53 pages • 1 hour read
Slavenka DrakulićHow We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
How does communism produce personal tragedies for Drakulić and women she knows? In what ways is grief a major theme of her work?
How does Drakulić use food and product shortages to illustrate the effects of communism on family relationships?
Describe how women in Eastern Europe strive to address their interest in fashion, makeup, and other pursuits often coded as feminine. How does Drakulić position this as an act of resistance and defiance, and how does her own daughter participate in this tradition?
How does Drakulić explore themes of memory and forgetting in her essays on the GDR and on new buildings in Zagreb?
How is toilet paper a symbol of Yugoslavia’s progress and regression?
Describe how Drakulić uses both the post office and apartments to reflect on the lack of privacy under communism. How does private life offer sanctuary from the state, while being inexorably shaped by its limits and restrictions?
How does communism shape relationships between the sexes, and Drakulić’s own relationship to Western feminism?
Consider Drakulić’s essays on New York and on fur coats. How is Drakulić both attracted to and repulsed by materialism, in herself and in her friends?
How is Drakulić critical of Western societies even as she acknowledges that communism has largely failed?
In what ways is surviving war reliant on similar skills and processes to surviving communism?
