The totalitarian experience in Europe: destruction and alienation of individuals in Katrina Kalda's fictional work

Abstract

Contemporary literary history, linked to the totalitarian experience of the countries of Eastern Europe, presents itself as a rich framework opening up to the analysis of the behavior of individuals subject to the requirements of the system. Based on a corpus of two novels written by Katrina Kalda (1980), an exiled writer from East-ern Europe, we will present some (feminine) trajectories illustrating the conse-quences of an organization that destroys individuals in favor of the notion of State. Introversion, silence, paralysis, mental alienation and ultimately suicide and exile become the most representative manifestations of a gallery of characters who act on the borderline of unbelievable and insubordinate. The novel, according to Milan Kundera (1986, 2006), offers us the best way of expressing an existential problem-atic, the loss and degradation of values. The author and her oppressed characters denounce the abuses of a destructive social organization over several decades.