Dancing on the X-rays: On the Theatre of Memory, counter-memory, and Postmemory in the Post-1989 East-European Context

The works selected for this article – Václav Havel’s play Leaving (2008), Tom Stoppard’s West End hit Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006), and Valery Todorovsky’s film musical Stilyagi [The Boogie-Bones] (2008) exemplify how contemporary writers of two different generations and three East European geographies reflect on the impact on today’s politicians, or lack thereof, of the political resistance of the communist era. Unlike many other performances, motion pictures, or TV programs serving the new post-Soviet ideology and thus cultivating a collective longing for the past, the plays and the film chosen do not exploit post-communist nostalgia. On the contrary, they examine critically the deceptions of collective remembering and forgetting. These works illustrate what Foucault refers to as three critical uses of the officially constructed historical narrative. The first case, exemplified by Havel’s play Leaving, is marked by the playwright’s ironic gaze at himself. It presents Havel’s semi-autobiographical account of attaining and then losing power in a former communist state, his tongue-in-cheek reflection on his own journey as a dissident and a state leader. The second case, the play Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Stoppard, represents the dramatization of the history of political dissidence, Foucault’s “counter-memory,” as it was imagined by the radical leftist west. The third case, the film Stilyagi takes history as constructed narrative. The present article employs Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” to analyse how the younger generation (the children of the dissidents) imagines, stages, and performs the “good old times” that the post-Soviet democracies utilize as their nation-building device. The choice of these three works was not random: apart from biographical overlaps, personal connections, and various instances of creative dialogue that mark the dramatic oeuvre of Stoppard and Havel, there are thematic preoccupations and aesthetic concerns that connect not only the plays selected but also the film. The present article argues that these works collectively oppose the new post-communist governments’ tendency to nurture the contemporary population’s “hypochondria of the heart,” and direct their critical gaze (marked by the generational gaps) at the life-cycle of political dissidence.