Browsing by Author "Temonen, Kati"

The Cold War research has recently experienced a change from the traditional perspective of confrontation and conflict to the interdisciplinary and dynamic study of its spaces, places and identities. The so-called spatial turn acts as a starting point of this Master’s Thesis. It investigates the perspectives of Milan Kundera and Václav Havel regarding their space and spatial relations with their eastern and western 'others'. Mental mappings of the Cold War space and places take priority over geopolitical concreteness with a strict focus on borders. The objective of this research is to analyse the concepts of victimhood and fate in relation to the demarcations in European space as narrated by the two Czechoslovakian dissidents. The source material comprises a variety of primary sources by Kundera and Havel published between 1968 and 1989. It includes a combination of novels, essays, plays, speeches and interviews, which reflect the four key themes of this research: the historiographical debates on Eastern and Central Europes, and the interwoven concepts of victimhood and fate. The primary material is supported with centrally relevant secondary literature such as book reviews and biographies. The methods are based on the historiographical debates as well as a theoretical framework combining both post-colonial and post-structural traditions. Instead of being a full-scale literature analysis, this thesis seeks to analyse the authors’ modes of perceiving and describing the hierarchies in the Eastern European space in the four different but interrelated categories, which follow the key themes of this research. This study shows that Milan Kundera approached the East with a great antipathy and an orientalist tone, whereas Václav Havel merely positioned himself against the totalitarian ideology, which forced him to live in a lie. Central Europe provided Kundera a way of escaping from the Eastern stigma, but he did not construe it as a unified political space. Instead, he sought to revive its culture and identity, which were on the verge of being forgotten. Václav Havel, on the contrary, did not regard Central Europe as a necessary or even a realistic concept. Both authors underlined their victimhood by the Eastern oppression as well as by the Western indifference; nevertheless, Havel regarded the Czechoslovaks simultaneously as victims and perpetrators. Kundera highlighted the ancient fate of the Czech nation, which Havel opposed by stressing the courage to face the difficult issues of the present rather than persistently reminiscing the fateful events of the past. Results of this research demonstrate that the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia was by no means a homogeneous one and disharmony existed despite shared ideological backgrounds. Kundera lived freely in exile and idealised his relationship both to his old homeland and to the West. Havel contemplated his relations to the others more realistically, which to a large extent was caused by the self-censorship under the communist system.