Environmental Cultures In Soviet East Europe Literature History And Memory Anna Barcz by Anna Barcz 9781350098350, 9781350098381, 1350098353, 1350098388 instant download after payment.

For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change?
This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansion of the mining industry and disasters such as the Chernobyl explosion, Anna Barcz opens up new understandings of local political traditions and examines how they might be harnessed in the cause of contemporary environmental activism. The book covers works by writers such as Christa Wolf, the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and film-makers such as Béla Tarr, Andrzej Wajda and Wladyslaw Pasikowski.
This book aims at examining texts, events and phenomena that help explain the environmental cultures of the former Soviet dominion and reconnect memory and environmental history through literature. A key question for this work is:how cultures make environments speakif literature serves as a source of historical knowledge?
Soviet Eastern Europe represents a unique relationship between violence and the landscape, where human and ecological disasters are dramatically converged. Eastern European cultural memory reveals these ecological scars because trauma is perceived here as more than human. Literature of this period is a special kind of radar, showing how language itself was affected by the Soviet colonization of Eastern European cultures and environments; how it was contaminated by Soviet propaganda and a worldview deformed by communism. The scope of the literature I analyse demonstrates a larger argument: history must be reconsidered through memory of the Stalin era and the late stage of heavy modernity.