Inside the Labyrinth. The Post-Communist Novel Between Anti-Communism and Nostalgia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article tries to map the perspectives of the post-communist East on its own communist past, as envisioned by four writers and their relevant novels: the Michal Ajvaz (The Other City, 1993), Mircea Cărtărescu (Blinding, 1996), the David Albahari (Leeches, 2006), the Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 2009). I argue that these novels – which take the form of mysteries and/or draw on conspiracy theories – resort to specific genre tropes in their attempt to render in an allegorical code the deficits in the cognitive mapping of the post-communist period. This blank spot concerns the project of post-communism as an evasive totality which the East has been constantly trying to grasp, after being confined in the cognitive labyrinth of the neoliberal capitalism that has predominated since the demise of communism in central Europe in 1989. My study relies on Fredric Jameson’s view that conspiracy theories are indicative of deficiencies of cognitive mappings. Subsequently, I analyse the four novels in a World Literature frame. These terms help in interpreting the ways in which the literatures of the former Eastern Bloc relate to their own past, but also to the new planetary conscience pushed forward by neoliberal capitalism.