Exorcising Communism. Three Case Studies: Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, Norman Manea

Abstract

This thesis approaches the literature of Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera and Norman Manea from two angles: the historical, sociological, political background of their works, as illustrated both by the authors' biographies and by their own writings on these topics, and the discussion of literary forms employed in their fiction. The complex role of the East - Central European intellectuals was quit e different from that of their Western counterparts. Their writings covered a wide range of aspects and were instrumental in creating an alternative view of life under communism from the official one projected by the communist authorities. In order to do this, they employed various narrative strategies, from autobiographical accounts to fictional creations. On the whole, this study answers three questions regarding the East - Central European intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century: who they were, what they had to say, and how they said it, through their fiction and nonfiction. Altogether, their writing can be seen as an exorcism of the communist trauma: by speaking about communism and convincing their readers in the West of its inherent inhumanity, the three authors also succeeded in making sense of their life experience under communism. The study offers a structured overview of three indicative oeuvres from the period and region, looking at the ways in which the communist experience, covering more than four decades, has acquired literary expression. The search for literary form is shown to be parallel with the actual unfolding events (viewed from geopolitical, historical and sociological perspectives): the authors' need to emphasize the authenticity of their literature determined their choice of biographical and autobiographical narratives, as well as the structure of those narratives. In their biographies (Milosz, The Captive Mind, Milosz's ABC), memoirs (Milosz, Native Realm ; Manea, The Hooligan's Return), short stories (Manea, Variations on a Self - Portrait) and novels (Kundera, The Joke, The Book of Lau ghter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being ; Manea, The Apprenticeship Years of Augustus the Fool), they create a powerful image of life under communism.