Central European literary escapes from history : Vladimir Bartol, Witold Gombrowicz, Sándor Márai

Abstract

The dissertation titled “Central European Literary ‘Escapes’ from History (Vladimir Bartol, Witold Gombrowicz, Sándor Márai)” is an outcome of the interdisciplinary research project conducted at the crossroads of literary studies, history, and anthropology. Inspired by contemporary methodology exploring the category of experience, the author aims to provide new insights into the writers’ narrative self-identifications, diaristic practices, and their common background of a Central European community of historical fate. This comparative study attempts 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 geopoetic Central European condition can be articulated in life writing and particularly in a diary. 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 spatial coordinates of Central Europe and temporary places of stay in exile. The author argues that to the post-war historical circumstances enclosed within the ideologised 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 diaristicwriting 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. The main sources are analysed using the anthropological approach which regards 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. The diaristic reconfiguration of time puts the kairotic dimension of temporality to the foreground which consequently undermines for a while its chronological, impersonal side.