The silenced vision

This essay explores the historical impact of war and totalitarianism on the literary imagination of several major Soviet Russian and West German writers. The painful experience which has become muted in this fiction is articulated through a «second», more subconscious and metaphorical, language. It is this subliminal poetic voice in the works of Borchert, Aitmatov, Grass, Pasternak and Nossack which provides us with a heightened sense of the spiritual condition of European man and the nature of modern and contemporary European writing.