The “New People” of Decadence in Eastern Europe

This article discusses the interdependent notions of “decadent” and “new” in Russian and Ukrainian writers at the fin de siècle. Eastern European decadence is located at the intersection of not only gender and temporal perspectives, but also spatial ones created by the impact of the colonial situation on the culture of the region. The analysis is not limited to decadent works by such Russian authors as Zinaida Gippius and Leonid Andreyev, but also includes Ukrainian writing produced at the peripheries of the Russian and Astro-Hungarian Empires by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Olha Kobylianska, who explore androgyny, cross-gendering, and new forms of female intimacy. By looking beyond the imperial Russian capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg to examine the “new people” of decadence, this chapter decenters traditional views of the region to draw a less predictable landscape of Eastern European literature.

Quo Vadis Polish-Canadian Writing? Reflections on Home, Language, Writing, and Memory in Recent Texts By Canadian Writers of Polish Origins

The aim of this paper is to look at the recent publications by writers of Polish extraction living in Canada and writing in English in order to examine these texts in the context of their treatment of the concept of home, attitude to mother tongue and the usage of English, as well as the authors’ involvement in shaping the Canadian literary scene. The analysis will concentrate on selected texts published after 2014 to delineate the latest tendencies in Polish-Canadian writing. The discussion will include life writing genres such as memoirs, short stories, and novels. Since these writers have undertaken themes of (up)rootedness, identity, and memory and they have touched upon the creative redefinition of the figure of home, these aspects will also be examined from a theoretical perspective in the introductory part of the article. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek through his concept of “in-between peripherality” (2010: 87) proposes to view Central and Eastern European literature as both peripheral and in-between its “own national cultural self-referentiality and the cultural influence and primacy of the major Western cultures” (2010: 87). Moreover, as diasporic studies are inspired by the search for transcultural, dynamic exchanges and hybridity (Agnew 2005), the analysis will also include discussions on hybridity understood as a transgression of borders, both literary and genealogical as well as thematic. That is why, the classic notion of hybridity known widely in postcolonial studies, is here understood, according to Moslund (2010), as having horizontal and vertical orientations, where the former designates transgression of borders and space and the latter is connected to the movement across time. This approach is particularly interesting in the context of Polish-Canadian migrant and diasporic literature as, according to Pieterse (2001), hybridity understood as movement and translocation can offer new perspectives on migrant literatures in multi-and transcultural worlds.

The Cassandra Motif in Szymborska and Miłosz

The article presents a close reading of Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Monolog dla Kasandry”, "Soliloquy for Cassandra". The view of Cassandra as expressed by the poet is compared with the corresponding motifs in Miłosz and more generally with examples from Polish and Eastern European literature and cultural history. It is argued that Szymborska does not agree with the common and traditional Polish image of Cassandra, but instead polemizes against it in a complex and contradictory manner.

The experience of mystifi cation and subordination in Middle Eastern European works written under pseudonym

The aim of this article is to analyse intertextual relativities in postmodern novels written by Czech, Slovakian and Hungarian authors. Postmodern mystifi cation in Middle Eastern European literature shows up the naivety of one’s interpretation, as well as social differences. The writers use multiple pseudonyms and undermine the border between work and its interpretation to present cultural differences.

“Non-strategic” Eastern Europe and the Fate of the Humanities

Until recent events intervened, Eastern European Studies found themselves under attack at my home university and other institutions for being, among other things, “non-strategic.” We see the same notion, if not the same terminology, applied increasingly to the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences, which lose ground daily to the so-called STEM disciplines in both educational policy and practice. How do we defend the study of Eastern European literature and culture in the current academic climate? This essay defends the centrality both of literary and Eastern European studies in the twenty-first-century curriculum.