Literature in the “Other” Europe Before and After the Transition: The Work of Blaga Dimitrova and Milan Kundera

This article analyzes the relations between literature and the language of authority in Central and Eastern Europe both under communism and during the transition. The study associates the Bulgarian writer Blaga Dimitrova and the Czech Milan Kundera. It focuses on two novels they wrote at the same time, the former in Eastern Europe, in Sofia, the latter in Central Europe, in Prague. These are Litze [Face] Dimitrova composed in 1977 only to see it forbidden by the regime, then censored, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera published in exile in 1979. During the communist era, art is subject to the fluctuations of power. Fiction complies with the only authorized aesthetic norm: that of socialist realism. The slightest digression from it is considered as a provocation and censored. However, the thaw of the 1970s brings a relative freedom in society and art. The ideological vocabulary that supports the totalitarian world becomes the target of the authors' irony. Dimitrova and Kundera outwit the peremptory assertions of the regime by thwarting them in a systematic mockery. Both narratives reformulate the collective memory of the pre-1989 era. They restore the remembrance of people and events erased by the official historiography. However, communism with the social practices and mentality it imposed, is not the only target of the writers' criticism. Dimitrova and Kundera witness not only the new freedom brought by liberal democracy, but also new kinds of censorship. Both writers continue to express their dissent from any ideology.