Modern and contemporary Eastern European literature from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania

We’ll begin with Forest of the Hanged, by Liviu Rebreanu, who has been called the creator of the modern Romanian novel. Rebreanu is a realist or naturalist of the rural world in the mould of Hardy or Zola: In sharp contrast, and to show how far Romanian literature has travelled, the course will end by looking at recent novels by Mircea Cartarescu, whose Blinding brings an encyclopaedic and hallucinatory intensity to the history of modern Bucharest, and Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi, an exquisite, paired-down but psychologically devastating account of her own experiences as part of a family of travelling circus artists.

We’ll devote one week each to the master Czech satirists Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal. Kundera’s The Joke, perhaps his most sustained and penetrating critique of the deadening effects of ideological oppression, comes closest of all the chosen works to an exact transcript of what it meant to be Eastern European in the decades of Soviet rule. Hrabal’s I Served the King of England is a typically joyful, picaresque account of how one man can adapt to and profit from the same degrading circumstances. Polish Nobel Prize winner Wyslawa Szymborska has been called "the Mozart of poetry". We’ll read a wide selection of her dancing, affirmatory poems of the everyday and of the understated from “Map: Collected and Last Poems”. Satire, in her hands, is resolutely celebratory and non-doctrinaire whereas Kundera’s withering irony can alienate his readers (especially women): we’ll consider this in relation to his later works written in France, especially The Festival of Insignificance. Finally, we’ll enter the absurd and paradoxical world of the great Polish émigré novelist, playwright and man of letters Witold Gombrowicz, whose Cosmos is a masterpiece of deadpan humour and existential terror. Gombrowicz, the “imp of the perverse”, fought against his Polish and Eastern European heritage all his life.