brought into the circle of “childhood discourse” and the concept of war is associated with the discourse of childhood and infantile behavior. By combining adult-real and children-fairytale perspectives, the official stereotypes indoctrinated into the mass historical consciousness through literature, film, posters, school, comic strips and political cartoons are reconsidered. On the one hand, the “childish”, inaccurate, fabulous, or fantastic, fragmentary idea of the war is literalized. On the other hand, adult play with the war mythologems takes place: The authors act as interpreters of the myth using the templates present in the minds of any representative of their generation. Both texts are embodiments of generational experience of existence within the ideology, they are also an attempt to achieve a unity between childhood and adulthood, naive and sophisticated, Socialism and Post-Socialism.