Authors

Discussion

The Polish PGR-s and Hungarian TSZ-es ‒ large state agricultural farms created as a result of the collectivisation in the Stalinist era - were one of the most tangible effects of the USSR's policy of dependency. After the political transformation in 1989, state farms were dismantled. Their former employees, who still live in the villages, are often suffering from unemployment, poverty, and transport exclusion. They also became objects of a newer internal colonisation and a further subalternity, as they were descendants of the peasants, politically exploited and orientalised by the upper classes (Buchowski 2008).

The posttransformational elites, who were following the Western model of modernisation and subsequently adopting the colonial perspective (Kiossev 1995), perceived the inhabitant of state farms as the Other, "homo sovieticus", a person embodying the communist system and incapable of adapting to the new way of living (Węglarz 1994). After the fall of the state socialism, people of PGR-s and TSZ-es were left out of the social discourse or cultural production and confined to the backward periphery, in contrast with the developed, rapidly westernizing centre.

Postcolonial interpretation of four literary texts (Polish short stories collections: “Tales of Galicia” by Andrzej Stasiuk and “White Nights” by Urszula Honek, as well as Hungarian novels “Our Street” by Sándor Tar and “The Dispossessed” by Szilárd Borbély) thematising the rural areas of the former state farms enables to assess the scale of the double subordination to which the inhabitants of the former Eastern Bloc were subjected in the 1990s. It also helps to better understand the consequences of this process for today's socio-political discourse in Poland and Hungary. While in Poland this topic is a part of the ongoing “people's turn”, among others aiming at the emancipation of the rural communities, in Hungary this literature seems to explain the rise of populist tendencies, with the ruling party exploiting the polarization of the society and promoting the Hungarian identity based on a specifically understood vernacular culture, in opposition to the institutions, concepts and systems represented by the West.