This document provides an overview of post-Soviet literature in Russia and Eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It discusses the historical context beginning with World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, then covers Soviet rule, resistance to it, and its eventual collapse. It also examines various theories of postmodernism and whether they apply to literature emerging from former Eastern bloc countries, noting both similarities to and differences from postmodernism in the West. Key postmodern concepts from thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Bakhtin are outlined.

1. After the Fall: Post-Soviet Literature in Russia and Eastern Europe

2. The Cycle of Empire: Destruction Thomas Cole, 1836

3. Historical Overview

4. Europe in 1914

5. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917

6. Vladimir Lenin

7. Warsaw, 1945

8. The Soviet Bloc

9. Eastern Europe Today

10. Moscow

11. Warsaw

12. Prague

13. Budapest

14. Kiev

15. Sarajevo

16. Mostar, May 1994

17. Soviet Leaders, Resistance and Repression

18. Joseph Stalin

19. Nikita Khrushchev

20. Budapest, 1956

21. Leonid Brezhnev

22. Prague, 1968

23. Lech Walesa

24. Mikhail Gorbachev

25. The Empire Collapses

26. East German Border Opened, 1989

27. Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989

28. The Velvet Revolution, 1989

29. Rally in Moscow, 1991

30. Boris Yeltsin

31. Vladimir Putin

32. The European Union Today

42. “ That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.” Aylesworth, Gary, "Postmodernism," http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries/postmodernism/