Literature and Film from East Europe's Forgotten “Second World”: Essays of Invitation

Gordana P. Crnković's Literature and Film from East Europe's Forgotten "Second World": Essays of Invitation is a delightful journey through more than twenty canonical works of literature and film in the second half of the twentieth century. While this wide-ranging collection of essays excels as a textbook for university courses, it is also an enjoyable read for non-academic audiences.Crnković begins by carving a space for East Europe. She explains in her introduction, "On Invitations and Discoveries," that her childhood in Yugoslavia had not fostered for her a connection to East Europe, yet such a connection ultimately became essential to her work. For more than two decades, she has taught comparative East European literature and film at University of Washington, Seattle. Her writing is imbued with the diverse perspectives of her students and her joy in teaching them. One has the sense that she is convincing the reader to pay attention to something that the reader might not have the time or energy to see, and in doing so, she is appreciating it even more herself.The rest of Literature and Film from East Europe's Forgotten "Second World": Essays of Invitation is divided into two parts. Part I, "Invitations," consists of essays on individual texts ranging from four to nine pages in length. There are short stories, novels, and films from Poland, Yugoslavia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Estonia. The essays are arranged chronologically beginning with writer Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" from 1948 and ending with director Lucian Pintilie's The Oak from 1992. Crnković covers, then, the entire period of the Soviet Union without covering Russia, hence the titular "second world." (Proving that it is not as forgotten as it may seem, all the chosen texts are well-known outside of East Europe and available in English translation.) Each of the fifteen short essays that comprise Part I is lively and engaging.In Part II, "Probing Deeper," Crnković delves deeper into the works of three filmmakers (Roman Polanski, Krešo Golik, and Milcho Manchevski) and one poet (Tõnu Õnnepalu). Unlike the vignette-ish essays of Part I, each of these chapters could stand alone as a work of traditional scholarship. She employs the tools of comparative literature, from seminal works of literary theory to formal film criticism to analyze the texts shot by shot and line by line. In the final chapter, "On Reading Literature: Turning the Tables, The Writers on Critics," Crnković examines the literary criticism written by East European writers. While this closing chapter seems a bit out of place, it is a unique and interesting way to end the book. In lieu of a formal conclusion, she offers extensive endnotes and a bibliography.Over and over while reading this book, I found myself longing to go back in time so that I could be a student again, to see these films and read this literature for the first time, to feel the exhilaration of discovery. Crnković is a wonderful writer. She selects films and books that are attractive to university students and uses these texts to pose questions that are relevant to them. Her book is a present to students who are trying to make sense of a changed and changing world. It is indispensable to anyone teaching these texts for the first time.Whether she is analyzing a short story, novel, poem, or film, a text's formal elements are central to her examinations. She deftly ties these formal elements to themes that run through her book. For example, the first essay in the collection, "The Flight of Form: 'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,'" examines the seminal Holocaust story. Crnković plunges the reader immediately into this deepest of waters. The reader is asked to come to terms with the fact that the Holocaust defined the decades to follow and yet itself evades definition. Crnković writes that Borowski's stories are "a precious chest of live and life-giving forms that can shape and aid our ongoing entanglement with the 'inexplicable that happens'" (p. 14). When she returns to the Holocaust in her last section, it is in an essay on the films of Roman Polanski, "The Victim's Double Vision and the Long Road to The Pianist." Where her first essay describes Borowski's suicide, this one describes Polanski's portrait of survival.While Crnković's attention to form is commendable and appropriate, her attention to sensibilities is what makes the book extraordinary. She is at her best when writing of the ways that love shapes characters' actions and worldviews. She writes, for example, of István Szabó's Lovefilm, "What becomes of such a present that bursts with true fulfillment and has the strongest, indelible past but no future?" (p. 41). Writing of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, she describes characters "trying to find and assert their own truths" (p. 50) in a changing political landscape. She covers a hefty amount of historical material and gives detailed analyses of more than twenty artistic works. It is her voice, however, that renders the book incredibly special. She exudes warmth and wisdom on every page.Some readers may wonder about her choice not to stray from the canon. The essays focus only on major figures, such as Bohumil Hrabal, Andrzej Wajda, Danilo Kiš, and Krzysztof Kieślowski, who are already well-known. Of the female artists of this period, only Věra Chytilová and Magda Szabó are featured. The choice to examine only widely available, translated texts is understandable. However, a book of this stature could have paved the way for the discovery of at least a couple of lesser-known writers and experimental filmmakers. To wish that it had is also understandable, although I hope that this limitation will not dissuade potential readers. Literature and Film from East Europe's Forgotten "Second World": Essays of Invitation is an exceptional achievement that I expect will be of great benefit to anyone interested in literature, film, history, and East European studies for years to come.