Utopia names a desire for a better world. But in the midst of war, catastrophic climate crisis, and new forms of fascism, pessimistic and apocalyptic visions of the future dominate current public and scholarly debate. This project will show that, against all odds, Utopia as human impulse and literary form lives on – and it does so precisely in the war-torn Eastern Europe, in the aftermath of a Soviet regime that once claimed (wrongly) to embody Utopia in state form. This project will offer a systematic study of the aesthetic, formal and political aspects of Utopia in a selection of Eastern European literatures from 1989 to the present. In doing so, the project will show that Utopian desire survives, but in strange, new, often satirical, forms. By reading these new forms in a global context in dialogue with contemporary theories of “world literature,” the project will revise current models of literary comparison and it will nuance the ways in which we think of our future.

2024

2028