Literary Reflections on Postimperial Violence in East-Central Europe after 1918: Wittlin – Hašek – Vančura

This paper discusses questions like the irony of history, the lack of illusions, and the prophecy of violence in three classic World War I novels by Jaroslav Hašek, Vladislav Vančura and Józef Wittlin, written in the decades after 1918. The novels have at least three aspects in common: first, the poetics of each is marked in a compressed way by the style of narrating the assassination in Sarajevo in 1918; second, three picaresque figures – Švejk, Řeka and Niewiadomski, respectively – standing in the centre of each novel; and, third, in addition to the war itself, each novel looks proleptically at its consequences, even if the narrated time does not extend to the end of the war. The paper tries to reflect on the novels as the literature of post-imperialist violence. Rhetorical figures of barbarization and self-barbarization, inversion of subject and object, fragmentation of space are particularly significant in the books, demonstrating the aesthetic processing of the reversal from euphoria, over the end of the war, to frustration, over the continuing violence. More specifically, these figures correspond with a remarkable degree with the unfulfilled peace after 1918.

Sinclair, May (1863–1946)

May Sinclair was a novelist, journalist and literary critic. She began writing relatively late in life to help support her family, and while most of her novels would most obviously be categorized as realist, she was a great advocate for the experimentation of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, and is perhaps most influential today as a literary critic of modernism; she was for example the first critic to use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in relation to literature. Her first commercial success came with her third novel The Divine Fire (1904), a philosophical novel combining a love story with an exploration and critique of the contemporary literary marketplace. Subsequent novels focused largely on social and/or marriage problems, prominent themes in literature of the period. A committed campaigner for women’s rights, her World War I novels (Tasker Jevons: the Real Story of 1916 and The Tree of Heaven of 1917) express her support for the war at a time when the suffrage movement was split between pacifist and pro-combat factions. She wrote two identifiably experimental novels, Mary Olivier (1919) and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), both significantly influenced by her interest in psychoanalysis.