Central European Nostalgia and its role in creating the collective identity of Central Europe

This thesis analyses the phenomenon of Central European nostalgia through essays by Milan Kundera and Yuri Andrukhovych. It examines the ways in which the nostalgic imaginations of the Central European space contribute to the creation of the collective identity of Central Europe. The first part of the thesis outlines the historical context of thinking about Central Europe, which is then used in the analysis of the examined texts. The second part deals with the method of the analysis and the theoretical background, the theory of nostalgia. It maps the academic debate concerning both nostalgia in general and Central European nostalgia in particular. In the following analytical part of the work, the method of critical discursive analysis is used to examine for what purposes and in what ways the authors in their essays relate nostalgically to Central Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and how they construct Central European space through this narrative. The thesis argues that although the nostalgia of Kundera and Andrukhovych differs in its manifestations, both authors set their homeland in Central Europe through their nostalgia. In continuity with historical thinking, they anchor them in Europe itself. Nostalgia in the examined texts acts as a counter-discourse, a resistance to..