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A Bakhtinian Poetics of Subversion: The Magical Realist Fiction of the 1980s in East-Central Europe

This article demonstrates how the specific forms of magical realism in East-Central European literature during the 1980s are an integral part of the larger subversive poetics of the final decades of Communist totalitarianism. It relies on Bakhtin's invaluable conception of the polyphonic novel and the carnivalesque. The article focuses on the works of Czech writer Milan Kundera and a number of Romanian novels that metaphorically dramatize the subtle relation between cultural representation and ideological control. This study highlights an aspect seldom remarked on by scholars of East-Central European literature: namely, that "indirect" or "allegorical" literary fictions often constituted the only available form of oppositional discourse in highly Stalinized Communist regimes.