Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe: Literature, History and Memory

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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 Bla Tarr, Andrzej Wajda and Wladyslaw Pasikowski.

Reviews

[A] fascinating and productive read, tacking back and forth among the fields of Ecocriticism, Soviet Environmental History, and the History of Memory ... Environmental Cultures will reward a wide variety of readers with interests in environmental history, literary criticism, and environmental policy. * The Russian Review *
This book shows dazzling evidence of Anna Barczs ability to integrate concepts and ideas from so many disciplines. And especially in the final chapters on Chernobyl and memory studies, we find some profoundly elegiac writing. This is a hugely ambitious book based on really delicate and persuasive readings of texts (including film) combined with (dis-)passionate writing controlled but deeply engaged. * John Morrill, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Cambridge and former Vice President for Public Engagement and Understanding at the British Academy) *

Author Bio

Anna Barcz holds a PhD in literary studies from the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw where she currently works as an Assistant Professor; she was the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub (Trinity College Dublin) in 2018-2019, and Rachel Carson Centre Fellow (LMU, Munich) in 2019-2020. She is the author of books: Ecorealism: From Ecocriticism to Zoocriticism in Polish Literature (in Polish, 2016), and Animal Narratives and Culture: Vulnerable Realism (2017).