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

About the author

Beata Kozieł

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bielsko-Biała, Poland

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9950-5426

Beata Kozieł was born in Karviná in the Czech Republic. She graduated from the University of Ostrava, where she studied Polish, Czech and Spanish Philology and Global History. During her research work, she carried out six-month internships in Spain (Málaga), Germany (Passau), Poland (Wrocław and Katowice) and conducted dialectological research in Russian Siberia. Her academic background combines Bohemian studies, with a focus on linguistic and literary phenomena, and foreign language pedagogy, particularly in Spanish, Czech and Polish. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree with a dissertation that compares Polish, Slovak, and Czech literatures, with a special emphasis on the literary representation of totalitarian societies. She professionally works as a court interpreter of Polish language.

How to cite

KOZIEŁ, Beata. The Totalitarian Society as a Literary Image: A Comparative Perspective. Global Insights & Research Network [online]. 2025, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 113–122. ISSN 3029-8318. Available from: https://girn.uk/1-2025/totalitarian-society-literary-image/

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Licence and copyright

Copyright © 2025 Beata Kozieł. This article is open access, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

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