"How could it happen you were a communist youth?" Literary representation of membership in the Communist Party in autobiographical texts
Abstract
After 2000 published several authors from the Central Europe their autobiographies in which they wrote about their communist past. In the 1950s they had participated in "constructing of socialism," but they later came to regard this participation as a mistake.
This papers concentrates on three texts of Sławomir Mrożek (Baltazar, 2006), Pavel Kohout (To byl můj život??, 2005, 2006) and Ivan Klíma (Moje šílené století, 2009, 2010). Membership in the Communist Party is depicted by a similar repertoire of metaphors or figures and writing about their common experience is for Mrożek, Kohout and Klíma a way to "plead guilty" and explain reasons for their behaviour.
The study explores the representation of past events in autobiographies, i.e., narratives that on one hand document real events in the contemporary world and on the other examine the past through the subjective view of the writer who is reminiscing.