ABSTRACT
To understand the background to this recasting of the familiar Greek myth as a novel narrated by several voices, a few bare details are necessary. In 1984, Christa Wolf produced her first re-casting of an ancient myth with the title Kassandra. Published at a time when West German interest in East German literature was at its height, Kassandra became a cult book in the West without obliging its author to flee the East or having her silenced by the censor – no mean achievement. Kassandra skillfully blended the type of feminism then popular in the West with a somewhat elegiac depiction of the betrayal of ideals in a society falling prey to totalitarianism. A contributory factor to the book’s success was the simultaneous appearance of a series of lectures the author gave at the University of Frankfurt, in the Federal Republic, in which she set forth very eloquently the background reading and conceptualization, which led to the form Kassandra finally assumed. There were critics who felt that the lectures, giving the novel’s ‘presuppositions’, were generally better written than the work itself, since they give the overall effect of an openness which is lacking in the highly stylized and gloomy prose of the novel itself.
