Totalitarian Experience Research Articles

Totalitarianism and Ukrainian Literature: Traumatic Memory and Revelation of the Past

The article highlights the topic of totalitarianism in Ukrainian literature, in particular, shows the traumatic memory and exposure of the past, which is interpreted differently by writers of different generations. Particular attention is paid to the causes of totalitarianism in Europe after the World War I and its impact on modern post-totalitarian cultures. Such cultures include primarily Ukrainian. Numerous social protests, revolutions, the war in Donbass are not so much the consequences of geopolitical conflicts as permanent attempts to return to the Ukrainian identity, to express national traumas, to identify cultural and human losses, which did not happen immediately after the collapse of the USSR. The problem of totalitarianism is also key in determining the specifics of its modern literary interpretation, because most works of art, which to varying degrees appeal to the reconstruction of the past, for the first time clearly verbalize those relevant topics that are still inconvenient and provoke misunderstandings among Ukrainians themselves.
 Today Ukrainian literature demonstrates a double stance against the totalitarian past. First, we read in it a steady protest against the socialist-realist heritage, embodied in the long search for inherent forms of artistic self-expression; secondly, modern Ukrainian literature resorted to a total revision of the consequences of cultural stagnation provoked by the experience of many years of totalitarian terror.
 The article reveals the connections between this regime and the art of speech, in particular the birth of the pseudo-artistic literary trend of the time - social realism. The author analyzes the peculiarities of the use of literature as a tool of propaganda. In addition, one of the main problems of modern research is the modern ways of artistic rethinking and the process of elaboration of totalitarian experience. In particular, it is about the cultural trauma of oppressed peoples in the Soviet period, which is related to human rights and freedoms, concentration camps, desecration of the myth of victory in World War II, denial of God, etc., which affects the behavior of modern societies and often provokes unpredictable in European politics.

Creation of author’s lexical and semantic dictionary in the dramaturgical practice of Oleksandr Irvanеts

The subject of the research is the lexical and semantic features of the carnival-ironic dramatic writing by Oleksandr Irvanets. The object of the research is the dramas “A Little Play about Betrayal for an Actress”, “Electric Train for Easter”, “Recording”, “Live Broadcast” and “Liar from Lithuanian Square”. The purpose of the article is to analyze the writer’s dramas through the prism of keywords, author’s semantic constructions, neologisms and other features of artistic language. Lexical-semantic and stylistic analyzes are an effective method for achieving this goal. As a result of the research it was found that in his dramas O. Irvanets exposes Soviet myths to aesthetic destruction and formulates a number of artistically camouflaged questions related to the civilizational choice of post-totalitarian Ukraine and addressed to readers / listeners / viewers of his works. Issues of totalitarian traumatic experience of Ukrainians and its postcolonial experience, simulated reality and its aesthetic representations, subjectivity / non-subjectivity of Ukrainians at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, return of Ukrainians to their own language and mental values become important for the writer in his dramatic work. He does not declare these issues directly, but resolves them at the levels of global conceptual metaphors, symbolic field, authorial word formation, anti-utopian modes, associations and allusions, combination of multilingual and multidisciplinary fragments and remarks, ardent discussions, including internal ones. This whole register of means is designed to encourage Ukrainians, both in the first post-Soviet decade and in subsequent years, to self-awareness, civilizational self-determination, and the search for their own subjective identity. The novelty of the study lies in the interpretation of texts on the basis of identified lexical and semantic features. The perspective of the research is to consider its results in the context of all the works of O. Irvanets, as well as with the lexical and semantic features of the works of other playwrights-postmodernists.

Svetla Koleva, Totalitarian Experience and Knowledge Production: Sociology in Central and Eastern Europe 1945–1989

Svetla Koleva, <i>Totalitarian Experience and Knowledge Production: Sociology in Central and Eastern Europe 1945–1989</i>

Did Totalitarian Experience Shape Democratic Norms? Struggle for the Independence of the Polish Judiciary and its Results: Conclusions from Talks with Professor Adam Strzembosz

This paper is a confrontation of the statements made by eminent Polish Professor of Law, Adam Strzembosz, in the interview published in the form of a book Między prawem i sprawiedliwością, with the views presented in the legal, historical, and sociological literature. I describe the ways judicial independence was limited in Communist Poland, and the strategies judges undertook to counteract that phenomenon. Special emphasis is put on the attitude of the “Solidarity” movement towards this problem and the judge’s behavior under Martial Law. In conclusion, I try to prove that the post-totalitarian trauma in Polish judiciary provoked an “over-sensitivity” in regard to the judicial independence.

L’expérience totalitaire en Europe : destruction et aliénation des individus dans l’œuvre de fiction de Katrina Kalda

La historia literaria contemporánea, relacionada con la experiencia totalitaria de los países de la Europa del Este, se manifiesta como un marco muy rico abierto al análisis de los comportamientos de los individuos sometidos a las exigencias del sistema. Partiendo de un corpus de dos novelas escritas por Katrina Kalda (1980), escritora exiliada originaria de la Europa del Este, presentaremos unas trayectorias (femeninas) ilustrativas de las consecuencias de una organización que destruye a los individuos en favor de la noción de Estado. La introversión, el silencio, la parálisis, la alienación mental y finalmente el suicidio y el exilio son la manifestación más representativa de una galería de personajes que actúan en la frontera de lo inverosímil y la insumisión. La novela, según Milan Kundera (1986; 2006), ofrece la mejor vía de expresión de una problemática existencial, la pérdida y la degradación de los valores. El autor y sus personajes oprimidos denuncian los abusos de una organización social destructiva a lo largo de varias décadas.

La experiencia totalitaria en Europa después de la IIGM. Voces de mujer: exilio, denuncia y escritura en lengua francesa. Oana Orlea y Rouja Lazarova

La experiencia totalitaria en Europa después de la IIGM deja una larga estela de consecuencias que se caracterizan, desde la perspectiva artística y literaria, por la opresión y la falta de libertad de expresión. La vivencia del exilio a partir de los años 80 en Francia abre la posibilidad a muchos escritores de denunciar lo vivido por medio de la expresión literaria en lengua francesa. Nuestro análisis se centra en el estudio del universo narrativo de las autoras Oana Orlea (1935), de origen rumano, y Rouja Lazarova (1968), de origen búlgaro, exiliadas en Francia en 1980 y 1991, respectivamente. Ambas autoras, en el marco de la ficción, introducen voces de mujer y proyectan su experiencia autobiográfica antes y después del exilio y adoptan la palabra para denunciar los abusos del régimen totalitario.

How Words Reshape the Past: The ‘Old, Old Story’ of Totalitarianism

Modernising the past and archaising the present is a kind of unwritten rule with respect to anachronisms. Although the words ‘totalitarian’ and ‘totalitarianism' were created in the 1920s in Fascist Italy, their application henceforth to earlier, even remote, historical periods was quite commonplace. Whereas the totalitarian experience par excellence corresponds to the interwar period, the word as a key element of modern political language reaches its climax during the first Cold War (1945–62), partly due to an increase in anachronistic uses of the term. Thus, the academic debate on totalitarianism and democracy in Ancient Greece, identified with Sparta and Athens, lent a historical basis to the geopolitical division of the world after 1945. Conversely, some ‘reverse anachronisms’, such as the notion of ‘oriental despotism’, instead of totalitarianism, applied to the USSR, were used to undermine the prestige of the enemy, degraded to the condition of a mere archaism embedded in modern times. Based on an exhaustive – and surprising – inventory of cases, the article highlights the importance of language as a virtual arena in a major historical conflict like the Cold War.

Interpretations of Fascism as a Political Religion in Post-Fascist Italy (1943–1948)

In the last two decades considerable work has been devoted to Italian Fascism considered as a form of political religion. Yet the debate about the religious nature of Italian fascism after the fall of the regime is almost completely neglected. After July 1943 anti-Fascist public discourse aimed at promoting the so-called ‘antifascist paradigm’. This reassuring narrative, which depicted fascism as a regime that had failed its goal to fascistize the Italian people, was supposed to allow the country to start a new democratic life, but produced a substantial misunderstanding of the actual nature of Mussolini's regime. Opposing this trend, some Catholic and ex-fascist intellectuals affirmed a counter-narrative of the recent past. They described fascism as a contemporary, religious-based totalitarian regime, and attributed to these features its appeal to Italian society. The opinions expressed by these intellectuals openly recalled those of Italian anti-fascists as well as Christian and lay intellectuals all over Europe who, starting from the mid-1930s, had acknowledged the religious nature of contemporary totalitarianism. From this point of view, they became part of a wider school of thought which sought to understand the phenomenon of the sacralization of politics. Intentionally disregarded and misunderstood by their contemporaries, these intellectuals nonetheless left a valuable patrimony of knowledge which, subsequently brought to light, has represented the basis for the elaboration of more advanced interpretations of the twentieth-century totalitarian experience.

Education and Interculturality in Approaching Post-totalitarian Identity Discourse: Interactive Views on Re-reading the Romanian Cultural Identity

Abstract The Romanian post-communist culture witnesses a process of value re-definition within which the memory of the totalitarian experience is mediated through identity-focused literary discourses mirroring the bias between two opposing topoi: the Southeastern space and the West, both of them being interiorized as the “periphery ego” legitimizes its writing in relation with Otherness. The experience of “travelling aboard” entails an existential quest during which Romanianness is constantly called in question: the “ego-graphic” writings are coping with the issue of cultural identity by means of recognition process (Charles Taylor, 1994 ) enabling the identity-otherness interchangeable game.

The Errings of Compassion (Memories of Evil)

A review of Todorov, Tzvetan. 2010. The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, translated by Andrew Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010b. Memory as a Remedy for Evil, translated by Gila Walker. New York: Seagull Books. ———. 2011. The Totalitarian Experience, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. New York: Seagull Books.

Totalitarianism and Shared Values, a Management by the Discourses? The International Olympic Academy as a Totalitarian Experience

This article intends to remind how the Olympic movement comprises the germs of totalitarianism known as the continual project of the command of a common ideal to individuals. The articlewill try toexplain howsuch a logic canbe realized at amicro-organizational scale, meaning at the level of interactionsbetween individuals.This article is also the result of a particularly theoretical thought by researchers who have taken part in the organization and have actively observed and participated to it.Given the importance of micro-powers in totalitarianism and the analysis being developed around the mechanism of knowledge and powerby Michel Foucault, it stands out that the speech logics have a sharp and permanent influence, far from the idea that the power and strength of great speeches would be the main cause for the influence on their addresses.An intra-organizational analysis has indeed made it possible to determine that the importance of the organizational speech is the main aspect both to spread the Olympic ideology, to set the individual in a pre-established cognitive mechanism and to strengthen the bond between the members of the organization essential to ensure its continuity. This article intends to go beyond the macro-social conception of the influence of masses that establishes the aura of the leader or the charisma of an idealized speech and intends to show that the ideology develops in the subtle game of micro-relations and requires to be spread by everyone. The combination of speech and action within the interpersonal relations seems to be the main aspect of the ideological influence on its members. DOI: 10.5585/podium.v1i2.29

The ‘Examination of Conscience’ of the Nation: The Lost Debate About the ‘Collective Guilt’ in Italy, 1943–5

This article tries to assess the still controversial question concerning the legacy of fascism in Italy, focusing on the early postwar discussion about the dictatorship. It shows the emergence of the theme of Italians' ‘collective guilt’, generally neglected by Italian historiography. It is a matter of fact that the final result of the struggle between conflicting narratives was to draw a veil of oblivion over the past. I suggest that, for a better understanding of the awkward relationships between Italian society and its fascist past, it is necessary to put aside a moralistic approach toward the contemporaries' attitude to forgetting and try to evaluate it, rather, as the dramatic consequence of the totalitarian experience.

Бой с Тенью: Советское Прошлое в Исторической Памяти Современного Украинского Общества

SUMMARY: In this article the author attempts to survey various implications of the Soviet past in modern Ukraine. The author points out that in Ukraine no radical break with the Soviet past occurred. In Ukraine, a national identity with its particular interpretation of the past, was formulated by the end of the 19th century. However, it soon gave place to a more complex Soviet identity, which combined Russian imperial elements with some national Ukrainian ones. Nevertheless, many Ukrainians preserved historical memories related to a specifically Ukrainian national identity. The survival and persistence of many identities in today’s Ukraine led many observers to question the model of nationalizing state as applied to the former Soviet republic. According to the author, the majority of Ukrainian population today remains essentially, Soviet, while a minority is divided into a pro-Western and consciously nationalist group and a “Soviet Creole group” opportunistically hanging on to power and ready to assume any identity for that purpose. As the country became independent, the nationalist vision of the past prevailed and implied a break not only with Russia, but also with the immediate Soviet past. Perception and internalization of that break by the broad masses of the population proved to be problematic. As a result, Ukrainian symbols and toponyms combined Soviet and Ukrainian national references, while Ukrainian history textbooks offered perspectives meant to satisfy those who cherish the Soviet past and those who desire to institute a radical break with it. According to the author, it proved ultimately impossible to present the Soviet past as nationally and culturally alien to the Ukrainian population, as it happened in the Baltic States. The last years even witnessed a marked return of the Soviet past to Ukraine’s symbolic space. This situation was replicated in the post-Soviet Ukrainian historiography, which tended to focus on state history and to universalize the Communist and totalitarian experience. A minority of nationalist minded historians, nevertheless, see totalitarianism through the national prism, stressing particular Ukrainian grievances. Most historians focus on “filling the gaps” of historical knowledge about the 20th century, publishing archival evidence. Given the presence of a broad array of alternative sources, the author believes that varying interpretations of Ukraine’s Soviet past will remain.

Shared Mental Models, Catch-up Development and Economic Policy-Making: The Case of Germany after World War II and Its Significance for Contemporary Russia

The paper deals with the connection between politically induced catch-up development, cultural and intellectual traditions and economic order in Germany and Russia. It is argued that in the history of both countries we encounter significant structural parallels, including the totalitarian experience. After World War II the German political elite managed to implement capitalism in a country, the population of which was still hostile towards capitalism. The key to success was that the German political rulers, in contrast to the Russian 'young reformers' of the early 1990s, from the beginning on took into account the shared mental models prevailing in Germany. Therefore some lessons may be drawn from the German historical experience in regard to today's Russia.

Review: The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, 1900–1950

Review: The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, 1900–1950

The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, 1900-1950 (review)

Reviewed by: The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, 1900-1950 Peter Scotto John Hoyles . The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, 1900-1950. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. 294 pp. $45.00. Exasperating and engaging, idiosyncratic and insightful, John Hoyles' The Literary Underground resists ready classification. Combining political theory, intellectual history, literary analysis, and a dash of film criticism, it does not offer anything like a comprehensive scholarly account of the historical experience of writers living in totalitarian states during the first half of the twentieth century. What interests Hoyles is a permanent dilemma that has its roots in the great unresolved tension in Enlightenment thought: the conflict between radical individualism and a dream of reconstructing humanity according to the dictates of Universal Reason. The paradigmatic figures in his discussion thus become Dostoevsky's "Underground Man" and "Grand Inquisitor." In Hoyles' reading of history, the "totalitarian experience" is recorded as an ongoing struggle between the alienated writer-as-Underground-Man and the various Grand Inquisitors who would compel him to sacrifice his solipsistic freedom in the name of comfortable socialization or self-satisfied conformity. Hoyles traces this conflict in three stages: from its adumbration in Rousseau and crystallization in Dostoevsky, through its flowering in the anti-utopias of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell, to its weird climax in Kafka's life and works. The author cheerfully admits to the holes in this line-up (where, for instance, are Mayakovsky, Brecht, Platonov, Gombrowicz?) and in a prefatory "Introduction and Concluding Unscientific Postscript," he invites his readers to fill in the gaps for themselves. A left-wing Brit of the Trotskyite persuasion, Hoyles makes no bones about his politics. Readers (like this reviewer) who do not share his political tastes may well be put off. Don't be. Along with the "lip-service to critical Marxism" (his own characterization) beats the generous heart a self-described "humanist" and "surrealist" who finds in the disturbing contours of the absurd a bastion against a pervasive "totalitarianism of everyday life." There is also more than a touch of old-time new-critical religion in his warning that "critical twiddle-twaddle is no substitute for close attention to the text and that attention at all times should be both reverent and skeptical." Whatever its faults, Hoyles' syncretic approach to his subject proves extraordinarily productive. Although his discussion of We will at first seem familiar, his approach from the left is perhaps better attuned to Zamyatin's thoroughgoing radicalism than that of those more conservative American slavists (myself included) who tend to domesticate it as a normative liberal individualism. His own humanistic, class-conscious radicalism provides a superb vantage point for tracing the connections between the revolutionary Orwell of The Road to Wiggin Pier and the antitotalitarian Orwell of 1984. Similarly, his discussion of Kafka ("a succinct introduction to one of the world's great writers") never drifts into pure [End Page 464] psychoanalysis or arid metaphysical speculation, but makes a compelling case for reading his work as a profound form of satire. In short, everyone will find something to object to in this book, but no one should overlook its virtues. Peter Scotto Mount Holyoke College Copyright © 1992 Purdue Research Foundation

The literary underground: writers and the totalitarian experience, 1900-1950

The literary underground: writers and the totalitarian experience, 1900-1950