Ideological and political horizon shifts in Transylvanian Hungarian poetry during the communist period and after the 1989 Regime Change

Although the communist regime, in literature as well as in all areas of social life, aimed at uniformity and creating an “art” serving propaganda purposes in the entire Central and Eastern European region, the Romanian Stalinist “cultural project” differed in many respects from that of other countries, e.g. Hungary's. In this era, the discourse emphasizing revolutionary transformation and radical policy change decisively builds on the image of the enemy; and the fault-lines between past and present, old and new, and the idea of the need for continuous political struggle also prevail in both poetry and prose as eternal actualities.For the Transylvanian Hungarian community, the 1989 Regime Change was supposed to mean the end of nationalist dictatorship, of the infinitely intensified ideological/political terror, of the deliberate policy of ethnic homogenization, and the solution of minority issues as well as of internal and external conflicts. Nevertheless, after a few months of cloudless enthusiasm, in 1990, Transylvanian Hungarians had to face the rearrangement of previous power structures; they confronted national and ethnic conflicts, disguised assimilation, and economic vulnerability. This paper aims to present the ideological/political characteristics which determined Transylvanian Hungarian poetry during the Communist Dictatorship and after the 1989 Regime Change.

Contesting Militarized Violence in “Northeast India”

The northeastern states of India have been positioned as India’s postcolonial other in mainstream politics with the aim to create xenophobic binaries between insider and outsider groups. Comprising the eight “sister” states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, this region represents India’s amorphous shadowlands in arbitrary political markings between the mainland and the off-centered northeastern periphery. These satellite states have been subjected to the neocolonial governance of the Indian government and its implementation of political terror through abusive laws, militarized violence, protracted wars against civilians and insurgents alike, and gender abuse. Women poets from the region, such as Monalisa Changkija, Temsüla Ao, Mamang Dai, and others, have played a leading role in exposing and denouncing this violence. This essay examines the importance of women’s poetry as a gendered documentation of conflict, a peace narrative, a poet’s reading of history, and a site of memory. Can poetry express the particularized “sorrow of women” (Mamang Dai) without sentimentality and concession? How do these poetic contestations of conflict represent complex interrogations of identity, eco-devastation, and militarization to invalidate an elitist “poetry for poetry’s sake” ethic?

Ego-documents of the History of Political Terror in Kazakhstan

Interdisciplinary approaches have expanded the research space of the history of political repression of 1920–1950s. The surge of interest in documents of personal origin in the historiography of the post-Soviet space led to an appeal to ego-documents — personal letters from victims of political repression. The study is based on archival and investigative materials of the Special State Archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Introduction of narrative sources into the scholarship enables to hear the history of political repression “from inside”, “from below”, to feel the psychology of terror. Letters to the authorities touched upon a complex of problems related to the violation of socialist legality in the field, especially in the period of political repression. The main message of the letters sent to the first leaders of the Soviet state was the monstrosity of the accusation of Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, the ridiculous mistake made by Soviet justice. The purpose of the article is to reveal the cognitive potential of ego documents in articulating the history of political repression. Based on the theoretical concepts of a linguistic, narrative turn, the historical past of political repressions, represented by ego documents of victims of political terror is constructed. A discursive assessment of the letter suggests its interpretation as a reconstruction of the sociocultural memory of the tragic past that left a cultural trauma in the family frame of memory. Each letter has its own power of power, the inner ‘I’ voices the daily practices of political terror.

Political terror and the right-wing movement (The case of Vladimir Governorate)

The article examines the street confrontation of October 1905 which went down in history as Jewish pogroms. The source base of the work comprises the documents of the police department deposited in the State Archive of Vladimir Oblast and the materials from periodicals of various political leanings. After the publication of the Manifesto of the 17th of October, 1905, in the streets of Russian cities, the revolutionary demonstrations whose participants viewed the Manifesto as a signal for a decisive assault on the autocracy clashed with the patriotic manifestations held by those who wanted to defend their familiar world. The defiant behavior of opposition supporters who preached their political ideals and in doing so insulted national and religious feelings of the conservative strata of population provoked street excesses, which then turned into bloody clashes. The situation was aggravated by the inaction of the local authorities who had not received timely instructions from St Petersburg and showed confusion during the first “days of freedom.” Thus, the pogroms of October 1905 which took place outside the Pale of Settlement were directed not so much against the Jews as against the revolutionaries (a considerable part of them were Jews). Contrary to the idea prevailing in historiography that the clashes of October 1905 were organized, the pogroms arose spontaneously. Neither the government, which was prostrate, nor the right-wing parties, the numerical composition of which in Russia at that time was measured by several thousand people, initiated or organized those events. In October 1905, there were no monarchist organizations in Vladimir Governorate at all. However, the supporters of autocracy are responsible for two political murders which occurred after the pogroms in November–December 1905. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk the crowd infuriated with the events of recent months tore to pieces a revolutionary woman who was transporting weapons, and in the village of Undol workers killed an agitator who called for the overthrow of autocracy. After the foundation of monarchist organizations in Vladimir Governorate, street clashes between the opponents and the supporters of autocracy gradually died down because the monarchists got an opportunity to defend their political convictions in a more civilized form. Although the conflicts between persons of opposite political views continued for some time, they were more like domestic quarrels and had no victims. Both sides were equally responsible for those incidents.

“Unfortunately, Some Mistakes Were Made”

This paper explores competing narratives of the Stalinist and Soviet past in the Republic of Georgia through examination of two public history sites: the Stalin Museum in Gori and the exhibit of the Soviet Occupation at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. While the former remains a site of Stalin’s cult of personality, largely unaltered even during the “de-Stalinization” campaigns that unfolded in the decades following the dictator’s death in 1953, the latter fails to interrogate Stalin’s unambiguous role in the Bolsheviks’ 1921 invasion and political terror amidst its strong emphasis on the martyrs to the Soviet regime. Both museum sites, we argue, are invested in larger scale political and ideological contestations of Georgia’s past in relation to present concerns that anchor, on the one hand, on economic instability and, on the other, on political assertions of Georgian “Europeanness.” The sites raise important questions about the role museums play in the preservation of a contested past and in shaping divergent visions of national memory and identity.

Metaphor, Parody and Madness

Folie, the final part of Marie Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, Colère et Folie (1969), depicts Duvalierist political terror in a small town in Haiti and the futile attempts to resist it by René, the narrator, and his three friends. They are all poets, and René appears to be mad. Ronnie Scharfmann suggests that in this situation of extreme violence the boundaries between madness and sanity become impossible to demarcate, and that René and his friends, in their desperate stance against the Duvalier regime, are heroes. (‘Theorizing Terror: the Discourse of Violence in Marie Chauvet’s Amour Colère Folie’, 1996). Michael Dash, however, sees the text very differently, as parodying the figure of the poet as national hero and portraying René satirically as pathetic and delusional (in The Other America, 1998). But the issue of whether René is mad or not can only be fully explored by examining the language of his narrative in more detail than either Scharfmann or Dash provide. Is his florid, extravagant style meant to be a parody? Is his prolific use of metaphor really in fact metaphorical, or a literal account of his hallucinations? e.g., when he claims to be ‘riding the sun’, is this a self-consciously poetic metaphor or a hallucination? And if the latter, is it parodic? In this chapter I argue that Folie suggests that parody and metaphor are both in some sense incompatible with ‘mad’ discourse, and that therefore the gradual disappearance of these formal features from the text as it progresses provides a way – the only way, in fact – for the reader to chart René’s descent into madness.