Aggressiver Lokalismus: Undergroundästhetik, Antiurbanismus und Regionsbehauptung bei Andrzej Stasiuk und Jurij Andruchovyč

This essay discusses the phenomenon of “aggressive localism” in literary works by Andrzej Stasiuk and Jurij Andruchovyč. The former is characterized by anti-urbanism, underground aesthetic, and regional determinism. The – as the revolutionary events of 1989/91 in East and Central Europe are commonly, if controversially, referred to in German – is used as metaphorical pivot. Across this rupture the city serves as the dominant frame of reference for (self-) interpretations of underground art, defined as a specifically all-embracing form of expression that seeks to subvert “official” claims about the city, i. e. spatial hierarchies. The city thus connects the marginally (sub-) urban with political dissent in the form of social nonconformity. Stasiuk and Andruchovyč intensely employ literary means derived from aesthetic patterns of underground art. Their characters envisage urban solitude and death, post-multicultural fissures in the (great) city. Yet, both narrators depict “their” respective city as a metropolitan village, as a place of a more local, even rural, of indeed pagan profile. At the same time, they use these patterns to praise the East Central European countryside as a “slow space”. In such manner, they appropriate a pre- aesthetic strategy in order to produce structural aggressive fantasies of a re-ruralized “East”.