The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe

Marci Shore teaches modern European intellectual history. She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and her Ph.D from Stanford University in 2001; she taught at Indiana University before coming to Yale. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. 

She is the translator of Micha? G?owi?ski’s The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current book project, a history of phenomenology in East-Central Europe, tentatively titled “Eyeglasses Floating in Space: Central European Encounters That Came about While Searching for Truth.” 

She is a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Presently she is co-curating a Public Seminar/Eurozine forum “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life” (title stolen from Nietzsche): https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-last-time-i-saw-them-new-democracy-seminar-forum/

Her articles and essays include 

• “Philosophy in the Time of Revolution” (The Interlocutor: Journal of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas); 
• “Can We See Ideas? On Evocation, Experience, and Empathy” (Modern European Intellectual History); 
• “Entscheidung am Majdan: Eine Phänomenologie der Ukrainischen Revolution” (Lettre International); 
• “Jews and Cosmopolitanism: An Arc of European Thought” (Historická Sociologie), 
• “(The End of) Communism as a Generational History” (Contemporary European History); 
• “‘If we’re proud of Freud…: The Family Romance of Judeo-Communism” (East European Politics and Societies); 
• “Rescuing the Yiddish Ukraine (New York Review of Books) 
• “Die Zerbrechlichkeit des Liberalismus oder Das Ende vom ‘Ende der Geschichte’” (Transit: Europäische Revue); 
• “Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, ?ydokomuna, and Totalitarianism” (Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History); 
• “Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism, and the Berman Brothers” (Jewish Social Studies); 
• “Czysto Babski: A Women’s Friendship in a Man’s Revolution” (East European Politics and Societies); 
• “Engineering in the Age of Innocence: A Genealogy of Discourse Inside the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, 1949-1967” (East European Politics and Societies); 
• “In Search of Meaning after Marxism: The Komandosi, March 1968, and the Ideas that Followed” (Warsaw: The History of a Jewish Metropolis); 
• “Dissidents, Intellectuals, and a New Generation” (The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History); 
• (Modernism in) “Eastern Europe” (The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism); 
• “On Cosmopolitanism and the Avant-Garde, and a Lost Innocence of Mitteleuropa” (Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility); and 
• “Wspomnienie o Krzysztofie Michalskim (1948-2013)” (Zeszyty Literackie).

Source: Yale University Department of History