Central European Literary Escapes from History

• Department of History

PhD thesis defence by Alexandra Tobiasz on an interdisciplinary research project conducted at the crossroads of literary studies, history, and anthropology.

Inspired by contemporary methodology exploring the category of experience in this comparative study I aim to give new insights into the writers’ narrative self-identifications, diaristic practices, and their common background of a Central European community of historical fate. I attempt to replace geopolitical conceptualisations of Central Europe in terms of regional identity with a geopoetic map of this area focusing on self-identifications of writers and their sensual experiences of this space. Whereas geopolitical Central Europe has been a laboratory of ideologies nourished by modernist dialectical tradition, the question arises whether geopoetic Central European condition can be articulated in particular life writing and problematised in a diaristic laboratory of self. The dissertation’s overarching theme regards the three writers’ attitudes to the History of the twentieth century, its accelerated pace as well as the changeable space of Central Europe and exilic temporary places of stay. I argue that to the post-war historical circumstances enclosed within ideologized dialectical thought and thus reverberating with the absurd overtone, Bartol, Gombrowicz and Márai responded with a hermeneutic laboratory of self, explored in diary and exile. They embarked on an exilic odyssey and diaristic writing which allowed them not only to maintain a certain distance from History (with a specific exception for Bartol) but also to reconfigure their experience of time and in the end also self-identifications. 

I analyse the main sources in an anthropological way regarding the diaries in terms of practice, existentially crucial for their authors in the process of redefining their selves in the face of rapidly shifting spatiotemporal contexts. A diaristic reconfiguration to the order of time puts the kairotic dimension of time to the foreground, which undermines for a while its chronological, impersonal side. 

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