Grotesque artifacts: state socialist <i>lieux de mémoire</i> in novels by Pavel Pepperstein and Jáchym Topol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article explores grotesque forms of post-socialist memory and representations of state socialist lieux de mémoire in Pavel Pepperstein’s novel Prazhskaia noch′ (A Prague Night, 2011) and Jáchym Topol’s novel Citlivý člověk (A sensitive person, 2017). Both novels can be classified in the genre of “magical historicism,” which processes the legacy of past traumatic events. Pepperstein’s novel satirizes the contradictions of post-socialist memory culture. The Gottwald mausoleum in Prague, a central site of Czechoslovak memory politics between 1953 and 1962, appears in the novel as a place where socialist personality cult and pan-Slavic rituals merge. In Topol’s novel, a Soviet tank that was destroyed by Czech resistance fighters during the Prague Spring is being restored. This tank not only reactivates the memory of the socialist system and its dissenters, it also becomes a symbol of the new threat emanating from Russia in the post-socialist Czech Republic. Topol’s novel thus enables a reflection on the differences and similarities between old and new historical narratives and their implications. By pointing to the instability (Pepperstein) and ambiguity (Topol) of assigned meanings, the grotesque helps elucidate the continued role that state socialist lieux de mémoire play in sustaining changing and conflicting post-socialist historical narratives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".