What is the literature of socialist trauma?

The present article aims to propose a new concept, that of the “literature of Socialist trauma”. Most of the countries of the Eastern Bloc developed repressive patterns inspired by the ideological and procedural matrix of the USSR. While they eventually evolved in their own individual way, the impact of these repressive systems on literature produced similar dynamics throughout the Bloc. In all these countries, a vast number of literary works – poems, oral poems, auto/biographical works, fiction – related to socialist-inspired state repression were written. The time has come to analyse them in a comparative perspective in order to understand if there is the potential to change our understanding of 20th and 21st century European literature by analysing what could be a hidden genre.