Ivana PERICA, Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Ivana Perica’s Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur is a bold intervention in the historiography of twentieth-century European literary politics. Its central achievement is to dismantle the entrenched binary frameworks that have long governed scholarship on left-wing cultural production: East vs. West, autonomy vs. commitment, evolution vs. revolution, and, most decisively, “true literature” vs. propaganda. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of literature, the history of socialism, and the intellectual history of Central Europe.