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.
Key Figures
Slavenka Drakulić
Slavenka Drakulić was born in Croatia in 1949. In 1979 she founded the first feminist group in Yugoslavia. She studied literature at the University of Zagreb and worked as a journalist in Croatia until 1992. She has published both novels and nonfiction, in Serbo-Croatian and in English. In the 1990s, she gave interviews in the Western press about the situation of women in Eastern Europe, arguing that equality under the law in systems like Yugoslavia did not result in real dignity of work for women, support for families, or relief from unremitting domestic labor. She collaborated with Gloria Steinem to establish women’s organizations in Eastern Europe.
Drakulić’s nonfiction has primarily dealt with communism, women’s issues, the Balkans in war and recovery, and the meaning of the communist past. After How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, she wrote Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War, followed by Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, in 1996. Balkan Express examines Yugoslavia’s dissolution in personal terms, its costs to social cohesion, personal lives, and the moral integrity of individuals. Cafe Europa, like How We Survived Communism, explores the effects of the communist past on Eastern Europe, and how those divisions persist into the present even with the transition to new political systems.
Drakulić returns to the legacies of war and genocide in They Would Never Hurt a Fly, a personal examination of the lives and current circumstances of the war criminals who have been incarcerated in the Hague to await trial, including Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic and his wife. Her 2011 work, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven, considers the Communist past in multiple countries, similar to How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.
She has received accolades for her writing, including the “Book Prize For European Understanding” at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2004. She currently lives in Sweden, Austria, and Croatia.
Josip Broz Tito
Born in what is now Croatia in 1892, Tito became a communist as a young man and spent some time in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, especially to avoid political conflict and imprisonment in Yugoslavia. He achieved his greatest prominence during World War II. When the European members of the Axis powers, Hungary, Germany and Italy, invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Tito became a leader of the partisan resistance to German occupation. The Yugoslav King, Peter II, supported the partisans, and Tito eventually acquired the support of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. After the monarch was deposed, Tito became the head of the new socialist government of Yugoslavia, a position he held until his death in 1980. Tito’s main policies were a form of nationalism that emphasized Yugoslav unity while providing some autonomy to the country’s republics and independence from Soviet-style communism.
Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky was a Russian writer, poet, and dissident. He was put on trial in his twenties for “social parasitism” as the content of his poetry was considered subversive and his lack of gainful employment made him, in ideological terms, a drain on society. The Soviet Union expelled him from the country in 1972. He settled in the United States. He won the 1987 Nobel Prize for literature, and became the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991. His 1986 famous essay collection, Less Than One, includes the essay “In A Room and a Half,” which Drakulić cites as part of her own work on the status of apartments and private life in Yugoslavia.
