Abstract
This article explores the literary representation of totalitarian societies in selected works of Czech, Slovak, and Polish prose fiction written after 1918. Focusing on the cultural and ideological legacies of authoritarian regimes in Central Europe, the study proposes a comparative framework that accounts for historical, linguistic, and aesthetic specificities. It argues that literary texts not only document repression and control, but also reflect divergent strategies of adaptation, resistance, and memory-making. Drawing on approaches from hermeneutics, historical poetics, and narratology, the analysis moves beyond national canons to include marginal, minority, and exilic literatures. A three-level model – contextual, textual, and interpretive – is proposed to examine how totalitarian experience is articulated through narrative form, character construction, and language. The article contends that totalitarian society, as rendered in literature, is not only a political structure but a cultural trauma, shaping both authorial voice and reader reception across generations.
Keywords
- totalitarianism
- Central European literature
- Czech prose
- Slovak prose
- Polish literature
- comparative literature
- narrative strategy
- cultural memory
- resistance
- literary canon
- minority writing