Nostalgic Returns to the Past. Musical Themes in Recent Central European Fiction

Abstract

This article explores musical themes in recent realistic fiction, particularly the trend of nostalgic narratives revisiting the 1980s and 1990s. References to popular songs are not a marginal phenomenon; rather, through intertextual allusions, they serve to build the plot. Music appearing in recent nostalgic narratives serves several functions. In the lives of teenagers, songs play a therapeutic role, allowing them to identify with artists and their lyrics, which facilitates the description of emotional states experienced during adolescence. Listening to music is a multisensory experience, engaging various senses. Music accompanies various life experiences, from first loves to traumatic events. Tracing musical themes in recent fiction helps to capture the generational experience of the global fascination with Nirvana. In nostalgic narratives, in which the action unfolds on two tracks (then and now), songs trigger an avalanche of memories, becoming the key to the archive of our memory. Certain sounds and music video stills activate our "flashbulb memory", allowing us to recreate certain experiences from the past. Songs, as cultural texts, therefore become an important seismograph of generational shifts in preferred musical genre, style, or artist. From the perspective of a literary historian or cultural studies scholar, thanks to the numerous references to song lyrics, we can not only reconstruct the image of the generation growing up in the 1980s and 1990s but also capture the experience of the communal dimension of music, which was accompanied by different distribution channels than today.