East of interest

How lit­tle we know about the cul­ture of that 'area of dark­ness:' East­ern Eu­rope. Liv­ing within a few hun­dred kilo­me­tres of this re­gion, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a hand­ful of di­rec­tors, ac­tors or music groups from some­where as close as the Czech Re­pub­lic or even from the for­mer East Ger­many. Com­mu­nism blot­ted out an en­tire world of cre­ative ex­pres­sion to those who lived in the so-called free West of Eu­rope and tastes in cul­tural fash­ion have hardly re­claimed any of it.

Read­ing Pol­ish writer Agata Pyzik's re­cent iron­i­cally ti­tled book “Poor But Sexy” helps to un­cover some of what she calls the 'cul­ture clashes' be­tween the two sides of the con­ti­nent. She ar­gues that twenty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eu­rope is as di­vided as ever. Only oc­ca­sion­ally using too much post-mod­ernist aca­d­e­mic jar­gon, she makes the highly con­vinc­ing case that the West­ern 'de­mo­c­ra­tic' world has main­tained an ar­ro­gant as­sump­tion that every­body wants to 'buy into' their cap­i­tal­ist be­lief sys­tems. As well as this, she ac­knowl­edges that con­ser­v­a­tive po­lit­i­cal fail­ures (in­clud­ing missed op­por­tu­ni­ties on the left) have meant that mar­ket forces and greed have also tri­umphed over so­cial or col­lec­tive re­spon­si­bil­ity in the East, just they clearly have tri­umphed in the West.

But what Pyzik also does is give the reader a new in­sight into the arts in a part of the planet when all cre­ative ac­tion had a po­lit­i­cal edge to it. Russ­ian films of the post-war era ob­vi­ously had a pro­pa­gan­dist pur­pose (very often) but the Sots Art move­ment also got away with mock­ing 'un­bear­able, rit­u­alised So­viet life' while si­mul­ta­ne­ously show­ing how the av­er­age per­son could at­tempt a nor­mal ex­is­tence among the ruins of the old world.

As well as this, writ­ers such as György Lukács used a kind of Brecht-like crit­i­cal re­al­ism to 'in­spire and ac­ti­vate the reader.' In his ear­lier book “Man With­out Qual­i­ties” - a su­perb title - he largely re­jects moder­nity, see­ing 'the tragedy of the mod­ern artist as some­one who lost the ground under their feet.' Sur­pris­ingly, he views this as 'an ad­vance rather than a dif­fi­culty.' Again and again in East­ern Bloc cul­ture Pyzik points out ex­am­ples of the con­tra­dic­tions and para­doxes of the kind that seem to me to be a big part of French think­ing but are so often overly sim­pli­fied into the black-and-white cer­tain­ties of Iber­ian habits of mind.

An­other strength of this book is that it recog­nises the un­her­alded con­tri­bu­tion of women in the East. It took the fem­i­nist film di­rec­tor Ag­nieska to ac­cu­rately pre­dict how fe­male ac­tivism in Poland's Sol­i­dar­ity move­ment would be wiped from pop­u­lar mem­ory and when this is com­bined with how sex­u­al­ity was re­stricted and banned in the movies across Com­mu­nist na­tions, it is alarm­ing how the idea of fem­i­nine pu­rity was so dom­i­nant. In a pa­tri­ar­chal Catholic Poland 'full of open sex­ism' pre­cious few women char­ac­ters of equal­ity got through to be seen.

And in this book there are count­less ref­er­ences to the cul­ture from the West so that we are not lost in un­fa­mil­iar names. Every­one from David Bowie to Ken Loach to Art of Noise gets a men­tion. There are plenty of rel­e­vant com­par­isons with con­tem­po­rary East­ern cul­ture, Pyzik finds. She ends with the dis­turb­ing state­ment that the pop­u­lace of East­ern Eu­rope “so strongly be­lieve we don't de­serve the nor­mal con­di­tions of a so­cial democ­racy that we hardly fight for it.” Let's not make that same mis­take in other parts of the planet.