Productive uses of nostalgia in contemporary Slovak fiction: Veronika Šikulová’s and Maroš Krajňak’s experiments with generational memory

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines fictional uses of generational memory and life writing in Veronika Šikulová’s Miesta v sieti (Dwellings in the web) and Maroš Krajňak’s Carpathia and argues that the representations of the past in these contemporary Slovak novels provide alternatives to pernicious nationalist forms of nostalgia that have been of particular concern in the country in recent years, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election, in which the neo-Nazi People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) won 8% of the vote and seats in the Slovak Parliament. The essay examines representations of time and pastoral borderland spaces in each novel, arguing that the writers’ treatment of nostalgia challenges existing theories of the phenomenon as a form of maladaptation. The novels ultimately suggest a productive compromise between restorative and reflective forms of nostalgia, which is a central distinction in Svetlana Boym’s influential theory of post-socialist nostalgia. The novels’ ultimate achievement is that they avoid the extremes of sentimentality and irony in their treatment of the past and suggest visions of collective identity that provide a counterpoint to nationalist idealizations of the past.