Contacts across Borders: The Literary (Neo-)Avant-Gardes between Central Europe and the USSR

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Revisiting the maverick works of Polish, Czech and Russian literatures, this panel proposes a more dynamic view of the historical avant-garde and its post-WWII legacies east and west of the Iron Curtain. How to align the divergent developments in Eastern European literatures with a Paris- or Zürich-based timeline of the avant-garde? To address the non-simultaneity of the national avant-gardes, the panel adopts a more decentred—refocused—lens of transnationalism. Our task is both to acknowledge the disparities in cross-cultural hierarchies and to recover a more horizontal history of the Slavic literary avant-gardes comprised of multiple nodes of transmission. We turn to writers who sought to perpetuate the utopian internationalist project of the historical avant-garde even as their experience reflects the multiple partitions and occupations in the region. In the case-studies under discussion, we address networks, encounters and trajectories that call for a revision of engrained narratives regarding the quick demise of the historical avant-garde followed by its drawn-out derivative afterlife in the neo-avant-garde. Our writers constructed hybrid identities, experimented with different languages, crossed national borders, straddled mercurial boundaries between historical periods or artistic movements and engaged global traditions past and present. Some of those crossings came from political coercion and wartime displacement, bearing witness to the violent histories of the region. Others were modes of aesthetic transgression that allowed the writers to transcend their space and time. In remapping these histories we seek to reimagine the avant-gardes across blocs, eras and languages as an urgent project of world literature.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Isobel Palmer, U of Birmingham (UK)

Papers

• Aleksander Wat’s Poems of the 1940s - Aleksandra Kremer, Harvard U

• From the Avant-Garde to the Neo-Avant-Garde: Deautomatisation in Jiří Kolář and Andrei Bitov as a Key to Historical Reading - Cristian Cámara Outes, U Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

• 'Accursed Poets' across the Socialist Avant-Gardes: Viktor Sosnora in Dialogue with Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński - Ivan Sokolov, UC Berkeley

Discussant

• Tomas Glanc, U of Zurich (Switzerland)