Communism and Nostalgia. Longing for Communismin Texts of Publicists from Central-Eastern Europe and Balkans

Abstract

The main objective of the article is to summarize the vision of nostalgia presented in the texts of the essay collection “Nostalgia — Essays on the Logging for Communism”. The authors of these texts are Ales Debelyak (Slovenia), Dubravk Ugresic (Croatia), Fatos Lubonya (Albania), Joachim Trenkner (Germany), Yuri Andrukhovich (Ukraine), Marius Ivashkevichyus (Lithuania), Martina Shimek (Slovakia), Pavel Smolensky (Poland), Vaclav Jacques (Czech Republic), Petr Sauter (Estonia), Svetlana Boim (Russia), and others. Using content analysis, induction and deduction we found common (regional) and differing (national, personal/author`s) features of nostalgia. We showed emphasis in the narration of the authors and concluded that they describe nostalgia on a semiotic level. To define nostalgia essayists analyze nostalgia structure associated with it, material data carriers in architecture, objects of the material world and non-material data carriers — music, movie quotes, and atmosphere. We regarded using of mentioned approach as analysis of the nostalgia “language” and its manifestations. We concluded that analysis of the regional level shows the variety of manifestations of nostalgia and reactions to it — pursuing a policy of decommunization, using nostalgia for capitalist purposes (Grūtas Park in Lithuania), exploitation nostalgia for political purposes (using ideas of Great Hungary or the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). The facts of discussing nostalgia and discussing reactions to nostalgia we characterized as a discussion for the sake of discussion. We came to this conclusion based on the statement that for the person nostalgia is one of the elements of self-identification because the answer to the question “Who am I?” happens by answering the questions “How did I become this whom I am now?”, “Who was I at past?”. We used this construct to argue that the policy of mashing memory is associated with a break in the continuity necessary for self-identification.

Keywords

• nostalgia
• communism
• essay
• identity
• self-identification
• decommunization