contributors

Articles by Tora Lane

1. Post-communist memory in the negative

   This essay takes the novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić as a starting point for a discussion of why the notion of a post-Yugoslav or post-communist cultural memory seems to be a contradiction in terms. The manifest impossibility of forming a collective post-Yugoslav memory provokes a reflection on how cultural and collective memory has been used in post-communist Eastern Europe to historify the communist past, which further has served the revival of a nationalist agenda. Ugrešić offers a counter memory, if we understand the term from Foucault as something that escapes the forming of identities. Finally, I suggest the notion of negative memory, as introduced by Reinhardt Koselleck, as a more apposite term for approaching memory in the post-communist sphere and in the unfolding catastrophes of the modern world.

2. The inverted myth Viktor Pelevin’s Buddha’s little finger

   In his contribution to the volume Russian Literature since 1991 entitled “The Postmodernist Novel”, Mark Lipovetsky makes the now rather widespread claim that the Russian postmodernist post-Soviet novel represents a break with the totalizing tendencies of the socialist realist novel and opens for new ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the world. In this paper this claim is critically examined on the basis of a reading of Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustota (transl. as Buddha’s Little Finger or Clay Machine Gun against the backdrop of contemporary debates about realism and simulacra. Here it is argued that the Soviet myth of Chapaev lends itself to the totality of the private myth.

3. Russian Literature since 1991. The past is part of the future

   Russian Literature since 1991, Eds. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 320 pages.

4. Theme: Perspectives and narratives of socialist realism Introduction. Ambiguities and dogmas of the real

   This special theme focuses on the relation between realism and social or socialist realism from different angles and with examples from different countries. It consists of contributions from eight scholars who took part in the workshop: Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Karin Grelz, Aleksei Semenenko, Susanna Witt, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Epp Lankots, and Charlotte Bydler and Dan Karlholm.