School Transnationalism? on References to Familiar Authors in World Literary History East(-Central) European Literature As Presented by Johannes Scherr
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Chapter 7 Old- School Transnationalism? On References to Familiar Authors in World Literary History East(- Central) European Literature as Presented by Johannes Scherr Michel De Dobbeleer East(- Central) European Literature and Transnationalism Now Not without reason, scholars of East(- Central) European Literature boast the availability, in their field, of a well-thought- out transnational literary histo- ry: the icla’s History of the Literary Cultures of East- Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2004– 2010), by editors Marcel Cornis- Pope, a Romanian working in the US (since 1983), and the late John Neubauer (1933– 2015), a US citizen born in Hungary who resided most of his career in the Netherlands (University of Amsterdam). Clearly knowing what it is to cross national borders, the editors came up with four majestic volumes which were indeed refreshingly transnational. Just like ‘Central’ and ‘Eastern’ Europe, ‘East- Central’ Europe is a region very hard to define, being home to plenty of so- called minor or peripheral liter- atures, of which Polish literature may be considered the biggest (esp., when measured by number of Nobel Prizes in Literatures).1 For the editors, the region is a liminal and transitional space between the powers in the west and the east, a long but relatively narrow strip stretching from the Baltic countries in the north to Macedonia in the south. To the west it is clearly bounded by the hegemonic German cultures of Germany and Austria; to the east it is hemmed in by Russia’s political and cultural sphere, but the border is, admittedly, less distinct, for the Ukraine, Belar- us, and Moldavia, were both part of Russia’s hegemonic power and sup- pressed by it. (Cornis- Pope & Neubauer 6) 1 Four, five or even six: Henryk Sienkiewicz (1903), Władysław Reymont (1924), Czesław Miłosz (1980) and Wisława Szymborska (1996) were unquestionably Polish. Often also the Polish- born Jewish- American author in Yiddish Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) is considered to be a Polish Nobel prize winner, while some Poles also want to include the Gdańsk- born, and self- declared Kashubian Günter Grass (1999). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_009 Old-School Transnationalism? 105 The nearly 2400 pages of the History offer various thematic, generic, institu- tional and other approaches (“nodes,” 16–18) to present and discuss the mu- tual dependence and overlapping of these often less- known literatures. The work’s innovative ‘transnational attitude’ thus unsurprisingly lies in the fact that many chapters surpass the national approach of the communist and ear- lier times. Admittedly, the majority of the individual contributions remain primarily national in scope, but their grouping together in (mostly thematic) book parts, provided with ‘transnational introductions’, allows the reader to put them in a transnational―or at least supranational―perspective. (Academic) study of the literatures of the region has been dominated for over a century by Slav(on)ic Studies departments, but in recent decades some of these changed their name, usually replacing “Slav(on)ic”2 with something like “East European.” By far the majority of languages in East- Central Europe are Slavonic, but the History convincingly shows that the (developments of the) ‘transnational’ similarities within East- Central European literary culture have little or nothing to do with language families (cf. infra). The two most prominent non- Slavonic literatures in the region, Hungarian and Roma- nian―coincidentally or not corresponding with the roots of the editors―are well- represented in the History, but the same goes for most other non- Slavonic East- Central European literatures.3 Looking at the tables of contents and skim- ming through the many pages, one gets the impression that the transnational (‘transregional’/ ‘transsubcontinental’)4 impact from the East, i.e., mainly from Russia(n literature), might have been less taken into account than that from the West. Reasons for this should be looked for in the partially political scope of the History. Already on the first page of the ‘General introduction’ (1–18), we read: In East- Central Europe, a region poised at the crossroads of its history, not only literature, but the political culture itself will benefit from a rethinking 2 In what follows, I use the British variant ‘Slavonic’ (‘Slavic’ is used in the US, while ‘Slav’ nor- mally refers to the Slavs as a people, outside linguistic/ literary contexts). 3 Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Albanian are ‘smaller’ literatures than Hungarian and Ro- manian. Literature in German and Yiddish used to be rich in East- Central Europe (or Mit- teleuropa, see Cornis- Pope & Neubauer 2– 4, 13, on why they did not want to use this term in their book title), but (just like Romani) there are currently no countries in the region in which these languages and their corresponding peoples are titular. (Probably, therefore, these literatures should―in my view―be considered more transnational than those which are also ‘national’.) 4 Russia is now and then considered a subcontinent, East- Central Europe, however, (to my knowledge) never (geographically at least, there is indeed no reason to do this)..