War Narratives, Literature and Reality

What can literature actually achieve? Admittedly, it inspires us with its stories and fills our free afternoons and vacation days with its words. It provides little thrills, evokes human and, more recently, animal and plant feelings, and makes its readers cry, laugh and think. Literature ensures stimulating conversations at the table, in the media and in seminar rooms.

The Cassandra team1 attributes another function to literature. Literature can indicate future developments because it can be seen as a source of practical data and information about reality. With this statement, the project would like to advocate for a committed literary studies. The project team shares the opinion that “literary texts (1) refer to key themes and emotions (feelings of threat, freedom / nationalist / separatist feelings) earlier and in a more sophisticated way than other media and (2) influences perceptions and thus the behavior of conflict parties and so on can be actively involved in the (violent) dynamics of a crisis/conflict.”2 In this way, literary texts can be made useful for political and social practice. Through their aesthetic perspective, they are able to maintain a certain distance from the discourses of knowledge, that is, from what is created through language and social practices in different contexts. Crises, wars, trauma, fears and strangeness are phenomena that are discussed in literary texts and played out through characters. 3 Literature deals with these key themes in a more nuanced way than other media by linking these experiences to concrete characters who act in a fictional context.4 Literature is the only medium that, in the best case, tells stories about people without bias and presents them as they really appear in the internal experience of the protagonists. It often tells the “prehistory” of “history” even before there were concrete terms for it, e.g. how Heinrich Mann with his “subject” warned in 1914 of a development that became reality with National Socialism.5

Vladimir Sorokin Vladimir Sorokin Vladimir Sorokin was born in Bykovo near Moscow in 1955 and is one of the main representatives of Russian postmodernism. After completing his engineering studies at the Gubkin University of Petroleum and Gas in Moscow in 1977, he worked as a graphic artist, book illustrator, painter and conceptual artist, designing more than 50 books. Vladimir Sorokin lives in Moscow and Berlin. He is considered Russia's most important contemporary writer and playwright and a sharp critic of Russia's political elites. His most important novels include __The Serpent 1983, The Obelisk 1992, Bro 2004, Days of the Oprichnik 2006, The Blizzard 2010, Manaraga. Diary of a Master Chef 2018. ― alongside [Ib title=Viktor Pelevin]Viktor Olegowitsch Pelevin was born in Moscow in 1962. He studied electrical engineering and later literature. His first story was published in 1989 and he has been working as a freelance author since 1990. Initially, several of his stories were published in various magazines, and now five novels and around fifty short stories have been published. He is considered one of the most important Russian writers and has long enjoyed cult status, especially among young readers. The New Yorker included him in its list of the “best European storytellers under 35”. He lives in Moscow. In 2001 he received the Richard Schönfeld Prize for literary satire (Richard-Schönfeld-Preis für literarische Satire) from the Hamburg Cultural Foundation.[/IB] and Viktor Yerofeyev Viktor Yerofeyev Viktor Yerofeev was born in Moscow in 1947 into a family of diplomats. He became known for his novel “Russian Beauty” (1989), which has now been translated into 27 languages. Yerofeyev writes regularly for magazines such as the New York Times Book Review; He is also the editor of the first Russian edition of Nabokov. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, he fled to Germany with his family. Important works: Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul 1999, The Good Stalin 2004, Russische Apokalypse 2009, Die Akimuden: Ein nichtmenschlicher Roman 2012, Der große Gopnik 2023. ― is considered one of Russia's most famous and respected contemporary writers. In his work “The Sugar Kremlin”13 (2010) he addresses the effect of “sugar-sweet” words. In “The Sugar Kremlin,” Sorokin describes how sweet words and Kremlin figures can be used to spread lies and inconsistencies and distract people from grievances. Vladimir Sorokin's works contain numerous depictions of violence, including rape, cannibalism, mutilation and flogging. Homosexual group sex is also described. These depictions are often carried out as parody, exaggeration or dystopia dystopia Unlike utopia, dystopia creates a negative future scenario. . In view of the current violence in Ukraine, the novel can be seen as a harbinger of things to come. “The Sugar Kremlin” is set in the year 2028. It is the sequel to the novel “Day of the Oprichnik”14  (2006), in which many reviewers wanted to read a deeply pessimistic, Orwellian anti-utopia. In the world of Vladimir Sorokin's novel “Day of the Oprichnik,” Russia in 2027 is ruled by a monarchy that has sealed itself off by a high wall and is held together by religion and violence. In this work, the henchman of power, Komjaga, experiences a day from his life. In 2027, a henchman of power rules, the “Russian bear” is awake and dangerous. In this dystopian world depicted in many of Sorokin's works, violence is omnipresent. Parents beat their children, supervisors abuse workers, and men abuse their wives. The “sugar-sweet Kremlin”, to which everyone has access, holds society together. In these texts, Sorokin sees Russia's situation as hopeless and darker than the world situation of his predecessors from Orwell to Huxley.

In Viktor Yerofeev's “Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul” (2001), a torn Russia is seeking a mythical figure: the Horror, in order to become a great power again. The first-person narrator is an intellectual who, because of a text “about the dawn of a new revelation,” finds himself in the circle of Kremlin secret service agents. With the help of the assistant to former secretaries general, Russia is to be restored as a great power. The figure of horror is portrayed as a kind of Putin, as Yerofeyev writes in the foreword to the novel. The author had already foreseen the current developments in Russia.

In today's Russian society, the 19th century intellectual debates between the Slavophiles and the Westerners are experiencing a revival ("The conflict between Westerners and Slavophiles in 19th century Russia was one of the most important intellectual disputes of that period, which have influenced the philosophical and social theoretical debates of the country to this day. However, the Slavophiles were never a closed group: from Tyutchev to Solzhenycin, many thinkers fought for a strong Slavic entity and a path for Russia that was independent of the West."15 ). On one side there are ultra-nationalists who propagate the idea of Russia going its own way, while on the other side there are those who demand European values and feel at home in western metropolises like as Paris, or in the USA. Victor Pelevin writes in “Tolstoy’s Nightmare” about Putin’s “managed democracy” and the Russian state’s mission to make the lives of its subjects as painful as possible.16

The Belarusian author Viktor Martinowitsch Viktor Martinowitsch Viktor Martinowitsch (also: Victor Martinovich) was born in Belarus in 1977. He studied journalism in Minsk and taught political science at the European Humanistic University in Vilnius. He writes regularly for “Zeit online”. Martinowitsch became known in 2014 with the novel “Paranoia,” which was unofficially banned in Belarus after it was published. In 2012 Martinowitsch received the Maksim Bahdanovich Prize. The novel “Revolution” was most recently published by Voland & Quist. also describes the seduction of people when the greed for power becomes the strongest motive for their actions in “Revolution”17 (2017). After the novel was published, its publishing house in Minsk was raided, the publisher was briefly imprisoned, and the book was taken off the market without explanation. Martinowitsch writes about human seduction, power, greed ― and a system that has control over the individual. The state apparatus manipulates all areas of social life. It is also a novel about the structures of a patriarchal post-Soviet state that shapes social and political life in Belarus.