“If Sweden is a province, what are we?” Map-making and man-making in Marius Ivaškevičius’s essay series My Scandinavia

This co-written article approaches the influential Lithuanian writer and playwright Marius Ivaškevičius’s essay series My Scandinavia (2004) from two different vantage points reflecting either side of the former ‘Iron Curtain’. Published in the year when Lithuania joined the European Union, the essay series describes the narrator’s travels and symbolic and ironic conquest of Northern Europe in the wake of the border openings following the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, employing the notions of “temporal” and “spatial nodes” (Ringgard & DuBois 2017), the article addresses how the crossings of the Baltic Sea and journeys through Northern Europe depicted in Ivaškevičius’s essays represent an awareness of significant shifts in the unfolding of European history and Europe’s spatial configuration. Second, the article reads My Scandinavia as an example of creative map-making in line with theories of critical cartography. Finally, the article puts the travelling subject in My Scandinavia centre stage, looking at the dialectic ways in which subject and place create each other. Just as Scandinavia has been actively moulding the narrating and, by implication, also the writing subject’s biography, so has he given Scandinavia shape through his discourse, while also idiosyncratically framing Europe’s shifting political and mental geography

Coming to terms with the North. Scandinavia in Polish culture at the turn of the 21st century

The article deals with representations of Scandinavia in Polish literature from the 1980s to the second decade of the 21st century. The basic claim of the article is that a shift in the Polish imagination from the West to the North has occurred through literature and growing public interest. This shift began with efforts to transform the initial stereotype of Scandinavia as a land of prosperity. In subsequent stages, the imaginary was expanded by literature to include the themes of equality, social trust and self-correcting modernity. Complicating the image of Scandinavia made it into a viable alternative to Western modernity

A transnational regioscape in the making. The Baltic Sea in Christian Petzold’s Barbara and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen’s My Favorite War

The Baltic Sea has effectively separated the Scandinavian and Eastern European countries, especially in the period when this body of water constituted a part of the Iron Curtain and functioned for Scandinavians as an imaginary protective moat. From the East-Central European perspective, the Baltic Sea offered a hope of escape to freedom, encapsulated in the cinematic trope of the sea as a ‘blue boundary’, or a ‘horizon of hope’. But the Baltic Sea was also feared as a life-threatening border, as expressed in the trope of ‘Baltic noir’, a variation of the ‘Eastern noir’ trope (Mrozewicz 2018) – imagining the sea in nocturnal scenery as wild and under state control. The article discusses screen representations of the Baltic Sea understood as performative regioscaping practices (Chow 2021), offering insights into the memories and histories of human mobilities across the Baltic Sea beyond official narratives, as well as into the human relationship with the sea as both a cultural boundary and material body of water. As demonstrated by the analyzed film examples, Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012, Germany) and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen’s My Favorite War (2020, Norway, Latvia), the Baltic Sea continues to be an important spatiotemporal node in the transnational re-telling of the region’s history and identity

A stereotype that deconstructs itself. Representations of Danes and Denmark in Joanna Chmielewska’s crime novels

The research question this article tries to answer is: how was Scandinavia “invented” in Polish prose written when the Iron Curtain still physically divided Europe? The text discusses three novels written by Joanna Chmielewska (1932–2013) and published in 1969 (Krokodyl z Kraju Karoliny [The Crocodile from Caroline’s Country]), 1973 (Lesio) and 1974 (Wszystko czerwone [All in Red]). Chmielewska, a vastly popular Polish crime novelist, especially known for the creation of the so-called “ironic crime” sub-genre, often introduced depictions of Denmark and the country’s inhabitants in her novels and used them to demonstrate amusing contrasts between them and her Polish protagonists and their reality in Poland. My goal is to show that while Westerners constructed and exoticized the East, Easterners did the very same thing to the West, only using different values and criteria in order to distinguish between “us” and “them”. We should therefore perhaps start talking about “inventing Europe” or “inventing Europes” – where the West invents the East and the East invents the West, and xenostereotypes introduce and reinforce autostereotypes. Those stereotypes can sometimes become so extreme that they are no longer sustainable and “collapse” under their own weight

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Before the age of mass media and mass travel (including tourism), cultural stereotypes were formed and communicated predominantly utilizing literature and other written sources (Fischer 1987). Nowadays, people travel extensively; they can get direct information from radio, television, and social media, yet stereotypes still seem to prevail. The general Czech contemporary notion of Scandinavian societies comes to the fore in the reviews of translated Scandinavian literature and Scandinavian (or Nordic) films, written by professionals and published in the edited press or the largely unedited social media. In these reviews, one can discern certain paradigms that doubtlessly amount to stereotypes. In this article, I will present a qualitative discourse analysis of Scandinavian stereotypes in the Czech reception of the Scandinavian arts, especially literature, taking into account the intertextual and contextual aspects of the Scandinavian ethnotypes occurring in reviews and paratexts in Czech mass media. I focus on two explicitly addressed images: The emancipated Scandinavian woman, and the alleged Scandinavian egalitarianism. Finally, I will resort to Tzvetan Todorov’s typology of relations to the Other. I will try to explain the activist criticism of Czech reviewers, who tend to compare the Czech situation with the Scandinavian one, using Todorov’s three axes describing the relation to alterity

Surface transfer in the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Swedish. A longitudinal study

This longitudinal study explores two specific aspects of the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Swedish: the use of a default gender and surface transfer. Twenty-one L1 Polish university students of L2 Swedish were tested by means of an untimed gender assignment task after two, three, and four semesters of studying. The data were analysed using a two-way ANOVA for repeated measures. Participants had more success in assigning gender to Swedish nouns that shared gender across Polish and Swedish than to Swedish nouns that differed in gender across the two languages, regardless of length of experience in learning Swedish. Contrary to previous studies that observed overgeneralisation of uter gender forms in production, this study did not identify the tendency to use uter as a default, presumably because participants had unlimited time to perform the task. This finding points to a dissociation between the knowledge of grammatical gender and the ability to use it during processing

Somewhere between Malmö and Copenhagen: Inter-spaces in Marius Ivaškevičius’ play Close City

In the drama Close City, first published in 2005, Lithuanian playwright Marius Ivaškevičius focuses on the (im)possible connections between Malmö and Copenhagen. The initially realistic setting of a failing marriage in the spirit of August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman evolves gradually into an absurd spectacle that explores spatial and intertextual interstices. This article investigates how the drama, as a scenic kaleidoscope, elaborates on the influence of imagined geographies in the Baltic Sea region, discusses (gendered) power relations, and questions Scandinavian exceptionalism

Stepping from College Classrooms to the Political Front. The Emergence of Feminism in the Norwegian Maoist Movement before 1973

The aim of this article is to investigate the origins of the Women’s Front, a women’s movement co-founded by Norwegian Maoists in the 1970s. The analysis seeks to capture the dynamics of women’s activism in relation to the broader political landscape and, concurrently, to understand the Women’s Front in a broader temporal perspective. The sources used were newspapers and publications issued by different branches of the Norwegian Maoist movement. Women’s politics are analysed both as a grassroots phenomenon and a part of agitation which emerged under the 1972 anti-EEC campaign. This makes it possible to show how women’s politics found a place on the agenda of Norwegian Maoism and what kind of obstacles it had to face on its way to gaining autonomy. The patterns of feminist mobilisation demonstrated by this analysis can make a contribution to the broader debate on the role and place of feminism in traditional political structures