Evgeny Dobrenko

Literary Pax Sovietica is an intentionally provocative way to refer to the establishment of socialist writing in post-war Eastern Europe as an attempt to create a unified cultural space under the Soviet rule. The timespan covers the first post-WWII decade, since the introduction of socialism and until the first signs of change that followed the death of Stalin.

The proposed project looks at the role that different forms of contacts between writers, readers and functionaries played in the institutionalisation of literature and the propagation of socialist ideology in both national and international perspective; at the channels through which these contacts were established and maintained; at how the general politics of literature in the Eastern Bloc was adjusted, based on experiences in specific countries and on the changing perception of the USSR; and at how all these processes fit into an alternative model of modernity which emerged as a rival to the capitalist one.

In the present-day reality, where nearly all major cultural and political projects have an international character, it is all the more vital to examine past attempts at the creation of a unified cultural and political sphere. The expansion of socialist rule into Eastern Europe after World War II was not exclusively a political enterprise; to no smaller an extent was it an exercise in transforming the national consciousness of the societies involved in the spirit of (forced) internationalism. In so far as literature is at the core of a nation’s identity, it is important to examine steps taken towards a unification of literary production and consumption following the introduction of socialist rule in East European countries, during the formative years of the new world order.

Concentrating on one particular national framework cannot give a full idea of the cultural and political mechanics involved in the construction of the new social and political reality. For that reason this project examines processes related to the institutionalisation of the production and consumption of literature during the first post-WWII decade in different East European countries, which exemplify different literary and political traditions—primarily the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. It looks at how similar, because initiated and implemented by Soviet authorities, events and procedures were adapted to specific cultural contexts and how, in turn, the centralized cultural policy responded to the particularities of each country.