Environmental thought and ecopoetics in the cultures of post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe

This article discusses the rise of an environmental awareness of place in post-socialist cultures as a reaction to decades-long authoritarian practices that had shaped and informed human beings' relation with natural space. Drawing on examples of fiction and non-fiction from Poland and Ukraine (Andrzej Stasiuk, Iurii Andrukhovych, Olga Tokarczuk, and Halyna Pohutiak), this article focuses on the ecocritical and environmentally transformative potential of several representative geographically conscious narratives. To examine such emergent readings of place, the article discusses the development of the narrative paradigms of (bio)regionalism and localism, which, on the one hand, represent alternative ways of conceptualizing the natural environment and, on the other, serve as reactions to earlier socialist constructions of centralist geographies and homogeneous national spaces.