Our Common Home: Eastern Europe / Central Europe / Post-Communist Europe as Signifiers of Cultural-Political Geographies and Identities

Kirilka Stavreva; Boika Sokolova; Natália Pikli; Jana Wild

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.28.02

Authors

Kirilka Stavreva Cornell College, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1960-1223
Boika Sokolova University of Notre Dame (USA) in England
Natália Pikli ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University), Hungary
Jana Wild VSMU (Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava), Slovakia https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1570-6924

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.28.02

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Keywords:

Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Post-Soviet Europe, East-Central Europe, transnational Shakespeare, intra-European stereotypes, nationalism

Abstract

The article discusses the historical mutability and political connotations of the geographical signifiers Eastern and Central Europe, and the chronotope Post-Soviet / Post-Communist Europe. It considers the tensions present in these denominations, arguing for the need to defamiliarize and re-define them. Three major sections survey the circumstances that shaped the referential and connotative values of the terms from the Enlightenment to the era of European integration. The article notes commonalities in the defining experiences of the countries in the east of Europe: their emergence from the ruins of former empires (Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman) and of the Soviet bloc. It considers whether the spatial terms have been developed from within or imposed from the outside, and discusses how they have perpetuated stereotypes of the region under consideration and its people(s) and generated enduring cultural myths. It concludes by proposing terms that recoup the cultural significance of the region—East-Central Europe, its close correlative East-Centre Europe, the neologism Europeast—and by alerting scholars working on transnational Shakespeare adaptations to the importance of recontextualizing research in individual national traditions as part of a larger investigation of the mutual translatability of shared experiences.

The publication of the article was supported by the International Visegrad Fund, project no. 22210007, titled “Crossing Borders with Shakespeare since 1945: Central and Eastern European Roots and Routes.” The project is co-financed by the Governments of the Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants. The mission of the Fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

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Author Biographies

Kirilka Stavreva, Cornell College, USA

is professor and chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, USA, where she co-founded the Foxden Press, a letterpress printing operation using a historic iron hand press. With Boika Sokolova, she has co-authored the second edition of The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare in Performance, Manchester University Press, 2023) and the essay cluster Operation Shakespeare in Post-Communist Bulgaria (Toronto Slavic Quarterly, 2017). Stavreva is author of Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) and contributing editor of two e-book series on British Literature for the Gale Researcher platform (Cengage, 2017) as well as of the essay cluster Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy (Pedagogy, 2013). Her scholarship on European Shakespeare and performance has appeared in numerous journals and essay collections.

Boika Sokolova, University of Notre Dame (USA) in England

teaches at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in England. She has published extensively on European Shakespeare and performance. With Kirilka Stavreva, she has co-authored the second edition of The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare in Performance, Manchester University Press, 2023) and the essay cluster Operation Shakespeare in Post-Communist Bulgaria (Toronto Slavic Quarterly, 2017). She has co-authored, with Alexander Shurbanov, Painting Shakespeare Red, An East-European Perspective (University of Delaware Press, 2001). She is the author of Shakespeare’s Romances as Interrogative Texts (Edwin Mellen Press, 1992) and The Merchant of Venice (Humanities EBooks, 2008). With Janice Valls-Russell she has co-edited Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-century European Performance, The Merchant of Venice and Othello (Arden, 2022); with Nicoleta Cinpoes, a cluster of articles on the Tempest (Shakespeare Bulletin Vol. 29, No. 3, 2011); with Evgenia Pancheva, Renaissance Refractions, Essays in Honour of Alexander Shurbanov (Sofia University Press, 2001), and with Michael Hattaway and Derek Roper, Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield Academic Press, 1994). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and essay collections.

Natália Pikli, ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University), Hungary

is associate professor at the Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She teaches medieval and early modern culture and literature and is Head of the relevant Doctoral Program. She also teaches contemporary popular culture, as well as theatre history and theatre reviewing for students majoring in Theatre Studies. She published extensively on Shakespeare, early modern popular culture, theatre, iconography, and on the reception of Shakespeare in our days, with a focus on contemporary theatre. Her articles came out, for instance, in Shakespearean Criticism (USA), European Journal of English Studies, Journal of Early Modern Studies (Florence), Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge), Theatralia (Brno). She (co-)edited five books and is the author of two monographs, The Prism of Laughter: Shakespeare’s ‘very tragical mirth’ (VDM Verlag, 2009) and Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture (Routledge, 2021). In her free time, she directs amateur student performances and writes theatre reviews.

Jana Wild, VSMU (Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava), Slovakia

is professor of Theatre Studies at the Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava, and head of board of the Ph.D. program for theatre, film and music studies. She teaches English and German theatre, methodology and critical writing. She writes on Slovak theatre and translates literature from German (F. von Schirach, E. Jelinek, C. Balme, R. Schimmelpfennig, C. Hein). Her research focus is on Shakespeare. She authored several monographies in Slovak (Westward Hoe: Geographies of Slovak Skakespeares, 2022; Shakespere. Zooming, 2017; An Enchanted Island: The Tempest Otherwise, 2003; Hamlet: the Adventure of a Text; 1999, et al.), edited international collections, including those in English (In double trust, 2014; Shakespeare in Between, 2018), and published essays internationally. For the conference Shakespeare in Changing Cultural Paradigms, 2018 in Bratislava, she brought together academics from post-Communist countries and launched the initiative to work together on Shakespeare (Visegrád projects, CEESRA).

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