My dissertation investigates the representation of rural communities in postsocialist Eastern Europe through contemporary literature and film, focusing on how disillusionment, cultural alienation, and socio-economic precarity are articulated across aesthetic forms. Drawing on works such as Peter Pišťanek’s Rivers of Babylon, Ioana Nicolaie’s The Black Wormwood, and films like Pamfir (Ukraine, 2022) and R.M.N. (Romania, 2022), the project explores how the rural becomes a site for negotiating the affective and epistemic dimensions of postsocialist life, including contested notions of progress and modernization. At its core, the dissertation proposes pessimism as a subjective and dialogic framework—not simply a philosophical stance, but a mode of relation and understanding. Building on Emil Cioran and Joshua Foa Dienstag, I approach pessimism as a form of critical subjectivity that enters into dialogue with the disenchanted worlds it observes. Rather than reading pessimism as withdrawal or despair, I treat it as a productive sensibility that questions Western dominant narratives of progress, neoliberal development, and populist nostalgia. By contrasting empathetic literary portrayals of village life with cinematic representations that often adopt a more distanced, neoliberal gaze, the project highlights the differing emotional and ethical dialogues that cultural forms sustain with the rural world. These exchanges illuminate how pessimism functions as both an aesthetic and affective conversation with loss, endurance, and the limits of optimism and modernization. Situated within postsocialist scholarship, the research responds to Anca Pârvulescu’s call for transnational frameworks by positioning rural Eastern Europe as a critical space of dialogue between local experience and global discourse. Ultimately, the project argues that pessimism’s subjectivity—its attunement to disillusionment—opens new ways of thinking and feeling through the uncertain futures of rural life, including the tensions between local realities and narratives of societal progress.

In 1943-44, the Soviet government – under the iron hand of Stalin and the watchful eye of NKVD leader Beria – oversaw the deportation of around one million people (Bugai 1992: 10-11) from the Caucasus and Crimea to the Central Asian steppes. On the pretext of having collaborated with the Germans in the earlier phases of World War 2, local non-Slavic minorities such as the Crimean Tatars, the Balkars, the Ingush and the Chechens were forcefully expelled and suffered immense losses before they were pardoned and allowed to return to their homeland in 1956. Though the end of Stalinism brought about relative liberalisation, the censorship surrounding the topic of deportations and ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus was not relaxed until Gorbachev’s policy reforms in the late 1980s. This contribution will consider two works by Russian writers who, despite not having to bear the plight of displacement themselves, wrote in solidarity with those who did – Anatolii Pristavkin’s (1931-2008) novel ""Nochevala tuchka zolotaia"" (1987), and Ivan Mintiak’s (1936-1989) narrative poem ""Vozvrashchenie ognia"" (1988). In line with both the ‘poetics of solidarity’ (Finnin 2022) and the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and peace and conflict studies (e.g., Massey 2005, Souza 2024), I will argue that these works constantly produce and negotiate the narrative space of Chechnya and Ingushetia in the early 1940s not only as conflict-ridden, but also as a potential locus of transnational amity, dialogue, and peaceful encounter beyond the Soviet ideal of the ‘friendship of peoples’. Such solidary place-making amidst conflict and displacement creates an in-between space that resists categorisation as either a ‘warscape’ or a ‘peacescape’ (Björkdahl/Kappler 2017), but rather mobilises complex feelings of sorrow, responsibility, and the possibility of reconciliation. Acting as discursive mediators among witnesses, victims, and perpetrators, the writers themselves assume an unstable position, caught between the master narrative of Soviet history – in which the memory of Stalinist ethnic cleansings in the Caucasus was constantly suppressed – and the empathy for the suffering of another people. The subversiveness of their works in a time of uncertainty, transformation and far-fetching reforms is a testament to the ability of (post-conflict) literature to channel compassion and bring to the fore marginalised spaces beyond dichotomies such as war/peace, friend/enemy and same/different.

This paper analyzes literary representations of uncertainty within the Slovene minority in Austrian Carinthia, focusing on three contemporary novels by Carinthian Slovenian authors: Angel pozabe (The Angel of Oblivion, 2011) by Maja Haderlap, Poizvedovanje za imenom (In Search of a Name, 2013) by Florjan Lipuš, and Na drugem koncu sveta (At the Other End of the World, 2020) by Vincenc Gotthardt. The analysis is based on the premise that literary thematizations of uncertainty are closely linked to the historical and socio-political position of the minority community. Since the mid-19th century, Austrian Carinthia has been marked by systematic Germanization of the Slovene-speaking population, which intensified after the First World War. Following the 1920 Carinthian plebiscite, the territory inhabited by Slovenes became part of Austria rather than the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, resulting in prolonged uncertainty regarding language preservation and minority survival. Despite the rights guaranteed to the Slovene minority by Article 7 of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, assimilation pressures and negative attitudes toward the Slovene language persist, and these conditions are reflected in contemporary Carinthian Slovenian literature. In Angel pozabe, Haderlap employs an autobiographically inflected narrative about a girl, her family, and their community to address the psychological and physical violence experienced by Carinthian Slovenes and its transgenerational consequences; uncertainty and internalized inferiority are conveyed through the memories of the first-person narrator and her family, particularly her grandmother and father, who were deeply affected by the violence of the Second World War. In Poizvedovanje za imenom, Lipuš uses a lyrical, fragmentary, autobiographically inflected, and memory-based narrative to depict the effects of violence, assimilation, and subtle mechanisms of social exclusion in the everyday lives of Carinthian Slovenes, while also raising the ethical question of individual and collective responsibility for the gradual abandonment of the Slovene language. Gotthardt’s Na drugem koncu sveta explores the existential and identity-related uncertainty of a Slovene artist living abroad. The narrative of gradual language loss is structured through analeptic memory sequences that intertwine the present experience of linguistic alienation with stories of ancestors and community members who continue to live in enduring uncertainty regarding the minority’s future and language preservation, while art emerges as a crucial space for maintaining and revitalizing a nearly forgotten language. The paper thus presents three distinct but interconnected literary representations of uncertainty, united by autobiographically inflected narration, retrospective perspectives, the emphasized role of ancestors and community, and the interplay between individual and collective memory.