Nier le totalitarisme avant qu'il vous nie... Images contemporaines des littératures tchèque et polonaise

Résumé En

“Acquainted with the Night” : The Struggle of Czech and Polish Writers with Totalitarianism Though the literary representation of totalitarianism has become a current theme of analysis, critics have somehow neglected to study the forms of opposition to it. Still, Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts, because of his original thinking and his political disgrace, allow us to understand the essential mechanisms at work behind an intellectual refusal of totalitarian rule. The polyphony concept, that is the existence of many voices, representing diverse points of view in a narrative, might have the power to challenge the monologues of dictatorship. The laughter principle tends to introduce relativity into ail forms of hierarchy. Third, the 'chronotope' theme, namely the linking of one specific time and one specific place in a narrative, helps to escape the seemingly helpless confinement, deriving from the 'here and now' perspective. We chose to apply the Bakhtinian concepts to the writings of some contemporary Czech and Polish authors, who demonstrated their particular resistance to the regime, such as Jan Patočka, Václav Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Konwicki, Paweł Jasienica. Their primarily moral revolt became a literary project. It then appeared that the Bakhtinian concepts are useful in describing literary mechanisms, and asserting the existence of a reflexive conscience, the most resilient obstacle to totalitarianism, in real life as well as in literature.