Imagination under Pressure: Ideology and History in Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and Milan Kundera’s the Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The present study focuses on fictional history and historical fiction as forms of oppositional discourse in the east-central european literature during highly stalinized communist regimes. the study evaluates comparatively danilo kiš’ a tomb for boris davidovichand milan kundera’s the book of laughter and forgetting, two literary works that express a reality which takes place within restricted ideological limits. while exploring the fictional material reified by the writers’ imagination being under the pressure of ideology, a number of aspects have attracted our critical attention. the first regards the importance of history, in general, and of the historical truth, in particular, as being expressed in the texts of the two writers. the second is represented by the authorial attitude towards the motif of ‘memory and forgetting’. the third concerns the originality of the genre: both novels receive the form of a collection of individual stories consisting of certain narrative lines which, on one hand, are seemingly separate, but, on the other hand, are linked within a given collection as a means of expressing the historical truth. the fourth refers to the characteristic humor of kiš and kundera’s novels. the works of the two writers reveal a very complex humor, alternating from black humor to thoughtful, from biting to sentimental, exposing the human experiences of grief, pain of existence and anguish at facing death. these aspects represent the main similarities between the two literary discourses, which were written in a period of crisis in the history of humanity, and, in order to reveal this, the investigation of these aspects in their thematic and narrative perspectives becomes the main aim of this study.