UC San Diego

Intense moments of political and ideological change in Eastern Europe – namely the Russian Revolution, interwar nation-building movements, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent rise of nationalist populism – presented people with a difficult choice: to cling to historical perspectives or to wholly embrace a new ideology. Writers from these periods of change often are defined by how their aesthetic choices either supported or rejected political and ideological movements. From our vantage point in 2018, we believe that we clearly understand which movements succeeded and failed and, as a result, we categorize associated writers as protagonists or antagonists, progressive thinkers or inhabitants of the wrong side of history. But these binaries influence the construction of narratives that mask all the critical contingencies of everyday life. Accordingly, this dissertation asks how literature from these volatile times offers ways of resolving the divisions between political and ideological changes, as abstract notions, and the tangible quotidian experience of them. Through an examination of literary case studies from the aforementioned periods in Eastern Europe, I identify an aesthetics of cognitive flexibility, which illuminates the cognitive counterpart, a concept that claims that each term, idea, and individual identity involved in political and ideological change has a necessary other, without which whole and ethical everyday life cannot happen. The four case studies that constitute this dissertation suggest that both within and among individuals is a constant effort to achieve cohesion between one experience and another, one worldview and another, one truth and another, and even between success and failure. The cognitive counterpart supports a nuanced understanding of fossilized perceptions of revolutionaries, nationalists, and dissidents by arguing that, in the context of ordinary life, these categories are rarely so absolute and one-sided as the bureaucratic mechanisms that support or contest them would claim. Reading with an eye for cognitive counterparts uncovers a way literary aesthetics are manifested in quotidian life, not as a symbolic vessel of an abstract idea but as a real-world vehicle for the empathetic and ethical implementation of political change.