Forum Scientiarum

The studies collected in the following volume can be seen as archaeological projects, as the objects of their investigation — spatial narratives from Ukraine and Poland — reflect the main geopolitical changes and their consequences for local communities.. All the articles in this special issue question the narratives that have shaped the cultural memory of the inhabitants of Poland and Ukraine. The authors have highlighted the role of literature and popular culture in providing alternative visions of the past and the present. The greatest common advantage of their methodological background is their rejection of generalizing and universalizing geopoetics. In turn, they go beyond the meta-narratives that have consolidated in cultural research and are commonly practised in the context of Central Europe, raising fresh questions within the scope of ruinology, research on nostalgia and resentment

In 1984 Czech writer Milan Kundera published his essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” in the New York Review of Books, which established the framework for disputes about the space “between East and West” for the following thirty years. Even today, the echo of those debates is still audible in spatial narratives. Discussing the way in which literary figures are positioned within new hierarchies such as gender, class, or ethnicity, this volume shows how the space of the imagined Central Europe has been de- and reconstructed. Special attention is paid to the role of the past in shaping contemporary spatial discourse.

The year 1968 tends to be seen as a crucial turning point in postwar history, and, for a matter of convenience or for more substantial reasons, researchers either start or end narratives around 1968, as the year was just in the middle of the Cold War and symbolic enough to make it a marker that separates before from after. With the arrival of the 68ers, the old world in which the historical consciousness of modernity shaped epistemic communities ceased to exist, and had been renewed by means of revolving old social structures from the bottom. It is true that “without 1968” we would not see a detour from Soviet-style Marxism, the developments of various dissent movements and underground activities in East Central Europe, the strong awareness of the other parts of the world (South Asia, Latin America included), and the rise of radical fundamentalism collided with terrorism. Its ephemera leaves a lot of questions and mythical arguments (the singular sujet of the “68ers”, for instance) to this day. Did it really change the world? To whom does it matter to discuss 1968 today?

Why does 1968 matter today? The authors of this volume believe that it is a crucial point of reference for the current developments, especially the ‘illiberal turn’ both in Europe and America. If we want to understand it, we need to look back into 1968 – the year that founded the cultural and political order of today’s world.