Questions of Identity

This literary study examines conceptions of individual and social identity in Eastern European writers. The section on the Czech President Vaclav Havel treats Havel's notion of personal identity as expressed in personal responsibility. The second section concerns national identity with particular reference to two early 19th-century Slovaks who rejected Slovak nationalism and whose ideas ultimately had a profound impact on East European thinking on nationality up to the fall of communism. The third section deals with the beginnings of Modernism and the apparent disintegration of the self in West European and Czech writers. The fourth section deals with the writer Vladimir Paral's expositions of the idea that the only individual identity left for the socialist citizen is sexual identity. This last section also describes the attrition of critical thinking in post-1968 Czechoslovakia.