Literature and Politics in Eastern Europe

by Celia Hawkesworth

Literature and politics have been closely related in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the centuries of occupation and fragmentation of its various states. Concentrating particularly on the twentieth century and the position of writers under totalitarian regimes, the essays in this volume offer insights into aspects of many of the literatures of the Bulgarian, Czech and Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian and Yugoslav. There are also references to some earlier an eighteenth-century Polish literary response to the launching of the first balloon and a reflection of the Germanisation of Ukrainian culture, thus giving the book's main focus a sense of historical perspective. Several of the essays consider questions of dissent and exile from the several prevailing communist ideologies in the period 1945-89. This volume is itself an historical document as the essays of which it consists were originally presented at the first international conference of Slavists to be held since the collapse of communism in East and Central Europe.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Celia Hawkesworth has translated nearly forty books from the Serbo-Croatian, including Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić; The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić; Belladonna by Daša Drndić, which was short-listed for the Oxford Weidenfeld prize in 2018; and Adios, Cowboy by Olja Savičević. She lives in London.