Articles de revues sur le sujet « Europe, eastern, fiction »

Abstract The topic of Otherness has been investigated from the point of view of popular culture and popular fiction studies, especially on the basis of the multiracial social environments of the United States. The challenges of addressing real or potential conflicts in areas characterised by an ethnic puzzle are to some extent similar, but at the same time differ substantively from the political, legal, and fictional world of “race.” This paper investigates these differences in the ways of overcoming ethnic stereotyping on the basis of examples taken from post-World War II crime fiction of Southern Europe, and Middle East. In communist and post-communist Eastern Central Europe there are not many instances of mediational crime fiction. This paper will point to the few, although notable exceptions, while hypothesizing on the factors that could favor in the foreseeable future the emergence and expansion of such artistic experiments in the multiethnic and multicultural province of Transylvania.

Identity and memory are two indispensable keywords of society and culture when we deal with Eastern and Central Europe in terms of their modernity and its predicaments. Put in the context of politics and literature, they allow a point of departure in a study of yet another Europe, that is, Eastern Europe on the mental map of Western Europe. They serve as an important trajectory in the history of consciousness of a significant part of Europe that has yet to be tackled, grasped, and appreciated by the political, academic, and educational mainstream of Western Europe with its innumerable clichés and stereotypes over Eastern and Central Europe. No theoretical or empirical analysis would match the depths and originality of exploration of this issue which we encounter in the essayistic writings and fiction of two major Central European writers – namely, Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera. This study in the history of consciousness and also in politics and literature offers an interpretive framework for a European scholarly debate on Eastern and Central European sensibilities.

The field of trauma theory emerged in the 1990s out of the confluence of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and Holocaust studies. It soon consolidated into a trauma paradigm with hegemonic pretensions, which was ill-equipped to recognise traumatic experiences of non-Western and postcolonial groups or nations. It likewise tended to dismiss from trauma fiction any narratives that deviated from the aporetic model of normative trauma aesthetic. These limitations were exposed by the postcolonial turn in history and memory studies, which made it incumbent upon trauma theory to expand its focus to other literatures that bear witness to the so-far neglected, minoritarian trauma traditions. This essay introduces one such tradition, which is the recently emerged body of historical fiction about Soviet deportations, atrocities, genocide and other forms of persecution meant to subdue or eliminate entire ethnic or national groups in Eastern Europe between 1930 and the late 1950s. The genre of Bloodlands fiction, as I have called it elsewhere,1first exploded in national literatures of Eastern Europe in the mid-1990s, after fifty years of suppression of cultural memory under the Communist regimes. About a decade later works of Bloodlands fiction became available in English, often written by diaspora authors. Starting with a challenge to the conventional definition of trauma fiction, this essay argues for a wider model that accommodates genres including Bloodlands fiction. Readings of Breaking Stalin's Nose (2013) by Russian American Eugene Yelchin, A Winter's Day in 1939 (2013) by Polish New Zealander Melinda Szymanik and Between Shades of Gray (2011) by Lithuanian American Ruta Sepetys are used to illustrate some of the key features, textual strategies and cognitive effects of Bloodlands fiction as a genre of global trauma fiction.

This article explores the waning days of the Ottoman Empire and emergence of the modern state system in the early twentieth century Levant from the purview of Kenizé Mourad's self-narrative Regards from the Dead Princess: Novel of a Life. A work of history and literary fiction, Mourad's novel is an account of the last remnants of a secular Levantine culture, the story of a crumbling empire, and the personal tale of a young woman and her exiled imperial family strewn about the continents, torn between Lebanon, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent.

On November 1, 2022, the Department of the History of Slavic Literatures and the Department of Modern Literature of Central and South-Eastern Europe (Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences) held the Academic Conference “Poetics as a seismograph: Fiction in the countries of the Central and Southeastern Europe of the 20th and the 21st centuries. To the 95th anniversary of S. A. Sherlaimova and the 90th anniversary of L. N. Budagova and Yu. V. Bogdanov”.

Woody Allen has long been seen as a definitive voice in American Jewish humor because of his films, but his short fiction has been largely ignored. An analysis of his fiction can, however, yield strong indications that while Allen himself may be an atheist, his prose owes a great debt to his religious upbringing and his ongoing religious literacy. This essay take a closer look at one particular story to note the ways in which Allen encounters religion in his fiction and uses his knowledge of Jewish scriptural forms to enhance the reader's experience of his satire. In this story, consisting of his parodies of the Hassidic tales of Eastern Europe, is he the Baal Sham Tov; the Master of the Good Fake.

Scholars of Russian-American relations in the late nineteenth century have long been concerned with the personalities and writings of university-based experts, journalists, diplomats, and political activists. We are well acquainted with the observations of various American commentators on the backward state of Russian state, society, economy, and politics. While the activities of prominent men such as George Kennan have effortlessly dominated the historical agenda, the negative discourses that they produced about Russia have subsumed other important American representations of the country. Since the period of early modern history, European travelers had seen Russia as a barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasions of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar. Subsequently, Larry Wolff has shown that Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers created images of a despotic and backward Eastern Europe in order to validate the idea of a progressive, enlightened, and civilized Western Europe.

Abstract The late-nineteenth-century Russian nihilist movement was popularized by the portrait of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But despite Turgenev’s nuanced and poignant portrayal, nihilism became associated with Russian revolutionary activities and especially terrorism. Discussions of the nihilist ethos were not limited to Russia but pervaded print culture in Western Europe. The orientalizing rhetoric of British journalism placed Russia firmly in the Eastern camp, so that it offered both the spectacle of exotic, retrograde monarchy and the equally fascinating or threatening vision of revolution in Europe. Revolutionary activities in Russia became part of the “dynamite theme” in British fiction of the fin de siècle, when terrorism also accompanied anarchist movements in continental Europe and Fenian bombings in support of Irish independence. Additionally, Russians became part of the London population through the immigration of Jews, a movement that increased significantly after around 1880. Russian dissidents themselves were welcomed in Britain after the Extradition Act of 1870. This article surveys a range of periodical writings, both reportage and fiction, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Periodical articles and stories reflect the pervasiveness and varied presentation of Russian revolutionary movements and ideas in late Victorian British publications.

The author compares two visions of Europe, seen from Switzerland: one by the English economist David Ricardo, who was here in 1822, the second one by Czesław Miłosz, visiting this country in 1953. Link between both is Ricardo’s future Polish translator, at the same time brother of Miłosz’s maternal grandfather. Miłosz’s essay is discussed in the frame of the idea of the „liberation of Eastern Europe”, launched by his editor, Jerzy Giedroyc, in the early fifties, and of Arthur Koestler’s call for an European Legion of Liberty. After comparison of the text of Sunday in Brunnen with the iconographic programme of the parochial church in Brunnen the author comes to the conclusion that Miłosz wrote a work of fiction rather than a documentary report on his visit in this small place in Switzerland. Brunnen can be seen as an exemplum.

In her public life, Clarice Lispector fought to be recognized as a native Brazilian; however, in her private life, she tended to associate with people with origins like hers. Many of her interviews are with artists who were either children of immigrants or emigrants from Eastern Europe. Scholars have probed Clarice’s fiction and the interviews she gave for a view of her approach to Jewish identity, but the interviews she conducted have not yet been examined. This article discusses Clarice’s dalliance with identity politics when interviewing notable members of the cultural Brazilian Jewish community, analyzes the questions she asked, and examines how she guided the conversation.

This essay contributes to George Eliot scholarship by examining the author’s interest in Eastern Europe, which spanned the length of her literary career, and its portrayal in her fiction. It situates Eliot’s Eastern European characters—from the minor ones, such as Countess Czerlaski’s late husband in “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton” (1857), to major protagonists, such as Will Ladislaw of Middlemarch (1871–72)—in the context of England’s policy toward Poland vis-à-vis Russia during the course of the nineteenth century. The international political backdrop is especially useful in illuminating the Polish aspect of Middlemarch, whose publication date and the time period the novel covers (1829–32) happen to coincide with or shortly follow the two major insurrections Poland launched against Russia. Drawing on Eliot’s interactions with Slavic Jews in Germany, the essay shows how the creation of Will Ladislaw and his reprisal in the character of Herr Klesmer in Daniel Deronda (1876) serves the purposes of Eliot’s imagined cure for English insularity.

Th is essay aims to thematize the poetic and cultural-historical image of debt, embodied as memorial discourse in both fi ctional and nonfi ctional literature. Th e poetics of debt are forged within the melting pot of mythic and historical images, political and cultural aspects, and poetic and testimonial temporalities – but always sheltered in the shadow of Mnemosyne. Th us, memory remains a permanent umbrella for the diff erent faces of debt. Debt is interrogated within the arc of authors Danilo Kiš and Zef Pllumi, two leading literary and cultural personalities in 20th-century south-eastern Europe. Th eir views provide a geopoetic and cultural background for a theoretical discussion of literary and cultural facets of debt. It is argued that because debt entails memory, obligation, and care for others, it is a distinguishing mark of the human psyche. Th e theorizing prelude will be followed by literary and confessional pieces of authors but, in the end, a theorizing observation on the subject will take place.

This paper will focus on some Bulgarian translations of works by foreign writers that were published during the epoch of Socialism. Throughout this period several works by authors from territories such as Latin America, Western Europe and the USA were translated into the languages of the Eastern European countries; some of them do not seem to fit the criteria of the Socialism realism: this is the case of genres such as science fiction or fantasy. Authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, the Italian writers Italo Calvino, Dino Buzzati and many others have been translated into languages such as Bulgarian and Russian. Many of them do not deal mainly with social and political themes, and some of them (for instance Dino Buzzati) are even highly critical towards doctrines such as Marxism. However, in the forewords of some of the Bulgarian translations of their works we can find political and social interpretations. Similar interpretations can also be found in science fiction works and in non-literary works, such as books devoted to practices such as Yoga, which in some books is analyzed from a Marxist point of view.

Michel Del Castillo's novel Death of a Poet was published in 1989, before the collapse of totalitarian systems in eastern countries. It is an autobiographical fiction. The action takes place in 1988. The narrator, Igor Védoz, relates the last events of the fall of a dictator, Marshal Carol Oussek, the "Guide" of an imaginary republic, Doumaria, a country located in the center of central Europe. It’s a reflection on absolute power. The intrigue is built on a detective plot. The investigation carried out by Igor Védoz allows us to glimpse some of the secret mysteries of power in this "Socialist, democratic and peaceful Republic of Doumaria". What does it reveal about the death of this dictator, a victim of himself, within the mysterious arcana of his own power? How is the story built on a police mystery, the discovery of multiple machinations and the secrecy of a fraud?

During recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered socialist television, and we have witnessed a rapid rise in scholarly interest in a new field of research: socialist television studies. On the whole, this recent body of literaturę presents two main new insights as compared to previous studies in the field of the history of Western television: on the one hand, it shows that European television during the Cold War was less heterogeneous than one may imagine when considering the political, economic and ideological split created by the Iron Curtain; on the other hand, it turns to and capitalizes on archives, mostly video, which have been inaccessible to the public. The interactions between Western and socialist mass culture are highlighted mainly with respect to the most popular TV programs: fiction and entertainment. The authors give us an extraordinary landscape of the Romanian socialist television. Unique in the Eastern part of Europe is the period of the early 1990s. Upon the fall of the communist regime, after almost 15 years of freezing, TVR found itself unable to move forward.

Fornaldarsagas or legendary sagas is an exemplary source to research the environment of Icelandic authors in the late Medieval time. They combine aspects of fiction writing, historical narrative, and folklore. The plots of these works had functioned in the memory a long time before reaching the pages of books. As a result of this, the meaning of these texts was constantly adapting to new conditions, leaving just some elements of the historic core. These aspects make Fornaldarsagas a valuable source for studying the collective memory and worldview of that time. In the current article, it was attempted to research the perception of Rus and Eastern Europe in the legendary sagas. We tried to reconstruct general conceptions and intellectual tendencies through the prism of the frontier images of these lands. As a result of involving Iceland in the sphere of influence of European culture, local scientists began to use ancient and European sources in constructing their historical narratives. When translating European treatises into their language, the Icelanders not only copied them but substantially supplemented them. Unlike European authors, who had too little empirical information, Icelanders inherited elements of memory from the Migration Period, Viking Age, and Rus-Scandinavian relations of X-XI centuries. Due to this combination of traditions, Eastern Europe received new images which absorbed the symbols of different times and cultures. An eloquent example of such symbiosis is the concept of Svíþjóð hin mikla. This term was supposed to be a translation of the ancient concept of Scythia but acquired a new meaning and turned the place into a «home of the Scandinavian gods». The idea of an Svíþjóð hin mikla became a mixture of ancient concepts and European interest in the East. At the same time, it was associated with Germanic episodes, that influenced the formation of the myth about the eastern origin of the Scandinavian gods. These ideas formed the literary canon, and the authors adhered to it when writing their works. These aspects of Icelandic writing help us better understand the intellectual environment and rethink the historicity of legendary sagas.

At the last two meetings of the Discussion Club of Literary Critics – a permanent scientific seminar of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences – the reports continued to cover the topic “Literary contours of modern Central and South-Eastern Europe: events, realities, trends”. The first session of this cycle took place in June 2022 and was devoted to the current literary situation in Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. The DCL participants discussed a number of issues related to the numerous productions of Russian literature on the Slovak stage, which testify to the permanent interest in the “Russian theme” among the Slovak theater audience; perception of the image of Russia and Russians in Slavic fiction, reflection of Russian realities and disclosure of the problem of contact of cultures, the formation and existence of national stereotypes (based on a contemporary Czech novel), as well as translations of Slavic fantastic works into Russian, the current state of science fiction literature in Russia and other Slavic countries. In addition, some of the trends observed in the current literary process in Slovakia and the Czech Republic were discussed. The reports focused on the most significant new book releases, the mechanism for awarding literary prizes, such phenomena as the inevitable influence of politics and public life on literature, and the commercialization of the latter. The DCL participants reflected on what factors of the non-literary process can affect the prestige of the institute of literature, what can attract / scare off readers, why they prefer world classics over the works of modern Slavic authors, and also compared the situation in Slovakia and the Czech Republic with the state of the literary process in other Slavic countries.

Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in ‘the West’ from the portrayed violence in ‘the East’, and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.

Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in ‘the West’ from the portrayed violence in ‘the East’, and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.

The article discusses ethnographic essays and novellas in the poems by Alexandra Andreevna Fuchs. The wife of a famous professor Karl Fuchs, she was resident of Kazan, hosted a literary salon, which was frequented by many local and visiting writers and poets, and met with Alexander Pushkin during his stay in the town. Alexandra Fuchs became the first Russian ethnographer writer; she purposefully traveled to places where the Chuvash, Mari (Cheremis), and Udmurts (Votyaks) lived, and wrote essays about the life, daily routine, manners and customs of these peoples drawing on her personal observations. Her essays took the form of letters and were often accompanied by response letters from her husband. They were published in the Kazan magazine Zavolzhsky Muravey [Zavolzhsky Ant], in the regional newspaper Kazanskie gubernskie vedomosti [Kazan Provincial Gazette], as well as in a number of separate books. The article analyzes the rhetorical peculiarities and author’s position of Alexandra Fuks’ essay writing. The analysis also involves ethnographic-fiction novellas (poems) by A. Fuchs, taken, according to her, “from the Tatar tradition”: ‘Princess Habiba’, ‘Founding of the city of Kazan’, a comment to which was written by her husband. These works fit into the tradition of the “Eastern novella”, popular in Russia since the eighteenth century. Depicting the exotic life of ancient Tatars and the peoples neighboring Kazan, Alexandra Fuchs sought to reconcile the orientation of the region to the East with the Orthodox-Imperial ideology which (in her view) was more advanced and progressive. Her sympathies as the author lay with female characters who contradicted traditional Muslim customs. Alexandra Fuchs’ essays and tales played a considerable role in awakening the interest of a Russian reader to the peoples of the empire, which preceded the mid-19th century rise of ethnography in science and literature.

In the historical context of the total disintegration that occurred in Europe between 1920 and 1940, the Russian community abroad was particularly interested in Buddhism and the Buddhist worldview. This is connected with the general pessimistic atmosphere among Russian emigrants. Because of their disillusionment with harsh reality, many of them find consolation in Eastern religion to escape from the whirlwind of earthly existence. Such an unusual phenomenon wasnoticed by the young writer Gaito Gazdanov. The writer described this psychological phenomenon in his fiction. The main purpose of this article is to discover in Gazdanov's characters a psychological mindset closely linked to Buddhism. Accordingly, the aim of the study is to highlight the main characteristics of the Buddhist worldview in Gazdanov's characters, analyse the writer's perception of some Buddhist concepts and examine Gazdanov's attitude to the Buddhist teaching on life and superrealism. The material for the study is the novels An Evening at Clare's and The Return of the Buddha, meaningful in the early and mature periods of the writer's work. The analysis of the «Buddhist text» in Gazdanov's novels reveals a number of psychological traits in the characters that are similar to the category of Buddhism, such as detachment from the major history, deliberate alienation from the real world and dreamlike meditation as the main way of perceiving the world. At the same time, a number of Buddhist concepts, such as metempsychosis and nirvana, become the theme of the writer's work as well. This shows the mystical side of Gazdanov's work. However, the article concludes that the writer also warns of the danger and harm of the nihilism and indifference to life inherent in this Eastern religion, which eventually leads to the disappearance of the personality

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, there is no doubt that education researchers will analyze the changes in teaching and learning over the years to come. There is no certainty that new waves and variants of COVID-19 will not force humanity to radically change educational technologies in the future. This will bring mankind closer to the predictions of science-fiction authors and futurists, not taken seriously before. In this regard, it is important to scientifically document and analyze various measures for transforming education in the current situation, thus, creating the database for future generations. Analysis reveals that geographically adjacent countries with numerous current or historical interrelations, show the uniqueness of their response to the pandemic because of a number of current economic, social, cultural and geographical factors. Quite promising in this regard are the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which in the second half of the 20th century had almost identical principles for developing national education systems, but changed significantly under the influence of the reforms of the last thirty years. Comparing the cases of five universities from Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic enable us, not only to identify common problems, but also to describe the most effective measures for the reorganization of higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic, dictated by the need to sustain the quality of teacher training.

The Post-Communist Novel of Transition as Realism of Transition. Thematic Precedents in Romanian and East-Central European Literature. The present study aims to analyze how certain narrative formulas circulate within the world literary system – one but unequal (Moretti 2004, WReC 2015) – starting from the case of the novel of post-communist transition, specific to many Eastern European literatures. The Romanian literature abounds in such novels, which take various forms according to the different literary paradigms from which they have emerged. Thus, we consider that post-communist Romanian literature, or at least its social-political regime of relevance, is a symptomatic case of what the authors of Combined and uneven development: Towards a new theory of world-literature (WReC) call “(semi-)peripheral irrealism”. According to this study, the literature produced in peripheries and semi-peripheries is often formally dominated by a series of practices identified as specific to modernism, which arise, determined by the condition of the semi-periphery, in the unique and uneven system of world-literature, in which fiction becomes the narration that mediates lived experience in the “palimpsestic, combinatory and contradictory ‘order’ of peripheral experience.” (WReC). Nevertheless, a new direction of contemporary prose is being traced recently in order to rethink/ reproblematize the past and the way it can be reflected in literature. A series of recent novels such as Bogdan Coșa’s How Close the Cold Rains Are (2020) and Mihai Duțescu’s Beech Sponges (2021), as well as others, give rise to a new aesthetic formula of the post-communist novel of transition through the ways in which they operate with realism. We therefore propose to investigate the recent history of the phenomenon of fictional representation of the Romanian transition in relation to similar phenomena in East-Central Europe, while also analyzing the specifics of “the realism of transition” (as we will call this new literary category, in the footsteps of Mihnea Bâlici). Keywords: the novel of transition, (semi-)peripheral literature, peripheral realism, post-communism, the realism of transition

International traveller and acclaimed Swedish-language author Göran Schildt sailed in the Black Sea in the summer of 1963. He was a well-read scholar with a deep interest in the Antiquity and a seasoned traveller with a vast experience of multilingual and multicultural situations. This was the first and last visit of his yacht Daphne to the Black Sea and the Eastern Bloc. Through the eyes of this keen observer, a small aperture can be detected among the bricks in the walls dividing Europe. A window had been opened by world politicians in the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1950s. Although there were periods of high global tension, new possibilities for travel and tourism were created in some Eastern Bloc countries, among them Bulgaria and Romania. Visits by dozens of journalists, writers and artists and thousands of charter tourists from the Western Bloc over the next few decades opened up new windows to the world beyond the Iron Curtain. Göran Schildt stands out among the Nordic cultural visitors to Bulgaria and Romania in the post-war period. His desire to get acquainted with everyday life and ordinary people, capability to see behind facades and analysing experiences could be defined as journalistic, but his travel writing went deeper. In comparison with some other writers from Finland, who visited Bulgaria or Romania during the Cold War, such as the poet Lassi Nummi or comic fiction writer Arto Paasilinna, and the Bulgarian author Yordan Radichkov who visited Sweden, Schildt’s background, interests and multilingual and multicultural strategies supported the discovery and collection of extensive information and the processing of it into a multidimensional travel book. This article discusses the journey and travel narrative of Göran Schildt from the perspective of multilingual and multicultural strategies for encountering other languages, societies and cultures, and the processing of experiences as recorded in his diary and his popular travel narrative.

The world economy has been suffering its most severe recession since the World War-II. Production has fallen in the United States and flattened in Japan. Western Europe is stagnating: the boost provided by German unification has petered out, while high interest rates remain. Growth has picked up in Latin America, but remains slow there and in other developing regions, other than parts of Asia. Central and Eastern Europe are suffering a precipitous fall in living standards; the transition process is proving much more painful than anticipated. Overall, signs of improvement are scant. The unexpected severity of the global recession reflects the presence of debt deflation in a number of industrialized economies - a process not experienced since the Great Depression. Household and business expenditures are being reduced, the flow of credit is shrinking, and confidence is being eroded. Econometric forecasts, by taking little or no account of the domestic debt overhang, have tended to paint an overoptimistic picture. A private sector weighed down by debt and high long-term interest rates will not generate stability or growth unaided. Governments must resume their responsibilities, by acting to foster a return to financial stability and to stimulate the level of economic activity. No single country can solve the macroeconomic problem on its own: the situation demands improved coordination. Without a swift policy response, cumulative forces may be unleashed, damaging all countries. World economic recovery is especially important for developing countries, for without sustained export growth further bouts of instability can be expected, including an intensification of threats to democratic institutions in countries where these have been established or re-established only recently. Many developing countries, as well as countries in transition, have unilaterally undertaken a fundamental change of direction towards greater openness in trade. For them to succeed in pursuing outward-oriented strategies, developed countries need to follow suit by relaxing their own import restrictions. A successful conclusion to the Uruguay Round is therefore highly important. Improved development performance will also require further policy effort at home. The need for reforms is inescapable, but these should be introduced thoughtfully, on the basis offa ct, not fiction.

The preservation and development of the languages of indigenous minorities is one of the most urgent problems in the functioning of the ethno-cultural diversity of the planet. The problem poses certain tasks to both the academic community and public and governmental organizations. In this paper, the author analyses the documents and draws on the basic research and his own field materials to consider the preservation of the language of three Balto-Finnic minorities - the Vepsians, the Votians, and the Izhorians. The research has established that the three indigenous minorities face both common and unique problems of language preservation, related to the demography, socio-economic situation of the region, and social aspects of language functioning. One of the most important current problems for the Vepsian, Votic, and Izhorian languages is the gradual loss of their communicative function. A review of the language use has shown that despite all the efforts of ethnic activists and publishing fiction and educational literature in their native language, the functionality of the languages is reducing both in the public and private spheres. The article also discusses the ways to solve the problem. First, the author draws attention to the programs being implemented to support the native languages of indigenous minorities and assess their effectiveness, in terms of both results and the language representatives' perception. At the same time, the author analyses new possible approaches to language support proposed by representatives of the academic, cultural, and educational community. The general message of the article is to recognize the need to exchange views and experience, conduct research and support a social movement aimed at finding optimal solutions to preserve the languages of indigenous minorities in Russian Federation as well as in Central and Eastern Europe.

"The association of the vampire with Eastern Europe has evolved in crime fictions which transform this fantastic character from a supernatural being to a means to comment on politics, many of them focusing on the imagological opposition between Eastern Europe and the Western world, a treatment that began with Stoker’s Dracula. Our paper analyses the transformation of this imagological vampiric stereotype, by investigating the deconstructivist novel Nepotul lui Dracula (Dracula’s Nephew) (2012) by the Romanian writer Alexandru Mușina."

Belarusian literature in Poland after 1989. About the necessity of developing a literature databaseSpeaking about Belarusian literature in Poland we focus on fiction, its translation into Polish and the study of literature. The existence of the Belarusian literature in Poland in the post-war period is indicated by the following bibliographies: a bibliography of translations for the period 1945–1994 (G. Charytoniuk, Literatura białoruska w Polsce. Bibliografia przekładów za lata 1945–1994, Białystok 1996) and a subject bibliography for the period 1945–1998 (G. Charytoniuk, Polskie białorutenika literackie. Bibliografia przedmiotowa 1945–1998, Białystok 1998). The new political, economical and social conditions in Poland after 1989 have had an influence on the situation of the Belarusian literature. In addition to the existing departments some new university departments and scientific branches have been organized. Their aim is to realize new scientific projects connected with the Belarusian literature in Poland and Belarus. A lot of nongovernment organizations (funds, partnerships, associations) have been organized not only in Bialystok region, but also in the other parts of the country. A new publishing market has been established which has focused on the modern literature of Central and Eastern Europe including Belarusian literature. The Internet also plays an important role in popularization of the Belarusian literature. That literature has been included in the database of the National library (Przewodnik Bibliograficzny, Bibliografia Zawartości Czasopism), regional libraries (Bibliografia województwa podlaskiego) and the digital library (Polska Bibliografia Literacka). The information is searched by institutional scientific depositories and digital libraries. The considerable part of the information has not been registered in the bibliographic database. In this situation it is necessary to develop an integral literature bibliographic database of the Belarusian literature in Poland. Literatura białoruska w Polsce po roku 1989. O potrzebie tworzenia bazy literackiejKiedy się mówi o literaturze białoruskiej w Polsce, trzeba mieć na uwadze literaturę piękną, jej przekłady na język polski i literaturę przedmiotu. O obecności literatury białoruskiej w Polsce powojennej świadczą bibliografie: przekładów obejmująca lata 1945-1994 (G. Charytoniuk, Literatura białoruska w Polsce. Bibliografia przekładów za lata 1945-1994, Białystok 1996) i przedmiotowa lat 1945-1998 (G. Charytoniuk, Polskie białorutenika literackie. Bibliografia przedmiotowa 1945-1998, Białystok 1998). Nowe warunki polityczne, społeczne i ekonomiczne w Polsce po 1989 roku wpłynęły i na sytuację literatury białoruskiej. Pojawiły się nowe uniwersyteckie katedry i zakłady naukowe. Realizują one projekty badawcze uwzględniające literaturę białoruską w Polsce i na Białorusi. Powstały liczne organizacje pozarządowe (fundacje, towarzystwa i stowarzyszenia) nie tylko na Białostocczyźnie, ale i w innych miejscach w kraju. Utworzył się nowy rynek wydawniczy, który zwrócił uwagę i na współczesną literaturę krajów Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej, w tym białoruską. Ważną rolę w popularyzacji literatury białoruskiej pełni Internet. Literatura ta jest rejestrowana przez bibliografię narodową (Przewodnik Bibliograficzny, Bibliografia Zawartości Czasopism) i regionalną (Bibliografię Województwa Podlaskiego). Wyszukiwanie informacji ułatwiają instytucjonalne repozytoria naukowe i biblioteki cyfrowe. Znaczna część dokumentów pozostaje jednak poza rejestracją bibliograficzną. Pojawia się więc potrzeba stworzenia bazy literackiej dotyczącej literatury białoruskiej w Polsce, która dążyłaby do kompletności bibliograficznej.

The gradual de-Sovietization of Eastern Europe caused the emergence of a “new historical wave” in literature, which combines various ways of covering historical material: from the traditional aesthetics of realism to playing with genres and stylistics on the border of socially acceptable techniques. The new Russian-Ukrainian war has actualized the issue of covering trauma in fiction. The question is whether a playful way of dealing with topics, sacralized by society, has the right to exist. The subject of the study is the poetics of Mykhailo Brynykh’s scandal and how it manifests itself in the author's text and personal branding. The purpose of the study is to outline the scandalous approach to highlighting the nation's trauma in Mykhailo Brynykh’s novel “Bread with cartilage” and to establish the correlation between the poetics of the scandal and the personality of the writer. The poetological and biographical methods were used to solve the tasks. As a result of the study, the following conclusions were made. The reaction of readers to new texts, where the topic of war appears, shows that they are more careful with authors who did not witness historical events but seek to use them for commercialization. An acceptable way, which will not cause public outrage, to use real stories to non-witness authors is a “bracketed representation” based on post-memory, which can be embodied by means of scandalous techniques that manifest themselves at various levels of the text. The main task of outrage is to expose the commonplace by rude means. The most obvious outrage in “Bread with cartilage” stands out precisely at the plot level, because the author combines the pop image of zombies with the topic of the Holodomor, which is sacralized in Ukrainian society. The trauma of the Holodomor is also manifested on different levels. According to the plot, the cannibalism gene is activated by alcohol, the abuse of which is a sign of social depression. The loss of identity is realized due to the stylistic play with the speech of one of the characters, which reveals the split of his personality. The correlation between the author's brand and his works with elements of outrage is important. Readers expect a prank from the writer, and therefore intuitively do not reject atypical representations. In his zombie novel, Mykhailo Brynykh used provocative means not only for the sake of playing with the reader, but also covered in a provocative way an event sacred to Ukrainians and achieved one of the main goals of the outrage — he exposed the problems of alcoholism or ignoring one's own history by rude means.

Abstract Over the last 20 years, literary nonfiction has become increasingly popular among the Dutch reading public. Thanks to increasing sales, translations and literary awards the genre achieved a strong position in Dutch literature. This article analyzes the image of Central and Eastern European countries in Dutch literary nonfiction of the last ten years (2004-14). It searches for characteristics of an orientalist and balkanist discourse and the presence of the imagological centre-periphery model in the works of Geert Mak, Jelle Brandt Corstius, Olaf Koens, Joop Verstraten and Jan Brokken. Contemporary Dutch literary nonfiction contains a euro-orientalist discourse. Characteristics such as underdevelopment, hedonism, obscurity and authenticity are projected on Central and Eastern Europe, which is put in the periphery of Western Europe.

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 4, no. 2, “East European Feminisms, Part 1: The History of East European Feminisms,” eds. Maria Bucur and Krassimira Daskalova, 2020.Maria Bucur, The Nation’s Gratitude: World War I and Citizenship Rights in Interwar Romania, London: Routledge, 2022, vi–viii, 231 pp., $160.00 (hardback), $48.95 (ebook), ISBN: 978-0-367-74978-1.Sanja Ćopić and Zorana Antonijević, eds., Feminizam, aktivizam, politike: Proizvodnja znanja na poluperiferiji. Zbornik radova u čast Marine Blagojević Hughson (Feminism, activism, politics: Knowledge production in the semiperiphery. Collection in honor of Marina Blagojević Hughson), Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research (IKSI), 2021, 621 pp., ISBN: 978-86-80756-42-4.Krassimira Daskalova, Zhorzheta Nazarska, and Reneta Roshkeva, eds., Ot siankata na istoriata: Zhenite v bulgarskoto obshtestvo i kultura, volume 2, Izvori za istoriana na zhenite: Dnevnitsi, spomeni, pisma, beletristika (From the shadows of history: Women in Bulgarian society and culture, volume 2, Sources of women’s history: diaries, memoirs, letters, fiction), Sofi a: Sofi a University Press, 2021, 621 pp., BGN 30 (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-07-5180-1.Melissa Feinberg, Communism in Eastern Europe, New York: Routledge, 2022, 229 pp., $44.75 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8133-4817-9.Fabio Giomi, Making Muslim Women European: Voluntary Associations, Gender, and Islam in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878–1941), Budapest: CEU Press, 2021, 420 pp., €88.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-963-386-369-5.Yulia Gradskova, The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South and the Cold War: Defending the Rights of Women of the “Whole World”? London: Routledge, 2020, 222 pp. £29.59 (e-book), ISBN: 9781003050032.Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl and Oana Hergenröther, eds., Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging, Aging Studies, vol. 19, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2021, 386 pp., €45 (paperback), ISBN: 978-3-8376-4554-5.Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front During World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 528 pp., $34.95 (hardback), ISBN: 9780190618414.Oksana Kis, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021, 652 pp., 78 color photos, 10 photos, €84.50 (hardback), ISBN: 9780674258280.Yelena Lembersky and Galina Lembersky, Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia, Boston: Cherry Orchard Books, 2022, 247 pp., $17.19 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-64469-669-9.Mihaela Miroiu, Povestiri despre Cadmav (Stories about Cadmav), Bucharest: Rocart, 2021, 270 pp., RON 31.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-606-95093-0-2.Mie Nakachi, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, 352 pp., $39.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0190635138.Olga Todorova, Domashnoto robstvo i robovladenie v osmanska Rumelia (Domestic slavery and slave ownership in Ottoman Rumelia), Sofia: Gutenberg, 2021, 444 pp., BGN 30 (paperback), ISBN: 978-619-176-195-1.

Attention to the western reception of Eastern Europe has been relevant for several centuries, but it is especially characteristic of the turn of the 21st century. The inertia of the Cold War is still felt in popular culture: evil is essentialized in the images of Russia/Eastern Europe and Russians/Eastern Europeans every time. Another tradition prefers to create the image of a Russian relying on the harmless, inactive characters of Russian fairy tales and novels, such as Emelya and Oblomov. Russia itself is often not named or portrayed in films and texts; it is replaced by Eastern Europe, Siberia, and fictional cities. The article highlights the main characteristics of the Eastern European text according to Larry Wolff: remoteness, coldness, savagery, passionateness, ambivalence, theatricality, frightening suspense. Eastern European images by the contemporary American writer Donna Tartt (Boris Pavlikovsky and other Slavs in her novel The Goldfinch) are compared with the interpretation of such images in the popular culture and by the writers of the 20th century (in William Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge). In Tartt’s novel, we encounter heroes who are not just interested in Russia and Russians/Eastern Europeans, but are literally fascinated by them, trying to learn the language, study Russian literature. It has been suggested that Fyodor Dolokhov from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, one of the key novels in the world literary tradition, could be the prototype for a significant number of Eastern European images. This ambivalent image combines all the main characteristics of the Eastern European text and allows both negative (most often) and positive (with careful consideration of the plots and characteristics) interpretations. For example, coldness, winter, blizzard can be considered as negative characteristics (especially considering some connotations), but, in the classic novel, which is also oriented towards Dickens, they are naturally connected with the Christmas theme of the miraculous elimination of contradictions, the fabulous resolution of all problems, and transformation. Therefore, it is not surprising that the “code” of the character is repeated, from name to separate themes and motifs. The characteristics Wolff lists – robbery, philosophizing, masquerading, duality – generate both repulsion and attraction. It is possible that the positive perception of Eastern Europe is rooted in the approach to the theme through the prism of literature and literary criticism. Tartt as a philologist is expectedly more influenced by modern literary theory inspired by the formalists, Propp, Bakhtin, Jakobson, and Lotman, than by political clichés.

This paper argues against what can be called a “double ontological erasure” of state socialism in eastern Europe, by both the east European right-wing intelligentsia and the west European militant left. In an effort to challenge said erasure, the paper draws on the journalistic and fictional work of Bulgaria's major dissident writer of the 1970s, Georgi Markov. Against mainstream readings of his work as staunchly anti-communist, the paper suggests that Markov makes at least three major contributions to the “communist hypothesis” from the perspective of eastern Europe. First, by offering a “postcolonial” (rather than a political-economic) critique of the “cult of things” and consumerism in the region. Second, by developing a truly immanent critique of state socialism from the position of the communist ideal. Lastly, by proposing what could be called a “communism of the abject” among individuals and communities on the margins of socialist governmentality. Arguably, this triple contribution not only proffers a more nuanced and complex understanding of life under socialism, but also has important insights for contemporary debates on the left today.

The work of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte was greatly influenced by the “Soviet” theme. He visited the USSR for the first time as a journalist in 1929, worked as a war reporter on the Eastern front in 1943 and visited the Soviet Union again in 1956. In Malaparte’s numerous fictional and non-fictional works dedicated to his Soviet experience (The Intelligence of Lenin; Coup D’etat: The Technique of Revolution; Lenin the Good Fellow; The Volga Rises in Europe; The Kremlin Ball; Me, In Russia and In China) the author widely used various elements of the European “myth of Russia”. The article studies the influence of the “myth of Russia” on the writer’s views and describes how various components of the myth transform depending on political situation and on the evolution of Malaparte’s beliefs.

Abstract Over the last few decades, the field of law and literature studies has increasingly focused on the importance of literary texts in the interpretation of legal doctrines developing wider perspectives on society and on the law’s effect on the community itself. By considering the dynamic relationship between narrative works and legal documents, the present analysis proposes a reading of Joseph Conrad’s short story “Amy Foster” (1901), which focusses on the investigation of the social and political aspects of migration in late nineteenth-century Britain. Echoes of the migrant figure as represented in Conrad’s story can be found in the Aliens Act, the law passed by the British government in 1905 to regulate the flux of migrants from Eastern Europe. Taking into account the legal value of the Aliens Act and the social consequences of its application, the article will first examine general views on migration at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will later explore the language used in the statute and its relevance in the short story. To this end, the notion of “undesirable immigrant,” first introduced to describe migrants with well-defined characteristics, is anticipated by Joseph Conrad in “Amy Foster” whose protagonist, Yanko Goorall, is an emigrant from Eastern Europe. Conrad’s fictional representation of Goorall as an “undesirable immigrant” allows us to reflect on how his writing deals with (and anticipates) events and socio-cultural trends.

Abstract The article adopts an approach to the history of Belarus’, which plays with imaginations. It opens up two vistas concerning the past that are marked by fictional texts. The former belongs to developments before World War I and is connected with a short story by Jakub Kolas, whereas the latter attends to events of World War II and is related to a novel by Jerzy Kosiński. In both cases supplements to the main texts offer insights into Soviet history, on the one hand into the era of revolutionary culture of the 1920s, and on the other hand into the political thaw of the 1950s. The result is an illustration of the metamorphoses that took place in the transitional region of Central and Eastern Europe in the process of Soviet modernization.

In Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004), Carlos Iglesias tells the story of Spanish migration to Central Europe during the 1960s through a fictional remembering of his family’s years as immigrants to Uzwil, in the Swiss eastern province of Toggenburg. His memories of the Swiss landscape, luminous, green, and open contrast with a grim, grey and enclosed Madrid, both origin and end of the six-year journey. This essay explores the interrelation between memory, space, and human mobility in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas. Through a journey of migration to Switzerland, Iglesias tells a story of return to Madrid, and unveils the contradictions of Spain’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s. Merging experiences of arrival and departure, presents and pasts, Iglesias’s film shows how immigration is rooted in space, and inseparable from economic, political and social processes that are historically specific.

Abstract Has the Cold War, anchored in both the US-USSR rivalry and the rising power of China, impacted the sense and the meaning of literature as art, and our understanding of world literature? If the world literature discourse reveals a cosmopolitan feature to the cultural contestation of great power politics in the Third World and Eastern Europe, does this also mean that the Cold War discloses an irreducible agonism at the heart of world literature? This article suggests we need to answer both questions affirmatively. I approach these questions both historically and heuristically; I begin with a fictional palimpsest, composed by short excerpts from three larger texts by Peter Schneider, Boris Polevoy, and Ismail Kadare. This reading strategy aims to show that both ideological and geopolitical concerns are relevant in theorizing world literature through the lens of Cold War literature.

Abstract The article discusses self-quotations as a strategy of politeness. I maintain that self-quotations fulfill strategies of linguistic politeness, and that the fulfillment of these strategies must be understood through the discourse event standing in the background of the self-quotation. In the corpus – 13 Hebrew articles written by women in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century – 35 self-quotations were found. All of them are “fictional”, i.e. they do not refer to an actual discourse event that occurred in the past. Nevertheless, the fictionality is not identical in all the cases examined, and it arises from the specific characteristics of each case. The examination of the construction of the other discourse event (past, future, or fictional) reveals that it strongly influences the quotation’s pragmatic function, and specifically its “polite” character. The discourse event might be a speech or thought event; it might actually have occurred in the past or only be implied by a future tense or a conditional structure; or sometimes it may be openly declared as a discourse event that will not take place altogether. Self-quotations function as hedging devices, qualifying various aspects of the utterance – its illocutionary force, comprehensiveness, the degree of social authority it expresses, or the act of uttering itself.

My article focuses on the film California Dreamin’ (Endless) in order to examine the way the movie problematizes and brings in dialogue contemporary overlapping and contradictory Romanian ideologies in relation to the US. By taking the movie as a lens for the Romanian context, my paper analyzes how the US is signified and decoded in the aftermath of communism in Romania. I discuss how the movie envisions a continuous questioning and interrogation of the precommunist past and the postcommunist present upon which images, perceptions, fictions, and appropriations of “America” are predicated in the post-1989 Romanian context. My argument is that by mapping the overlapping terrain of the foreign and the domestic past and present, the film critically reconfigures the space between the US and one of its main supporters in the “New Europe.” It explores axes of local, national, and international interests, pointing to the contradictory, ambiguous sociocultural representations that accrue to “America” as it is caught up in itineraries and mis/translations across a “Second World” site. I contend that the dialogic examination Romania–US that the movie successfully achieves can become an ideal model for approaching the US in the Eastern European space.

Every discourse on geopolitical issues in contemporary world rearticulates how geographical factors such as location, resources, terrain, and climate influence political behaviour, power structures, and foreign policy decisions of states and nations act on the global stage. Any strategy undertaken for geopolitical analysis considers the distribution and exercise of power by examining the capabilities of states in terms of military strength, economic resources, technological advancements, and diplomatic influence. In fact foreign policies are formulated; trade, commerce and international relations are assessed; the significance of territory and borders are shaped; potential disruptions, political instability and shifts in global power dynamics are anticipated; all determined and bridled by the geopolitical flux. Even though literature is primarily entitled to narratives and character build ups, literary texts are often employed by authors to comment on real-world geopolitical issues, power dynamics, and global events. By delineating details such as borders, territories, and geopolitical alliances; by examining the larger politics between individuals, communities, or nations; by weaving complex plots involving espionage agents, political leaders, or diplomats, by highlighting the intricacies of international relations and the pursuit of strategic interests, fictional narratives offer insights into the complexities of human relationships, societal structures, and the forces that shape our world. The current paper is an exhaustive study of the geopolitical configurations and intricate dispositions in the fictional fabric of Elif Shafak, the most widely read Turkish British author whose novels reflect the convoluted tapestry of Turkish society, the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures, and Turkey's unique position bridging Europe and Asia.

AbstractUsually the European perception of South Asia and, related to it, academic research into this region, is informed by specific, powerful images and metaphors that establish a dichotomisation of the world. The reasons for this development cannot be analysed in detail here. Suffice it to say, however, that this organisation and designation of the world has deep roots. Until the Reformation, Europe was basically perceived only in terms of geographical boundaries. But the dichotomy between “Europe” and “Asia” acquired a new dimension in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when, in the wake of a change of paradigm into modernity, European self-consciousness gradually developed into a sense of European intellectual superiority. Just as a new form of collective identity had developed within the boundaries of Europe, based on the idea of “nation” in the late eighteenth century, and just as the members of the early nation-states forcibly dissociated themselves by definition from members of other societies in order to be able to establish their own identity, now, with the same intention, though on a different level, Europeans dissociated themselves from “Asia”, the “Orient” and “Islam”. The political recollection of important master narratives kept the mythical fictions in mind and imbued the nation-building process with enormous real power. This development towards a modern European identity was based, as can be deduced from many travellers' testimonies, on the history of reception, reciprocal perceptions, and the development of enemy images. In this process, the Orient and the Orientals were also used by Europeans as a didactic background for the critique of their own (European) urban societies. The literary technique of contextual alienation and distancing, such as can be found in Montesquieu's “Persian Letters”, was born in this period. These and following processes of projection were connected among others things with the fact that Europeans, as colonial masters, advanced to confront the world outside Europe. There they were faced with attitudes and norms that forced them to question their own perceptions. In doing so, they also tended to accept some of these strange and different ideas, and, thus, exposed themselves to cultural hybridisation which could then only be overcome by the reconstructing of their own culture as something “pure”, in contrast to the “degenerate” culture of the colonialised. In this way, collective antagonisms developed. Even the Oriental crusades that had been critically evaluated by European academicians, were now for the first time perceived in terms of cultural clash. Analogously, Europe and Asia were constructed in the eighteenth century and very predominantly in the nineteenth century in terms of arenas of power politics. For instance, it was during this time that the eastern borders of Europe were conceptualised, with the Balkans and Transoxania being considered as buffers or gaps between the two.

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. Hence, this chapter, as part of the book itself, aims to contribute to studies of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies. References David P.G. Bondand Stephen E. Grasby. "Late Ordovician mass extinction caused by volcanism, warming, and anoxia, not cooling and glaciation: REPLY." Geology 48, no. 8 (Geological Society of America2020): 510. Cyril Langlois.’Vestiges de l'apocalypse: ‘le site de Tanis, Dakota du Nord 2019’. Accessed June, 6, 2021, https://planet-terre.ens-lyon.fr/pdf/Tanis-extinction-K-Pg.pdf NajouaGharsalli,ElhoucineEssefi, Rana Baydoun, and ChokriYaich. ‘The Anthropocene and Great Acceleration as controversial epoch of human-induced activities: case study of the Halk El Menjel wetland, eastern Tunisia’. Applied Ecology and Environmental Research 18(3) (Corvinus University of Budapest 2020): 4137-4166 Elhoucine Essefi, ‘On the Geochemistry and Mineralogy of the Anthropocene’. 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The Anyoto leopard-men, a society from eastern Congo, operated between approximately 1890 and 1935. Until now the history of the leopard-men has inspired representations of Central Africa as a barbaric and disorderly place, and the idea that a secret association of men attacked innocent people and ate their limbs remains dominant in western culture. Since the early 20th century this image has been rather faithfully perpetuated in colonial ethnography and official reports and in popular representations of Africa. The Anyoto costumes in the collection of the Royal Museum for Central Africa have in particular inspired leopard-men iconography in western sources until today. There are certain striking similarities between western fictional literature on the Anyoto society and the factual sources, such as eyewitness reports from colonists and missionaries. Both share the historically rooted and culturally-specific representation of people from outside their own areas. In Europe there has been a long tradition of representing heathens and non-Europeans as being half man, half beast and behaving like animals, including eating their own species. Such cultural predispositions have stood in the way of understanding the real purposes of this society. Anyoto men’s activities were a way of maintaining local power relations, performing indigenous justice in secret and circumventing colonial government control.

The research is based on the hypothesis that geographical spaces reflect the imprint of social, political, historical and cultural life. Spatial representations of settlements are the projections of social crisis and historical periods. The city has its own vocabulary and language, reflected in its buildings and spaces. These 'speaking' cities are open in space and time, and become theatres of self-writing, as the spaces of the city try to find forms of expression to see unspoken traumas, that is, theories of the city are also theories of the subject. The main question of the investigation is: what are the specific possibilities and challenges for Polish contemporary women's literature to mobilise social memory and to create possibilities for confronting the traumatic past? Using examples from Olga Tokarczuk's novels Dom dzienny, dom nocny (Day House, Night House) and Joanna Bator's Piaskowa Góra (Sand Hill), I will present the relationship between memory and coming to terms with the past in the historical context of East-Central Europe in Poland. In particular, I will focus on the ways of reflecting on historical events of the Second World War and the regime change of 1989. A further aim of the research is to explore how Polish women's literature after 1989 attempts to come to terms with the great social traumas of the twentieth century. In the following, I intend to examine the fictional representation of the culture of memory of the 1989/90 regime change in the body of contemporary Hungarian and Polish women's literature in order to find a common intersection of Central and Eastern European literatures.

This article is about a piece of research started in 2019 which focuses on the literary, cultural and sociological analysis of biographical and family stories by contemporary Jewish female authors from Eastern-Europe writing in German. This study investigates the relationship between the literary and lingual appearance of memories and the age, the Eastern-European origin, the socialization and the identity of the authors. The research also deals with the differences between the literary forms of the various generations of authors and the identifiable irony-fiction-reality correlation in the memories told.