The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (review)

Building on Segel’s Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe since 1945 (2003) and on his other studies in Slavic and comparative literature, the present History reconstructs the historical narrative of post-1945 literary changes in Eastern Europe. While not the first multicultural treatment of post-World War Two Eastern European literatures (see especially the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. Vol. 1. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. pp. 39–176), Segel’s volume includes a large number of writers from twelve Eastern European cultures (Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, East German, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Albanian), and two additional ones in the post-1990 chapter (Lithuanian and Ukrainian). To facilitate a quick but by no mean cursory introduction to this rich multicultural area, Segel’s History is organized around “topical” more than chronological lines (xi), breaking narrative linearity and pursuing a number of thematic strands. These strands, developed in eleven separate chapters, do not claim to give “the whole story” (xii), yet they present an enticing and often personal view of six decades of Eastern European literary developments. Throughout the book, the historian is doubled by a fine narrator and translator who offers, in many cases for the first time, texts by Eastern European writers in English translation; dozens of writers from most every language area are quoted in extenso, allowing the Western reader direct access to the text. The narrative impulse is well illustrated both in the titles of sections (“Czechs Who Stay and Czechs Who Go,” “France, Nearly Everyone’s Home Away from Home,” “The Polish Story,” etc.) and in the retelling of important moments in the individual and collective history of Eastern European literatures.

Inside each chapter, writers are presented in national/ethnic clusters, with short biographies followed by thematic abstracts and, in some cases, detailed descriptions of key works. The works discussed are most often novels and collections of short fiction, more rarely poems and plays, with the exception of Chapter 8, dedicated entirely to women poets, and sections of Chapters 4 and 5, focused on playwrights. Criticism is mentioned only incidentally, as part of the discussion of a writer’s work in which fiction and theory mix. Most often, the discussion of particular works focuses on thematic and typological issues, with some comments on structural-generic features (the mix of realism and surrealism in Poris Pahor’s work, metafictional elements in Imre Kertész, the polyphonic nature of Alexandr Kliment’s fiction). Less frequent are the analyses of works that problematize genre and sometimes the very category of literature (as in Edvard Kocbek’s diaries, for example).

The first chapter considers the impact of World War II on the literatures of Eastern Europe. The analysis points out the shifting allegiances in the area, with the local cultures allying themselves alternatively with the Germans and the Soviets in order to survive, or being split (like Yugoslavia) into warring ethnic factions. In his overviews of specific works, Segel is careful to point out their complexities, as they respond not only to “the tangled web of prewar . . . politics” (15), but also to the contradictory history of World War Two and its equally perplexing aftermath. Segel’s discussion follows both national contours and generic transcultural ones (Polish and Czech resistance novels, Yugoslav and Albanian partisan novels, Hungarian, Romanian, Croat writers of World War Two, etc.). The overview of some literatures is somewhat thin. In addition to the recently published diary of the Romanian Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and the communist inspired work of Titus Popovici, the author could have mentioned the political poetry of Ion Caraion (detained by both right-wing and left-wing governments), the psychological-symbolic fiction of Laurenţiu Fulga, and the magic-realist war fiction of Fănuş Neagu; also Alexandru Sever’s debate play, Îngerul bătrân (The Old Angel; 1976), set in a World War Two...