World Fiction, Post/Socialist. Eastern European Literatures and Cultures
The socialist project of creating a new world, fundamentally different from all previous ones and the capitalist in particular, was not restricted to the political and economic sphere. What is more, it aimed to revolutionize people’s relationships to each other and to their surroundings. The many different ways in which literature and popular art forms create fictional worlds are particularly well-equipped to observe what became of those goals and how their failure lives on in the cultures of Eastern Europe to this day.
Various projects investigate the complexities and ambivalences of these world fictions from a growing historical distance, overcoming the Cold War dichotomies of state repression and dissidence, totalitarianism and democracy, and official and unofficial art. Exploring how the past is continuously reinterpreted and reappropriated in the post-socialist present—ranging from Manichean demonization to nostalgic glorification— these projects’ aim is to expand and revise common readings of aesthetic practices, artistic methods, popular genres, and cultural conceptions of the world in historical and comparative perspectives.
A product of collaboration with various colleagues, one project examines, for example, how documentary aesthetics in the 1960s radically altered the ways in which artists accessed reality, another how, in the production of socialist masculinities, bourgeois gender relations were disrupted. Using travel literature as yet another example, one can trace the emergence of new notions of the global in the postwar period. Drawing on post-socialist representations of history, one can explore how globalized cultures of memory and social media radically disrupt conceptions of the past. Post/socialist world fiction thus negotiates two issues: the political fiction of a better world, increasingly becoming a fantasy estranged from reality, and the artistic production of divergent world concepts that articulate both fascination with everyday life and the horrors of it.
Fig. above: © Matthias Schwartz
see also
- Affective Realism. Contemporary Eastern European Literatures (Matthias Schwartz, project 2017–2019)
Publications
Jenseits der Nostalgie? Neuaneignungen des Spätsozialismus in osteuropäischen Gegenwartskulturen
Themenschwerpunkt des Wiener Slawistischen Almanachs
Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond
Matthias Schwartz
- Introduction: Firsthand Time, in: Clemens Günther, Matthias Schwartz (eds.): Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond. Leiden: Brill 2024, 1–28
- The Technique of Documenting: on the Early Reportages of Ryszard Kapuściński and Hanna Krall, in: ibid., 164–185
- Das Ende der Nachkriegszeit. Aleksandr Prochanov und die spätsowjetischen Konzeptionen einer globalen Weltliteratur, in: Weimarer Beiträge 3 (2023), 427–454
- Klogestank und Klubarbeit. Zum Versprechen und Nachleben sozialistischer Kulturpaläste, Humboldtforum, 28 Sep 2023
- Generation Nothing and Beyond: Childhood and Youth in Contemporary Russian Literature, in: Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova, Anastasia Kostetskaya (eds.): Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood: Myths and Realities. New York: Routledge 2022, 238–256
- Wenn eine Epoche beerdigt wird. Gedichte Anna Achmatovas zum Krieg (Auf den Seiten alter sowjetischer Zeitschriften), in: Mitropa 2021|22, 102–105
- Mikrokosmos, in: leibniz 21: Universum, 26 May 2023 (with Dirk Naguschewski)
- “Diener des Volkes”. Eine TV-Serie zwischen satirischer Fiktion und politischer Realität, in: INDES – Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft 1–2 (2022), 70–75
- Das kosmische Zeitalter reloaded. Zur Renaissance der menschlichen Raumfahrt in Russland, in: ZfL BLOG, 26 Jan 2022
- Dem Wunschtraum entgegen. Kosmosbegeisterung in der Sowjetunion, in: Berliner Debatte Initial 32.4 (2021), 1–15
- Die Erfindung des Kosmos, in: leibniz 17: Räume, 30 Nov 2021
- “Ich habe getan, was ich konnte.” Zum literarischen Werk von Stanisław Lem, in: Dialog Forum, 15 Nov 2021
- Servants of the People. Populism, Nationalism, State-Building, and Virtual Reality in Contemporary Ukraine, in: Telos. Cricital Theory of the Contemporary 195 (2021), 65–81
- Eine Welt ist nicht genug. Imaginationen alternativer Welten in sozialistischer Science-Fiction, in: Johann Ev. Hafner, Lukas Struß (eds.): Strings, Sphären und SciFi. interdisziplinäre Zugänge zu alternativen Welten. Baden-Baden: Ergon 2021, 185–198
- Prosa der Verstörung. Zum 100. Geburtstag von Stanisław Lem, in: ZfL Blog, 2 Sep 2021
- Die Traurigkeit des Golems. Stanisław Lems Figuration posthumaner Intelligenz als Poetik der Erinnerung, in: Alexander Friedrich i.a. (eds.): Kosmos Stanisław Lem. Zivilisationspoetik, Wissenschaftsanalytik und Kulturphilosophie. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2021, 43–72
- Abschied von einer Utopie. Mediale Inszenierungen der Raumfahrt in der russischen Gegenwartskultur, in: Tobias Haupts, Christian Pischel (eds.): Space Agency – Medien und Poetiken des Weltraums. Bielefeld: transcript 2021, 73–98
- Silberlöffel und andere Aborte. Marginalien zu Stanisław Lems Lokaltermin, in: Jacek Rzeszotnik (ed.): Ein Jahrhundert Lem. 1921–2021. Dresden: Neisse Verlag 2021, 121–140
Events
Contributions
2 Feb 2023 Video
“Grossmans ‘Stalingrad’ (wieder) lesen. Geschichte, Übersetzung und Rezeption eines Jahrhundertromans”
Reading and discussion at Museum Berlin-Karslhorst with Christiane Körner (Frankfurt a.M.), Matthias Schwartz (ZfL) und Heike Winkel (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge)
© Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
18 Jan 2022 Audio
“Der Weg zu den Sternen. Zukunftsvisionen in sozialistischer Science-Fiction”
Lecture by Matthias Schwartz in the context of the exhibition “BACK TO FUTURE. Technikvisionen zwischen Fiktion und Realität” at the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin
© ZfL
27 May 2021 Video
“Wenn die Geschichte die Literatur einholt”
Virtual workshop of the ABDOS (Association of Libraries and Documentation Centers for East, East Central and Southeastern European Studies) with Matthias Schwartz and Viktor Martinowitsch as part of “Leipzig liest extra,” an event of Leipzig Book Fair
© ABDOS e.V.