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The myth of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) lost its power and significance in Lithuania shortly after the restoration of the country’s independence in 1990. The concept of the Great Patriotic War was hastily abandoned, with part of the Soviet monuments meant to promote this myth being dismantled and Victory Day (May 9) no longer being celebrated. However, the Soviet military cemeteries remained. Being behind the horizons of the great Lithuanian narratives, they did not attract much attention until the 21st century, when the neighbouring state began taking an interest in them and using them for their benefit. They started getting suspicious looks from Lithuanians after the beginning of the Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Then, the cemeteries began to be seen as relics of the Soviet occupation regime and exposed as instruments of Russia’s current soft power. So they are not the past. These are places that have not lost their ideological charge and potential, spreading stories that are inconsistent with national Lithuanian narratives, masking the occupation, and suggesting that we remember the liberation.

The publication looks back at the origins of the Soviet Great Patriotic War military cemeteries and the main moments of their formation, first and foremost perceiving them from the perspectives of politics of memory and using appropriate research instruments. These sites have little in common with the original burial sites and were essentially created as propaganda tools in keeping with best practices in memorial design. In addition to being burial sites, they were constructed to spread the myth of the Great Patriotic War and other great Soviet narratives. The work examines what makes these places so special and convenient, and what meanings and narratives they were created to convey.

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The purpose of this outline was to introduce the topic of using armored weapons elements in the erection of monuments. The text discusses the issue of “monuments of gratitude” to the Red Army, which often drew on the motif of the tank monument, using a tank of the liberator of a particular locality. Monuments to the brotherhood of arms between the Red Army and the People’s Polish Army are also discussed. Two unique works that were not created by state order and were not propaganda manifestations are discussed next: the monument in Kasina Wielka and the now demolished one in Zyndranowa. In Kasina Wielka, a local artist designed a monument commemorating Polish soldiers who fell in September 1939. The work uses the turret of a Vickers tank, a real rarity since not a single Vickers tank taking part in the operations of the 1939 campaign has survived to this day. Moreover, it shows the grassroots initiative of citizens who wanted to commemorate the clashes in Kasina Wielka. The second monument was erected in Zyndranowa to commemorate the casualties of the 1944 Dukla operation. Importantly, it was again a grassroots initiative. The text discusses the stages of its creation, along with the actions taken by the authorities to dismantle it. The article is supplemented by a table listing “monuments of gratitude” that used elements of World War II military equipment.

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The article focuses on the radical shift in Czechoslovak culture after World War II, characterized by an ostentatious approval of the Soviet Union, which was reflected in all areas of public life. Interesting testimony of the Sovietization of Czechoslovak culture from 1948 to 1989 is provided by architecture. Initially, it is characterized by historicism, argumentatively supported by the doctrine of socialist realism, and from the late 1950s, a moderated modern style, serving the same representative function (metro, hotels, monuments).

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This article analyzed the post-World War Two reconstruction of the public spaces that had been devastated during the conflict. Mostly focused on the Chisinau urban area, we examined the ways in which the communist ideology and the socialist-modernist school of thinking influenced the reconstruction process. It has often been postulated that the main trait of the new political regime was the discrimination against the old conservative society by means of secularization and dismantling of the sacred. In the aftermath of the war, this trend was relatively limited, whereas during the Khruschev’s ”thaw”, it significantly gained momentum. As an example, the statue of Stephen the Great, representative for the Moldavian national spirit, was brought back to Chisinau, but the central positions had been already reserved for two symbols of the communist regime: the statue of Lenin and the Victory Square. During the 1970s and 1980s, other monuments representative for the party ideology and discourse continued to be unveiled, one such example being the equestrian statue of Gr. Kotovski. Except for

the statues of Lenin, Marx and Engels, most of the communist additions to the public space in Chisinau still stand to this day. It was there that the first celebration of the victory over Nazi Germany occurred, in 1965. Ten years later, a majestic memorial complex honoring the same event was to be inaugurated. In line with this, most of the non-metropolitan towns or villages, no matter how marginal, erected a statue of a soldier or at least a commemorative plaque in memory of those who lost their lives against their will. The urban plan itself was altered without any consideration to the street outlines that appeared in the plans of A. Șciusev. This practice was pursued in parallel with a demolition campaign in which the old town buildings and narrow alleyways, influenced by the Oriental style, were pulled down. The top position in the list of monuments that were lost at the time is occupied by the St. Ilie church. However, a section of the pre-war Chisinau, along the upper central boulevard, survived. It consisted of original or reconstructed imperial Russian and interwar Romanian buildings. A change in style occurred during the 1970s and 1980s, when the downtown area witnessed the addition of modernist buildings, tightly clustered and in obvious conflict with the spirit of the old town. In addition to that, their functionality was disproportionate to the role of the small republic. It was after the independence that the process of urban space degradation gained momentum, and some neglected buildings were lost. Meanwhile, some other buildings went through the validation process without any consideration to their contextual harmony. Planned with very little concern for artistic and architectural value, these new additions contribute to the already eclectic and highly inharmonious spirit of the city.

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The purpose of this article is a synthetic and historical overview of the debates on the Polish literary canon, which took place in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article attempts to classify post-1945 attitudes toward the canon and the works that constitute it. Political, historical and social circumstances greatly influenced the choice and assessment of works what were considered the most important in the history of Polish literature. In presenting and analyzing the views of renowned critics and literary historians (as well as other experts on the subject), the essay reveals that the outlook on the canon, which is one of the key elements of any nation’s culture, is heterogeneous, multilayered and embedded in many different contexts.

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In the genre of realistic novels, fiction is confined within the boundaries of the real world, yet the author or narrator presents it as reality, as if nothing were fabricated and the entire plot were simply transposed from reality into text. Contemporary authors disclose the processes of their creation, differentiating between what is fabrication, what is fiction, and what is directly incorporated from reality into the text. In postmodern prose, the methods of realism and modernism are interwoven, both integral to the artistic text. In Slovak literature, this phenomenon appears most notably in the works of Pavel Vilikovský and is even more pronounced in the works of Czech-French author Milan Kundera. Often, authors insert themselves into the narrative, particularly in the roles of commentator or by including mini-stories from their own lives into the plot. This is executed through various forms of metafiction. Metafictional techniques, while a hallmark of the postmodern text, are not new; similar elements have appeared in literature in previous centuries but never as extensively as they do now. By the end of the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century, Slovak literature witnessed the rise of authors with distinct postmodern prose features, such as Peter Pišťanek, Pavel Vilikovský, Lajos Grendel, Anton Baláž, Viliam Klimáiek, Daniela Kapitáňová, Michal Hvorecký, Pavol Rankov, and others. Metafiction is undoubtedly a defining characteristic of the postmodern text, primarily due to the increased prevalence of these elements compared to the past.

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Ethnic borderlands were an important part of the national landscape of the Second Republic of Poland. They existed in the areas of contact between the Polish national population and the most important national minority groups inhabiting distinct territories: Ukrainians, Belarusians and Germans. Especially in the 1930s, they aroused growing interest in the state administration. The purpose of this article is to outline different policies of the Sanation camp toward “ethnically transitional areas”. These policies varied, but their final goal was always unification through the Polonization of the communities inhabiting such borderlands.

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The article is an attempt to reflect on the category of the Russian antihero not only as a literary phenomenon, but also as a philosophical and cultural one. The concept of antihero refers to problems that are important for the formation of modern culture, because it models a certain type of anthropology of characters who critically fit into the traditionally established model of heroism and European identity. The Eastern (Russian) perspective adopted here provides an alternative to both Western anthropology and the Western antihero. The specificity of the Russian antihero can be described, among others, on the basis of distinctively Russian problems, such as the so-called ‘superfluous man’ or ‘broad soul.’ The Russian antihero is open to criticism of Western values, such as reason, ‘disenchantment of the world’ (rationalization), and social activism.

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The article undertakes an analysis of the depiction of The Last Judgment on the western wall of St. George’s Orthodox Church in Voroneț, northern Romania. The composition is part of a larger artistic issue related to the phenomenon of painted churches of northern Moldova, created in its essential core in the 16th century. The objectives established in the title, that is, to determine the genesis and meaning of the composition, encourage tracing several aspects of the fresco. First, it is necessary to outline the possible directions of the influx of inspiration, artists and cultural influences. Next, the sources of the very way of depicting the Day of Judgment and the pictorial formulas used (iconography) should be examined. The message of the work is also directly linked to the functions the fresco has performed over the centuries, reflecting the radical change in the optics of perception depending on the historical and cultural situation. As a whole, it reveals the complex meaning of the image, which invariably makes for an interesting research topic.

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In the first half of the 1980s, the Western sanctions against Poland led both to an increase in Romanian-Polish trade, and to closer political relations. With Gorbaciov’s reforms and Poland opening up to the West in the second half of the 1980s, the relations which had improved between 1982 and 1984 suffered a setback. The present paper starts from the premise that the development of Romanian-Polish economic relations during the 1980s was influenced by the crisis which both countries were facing, as well as by changing international conditions. One aim of the paper is to present the domestic situation in the two countries in 1985, in order to understand the context which fostered bilateral economic cooperation. The second aim is to analyse the development of relations between Romania and Poland after Gorbachev’s coming to power and the implementation of his reforms. Here we shall mainly focus our attention on the regular summit meetings between the two leaders.

Finally, we shall assess the impact of these reforms and the way in which they affected the Romanian-Polish cooperation. In undertaking this investigation, we shall, first of all, use the transcripts of the meeting between Ceaușescu and Jaruzelski, found in the National Archives, Foreign Relations Section, as well as the diplomatic correspondence of the Romanian embassy in Warsaw. The press of the time, in particular Scanteia – the official newspaper of the Romanian Communist Party [RCP], provides a general framework for understanding how the relations with Poland were represented by the communist regime.

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A city in present-day Romania with a multicultural, multiethnic and multiconfessional history, Oradea (Nagyvarad, Grosswardein, Varadino, Magnum Varadinum) has had from its very foundation an entirely distinct geopolitical reality, its century-long existence being marked by a wide variety and continuous differentiation, which penetrate deeply into every aspect of everyday community life. The Jewish community, actively present since the 18th century, carved out a place for itself and represented a hub of Jewish emancipation in the episcopal city, which was often a battleground for the hegemonic local forces, the reformed Transylvanian ones, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. After a long and relatively peaceful period of Romanian rule (1918–1940), following the Second World War the population of Oradea was shaken by racial laws issued first by the Romanian authority and afterwards by the Horthyst occupying forces (1940–1944) in Northern Transylvania, which concentrated Jews for deportation in the second biggest ghetto in Eastern Europe after Budapest. The demography of Oradea showed the loss of one third of its residents. Out of nearly 30,000 inhabitants, barely 2000 survivors returned, and the transgenerational trauma sent its echoes through time to the fourth generation, that of today’s teenagers. Their grandparents and great-grandparents, returned from deportation, had to go through another trauma and persecution, with the communists’ coming to power in 1948 and soon afterwards, that of the ‚red antisemitism’. The ways this trauma passed down across generations and deepened during communist totalitarianism, its masks during the postcommunit period, as well as the means of limiting and combating it are the ramifications of the topic which was examined not only theoretically, but by concrete examples of original case studies based on face-to-face interviews and microhistorical accounts received from the descendants of concentration camp suvivors. To these we shall add several examples from post Shoah memoirs of Oradea survivors and their descendants.

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The present review aims to present a volume published is 2022, the completion of a project launched nearly three decades earlier: The Dictionary of the 20th Century Central-European Novel (Iasi, Polirom Publishing, 755p.), compiled from 255 novel reading notes, coordinated by Adriana Bebeti, who is also the author of the extensive introductory study, which could have formed a book in itself. The members of the ‘Third Europe’ foundation (name which refers to an intermediary space between the East and the West, based on intersections and the recognition of constancies), literary researchers in Timisoara, as well as prominent figures of the national and international academic world participated in creating the dictionary. Central Europe appears as a cultural space with a chequered history, an unsettled world ruled by instability and devoid of security, but enriched by multiculturalism and multilingualism. The Dictionary of the 20th Century Central-European Novel may be regarded as a natural sequel to the anthology volumes in the ‘Third Europe’ series, coordinated bv Adriana Babeți and Cornel Ungureanu: Central Europe. Neuroses, Dilemmas, Utopias (1997) and Central Europe. Memory, Paradise, Apocalypse (1998). By its scientific rigour and compelling style, the dictionary proves to be not only a useful working tool for academics, researchers and students, but also a possible handbook for any student of literature.

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Cultural heritage is one of the most important aspects of our history and identity. It is a treasure passed down from generation to generation that shapes our view of the world and influences our daily lives. We admire with pride what our ancestors built, we observe with curiosity what the representatives of other cultures have built – we try to understand each other, sometimes fascinated we find our origins in the elements of our own heritage so we begin to understand some of the emotions, the reflexes, the sense of beauty. All these elements breathe goodness, set us creatively and positively towards our surroundings, and yet they do not exhaust the forms in which we come into contact with the past we have come to share. There are also elements that we would not like to see, that our compatriots or fellow citizens did not want to see either. Objects which became traces of a tragedy inflicted on a supra-individual scale – on communities or nation. We treat unwanted heritage as ‘ballast’ or ‘burden’ that represents a unique challenge for many communities. This heritage, which arose from circumstances beyond our control, can affect our lives in a variety of ways. While many of its elements are in material form, visible in space, its impact manifests itself primarily on an emotional level. This kind of legacy may require time and effort to understand and work through, in order to avoid transmitting these problems to future generations (Schulberg 1997, 324). It is also possible to adopt an attitude that tells us to get rid of forcibly imposed elements that remind us of a past marked by suffering or freedom deprivation. To remove and build anew, without the burden of trauma, without complexes and thorns. However, this is not always possible. For many people, struggling with such a legacy can be difficult, but at the same time it can be an opportunity for learning and personal growth. It is worth emphasising that whatever unwanted legacy we inherit, we are in control of how we react to it and the steps we take to influence our lives and the lives of future generations.