Istoria trăită – o biografie ideatică. Rău și violență în Europa Centrală
History as Biography. Evil and Violence in Central Europe

Summary/Abstract: In our research we are concerned with “residuals” in post-war Central European literature. One of their fundamental forms is violence. This can make one wonder if there is a connection between the violence in the novels and the one produced by the social-political milieu. In this sense, residual violence would be the artistic answer to a violent context. The causal relation between history and artistic violence is often accepted as valid without being even verified. Because such an assumption cannot be taken for granted, this article aims to verify its validity in the historical and cultural context we are interested in. Our starting point is that, in order to consider this causal relation as true, we must explain the environment in which the novelists wrote their books. Without taking a biographical interest, we focus on the ideas that were representative in those times. This way we identify the ideological atmosphere in which the novels were written. Instead of just accepting the common position about the Iron Curtain, we try to determine what an inner and authentic position looks like. Basically, we consider that if we can access the way they internalized their history, we can determine what its echo was in literature. We do this by exploring how communism and its violence were perceived in essays written by the most representative dissenters in Central Europe.

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