New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

NIKOLAI VUKOV
monuments, as embodiments of everlasting ideas; decorative and artistic
monuments, intended to fulfill a more utilitarian function, etc. Even a
close observation of monuments of a predominantly commemorative
nature reveals an array of types and realizations – societies in Eastern
Europe created various forms of monumental expression: stone plaques,
war memorials, brotherly mounds, collective or individual monuments,
mausoleums, house-monuments, hut-monuments, museum-monuments,
park-monuments, fountain-monuments, etc.
It is clear that, given such a wide range of aspects of the problem, any
research on post Second World War monuments in Eastern Europe has
either to be limited in scope, or sheltered within a framework large enough
to encompass the numerous forking paths traversing it. In this paper, I
have tended towards the second option, and, by means of discursive
analysis, intend to investigate the implicit meanings of the relationship
between death and vitality in post Second World War socialist
monuments. This text aims to pursue the shaping of the socialist discourse
of representation within the death and vitality idiom, within a framework
of ideas that refer directly to death and overcoming. To this end, I have
dedicated special attention to the particular ways in which death was
encoded by means of metaphors of life and regeneration; to the
representations of the body in statues and monumental ensembles – as
dying but victorious, killed but surviving; to the special status of heroes
represented in monuments – as split between life and death and sacrificing
themselves in the hope of defeating the latter; and, last, but not least, to
mausoleums of socialist leaders – as representing the power of ideas
through the simulated and miraculous incorruptibility of their bodies. For
all intents and purposes, this approach represents an attempt to look at
socialist monuments not from the perspective of the overtly political
aspects which monuments had and expressed, but from the view of those
undercurrent motives and mechanisms for producing meaning in what
was among the most representative of traditions in the socialist period.
For, despite the varying faces of socialism in Eastern Europe and the
different histories of attitudes to monuments and their referential potential,
every country in Eastern Europe witnessed a wave of monumentalization
and commemorations which, though subject to a cycle of different peaks
and troughs over the years, nonetheless remained characteristic for the
whole of Eastern Europe. Moreover, the search for a common key to
understanding and explaining the ideological suppositions behind this
wave is not only justified, it is also of utmost necessity.
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