Romancing Modernism

In the development of modernist fiction, perhaps no artistic product has had as vaunted a place as the novel, a genre theorized primarily with recourse to Western authors. Here, Lukasz Wodzynski challenges the primacy of the novel as the organizing principle of modernist prose in Eastern and Central Europe, particularly in Polish and Russian culture. By carefully studying some of the most innovative texts from these cultures, Wodzynski posits that the "novel" genre has hindered our understanding of long modernist narratives and proposes to read these pathbreaking works as an early twentieth-century reclamation of the romance. Specifically, he argues that these latter-day romances channel early modernist apocalyptic and utopian ideals through popular genres like science fiction and adventure narratives—and thus imagine a human future freed from modern fixations on control, efficiency, and utility. The romance form, he suggests, was uniquely poised to address the deep civilizational anxieties underwriting modernist literary publications in East-Central Europe. Understanding these works and the ways in which they spoke to these anxieties thus informs not only the study of Polish and Russian literature but also the development of modernism itself.