Central Europe in Symbolic and Literary Geography

Central Europe, that can be legitimately defined as “epicentre of ethnic, linguistic, and political plurality”, has undergone real transformation not only in time and space, horizontally and vertically, but also in its structural core. The book Central Europe in symbolic and literary geography provides an analysis and specification of this phenomenon from the comparative point of view of intercultural and – notably – interliterary relationships. Currently, it is already very difficult, in fact impossible, to navigate through the multitude of journalistic and cultural texts that deal with this phenomenon from various perspectives. Regardless of the results of such debates, it is evident that literary-scientific, cultural-historical, and political conceptions do not generally cover the whole geographically defined territory of Central Europe. Central Europe, as cultural and geographic space or crossroad between the West and the East, was always characterised by a variable position of unstable centres and peripheries, with specific blending of ethnic groups, cultures, and religions. The territorial principle of mutual “touch” led to a more intensive way of communication and exchange of not only literary values, deeper understanding, but also collisions and conflicts between artistic traditions, poetics, norms, and conventions. The metonymic motivation of such communication, which derives rather from “neighbouring” contact than from genetic affinity of languages, may evoke not only an intercultural process resulting from the open horizon of receptive expectation but also an effort of postulating and codifying the myth of the literary oneness of diversified aggregates and systems – mostly under the influence of Western Europe and its Greek-Latin civilisation origin. The hegemonistic and universalistic character of this paradigm, based on the idea of “greater”, “evolved”, and “influencing” national literatures, strengthened the historiographic models of the last two centuries. Indeed, such models were focusing on “ethnocentric ideology” and suggested the myth of the Western-European literary oneness and its common basis, without taking into account the “diversity” of values of the so-called peripheral literatures and their different roots.

It is evident that the Central European literary space relativises or rather deconstructs the traditional category of national literature. This statement applies not only to the national revival of Central European peoples but also to the current turn of the century (from the 20th to the 21st century), when colonisation, global migration, and the origination of multi-ethnic post-colonial states (not only in Central Europe but also – for instance – in the Balkan region and in the Asian continent) destabilised this category derived from language and geographical location. Language-determined national literature represents a relatively closed ensemble connecting literatures of various peoples under a common denominator. Nevertheless, in the other case, national literature gets shaped as a multi-linguistic and multicultural conglomeration; in other words, it constitutes a sort of “small-scale world literature”. In both cases – well identifiable in the Central European literary area – the above-mentioned feature of literature marks not only the monolingualism but also the bilateralism and the dual homeland condition of Central European writers, notably in the multi-ethnic Habsburg monarchy. In the Central European context, the “closeness” or “similarity” of culture is given not only by ethnic-linguistic aspects but – above all – by administrative-geographical elements. Here, single literatures “share borders” and are in touch with each other in terms of communication. From a semiotic point of view, their mutual awareness is metonymically determined on the basis of their own interest – which may also be discontinuous. The Slovak literary theoretician Dionýz Ďurišin subdivides the cultural areas participating in the interliterary process in (i) interliterary communities and (ii) interliterary centrisms. Within the communities, interliterary communication is metaphorically motivated, whereas in the case of centrisms – as we’ve already mentioned – the metonymic aspect comes to the fore. Such subdivision of larger interliterary processes (interliterary communities and interliterary centrisms) is – at the same time – a differentiation between metaphorical intraculturalness and metonymic intraculturalness. In practical terms, this difference gives way to two area models that are opposite of each other and complement one another: the first area comes from the interliterary communities and is identified with mono-cultural unity; the second area is based on the centrism theory and exploits the receptive aspect in order to postulate an area to be interpreted as a fictive polycentric field which preserves individuality of single parts. In the case of Central Europe, the single areas showed their “nationality” and – at the same time – they logically followed the path of their multinational “Central Europeanship” by forming a regional identity which crosses the borders of single homelands or concrete states. From this point of view, Central Europe shows a conflict between two conceptions of Europe: Europe of national homelands and a Europe of regions, where we should study and compare the literary production of geographic regions, which are also considered as literary or cultural areas and which are not assessed according to their linguistic-ethnic barriers and political borders of single states.