Introduction: Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, Western Europe and North America have been living through a “memory boom.” It is an open question whether this boom—or is it a bubble?—has spread to other parts of the globe. This volume focuses on cultural memory in Eastern Europe and its adjacent subcontinent, Northern Eurasia. To define this space, however, is notoriously difficult. In the obsolete terms of the Cold War and postcolonial emancipatory movement, this was the core of what was called the Second World, which marked its difference from both the rich First World and the developing Third World. Such a vision incorporates the former socialist states, from what used to be Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany all the way to Siberia (with its rich and much-ignored memory of the Gulag) and the eastern edge of the former Soviet Union. Yet the very act of stretching some kind of cultural entity from Prague to Vladivostok causes dissonance for many. The Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of the famous maxim “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” wrote vociferous attacks on the “kidnapping” of part of Europe that really belonged to the West by a culture that belonged firmly in the Asiatic East.